After the Parade (21 page)

“Thank you,” Aaron said. He took the pajamas. “What happened to the teacher who was afraid of you?” he asked.

“Ah, Nordstrum has caught your interest,” said Clarence. “I am not surprised to learn that classroom injustice interests you. In fact, I would be happy to finish the story, particularly since justice prevails, but first you must take those wretched pajamas down the hallway to the bathroom and get yourself ready for bed. Agreed?”

“Yes,” said Aaron. He ran down the hallway, changed into the pajamas, folded his clothes, urinated, rinsed his mouth because he had no toothbrush, and returned.

“You look ridiculous,” Clarence said as Aaron stood before him in the Santa pajamas. “But there's nothing to be done about it. Climb beneath the covers at least, so I don't have to look at you.”

Aaron did, and Clarence began his story immediately. “This Nordstrum was bothered by my presence in his classroom to the extent that he wished to have me removed from it altogether. The principal—who was not a bad man, merely limited in his sensibilities—did not grant his request, could not, for ours was a tiny school. Nordstrum was in charge of not just my fourth-grade class but fifth and sixth as well, which meant that he had three years of my unsettling presence to look forward to.

“Instead, the principal summoned me to his office, and perhaps
because he too found me freakish, he spoke with candor. Mr. Nordstrum's fear had nothing to do with me personally, he said. It was caused solely by my appearance. He seemed unaware that his assessment contradicted itself. In closing, he noted that Nordstrum would adjust to my oddness, just as everyone else had managed to do. What he asked of me was patience. Though I've outgrown it admirably, patience was one of my virtues as a boy, for hadn't I waited, day after day, year after year, to grow? Of course, a man like Nordstrum never gets over his fear because it's nothing but a stand-in for prejudice. Nonetheless, justice was served.” He paused and patted his chest. “By me. From that day onward, I made a point to be always in front of Nordstrum. I sat in the front row so that when he glanced up, I was the first thing he saw. I arrived early for school and stayed late, and when we went outside for recess, I trotted behind him like a shadow so that when he turned, I—”

“You could walk?” Aaron interrupted.

“Of course I could walk,” Clarence said. “I walked to school, several miles each way, though in winter my sisters—Gloria, whom you know, and Frances, who is a year older than Gloria—took turns pulling me on a sled.”

“Were you afraid of snow?” Aaron asked.

“Quite the opposite. Sometimes my father would hoist me on top of a big bank of snow and I would run across it, liberated by the realization that no one was light enough to follow me.”

“But now you have to be in a wheelchair?” Aaron asked.

“I was an active child, and when it became clear that I had weak bones, my parents began to restrict my activities. They lacked money for medical bills and did not like to see me suffer. Moreover, my mother felt secretly responsible for my overall condition because of an incident that occurred in my infancy, involving my grandfather, her father, who had come to stay with us around the time I was born. I don't remember him well—he died when I was still young—but I have been told that he liked to drink. Over the years, he lost everything, all the land he had farmed with decreasing success. He had come from Sweden as a child with his parents and six siblings, but only he and his
parents survived the journey. Later, everyone marveled that it was this weak, easily crushed man who had had the stamina, or simply the luck, to remain alive as his siblings fell like flies.

“After he had sold off all his land in bits, he was shuffled around until he came here to be with his youngest daughter. By then he had become like a child again. My mother said that he would chase my sisters around the house making animal noises, quacking like a duck for hours until even my sisters, who were two and three at the time, begged my mother to make him stop. Of course, my mother allowed no alcohol in the house, so at night, while everyone slept, he would sit in his room at the window, seized by tremors and longing, before rising to pace the house. The years of drinking had affected his motor skills, so he clomped along noisily, bumping into things.

“One night, he passed by my sisters' room, where I slept in a clothes basket. Later, he explained that he had heard me crying and, wanting to be useful, had gone in and lifted me from the basket, thinking he would rock me back to sleep. My parents awoke to the sound of my howling outside their window and jumped from their bed to look. They couldn't see me there on the ground because it was dark, but they could hear me. My mother said that my father pried open the window and climbed right out to retrieve me. They found my grandfather asleep upstairs, still leaning on the sill. He remembered nothing more than sitting down to rock me.”

“What happened to him?” Aaron asked.

“He killed himself several years later,” Clarence said matter-of-factly. “As I began to grow—or rather, as I began
not
to grow—he became despondent. Though he had become childlike in most ways, it seemed that he still possessed an adult capacity for self-recrimination. Often he was up at three or four a.m., before my father rose to attend to chores even, and I would occasionally join him for breakfast. He always made oatmeal, and we rarely spoke, though he would giggle over something silly—a chair scraping across the floor that sounded like gas being passed. When we were finished, the bowls and spoons rinsed, he would remove the yardstick from the old butter churn and gesture for me to stand. I would, and he would press it to my back, hold his hand level
across my head, and mark a spot on the stick with his finger. He would study that spot, muttering to himself, and then return the yardstick to the churn and go outside.”

*  *  *

“I have a bully,” Aaron announced to Clarence after breakfast the next morning. Gloria had served eggs, and their runniness added to the nauseated state in which he'd awakened, the result of having slept poorly. The night before, his mother had not returned to tuck him in, but even after Clarence shut off the sunroom light and the house became still, he'd been unable to sleep, his mind looping back through all the stories that Clarence had told him. It was pleasant, like watching reruns of his favorite television shows, except he realized that he had told Clarence nothing of himself in return, nothing to keep him alive in Clarence's memory the way that the stories about the schoolmaster who hated Clarence and the grandfather who dropped him out the window would keep Clarence alive in his. He resolved to tell Clarence the story of his bully the next morning, and only then had he drifted off to sleep.

“Of course you have a bully,” Clarence replied. “Men like us always have bullies. You must think of it as a badge of honor. In fact, I consider it one of my requirements for friendship. I have little interest in the unbullied masses.”

Aaron looked down, scuffing the toe of his shoe along the ground in pleasure.

“Does your bully possess a name?” Clarence asked.

“Yes,” said Aaron. “Her name is Roberta.”

“Ah, a female bully. I have always found female bullies relentless.”

“What does
relentless
mean?” Aaron asked, adding, “I know it's an adjective.” He had recently learned about the parts of speech and appreciated adjectives most of all because they were not essential like nouns and verbs.

“It means that quite often there is no dissuading them. Boys, you see, tend to bully for the sheer joy of it and are, therefore, indiscriminate. They are motivated by the pleasure of bringing pain and welcome any opportunity to do so, provided it can be achieved with ease.”
Clarence paused. Aaron nodded to indicate his interest in Clarence's commentary, even if he did not fully understand it. “The female bully, on the other hand, is loyal. It is you she is after, and she will not be distracted by substitutes.”

The bullying had begun in the spring, when the weather turned suddenly and unbearably warm and Aaron and his classmates twitched in their seats and sighed at Mrs. Lindskoog's demands upon them. For weeks they sat, brains dormant, the air rotten with a smell like turning milk, which was the odor of their bodies ripening in the closeness of the room. Then, on the last Thursday of April, a day on which the superintendent announced over the intercom that the temperature had reached ninety-six degrees, a girl named Roberta Klimek sauntered past Aaron's desk on her way to the pencil sharpener and delivered a single blow to his right arm. She had not spoken—in warning or explanation—and nobody else seemed to have noticed the attack, the first of what was to become a daily ritual. Soon, both of his arms were covered with bruises, dark like thunderclouds, and he began wearing long sleeves to conceal them, despite the heat. Still, it intrigued him to think of his body creating and hosting such rich, deep colors, and as he got ready for bed he took to standing with his shirt off before the bathroom mirror, admiring the contrast of blues and purples and yellows against his pale skin. It was in this pose that his mother found him one night. She opened the bathroom door, unaware that he was inside, and as she backed out, the flash of color caught her eye.

“Where did those bruises come from?” she asked quietly. His father's anger had been loud, drowning out everything else. It was only after his death that Aaron realized anger came in quiet forms as well.

“It's nothing,” he said.

“It doesn't look like nothing.”

“It's a game,” he said, and having thus committed himself to mendacity, he added, “They don't even hurt.”

“A game?” she said. “Who exactly do you play this game with?”

“Just some kids.”

“Brush your teeth,” she said at last.

It was working in pairs that had first brought him to the attention
of Roberta Klimek, after he had been paired not with her but with Kimberly, the pug-nosed girl who had been a favorite of Miss Meeks. When Kimberly heard her name coupled with Aaron's, she blurted out, “Can't I work with somebody else?”

“You can, but you may not,” Mrs. Lindskoog answered sternly, as if grammatical impropriety were the issue. She believed in the benefits of working in pairs, which Aaron dreaded even more than group work, for in groups he could keep quiet and do a disproportionate share of the work while in pairs there was no room for silent diligence.

He and Kimberly pushed their desks together and turned their attention to reading about another pair, Dick and Jane, who were a steady and tedious presence in their readers. After several minutes of boredom, Kimberly announced, “You know that nobody likes you.”

“I know,” he said.

“Miss Meeks didn't like you,” she tried again.

“I know,” he agreed.

The two of them sat then, books open, neither making further attempts to read aloud, but Kimberly was not content to while away their reading period in a state of benign idleness. She gazed around the room for inspiration, and her eyes fell on Roberta Klimek. “You love Roberta,” she announced with such authority that the other children began to giggle.

Aaron stared down at his book, shocked by Kimberly's casual invocation of the word
love,
then peeked over at Roberta Klimek, whose hands lay on top of her reader, twitching like fish too long out of water. As Kimberly continued her taunting, Aaron watched those hands draw together into fists.

Roberta Klimek was large for her age with long, straight hair and a blotchy complexion, a shy girl who carried out her attacks covertly, for she did not crave the fanfare that often marked bullying as a public event, a factor that he soon realized was not in his favor. He began to study her in the same way that she tormented him—furtively and with persistence. He learned that, unlike his other classmates, who settled into one or two “good” subjects and tolerated the rest, Roberta Klimek had the distinction of being poor at everything. She remained
steadfastly unable to alphabetize, seemed not even to see the relationship between this skill and the alphabet itself, that series of letters that she had spent kindergarten, and now first grade, struggling to keep in order.

Finally, on a sweltering day in May, Aaron approached Roberta Klimek on the playground, where she stood by the monkey bars, alone like him. “Excuse me,” he said, the first words he had ever spoken to this girl whose fists he knew intimately, wanting to establish himself as a polite boy, a boy who said “excuse me” even to his tormentors, but as Roberta Klimek leaped on him and began to pound him with her fists, he knew that this trait was what flamed her hatred.

His mother was summoned to a meeting attended by the principal, Mrs. Lindskoog, the school nurse, Aaron, Roberta Klimek, and her father, who sat beside his daughter with similarly clenched fists and explained that she was in training. She planned to become a boxer, and he supported her dream. That was the word he used—
dream
—and Aaron would always remember how everyone looked down at the floor at the very sound of it.

“What can I do?” Aaron asked Clarence as he finished telling the story.

“I've never had much success thwarting bullies,” Clarence told him, “though if it's any consolation, bullies, in my experience, eventually tire of you and move on.”

“It's time to go,” said Aaron's mother from the doorway of the sunroom. “I don't like driving on gravel roads after dark.” It was not yet noon, so her comment made no sense, but Aaron did not say so. “Five minutes,” she said and left.

“Please, Clarence,” he said. “Tell me about Olga's tale of woe before we go.”

“Impossible,” said Clarence. “Stories should never be told quickly. One must always leave time for creative embellishment and digression, or what are we left with?” He looked at Aaron, who shrugged. “The dreary facts. That's what,” said Clarence. “And I can assure you that Olga deserves much more than the dreary facts.”