Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Well,” said his father, “that’s the funny part. You see, I brought a slice of raw bacon with me when I went to pick you up from the Jews. They probably thought I didn’t know anything about Jews — they were snobby like that — but I had the bacon wrapped up in tinfoil in the glove compartment, and just before I went up and knocked on their door, I took the bacon out and rubbed it all over my hands, and when the Jews opened the door, I shook hands with them, both of them.” From the other side of the closet door, Aaron heard his father laughing while beside him, his mother remained silent. “I don’t hear you laughing,” said his father. “Don’t you get it? I had bacon grease all over my hands, and they didn’t even know it. They just acted so polite and pleased to meet me.”

His father grunted. “You see — not a damn shred of humor between the two of you.” His glass kept clinking, but he did not speak again. Soon, they heard his deep snores on the other side of the closet door.

His mother wet herself first. When Aaron smelled it — a wild, frightening odor amid the smells of dust and wool and moth balls — he thought that it was his own bladder betraying him, even though he had been focusing on holding it in. He relaxed, a defeated letting go, and felt the sudden warmth of urine seeping across his thighs, pooling beneath his buttocks.

“Jerry,” called his mother, “we need the bathroom.”

His father rolled over heavily on Aaron’s bed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all this racket?” he said, his voice thick.

“We need the bathroom, Jerry. Please.”

After a very long silence, his father said in the same thick voice, “What if I can’t live without the two of you?”

“You don’t need to, Jerry,” said Aaron’s mother. “Open the door so we can all go to bed. In the morning, I’ll clean everything up, and then we’ll go to the parade.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said his father.

“Understand what, Jerry?” said his mother. “Tell me.”

Aaron heard his father moving around on the bed, heard him mumbling. “I don’t think the two of you understand what a good life I gave you,” he said at last.

The gunshot came immediately, an exclamation point on his father’s words.

“My god,” screamed his mother. She began to kick at the closet door, calling his father’s name.

It was August, a humid month. The heat from their bodies was trapped in the closet with them and gave substance to the smell of urine and sour clothing and fear. Aaron could not breathe. It was like being in the iron ore mines, like being underwater.

“Aaron,” his mother said, “ask your father to let us out.”

“Can we come out?” Aaron whispered.

“Remind him about how you kicked Paul Bunyan,” said his mother.

“I kicked Paul Bunyan,” he said.

“He did that for you, Jerry,” his mother said, but there was no reply, no sound at all from the other side of the door. His mother’s sobs settled into a steady whimper, and the whimpers gave way to silence. Inside the closet and out, there was only silence.

* * *

Aaron awakened to the sound of birds. There were nests in the eaves above his window, which his father sometimes sprayed with the garden hose, blasting them loose, eggs falling to the ground along with bits of feather and twigs and dried grass. But new nests always appeared. Aaron never told his father about the new ones because he liked waking up to the cooing of birds. The closet was still dark, but the light beneath the door had changed. It was morning. His stuffed giraffe nudged his chin, though he did not remember taking it out of his suitcase during the night. His mother breathed steadily beside him, asleep on his leg.

He heard a key in the lock, and the closet door swung open. His father stood over them, haloed in light, still wearing his police uniform. His shirt was coming untucked, the belt hanging undone. His gun was snapped into its holster. Aaron’s mother sat up, the smell of urine rising with her, a stench like gas station bathrooms.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her words breaking into sobs.

“I was just having some fun,” said his father. “But as usual, you two don’t get the joke.” He laughed and stretched in a leisurely way, then brought his hand up over his nose. “Jesus, did you two shit yourselves? Get up and get changed,” he said. “In five minutes we’re leaving for the parade.”

Aaron awakened at eight his first morning back. He had fallen asleep at eight the night before, a symmetry that might have comforted him, except twelve hours was a long time to sleep. Ahead lay a day of getting up and going to school, teaching and coming home. Each of these tasks alone seemed beyond anything he felt equipped to do, but he got out of bed and ate, cold, the rest of the spaghetti with butter he had made the night before, after he realized that he had no interest in going out to buy groceries, had no interest in anything.

When he walked into the school an hour later, his colleagues greeted him as if it were a normal day, as if he had not been gone for nearly two weeks, as if Bill were not still suddenly dead, THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL sign gone, Bill’s students gone also. Aaron had been the only person from the school to attend Bill’s funeral, which was held at Mission Dolores. It was easy to pick out Bill’s sisters, one large and disheveled like Bill, the other tiny, both of them looking dazed. “Bill was such a joker,” they said to Aaron when he went over to offer his condolences. Earlier, he had watched them approach the casket, holding hands and peering inside as though they expected Bill to leap up and scare them. “He had a delightful sense of humor,” Aaron agreed, and they looked up at him like he was mocking them.

He walked into his classroom at precisely nine, which meant he was on time, strictly speaking, but the students had all arrived early, imagining he would be excited to see them. “Welcome back,” they said. “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you.” He had taught them that expression right before he left.

He set down his satchel and tried to smile.

“How was your vacation?” they asked. Vacation was what he had told them — anything else, namely a mother he had not seen in almost twenty-five years, seemed too complicated.

“Fine,” he said. “It was fine. Thank you. Now, let’s get started.”

He moved toward the board to write out phrasal verbs for review, but his legs felt weak and he detoured to his desk, where, he told himself, he would sit for just a minute, but his mouth was like a drain: as he talked about the difference between put off and put aside, his last little bit of energy flowed right out of him. When classes ended at one thirty, he was still sitting. He could see the confusion on their faces, which evolved into sadness over the following weeks as he continued to show up at nine, right at nine, with no time for pleasantries or questions, no time to help with college application essays or explain the best way to ask an employer for time off. When they straggled back from break late like everyone else, he said nothing, just sat at his desk at the front of the room, flipping through magazines that the former teacher had left behind.

* * *

After he left Gloria’s farm, he had driven back to Minneapolis and straight to Winnie’s house, where no one was home because no one was expecting him. It was Wednesday. They were at either work or school. There had been no plan. When he called Winnie from the airport hotel on Monday night, they had spoken for fifteen minutes, just long enough for him to stop crying and tell her about his mother, about how she was living with Gloria and had been all these years, about how Bill had found her and then died, about how he had booked a flight and gotten on a plane and now he was scared.