We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  The room was dark, but Nels worried that shame was visible in the dark.

  “You left your phone,” Clayton said. He dug in his pocket for it. “That girl called again. Bernie. She wanted you to bring a mixer, so I brought Coke.”

  “Oh,” Nels said. He felt relieved, then excited. “Nice, man, nice. What’s that,” he said, pointing to the cup.

  “Coke.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Bernie appeared. “Your friend,” she said to Nels. “Did you know”—she was bemused—“he’s an actual, like, real, live Republican?” She pushed at Clayton, but he didn’t even rock back. “You’re kinda cute,” she said to Clayton, “for a Republican who solves centuries of ingrained ideologies with guns. Come on,” she said, and she took his hand. She pulled at him, and, genial Clayton, he followed. Nels sat on a couch. “I’m so drunk,” a girl said next to him. “I can’t drink this,” she said, so he downed it, and it burned brightly, he felt the booze churn in his stomach.

  When Nels finally rose to get another drink, Clayton was sitting in the living room. Bernie was on his lap. Clayton looked uninterested in the fact that Bernie was sitting on his lap. “Please,” she was saying to Clayton. She made a moue. “Just one little sip,” she said, and she pressed the lip of her cup to his mouth. Clayton pushed the cup away.

  “Yo,” Nels said.

  “What’s up,” Clayton said. He lifted his cap in a kind of salute. Then he managed to stand with her in his lap. He set her on the floor. He didn’t seem angry, just bored. Nels admired him, for being bored with the scenario. It reminded him of his father, how his dad bolstered his intelligence with silence.

  “What’s up with him,” Bernie said as he left.

  “He’s from a farm,” Nels said, as if this explained anything. “Cows. Not very lively,” he said. He drank with a fervor.

  * * *

  That weekend at haps Tricia caught him by the cheese and crackers. Everyone else was singing in the living room—here as a flickering candle, has been my life of faith—and Nels was ladling himself more punch. It was sickly sweet and tasted of childhood.

  “Are you going to Pelkie Ski Days?” she said. “I was thinking … we could borrow Clayton’s truck and go out together.”

  “Finals, you know,” he said.

  “Well, anyway,” she said. “Come over for Tyler’s birthday. He’s one—big day,” she added. She was the oldest of ten.

  “Going to let him just dig into the cake?” he joked. It felt strange, that domesticity was what they had to talk about. He had a brief vision of Uppu when she was small, clawing happily at the whipped cream. He said he would go.

  When he got home from haps it was early still, barely midnight. He and Clayton had ditched early, hadn’t stuck around for the board games. Nels was falling asleep on the couch when Tiina called to say that Brita was pregnant.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” Tiina said. “Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

  “Congrats, man,” Clayton said. “Gonna be an uncle.” Clayton had fourteen nieces and nephews and only four of his siblings were married.

  “Yeah,” Nels said. The news made him edgy. Brita had just been married four months ago, and he felt like he was still adjusting to that, the idea of her being married, a wife—those adult words still felt odd in his mouth. It seemed to presage his own life, when he would be calling Brita to say Tricia was pregnant. The thought made him ill. Who contemplated these things at nineteen? “Wanna go out?” he asked Clayton, but Clayton was nearly asleep on the couch, his chin flush with his chest. Nels walked the streets, pushing his pace, trying to wear something off, or something out. He realized he wanted Bernie to call him, or maybe he just wanted to be somewhere loud, someplace where he couldn’t hear himself think.

  He called Bernie and in twenty minutes he was downtown, and she got him into a bar through the back door. The place was jammed and the speakers popped things inside him, in his ears, in his blood. He shouted things at Bernie and she shouted things back at him and they had something to drink. He had a shot, two shots. He jumped up and down. He felt not deadened by the noise, not annoyed, not smothered, but alive—there was a strange synchronicity to the dancing, like everyone raising their hands to give forgiveness in church. There was a contagion to the movement. He recognized people from the stoplight party, and he felt very close to them, they seemed like great people. Why hadn’t he been friends with them before? What were their names? John, Jenny? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He felt a hundred old happinesses rise in him as one. How had this desire—to move like an animal, with crude and sudden movements—waited in him so long? He didn’t even mind when Bernie pressed against him, he let it be part of the night. He had another shot and it boiled less urgently in him, mixing more smoothly with what he was feeling, pushing him further and further into the surrounding sound.

  Outside the feelings dampened sharply with the shutting of the door behind them. Bernie stood and looked at him expectantly and he felt it would be rude not to kiss her, so he did. In the brief seconds they had been out of the bar her mouth had managed to become cold, and he was reminded of putting his pillowcase in the freezer in the summer. He pulled away. “I gotta go,” he said. She didn’t disagree.

  On the walk home he had to stop to throw up, vomiting into a window well because it had the aspect of depth, even though as he did it he could see, through the basement window, people playing video games. They saw him vomiting. A guy yelled, “Sick, man, do that somewhere else,” and gave him the finger. He wiped snow around his mouth and tried to make his way home. He’d left his jacket in the bar but he didn’t want to go back in to get it, and instead he walked home in his T-shirt, and when he stepped through the door to his apartment Clayton was reading a book, some western.

  “Dude,” he said, “you were out there with no coat on?”

  “Just a short walk,” Nels said, focusing hard on sounding not drunk.

  “There’s something on your shirt.”

  “Oh,” he said. He wiped at frozen puke.

  In his bed he couldn’t fall asleep. What he had done did not feel real. He tried to recount the night deliberately—I snuck into a bar after haps, and at the bar I had shots and danced. He remembered suddenly that he had kissed Bernie.

  No more, he thought, and he shook his head. Now you’ve done that. Now no more. Still he couldn’t fall asleep, until he remembered he hadn’t gone through the Benediction, and he thought through each phrase with his hands folded. But the memory kept waking him, and he stood and shook his hands violently. He did ten push-ups. He opened the window and let the cold air in, and laid down on the floor, remembering to turn onto his side, in case he vomited in his sleep.

  * * *

  He told Clayton.

  “Can I—” he said. They were in the kitchen and Clayton was rinsing a staled cup of coffee. “Can I have it taken care of?” he asked. He kept his voice light.

  “All sins forgiven in Jesus’s name and precious blood,” Clayton said. They didn’t look at each other. Clayton poured coffee into his hardly rinsed cup.

  Nels left for class. When he walked he felt so full of something—hope, maybe—he wanted to run. The sky was the same stubborn white, but he felt cheerful about the snowbanks and about the sidewalks packed down but not cleared. The iced air woke him up, made him feel clean and alert. He sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even know, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted. He remembered the bar, the surge of sound. It had come and gone. He thought maybe he would invite Bernie to church. No, he decided, that was weird. He wondered if he should call her at all, clarify what had happened the night before.

  But wasn’t this the whole college gambit? You had absurdist experiences. You were allowed to and even supposed to, was how Bernie would see it—
that was how the world saw it. That was how the world did college. Bernie would move on.

  Up in front the professor wandered on about buffers, equal amounts of acids and bases. Like blood, she said. Blood is a buffer, so that if you are exposed to acid, you have bases in your blood to neutralize the acid. Okay, Nels thought. He tried to fix the thing in his brain but he already felt it slipping.

  * * *

  He went with Tricia to the Mall of America. She wanted to do things—the roller coasters, as if the tickle-belly of the ride was exciting, when it was only the context, only the sight of shoppers on the third floor that made the spin and drop of interest. Then it was the photo booth, where she let him fight to give her bunny fingers, so all their pictures were blurred, her face showing her pleasure at being teased.

  Then she wanted him to try on new jeans, so they went to the same store everyone went to and Tricia mocked all of the innuendo on T-shirts—“Tacky,” she said—and she began browsing the racks. He was waiting for her to find the right blue of jeans when Bernie appeared from the dressing room in a too-short dress.

  “Nels!” she said, clearly pleased, and she came and gave him a hug and he could feel her body. She draped her hand on his arm, chattering, saying did he hear about Jenny sleeping with John again.

  He felt Tricia eyeing him.

  “Oh,” Nels said, “this is Tricia.”

  “Oh!” Bernie said. Her face became red but she stayed resiliently cheerful.

  Tricia smiled without showing her teeth. Nels saw how Bernie saw her, slightly infantile—her T-shirt was plain and white—and average in every way, in what she wore, in how she did her hair. It occurred to him that almost everyone in the church dressed this way, as if dressing like a more modest version of everyone else would keep them both the same and apart.

  “Listen,” Bernie said, “you should both come tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t know,” Nels said. “We’re going to be at Tricia’s place, I think. Tyler’s birthday?”

  “That’s Sunday,” Tricia said. “After church.”

  “You don’t want to miss it, though. It’s going to be at John’s again, but rumor says it’s going to be a kegger.”

  “A what?” Tricia asked. The way she said this, as if it weren’t an embarrassing question, made him wonder if she already knew what it was.

  “You know,” Bernie said awkwardly, “a keg.” She clearly lacked the ability to be cruel, wide open as the opportunity was. “You should come,” she said to Tricia.

  “Yeah,” Tricia said.

  He walked with Tricia slowly around the racks. She held up pants that clearly would never fit him. “I had it taken care of,” he said. “Clayton,” he added.

  “Okay,” she said, “I get it,” but she wanted to leave. She didn’t want a pretzel from the pretzel stand, like she always did. He dropped her off at home and he didn’t go inside to say hi to her parents. Two of her little brothers waved from behind the glass door.

  * * *

  Tricia told him she didn’t want to be with him anymore. “You make me a worse believer,” she explained over the phone. “It makes me doubt.” She didn’t like to doubt things. He didn’t go to Tyler’s party.

  “All the Marjanens are super straight like that,” Clayton said.

  The semester passed without him seeing Tricia outside of church, and without him seeing Bernie outside of class. At haps he had the feeling that all of the girls were staring at him; in orchestra Bernie had stopped poking him in the back with her bow, and they said hello and good-bye the way people who are trying to avoid each other do, with exaggerated enthusiasm. He got his usual top-of-the-middle grades—he had long since dealt with his sisters’ overachieving by not really trying, though he was aware of this defense mechanism—and he spent his free time with Clayton, playing the video games his mom wouldn’t have let him play at home. He ate grilled cheese sandwiches; he got skinnier still.

  By the time he went home for Christmas break, he felt only embarrassment when he thought about the semester, how typically he’d behaved, going away to college and sneaking off to parties. But almost as proof of their faith in him no one asked and he didn’t offer, and this made it still more difficult to offer.

  He came back after break to find Bernie waiting where his stand partner usually sat. She looked better—her outfit called less attention to itself.

  “I just wanted to say sorry,” she said.

  “What for?” He took his cello out of its bag, to keep things casual. He felt nervous.

  “I made things all weird.”

  “No,” he said, “not at all, I’m not even with Tricia anymore—it’s not a big deal.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’m dating someone now.”

  They went out for coffee, to a family diner where the waitress called them sweetheart and asked too frequently if they needed warm-ups. They ordered pecan pie, and Bernie told him about the guy she was dating, and asked what had happened with Tricia, and for a long swig of coffee he considered an easy lie but then he figured it didn’t matter, and he told her everything, he told her about the church, about growing up. He listed all the things he couldn’t do. He told her about modesty and restraint and not tempting yourself.

  “It’s just always easier not to do stuff,” he said, “than to think you can handle something, and then before you know it you’re doing the next thing you weren’t supposed to be doing.”

  “Yeah,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she thought he was crazy or not. He showed her pictures on his phone from Brita’s wedding, and she learned all their names in order, reciting them almost as fast as he could—Brita-Tiina-Nels, Paula-Simon-Julia, Leena-Anni-Uppu—and he told her which instrument each of them played.

  “You all look alike,” she gushed. “The same eyes.”

  “No,” he said, “not once you know us.”

  He kept hanging out with Bernie. He felt comfortable around her now. She knew his secret, and he could tell she kept it. She didn’t invite him to things, but he would go over to her apartment—so large and spacious she didn’t even use one of her rooms, the fortunes of an only child visible everywhere—and they went through her cello CDs and she never made him look at her other music, even though he kind of wanted to.

  “Listen,” she said one night, “my birthday’s next Thursday and I want you to come. Other people are coming, there’s going to be stuff there and everything, but you don’t have to do any of it, obviously.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, and he went. When he got there he realized how many friends she had—she went to everyone else’s parties, and so they were all obliged to come to hers. She served drinks from a cooler, a mix of whiskey and beer and pink lemonade, and Nels could smell it on everyone’s breath, sweet and heavy at the same time. Bernie gave him a cup that was pure lemonade, and it was so sharply sweet he coughed, and he wished he were just drinking water in a clear cup, without pretense. Someone appeared with a cake, and the group sang, remarkably out of tune, no one able to agree on a starting pitch. Everyone seemed to be having more fun than he was—nothing was funny to him. He didn’t feel like watching people dance. He wished Bernie hadn’t given him the lemonade; he wished she didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to dance. He felt like leaving, but he had to look like he was having fun so that she’d think it was possible to have fun without drinking and dancing.

  Now he was sulking. He made small talk with people he knew vaguely, but they were talking about a TV show he’d never seen. This made him feel still worse—he never knew if he should pretend or not, or try to change the conversation. He kept his eye on Bernie, and when he was sure she was out of the room, he put on his jacket. He went into the kitchen, and from a number of bottles on the counter, he took a bottle of amber-colored liquor. Rum. He held the bottle like it had been his all along and strolled calmly out the door. No one waved good-bye or asked why he was going, and by the time he was out in the street he felt stupid and angry. As he walked he could hear
sounds emanate out of other people’s houses—the spurts of televised gunfire, a louder party, complete with stragglers smoking on the porch. A loner played the harmonica on his back porch, badly.

  In his apartment he took out a mug with a drawing of deer. He poured an inch of rum. He sniffed it; it stank. Clayton came out of his room.

  “How was the birthday?”

  Nels took a swig. His eyes teared sharply and he coughed. “Try it,” he said.

  Clayton lumbered over. He picked up the bottle and studied it.

  “Don’t you ever wonder?” Nels said.

  Clayton sniffed the top of the bottle. “What makes you think I haven’t?”

  Nels took another swig from his mug, larger this time. “A toast,” he said, “to—” He wanted to think of something inappropriate, funny, make Clayton loosen up a little. “To my dad, good old Warren Rovaniemi, who talks about his kids’ sins in his sermons. Bring this one up, Dad, see what they think.”

  Clayton tipped his head from one heavy shoulder to the other.

  “This one’s to—Howard Pelto,” Nels said. He poured another. “Neil Ojala.”

  “Buddy Laho,” Clayton suggested. His tone was flat.

  “Good one,” Nels said. “Here,” he said. He poured some into another mug.

  Clayton picked up the mug and sniffed the rum. He tasted it, and his eyes, squinting, teared a little. “Well,” he said. “Tastes like booze, I guess.”

  “Why,” Nels said, “when did you have it?”

  Clayton shrugged.

  “Farm boy,” he said. And he downed it, coughing. It wasn’t until his second mug that he began to laugh—they both began to laugh. Nels felt light and easy. His yoke was easy and his burden was light.

  * * *

  When they woke the next day they didn’t speak of it. Nels was the one to clean the bathroom and the shower, which, after some heavy vomiting, badly needed it. They went to a Youth Discussion out in Menahga, and to church, and even to Communion, the taste of wine at Communion bizarrely familiar and now not unpleasant. When they drove to and from church events they still listened to Clayton’s country music, and they still turned the radio to a news station before they turned into the church’s parking lot.