Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

When he tried to push these thoughts away by focusing on the gift itself — picturing himself handing the package to Walter and Walter opening it — he found that there was not only An Apology inside but so many other things, all the things he had realized during his trip: that he loved Walter but when he was right there beside him, day after day, the love part disappeared. It was only from a distance, without the daily grievances and resentments to obscure it, that he was able to recall this love at all, and even then, he was not sure whether what he felt was love or the memory of love. But if he included that in the package, he would need to include the part about how he had also come to hate Walter, in order for any of it to make sense. And what kind of gift was that?

* * *

“Did you find a new place yet?” Winnie asked each time she called, and each time he said, “No, I haven’t seen anything interesting.”

“You are looking?” she asked finally.

He did not answer, and Winnie did not fill the silence because she knew he would answer eventually. “No,” he said. “The truth is that I’m not doing anything. I go to school and I teach, if you can call it teaching, and then I come home and I wait to go to bed. I try to make it to nine because that seems like a respectable hour, but I rarely make it past eight. It’s like I’m swimming through the day, and the shore’s so far off, and the only way I can get to it is by taking one stroke at a time and ignoring everything else around me, and when I do get there, I’m exhausted. All I want to do is sleep.”

“What about your landlords?” she asked. He had told her about the Ngs. He had told her everything.

“The same. Everything’s the same, Winnie. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He did not tell her that he was scared, though he supposed she knew.

“The trip was a lot,” Winnie said. “There’s also Bill’s death. Maybe you didn’t know him long, but he was your friend. Sometimes you just need to let yourself be sad, and if you don’t take time, your body takes it anyway. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now.”

“I taught my students that expression not long ago,” he said, “and now they use it constantly. Last week Melvin told me he wanted to do his upcoming presentation on the Amish because they have a lot on their plate.”

“What did he mean?” Winnie asked.

“I’m not sure. I think he meant that they have a lot of rules to follow. I guess I’ll find out soon enough — they start presenting tomorrow.”

“How is Melvin?” she asked. He had told her about what he had seen in the basement, and she said that he needed to talk to Melvin about it, that saying nothing only reinforced Melvin’s feeling that having sex with a man was shameful, which was what had led him to the basement in the first place. At the time he had agreed, but now, talking to Melvin was just one more thing he didn’t have the energy for.

“It’s always hard with Melvin to tell how he is,” Aaron said, “but I suspect Melvin has a lot on his plate also.”

* * *

The next morning, Aaron asked for a volunteer to begin the presentations. Everyone looked down, as students do when they fear being chosen. As he stared out at their bent heads, the room became once again a great expanse of water. He knew that if he stopped swimming, he would go under, so he sat at his desk and they stared at theirs, until finally Paolo raised his hand and said he would go first.

He went to the front of the room, smiled at everyone, and said, “Today I will tell you about a very important subject, Harley motorcycles in this country, the United States.” The students laughed, and Paolo looked pleased. “In August I will go for first time to bike rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. This rally starts in 1938.” Aaron did not tell him to watch his verb tenses. Paolo wrote vocabulary words on the board— rally and hog and biker chick —and then he walked over to the map of the United States and traced the route that his motorcycle club would take when they drove to South Dakota. He told them how many miles they would ride each day and gave them data about how many bikers attended each year and how much money Sturgis earned from the rally, because at heart Paolo was still a man who felt most comfortable assessing the world in numbers.

When Paolo was finished, Neto raised his hand and went next. He had attended Burning Man for the first time and spoke with the zeal of a convert. His presentation consisted primarily of pictures of people who appeared to have survived an apocalypse. Normally Aaron would have tried to understand what Neto saw when he looked at the photos, would have asked Neto questions with that objective in mind, but this time he sat at his desk and watched Neto’s slideshow in silence. After that, one of the Borols talked about Levi’s jeans, which had been invented during the Gold Rush, and then Lila explained the role of the Chinese in building the railroads. She used note cards and a PowerPoint, and Aaron was sure no one would volunteer to follow her, but Melvin, surprising everyone, offered to go next.

His first talk, about computers, had been incomprehensible, but this time he stood in front of them and said, “I will tell you about some people I met when I was on East Coast. They are called Amish people. They do not drive cars or use telephones.” He showed a picture of an Amish horse and buggy and wrote the word buggy on the board. “My friend, who is Amish person, cannot sit at family table. He must sit quietly in corner to eat his food.” He turned and wrote shun beside buggy . “When I visit with my friend’s family, I sit at table but my friend, he is on the floor, and we must not talk to him.”

“Why?” asked Pilar. “Why must he sit on the floor?”

“Because he buys car and keeps it in secret garage. This is how I meet him. He is selling car very cheap, and I think I will buy car and drive across America to my new home, which is San Francisco. He told me that he had to eliminate the car from his life because now his family knows he has car. They are very angry and also embarrassment because all of the Amish people know about the car, and they criticize his family. The car is called ‘stigma.’ ” Melvin wrote stigma on the board next to shun .

“Stigma is what Jesus had,” Lerma said. “From the nails in his hands.”

“Excuse me,” said Katya. “I am not understanding this word stigma .”

She looked at Aaron, and from his desk he said wearily, “A stigma means that other people look at you in a negative way because they think something about you is shameful.” He paused. “If you have a mental illness, for example, people might think of you in a negative way, so we say, ‘There’s a stigma attached to mental illness.’ ”

“What else?” said Katya. She was taking notes. “What else is attaching with stigma?”

“Well, I guess being in prison, having AIDS, being homeless. But remember, sometimes the stigma disappears.”

“How can it disappear?” asked Katya.

“Well, because the stigma isn’t real. It’s about how people think, so maybe society changes. People become educated about a topic, and then they think the situation isn’t shameful anymore.”

He could see from their faces that he was not explaining stigma well. He should get up and write his examples on the board, but he knew that if he left his desk, he would drown.

“What about Jesus?” said Lerma.

“That’s not relevant,” he said. He could hear the impatience in his voice. The others looked down. Lerma looked down also.

Each day after class, Lerma took two buses to her job, her first job, which involved picking up a brother and sister from school and shuttling them home, where she oversaw their homework and made dinner and got them ready for bed. Their mother was there also, but she did not like to be disturbed. She required “peace and quiet,” lots of it, she had told Lerma at the interview. She reminded Lerma about this whenever the children became loud. Lerma put the brother and sister to bed, and then she went to her second job, sleeping in a chair beside the bed of a sick girl. Every two hours an alarm rang, waking her so that she could check on the girl. She did this until the nurse arrived at seven, and then she went home and changed in order to be at school by nine. This was her schedule every day except Sunday because Sunday was church day. She worked hard to improve her English. She did not complain or fall asleep in class. And in return he had yelled at her for wanting to understand stigma better. He said her question was “not relevant” because everything felt irrelevant to him now, and he had not stopped to consider that for Lerma it was more relevant than anything else.