We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  “I’m heading out,” she said lightly. “The little girls are upstairs.”

  “Okay,” he said, and she got into their van, threw it into reverse, trying not to pull too hard out of the driveway. Simon, she prayed as she drove, you have such a good heart. I know it, I know it, she prayed. I saw you cry at your confirmation, she thought, and she hung on to that, that youthful contrition, that want for freedom and forgiveness. She hurried the van, impatient behind the SUVs heading out for Saturday dinner at family restaurants. Go, go, she urged them. She wanted to see Simon’s face, to see if he felt guilty or not, to show him that he could not hide things. When she got to the movies, she parked at the back, walked as calmly as she could into the theater, following a dad with his kid on his shoulders. I’m just like him, she thought, just like anyone else going in to the movies. She entered and saw two booths behind glass, two young men sitting with microphones. There was a list of movies, too many, maybe ten—how was she to know which one Simon was in? Was Nels supposed to be picking him up afterward? She should have asked, she realized. She wondered if the theater was like an amusement park, if she could report that her kid was missing. She decided to see if they would stop her from going in, and she pulled at the second glass door, stepping into a giant catacomb of glass, the scent of popcorn sweet like rotting meat, the concession stand flanked by teenagers carrying unwieldy large drinks, rubbing up on each other, hands on shoulders, on hips.

  She sat on a bench. No one else sat on benches—the benches seemed more gestural than functional—and some people looked at her funny, but she didn’t care; she was good at not caring what other people thought. From watching the crowds she could see that Simon would have to come by her to leave the theater, and she felt like she was at the airport, waiting impatiently for him to cross past security and into her arms.

  Twenty minutes passed, thirty. Her butt hurt from the bench. She was hungry, and she bought some popcorn, even though the price was some form of usury. She threw the receipt carefully away. Back at the bench, she went through her purse and cleaned it out, threw away all the old receipts and gum wrappers and Uppu’s drawings from church, the drawing of every kid in their family, all labeled, in order of age, Brita with her boyfriend clinging to her stick-figure arm.

  After a half dozen dirty-blond boys passed by, she saw Simon, turning a corner. He was walking beside a guy she didn’t recognize, with short gelled hair—he was tan, or Hispanic maybe, she couldn’t tell. She stood up, and she saw the other boy reach out and touch Simon, on the arm, the way boys never did, and then Simon looked up and when he saw her he became immediately red. She could see but not hear the guy ask if she was his mother, and she could see Simon say yes, and his friend began walking the other way, quickly, as if to avoid her, but she figured that was fine, she didn’t have anything to say to him, and she waited for Simon to walk toward her, her heart sickly, nervous.

  “Mom,” he said, and he looked down at the star-spangled carpet.

  “Simon,” she said. “What are you doing here?” It was a stupid question, but it was all she knew how to say. He still hadn’t looked up. It was really very loud, and she could hardly hear him over the music, over the streams of crowds. A girl ran screeching out of a hallway. A boy picked her up and began carrying her while she screamed in fake protest. Pirjo looked at Simon very carefully. She could see that he had done his hair.

  “Mom,” he said, “I didn’t even want to see the movie.” He picked at a nail with his thumb. “Mom—” he said, “it was just that he—” and she saw what he was going to say, she knew with total and absolute finality what Jess Kariniemi had meant when she had asked, is Simon okay.

  “We had to go somewhere,” he said.

  “Are you—” Her hands were literally shaking. “Don’t say it,” she said, “I need a minute.”

  Then his eyes began to tear at their edges and she pushed him by his elbow out the front doors and then they were outside, and there was the rush of the still-chilly spring. They stood on the grass at the side of the building, looking out at the dumpsters at the back, lit up by the parking lot lights.

  “What am I going to do,” he said, his voice cracking. “I don’t know how to live,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mom,” he said.

  She wanted one of his cigarettes but couldn’t bring herself to ask.

  “What if I don’t want to go, what if I want to stay?”

  “What will you do?”

  “I mean, I can just—” He shrugged. “It’s a temptation like any other, right, I can still come to church.”

  “It’s a very hard life,” she said, not sternly enough. She wanted to say, It’s an impossible life. She wanted to say, They will never like it and they will always look at you funny. Do you have to be this way? she wanted to say, but she made herself not say it.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  She didn’t know this answer. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

  He kept touching his face, touching his hair, almost spastically. “I’m so scared,” he said. “Dad will hate it. Dad will hate me.”

  “He’s just your dad,” she said. “Of course he still loves you,” she said, but really she couldn’t guess what Warren would say, if he would be quiet and calm and disappointed or if he would say something that would stick in Simon’s mind forever. “Just remember—all sins, all sins can be forgiven,” she said. “Even this one.” She saw that his mouth had tightened into a firm frown, like it always did when he couldn’t keep from crying, and she half wanted to hug him, to carry him as if he were not sixteen but two or three and had fallen asleep after a hard cry, and she would lay him down so gently he wouldn’t wake, but only realize when he woke in his pajamas that he had been tucked in—and at the same time she wanted to shake him, to slap him. She felt slapped, she felt rejected, she felt like he had looked at the life she had made for him and he had spit on it.

  She squeezed his arms and he collapsed into her, and she let him hug her, but she couldn’t quite hug him back. She said his name, Simon, Simon, and she pitied him.

  * * *

  On the drive home it was as if there were no streets, no stoplights, only Simon, his life playing back in her mind as she searched for the signs she hadn’t seen, the signs in his life, in his face, in how he sat now in the passenger seat, his body turned away from her, his knee shaking like Warren’s. Your child being gay was one of those things that happened to other people, like fires, car accidents where they needed the Jaws of Life. What had they done wrong? Science said there was nothing you could do—genetics—but that seemed like the worst answer of all. At church they said that gayness was a trial, like any other trial, any other temptation, and anyway all sin was the same in the eyes of God. But not in the eyes of man—that, that Pirjo had always known.

  She was angry that now she had to be the mother with the gay son, the minister’s wife with the gay son—always she would carry the burden of Simon with her, the shame of having birthed something that could not be happy in this world, like the shame of mothers with retarded children, the burden of having to love something society feared, something repulsive to the world. From now on people would always ask was he married, or was he dating, and each time she would have to keep her face still, she would have to be in control. She would never be able to admit her shame, and that was the greatest burden of all.

  She pulled the van into their neighborhood, relieved to be home, scared to be home. On the street the same trees hung over the same telephone wires. Beyond the houses the lake laid staid and still. She parked the van near the garage and for a minute she and Simon sat, neither moving. At last she took her purse and made her way to the door but the house was dark, except for a blue twitch of light. “I’m home,” she called out, but there was no answer. She turned the corner to see the girls in the family room. They did not even look up to see her enter, so steadfastly, so earnestly were they watching.

  PARTY BOY
/>   NELS WENT TO a party.

  He tried not to ask himself why.

  Sure he was tired of his apartment. His apartment was a hole. His apartment was such a wasteland that new furniture changed exactly nothing. It had become a game, seeing how long he and Clayton could go without buying anything or cleaning anything. So far it had been three and a half months, and when he showered, the tiles were so filmed with dirt he felt only marginally cleaner.

  His apartment was the reason Tricia didn’t visit very much. When they saw each other now it was mostly on Saturdays. He would walk into Herralas’ or Simonsons’ or Muhonens’, she would clear a spot for him on the floor, and she’d act like there weren’t enough songbooks, so they could share. He hadn’t even meant to date her, but now everyone said they were, so he supposed he was. It was fine, she was cute enough, but when he looked at her sometimes he felt like he could already see the mother in her, when her face would tire from the pregnancies. She wouldn’t be fat, but her chin would be less defined and all of her motions would be too defined, from always grabbing at an escaping kid.

  Maybe it was because of Tricia he went to the party. He’d been invited by a girl in orchestra, who played cello the way she talked, idly. “I never see you around,” Bernie had said. The complaint was familiar—he never saw anyone who wasn’t a believer—but the flirtation behind the accusation was pleasing.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  But he surprised himself and went. Like on all Saturdays, he was supposed to go to haps, but he told Clayton he had studying to do, and when he heard Clayton’s truck pull out of the driveway he took a shower. He found some clothes that looked careless. He brushed his teeth, just in case. He focused on walking hurriedly so he couldn’t think about it, and even when he heard the music outside the door he didn’t let himself falter, he just went in. It was a basement apartment, and the lights were garishly on, and there was a series of couches that people sat on, watching sports. Except for the music, it was awkwardly quiet. He guessed from the stink of things that everyone must have been high. This is what pot smells like, he told himself. He felt a strange stickiness beneath his feet and realized the entire carpet was preemptively covered in plastic, an odd maturity that anticipated immaturity.

  Bernie pulled herself up from the couch when she recognized him. She brought him a beer. It amazed him how average everyone looked. Didn’t they know they were at a party? He realized he also looked average. He tried the beer, and at first the stale smell revolted him, but he was good at mind over matter, good at plunging his hand into the garbage disposal when the sink was full of softened chunks of oatmeal and the pulps of peppers.

  “So,” Bernie said, “you’re from…” She had a habit of waiting for people to finish her sentences.

  He answered all of her questions without seeming too interesting. He’d gotten very good, over the years, at avoiding conversational paths that pointed toward the church. When she asked him, for instance, if he was going to the game on Friday, he said he already had plans and, anticipating a follow-up, asked about her. People liked themselves more than they liked to uncover his evasions. She was from St. Paul and her father worked at the library at the university and she had been trying to escape Minnesota her whole life but she never had. She said she hated the Midwest because it lacked radicalism. He asked if the insistence on moderation and middle age was its own radicalism. She took this to be clever, which he found a little overeager. When she talked he found himself staring at her breasts. She had the body of someone who didn’t care what her body looked like—not heavy—but it was almost attractive, how she flung herself about. She couldn’t, he thought, be less like Tricia, whose body was too polite to occupy space.

  “God,” Bernie said, “I feel like a sweaty mess. Do I look like a sweaty mess?” It occurred to him that she was nervous, too.

  “You look great,” he said awkwardly. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say. His heart was drumming. But no one, ever, by looking at him, would guess that he was nineteen and the third oldest of nine kids and not supposed to listen to music with a beat. He went into the living room and leaned against the doorjamb and tried to look as if hell itself did not rest on what he did or didn’t do that night.

  * * *

  Someone dropped a stack of plates in the kitchen, and they broke. At this point in the evening it was hilarious, even to Nels. The heat on his face stretched back to his ears. Bernie poured more shots. “Shot number who knows,” she said.

  They played Never Have I Ever. The rules were not immediately clear to Nels, and he drank when other people drank, shaking his head when they shook their heads, laughing when they laughed. He spent everyone else’s turn trying to think of what he would say, something that seemed, in its admission of having not done something, to admit to having done other, wilder things. When it was his turn he said, “Never have I ever”—inwardly unsettled at how long this list actually was—“made out in a movie theater.” He did not mention that he had never really made out with his girlfriend, that even kissing her those few times had been risqué. He did not mention that he had never been to a movie theater, though he knew his other siblings had—Simon had invited him once, and Tiina, and once Tiina had told him that Brita used to go to the movies, but he didn’t know if that was actually true. It was always him and Paula, at home, knowing where the others were but refusing to even ask.

  By the time it came around to him again he was fully loosed from reality. He was undeniably drunk. I’m drunk, he wanted to say, gleefully, but he knew better. “Never have I ever—gone trick-or-treating,” he said. It fell out of him. Whatever, he thought, they wouldn’t get what it meant.

  “Really?” someone crowed.

  “We all have to drink,” someone whined happily. Drinks were taken dutifully. Bernie looked at him funny.

  He rose to go to the bathroom and felt a wave roll through him. Someone steadied him. He walked disjointedly to where the bathroom might be. He was interested in this feeling of drunkenness. He thought of the tests police gave people on the crime shows he used to watch at the neighbor’s, like touching your finger to your nose or counting backward from ten. He was too drunk to assess his ability to perform these tests. He had to put his hand against the wall just to piss.

  “So, no Halloween,” Bernie said when he emerged from the bathroom.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Religion, I presume?”

  “You could call it that.” He shrugged and went to the back door and out onto the patio, where the beer was cooling. He struggled to pull a beer from the snowbank.

  “No, really,” she said when he came back in.

  “Just a sticking point for my parents,” he said, but he felt more nervous than he had all night. He didn’t want to think about the church. He especially did not want to think abstractly about what sin he was doing while he was doing it—he wanted to reserve that for another time, for remorse. Of course that was exactly what you weren’t supposed to do—sin with the expectation of forgiveness—but even as he drank his beer he landed upon a rationalization that satisfied him: he was only human. To err was human, to forgive was divine. Or something—he was drunk; he couldn’t think. Yes, he thought, there it was. He was drunk; he couldn’t be expected to think.

  * * *

  He awoke in his bed with a sour pit in his stomach. He made his way safely to the kitchen.

  “So,” Clayton said. Clayton himself broke rules—like listening to country—but he was the kind of church kid who was careful not to go too far. He was the kind of guy who would stop taking out movies from the library and throw out his CDs when he got married.

  “Yeah,” Nels said.

  Clayton ate his cereal. He was big—he gave off an air of being immovable—but the weight was deceptive. Nels had seen Clayton on the farm, throwing ninety-pound hay bales without tiring, his cheeks pink with the effort but not a sound or heavy breath. The two cousins were nothing alike—the farm boy and the suburbs boy, Clayton al
ways in some T-shirt espousing that a man never be separated from his truck, Clayton’s jeans wide in the legs, baggy, belted. When he drove—beating two fingers against the steering wheel in time to country songs, raising a finger to say hi to passing drivers—he assigned one point for hitting roadkill and two points for hitting animals that were alive, but this might or might not have been a joke.

  “You gotta shower now or we’ll be late,” Clayton said.

  They drove out to the suburbs for church. Nels made Clayton stop once so he could vomit on the side of the road, but Clayton didn’t say anything. During the sermon he sat next to Tricia and she offered him gum. He talked with her as briefly as was humanly possible. She was still in high school and was planning to apply to a nursing program, at St. Cloud State or maybe in Fargo, and he was pretending to be interested in premed when he just wanted to take cello lessons, and they talked about the premed stuff, the biology labs, which were endless. The chemistry courses, which had no foreseeable application. After the sermon, when they went out to lunch at a family diner, he sat with her and paid for her chicken strips. He could tell her friends were jealous.

  On Thursday, Bernie called again.

  “It’s a stoplight party,” she said. He looked that up online.

  “Do you have a yellow shirt?” he asked Clayton. “Just to borrow for the night.”

  Clayton dug through a pile of clothes on his bed. He threw Nels a T-shirt advertising sunflower seeds. It was too big, but Nels tucked it in partway.

  “Slowing down or speeding up,” Bernie said, but she didn’t seem dissuaded. Her shirt was green mesh. They bobbed next to each other in a room with all the furniture pushed to the sides. She pressed her back up against him and he took a step back. He nodded his head harder, as if the music meant something. People kept getting excited about each song that came on, and he put his hand in the air and tried to look excited, too. Everyone mouthed words, and he kept his head turned toward the floor. It must have been an hour later, maybe more—he was doing some kind of dance, some kind of head bobbing with some girl or, at least, near some girl—when Clayton appeared in the doorway of the room. He was wearing a Twins cap. He had a red cup in his hand.