We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  “I was a teenager and pregnant,” Irene said.

  “You were?”

  “Well,” Irene said, “I got married. I had my baby. Now he’s marrying a girl who looks like a whore.”

  Then the alarm on the doors to the parking lot went off. “Paula,” Manny yelled from down the hall, and Paula guessed that Otto had escaped. Paula was the only one who could talk him back in, because she knew to tell him the Holocaust was over. Running out of the room she saw the clock, the large analog numbers, and she knew it would be nine or nine-thirty by the time she left and yet she knew she would only be paid until eight-thirty; they always did that. Julia always said she should sue, but she was the one who would be sued—for being slow, for spilling soup. You couldn’t sue the entire Jewish Community Center for a half hour of pay. You couldn’t sue a place with people who had survived the Holocaust.

  Out in the cold, looking for Otto between the rows of cars, she thought about Leena, how people would look at her in the grocery store, with her ringless finger. She put her hand on her stomach and felt the muscles move as she ran. She wondered about her own children. Would they have faces like a sow? “Listen,” she would tell them. “Once, I kissed a beautiful man. His name was Manny. He wore cologne. When he walked in the room, everyone turned to look at him. And he kissed me.” She would tell the story about the knife, about cutting carrots. Her youngest daughter, whose middle name would be Paula, after her, would watch her, wide-eyed. She would touch her daughter’s cheek with her incredibly soft hand. “Come here,” she would say, and her daughter would lean in close. “All of my children are beautiful,” she would say. “Just kiss the boy.”

  TOTAL LOSS

  RIGHT BEFORE THEY had sex and only right before they had sex Julia felt something was possible between them. But Will was like that, or their sex was like that—kept forever at bay and then, once held up close, revealed to be much further away than before. She was compulsively desiring of him until she had him, and then she was ashamed to see that having him was not enough, and this deepened the distance yet again. But she could not quit, halving herself and doubling her wants until there was hardly anything left of her to sustain. It was New Year’s Eve and especially tonight she wanted to be hopeful, but instead the holiday had given the sex a special artificiality and she regretted everything, and afterward she continued drinking, willing herself into drunkenness until she went to bed and coached herself to pass out.

  If she could have she would have slept until it was late in the day, but her dreams were thin and anxious, and interrupted at their breaking point by the sound of the phone ringing close to her ear.

  “Where’s your violin?” her mother snapped.

  “What time is it?”

  “The house is burning down, we need to know if it’s in the house, where is it?”

  She sat up in bed, but Will turned over and slept more tightly. She forced herself to think about the question of the violin.

  “It’s at home,” she said. “Here, it’s here.” The answer was complicated by her being in Will’s apartment, and not her own.

  “I have to call Simon,” her mother said, “we can’t find his viola, either,” and she hung up, leaving Julia again in the emptiness of Will’s sleeping body. She knew she would not fall back asleep, and she called her dad’s phone to get the actual story. He spoke so slowly and quietly he seemed to be mimicking the hundreds of miles between Julia and her childhood home, as if the words took longer because of distance. His thoughts wandered. The house would be fine, except the bedroom. Well, not fine, he said. Well, the floor might cave. He told her the story of everyone escaping. There was the sound of firemen calling to one another calmly.

  When the call was over she lay back down. She pretended to sleep, going so far as to breathe deeply and evenly. When Will woke she rolled slowly over, as if from heavy slumber. She watched him select a T-shirt from a hanger. She had the sense even in this ordinary action of how extraordinary he was; Will existed for her in a permanent state of—she didn’t want to think it, but the word was exotic—of exotic good looks. He had the dramatic features of high-end ads, and even in cotton drawstring pajamas seemed to be selling something. Will was the first person she had dated to not tell her on a regular basis that she was beautiful. Her last boyfriend had called her a snow queen; the one before that, a princess of the elves. Her boyfriends let her hair—white, like hundreds of Finns she knew—hang loose over their faces, over their chests. Will was unimpressed by everything, and this impressed her. He was older than her by five years and he made her feel old, and mature—even the distance of his interest in her made her feel old. I’m having a casual relationship, she told herself, and I’m fine.

  “That was my mom,” she said, as she followed him to the kitchen. “On the phone last night.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “There was a fire,” she said. “An old outlet set a mattress on fire, I guess.” She looked to see if he was listening. “But everyone’s okay.”

  “That’s good,” he said absently. He stared at his computer. He was often like this—he reacted to all her allusions to her eight siblings, her religious apostasy, her mother’s antics with equal aloofness. To him her past was utterly surmountable, perhaps because of his own, what with his inner-city stories, his friend shot, his scars from bar fights. She liked it—she had always wanted a man who had also lived through something—and she wanted to emulate this same boredom with drama, to be reticent and hermetic like him, seemingly unfettered by the past.

  She thought about telling him the rest of the story: her mom discovering the mattress aflame, running down to the basement to wake up Brita and her husband and their kids, swaddling the baby in a nearby sleeping bag, running out into the snow in bare feet—how lucky that Anni and Uppu weren’t in their room but in Minnesota for the holiday.

  “My home,” she said, more to herself.

  “Yeah, I lost mine years ago,” he said. “Fire would have been an improvement, come to think of it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Long story,” he said, but he clearly wasn’t going to tell it.

  “I might go help out.” She said this as it occurred to her. Mostly she wanted to see if he would want her to stay.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “For a couple of weeks.”

  “It’ll be good for you—it won’t be that bad.” He stared at the screen and she went to her computer, and they sat in near silence. He liked to spend the morning reading the news. He said if he wanted his students to care about the world, he had to care about the world. He was a history teacher, like Nels, and he did everything in the name of his students, like her mother. He didn’t find these connections interesting. The sun moved threateningly slow across the cramped counter. He didn’t like to be disturbed, and she didn’t like to disturb him.

  At lunch she faked that she had bought a ticket, to see what he would say.

  “Do you want a ride to the airport? When’s the flight?”

  So she bought one. She was just working at a lingerie store anyway, waiting for a real job to come through. She had applications everywhere, at nonprofits, at research groups, at public relations firms, but she knew it hurt her that she had gone to a state school, even if her grades were good, even if her professors had liked her. She knew she surprised people—they didn’t expect her to be smart. But in the meantime she was tired of holding a tape measure. She was tired of feeling the sweat and heat of women’s armpits as she measured someone else’s chest. Her feet hurt from standing, and by the end of the day her face felt strangely chalky from makeup. She had hoped this would make her boss fire her, but her boss was too desperate for help, and even acted sympathetic.

  “I’m coming home,” she said to her mom, and her mom began to cry, she was so happy.

  “It’s just a visit,” she said.

  “I know,” her mom said. “I’m just so happy when my kids come home.”

  When Will dropped her off at the
airport—kissing her briefly good-bye—she grabbed her suitcase from the backseat on her own. She walked away from him briskly and did not look back. It was a limited, gendered power, the power of removal, but she tried to exercise it when she could, to at least prove to herself that she was capable of walking away.

  * * *

  Her mother picked her up a half hour late.

  “Just wait until you see it,” her mother clucked in the car. “You’ll never believe it.” Julia thought she was talking about the burnt house, but she was talking about the new house the insurance company had found for them while the second floor was being rebuilt. In the only example of divine insurance justice Julia could think of, their policy had stated that the insurance company had to move them to a house that was nearby, of comparable value, and could accommodate a similar number of people. Her family, with their nine children, had spent the past twenty years rearranging the four-bedroom house to sleep twelve (Brita and her husband and their boys had recently moved in), and so the insurance company had had to move them into what was literally a mansion.

  It took a full fifteen minutes to tour the mansion, to inspect its seven bedrooms, its wine cellar (already being used for the cat’s litter box), its varied cornices and closets, its not one but two sunrooms. The overall effect was of newness, openness, like a hangar wing for miniature aircraft, with the occasional capitulation to humans—a stainless steel stove and glass coffee tables and everywhere the sinking sensation of carpet. It was so absurd—a house that finally fit their family, but too late, and its luxury only borrowed.

  Julia found Brita in the second sunroom, trying to nurse her baby.

  “Howdy,” Julia said shyly.

  “I have no milk,” Brita said. “Do you know what that’s like, when you can’t nurse your own baby?” She switched Nick from one breast to the other, and Julia saw for an instant the frank brown of her nipples, swollen and wide. She tried not to stare.

  * * *

  Though no one said it—and it made sense not to say it—it was clear a truce had fallen, wherein no one was to directly confront the fact that now that Julia had left the church the past summer, three of the nine of them had left the church. Julia charted how closely conversation would come to mentioning the uncomfortable fact but never quite touch it—how her mom would ask if everyone had heard about how the Niskanen boy had lost his faith and then, adroitly, Brita would say that Makelas had invited everyone over for coffee lunch. It was a game in which the rules were never expressed and yet were very clear to all the players.

  In a way, Julia was grateful for the game. She had always been the peacemaking middle child, calming Brita or Tiina down, and even when she had left the church there had been no dramatic tears, like with Tiina, no banging doors, like with Simon; she had just announced it before she had moved to New York, telling them at the same time that she had found a job and that she did not believe, and then she had gone to her room and pretended to read a book, her hands shaking so that the type was illegible. And since then she had tried to seem like an approvable daughter—she never mentioned who she was dating, or made references to drinking or movies, and she took off her nail polish and makeup when she went home, and kept her shirts long and loose. She wore bras that shrank her chest. She looked clean and wholesome and decidedly not herself.

  But these concessions were preventative rather than reparative. She spoke to Brita now only when her babies were born, or around other big news, and already there was the uncomfortable trend of the three unbelieving siblings talking to one another more frequently than they talked to the believing siblings, and vice versa. When she came home she still felt close to Anni and Uppu, because they were only in high school and had not yet decided to go or stay, but even in their interactions she felt the future hanging between them, and she was cautious. She wanted to prove that she could leave the church and not become a disaster, that she could still be a good sister, a good aunt, find a good husband—she could still be loved, just the same. At night when she got in bed next to Anni she wanted to ask, “I seem happy, right?” but it was the kind of question that, in being asked, answered itself, and instead she rolled in close to Anni and slept more cleanly than she could remember, the old childhood security of many people asleep in one place, the uncomplicated comfort of someone in her bed who was not her lover, and even when their mother appeared at the door, waking them up for church, she didn’t mind.

  She dressed with Anni, rooting through their suitcases for tights without holes, and went to the church she had always gone to, sitting in the back pew with Anni and Uppu like she always had, everything seemingly the same but of course impossibly different. People studied her, looking for signs of difference. Welcome, people said, and she blushed each time they did not say God’s Peace to her, but it had to be borne—she had to show the little girls that these things did not affect her.

  By the time they got back to the mansion she felt calmer—they were just a family again. There was Anni on the piano and her dad closing his eyes, upright in a chair. Paula was making lunch, meat and potatoes. Leena had come over so her boy could play with Brita’s boys—they were always together now, the two mothers—and they sat at the kitchen table and criticized all the new baby names in the church newsletter. “More fake-sounding last names for first names,” Brita announced. Brita’s baby cried from the car seat, and her mother picked him up and impatiently murmured to him as they had all been sung to, patting his back, It’s o-kay, she sang, it’s o-kay, it’s o-kay, my ba-by.

  The baby rubbed his eyes with his hands and she saw, for an uncomfortable instant, a vision of Will. It was something he did, and the gesture was always bizarrely infantile and she would recognize for an instant that he was only human.

  In her mother’s arms Nick quieted. How do I have this, Julia wondered, how does this work, how will I be happy the rest of my life?

  * * *

  The old house looked worse than she’d imagined. From the street it looked like a kicked-in sand castle, with the extra abandonment that came from the care of boarded windows. Inside the house the upstairs walls had a patina of soot and Anni and Uppu’s bedroom itself was a cave of melted things—mirrors, and doll hair, the old Christmas dresses in a waxen heap from the collapse of the hangers, everything destroyed just enough to still be recognizable.

  The entire house, it turned out, had to be emptied. Everything that could be used again—that was not a toiletry, that was not food, that was not perishable, that was not actually burned—had to be cleaned, and boxed, and put into storage until the house was rebuilt. Everything burned had to be inventoried, its original price accounted for, its depreciation calculated. The insurance called it accounting for “total loss.” Technically speaking, the insurance would pay someone else to do it, but if you did it yourself they paid you instead, and her parents had inherited the working-class attitude of refusing to pay someone to do anything they thought they could do themselves. Instead, they wore masks and for hours they packed boxes—first the boxes had to be built—and Julia’s shoulders hurt and her thighs hurt and every time she walked a box outside the cold air made her taste blood in her throat but she kept doing it because it had to be done.

  Occasionally someone went to a gas station and brought back Diet Coke and they sat on boxes and opened up cans. “What a lot of junk,” her dad said. He was embarrassed by it all, by the dumpster outside, slowly filling with Grandma’s broken chairs, the 1940s Life magazines no one had sold, the violin bows that had warped and never been rehaired, dead Christmas lights, the still-standing tree. As they opened each drawer, his irritation increased. “What is this doing here?” he would ask, as if realizing for the first time that he’d lived in a house where a withered orange peel sat alongside a staling swimsuit in the same drawer as the old church songbooks.

  Simon called her from Boston. “You have to keep an eye out for my stuff,” he said. “Don’t let them touch it. Don’t even look at it.”

  “I wouldn’t
,” she said, slightly annoyed.

  “Just throw away any journals. Basically, if it has my name on it, throw it away. No, hide it away somewhere so I can go through it later.”

  “Okay,” she said. Paula and Anni and Uppu walked back and forth from the house to the dumpster, still carrying boxes.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if Dad found some of my gay porn?” Simon said.

  “Not really.”

  “Better yet,” Simon said, “pictures of Christopher. Hey, should we plant some? Hey, you want to plant some?”

  “No.”

  “It would just be, like, Dad thinks he’s packing away books in the boys’ room and then—boom. Boom.” He laughed and she joined the laughter halfheartedly. “So,” Simon said, “anyone asked whether Will exists yet?”

  “No,” she said. She had an image of Will, sitting on the bed. She was lotioning his back. She saw the narrowness of his waist.

  “Not going to tell them, huh.”

  “No.”

  “I told them about Christopher.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” she said. She sighed. Also, she wanted to say, Will isn’t the kind of boyfriend you admit to, someone who isn’t going to marry you and doesn’t want to meet your parents. At least Christopher had come to Christmas once—quiet, sweet Christopher, bringing everyone fancy gift baskets—even if he had never come again.

  “They can compromise too, you know,” he said. “You have to be uncomfortable in their world, they can be uncomfortable in yours.”

  “Yeah,” she said, to make him stop talking about it, but she didn’t agree. She was more pragmatic than Simon and Tiina. She didn’t believe honesty was really the best policy.

  By the end of the day it hurt to sit down, to stand up again. She went out and picked up takeout from an Indian place.