After the Parade (24 page)

Over the course of the year, he grew tired of their ridicule, which outweighed even the deep pleasure he felt when he passed Mrs. Korkowski's desk on his way back to his own and she whispered, “Aaron, that was just lovely.” Finally, one Friday he decided to
prepare nothing and then learn a joke during lunch. He ate his tuna casserole quickly and presented himself at the library, where he asked for joke books. The librarian pointed him toward an entire shelf, from which he chose one at random. The book was called
Fifty Polack Jokes,
and the assistant librarian, who was not really a librarian but one of the mothers, flipped it open and scanned a page, chuckling. “This has got some good ones,” she said, and she stamped the book and handed it to him.

That afternoon, Aaron stood before the class and asked, “What did the Polack say to the garbage collector?” His classmates sat up from the slouch they had slipped into, but before anyone could respond, Mrs. Korkowski called out, “Aaron Englund, sit down.” They all laughed.

“That's not the end of the joke,” Aaron said weakly, desperate to deliver the punch line—“I'll take three bags, please”—which he considered very funny.

“Now,” shouted Mrs. Korkowski. “Right now.” A few of the students laughed again, but when Mrs. Korkowski stood up, her chair flew backward, and the room grew silent, as though she had actually picked the chair up and flung it.

After school, Aaron went right home and told his mother what had happened, determined to make sense of it. His mother thought for a while in that distracted way of hers that did not always resemble thinking, and then she said, “
Korkowski
is a Polish name.” He nodded and waited, and his mother said, “You do know that
Polack
is a bad word for Polish people?” He did not know about the “bad” part, though of course he had heard the word
Polack
many times, mainly from the men in the café.

The next morning he wanted to stay home from school, but his mother said that staying home was not a solution, and so, stomach sour with dread, he went early and found Mrs. Korkowski sitting at her desk, grading their vocabulary assignments. “Yes?” she said when she saw him standing in the doorway.

In a rush, he told her how sorry he was. “I didn't know you were Polish,” he said.

She put down her pen and rubbed her eyes as though she were
already exhausted by the day. “My name is Polish,” she agreed. “But Korkowski is my husband's name. I hope you understand that I would be disappointed to hear you tell a joke like that no matter what my name was. I've always thought better of you than that.” Years later, he would realize that he had been chastised for delivering a joke from a book that came from the school library, a book with
Polack
right in its title, but at the time he had not known to consider any of this. “There's a whole world out there,” Mrs. Korkowski continued, more gently now. “I want you to remember that, Aaron, to remember that there are things out there beyond what you know or can imagine right now.”

*  *  *

Aaron generally avoided the faculty room during break, but that morning he went in, hoping to avoid answering Paolo's question. He found his colleagues sitting around a box of pineapple buns, purchased from the Chinese bakery next door by Marla, which meant that someone had been in her office asking for something—timely photocopies, perhaps even a raise. He reached for a bun but stopped when he saw the Post-it note taped to the box:
Thanks for the hard work. Love you guys, Marla.

Aaron felt increasingly old-fashioned and cranky amid this new social topography: business transactions sealed with a hug rather than a handshake; cell phone conversations carried on in public places, offering the sorts of details traditionally reserved for the bedroom or doctor's office; and now this, people who hired you to teach English professing love on a Post-it note. Once, when he and Walter overheard a teenager and his parents bid each other farewell at the shopping mall in Albuquerque, Aaron had asked, “Why must they say ‘love you' as though the kid's shipping off to war? He's obviously just heading over to the Gap for a few hours while his parents buy him way too many Christmas gifts.”

Walter had replied carelessly, suggesting that maybe Aaron needed to become more
comfortable
with his feelings, as though these rote declarations signaled people at ease with emotion. In fact, Aaron suspected the opposite was true, that people had become so removed from their
feelings that they were not bothered by what he viewed as emotion-devaluing gestures: words and actions that undermined the very sentiments they purported to evoke by turning them into commonplace, all-purpose responses.

Only Winnie had understood, because she was Winnie. He looked again at the Post-it, missing her terribly.

O
n his way back from the faculty room, Aaron paused in the doorway of the detective's classroom, planning to introduce himself, but only the detective's students were inside: a man in his forties, who, he would later learn, was from Kenya; a young woman with neck tattoos, dressed primly in a pale blue sweater and slacks; and a woman in her sixties, who he would come to suspect was a transsexual, though not because she fit any stereotypes of transsexuals. She was, in fact, a diminutive woman who wore tailored pantsuits, no makeup except lipstick, and little jewelry. Aaron's suspicion would be based on one small but curious detail, a habit the woman had of stepping back and letting other women pass through doorways before her, as though unable to dispense with years of gentlemanly decorum. The three students were reading from handouts, and he did not ask them where the detective was. He assumed smoking. Four times that morning, he had seen the man slip out of his room and head toward the smoking balcony at the end of the hallway.

Aaron followed his own students back into the room, where he wrote instructions for the next activity on the board while they were getting seated:

On a half sheet of paper, in 3–5 sentences, write an anecdote or detail about yourself that is surprising, amusing, interesting, or even embarrassing. It should be something about you that no one in this class knows. Do NOT include details, such as place names, that would make your identity known. When you are done, fold the paper in half twice.

“Please,” said Yoshi, pointing to the board. “What is
anecdote
?” He pronounced it with a soft
c
so that it sounded like a type of headache medicine.

“An an-ik-dote,” said Aaron, “is a little story about something that happened to you.”

“Can you give us one example?” said Pilar.

“Okay, here's
an
example of something about me,” he said. “I love to eat different types of animal feet—pigs' feet, chicken feet, duck webbing, sheep hooves. This is a detail about me that is surprising. Now I want you to write down an anecdote, and then we'll read them and see whether the class can guess who wrote each one. It will be a way for us to get to know one another better and to learn about the two new students.” The two new students had arrived the week before, a Turkish woman named Aksu and a young Korean woman who cried when he asked her to introduce herself to the class. Later, she told him that she had never spoken in class in her life, that back in Korea she had received a doctor's dispensation from public speaking.

The students composed their anecdotes slowly, recopying the final drafts onto fresh pieces of paper, which they folded and dropped into a punch bowl that Aaron had borrowed from the faculty room. He drew a slip and read it to the class. It was about a boy getting his penis caught in his pants zipper and screaming in terror when his father said that he would need to cut it, believing his father meant his penis and not the zipper. Everyone laughed and looked at Luis, who was pleased to be recognized as the obvious author. The next two were in a similar vein, sweet childhood memories that made the class giggle. But the fourth slip described how the narrator had pried open the window of his family's nineteenth-story apartment and thrown his mother's cat out. He was eleven and had been egged on by a teenage cousin, who assured him that cats had nine lives. When he rode the elevator down to retrieve the cat, he found it flattened on the sidewalk below. The class grew quiet as Aaron read. Nobody wanted to guess whose anecdote it was because doing so seemed akin to voting for who among them seemed cruelest. Aaron was sure that Neto had written it—he
recognized his handwriting—but when Aaron asked whose anecdote it was, Neto sat quietly, refusing to claim ownership.

“Okay,” said Aaron. “I guess that was our mystery writer.”

They learned that Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a couch potato and that Ji-hun went to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, because people gathered on the sidewalk near the museum each Sunday to swing dance. Finally, Aaron pulled his own slip. He had thought about the stories he could tell—his father falling from a parade float, his mother disappearing, saving Jacob's life—but in the end he wrote down a story that August, his great-great-uncle, had told him the summer of the Englund family vacation. The story was about how his family on his mother's side had lived above the Arctic Circle for ten years with six other Norwegian families and the Lapps. They had nearly starved because the only thing that grew in the frozen ground was potatoes, and even those grew poorly. At last, they moved to America, where they once again became farmers in a very cold place. Aaron had imagined that the students would relate to the story because it was about coming to this country, but instead they seemed perplexed.

“Why would they farm in the snow?” Chaa asked.

“They needed to eat,” he said, but he knew that what Chaa was asking—what everyone was wondering—was why they had moved above the Arctic Circle in the first place and why they had stayed so long once they realized that the situation was hopeless. He was five the summer that August told him the story, and so he had not questioned his ancestors' reasoning. But now, assessing the story via the detached logic of his students, he thought that maybe it ran in his family—this attraction to what was futile, this inability to see it as such—for hadn't his mother chosen to marry his father, even though she was happier working for the Goulds, and when his father died, hadn't she moved both of them to Mortonville because she said it was not a place to start over? And what about him? It was true that he had once loved Walter, but then, for many years, he had not—yet he had stayed. He had stayed above the Arctic Circle because what was familiar was important, even when it felt like growing potatoes in the half-frozen ground.

His students were still staring at him, waiting.

“I guess they wanted a challenge,” he said. “And they wanted land, even if it was above the Arctic Circle.” He reached into the punch bowl. “Next story.”

He unfolded the paper, which read:
I am engaged to Bulgarian woman. We meet last year in my country. Now I am in USA and she is in her country. I am waiting for H-1B visa, and she will come here and marry with me.

The students called out the name of every man in the class, including Aaron, every man except Melvin. Aaron wondered how it made Melvin feel, to seem less likely than his gay teacher to have a fiancée. Of course, Aaron was not sure that the students understood he was gay. He had referred once or twice to his “former partner,” but even native speakers had trouble with the nomenclature of gay relationships, and he knew that for many of the students, Nico, in his chaps, was the model for gayness.

“You're forgetting someone,” Aaron said, though it had taken him a moment also to realize that Melvin was the author. Melvin was Korean. His real name was Man-soo, but here in the United States, people had begun shortening it to Man, a nickname that had discomfited him, and so he decided to create his own, Melvin. “Melvin, is this yours?” Aaron asked. “Are you engaged?”

Melvin began to stammer. “Her name is Nikolina,” he said.

“How did you and Nikolina meet?”

“She was cleaning in Korea.”

“A maid?” said Aaron.

“Yes,” said Melvin.

“Your maid?” Aaron asked.

“No.” Melvin shrugged, licked his lips, which always looked painfully chapped, and said nothing more.

Of all his students, Aaron had the least sense of Melvin, who tended toward one-word responses and never smiled. The others treated him politely, but they did not tease him as they did one another, perhaps because he was older, thirty-two, though Paolo was in his fifties and everyone in the school joked with him. Aaron knew that their careful, almost deferential, treatment of Melvin had to do with his face, which
was crumpled in on the right side, as though a horse had stepped on it. Melvin never mentioned his face, but he carried himself like someone accustomed to people's stares.

“Congratulations, Melvin,” Aaron said.

*  *  *

That afternoon, Tommy, who was not so secretly one of Aaron's favorite students, stayed after class with the other Thais to ask whether there was a word in English to indicate that someone was in love with a person who didn't love him back. As they huddled around his desk, Aaron noted that Melvin, who was usually the first to leave, was still seated. “Unrequited love,” Aaron said. “
Unrequited
means unreturned.”

They repeated it—“unrequited love”—and Bong, the most serious of the three despite his unfortunate nickname, asked questions aimed at pinpointing how the word might be used, questions along the lines of whether
unrequited
could be used to talk about unreturned library books or food that customers wished to send back to the kitchen.

“No,” Aaron told him, and “No.”

“I have unrequited love,” Tommy announced tragically, and Aaron and the other Thais laughed. Tommy tried to look miserable, but he was an optimist with a natural goofiness that he took care to cultivate, all of which undermined his occasional attempts at angst.