Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“It was completely Virginia Woolf -ish,” Aaron told Winnie, referring to the Albee play and not the author herself.

“They probably had a very passionate relationship in the beginning,” Winnie said. “When couples start hating each other, everything goes but the passion. It just gets rechanneled.”

Aaron met Winnie when he was nineteen, the summer after his first year of college. One day Walter announced that his sister would be coming for the weekend. He had never mentioned a sibling.

“Are you close?” Aaron asked.

“We’re not un-close. There’s no underlying animosity, if that’s what you mean. We’re typical of many adult siblings, I suspect. Being close, as you put it, requires a certain commitment from both parties, and perhaps we lack the commitment.”

Aaron thought of his mother and Uncle Petey, how they had gone years without speaking, not because they were angry at each other but because they too lacked commitment. His mother said that at the end of each day, when you were tired and just wanted to be left alone, you made a decision either in favor of being left alone or in favor of the relationship, and she and Petey had both chosen solitude. The good thing, she said, was that there were no hard feelings that way.

It turned out that Winnie was visiting because she and Thomas were moving to Minneapolis, where Thomas had taken a job as vice principal at a private school. When Aaron asked her whether they had chosen Minnesota to be closer to Walter, she laughed and said, “The sort of relationship we have doesn’t require proximity.”

“Walter didn’t even tell me he had a sister,” Aaron confessed.

“That sounds like Walter,” Winnie said, sounding not at all upset.

After she left, Walter noted how well Aaron and Winnie had gotten along, offering this assessment without jealousy. It was the same way he sounded when Aaron asked to borrow a scarf or a bicycle helmet. “Take it,” Walter would say. “I’m not using it. Someone should.”

Now, Aaron was giving Walter his sister back. Walter had not indicated that he wanted his sister back or even that he felt she had been taken, but Aaron preferred to think of his motives in this way because he did not know how to tell Winnie he was leaving. She would want to know why. She would want to know everything. He had instead recorded his reasons in a notebook, cataloging them as though he had in mind a tipping point—25 or 41 or 100—the number of grievances that justified leaving.

Grievance #1: Whenever Walter and I are sitting in a room together and he gets up to leave, he turns off the light on his way out. He claims that it is a gesture born of habit, something ingrained in him by his parents, but I cannot help but feel that his focus moves with him so that when he leaves a room, everything in it, including me, ceases to exist.

He told me once, not unkindly, that this bothers me because I have “abandonment issues.” I don’t particularly care for therapy lingo, yet it struck me as a convincing argument. Still, I cannot help but wonder why Walter does not then take more care to avoid triggering my “issues,” why he continues turning off lights as he goes blithely along to his study or the kitchen, leaving me there in the dark.

Grievance #14: Walter insists on using the French pronunciation of all Anglicized French words, an affectation that I must admit has become a source of embarrassment for me, unexpressed of course, for I understand that I am the one who has changed. In other words: Once, at the very beginning of our relationship — before sex entered the equation, before I became the person I now am — we went grocery shopping together. There, I watched Walter ask one stock boy after another where he might find the “my-o-nez,” watched and felt proud of his perfect pronunciation, proud of the fact that it never brought us one step closer to what we sought, a jar of bland, white mayonnaise.

Grievance #86: Last night we got together with three of Walter’s friends from college. The Credentialists, I call them. Walter doesn’t approve of the name, but I consider it apt. The first time we met, several years ago now, one of them, Harold, immediately asked where I had attended college.

“I went to a state school in Minnesota, the one where Walter used to teach.”

They had gone to Harvard. They said it apologetically—“at Harvard.”

At dinner, they proclaimed the food “fabulous,” and one of them said, “Remember how awful the food was in the cafeteria?” and another, Harold again, said, “It was dreadful, but that’s the thing. Anyone else can say their college food was terrible, and nobody thinks they’re talking about anything more than food, but if I say to a group of people — not you guys, of course, because we’re all in the same boat — that the food was awful at Harvard, well, everyone just assumes that I’m not talking about the food at all. It’s become a bit of a problem.”

“That does not sound like a problem,” I said.

There were 149 grievances in the notebook by the time he left, but the main reason that he was leaving, which he never recorded, was that he no longer loved Walter. He did not know how to consider this alongside the sheer longevity of their relationship, the fact that he had been with Walter more than half his life. Several years earlier, before Aaron began keeping his notebook, Walter had remarked during a walk one day, casually, “You know if you left me now, it would be like tossing these years aside, regarding them as wasted.” There seemed to Aaron nothing worse than feeling you had wasted your life.

The day he stood in Walter’s office reading aloud the list of items that he wished to take, after Walter said, “I saved you” and began to cry, Aaron went into his own office and took out the notebook. It seemed cruel to add to it in the home they had created together, but he took up his pen and composed Grievance #149: He saved me knowing that there is no stronger way to bind another human being to you than by saving him. This is why I must leave.

* * *

Most of his grievance cataloging had been done at Milton’s, a diner on Central Avenue, where he had secretly been eating lunch every Friday for the nine years they lived in Albuquerque. He considered himself a regular, though he suspected that nobody else did. The true regulars fell into three categories: truckers, prostitutes, and the old men who lived in the Route 66 motor lodges scattered along this stretch of Central. The truckers came and went, as did the prostitutes, though their comings and goings were dictated not by the road but by the law and their own bad luck. They sat in groups of three or four, talking without lowering their voices, even when they discussed the vicissitudes of business or the policemen who trolled for “freebies,” which the women expeditiously dispensed in the front seats of squad cars. They did not rage against these circumstances, but instead spoke as if bad luck were a family member they could not envision their lives without.

It was the old men who intrigued him most. He knew nothing of their lives and had always been too intimidated to strike up a conversation, but he thought of them, collectively, as a cautionary tale. Do not become comfortable with loneliness, he told himself as he listened to them converse awkwardly while vying for the waitresses’ attention. One of the men, whom he nicknamed Elmer, was obsessed with terrorism, specifically with the possibility that his flophouse motel might be the next object of an attack. This was right after 9/11, when terrorism was on everyone’s mind, but the certainty with which Elmer asserted his theory left Aaron disheartened. Elmer held forth from the smoking end of the counter, waving a cigarette in the air to help his point along. Aaron had never seen him without one, and as he watched Elmer light each new cigarette from the butt of the last, listened to him wheeze and hack phlegm into his napkin, he wanted to scream from his booth that it was clear what would kill Elmer and it had nothing to do with terrorists.