Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

Bernice sampled a roll of lefse from the stack she had buttered and sugared for the two of them. The lefse had been dropped off earlier by Agnes Olsson as partial payment on a plumbing bill. “Agnes’s potatoes weren’t dry enough,” Bernice observed, “but I guess it’s a fair trade since my father’s not the best plumber in town.” It was true that Rudy was not the best plumber, though he was cheap and did not mind getting dirty.

Bernice’s voice turned confessional then, as it had when she told him the story of the desk. “In the fall of 1976, I enrolled at Moorhead State University,” she began, moving from elementary school straight to college, as if the years in between had been too uneventful to mention. Aaron rolled onto his side to listen. “My graduation marked a crossroads: I had come down a path of uninterrupted disappointment, also known as my youth, to find myself in a clearing, a flitting moment in which I allowed myself to feel hopeful, to feel that life just might jag crazily off in a new direction. In short, my life became like a Robert Frost poem.”

Bernice disliked Frost. She had told Aaron so repeatedly over the years, but that night she told him again, noting that her aversion had been heightened by the fact that her teachers all seemed to find his poetry compelling and insightful and not at all trite, despite its overt symbolism, decipherable even by a group of uninterested fifth graders, for fifth grade was the year they had been introduced to poetry, a poem a month chosen by their teacher. “ ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ was our November poem,” Bernice continued, though this too she had told him before. “We had one month in which to recite it from memory in front of the class, without errors or excessive prompting. Three more Frost poems were similarly imprinted in my brain over the next seven years. So it was that, at eighteen, I stood in the clearing, contemplating a road not taken, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was the only language I had to describe this unfamiliar feeling known as optimism.” She paused to take a bite of lefse .

“The ‘clearing’ appeared courtesy of the newly hired guidance counselor. Matthew Brisk was his name. He was the first person who seemed not to notice my size. He didn’t smirk when I turned sideways to fit through the doorway of his office, didn’t hold his breath when I lowered myself onto the flimsy folding chair across from his desk. Instead, he talked to me about something called My Future. He spoke with full-on exclamation points. ‘Your grades are stupendous! What a transcript! You have so many options with grades like this!’ With the same enthusiasm, he asked, ‘How about clubs? Are you much of a joiner?’

“Well, the merging and mingling and coming together of people had never interested me, though I could not say so to Matthew Brisk. You see, from that very first meeting, I felt a shameful need to mold myself to his vision of me, so I said I had belonged to FHA, which was true. I had joined my sophomore year at the coaxing of the club advisor, a dull woman with firm orders to breathe life into the organization. I did not tell Matthew Brisk that after I joined, someone crossed out the word ‘Homemakers’ on the sign above the meeting room, changing it to read ‘Future Hogs of America,’ or that I quit just three weeks later after my fellow ‘homemakers’ filled my chocolate cake with grape bubblegum as it baked in the oven during our meeting.

“I filled out the applications that Matthew Brisk gave me and took the SAT exam, which I enjoyed because it was rife with archaic vocabulary words and obscure second meanings, words like husband, which I certainly had no interest in as a noun, despite my brief membership in FHA, but found rather attractive as a verb. When I began receiving acceptance letters, I took them to Matthew Brisk, who slapped me on the back and said, ‘Nice work!’ I chose Moorhead State and informed them I would be attending in the fall. Only later did it occur to me that I had been fooled, that Matthew Brisk, with his exclamation points, had no insight into my future at all.”

Bernice paused to eat two more rolls of lefse . When she resumed the story, she leaped ahead to the point five weeks into her first quarter, when she hitched a ride back to Mortonville with Karl Nelson, a college sophomore who returned home every weekend. “He had spent his high school years working to attain even a modicum of popularity and was not willing to begin all over again,” Bernice explained. “He retained a girlfriend here, a semipopular girl who was a senior, and together they attended sporting events, at which Karl received more attention as a college man than he ever had during high school.”

“Did Karl Nelson tell you this?” Aaron asked. Karl Nelson owned an accounting business that catered to farmers, with whom he had often held meetings at the café, so, of course, Aaron knew him, but not in the way that Bernice described him, with the emotional depth and motivations of a character in a book. He knew him simply as a man who talked to farmers about depreciation and yield and never consumed more than two cups of coffee at a sitting because coffee made him “jumpy.”

“Of course not,” Bernice said. “He drove with his transistor radio pressed against his ear the whole time. The only time we spoke was when we stopped in Fergus Falls for gas. While it was pumping, he leaned in and said, ‘Ten bucks,’ which was the amount I had offered when I called him the night before, an amount I knew would ensure a ride. I spread two fives on his car seat, which was unpleasantly warm from his buttocks, though I’m certain neither of us wanted the greater unpleasantness of touching hands as we exchanged money. I had contacted him because I knew of his weekly trips home from my mother, who brought them up each time she called. Until the day I came back for good, I had not made a single visit home. I told no one that I was coming, not even my parents, but when they saw me hoisting my belongings out of his trunk, they deduced that I was home to stay, that I had attempted the road less traveled and failed.” She stopped speaking, as though she had reached the end of a recitation.

“And then you stayed in your room studying Spanish?” Aaron asked, referring to the conversation they had had several years earlier.

“Yes,” Bernice said. He could tell that she was pleased he remembered. “In high school we were obligated to study German, which never appealed to me, but I took to Spanish immediately, in part because I liked the professor, Dr. Baratto. He was Italian, he told us the first day of class, and in Italian his name meant ‘barter,’ but in Spanish it meant ‘cheap.’ ‘When I go to Mexico,’ he said, ‘everyone thinks, Here comes that stingy guy .’ The whole class laughed. I thought, then, about the way people had always overstressed the first syllable of my name, HOG-a-dorn , and about how I’d never met an Italian before and now I was learning Spanish from one. From that very first day, I knew that college was the thing for me.”

Bernice yawned, letting him know that the story was over. Perhaps she had simply looked at her watch and seen that her mother would be home soon — indeed, she walked through the door humming “Silent Night” five minutes later — but Aaron was sure that Bernice had chosen that specific spot to stop, as if she had gone away to this magical place called college and never returned.

Aaron would later wonder whether Bernice had sensed something about him that he had not yet allowed himself to see, namely that his reasons for not desiring her body had nothing to do with her body itself. He did know that she did not want him to leave Mortonville, but he suspected that this had nothing to do with love or sexual desire.