After the Parade (25 page)

“Are you sure that your love is unrequited?” Aaron asked, which made the other two laugh harder. They apparently knew the object of his affection.

“Yes,” said Tommy. “I am definitely sure. It's Aksu.”

“Ah,” said Aaron, then regretted sounding surprised.

Aksu, the new Turkish student, was a quiet, beautiful twenty-four-year-old who had just arrived in the United States, having completed her studies to become a French teacher. When she explained this to the class her first day, Aaron asked, “Why didn't you go to France instead of coming here?” and she replied sadly, “I hate French.”

“Then why did you study it?” he asked, and she said, either logically or illogically (he wasn't sure which), “How could I know I hated it until I learned it?”

“Aksu is quite a bit older than you,” Aaron said, trying to make her seem less desirable, not easy given her wistful smile and doe eyes. Tommy was just nineteen, fresh from high school.

“I've decided I prefer older women,” he said. “They're worldly.” Aaron laughed.
Worldly
was a vocabulary word. “And we're perfect for each other. We're both couch potatoes.”

“You'll need two couches,” said Aaron.

“Tell us the couch potato story again,” said Chaa.

“You already know the couch potato story,” Aaron said. He deeply regretted telling them the story, which had only reinforced their notions of this country.

“Yes, but we like to hear it again,” Chaa said. “Please.”

The story, told to him by an ER nurse at a party in Albuquerque, was about a man who had been brought in with chest pain. “He was four hundred and eighty-two pounds,” the nurse said. “It took four paramedics to lift him off his couch. So I'm undressing him and trying to get him into a hospital gown—nothing fit, we ended up wrapping a sheet around him—and I felt something hard in his stomach area. I started massaging the region. You know what it was? A TV remote, folded into the rolls of his stomach.”

He had told his students the story because they were doing a unit on uniquely American court cases, among them the case of a man suing an airline for charging him for two seats because he had not fit into one. Pilar said that when she flew back from Spain after Christmas, she had been made to sit in one of the crew fold-down seats because the woman next to her had spilled into hers, making the flight uncomfortable for both of them. “Even though I paid for my seat,” said Pilar, “I could not occupy it.”

“Does a ticket represent a person or a seat?” Aaron had asked the class.

“Why is this a case?” Katya asked. “The man is using two seats. He must pay for two seats.”

It was then that he had told them about the patient with the remote control folded into his stomach. The truth was that when the ER nurse told him the story, there at the party, they had both laughed at the notion of a man's
vice melding with his body, impressed by the symbolism, but as he told his students the story, it no longer seemed funny or symbolic. It seemed cruel. He felt cruel for telling it, particularly as it aligned too neatly with their stereotypes of America: a place where a man could lie on his couch and eat himself to death because, in America, you were free, free to be lonely, to become so big that you could not get off your own couch.

Melvin was still at his desk. Already he had taken out and put away his notebook twice, feigning busyness.

“No story,” Aaron told the Thai boys firmly. “I need to talk to Melvin.”

Melvin's head snapped up.

“Good-bye, Aaron,” said the Thais. “See you tomorrow.”

“Be on time,” he called after them, knowing they would not be. “And don't fall in unrequited love.” They laughed from the hallway.

Melvin sat waiting with his crumpled-in face. Aaron wondered what he had thought of the couch potato story. Did he think to himself that everywhere in the world, people looked at those who were different and said unkind things, or did he hear the story of a fat man and think that it had nothing to do with him?

“Melvin,” he said. “You've been very patient. Do you have a question?”

He was expecting a grammar question, a request for clarification on the passive voice, for example, but Melvin began to stammer. “I have romantic question,” he said.

“Oh,” said Aaron. “Okay. Well, it's certainly the day for that. What is it?”

“Nikolina and I do not have a language together,” he began.

“What do you mean?” said Aaron.

“I do not speak Bulgarian, and she does not speak Korean.”

“But you met her in Korea. She must speak Korean.”

“She was maid,” Melvin reminded him.

“English?” suggested Aaron.

“She does not speak English.”

“Okay,” Aaron said. “Can you explain to me how the two of you communicate?”

“I write in English, and when she receives email, she uses computer translation program to change to Bulgarian. She writes in Bulgarian, and I translate to English. Soon, I will send money to her for English class, but right now, we are using system.”

“And?” Aaron coaxed him.

“Two days ago I sent first romantic letter,” Melvin said, looking as though he might cry.

How, Aaron wondered, had their engagement preceded any kind of romantic declaration? “Okay,” he said. “And what happened then?”

“Yesterday, she sent response.”

“Great,” said Aaron.

“It is not romantic response.” Melvin's eyes got watery. He handed Aaron a copy of the email and looked away:

Dear Man-soo,

Thank you for your letter. I am very like meat. I am very like big steak with potato and sour cream. I hope we are eating steak in America very soon.

Yours truly,

Nikolina

“It is a strange letter,” Aaron agreed. He did not know what to say. “Did you ask her opinion about meat?”

“It was romantic letter,” Melvin said.

“Well, may I see what you wrote? Maybe she misunderstood?”

“She used computer translating program,” Melvin repeated firmly.

Melvin had arrived in the United States a poor man, but he had spent several years acquiring a very specific computer skill, a skill rare enough that the American government had granted him an H-1B visa, a skill so complex that even though he had described it in detail the first day of class, Aaron had no idea what he did. Computers had gotten Melvin a job, a visa, and, in a roundabout way, a fiancée; he was not about to doubt them, to speculate about their fallibility.

Finally, he opened his backpack and extracted a second sheet of
paper, which he handed to Aaron, who read it and began to laugh. Melvin looked down, embarrassed, and quickly Aaron said, “I've found the problem. Your thumb has betrayed you. Space bar, Melvin.” He placed his finger under the last sentence, which read:
I would like to keep you near meat all times.

Melvin stared at it, not speaking, so Aaron picked up Melvin's pen and underlined the word
meat
. “You didn't space,” he said. “You meant to write ‘near
me
at all times,' but accidentally you wrote ‘near meat.' ”

Melvin stared at the paper, at his feeble attempt at romance. Two weak
haha
s escaped from his mouth. It was the first time Aaron had heard him laugh.

“I wouldn't worry, Melvin. I'm guessing she found your desire to keep her near meat very romantic.”

Melvin pondered this. Then, he wrapped his spindly arms around himself and laughed, the crumpled-up side of his face like a second mouth gasping for air.

T
he day Aaron left Mortonville, he did not think of himself as following in his mother's footsteps, for she had disappeared in the middle of the night, telling no one, while he left on an ordinary Sunday afternoon in July. At precisely two o'clock, Walter pulled up outside the Hagedorns' house, where Aaron had been living since his mother left. He came up from his basement bedroom, leaving behind the bed and dresser that Mr. Rehnquist and Mr. Hagedorn—Rudy—had moved from his room above the café the year before. He carried a suitcase in each hand, into which he had packed his clothes, a photo album, and some books, and set them by the front door before he went into the living room, where the three Hagedorns sat waiting, for they realized that he was going.

They had been kind to him, but Aaron assumed that they would be happy to have their home back because that was how he would feel. He did not consider their kindness diminished by the possibility of their relief. He shook Rudy's hand, and Rudy, who had been drinking already, slapped him on the back and wished him well. Mrs. Hagedorn asked where he was going and why and with whom because even though she would miss him, she still planned to report the details of his departure to her phone friends later. Bernice stood to the side, pretending to be uninterested. When he reached out, awkwardly, to hug her, she pulled back, her hair a black curtain closing over her eyes. He did not know whether she was reacting out of anger or an unwillingness to let him experience her body that intimately, but Walter would later
assert that she was in love with Aaron and had pulled away to show him that he was making a choice.

As Aaron lifted his suitcases into Walter's trunk, he could hear cheering and horn honking from the ball field several blocks away, which meant that someone had hit a home run, the ease with which he interpreted the sounds only reinforcing his desire to go. As they drove down Main Street, he thought about the day he and his mother arrived, how they had pulled up in front of the café that meant little to him then. Thirteen years later, he was driving out of town and away from the boy he had become here, the shy, polite boy who had few friends, whose mother had abandoned him. Once people thought they knew you, it was almost impossible to change their minds, which meant that it was almost impossible to change yourself. Maybe this was why his mother had gone also—because she did not know how to be anything else here but his unhappy mother.

When his mother first took over the café, she had done all the baking and cooking herself, as well as much of the waitressing, hiring women from town as needed to take orders and serve food during the busy parts of the day, but eventually the baking became too much for her and she hired Bernice. Sometimes Bernice also handled the grill while his mother ran between kitchen and dining room, though Bernice refused to enter the latter, would not even carry out a plate of eggs that was growing cold. Customers loved her baked goods, especially her hamburger buns, which surprised everyone with their sweetness. “That Bernice has the best buns in town,” the men said as they ate their hamburgers. They never got tired of this joke, which had to do with the fact that Bernice was a large woman—359 pounds she informed Aaron matter-of-factly one morning, information he did not know how to respond to, beyond arranging his face so that it did not suggest any of the things that he imagined she was expecting, horror and shock and repulsion. She had particularly large buttocks, which Lew Olsson described as “two pigs in a gunnysack fighting to get out.” Aaron did not care for vulgarity or meanness, both of which the joke hinged on. The men, sensing his discomfort, did what men sometimes do. They added to it, making a point to refer to Bernice as his girlfriend. It was
true that they were friends and that this struck people as odd because Bernice was a good bit older than he, twenty to his thirteen when she began working at the café, which meant it was an “unlikely friendship,” but unlikely friendships, he had since learned, were often the easiest to cultivate.

Each morning at four, Bernice made her way up the alley that ran from her house to the back door of the café, where she let herself in and immediately turned on the small coffeemaker that Aaron readied for her each evening as he and his mother closed up. His bedroom was directly over the kitchen, and in his closet was a vent that brought the smells directly into his room, a sort of olfactory alarm clock: first the odor of coffee wafted in, and then, like a snooze alarm, that of eggs and bacon (Bernice's standard breakfast), all of it waking him in the most pleasant of ways. He dressed and tiptoed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, by which point Bernice was ready for him. “I'm fit, just barely, for company,” she would say when he appeared, because that was the way Bernice talked. Early on, she told him that she was a misanthrope, which had pleased him, the admission as well as the word itself, which he found beautiful.

“Homebody,” she announced another morning as she pounded away at a lump of bread dough. “What do you picture?” This was a game they sometimes played. He saw the word as the claustrophobic juxtaposition of two nouns—
home
and
body
—that had been pushed up against each other. He told her this, and she nodded indignantly, encouraged by his assessment, but said nothing more.

Most mornings, he measured out the ingredients—baking soda and sugar, cup after cup of sifted flour, salt—lining them up in bowls so that all Bernice had to do was follow the trail down the counter, adding and mixing as she went. This system allowed her to concentrate on the conversation, which revolved around words, the possibilities that they presented as well as their inadequacy. They were kindred spirits, Bernice said, two people more comfortable with words than people, though Aaron came to see the irony in this: words existed because of people, because of a deep human need to communicate with others, not as an end in themselves.

Bernice had gone away to college, planning never to return, but something had happened there, something that caused her to pack up halfway through her first quarter and return home. She said that this made people in town look at her a certain way—like she had thought she was better than they were but had learned she was not. This was all Aaron knew of the story for the first two years of their friendship. Then, one morning as they stood making pies, she told him that after she dropped out of college, she had not left her bedroom for six months, except to fetch food in the middle of the night and to use the bathroom. Over time, he would learn that this was the only way that Bernice discussed her life, parceling out details at unexpected times.