Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Clarence told me that story,” Aaron said. “After the wasps attacked me. Remember?”

Gloria nodded. “I made mustard compresses.”

He felt foolish, for of course she remembered. She remembered everything connected to his mother. He saw that now. He had not seen it as a boy, but Clarence had, and so had his mother. It was why she had come here. Sad Café Love, he thought. It was better to be the loved than the lover, if better meant easier, safer.

“You know, Clary hated nearly everyone, but especially children,” Gloria said. “I always thought it had to do with their size, but after you left that day, he told me he thought you might grow up to be ‘more bearable’ than most folks.”

She laughed and Aaron found himself joining her. His mother did not laugh. Gloria was the one who had cracked open.

* * *

His original plan had been to show up unannounced. He imagined something useful coming out of the surprise, but he had changed his mind when he arrived in the Twin Cities the night before, once he was back in Minnesota and could feel how easily he might lose his nerve, how he might drive back and forth past Gloria’s farm for an entire afternoon without ever pulling in. He needed something that would bind him to action, something beyond his own weakening resolve, so he took out the telephone number Bill had given him and dialed it from his hotel near the airport.

Gloria had answered. “Yut,” she said, and he said, “This is—” and she said, “Aaron,” as though she had been sitting there by the telephone waiting for him to call.

“Yes,” he said. “This is Aaron,” and then, not knowing what to say next, he added, “Her son,” using the pronoun even though they had not yet mentioned his mother because his mother was all they had between them.

“I’ll put her on,” Gloria said. Her breathing was off, wheezy.

“No,” he said. “Just let her know I’m coming.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“All right, then,” Gloria said. She did not say that his mother would be happy to see him or that they looked forward to his arrival. He appreciated the lack of pleasantries.

The hotel was not in an area conducive to walking. This he had learned during check-in, when he asked the woman at the front desk — her nametag said IRENE — what restaurants were in walking distance. She looked at him as though he were asking about strip clubs or how to obtain a sexual partner. The last time he’d stayed in a hotel was in Needles. He remembered the way Britta had regarded him as he signed in; he’d been too tired to operate a pen, unable to recall his address, the one in Albuquerque that he was leaving behind. Perhaps it was just the nature of people who worked front desks to act skeptical and uninterested, to make clear that hospitality had its limits.

“Walking distance?” Irene said. She slid a list of restaurants across the counter. The nearest was three miles away. She put an X beside two she thought might still be open at this hour. It wasn’t even late, nine o’clock, still seven on his watch, which he had not moved ahead when the pilot suggested they do so just before landing. He was sure that he would not be in Minnesota long enough to make it worth the effort of losing and then regaining time.

He was not hungry enough to do everything required to obtain food: get back into the rental car, follow a map, enter a restaurant filled with people, some of whom he would need to interact with in order to procure a meal. Instead, he took his suitcase to his room and set it on the bed, sat down next to it, stood up and paced, and sat again. It was then that he had called Gloria’s number, but when he finished talking to her, he still felt restless. He knew this had to do with the flight, on which he had occupied a window seat for four hours, his knees pressing hard against the seat in front of him. Despite his long legs, he always requested the window. He had come to flying as an adult and hated it, hated especially the moment when the plane veered onto the runway and he could see the long expanse of tarmac before him. The engines revved, the plane lurched forward, faster and faster, while he considered the sheer impossibility of it all. Walter, by contrast, got on a plane, took out a book, and began to read, as calmly as if he were in his study at home. Aaron supposed Walter’s calmness should have made him calmer, but it never had. The only thing that made him calmer was staring out the window with a steady focus that kept the plane moving down the runway and into the air.

He left his room and began walking briskly up and down the hallways of the hotel. Until San Francisco, he had never lived so close to strangers. It both shocked and impressed him to know that people did not alter their behavior around the fact of this proximity. The Ngs continued to scream their discontentment day after day, night after night, despite the fact that he, a stranger, lay below them, while behind each door of this hotel, there were televisions on too loud, children crying, even a dog barking. He did not understand people who traveled with dogs. As he paced, he heard other sounds, private sounds: gas being passed, a man saying, “I’m ashamed to even know you,” people moaning. In room 208, a woman panted the word bigger over and over in a rhythmic, unsettling way. It seemed an impossible demand.

On the landing between the second and third floors he discovered a vending machine. There was nothing in it that he wanted, but he bought two bags of pretzels, a bag of M&M’S, and Cheetos. Back in his room, he emptied everything into the ice tub and began to eat, going from the salty pretzels to the chocolate to the chemical flavor of the Cheetos. Finally, he washed the orange Cheetos powder from his hands and picked up the telephone again, dialing from memory. It was almost eleven, but he knew Winnie would be awake, stretched out on her gerebog, a coffinlike, wheeled rice chest from Java. It had taken four large Samoan men to get it into her living room. When they set it down, they were coated with sweat and collapsed onto it, filled with admiration for its solidness. At night after everyone went to bed, even the dog, Winnie lay atop the gerebog reading, for though she loved Thomas and her boys deeply, she said that part of maintaining that love was knowing to end her day alone.

Aaron listened to the phone ringing, imagined her resting her book across her stomach as she reached for it. Then, “Hello,” she said, right into his ear. She sounded tired, and he wanted to hang up, understanding his own selfishness. She said hello again, and when he still did not reply, she said, “Aaron, is that you?”

“Winnie,” he said. “I’m here. I’m in Minnesota.” And he began to sob.

* * *

It was Gloria who asked him to stay for supper. His mother had gone out to feed the animals, the three dogs as well as the geese and chickens they still kept. They had gotten rid of everything else, Gloria said. It was too much work for a couple of old spinsters. He had not offered to help his mother. He needed a few minutes away from her. He asked Gloria what he could do to assist her with the meal, but she said she had her own way of doing things in the kitchen and did not really know how to factor another person into it, so he stood awkwardly off to the side watching her.

“My mother doesn’t help with the cooking?” he finally asked.

Gloria had taken a pint box of fish fillets out of the freezer and was running hot water over it. “I guess you like sunfish?” she said.

“I haven’t had them in a while.” He did not want her to think he hadn’t had them because he didn’t like them, so he added, “They’re not easy to come by in San Francisco.”