Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

Around five, they decided to sneak out the back door and walk up the alley to the Hagedorns’ house. While Bernice stayed in the kitchen wrapping up baked goods, Aaron went up to his room to pack a bag and to confront the new reality of his life: overnight, he had become jobless, homeless, and motherless. He found himself in his mother’s room, looking for clues but mainly for something that would catapult him forward, toward anger or clarity or grief. As he opened her dresser drawers, he saw that she had taken every bit of clothing she owned, shorts and sleeveless blouses as well as wool pants and sweaters, the broadness of her needs suggesting that she had not known where she was going, only that she would not return. In the bottom drawer was the family photo album. He picked it up, imagining her shifting it out of the way in order to access all the entirely replaceable items she had chosen to take. He dropped it back in the drawer and kicked the drawer shut, hard.

The following week, when Mr. Rehnquist helped him move, he found the album there in the drawer where Aaron was determined to leave it. “It’s a sacrifice,” he told Aaron. “She’s depriving herself of these memories in order to give them to you.” Though it would be years before he allowed himself to accept the possible truth of this or feel anything but rage at the sight of the album, he let Mr. Rehnquist pack it.

That first night, as he lay on the makeshift bed that Mrs. Hagedorn had made for him atop one of their couches, Aaron flipped through his textbooks, stopping on the map of Canada. It seemed so long ago that he had stood with Bernice in the kitchen of the café, spelling Saskatchewan and waiting for his mother to come down. The note was tucked into his chemistry book. His mother had put it there, believing that he would find her gone, pick up his books, and go off to school. She thought she knew him, and he was angry all over again. You’re old enough now, the note said, only that. He lay awake in the Hagedorns’ living room, wondering what he was old enough for and how long she had been waiting for him to get there.

The Hagedorns were large people who occupied the smallest house in town, a dollhouse that the three of them had been forced to move into when Bernice was a teenager, after their old place burned to the ground, the three of them awakening just in time to escape. Bernice and her parents ended up in the only house they could afford, where, she told Aaron, they were like three cabbages rolling around inside a produce drawer. By the time Aaron came to stay, they had occupied the house nearly a decade. It had grown even smaller with their belongings, yet they made room for him. Their living room contained three couches, and most nights he and Bernice lay on them, reading or talking. She never mentioned his mother, never asked whether he missed her. He knew that this was partly his fault because in those first weeks after she disappeared, he had pretended not to care; at the time, with his teachers looking sorry for him and his classmates ignoring him for a change (a gesture of kindness he supposed), it had seemed the only way to make it through the day.

Instead, over the course of the year, Bernice told him the story of her life, in installments, each one perfectly composed so that he wondered whether she wrote it out and practiced telling it beforehand. On those nights when her voice slipped into confessional mode, he rolled onto his side so that he could watch her as she spoke, the mountain of her stomach dwarfing the twin hills of her breasts. Her story, which she referred to as “the story of my expanding girth,” began like this: “For the most part, it has been a steady climb, one without shortcuts or the occasional dips and plateaus. As a baby, I watched from a high chair in the corner of the kitchen as my mother chopped and pounded, rolled and sprinkled. When I cried, she paused long enough to pop a bit of something — cookie dough, fried potatoes, a fingerful of Cheez Whiz — into my mouth so that by the time I was two, I had become a corpulent child who could not yet walk but demanded treats incessantly. My entreaties, according to my father, were frighteningly eloquent, marked by the syntax and diction of a child twice my age. ‘You were a little queen holding court,’ he likes to say, which has always bothered me, not the image itself but the clarity with which he recalls it, for in my memory of those early years, my father does not exist. There is only the kitchen — the oven, its door opening like a warm mouth, the potholders hanging beside it — and my mother, who exists as a fat finger smelling of nicotine that delivers these ‘shut-up’ treats into my mouth.

“By third grade, I had outgrown all the desks that the school had to offer, so one was created for me, a space-consuming contraption made of an old door that the janitors balanced across the tops of two tin barrels, each of which was big enough to have fit any of my classmates inside. I remember the wonderful racket the barrels made as they were rolled down the hallway to our classroom. The desk, which was larger than the teacher’s even, accorded me an authority that I had not experienced before. When, after a few days, the atmosphere threatened to return to normal, I began tapping my pencil steadily against the barrels, keeping this up for minutes at a time. I pretended to be deep in thought, unaware of my actions, though I simply wanted to see whether anyone would tell me to stop. Nobody did, not even the teacher.

“From there, I discovered that if I stayed at my desk feigning busyness when the others got up to go outside for recess, my absence went unchallenged. I particularly hated recess since I’ve always felt most keenly aware of my size outdoors. I despised, as well, the games we played, each of which afforded my classmates another forum to ridicule me. During kickball, they cheered mockingly when I ran the bases, and during Farmer in the Dell, whether I was chosen as the cheese or the cow, there was always the opportunity for a joke. But dodge ball was the worst. My peers all seemed to have unusually good aim, though I helped them along by providing an ample target. It reached the point where even my own teammates could not resist taking aim at me. The first time this happened, I was caught off guard, and the ball hit me squarely between the shoulders and jolted me forward onto my knees. Both sides laughed merrily.”

Bernice laughed also as she described this. Aaron watched her stomach quiver gently. He did not laugh.

“I went home sore and bruised on dodge ball days, and at night I would lie in bed and press hard on the bruises to intensify the pain.”

“Why?” Aaron asked.

“I thought that if I could increase my tolerance for pain, I would eventually inure myself to it altogether.”

“And did you?”

This question she seemed to consider only briefly before declaring that the desk had been her “salvation,” saving her from physical activity, which tired her, as well as the humiliation of being a spectacle, which tired her even more. “Most days,” she said, “I was content to stay at my desk reading, enjoying my solitude in the empty room, but occasionally I would go over to the desk of a classmate who had been particularly cruel to me that day, open it, and handle the items inside. Later, as I watched him prop his desktop open with his head and rummage around inside, a pencil gripped between his teeth, I liked to imagine myself sauntering over and informing him of what I had done, liked to imagine his repulsion. I never did. It was enough to sit at my desk and watch him sliding his hands back and forth, back and forth, across all of the places that mine had been.”

* * *

Bernice had told him the story of the desk in October, five weeks after he moved in. The next installment did not come until Christmas Eve. They were alone in the house, despite the late hour, for her father had taken a bottle of spiced rum and retreated to his fish house and her mother was at church, the midnight Mass, which actually started at eleven. It was a particularly cold Christmas — cold even by Minnesota standards, which were far beyond the standards that people elsewhere applied when assessing the cold — but the cold did not keep people home. Indeed, Aaron had noted over the years that morning coffee hour at the café was often busiest the day after a blizzard, as though people needed to make clear that the weather did not dictate their actions. After Mrs. Hagedorn left, Aaron and Bernice lay on their sofas listening to cars crunch by and to families discussing Christmas light displays as they walked past the house on their way to church. They competed to see who could identify the voices first, a contest that Bernice won, despite Aaron’s years of having waited on these people at the café.