Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

The truth was that he thought of sunfish as specific to his childhood, along with lutefisk, which his mother had served in place of meatballs as the Thursday special the last two weeks before Christmas. She prepared it with boiled potatoes and a white sauce of butter, flour, and water, and on the side was a sheet of potato lefse, everything on the plate as white as snow. Then she added string beans and lingonberry sauce, the green and red giving the plate a holiday feel. On those two Thursday nights, people lined up outside the café to get in.

“Why don’t you serve lutefisk every night?” he had asked.

“That’s not the way it works,” she said. “Folks are only this interested because I don’t serve it every night. That’s human nature. Besides, I couldn’t stand the smell of it every day.”

His mother hated fish. Didn’t Gloria know this?

“Your mother caught these sunfish last summer,” Gloria said.

“My mother caught them?” he said. She had also hated fishing, though she had gone only once that he knew of, with his father when they stayed at Last Resort on their honeymoon. She had told him the story of that trip numerous times, and always she stressed that she had never been so aware of her life ticking away as when she sat in that boat waiting for a fish to bite.

“Sure,” Gloria said. “All summer long she’s out on the lake. Winter too. She’s got a fish house that one of the neighbor boys hauls out with his truck after the lake’s solid. He gets it all set up for her — puts in the stove, stacks some wood, drills a few holes, brings in her card table and chair. Every morning she packs sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and I don’t see her until bedtime most days.”

Gloria worked a butter knife between the fillets. “Try not to judge her too harshly,” she said now that her back was to him. She plugged in a frying pan and dropped a chunk of Crisco into it. As it melted, she dredged the fillets in flour and then lined them up in the pan. “Anyway,” she said, “she’s a different person.”

At supper his mother dished up several fillets of the sunfish and ate them without comment. “How’s work?” she asked him.

“Do you even know what I do for a living?” he said. He took a bite of his fish and thought about how much better it would be fried in butter.

“Yes,” said his mother. “Actually, I do. I know some things about you, you know, about your life.”

“How?” he said. “How do you know these things about me?” He knew that she was lying.

“Well,” she said. “I shouldn’t say how I know because that involves other people, and it’s always best not to involve others, but I know you’re a teacher.”

She put another piece of fish into her mouth and swallowed quickly without chewing, which was what he did when someone served him onions and there seemed no polite way to avoid them. Gloria was wrong. His mother had not changed. She still hated fish. Except now she was a person who would pretend she did not hate fish, which meant Gloria was right. He felt his chin quiver, which meant he was about to cry. He did not want to cry, not here in front of his mother. He was no longer the same person either, and he did not want her to think he was, to think he was still the boy who cried about everything. At a dinner party once a doctor had told him a trick she used to keep herself from crying when giving families bad news. She pushed out her jaw. He tried it, and it worked. He turned to Gloria and said, “Supper was very good. Thank you for cooking and for inviting me to join you.”

“You were always so polite,” said his mother. “That was another reason the kids were afraid of you.”

“No, that’s why they didn’t like me,” he said. “When you’re polite to people who don’t deserve it, they think you’re mocking them.”

“I think Aaron has lovely manners, Dee,” Gloria said. “We’re just not used to such things.” She stood and began stacking the dishes, and Aaron rose to help her. His mother sat staring down at her plate, but Aaron took it from her and carried it into the kitchen. A few small bones from her fish were lined up and teetering on the rim.

“Aaron,” said Gloria, “you’ll stay the night.”

It was after eight. He could not imagine leaving now, trying to locate a town big enough to have a motel. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“It’s no trouble,” said Gloria. “We’ll put you in Clary’s room.” They heard his mother’s chair scrape back from the table. She did not say good night.

* * *

It was just as he remembered, the shelves of books with their spines turned in, keeping their titles to themselves. He sat on the bed, Clarence’s bed, and laughed at the memory of his young self advising Clarence to turn the titles outward. In the corner beside the desk, turned inward like a naughty child, was Clarence’s wheelchair, the afghan that had covered his legs folded neatly across the back. Aaron rose from the bed and gripped the chair’s handles, recalling how he had maneuvered it so carefully down the hallway while Clarence berated him for his clumsiness.

He could hear Gloria moving around the house, closing up for the night. His mother used to engage in a similar routine when he was a boy, a routine that had angered his father, who liked bedtime to be a fast transition into sleep. After checking the doors and windows, she would pause longest at the oven, staring at the dials, and then, still unconvinced, she would open the door and put her head inside. From his bed, Aaron had listened for these familiar sounds, even though the routine often ended with his father screaming, “It’s off.” Once, as his mother crouched before the oven, head inside, his father had come up behind her and pushed her in. Aaron had seen it happen. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, needing another glass of water, but he had crept back to bed with his empty glass.

His day had started in a nondescript airport hotel in Minneapolis and was ending in Clarence’s bedroom. He imagined he would lie awake all night, trying to sort through everything that had happened in between. In fact, he fell asleep immediately. When he awakened — minutes or hours later — he moved from deep sleep to consciousness quickly, aware of something, a presence there in the dark. It was the sort of dark that seemed both vast and one-dimensional, and he stretched his hand into it, colliding with something hard — metal and rubber. It was Clarence’s wheelchair, pulled up beside the bed.

In the iron ore mine when he was five, the Finns had pointed out stalactites, which he did not touch, though he had imagined how they would feel: cold and smooth and slick. He had thought of the stalactites when he laid his finger on Clarence’s tusk. But had the tusk been slick? He could not remember, the tactile part of the memory simply gone. How was it possible to lose part of a memory, for one of the senses to stop contributing? If he reached out into the darkness again, would his fingers remember how Clarence’s tusk had felt in the seconds before Aaron said, “I love them,” or in the seconds after?

Clarence had been crying. He understood this only now.

“Aaron,” said a voice from the dark, “why are you here?” It was his mother.

She had awakened him like this once before, when he was five. Nearly five. It was New Year’s Eve. His father had had to work the night shift, and he and his mother stayed up late watching television and eating popcorn with an ease that felt festive, neither of them saying aloud what they both knew: it was his father’s absence that made it feel like a holiday. He did not remember falling asleep, but he woke up in his bed, the room dark, his mother beside him. “Welcome to the seventies, Aaron,” she said. She smelled of alcohol, though she was not a drinker, and crackers. He recognized both as she leaned close to kiss his forehead, the latter an everyday smell that he associated with soup and upset stomachs, the former a rarer odor that occasionally wafted from his father’s glass at the supper table. She remained there with him a long while, her breathing unsteady, her hand warm on his brow, before she stood and whispered, “Don’t be afraid of the world.” Years later he thought that she had been talking to them both.