Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Well, they’ll end up in hell eventually,” Pastor Gronseth’s wife said, and his son nodded. They raised the window and drove off. The next day they too were gone.

* * *

On the morning of Tuesday, March 13, his forty-second birthday and his first alone, Aaron awakened early to the rare and disorienting sound of his telephone ringing. His first thought was to wonder not who was calling but why he had even installed a telephone. “The human voice carries entirely too far as it is,” Mark Twain had said upon the invention of the telephone, words Aaron had repeated to Walter frequently in trying to explain the hostility that a ringing telephone invoked in him.

The origin of his phone antipathy lay in two incidents that had occurred twenty years earlier, when they were still living in Minnesota, the first while he was in college. As he spoke on the telephone to a classmate from his humanities class about a project on which they had been paired, he heard the distinct sound of a toilet flushing on the other end, a sound that, in retrospect, gave meaning to a series of grunts he had discerned earlier in the conversation. It had shocked him to know that while he and this stranger, Franklin (after the president), discussed a mediocre book about an environmental utopia, Franklin had been defecating. It was as if he had been in the bathroom with Franklin.

His distaste for the instrument deepened two years later, as he sat one afternoon in the Democratic headquarters in Moorhead, cold calling on behalf of a candidate whose virtues he could no longer recall. He spent a dull few hours reading from a script that encouraged others to join him in supporting Shirley Lund for state senate, and to amuse himself he invented stories about the people on the list: Marsha Norquist collected antique quilts; Jerold Harvey liked portly cats and bingo; Howard Hofbrau, plagued by a flamboyant name, had become increasingly retiring over the years.

As he dialed the final name on his list, Sadie Thompson, he could not move into the more liberating realm of fiction, for he had known a Sadie in Mortonville, Sadie Sandstrom, a woman in her eighties who painted customized landscapes, though what he remembered most was the way she dressed, in a tweed jacket and men’s dress shirt with a loosely knotted tie. The Sadie who answered his unsolicited call that day was also elderly, her voice like chalk, dry and constantly breaking. She was crying, he realized, sobbing to be specific, and he wanted to hang up, but instead he asked whether she was okay.

“Yes, I’m okay,” she said, “but my husband is dead.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Thompson,” he said. “How did he die?”

“I can’t tell,” she said. “He was watching the set when I went out to the garden to pull up some weeds.”

It registered then that her husband had just died, was lying before her dead even as they spoke. “You need to call an ambulance,” he said, looking frantically at his script.

“I called them,” she said. At that very moment an ambulance passed by the campaign headquarters on Tenth Street where he sat making calls, and he felt overwhelmed by the small ways that his life was attaching itself to this stranger’s.

“What were you calling about, young man?” Sadie Thompson asked, and so he explained his mission, referring to the script as he spoke.

“Bob’s a Republican,” she said when he had finished, dropping her voice in deference to years of discussing her husband in muted tones. “I’m a Democrat, but we try not to fight about it. We just take turns voting. One year I go in, and the next year he goes, because otherwise what good is it? We’d just be canceling each other out.”

Aaron wanted to explain that that was the whole point of voting, that an election was nothing more than a grand process of canceling one another out, but he did not have the heart to point out that the system she and her husband had utilized all these years lacked logic. He stayed with her on the line until he heard the sirens outside her house, and then he said, “I’m very sorry about your husband, Mrs. Thompson” and hung up.

That night at dinner, he told Walter the story. “I’m a stranger,” he said at the end. “What right did I have to intrude like that when her husband was lying there dead?”

He was being intentionally dramatic, but Walter responded calmly. “Think of how she was feeling at that moment, sitting there with him. She was probably happy that you called. After all, she picked up the phone.”

“She didn’t pick it up thinking it was me,” said Aaron. “She probably answered because she always answers the phone. Or maybe she thought it was the hospital calling or the police or their children.”

“Or maybe she just needed to hear a voice,” Walter said, in the soothing voice that made students and friends turn to him for advice and comfort, the voice that had had that effect on Aaron also, until one day it no longer did.

* * *

Aaron picked up on the fifth ring. “Hello,” he said.

“Aaron?”

“Winnie?” He noted the time, 5:09, which meant 7:09 in Minnesota, far too early for Winnie to be up. “Is everything okay?” he asked. “You? The kids? Thomas?” and then, “Walter?”

She said his name again, sounding at once happy and sad. He had always loved her ability to evoke contrasting emotions and make them seem valid and compatible. “Everyone’s fine,” she said. “We’re fine. Walter’s fine.” She paused as though expecting him to respond, but when he did not, she said, “He misses you. We all do.”

“I miss you,” he said. “But I like it here,” and then, “I’m in San Francisco.”

“I know. Walter told me.” Winnie giggled. “My god, Aaron. All those gay people — it must be driving you crazy.” They both laughed. “Happy birthday,” she said and began to sing a raucous, operatic version of the song, attempting to conceal her terrible voice.

He pressed the telephone to his ear and covered the receiver with his hand because he did not want her to hear his sniffling. “Thank you,” he said when she was done. “And thank you for calling. It’s the best birthday present ever.” He was embarrassed by how trite this sounded, how inadequate, and so he said her name again, whinnying it like a horse, “W-w-winnie,” their old joke.

“He’s miserable,” Winnie said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said.

“Don’t be sorry. He’s difficult, my brother. Nobody knows that except us because he’s only difficult with the people he loves, and we’re it, Aaron. We are the only two people in the world he truly loves. You know that, right?”

He did know, though did not know how to respond to having it stated.

“Are you teaching?” Winnie asked.

“Of course,” he said. “You know I love teaching. Besides, I have no other skills.”

“That is not true,” Winnie said sternly. “You’re logical and well read, and, most important, you’re the kindest person I know.”

Aaron hid his pleasure with a laugh. “You’ve just hit on the most sought-after qualities in any job market. In fact, I was just reading a job description when you called.” He cleared his throat. “Wanted: logical, well-read, kind person for six-figure position.” She laughed, and he said, “Anyway, enough about me. How’s business?”

“I just got back from my spring trip to Korea. That’s why I’m up at this ridiculous hour — jet lag.” Most mornings, Winnie rose at 8:52, which allowed her just enough time to drink one cup of coffee, shower, and drive across town in order to open at ten o’clock. “I’ve been awake since four,” she said. “You know what I was thinking about? That time the three of us stopped in Hong Kong on our way back from Bali, and we stayed in that little hotel with the poster taped up in the foyer: Seeking hairy Caucasian men . Remember?”