We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  She still had water legs when Jimmy dropped off the boys for a couple hours while he ran errands. “Couldn’t you find them nicer clothes?” she said to Jimmy. The boys were in T-shirts they normally wore to bed. There was an actual hole in Paulie’s shirt.

  The boys were bored with the hospital, they said, because it was too much like church. They had to sit still and not touch anything. They couldn’t wrestle, and of course they couldn’t turn on the TV. They played Communion. Paulie fed Alex and Nick and Jacob the remains of her hospital food, a spoonful of applesauce, a sip of juice.

  Dr. Schwartz came in, Jenna behind him. Jenna waved, awkwardly. Brita felt too tired to manage the situation.

  “They’re playing church,” she said, in explanation.

  “Jesus says come, for all is ready,” Paulie said. The boys doubled up, laughing.

  “Poijat,” she said, “hiljaa. Nyt.” She sat up and tried to swing her legs over the bed, but they felt like someone else’s legs. She was sure stones had been sewn into her seams.

  “Do you need help?” Jenna asked. The question made Brita’s eyes smart. An absurd question with such an obvious answer. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine, really,” she said, again and again, she didn’t know how many times. She moved her feet to the floor. Somehow she stood. Somehow she walked to Lars, feeling like her gown was opening in back. At the very least they could see her legs, the heavy, useless stubs. She got to Lars, but she couldn’t pick him up. “Paulie,” she said, “pick him up.”

  She turned back to Dr. Schwartz, to Jenna. She saw suddenly the resemblance between them, in the manner they wore their faces, in constant worry.

  In two weeks she was allowed to go home. Jimmy insisted on making a production of it, bringing her balloons and promising that the freezer was filled with lasagnas and tuna casseroles, collecting her cards and flowers into bags that he carried almost proudly out to the van, which—he pointed out twice—had AC that worked now.

  Too soon there was the sight of their house, and she seemed to see this anew, and newly terrible: a small ranch, the brick painted white, the bushes thin and failing in front, the driveway’s cement splintered with weeds, toys strewn under the trees. She stepped slowly to the front door, hand to sore stomach, her own mother on the porch, her quiet suggesting she was impressed by what her daughter had endured that she had not. Be gentle, her mother said, when the boys tried to hug her. They couldn’t be gentle though, they hardly knew how—already they tired her, already they were so needy. Look, look, they said. Paulie stood holding the door open for her, pacing as he held it. “Mom,” he said, “come on,” and she made her way up the steps, more slowly than she needed to, proving to Jimmy how fragile she still was. She was fully inside the foyer when she realized she was looking at a grand piano, Dr. Schwartz’s grand piano. Her hand moved to her mouth, to her chest. Everyone was watching her face, and she felt herself form what she thought was a smile, what was trying to be a smile, and she heard herself say, I can’t believe it, or something of the kind.

  “Dr. Schwartz had it delivered yesterday,” Jimmy said. He shrugged over the boys’ heads, to tell her he didn’t pay for it. “Technically,” he said, “it was his daughter’s idea.”

  She turned to the piano and sat at the bench, slowly. She felt a wave of bitterness—the piano was much, much too large for the room. Its grandness was inappropriate, next to the couch with its tearing cushion, the coffee table’s crack. Jenna, sending her a piano. She wanted to sit Jenna beneath the piano and have it collapse on her.

  “Well, go on, play,” Jimmy said.

  Brita lifted the cover of the keys. Inside they lay clean and clammy. She looked up, and she saw the sun running off the top of the piano, and as if still in the morphine world she saw not a piano but a table, herself flat upon its back, wanting to get up and never able, the rest of her life stretching across its planes. Always there would be more to give, always it would be she who would have to give, and she had nothing left to give at all. For her there would only be the pittance of others’ pity. That poor mother, they would all say. You poor mother, the piano said.

  “Mom, play something,” Paulie said, and he bent his knees up and down.

  Obediently she touched her fingers to the keys, the reflection of her fingers shaking. She pushed a key so slowly it made no sound at all.

  JONAS CHAN

  HE WAS THE new kid, but already he knew who Uppu Rovaniemi was. Everyone knew who every Rovaniemi was, the way people recited the litany of their names, the way teachers would say, “Well, we can’t all be Rovaniemis,” laugh, laugh. And Uppu, as the last of the nine, inheritor of the legacy, seemed determined to surpass them all—her impatience with stupid people, the way she leaned in over the test and circled undoubtedly correct answers faster than he could read the questions. And it would have always been like that, his eyes tottering after her down the halls, except that she had sat by him in calculus and locked her arm in his and said—knowing perfectly well he couldn’t disagree—that they ought to be friends.

  Before Uppu, he’d come home and submit his backpack to its inevitable inspection, do his math (first in pencil, then in pen), turn down the after-school snack. “He’s too anxious to eat,” his mom had reported one night at dinner.

  “He’s going to give himself ulcers,” his dad had said.

  “I have gum in my purse. You want it? You can share it,” his mom said, already standing, rustling through her purse. “Make new friends.”

  “It’s good for stomach acid, too,” his dad said.

  He’d tried the gum, he’d even sat next to strangers at lunch, but after he’d talked about how it never really got hot or cold in the Bay Area, and after he’d asked whether he really did need snow boots (actually, his mom had already bought him some), he would pretend to be finishing homework, to cover the quiet. The truth was that he wasn’t nerdy enough for the nerds, no one cared that he came from California, and there were exactly enough Asians for him to be different without being interesting, and those Asians were Korean, and he was Chinese from Malaysia, and anyway the Koreans all went to the same church, and at lunch they held hands and prayed together. The only thing he had going for him was the viola. But who wanted to be friends because you were a good violist?

  Uppu did. “Such a relief,” she gushed, “to not wince when the violas come in. But you play like a violinist,” she said. “Not enough weight on the bow.”

  “My parents made me switch,” he said. He pushed at his glasses nervously.

  “I knew it,” she said. “I could see it a mile away. Okay. Other guesses. You practice every day. True or false.”

  “True,” he said.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  She announced that they were skipping school to go to the zoo. She said it was more educational. They walked through the glass tunnel with the polar bears and held their hands up to the enormity of its paws. He stood just behind her so he could stare at a small freckle behind her ear. “His fur is getting moldy,” she said. “Look, it’s, like, oxidizing.” Around them moms tried to push strollers and kids screamed, and the bear lolled in the water. The bear flexed its mouth in boredom.

  “This is so much better than the Hutch,” she said.

  His dad grounded him for skipping school. He announced this via a Post-it on Jonas’s door.

  “Who does that?” Uppu said, when he called to tell her he was grounded. “Tell them to read some parenting books, I mean, really.” She had a point; he just spent the time on the phone with her. Hours on the phone. Right now, he could hear her eating Cheetos. Her plan, she said, was to eat Cheetos and drink Mountain Dew and read science fiction all night.

  “How come you aren’t in trouble?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s the only good thing about big families. My parents never check up on anything. Except faith.” She made an ungraceful, snorting sound. “Nothing else matters,” she intoned, in imitation of someone.

  “Ho
w come you never talk about it?” he said. “Your church.”

  “It’s just that insanity is so dull. Nothing to say.”

  “But what kind of Christianity is it, even?”

  “Well,” Uppu said. She stopped to eat a few Cheetos. “It’s called Laestadianism. It’s a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans. End of story.”

  But really he wanted to hear her talk about it. At school he asked his stand partner. The Rovaniemis, Andy told him, were more or less brainwashed; the Rovaniemis had a million kids because they did not use birth control; the Rovaniemis did not go to school dances; the Rovaniemis did not have a TV. Andy bit fretfully at his cuticle and went back to his drawing of a ribosome he had taped to the stand. Suddenly he turned to Jonas. “Why?” he said.

  “Just curious,” Jonas said. This was what he told himself, anyway; after all, his parents were technically Christian, and he’d been baptized, but even in Los Gatos they had really only gone to church on holidays, and now that they’d moved, they had quit altogether. But he was also dimly aware that he was curious because he wanted to know—had to know—if the rumors were true, if the crazy church stuff meant he was never, ever going to be with Uppu.

  He called his friend Billy in California. The conversation lasted six minutes. “Just go to her church,” Billy said. “You can find out what it’s like and she’ll think it’s nice of you—you’ll seem really … gentlemanly.” Billy was learning guitar and in the background there was the sound of him picking out chords. “So,” Billy said, “is it snowing there yet?”

  Jonas told him it wasn’t.

  * * *

  The website said services started at eleven, and he showed up five minutes early. When he pulled open the sanctuary doors, the room was nearly empty and a little chilly. He sat toward the back. The church filled suddenly a few minutes after eleven, a couple making their way over toward his bench. They looked to be in their early twenties, and the husband carried a car seat with his arm slack, like it was heavy. Three kids trailed in front of them.

  The church, he saw now, was entirely white, and moreover, everyone looked so similar it might have been a family reunion.

  Uppu herself showed up after the organ had started playing, lagging behind her sisters slightly, plucking at the back of her tights. When she saw him he smiled, but she blushed and looked quickly away. She sat with her sisters in the back and folded her arms, her crossed leg beating out a nervous rhythm.

  When the sermon began he realized almost immediately that the minister must be her father. She had his face, especially his eyes. He felt hurt she hadn’t told him about this. He tried to listen, but he felt too distracted—once one baby cried they all cried, like dogs—and the heavy woman in front of him kept reaching into her purse and taking out a single marshmallow. She chewed the marshmallow like gum. Then, carefully, she selected the next marshmallow. And Uppu’s father spoke very slowly, to his hands, or to the windows. There was much mention of forgiveness, much talk of just being human—“God understands,” her father said, “how often and easily we fail”—and on the whole it didn’t seem particularly strange. Unlike his family’s old church, no one said they loved Jesus, no one was overemotional, and God was less a personal friend than someone spoken of quietly, as if in fear of disturbing Him. Afterward, people came up to him, asked where he was from, how he knew Uppu. They said it was great he was thinking of music school. Someone invited him to come again next week.

  At school, Uppu reamed him. She spent three days not speaking to him at all, and after he had written her note upon note that she returned, she finally broke down in the parking lot and told him that she was humiliated and that now everyone thought they were going out and her parents had lectured her about not dating school boys and it looked like she had invited him and everything about it was insane and he could never come again.

  “Ever,” she said, “ever.”

  “Fine,” he said, cowed. “It’s just church, okay.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “You didn’t grow up with this, I grew up with this. It’s not just church, it’s not just anything. I love,” she said, “that you have nothing to do with it. Don’t ruin it, Jonas, please, please.” And then she kissed him.

  And with that his life became her car, that dear cheap crappy car, with heat and AC that only worked at the highest setting, and a driver’s seat stuck permanently a little too far from the pedals for Uppu’s legs, so she shoved a large teddy bear behind her back. And even when he was kissing her, when he was trying to pull her from the driver’s seat, the teddy bear was always there, or they pulled it over the gear shift so that her thigh would not jam into it when they were undressing in a fervor. But they did not have sex. They did not talk about sex, but both bodies agreed not to do it.

  One night she picked him up and they drove out to where the suburbs dwindled into houses with actual acreage—an actual horse chewing beside the car, its jaw moving side to side, side to side—and as they began their feverish clamberings he tried not to but still he saw the littered candy wrappers on the floor, he saw sweaters, he saw a crumpled catechism even, he saw rolling and emptied cans of pop. He had nearly forgotten about these things when her phone rang in the cup holder. “Where are you?” he heard her father ask her, tinny, distant. Uppu broke several laws on the ride home through the small backcountry roads. They were going to hit a deer, but they didn’t hit a deer. She dropped him off and, as she later reported to him, she arrived home to find her father on the porch, pacing.

  “Where’s Jonas,” he said.

  Uppu told the only lie she could tell. They had been discussing faith matters.

  His world pulled and refracted with a mighty tug.

  * * *

  The dog, a small, bug-eyed thing, wriggled in Uppu’s arms, but she kept it pinned to her chest. “So when you say you’re interested in the church, do you mean you’re going out to coffee with my daughter or that you’re having casual sex?” her father asked.

  “Um,” Jonas said. He cleared his throat.

  Her father looked mostly out the window behind Jonas.

  “Can you take that thing out,” her father said softly, and Uppu put the dog out on the chain in the backyard but immediately it began to bark.

  The table was an old, soft wood and Jonas found that if he pressed hard enough into it with his thumbnail he could leave a permanent ridge.

  The conversation took two hours. Uppu sat through the whole thing, unwilling, uneasy. She was a different being: silent, almost statuesque. Uppu’s mother, with the name he couldn’t say aloud, Pirjo, darted in and out of the kitchen, refilling her coffee. Jonas listened diligently to slow commentary on the church and modesty and vanity and forgiveness—how converting just meant asking forgiveness, nothing else. All you had to do was ask your sins forgiven, her father said, looking at his hands. That was all. Then you were a believer. You were in the church. Once you had the heart of a believer, he said, the restrictions weren’t restrictions at all—it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not do. There wasn’t a rule at all about no TV, but their consciences told them it would be better to stay away from that kind of temptation.

  “It’s really,” her dad said, “the simplest thing in the world. It’s a simple faith.”

  “See,” Uppu said after.

  “See what,” Jonas said.

  “The madness.”

  “At least they do what they say. Practice what they preach.”

  “Some,” she said, “not all.” She smiled her mischievous smile.

  He started going to church, in part to uphold Uppu’s lie but also because it was a way to spend time with Uppu. Immediately he began to see her parents relax some, and when he came over they were even nice, almost intensely so. It was his birthday and her mother baked him a cake and hung balloons from the chandelier. In the dining room they lowered the lights and the table was surrounded with them, with B
rita and her boys, with Uppu, her parents, Paula, Anni—everyone on pitch, in harmony, singing first in English, then in Finnish. “It doesn’t exactly translate,” Pirjo explained. “We aren’t really saying happy birthday, we’re saying, joy, lots of joy to you.” They gave him presents they had made: a mail holder from a clementine box, pie weights made from pennies, a scarf. They sat around the table and played board games until his eyes hurt, Uppu dancing around the table when she won. “Sheepie queen,” she chanted, “sheepie queen,” and her dad rolled his eyes and ate ice cream from the box.

  His mother was almost desperate to have Uppu over for dinner. “Can’t we meet your new friend?” she said. When he came home from school she was planning the menu, stir-fried vegetables, tofu with black bean sauce, a whole steamed fish with tomato and garlic sauce—“Does she like garlic?”—and he said it was all fine, everything was fine, but at the last minute she baked a frozen pizza, too, the smell of its burning crust filtering up to his room.

  Uppu came with a braid of Finnish bread she had baked herself. She told them her favorite classes were physics and math. She admired the piano, a modest upright, and, when asked, played them a Debussy nocturne, fudging the middle a little, shrugging her shoulders as she played through it to the end, to a final chord that fell easily into place.

  “Why can’t you be more like your friend here,” his dad said. Jonas wondered if Uppu could understand their accents.

  “Both piano and violin!” his mother said. “You must practice all the time.”

  “Ha,” Jonas said.

  “Well, I’m really not very disciplined,” she said. She had taken small servings of everything, and ate slowly, with little bites.

  “You’re just being modest,” his mom said.