by Nancy Thayer
“Look. I’ve got homework. And we need to eat.” Sam’s voice was edged with impatience.
Sam sat, all sensible and civilized from having walked into his classes, all friendly with teachers and parents, on the side of this rented bed, staring at Julia.
Julia sat looking at him. She could feel her body shrinking inside the white cotton shirt, shrinking just slightly, as if her body were water becoming ice. She knew she was aggravating Sam, but she couldn’t help herself. What it came down to was: He didn’t really want to marry her. She wasn’t safe.
“Let me wash my face, then I’ll walk up to the dining hall with you,” she said. She could actually see the tension leave Sam’s body because she was acting normal again. She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, and as she washed her face she studied the little room and envisioned a scene: She’d be in the bathtub, with a kitchen knife, with warm water running.
Chapter 7
Diane
On Tuesday night, just after ten o’clock, Diane stood in her kitchen staring at the phone buzzing in her hand. Julia had just hung up on her—but at least she had called. Weak with relief, Diane sank into a chair and buried her head in her hands. Julia had been impatient, but her voice had sounded strong and steady. She was all right.
After her heart stopped racing, Diane took a deep breath and dialed Jim’s lab. Twelve rings and no answer; he must be on his way home. Such a reasonable, optimistic man, Diane thought. He hadn’t spent the whole evening lolling around like a fevered invalid, indulging in memories and doubt. He’d gone on as he always did, in orderly steps, trusting that all would work out for the best. She envied him his serenity.
She’d only just pulled herself out of bed, away from her memories, which lingered with her still as she moved around the kitchen brewing a pot of decaf. Now, relaxing in the knowledge that her daughter was safe, Diane sank into a chair and sat staring out the window and saw, instead of the dark night, the one time she’d tried to live only for herself, the one time Jim had lost his composure.
It was 1980. Jim was happily ensconced in his new lab, Chase and Julia were ten and eight, engrossed in their school and friends, and Diane was wild to get back into her work. All summer as she chauffeured her children to the beach or took them shopping for school clothes, she remembered her springtime conversation with Lisa. She needed to take a vacation just for herself. Where should she go? What should she do?
At the end of September that year, she managed to get down to New York for the International Jewelry Convention, where the hustle and chatter and glitter of the other jewelers and their displays usually revitalized her. This year she found herself drawn to a Finnish jewelry designer, Tarja Wiio, whose work Diane had admired for a long time. Even though Tarja herself seemed formidably cold, she asked her to join her for dinner that night.
They skipped the banquet held in the ballroom of the hotel and took the elevator to the restaurant on the top floor, where the lights were low, the prices high, and the food sumptuous. After ordering champagne and salmon and duck with cherries, Diane leaned back in her chair and smiled.
“God, it feels so good to know I get to eat an entire meal without interruptions!”
“Oh?” Tarja looked puzzled. In many ways the Finnish woman resembled Diane—both of them were tall and large boned. But Tarja’s hair was white-blonde, cut helmet–style, and her posture was almost military. “Who interrupts you?”
“Why, the children. The telephone. Or one child gets home late from ballet, and the other has to leave for a scout meeting. That sort of thing.”
“I see. I have no children, fortunately.”
“Are you married?”
“Oh, no.” The Finn seemed slightly offended by the thought.
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
Tarja didn’t elaborate, and Diane didn’t want to seem intrusive. She changed the subject. “I like your new designs, Tarja. They are strong, powerful. Almost shocking—but I mean that as a compliment.”
“I understand. Thank you.” Tarja speared a flaky piece of salmon with her fork. “I liked the design you did about five years ago. The handsome pins that looked like military medals.”
Trust Tarja to speak honestly, rather than praising her current, tired, redundant line, simply to be polite, Diane thought. She smiled. “Thank you. I was proud of those pins. I’d like to get back to that kind of work. I have a feeling that women’s jewelry is about to change. With more women working at executive levels, they’ll want serious jewelry.”
“Go on …” Tarja urged, smiling slightly.
“I’d like to develop a new fine jewelry line for Arabesque. I’ve been thinking about it for months. Using gold, silver, precious and semiprecious stones set in opulent, ornate, but very formal designs. Heavy. Weighty.” Pulling a pen and pad out of her purse, Diane quickly sketched two examples. “Like this. And this.”
Tarja studied them, then nodded. “Yes. I see.”
“But they’re not quite right, are they?” Diane stuffed the pad and pen back in her purse. “I’m so frustrated! I can’t quite see what I want. My mind’s crowded with images of Darth Vader and Strawberry Shortcake and Winnie-the-Pooh! Whenever I have a quiet moment in my studio, I find myself drawing cartoon shapes—daisies, balloons, building blocks.”
“You need a vacation.”
“You’re right. I do.” Diane took a swallow of champagne. “I need to get as far away as possible from my ordinary life.”
“Why don’t you come to Helsinki?” Tarja suggested. “I could show you my studio, my city, and then we could fly together to Leningrad and see the Hermitage.”
“Oh, I couldn’t!” Diane declared, discovering that she was surprised and even slightly—and depressingly—frightened by such an extravagant thought.
“Why not?” Tarja demanded.
“Well—it would be so expensive. The airfare. Hotels.”
“You could stay with me, of course. I have plenty of room.”
Diane stared at Tarja. “How long does it take to fly to Helsinki?”
“Fifteen hours, more or less. Are you afraid of flying?”
“Oh, no. It’s not that. But I’d have to be away from the children for so long—”
“That would be good for you,” Tarja declared. “Were you not only now just saying so?”
“Yes, yes … I think I’d better order some coffee,” Diane told her. It was so appealing, the thought of experiencing two truly foreign countries, especially Russia, with its history of excess and opulence, its wealth of artwork.
“Your children are old, are they not?”
“Eight and ten.”
“And healthy?” Tarja’s voice was stern.
“Yes. Yes, they are healthy.”
“And they have a father.”
“Yes, and we’ve got a housekeeper, now, too.” Diane hesitated, then was surprised to hear herself saying, “Yes, Tarja. I think you’re right. I think I should go.” It will be good for Jim to have to truly be in charge for a while, without relying on me, she thought. And it will be good for my children to know I have a life, and that they can survive without me.
Tarja seemed to read her thoughts. “It will be good for you,” she declared.
Before she left, Diane sat Chase and Julia down in front of a globe of the world and pointed out exactly where she was going. She pulled out volumes of the encyclopedia and had them read aloud to her about Finland and Russia. Finland lived in an uneasy alliance with its vast neighbor. It was an odd country, struggling for its own singular identity. Diane felt a kinship with it. She felt like a country struggling to be free but attached by irrevocable geography to a magnificent, obstinate territory: motherhood. Jim traveled away from his children often, without worrying about their safety, without feeling a tug, a pain, or any agonizing guilt. Diane wanted the same for herself.
The weather, so golden in Massachusetts, was bronze in Helsinki. Light glanced off the modern glass-a
nd-stone buildings in brilliant chips, and the air was crisp and metallic, as if extracted from coins.
Tarja met Diane at the airport, put her up in her chic apartment in residential Tapiola, and spent two days showing her the city. The second day she took Diane to her studio, which was located in the heart of Helsinki in a brazen chrome-and-glass arrow of a structure that shot its way skyward between two neoclassical brick edifices. Tarja’s shop was remarkable. Her jewelry was displayed not under a glass counter, but instead in small silk- or velvet-lined vaults built at eye level into a dark blue wall, brightly lighted, protected by locked glass doors. Most of the jewelry was one of a kind, made from silver or gold, some set with precious stones. It could not be called pretty. It was powerful, unsettling, some of it ugly. The heavy, twisted, peaked, and pitted pieces seemed like bits of landscape wrested from the surface of the moon. Diane imagined their cold weight against her hand.
“Extraordinary. Fantastic.”
“Let me show you my workroom.”
Tarja led Diane through a narrow hallway to a windowless room at the back of the building. Immediately Diane was accosted by the familiar, not-unpleasant odor of melted metals, wax, and plaster, of crucibles cooling from the small furnaces. Safety goggles and face shields lay on plain wooden workbenches near Plexiglas collection boxes for precious-metal filings. Drills, magnifiers, electronic scales, propane and acetylene torches, polishing lathes, all stood gleaming. In one corner was a security vault for the priceless sheets and crumbs and ingots of gold and silver.
“This is my idea of heaven,” Diane said wistfully. “God, I envy you, Tarja. You’re serious about your work.”
Tarja shrugged. “I am an artist.” She didn’t seem surprised or complimented. “And I have no children who require my time and energy.”
The next morning Tarja ushered Diane into her small mini and drove north, up to her summer cabin on a lake near Lappo. The day was brilliant with sunshine. Almost immediately the road was surrounded by battalions of forests with pine trees so massive that they looked like statues of trees, their trunks hewn from iron.
About an hour from the city they turned off the much-traveled major road onto a smaller, quiet one, and from that onto a lonely, winding narrow path. The forest opened up around them. Cylinders of light shimmered down through the evergreens, exposing sunny open spaces lush with wild berry bushes, underbrush, fallen deciduous leaves, moss-coated rocks. In the midst of all this stood Tarja’s cabin, unpainted pine, satiny as skin, with bright circles of colored glass hanging in the windows. It looked as at home in the middle of the forest as if it had sprung up from the roots of the surrounding trees.
“Oh, it’s wonderful!” Diane exclaimed, jumping out of the car.
Tarja smiled. The two women crossed back and forth over the crunchy carpet of autumn leaves, carrying their luggage and groceries into the cabin.
“Put your things in the bedroom. I’ll sleep in the living room. I insist,” Tarja directed.
While Tarja turned on the heat and electricity, Diane looked around the cabin. There were just two rooms: a long rectangle serving as living room, kitchen, and dining area, and a bedroom; a tiny hallway led to a bathroom and sauna. It was all stark, plain pine, slick glass, polished ceramic. The lines were squared and angular, the colors of the curtains, bedspreads, towels, even the cushions on the benches bright, blank reds and blues and yellows.
“Now, come with me,” Tarja said when she’d finished her chores. She led Diane outside through a spacious woods of birches and pines that spread around the cabin. Very quickly they came to the shore of an enormous, jewel-blue lake. The sun was deceivingly bright; it made the air look warm. Diane had taken off her coat and gloves in the house. Standing in only her wool slacks and sweater, she shivered.
“Are you hungry? While the sauna heats up, we’ll take a quick dip, then have a sauna, then I promise you your food will taste like heaven.”
“What do you mean, take a quick dip, Tarja? That water must be freezing.”
“It’s not freezing! Do you see any ice?”
“Well, Tarja, I know that. I can see that. What I mean is, that water must be very, very cold.”
“Of course it is. It will be a shock. Then the heat of the sauna will be shocking, too. But it is good for you. We Finns do this all the time. I do it every weekend that I can, every month of the year, except perhaps in February. That’s why I am so slender, and why my skin is so good, and why I look so young. It improves the circulation. It is restorative. You’ll see.”
“Well, go ahead since you’re used to it, but I can’t possibly—I’d have a heart attack and die. I’m really not the outdoor type, anyway.”
But Tarja was already striding back toward her cabin, so Diane slowly followed her strange friend along the narrow leaf-strewn path through the woods, considering. A few years ago she would have eagerly relished such a new, invigorating experience. Wasn’t this exactly the sort of thing she’d come for—to experience the new and foreign?
Certainly she was seeing a new side of Tarja—not just her naked body as, back inside the cabin, the Finnish woman unabashedly stripped off her clothes—but a bolder, brassier facet of Tarja’s personality. Here in her own country Tarja was still not cheerful, but she was self-assured, even bossy. She did not exude happiness so much as triumph, and Diane watched her with a growing mixture of admiration, amusement, and fondness.
Oh, well, in Rome do as the Romans do, Diane admonished herself, and how bad could it be, for Tarja was undressing with an extraordinary eagerness. Tarja’s body, exposed to the brilliant sunlight, was as geometric as the jewelry she designed—so thin that her hipbones protruded, making, with the swollen mound rising at her crotch beneath a concave stomach, a triangle. Her small, tight breasts were mere doorknobs. Tarja was long, straight, narrow, and her skin was so pale that it seemed like translucent silver leaf stretched over her luminescent white bones. In this place you believe in fairy tales, Diane thought, watching Tarja race naked out the door and along the forest path, her flashing body as natural, as elemental, as if she were a fish-woman risen from the lake.
In contrast, Diane recognized the languid weight of her own body as she peeled off her wool slacks and sweater. Even though she was standing in a patch of sunshine, her skin pimpled and constricted as it was exposed to the chill air.
“Come on!” Tarja yelled.
“I’m coming!” she yelled back, then dashed out the door. Immediately she was shocked by herself, as painfully embarrassed by her nakedness in the outdoors in the daylight as if she were in a spotlight onstage with an audience of hundreds.
She ran with her arms crossed over her chest, partly from shyness, partly to support her heavy breasts, which bobbled as she ran. Sticks and brittle leaves snapped beneath the delicate skin of her feet like tiny explosions of cap guns, powdering her soles with their dust. Her own movements as she ran along made the sunlight flicker unsettlingly against her eyes, and the air became eerily more substantial—as if she were passing through not shade and brightness but through matter, now sharp, now soft.
Ahead of her Tarja screamed piercingly as she hit the water. At the shoreline Diane hesitated, watching as the other woman leaped and frolicked.
“Don’t stop now!” Diane urged herself. Then she jumped.
The water was so cold she felt as if her skin were sizzling against her bones. Already, from the run and the chill of the northern air, her heart was thudding, but when she plunged into the water’s icy depths, it was instantly transformed into a jackhammering machine, automatically functioning like a steel motor within her appalled, assaulted flesh. The cold of the lake water drove her breath from her lungs. Her body was a scream of pain. She sank, feetfirst, through the blurry cold, each organ, muscle, bone, and nerve flinching fiercely. Gleaming water closed over her head. This was like childbirth in its extremity. Everything human in her was helpless.
Not of her own volition, she suddenly surfaced. Almost without conscio
usness she gasped and sputtered, thrashing her arms against the freezing, burning blue. As she pulled the frigid air into her tortured lungs, her body became a statue: marble solid, still. Her limbs, her torso, her heart, and veins were made of rock. And this hardening was bliss.
She let herself sink down once more.
“Come out now!” Tarja was yelling. “You must—” Then she splashed out from the shore and grabbed Diane’s upper arm and pulled her. Diane didn’t help; she couldn’t. Tarja hauled her upward until Diane lay curled on the grass, gasping for air. This air, warmer than the water, hit her once again like a slap, as if the universe had convulsed against her. Diane’s ears were ringing; her sight was blurred.
“Wow. You are in terrible shape,” Tarja scolded. “Come on.” She pulled Diane up against her and they stumbled toward the cabin. Diane could not feel her feet or legs or any part of her body. Her consciousness had shrunk to a nugget within a fiery field of red. If Tarja had not pulled her along, she would simply have toppled over woodenly and died. But by the time they reached the cabin, her fingers and feet were tingling, and the warm air inside was balm to her lungs.
Tarja pulled Diane to the back of the cabin, opened the heavy wooden sauna door, and brought her into the tiny room of intensely dry heat. At once Diane’s skin dried so fast she felt as if it were cracking like the skin on plump, ripe grapes. Her heart, which had been laboring mechanically inside her, swelled with an animal flexibility until it bulged against her chest.
“I’m going to die,” Diane gasped.
“No, you won’t. Just lie down. Catch your breath.”
Tarja arranged Diane’s weak body on a narrow, flat plank. It was so fiercely hot it seemed airless. Diane fought off a wave of claustrophobia.
“Wake up!”
She was not aware that she had passed out. “Wake up, Diane. Sit up.”
She felt Tarja’s hands pulling at her until she was sitting, leaning against the sauna wall. Strange pricklings at her hairline told her that she was sweating. Odd, every bit as odd as childbirth, how her body continued to slug along on course, to live, to function, without her permission or even her desire.
