Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

One Friday Aaron arrived feeling particularly fed up with people’s irrationality, for he had just sat through a faculty meeting. To add to his displeasure, the booths were full, so he was forced to take a stool at the counter, to the right of the smoking Elmer, who was putting forth his theory yet again for the bored cook.

“Excuse me,” Aaron said loudly, turning to Elmer, who rotated slowly toward him. This close, Aaron could see that Elmer’s eyes were rheumy, their greenness turned to milk, and he realized then that Elmer was just a very old man engaged in a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his life. He gestured at the pepper shaker. “Pass the pepper?” he said, as though pepper were what he had wanted all along.

The next week, Elmer was not present. From his booth, Aaron heard one of the waitresses say to a regular, “Did you hear? The terrorists finally got old Dick.” She inclined her head toward Elmer’s usual spot. Aaron finished his breakfast burrito and set a ten-dollar bill on the table, anchoring it with his coffee mug. When he got out to his car, he put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed. He had not known the old man, had not even bothered to learn that his name was Dick, so he was not sure where the grief came from, except that he pictured the old man alone in his motel room, smoking and peering into the parking lot, and he regretted that he had not argued with him.

Aaron had not thought of Elmer, Dick, in a couple of years, but the Friday before he left Walter, as he sat at Milton’s for the last time, he looked around at the old men and what came to mind was Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He was sure Thoreau had meant, literally, men, for Aaron knew that men lived far lonelier lives than women — with the exception, perhaps, of his mother, though he considered the possibility that she was no longer lonely, that she had left Mortonville (and him) all those years ago to escape loneliness. He had not read Thoreau in years, not since college. He was not interested in reading about nature, not because he disliked nature, but because he disliked the artistic tendency to interpret nature, to put nature into words. He felt that nature spoke sufficiently for itself. He did not care to discuss it or to listen to others discuss it, nor to read about it in prose or poetic form or to see it depicted in art, for nature did not puzzle him: the seasons changed in the same order year after year, animals reproduced, birds assembled nests, flowers bloomed. People, on the other hand, did perplex him, and because the mind is often like that, gravitating toward mystery and challenge, Aaron preferred people.

Here was the thing, the irony perhaps: he had been coming to Milton’s these nine years in order to be alone. No one knew of his Friday ritual, especially not Walter, for how could he have explained to Walter that surrounded by these men, these lives-of-quiet-desperation men, he had acknowledged his own abiding loneliness. He ate a forkful of beans and looked around the diner, wondering whether anyone there would notice his absence and ask, “Does anyone know what happened to that quiet young fellow who came in every Friday and ordered the breakfast burrito with chorizo?”

He hoped so.

* * *

Aaron stopped to eat just after Bakersfield, at a place marked by an old door propped up beside the road, doorknob intact, painted with the words SALS FOOD. The apostrophe — what his students called “the up comma”—was missing, though he knew that the sign looked the same to most people with the apostrophe or without. He could not get over this, for all he could see was the missing mark; it was like looking at a face without a nose.

The parking lot was empty, which meant that he could position the U-Haul in front of the window. When he walked in, three waitresses jumped up from a booth and ran toward him, calling out, “Welcome. Merry Christmas.” There were no other diners. They tried to put him at a small table with a fresh flower on it, and when he asked for a booth near the window, they became flustered. Aaron wanted to tell them that the flower was beautiful but the truck outside contained everything he owned in the world. He noted the bulge in his throat, the telltale quiver of his chin, and knew that if he did not pick up the water glass that had been set before him and drink from it right away, he would begin to cry. The three waitresses watched him, listening to his throat convulse loudly as he swallowed. When he set the glass down, one of the women — SHIRLEY said her nametag — refilled it and handed him a menu. They watched him study it, and Shirley wrote down his order — a breakfast burrito with chorizo — while Margarita stood to the side snapping photos.

“I’m sorry,” said Shirley, nodding at Margarita. “You’re our first customer.”

“Ever?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “We just opened ten minutes ago. I’m sorry if we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s our first time. We’re sisters. That’s our father.” She pointed to a man wearing a chef’s apron who stood in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Sal?” Aaron asked, and she nodded. He smiled at Margarita and hoisted his water glass as proof of their hospitality and his pleasure, evidence for their future customers, who would be looking at his picture — taped to the wall or the cash register — for years to come. “You’re doing very well,” he said.

“Thank you. Are you from around here?” she asked hopefully, though he could see that she did not think it likely.

“I’m passing through,” he said, and he pointed out the window to the truck. “I’m moving to San Francisco.”

Like most major cities of the world, San Francisco, Aaron would quickly learn, had developed its own brand of provincialism, which manifested itself in its citizens’ unwavering belief that theirs was the only city where one would want, even dare, to be gay. Upon discovering that he had spent the last nine years in New Mexico, more than one San Franciscan had remarked, “So I guess you moved here to really be gay,” a comment that annoyed but mainly perplexed him with its implication that, until now, he had been only going through the motions, playing at being gay.

“Actually, I came here because of a woman,” he generally replied. This was true, for he had chosen San Francisco because of Taffy, whom he had met two years earlier at an English-as-a-Second-Language conference in El Paso, a three-day event aimed at connecting ESL teachers with overseas jobs. He did not tell Walter that this was the conference’s emphasis, allowing Walter to believe that he was going off to learn yet another strategy for teaching the past unreal conditional. Aaron went with the goal not of securing a job abroad but of entertaining the notion, of talking to recruiters from Hungary and Japan as though he possessed the intention and the freedom to pick up and go. It was his first step toward leaving. Taffy, on the other hand, attended because Glenna, her girlfriend of twenty-five years, had broken up with her, which meant that Aaron and she were two halves of the same coin — the leaver and the left. They became inseparable, attending meals and events and group interviews together, prompting a recruiter from Osaka to inquire, hopefully, whether they were married, hopefully because married couples were highly sought after, two-for-ones that were considered more stable. Aaron was afraid that even uttering a simple “no” would reveal the shock and horror he felt at considering the question, at imagining Taffy as his lover.

Her given name, the one recorded on her conference pass, was Hulda. It suited her far better than Taffy, which was, after all, not a name but a candy. One heard Taffy and expected a pink-hued, stickily sweet young thing and not a dour, obese woman in her fifties who wore too much red, unbecomingly, and often left her hotel room without wiping the sleep from her eyes or the toothpaste residue from the corners of her mouth, oversights that Aaron felt obligated to point out. He told himself that Taffy had been getting along just fine without him, yet each morning at breakfast he found himself mentioning the glob of lotion that clung to the side of her cheek or offering her his unused napkin while noting that she might want to give her nose one more good blow, all of which had imposed a level of intimacy with Taffy that he did not want.