After the Parade Read Online Free PDF Page B

everything.”
    â€œYes,” Aaron had said, “but when people are really unhappy, they feel like they need witnesses, some kind of permanent record.”
    He told her about a fiftieth-birthday party that he and Walter had attended for one of Walter’s colleagues, a woman named Nina who taught German. Nina’s husband, Peter, had planned the event, an elaborate affair that he referred to throughout the evening as his labor of love, but as he became drunker, he began to tell stories about Nina, secrets that he presented as charming little anecdotes: she had once locked their baby daughter in the bedroom with a mouse for two hours while she waited for him to get home to kill it; during a humid summer in Thailand, a mushroom had sprouted in her navel. After each story, Peter held his glass in the air while Nina sat with a tight smile on her face, inviting the guests to laugh along with her husband, who was too drunk to notice that nobody did.
    â€œIt was completely Virginia Woolf -ish,” Aaron told Winnie, referring to the Albee play and not the author herself.
    â€œThey probably had a very passionate relationship in the beginning,” Winnie said. “When couples start hating each other, everything goes but the passion. It just gets rechanneled.”
    Aaron met Winnie when he was nineteen, the summer after hisfirst year of college. One day Walter announced that his sister would be coming for the weekend. He had never mentioned a sibling.
    â€œAre you close?” Aaron asked.
    â€œWe’re not un-close. There’s no underlying animosity, if that’s what you mean. We’re typical of many adult siblings, I suspect. Being close, as you put it, requires a certain commitment from both parties, and perhaps we lack the commitment.”
    Aaron thought of his mother and Uncle Petey, how they had gone years without speaking, not because they were angry at each other but because they too lacked commitment. His mother said that at the end of each day, when you were tired and just wanted to be left alone, you made a decision either in favor of being left alone or in favor of the relationship, and she and Petey had both chosen solitude. The good thing, she said, was that there were no hard feelings that way.
    It turned out that Winnie was visiting because she and Thomas were moving to Minneapolis, where Thomas had taken a job as vice principal at a private school. When Aaron asked her whether they had chosen Minnesota to be closer to Walter, she laughed and said, “The sort of relationship we have doesn’t require proximity.”
    â€œWalter didn’t even tell me he had a sister,” Aaron confessed.
    â€œThat sounds like Walter,” Winnie said, sounding not at all upset.
    After she left, Walter noted how well Aaron and Winnie had gotten along, offering this assessment without jealousy. It was the same way he sounded when Aaron asked to borrow a scarf or a bicycle helmet. “Take it,” Walter would say. “I’m not using it. Someone should.”
    Now, Aaron was giving Walter his sister back. Walter had not indicated that he wanted his sister back or even that he felt she had been taken, but Aaron preferred to think of his motives in this way because he did not know how to tell Winnie he was leaving. She would want to know why. She would want to know everything. He had instead recorded his reasons in a notebook, cataloging them as though he had in mind a tipping point—25 or 41 or 100—the number of grievances that justified leaving.
    Grievance #1: Whenever Walter and I are sitting in a room together and he gets up to leave, he turns off the light on his way out. He claims that it is a gesture born of habit, something ingrained in him by his parents, but I cannot help but feel that his focus moves with him so that when he leaves a room, everything in it, including me, ceases to exist.
    He told me once, not unkindly, that this bothers me because I have