Free After the Parade by Lori Ostlund

several blocks to Golden Gate Park, where he lingered longest. Often, the bison were out, a herd that was kept there—in the middle of a city—to commemorate the lost American frontier. He liked to watch them and think about the irony of this. His last stop before exiting the park was a lake, man-made, where he sat on a bench watching a group of elderly Chinese doing tai chi, teenagers smoking pot before school, and a boy and his grandfather who came frequently, though not every morning, to motor a toy sailboat across the lake.
    He preferred to begin his days in silence and found that walking to work eased him into the world. There was also the fare he saved by not taking the bus. He worried about money now that he was on his own, not because he had relied on Walter—he had not—butthere was something reassuring about a household with two incomes. Mainly, he was avoiding the bus because of the twins, who were always on board. He had come to suspect that they had no destination, that riding the bus was what they did, the way that other people went to jobs.
    The twins were identical. They dressed alike, usually in zippered, gray sweaters over emerald green cowboy shirts with snap buttons, and groomed each other like cats, one tamping down the other’s cowlick with moistened fingertips, straightening his collar, rebuttoning his shirt, zipping his sweater to a point just above the heart. It was as though the public nature of the bus allowed them to more fully enter their own secret world. Aaron could not look away.
    Twins were popping up everywhere. In class, Yoshi, who had recently become the father of fraternal twins, raised his hand to note that twins were highly unusual in Japan. Only here in America did you see twins with regularity, said Pilar, the Spaniard, turning Yoshi’s children into a by-product of their parents’ temporary expatriation. Several of her classmates nodded in vehement agreement.
    Aaron knew that he should point out the obvious: the United States was nothing more than an aggregate of the world’s populations and it seemed unlikely that the genetic capabilities of these same populations would change so drastically on American soil. But he did not disabuse the class of its theory, for he had noticed that the students were sometimes skeptical of his views on topics other than grammar. They would not be convinced, for example, that homelessness was not caused by laziness or that Americans did not all eat old food, as one of the Bolors had suggested.
    â€œWhat is ‘old food’ anyway?” he had asked, perplexed by the deceptive simplicity of the words.
    â€œFood that is old,” another student said, because they all understood the charge being made. In fact, they had an arsenal of anecdotal evidence, stories of host mothers who prepared frozen waffles with expiration dates years past, of babysitting for families who ate around mold and expected them to do the same. He tried to explain that they were arguing from exception, assuring them that most Americansdid not eat spoiled food or feed it to guests, but he stopped because he saw that they needed to believe these things. They spent their days cleaning houses and delivering pizzas to people who counted change in front of them, convinced of their dishonesty or inability to subtract, or, more likely, some combination of the two, being told—as they accepted a fifty-three-cent tip—how grateful they must feel to be in this country.
    And generally they were grateful. They were young, most of them, and thought about their lives the way that young people do: with anticipation and the sense that their futures would build like symphonies, one great note following the next. But there was a difference between feeling grateful and having gratitude demanded of you.
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    Aaron encountered his first twins the summer he was five, when he and his parents embarked on a two-week vacation marked by long