After the Parade

12

February started warm (unseasonably so said his colleagues), but over the course of a weekend, the temperature dropped thirty degrees. Aaron woke up late that Monday. There was not enough time to walk to school, and anyway, it depressed him to imagine the bison in Golden Gate Park huddled together on such a bleak day. He added a second sweater under his corduroy jacket and walked down to wait for the bus, which arrived late and fuller than usual, everyone on it subdued, the way people get when the weather has tricked them.

His classroom was like stepping into a freezer vault. When Chisato arrived just after him, he greeted her, and his breath hung like smoke between them. “Excuse me,” he said because he was on his way downstairs to inquire about the lack of heat, but she blushed as if he were asking her to ignore some bodily indiscretion.

Chisato had begun arriving earlier each day so that now she was often there when he came in, sitting in the half darkness of the room, her feet swinging above the floor. She was short, well under five feet, and coy about her age, though Marla had let slip that she was in her mid-forties. She often dressed like a teenager, a chaste teenager, in plaid skirts with fringe and knee-high boots, her hair held back by matching barrettes. That morning, she had on thin white gloves of the sort librarians wear for handling rare documents. Chisato did not interact with the other students, though they were friendly toward her. The Brazilian boys flirted, but Aaron knew that the flirting meant nothing. That was just the way the boys communicated, standing close and touching, laughing easily with their mouths wide open so that you could see their teeth. They all had beautiful teeth, white and not overly corrected the way American teeth were.

At first, he had imagined that Chisato must be terribly homesick, here without family or friends, but as he got to know her, he decided that she was probably lonely in Japan also, that Chisato would be lonely wherever she went. When she started coming in early, he feared that she was developing a crush but soon realized that she viewed this time before class as an opportunity for individual instruction. He appreciated her studiousness yet had begun to feel oppressed by it and by the way she planned out precisely what she would say to him, obviously with the aid of a dictionary and a grammar book, so that even when she described simple things — her landlord’s dog or the bar where she played darts — she sounded like a child reciting a poem that she did not fully understand, her sentences technically correct but without the rhythm and inflection that imparted meaning.

“I was quite moved,” she had told him recently, describing her first bowl of miso soup since leaving Japan, her delivery so lacking in spontaneity or proper inflection that he had understood neither the words nor the emotion they were meant to convey. At his urging, she repeated the story — three times, each telling exactly the same, right down to the intonation of “I was quite moved”—and then, also at his suggestion, she had written those final words out on the board, along the bottom so that he had to crouch to read them.

“Ah,” he said, finally understanding what she had been trying to tell him, though by then the words had meant nothing.

Several of the teachers were already in Marla’s office, where she was explaining that Mr. Pulkka had come in during the night and placed a padlock on the small storage room that housed the heater controls. At the end of her explanation, she looked at her watch and announced enthusiastically, “It’s time for class,” not giving them the opportunity to complain. The teachers turned and went back to their freezing rooms. As Aaron climbed the stairs to the third floor, he thought about how Walter would have stayed right there in Marla’s office until heat had been restored because that was how Walter was. He argued and complained and made demands — to hotel clerks and customer service reps, managers and stewardesses — while Aaron stood by, looking apologetic and embarrassed but still, as Walter had always reminded him, ultimately benefiting from the results that Walter achieved.

Aaron had never learned to be comfortable with anger — because of his father, he supposed — though Walter’s anger was nothing like his father’s. Walter did not get angry often, but when he did, he did not hide it from the world. On the contrary, anger was Walter’s way of getting everyone else to see what was right. It was a public event. Aaron understood all of this. He did. But understanding it did not change the way he felt, and the way he felt was sick inside every time he witnessed anger — not just Walter’s — or felt it rising in himself. He preferred to think of himself as someone who did not get angry, except that he did, his anger seeping out in small bursts of sarcasm or heightened politeness.

Aaron found his students huddled at their desks, bundled up in coats and scarves so that he could not make out who was who at first. They peered at him, sure that he had rectified the problem because they believed he would not let them freeze. “It’s time to start class,” he said, echoing Marla without realizing it, and his students opened their notebooks and prepared to learn. Soon, Bart, a work-study student from Ukraine, appeared with a space heater in each hand. He plugged in the heaters, ceremoniously, one on each side of the room, and then loitered for a moment, like a luggage porter expecting a tip. The heaters’ singular effect was to remind the students that they were paying tuition to freeze. And they were freezing. Each time they answered a question, their words crystallized in the air, shocking the Brazilians and Thais in particular. After an hour of this, Aaron tossed his chalk on the desk and went back downstairs.

“Come in,” Marla called when he knocked at her office door. As he opened it, a wave of heat rolled out.

“I’m glad at least one of those space heaters works,” he said.

In response, she flapped her arms, a gesture he interpreted as “shut the door and stop letting out the heat.” She had not yet taken down the Christmas lights above her desk, and they blinked off and on, making the sweat on her brow and nose glisten. He shut the door but remained standing, despite her suggestion that he sit, while he described the impossibility of teaching under such conditions. “They’re trying to take notes with mittens on,” he said. “It’s like watching some silly party game.”

“Do something that doesn’t require writing,” Marla said. She sounded tired. “It’s supposed to warm up again by Wednesday.”

“What are you saying? That Mr. Pulkka won’t turn the heat back on?”

He knew that she had not asked. Taffy had told him that when Pulkka and Marla looked over the books together, Pulkka questioned each expense and hinted that he could always find a new director, someone less blind to waste. Their work relationship was complicated by the fact that they had dated briefly, years earlier. “She dropped him,” Taffy said, “so he enjoys making her feel insecure about her job, especially now that she’s divorced with two kids to support.” It shocked Aaron that Marla had confided in her employees about such things.

“It’s more than just the wasted time,” he declared. He was still wearing both sweaters and the corduroy jacket and could feel the sweat pooling under his arms.

Marla looked up, responding to his tone, but he did not know how to explain to her that it made him feel foolish, like a failure really, to stand there before his freezing students blowing warmth into his cupped hands as he scribbled sentences on the board, aware that they were all watching him, watching him accept these conditions. He looked at Marla, her desk piled high with papers, photos of her children on the walls, a sprig of mistletoe — he noticed it only then — hanging over her head.

“Never mind,” he said. “The students are waiting.”

* * *

Lila was leading the class in calisthenics. She had become interested in what she called “American-style fitness” during the year she worked at Disney World. He waited for the class to complete a round of jumping jacks before announcing, “The heater is very broken. It cannot be fixed today.” He wanted to tell them the truth — that the owner had locked up the controls — but he maintained an old-fashioned belief in basic workplace loyalty, even when it seemed so obviously misplaced.

They spent the rest of the morning playing the Culture Game, which he had invented when he was teaching at the community college in Albuquerque. The game, which required them to discuss questions that focused on small cultural differences between their countries and the United States, had started as a way to fill leftover minutes at the end of class, but his students had begged to play it at other times because they knew firsthand that the small differences were what bred confusion and distrust. Over the years he had created a lengthy list of questions, which he added to constantly:

What should you do if you see an old man kicking a dog?

When someone on the street asks for directions, should you make up directions if you are not sure how to get there, just to be polite?

If you are invited to a friend’s house for dinner, should you help with the dishes?

The rules were simple: he read a question aloud, blew his whistle, and the students rushed to discuss it with someone who was not from their country. Four minutes later, he blew the whistle again and the class reported their responses. Of course, they liked this part of the exercise, enjoyed explaining how things worked in their countries, but soon enough someone always asked, “What is the correct answer here in America, Aaron?” They liked to believe there was a correct answer.

The cold had made the students listless, so Aaron began with this question: Is it okay to ask someone how much money he pays for rent? He had found that money questions had an energizing effect. Their answers were nuanced, most of them having to do with the motivation behind the asking. “Is not okay if you are just being nosy,” said Pilar, though she pronounced it “noisy.”

When it was Aaron’s turn, he told them that once when he hosted a class party in Albuquerque, a Vietnamese student had inquired how much his house cost.

“Were you embarrassed by this question?” Katya asked.

He admitted that he had been.

“This I do not understand,” said Katya. “Americans are thinking all the time about money but always they are saying it is bad manners to talk about money. Maybe if they are talking about money more, they will not be thinking all the time about it.”

The others nodded.

“Maybe,” Aaron said. He knew they were expecting a better answer than this, but he put the whistle to his mouth and blew. “Next question: Is it okay to drop in on a friend uninvited?” They had just learned the phrasal verb to drop in on, and he noted their excitement at encountering it.

Ji-hun, one of the Korean students, began the group discussion by acknowledging that it was best to call ahead, his reasoning practical: one should not waste time driving to visit a friend who was not home. Beyond that, everyone agreed that it was okay — not just okay but a happy surprise. They seemed perplexed that it was even a question.

Finally, Diego asked, “And for Americans?”

“It depends on the person,” Aaron said, an answer that always displeased them. They wanted a set of rules that they could draw upon without having to consider individual desires or preferences.

“Is like this in London,” said Neto, one of the Brazilians. He had studied there for two years and claimed to miss it, but now he told them a story about an elderly couple who had lived in the apartment above his and invited him for dinner once a week and on holidays. “They were my family there,” Neto said. “But one day I received good news at school, and when I arrived at my apartment that night I went up to tell them. It was ten o’clock, and they were wearing their robes and watching television, which I knew because I can hear the television from my ceiling. I only go because I know they are awake and because I am very exciting, but they told me it was too late, that I should not come to their door like this, unannounced.”

The others listened, but Aaron could tell from the way they shook their heads that this made no sense to them.

“The next day,” Neto continued, “I told my news, and they made a special dinner. I did not tell them, never, that I felt so sad when they scolded me.”

The class was quiet. Finally Paolo asked, “What is your idea about drop-in, Aaron?”

He considered blowing his whistle or correcting one of their grammar errors, but he looked at his students there before him, coats zipped, hoods up, all of them shivering yet focused, wanting to know what he thought.

“I do not like when people drop in,” he said.

They shifted in their seats and waited for him to explain, but he could not tell them about the hostility he felt each time his doorbell rang unexpectedly, how he pressed himself against the wall out of sight or tiptoed into the bathroom and turned on the shower, hoping that the unwanted visitor would hear it and leave. Once he had even crouched under his desk until he was sure the person had gone.

His students were looking at him, waiting for him to elaborate. Eventually, Katya said, “Americans are so friendly when you meet them, but they will never invite you into their homes.” The others nodded, and she added, “Russians are opposite people. We are very moody outside people, but we will invite you into our hearts.” Katya believed that heart and home were the same thing.

His students wanted desperately to make American friends and came to him for advice, considering him equipped to offer instruction in the art of befriending Americans. He gave them pointers — eating out was good, but karaoke made many Americans uncomfortable. He did not tell them that he too was alone in this city, that as he walked down the street each day, he wondered about everyone he passed: what they had eaten for breakfast, whether they cursed more when they were happy or when they were sad, whether they were smiling because of something they had just observed or because they always smiled when they were out in the world alone. Lately he had found himself deeply curious about the details of strangers’ lives, yet the thought of engaging in meaningful conversation struck him as unbearable. He was perplexed by his conflicting emotions but accepted that he felt oddly liberated by his loneliness, just as he accepted that he could not tell his students any of this without changing everything between them.

* * *

On Thursday, the fourth day without heat, there appeared inside each faculty member’s mailbox a small candle in the shape of a heart, which Aaron interpreted as a token apology, an attempt at appeasement. The candle only intensified his frustration, for it was so small, the school so cold. Worse, when he turned it over, he saw that the price tag had not been removed—49¢, which meant that the collective apology had set the school back less than five dollars, though he suspected that Marla had paid for the candles out of her own pocket.

By then, it was colder indoors than out, so at the start of class he pulled up one of the yellowing shades along the far side of the room and opened a window. Yoshi went over and leaned out, joking that he wanted to warm up his ears, which was a big deal for shy Yoshi. As he pulled his head back inside, the window slammed, almost guillotining him, and then, in such quick succession that the two events seemed connected, the entire third floor went dark. Aaron supposed it was a blown fuse. He also supposed he should do something about it — report it at least — except weren’t the cold and the dark and the broken window all Pulkka’s doing?

Soon, he heard the jangling of Felix’s belt in the hallway. When he looked out, Felix’s bicycle strobe was flashing eerily from the stairwell.

Ten minutes later, the lights came back on. “Okay?” Bart asked, poking his head into the room. Aaron thanked him but could not make his voice sound sincere. He knew that it was not Bart’s fault that nothing in the building worked, that he was just a student working to defray tuition costs, yet Aaron could not help but believe that Marla chose students who were sympathetic to the school’s ways. Bart pointed at the two heaters he had brought up on Monday, which had yet to produce heat, and shook his head as though the heaters had nothing to do with him. He unplugged them and paused in the doorway, a contraband heater in each hand, to say, “Meeting in Marla’s office at noon. Bring your own lunch.”

Of course, the meeting had not been called to address anything as urgent as the lack of heat, though Aaron noticed that Marla had let her office cool down. Her mistletoe and Christmas lights had been replaced with hearts that said WILD THANG and U R MINE, and she began by wishing them all an early Happy Valentine’s Day. “Did you guys get the candles?” she asked, and they gave mumbled responses, like children who had been asked about a topic that embarrassed them.

“I have some exciting news,” she said next. “Are you ready?” She paused dramatically. “Mr. Pulkka has rented out the spare room.” She said it as if they were all getting raises.

“His office?” asked Valerie, whom Aaron did not really know because her classroom was on the first floor and she rarely came up to the faculty room.

“No,” said Marla. “That little room on the third floor that nobody uses — right across from Felix and Aaron.”

“To who?” said Felix.

“Yes,” said Aaron, “to whom?” He hoped that Felix had noted the correction.

“A private eye,” said Marla excitedly.

“What’s a detective want with a room in an ESL school?” asked Eugenia.

“He’s going to teach classes,” Marla explained.

“Classes in sleuthing?” said Aaron, and everyone except Marla laughed.

* * *

It turned out that sleuthing was precisely what the detective planned to teach. That afternoon, the mushrooms were scraped from the wall, a table, chairs, and a whiteboard carried up from the basement. When Aaron arrived to a warm building the following Monday, a function entirely of the weather, he got his first glimpse of the detective. He could see him across the hallway, attaching a hand-lettered sign to his door: THE PRIVATE EYE SCHOOL. He resembled a Hollywood version of a detective — ruddy and big-bellied with a shambling walk and, Aaron would quickly learn, a penchant for tobacco. Unlike priests and professors, who surely benefited from looking priestly and professorial, Aaron imagined that the man’s appearance only made his job — much of which he pictured taking place undercover — that much harder. Perhaps he had turned to teaching as a way to finally cash in on his detectivelike looks.

Aaron always gave a quiz on Monday mornings, his way of nudging the students back to English. Most of them retreated to their native languages over the weekend, except Paolo, who spent weekends riding with the San Mateo Harley Club and always had questions on Monday morning. What Paolo wanted to know this Monday — waiting until the others were working away on their quizzes to ask — was why the Chinese were such bad drivers. He picked up his pen, preparing to take notes, and the others, even the Chinese students, looked up from their quizzes expectantly. Aaron studied his chalk while the class studied him. He hated stereotypes, particularly those that struck him as somehow true, but he envied his students their ease in asking such questions.

They asked one another such questions also. The Brazilians asked the Chinese whether they could spot a Chinese American, for example, and they said of course they could because the Chinese Americans walked a different way. “How do they walk?” the Brazilians asked, and the Chinese students said, “Aggressive like Americans. They are not humble anymore.” It was the “anymore” that intrigued him, for it implied that they had been born humble and then had it squeezed out of them. They asked about one another’s features, the shapes of their eyes, the color of their skin, always turning to him for vocabulary: what was this type of nose called, this shade of skin? Most often, he replied that there was no word, at least none that he could think of, and Lerma, the lone Filipina, said, “How do you speak about noses without words?”

“I rarely talk about noses,” he said, then, “Let’s see. We have hooked noses, aquiline, hatchet, pug.” He tried to recall whether any of these were derogatory.

When his students had these discussions, he listened carefully but did not take part, except once when he overheard Chaa, one of the Thais, say that Thais liked to own businesses in the Castro. “Why?” Aaron asked, and Chaa said because gay men liked to spend money. “You can raise the price very high,” he explained, “and still gay men will pay because gay men care most about pleasure.”

Aaron knew that some gay men would take offense at this comment, at the notion that they could be duped into buying anything provided it made them feel good, but he also believed that real conversation ceased the moment a group turned inward, toward communal indignation fueled by a constant parsing of the comment. What did pleasure mean here? Wasn’t this just one more case of hyper-sexualizing gay men? And if the conversation stopped before it really began, could people ever become comfortable with one another? Could straight people understand what it meant to be gay if they were too afraid of making mistakes to ask questions? He had come to prefer dealing with people who barreled in with questions that might be regarded as insensitive to those who maintained a careful distance, forming measured comments that all demonstrated the same studied sense of what was correct. Listening to his students ask questions had taught him this: that nothing could truly get better in this country until people learned to ask the kinds of questions that they had been taught never to ask.

Still, the truth was that he did not know how to ask these questions either, certainly not about race. Mortonville had existed in a racial vacuum, its citizens not just white but primarily northern European. The only diversity he had known was a handful of Poles who lived along one of the lakes and two boys who were half Vietnamese. Their father was a local man who had gone off to Vietnam to fight and returned married. His name was Richard Schultz. Aaron’s mother said Richard Schultz had left as one sort of person and come back another.

“What kind of person was he when he left?” Aaron asked.

He knew what kind he was when he returned. Once when Richard Schultz ordered his eggs scrambled but Aaron’s mother accidentally sent out fried, Richard Schultz karate-chopped his hand down on the edge of the plate so that the eggs flew into the air and landed in a mess on the floor. “Now they’re scrambled,” he had said.

“I only knew him briefly before he left, but I remember him as a sweet boy, shy and so polite,” Aaron’s mother said, a description that had terrified Aaron because he’d heard these very words used to describe him. He wondered how it was possible to go away to a place — a place like this Vietnam that nobody in Mortonville wanted to talk about — and come back a man who was angered by eggs.

The two boys spoke Vietnamese with their mother when they were young, but their father put an end to this because he said he wanted his sons to be American. The mother came into the café sometimes and sat alone drinking coffee filled with sugar and milk. When Aaron approached her table to see whether she needed anything, she tried to engage him in conversation, but he could not understand what she was saying, which embarrassed him. Eventually she stopped trying to converse with him and with everyone else in town. He wondered whether living in Mortonville was more difficult for the sons, who thought of Mortonville as home yet looked different from everyone around them, or for the mother, who passed her days keenly aware that it was not home, despite the fact that she would spend the rest of her life there. Aaron always smiled at the boys when he saw them in the hallways at school because even though he looked like everyone else, he knew how it felt not to fit in.

What Aaron came to understand as a boy was that people focused on difference. He had learned his first real lesson about this the way that people often learned lessons, by doing something that it still made his face hot to think about. It had happened during Show and Tell, which was not actually called Show and Tell anymore because they were sixth graders, though this did not change the fact that each Friday six of them had to go to the front of the room to perform something — a joke, a poem, a story. This was meant to teach confidence, which Aaron suspected could not be taught. He spent long hours memorizing Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” and recited “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer to bored silence while the next boy got up and told a knock knock joke that left everyone hooting with laughter. They laughed when Aaron finished also, but only because he had worked so hard.

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.

13

On 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.

“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 hahas 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.

14

The 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.

“For the first three weeks,” she added, “I ate only meat.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Meat makes me constipated.”

“And you wanted to be constipated?” he asked, trying to sound casual. He had not gotten over his childhood discomfort at discussing bodily functions.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did.” She sounded angry, as though his question was obviously foolish.

“What did you do in your room all day?”

“I read, mainly my textbooks because I wanted to keep up with my classes. I practiced my Spanish verb conjugations. We’d only gotten as far as the present tense when I left, but I didn’t mind. I liked being cut off from the past and the future. Some mornings I heard my mother outside my door, listening. Once, I heard her telling Dad that I’d joined a cult, that I was in there speaking in tongues.” Bernice laughed. “It scared her, I think, not to know what I was saying, but I wanted her to be scared.”

“Why?” Aaron asked.

“Because every night after I came home, I heard her on the phone telling her friends that it was true, I was back for good. ‘Bernice is just a real homebody,’ she’d say. So you see, I wanted her to be confused and scared, to realize that she would never know why I’d returned. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t know me at all. Does that make any sense?”

Aaron opened a can of cherries and poured it into one of the crusts that she had lined up for him. “Yes,” he said. “It makes sense.”

“I hate her,” Bernice said. She made it sound simple.

* * *

Mornings at the café went like this: his mother came downstairs at seven twenty, and just ten minutes later, after a quick check to make sure that everything was in order — tables set, shakers filled, coffee brewing — they unlocked the front door and turned the sign to OPEN, and the dining room became instantly busy. Aaron assisted his mother, filling coffee cups and taking orders, until eight twenty, when he gathered his books and ran out the back door and down the same alley that Bernice crept up at four. Sometimes, as he passed the back of her house, a tiny place squatting between two much larger houses, he saw her mother through the kitchen window, standing at the sink in her robe. It felt strange to see her there, knowing what he knew: that her daughter hated her.

The day he found his mother gone, as he and Bernice sat in the kitchen waiting for her to come down because they did not yet know she was gone, he recited the Canadian provinces for a map test he was taking that day. Bernice had made him spell Saskatchewan for good measure.

“Do you think she overslept?” Aaron asked. It was only seven twenty-five, but his mother had not come down late since the day they opened ten years earlier. It was just the two of them that first day, and he had risen early, too excited to sleep, and sat in a booth waiting for her. He knew when it was time to open because the farmers had gathered on the steps outside, including Mr. Rehnquist, who finally tapped on the window and beckoned to him. When Aaron unlocked the door, Mr. Rehnquist said, “I’m sure it’s first-day jitters. Go on up and give her a boost.”

And he had. He had gone up to his mother’s room, where he found her sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed. “Do you have a headache?” he asked.

“I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

He sat down beside her and said that she could do it, that he would help her do it. They would go down together and open the door, and once they did that, everything would be fine. He told her this even though he was not sure it was true.

“What would I do without you?” she said. She stood and smoothed the bed covers because she believed in the small comfort of entering a tidy bed each night, and together they went downstairs and opened the café.

“Better go up and check on her,” Bernice said, but he could no longer imagine doing what he had done just ten years earlier: entering his mother’s room, sitting on her bed, speaking to her encouragingly. Once a week he set a basket of clean clothes, folded, outside her closed door. Other than that, he did not go near her room, nor she his.

By seven thirty, he had no choice. He dragged himself upstairs and down the hallway to his mother’s room, where he found the door open, bed made, his mother gone. He looked out her window, to the alley where she parked the aging Oldsmobile. It was not there either. When he reported this to Bernice, she said that come to think of it, the Oldsmobile had not been there when she arrived at four. She asked whether his mother had seemed strange the night before. He said no, that his mother and Pastor Gronseth had sat in a booth talking as they often did, that after he finished memorizing the Canadian provinces, he had stacked his books on the edge of the table and stopped beside their booth to say good night. There had been nothing strange.

Bernice appeared skeptical but did not waste time arguing because the crowd of customers outside was growing. Instead, she made a sign that read, CLOSED INDEFINITELY. FAMILY EMERGENCY, which he wanted to amend to CLOSED FOR PERSONAL REASONS because he thought the word emergency implied that someone was dead, but Bernice said that nothing made people gossip more than the word personal. In the end, it would not have mattered what they wrote: news spread and people came, making a show of pulling at the locked café door and reading the sign aloud, of peering through the window. “It’s closed,” someone else would say, someone who had engaged in this same series of actions just minutes earlier. Then, they all milled around together, shaking their heads and comparing information.

The news exploded into full scandal just before noon, when it was learned that Pastor Gronseth was gone also. Aaron and Bernice had sequestered themselves in the kitchen, and even after Bernice’s mother phoned with this second wave of news, they continued to bake the bread and rolls and buns that had been rising since morning. As they worked, they talked about keeping the café going, though they both knew that this was impossible: Bernice was a kitchen recluse and Aaron was about to begin his final year of school. In the end the Trout Café would stay closed, the title reverting to the bank, but that day they had appreciated the distraction that pretending provided.

Around five, they decided to sneak out the back door and walk up the alley to the Hagedorns’ house. While Bernice stayed in the kitchen wrapping up baked goods, Aaron went up to his room to pack a bag and to confront the new reality of his life: overnight, he had become jobless, homeless, and motherless. He found himself in his mother’s room, looking for clues but mainly for something that would catapult him forward, toward anger or clarity or grief. As he opened her dresser drawers, he saw that she had taken every bit of clothing she owned, shorts and sleeveless blouses as well as wool pants and sweaters, the broadness of her needs suggesting that she had not known where she was going, only that she would not return. In the bottom drawer was the family photo album. He picked it up, imagining her shifting it out of the way in order to access all the entirely replaceable items she had chosen to take. He dropped it back in the drawer and kicked the drawer shut, hard.

The following week, when Mr. Rehnquist helped him move, he found the album there in the drawer where Aaron was determined to leave it. “It’s a sacrifice,” he told Aaron. “She’s depriving herself of these memories in order to give them to you.” Though it would be years before he allowed himself to accept the possible truth of this or feel anything but rage at the sight of the album, he let Mr. Rehnquist pack it.

That first night, as he lay on the makeshift bed that Mrs. Hagedorn had made for him atop one of their couches, Aaron flipped through his textbooks, stopping on the map of Canada. It seemed so long ago that he had stood with Bernice in the kitchen of the café, spelling Saskatchewan and waiting for his mother to come down. The note was tucked into his chemistry book. His mother had put it there, believing that he would find her gone, pick up his books, and go off to school. She thought she knew him, and he was angry all over again. You’re old enough now, the note said, only that. He lay awake in the Hagedorns’ living room, wondering what he was old enough for and how long she had been waiting for him to get there.

15

The Hagedorns were large people who occupied the smallest house in town, a dollhouse that the three of them had been forced to move into when Bernice was a teenager, after their old place burned to the ground, the three of them awakening just in time to escape. Bernice and her parents ended up in the only house they could afford, where, she told Aaron, they were like three cabbages rolling around inside a produce drawer. By the time Aaron came to stay, they had occupied the house nearly a decade. It had grown even smaller with their belongings, yet they made room for him. Their living room contained three couches, and most nights he and Bernice lay on them, reading or talking. She never mentioned his mother, never asked whether he missed her. He knew that this was partly his fault because in those first weeks after she disappeared, he had pretended not to care; at the time, with his teachers looking sorry for him and his classmates ignoring him for a change (a gesture of kindness he supposed), it had seemed the only way to make it through the day.

Instead, over the course of the year, Bernice told him the story of her life, in installments, each one perfectly composed so that he wondered whether she wrote it out and practiced telling it beforehand. On those nights when her voice slipped into confessional mode, he rolled onto his side so that he could watch her as she spoke, the mountain of her stomach dwarfing the twin hills of her breasts. Her story, which she referred to as “the story of my expanding girth,” began like this: “For the most part, it has been a steady climb, one without shortcuts or the occasional dips and plateaus. As a baby, I watched from a high chair in the corner of the kitchen as my mother chopped and pounded, rolled and sprinkled. When I cried, she paused long enough to pop a bit of something — cookie dough, fried potatoes, a fingerful of Cheez Whiz — into my mouth so that by the time I was two, I had become a corpulent child who could not yet walk but demanded treats incessantly. My entreaties, according to my father, were frighteningly eloquent, marked by the syntax and diction of a child twice my age. ‘You were a little queen holding court,’ he likes to say, which has always bothered me, not the image itself but the clarity with which he recalls it, for in my memory of those early years, my father does not exist. There is only the kitchen — the oven, its door opening like a warm mouth, the potholders hanging beside it — and my mother, who exists as a fat finger smelling of nicotine that delivers these ‘shut-up’ treats into my mouth.

“By third grade, I had outgrown all the desks that the school had to offer, so one was created for me, a space-consuming contraption made of an old door that the janitors balanced across the tops of two tin barrels, each of which was big enough to have fit any of my classmates inside. I remember the wonderful racket the barrels made as they were rolled down the hallway to our classroom. The desk, which was larger than the teacher’s even, accorded me an authority that I had not experienced before. When, after a few days, the atmosphere threatened to return to normal, I began tapping my pencil steadily against the barrels, keeping this up for minutes at a time. I pretended to be deep in thought, unaware of my actions, though I simply wanted to see whether anyone would tell me to stop. Nobody did, not even the teacher.

“From there, I discovered that if I stayed at my desk feigning busyness when the others got up to go outside for recess, my absence went unchallenged. I particularly hated recess since I’ve always felt most keenly aware of my size outdoors. I despised, as well, the games we played, each of which afforded my classmates another forum to ridicule me. During kickball, they cheered mockingly when I ran the bases, and during Farmer in the Dell, whether I was chosen as the cheese or the cow, there was always the opportunity for a joke. But dodge ball was the worst. My peers all seemed to have unusually good aim, though I helped them along by providing an ample target. It reached the point where even my own teammates could not resist taking aim at me. The first time this happened, I was caught off guard, and the ball hit me squarely between the shoulders and jolted me forward onto my knees. Both sides laughed merrily.”

Bernice laughed also as she described this. Aaron watched her stomach quiver gently. He did not laugh.

“I went home sore and bruised on dodge ball days, and at night I would lie in bed and press hard on the bruises to intensify the pain.”

“Why?” Aaron asked.

“I thought that if I could increase my tolerance for pain, I would eventually inure myself to it altogether.”

“And did you?”

This question she seemed to consider only briefly before declaring that the desk had been her “salvation,” saving her from physical activity, which tired her, as well as the humiliation of being a spectacle, which tired her even more. “Most days,” she said, “I was content to stay at my desk reading, enjoying my solitude in the empty room, but occasionally I would go over to the desk of a classmate who had been particularly cruel to me that day, open it, and handle the items inside. Later, as I watched him prop his desktop open with his head and rummage around inside, a pencil gripped between his teeth, I liked to imagine myself sauntering over and informing him of what I had done, liked to imagine his repulsion. I never did. It was enough to sit at my desk and watch him sliding his hands back and forth, back and forth, across all of the places that mine had been.”

* * *

Bernice had told him the story of the desk in October, five weeks after he moved in. The next installment did not come until Christmas Eve. They were alone in the house, despite the late hour, for her father had taken a bottle of spiced rum and retreated to his fish house and her mother was at church, the midnight Mass, which actually started at eleven. It was a particularly cold Christmas — cold even by Minnesota standards, which were far beyond the standards that people elsewhere applied when assessing the cold — but the cold did not keep people home. Indeed, Aaron had noted over the years that morning coffee hour at the café was often busiest the day after a blizzard, as though people needed to make clear that the weather did not dictate their actions. After Mrs. Hagedorn left, Aaron and Bernice lay on their sofas listening to cars crunch by and to families discussing Christmas light displays as they walked past the house on their way to church. They competed to see who could identify the voices first, a contest that Bernice won, despite Aaron’s years of having waited on these people at the café.

Bernice sampled a roll of lefse from the stack she had buttered and sugared for the two of them. The lefse had been dropped off earlier by Agnes Olsson as partial payment on a plumbing bill. “Agnes’s potatoes weren’t dry enough,” Bernice observed, “but I guess it’s a fair trade since my father’s not the best plumber in town.” It was true that Rudy was not the best plumber, though he was cheap and did not mind getting dirty.

Bernice’s voice turned confessional then, as it had when she told him the story of the desk. “In the fall of 1976, I enrolled at Moorhead State University,” she began, moving from elementary school straight to college, as if the years in between had been too uneventful to mention. Aaron rolled onto his side to listen. “My graduation marked a crossroads: I had come down a path of uninterrupted disappointment, also known as my youth, to find myself in a clearing, a flitting moment in which I allowed myself to feel hopeful, to feel that life just might jag crazily off in a new direction. In short, my life became like a Robert Frost poem.”

Bernice disliked Frost. She had told Aaron so repeatedly over the years, but that night she told him again, noting that her aversion had been heightened by the fact that her teachers all seemed to find his poetry compelling and insightful and not at all trite, despite its overt symbolism, decipherable even by a group of uninterested fifth graders, for fifth grade was the year they had been introduced to poetry, a poem a month chosen by their teacher. “ ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ was our November poem,” Bernice continued, though this too she had told him before. “We had one month in which to recite it from memory in front of the class, without errors or excessive prompting. Three more Frost poems were similarly imprinted in my brain over the next seven years. So it was that, at eighteen, I stood in the clearing, contemplating a road not taken, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was the only language I had to describe this unfamiliar feeling known as optimism.” She paused to take a bite of lefse.

“The ‘clearing’ appeared courtesy of the newly hired guidance counselor. Matthew Brisk was his name. He was the first person who seemed not to notice my size. He didn’t smirk when I turned sideways to fit through the doorway of his office, didn’t hold his breath when I lowered myself onto the flimsy folding chair across from his desk. Instead, he talked to me about something called My Future. He spoke with full-on exclamation points. ‘Your grades are stupendous! What a transcript! You have so many options with grades like this!’ With the same enthusiasm, he asked, ‘How about clubs? Are you much of a joiner?’

“Well, the merging and mingling and coming together of people had never interested me, though I could not say so to Matthew Brisk. You see, from that very first meeting, I felt a shameful need to mold myself to his vision of me, so I said I had belonged to FHA, which was true. I had joined my sophomore year at the coaxing of the club advisor, a dull woman with firm orders to breathe life into the organization. I did not tell Matthew Brisk that after I joined, someone crossed out the word ‘Homemakers’ on the sign above the meeting room, changing it to read ‘Future Hogs of America,’ or that I quit just three weeks later after my fellow ‘homemakers’ filled my chocolate cake with grape bubblegum as it baked in the oven during our meeting.

“I filled out the applications that Matthew Brisk gave me and took the SAT exam, which I enjoyed because it was rife with archaic vocabulary words and obscure second meanings, words like husband, which I certainly had no interest in as a noun, despite my brief membership in FHA, but found rather attractive as a verb. When I began receiving acceptance letters, I took them to Matthew Brisk, who slapped me on the back and said, ‘Nice work!’ I chose Moorhead State and informed them I would be attending in the fall. Only later did it occur to me that I had been fooled, that Matthew Brisk, with his exclamation points, had no insight into my future at all.”

Bernice paused to eat two more rolls of lefse. When she resumed the story, she leaped ahead to the point five weeks into her first quarter, when she hitched a ride back to Mortonville with Karl Nelson, a college sophomore who returned home every weekend. “He had spent his high school years working to attain even a modicum of popularity and was not willing to begin all over again,” Bernice explained. “He retained a girlfriend here, a semipopular girl who was a senior, and together they attended sporting events, at which Karl received more attention as a college man than he ever had during high school.”

“Did Karl Nelson tell you this?” Aaron asked. Karl Nelson owned an accounting business that catered to farmers, with whom he had often held meetings at the café, so, of course, Aaron knew him, but not in the way that Bernice described him, with the emotional depth and motivations of a character in a book. He knew him simply as a man who talked to farmers about depreciation and yield and never consumed more than two cups of coffee at a sitting because coffee made him “jumpy.”

“Of course not,” Bernice said. “He drove with his transistor radio pressed against his ear the whole time. The only time we spoke was when we stopped in Fergus Falls for gas. While it was pumping, he leaned in and said, ‘Ten bucks,’ which was the amount I had offered when I called him the night before, an amount I knew would ensure a ride. I spread two fives on his car seat, which was unpleasantly warm from his buttocks, though I’m certain neither of us wanted the greater unpleasantness of touching hands as we exchanged money. I had contacted him because I knew of his weekly trips home from my mother, who brought them up each time she called. Until the day I came back for good, I had not made a single visit home. I told no one that I was coming, not even my parents, but when they saw me hoisting my belongings out of his trunk, they deduced that I was home to stay, that I had attempted the road less traveled and failed.” She stopped speaking, as though she had reached the end of a recitation.

“And then you stayed in your room studying Spanish?” Aaron asked, referring to the conversation they had had several years earlier.

“Yes,” Bernice said. He could tell that she was pleased he remembered. “In high school we were obligated to study German, which never appealed to me, but I took to Spanish immediately, in part because I liked the professor, Dr. Baratto. He was Italian, he told us the first day of class, and in Italian his name meant ‘barter,’ but in Spanish it meant ‘cheap.’ ‘When I go to Mexico,’ he said, ‘everyone thinks, Here comes that stingy guy.’ The whole class laughed. I thought, then, about the way people had always overstressed the first syllable of my name, HOG-a-dorn, and about how I’d never met an Italian before and now I was learning Spanish from one. From that very first day, I knew that college was the thing for me.”

Bernice yawned, letting him know that the story was over. Perhaps she had simply looked at her watch and seen that her mother would be home soon — indeed, she walked through the door humming “Silent Night” five minutes later — but Aaron was sure that Bernice had chosen that specific spot to stop, as if she had gone away to this magical place called college and never returned.

16

Aaron would later wonder whether Bernice had sensed something about him that he had not yet allowed himself to see, namely that his reasons for not desiring her body had nothing to do with her body itself. He did know that she did not want him to leave Mortonville, but he suspected that this had nothing to do with love or sexual desire.

On the night of his eighteenth birthday, she told him the end of the story, presenting it like a gift. First, though, Mrs. Hagedorn had cooked him a special dinner, lamb chops, his favorite. After supper, she brought out a cake with eighteen candles, and all three of them sang. They gave him gifts: a tie from Mrs. Hagedorn because he would need one for graduation; from Bernice, a book called Jude the Obscure that she had read in college and enjoyed and that he read but found not at all enjoyable because in it three children hanged themselves to lessen the burden on their parents; and a fishing pole that Rudy had made by sinking two large nails at either end of a piece of wood and wrapping a line back and forth around them.

The last birthday that Aaron had celebrated was his tenth because his mother had come to believe that celebrations should be reserved for actual accomplishments, and she said there was no achievement in being born. Each time she said this, he tried hard not to think about the party that she had made for him when he turned five, how she had blown up a whole bag of balloons while he was napping and he had found her lying on the floor of the living room, light-headed from the endeavor. He’d lain down beside her, and she told him that he’d been born during a snowstorm. His father had driven her to the hospital in the squad car, the lights flashing. “You were nearly born right there in the backseat. Your father was a nervous wreck,” she said. “I’ll never forget it, driving through all that whiteness, and then, at the end of it all, there you were.” When his mother, the one she became after the parade, said that there was no accomplishment in being born, he went up to his room and cried because he knew she had forgotten about the snowstorm.

Aaron ate three pieces of cake and tried to look pleased instead of uncomfortable with the attention. Afterward, Mrs. Hagedorn went to her bedroom to talk on the telephone and watch television and Rudy went across town to the liquor store. Aaron sat at the kitchen table, where he studied most nights because the light was best there. He had a math test the next day. Soon, Bernice appeared. “I’ll tell you the story of why I left school,” she said, “but you must not ask any questions, not while I’m talking, not after I’ve finished. In fact, we must never speak of it. Those are my conditions.”

He was on the cusp of a B+ in his math class, had worked hard to get there, but he could not tell Bernice that a test was more important than her story. He thought that maybe she was testing him also. He stood up and followed her into the living room.

“You understand the rules?” she asked.

“I understand.”

“And you want to hear the story?” She needed him to say it.

“I really want to hear it,” he said. This was true. He lay down on his side, as usual, so that he could watch her as she spoke.

“Don’t look at me while I’m talking,” she said. “I need you to listen.”

He did not argue with her. He just rolled onto his back and stared at the spackled white ceiling. “I’m listening,” he said, and she began to talk.

“My roommate’s name was Gladys Moore. I was sent her address by the housing department, a standard practice allowing future roommates to exchange information about themselves. While I was still considering whether to make contact, Gladys Moore wrote to me. The letter was on onionskin paper, though she’d clearly composed it with a piece of lined notebook paper beneath. Her handwriting replicated perfectly the cursive we’d been taught in the second grade, right down to the odd capital Gs and Fs and Ss that nobody ever uses, and I thought then that Gladys Moore and I would get along just fine. The gist of the letter was that she would be bringing a toaster, which I would be welcome to use. It would be a two-slicer. I remember thinking the tone apologetic. She added that if I felt uncomfortable sharing a toaster with a stranger, she would use the left slot, I the right. She would not mind this at all. She signed the letter God Bless You, followed by Sincerely and Your Roommate, and finally her full name. I wrote back two days later, having debated whether to mention my size, which I decided against. I said only that a toaster would be useful and that I would bring an iron, which we would consider the room iron. I signed it Sincerely, Bernice.

“The next month, my mother drove me to school. She was slow about everything that day — getting into the car to leave, driving, choosing a parking spot — so by the time we checked into my dorm, it was nine o’clock. As we walked down the hallway, we passed open doors revealing rooms that already looked lived in, beds made, posters on the walls, girls lounging in sets of four and five. I knocked on my door as a courtesy, but when there was no response, I went in. It was clear that Gladys Moore had not yet arrived. My mother was suddenly in a hurry to leave, nervous to be driving home so late, which I felt obligated to point out was entirely her fault. We argued briefly, and she left.

“I chose the bed nearest the door, away from the window, believing the window bed to be more desirable. It was a gesture. I had not brought much — a large suitcase of clothes, my typewriter, two boxes containing sheets and towels, toiletries, a dictionary, the aforementioned iron, and snacks. It was eleven when I finished unpacking. Gladys Moore still had not arrived, and the front desk was closed by then, which meant she would not be coming that night, so I shut off the light and went to bed.

“I awoke to find the room lit by the dim glow from the hallway light, three people standing over me, mother, father, daughter, all of them tall and very thin, like a family of flag poles. I sat up, and they jumped, as one, backward. ‘Heavens,’ said Gladys Moore’s mother, and Gladys Moore, who was holding a toaster, the toaster, said, ‘I’m Gladys Moore,’ and her father said, ‘Oh, you’re up. We were trying not to disturb you,’ and he turned on the overhead light. I glanced at my watch. It was one o’clock.

“I thought it improper to get out of bed wearing just a nightgown, more improper than not helping, so I lay under my covers while they carried Gladys’s things in and her mother made up her bed. ‘I left you the window,’ I pointed out, and Gladys said, ‘That’s fine,’ like she was reassuring me. When they were finished, her father said, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind a slice of toast before we get on the road, Mother,’ and Gladys’s mother, who had obviously done the packing, located the bread and margarine and a butter knife. She made us each a slice, bringing mine to me in bed, and we ate our toast without speaking, me propped up in my tiny new bed, the three of them standing and chewing.

“ ‘Okay, then, you’ve got everything?’ asked her father, and Gladys said she did, and her parents went over and stood in the doorway to say good-bye, no hugging, just three people with their hands raised like they were taking an oath.

“ ‘Sorry we woke you,’ said Gladys after they’d gone. She turned away from me to remove her shirt and bra and pull on her nightshirt, and then she turned back and said, ‘We actually got here at six, but I felt a little nervous, so my mother got the key, and we went out to supper. We’ve been sitting in the car praying.’

“I would learn that Gladys Moore was like this, apologetic in a way that made her overly disclosing. I said that I’d arrived late also. I mentioned again that I’d left her the bed by the window, and this time she said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ like she realized that reassuring me was not enough and forgiveness was in order. She shut off the light and made her way back to the bed by the window. I heard her knees tap the ground as she knelt, the rushed murmur of praying, the whisper of my name. She got into bed and fell asleep, but I lay awake for hours, feeling alone and lonely and frightened.”

Bernice paused. Aaron wanted to ask whether she had felt the usual loneliness that comes with new surroundings, or whether it had been something more, something related to the intimacy of sharing a small space with a stranger and hearing that stranger pray for her in the dark. Later, it occurred to him that she had paused precisely at that moment so that he could ask, for when it came down to it, that was what people needed, almost more than sex or love — the reassurance that others wanted to understand them and their fears. He understood this as an adult, but only because of Walter, who had set out to learn everything about him. What a heady feeling that had been, Walter quizzing him on every detail of his life and Aaron answering, flattered and too inexperienced to know how to reciprocate. Eventually — it had taken years — Walter’s questions had stopped seeming flattering and started to seem like one more form of control, especially as Walter continued to offer little in return. Their conversations began to resemble a board game, the details of their lives like play money, both of them trying to get around the board without having his dollars end up in the other’s stack.

But that night in the Hagedorns’ living room, he had still been a boy who believed that what people said they wanted from you and what they wanted were the same thing, so he had lain on the sofa listening to Mrs. Hagedorn snore in her bedroom, her television on, while he waited for Bernice to continue. And at last, she had.

“Gladys Moore and I developed a routine. I got up early and left for my first class, and when I came back at ten, she would be running out the door and I would have two hours alone in the room. I’d unhook my bra and flop on the bed to read. Once, I clipped my toenails. Usually, I made toast, two slices with margarine because I did not like the dining hall in the morning. A few weeks passed, during which Gladys Moore and I did not become close, not the way that other roommates appeared to. I preferred this. She spent her time either doing homework or holding Bible study with several other girls. They met in the lounge so that everyone could see them poring over their Bibles because they liked the attention, though Gladys was different. I once asked her what they did at these meetings, my motive purely conversational, and she said, ‘Oh, Bernice, you should join us. We’re discussing scripture.’ She didn’t seem to get that people sometimes asked questions simply to grease the wheels of social discourse.

“Occasionally, after we turned off the lights at night, we talked for a few minutes in the dark about our families and the towns we had come from and what we hoped to do with our lives. Gladys Moore came from a town just across the North Dakota border, the kind of place that most of us were from, a small farming community. Her parents raised pigs, and she said that what she liked most about going to college was leaving the smell of the pig farm behind. She had very specific goals. She wanted to marry a pastor and live in a town like the one she had come from, where she planned to teach third grade. I’d never cared for children, nor had I considered that I might one day marry, but that was fine because I did not want us to have too much in common. It made living together in such close quarters easier, I thought. Still, there was something comforting about lying in bed, one of us talking while the other listened until she fell asleep.

“One morning when Gladys Moore came back from class, I was listening to the radio, and she demanded that I shut it off. I did. She said that she had been listening to the radio once, rock music, which was forbidden in their house, and the DJ began speaking directly to her, in words that only she could understand. ‘I knew it was Satan,’ she told me in a whisper. ‘It was just what my parents had warned me about, all of these tricks he would use to get to me.’

“I asked her what everyone else listening to the DJ at that moment had thought they were hearing, but Gladys said of course they had not heard what she did. They heard him still speaking in his normal voice because that was how Satan worked. I said that maybe it was her imagination punishing her for disobeying her parents. ‘Our psyches work that way,’ I added. I was taking an introductory psychology course.

“At hearing me interpret what had happened not as a battle for her soul but as a matter of simple human psychology, Gladys Moore looked terrified. I saw it in her eyes before she turned away, gathered her books, and left the room. The next day as I passed through the lounge during their Bible study session, Gladys whispered something to the others, and they all turned to look at me and then joined hands and began to pray. After that, the others made a point of pressing up against the wall when we passed in the hallway or moving to another sink if I stepped up beside them to brush my teeth. Only Gladys did not. She remained polite and apologetic, but something had changed. I came back from class one morning a few days later, assuming she’d already gone, but as I stood there fiddling with my bra, I realized that she was still in bed with the covers pulled over her like a tent. It was the same the next morning and the next. She stopped going to classes and then to the dining hall, and just like that, this became our new routine. She survived on the care packages that her parents sent each week, filled with her favorite foods: a fresh loaf of bread and currant jam, nacho chips and salsa, beef jerky, all of which she now consumed inside her tent.

“Her parents began calling more often, but she instructed me to tell them that she was at class, and I did, even though she was right there listening to us talk, listening to me answer questions about whether she seemed to be getting enough sleep and was enjoying her classes, whether she read her Bible and went to church on Sundays, whether anything seemed funny. I always gave the answers that I supposed they wanted to hear, which were also the answers that I supposed Gladys wanted given, and sometimes, Gladys would chuckle, as if maybe something did seem funny to her.

“ ‘Your parents want you to call,’ I would say when I hung up.

“ ‘Roger,’ she would say from under her covers.

“One morning as I made myself toast, Gladys peeked out. ‘You’re using my side,’ she said. I asked what she meant and she said in a panicky voice, ‘My side. Your side. We have sides.’ I apologized and said I hadn’t realized we had sides, and she said, ‘Don’t you remember the letter I sent?’ I said I remembered the letter, of course, but that I had thought she was just being polite, establishing what kind of a roommate she would be. ‘So when you make two slices of toast, you do it one slice at a time?’ I asked, not arguing but clarifying. By then she was completely out of her bed.

“Yes, she said, yes, of course she did, and I said, ‘Even when I’m not here?’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Gladys Moore. ‘It’s still your side.’

“ ‘Is it because you think God’s watching?’ I said.

“ ‘God is watching,’ she said, so I said, ‘I don’t mind if you use my side.’

“ ‘We have our sides,’ she said. ‘And he’s watching you also.’ She picked up the bread knife and held the blade against my forearm. ‘Remember that.’

“She got back into her tent, and I went to the library, where I couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d pressed the blade into my skin. I stayed there until it closed, so it was late when I got back to the room, almost eleven. Gladys Moore had turned on my desk lamp, which I thought she maybe intended as an apology. I undressed quietly and got into bed, but once the light was off, she whispered, ‘Be careful.’

“ ‘Careful of what?’ I whispered back.

“ ‘Of me,’ she said. ‘The devil is trying to make me do things.’ I could hear that she was crying, but the next day she seemed fine, not just fine, better. She was gone when I came back from my first class, and that night she sat at her desk, typing. I assumed she was writing a paper for a class, so even though the clatter of the keys made it difficult to sleep, I said nothing because I was relieved to have her out of bed and back to being a student.

“I woke up to the smell of smoke. Gladys was crouched over the wastebasket, tending a fire inside. I jumped out of bed and tossed a glass of water on it, but it was still smoldering, so I picked the wastebasket up and hurried down the hall to the bathroom, holding it out in front of me. I set it inside a shower and let the water spray on it. The remnants of the paper she’d been typing were inside, charred and soggy, and I emptied everything into the garbage bin in the bathroom and covered it with wet paper towels.

“ ‘What were you doing?’ I said when I returned. ‘Are you crazy?’

“She was back in bed, inside her tent, and when she didn’t answer, I went over and pulled back the covers. A smell rose up, the sour stink of unwashed bed linens. She looked up at me. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in days, and her hair had been singed. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she whispered. I could see that she believed it, believed that she’d had no more to do with the fire than I had. I took the blanket from my bed and went to the study room, where I slept on the floor, poorly. In the morning when I returned to our room, Gladys was curled up asleep with the toaster in her arms like a baby. I tiptoed around, foolishly imagining that all she needed was a good sleep, but when I opened my drawer to take out a pair of underwear, I saw that the crotch — indeed, the crotch of every pair — was smeared with currant jam.

“After class I went to the housing office to fill out paperwork for a room transfer. I had to state my reasons, so I wrote down something about differences in religion and schedules because I didn’t want to tell them about the tent or the toaster or the fire or, most of all, the jam in my underwear. When I arrived back at our room, Gladys’s four Bible study friends were in the doorway, holding hands and praying. Inside, Gladys stood in front of the mirror, clutching a pair of scissors, which she’d used to chop her hair down to the scalp. I went in and took the scissors away from her, swept up the hair. ‘Time for you to leave,’ I told the girls, who were watching but doing nothing to help their friend.

“ ‘She asked us to come,’ said Beth, who was quieter than the other three and had, for this reason, struck me as more reasonable. ‘She needs our help.’

“ ‘How’re you going to help her when you’re too afraid to even come in the room?’ I said.

“ ‘We don’t need to come in to pray,’ said Beth, and I saw then that I had been wrong about her, that she was quiet because she was in charge. ‘We’re going to do an exorcism. We were just waiting for you.’

“I knew vaguely what an exorcism was, though not the specifics of what it entailed. ‘I don’t think I’d be much help,’ I said.

“ ‘Gladys said to wait for you,’ Beth said. The four of them looked at one another but not at me or at Gladys, who sat on her bed, shorn, flipping through her Bible and acting as though we had nothing to do with her.

“ ‘She said we needed you because there was no other way to know when the devil was out of her,’ said one of the other girls finally.

“From her bed near the window, Gladys began reading from her Bible: ‘So the devils sought him, saying, If you cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.’

“ ‘We’re praying for the devil to leave her,’ said Beth.

“ ‘And how will you know when such a thing has occurred?’ I asked.

“ ‘When pigs jump,’ explained Gladys calmly, ‘it’s because they’re trying to snatch the devil out of the air.’

“ ‘So we’re praying for pigs to jump,’ Beth added.

“ ‘Well, I’ve got a test tomorrow,’ I said, ‘so I’ll just leave you to it.’

“I picked up my book bag, but as I walked down the hallway, away from Gladys Moore, who believed the devil was inside her, I heard her call out, ‘Is she jumping?’ and I felt something inside me move. I leaped upward, nipping the air, and from our room, I heard Gladys Moore say, with clear relief, ‘He’s gone.’ ”

* * *

Until he came to live with the Hagedorns, Aaron knew Rudy only through the stories narrated by the men at the café, where Rudy Hagedorn had been a frequent topic of discussion and amusement. He knew that Rudy spent his winters on the lake, drinking himself into a stupor inside his fish house. When Mrs. Hagedorn had not seen him in a few days, she phoned the café and a party of men was sent out to check on him. Once, he had been found asleep beside a Monopoly board, only one game piece, the shoe, wending its way around the track. Another time, he was passed out over his fishing hole, naked but for a pair of wool socks. After they had determined that he was still breathing, alive and eligible for teasing, the men wanted nothing more than to get back to the café, where they could have a cup of hot coffee and deadpan that they had found Rudy with his head stuck in his own hole — his fishing hole, they would clarify, timing it for humorous effect. With this to look forward to, they hurried him back into his clothes and pulled up his line, only to discover a walleye on the hook, spent from hours of trying to free itself. It was bigger than anything any of them had pulled out of the lake that winter, they said in telling the story later, their voices somber as they recalled how they had all stared at the fish, shaking their heads.

When Aaron first moved in, he rarely saw Rudy, who often did not come home after work, the first part of his day bleeding into the second, particularly when his final plumbing call involved a relieved homeowner expressing gratitude with a bottle. Other times, he came home briefly to put something in his stomach before going back out. While he sat in his recliner eating, a bottle of beer poking up from between his legs, he engaged Aaron in conversation, choosing unexpected topics, though Aaron was quick to hide his surprise. One night, for example, as Aaron sat reading My Ántonia, Rudy said that he preferred Song of the Lark, which Aaron had not read, though he was making his way through all of Cather’s work.

“I’ll read it next,” Aaron said. “Did you read Death Comes for the Archbishop?”

Rudy sighed. “I tried, but I didn’t care for it much.”

“Me neither,” said Aaron, the first time he had admitted this to anyone because his teacher had told him that many people considered it Cather’s masterpiece.

He had never seen Rudy with a book, but that spring when Rudy started taking him fishing, Aaron discovered that he carried one in his glove compartment and another in his tackle box, that he sat each night in his gently rocking boat reading until the light was nearly gone and just enough remained for him to steer to shore by. Rudy taught him how to drive his truck and manage the boat and determine how much line to let down. Aaron looked forward to these evenings, and though Rudy did not talk a lot, he thought that maybe Rudy liked having him around too.

One night, as they sat in the boat staring down at where their lines disappeared into the water, Rudy said, “It was the goddamn desks, you know. They always came around her too snug.” They had not been talking about Bernice before this. They had not been talking at all. Aaron pulled up their lines and turned the boat around, rowing the whole way back instead of using the motor while Rudy sat quietly in the bow. Rudy stored his boat at Last Resort in exchange for handling their plumbing needs, but when they pulled to shore that night he was not sober enough to help Aaron get the boat out of the water. After Aaron had struggled several minutes on his own, a voice came from the dock, asking whether they needed help.

“Walter,” Rudy called back. “Give this boy a hand.”

Together, Aaron and the man hauled the boat out and got it stored while Rudy gave orders from the dock, where he sat, still drinking. When they were finished, they went over to join Rudy, who introduced them by saying, “Aaron, this here’s Walter Shapiro. He’s a professor at the university in Moorhead and no doubt the only goddamn Jew in a thirty-mile radius.” Walter laughed at the introduction and shook Aaron’s hand, and the three of them went into Walter’s cabin for what Walter called “a nightcap.” It was there in the lighted cabin that Aaron recognized Walter as the man who had come into the café for breakfast three years earlier, the man who read a book in French while he ate.

“You came into my mother’s café for breakfast,” Aaron said. “The Trout Café?”

“I remember,” Walter said. “Your mother was an excellent cook. That’s why I had to stop coming, or I would have started to look like Rudy here.” Rudy laughed, though Aaron would later learn that men did not always like to have their weight discussed either. He would also learn, after he and Walter had become lovers, that he was the real reason Walter had not come in again. “You were such a lovely boy,” Walter would explain. “So wistful and polite and filled with yearning.”

Just like that it became the three of them motoring out in Rudy’s boat each night, Rudy listening as Aaron and Walter conversed quietly, often about poetry. The poetry that Walter read aloud to them out there on the water was nothing like the poetry that Aaron had been forced to memorize in school, poems about the loveliness of trees. He started with several by Anne Sexton and T. S. Eliot, followed by a poem that he had driven all the way back to his house in Moorhead to retrieve because he had realized at breakfast that they needed to hear it. It was by a man named Richard Hugo, a poem that began so beautifully Aaron had found himself in tears: You might come here Sunday on a whim. / Say your life broke down.

Walter also asked questions, lots of them, his tone matter-of-fact: What had happened to Aaron’s father, and did he know where his mother had gone, and did he think his life would shape up differently because of these factors? He asked Aaron what he planned to study in college, as if college were a given and the only thing left to be worked out was what Aaron hoped to do with his life. Aaron discovered that Walter was a good listener, and he found himself answering honestly.

“Did Rudy know about you, that, you know, that you’re gay?” he asked Walter later, when he was just starting to figure this out about himself.

“I never told him in so many words, but I suspect he knew. Rudy is a very perceptive man,” Walter said. “Did you know he came out to the cabin one afternoon to talk to me about you?”

Aaron shook his head.

“Well, he did. He wanted my help getting you into college. He wasn’t sure what I could do exactly, but he wondered whether there wasn’t something, given my position at the university. He said he didn’t want you stuck there like his daughter.” It had made Aaron’s heart ache to picture Rudy doing this. “He’s a good man, Rudy is, a kind man. It’s probably why he drinks too much. There are some people that the world’s just too much for, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” Aaron had said. He was just eighteen, and there was so much he didn’t know.