After the Parade by Lori Ostlund Read Free Book Online

replied. This was true, for he had chosen San Francisco because of Taffy, whom he had met two years earlier at an English-as-a-Second-Language conference in El Paso, a three-day event aimed at connecting ESL teachers with overseas jobs. He did not tell Walter that this was the conference’s emphasis, allowing Walter to believe that he was going off to learn yet another strategy for teaching the past unreal conditional. Aaron went with the goal not of securing a job abroad but of entertaining the notion, of talking to recruiters from Hungary and Japan as though he possessed the intention and the freedom to pick up and go. It was his first step toward leaving. Taffy, on the other hand, attended because Glenna, her girlfriend of twenty-five years, had broken up with her, which meant that Aaron and she were two halves of the same coin—the leaver and the left. They became inseparable, attending meals and events and group interviews together, prompting a recruiter fromOsaka to inquire, hopefully, whether they were married, hopefully because married couples were highly sought after, two-for-ones that were considered more stable. Aaron was afraid that even uttering a simple “no” would reveal the shock and horror he felt at considering the question, at imagining Taffy as his lover.
    Her given name, the one recorded on her conference pass, was Hulda. It suited her far better than Taffy, which was, after all, not a name but a candy. One heard Taffy and expected a pink-hued, stickily sweet young thing and not a dour, obese woman in her fifties who wore too much red, unbecomingly, and often left her hotel room without wiping the sleep from her eyes or the toothpaste residue from the corners of her mouth, oversights that Aaron felt obligated to point out. He told himself that Taffy had been getting along just fine without him, yet each morning at breakfast he found himself mentioning the glob of lotion that clung to the side of her cheek or offering her his unused napkin while noting that she might want to give her nose one more good blow, all of which had imposed a level of intimacy with Taffy that he did not want.
    â€œNot married,” Aaron finally replied. “We’re friends.” This struck him as deceitful.
    The recruiter, a trim Japanese man in his sixties, smiled at his response. Was he smiling at how long it had taken Aaron to respond, or because he considered friendship a virtue worth smiling about? Or was he suggesting Aaron had employed friends as a euphemism for lovers, which meant that the conversation was back where it had started. Generally, Aaron enjoyed these strolls across cultural lines, into territory where people and situations could not be easily read or categorized. It was one of the aspects of teaching foreigners that appealed to him, but this interaction had drained him.
    On the final afternoon of the conference, as Aaron and Taffy worked their way, table by table, through the conference hall, a Korean recruiter informed Taffy that she would not find work unless she lost weight. “Diet,” the delegate said, pronouncing the word with an odd inflection so that, at first, Aaron thought he was actually speaking Korean.
    Smiling pleasantly, Taffy assured the man that she had no interest in teaching in Korea. “Crossed it off my list ages ago,” she said, adding in a mock-friendly tone, “Korean food is not very likable.” She laughed and slapped the man on the back, and as she and Aaron walked away, she whispered, “That’ll get him. Koreans can’t stand to have their food maligned.” Then she slapped Aaron on the back. “Come on,” she said. “We might as well get a jump on happy hour.”
    They left the sea of tables, each representing an opportunity to escape the lives to which they would be returning the next day, and once they were settled in the hotel bar, drinking beer and eating free nachos, Aaron said, “Don’t you