After the Parade (28 page)

“ ‘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.