“Do you think John—?” Pirjo was saying.
“Well, for sure, or—maybe even Al Laho,” Peggy said. “Maybe Warren,” she said, seeing him standing there.
“Oh, not Warren,” Pirjo said, laughing, “no, no.” Warren managed a smile, as if Pirjo was being modest, when he knew she was being honest, and he rattled the change back and forth in his pocket.
Leena appeared, pulled at his suit jacket. “I didn’t eat anything for breakfast,” she said.
“Tell your mother,” he said.
He went out to the van to wait. The kids followed, found books on the van floor, Simon reading and biting his nails. It was the end of fall and Warren turned the van on, to warm it.
“Someone run and get your mother,” he said. No one moved.
Howard stopped by on the way to his car. He waved, and Warren rolled down the window and they shook hands. “You do know,” Howard said, “your name may come up.” There was the smell of coffee on his breath.
“Well,” Warren said. He didn’t want the kids to hear this. He cleared his throat.
“Well,” Howard said, “it’s all in God’s hands now, isn’t it.”
Pirjo appeared at the van, Leena dragging at her hand. Howard leaned his large head through Warren’s window to say hello to Pirjo, to say God’s Peace to the kids. Be good to your parents, he said. Do your homework. It was the unbearable side of Howard, the constant admonitions, the way Howard thought it was his responsibility to drag your kid to you by the ear when he caught them listening to music in the parking lot.
The kids said good-bye awkwardly. They wanted him to leave too, Warren realized. Smart kids, Warren thought, good for them.
“Dad,” Nels said when they’d pulled out of the parking lot, “are they going to make you a minister now?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s not up to us, honey,” Pirjo said in her voice for the kids. “You see, the board gets together—”
“We all know it won’t be me,” Warren said. He felt the familiar flare in his chest. “Okay. We all know.” He pushed against the back of the seat and Pirjo put her hand on his arm.
* * *
Warren’s temper was mysterious even to himself. These things were supposed to run in cycles. “Was your dad like that?” Pirjo had asked once, after a shouting match with one of the boys. “No,” he’d answered. “Then what’s your excuse?” she’d said, exasperated, crying harder than the kids.
In fact, his father had been particularly gentle. He’d brought home penny candies from the shop, sat in the living room with the paper when Warren practiced piano. He’d had an unbearable amount of principle, true, making them swim at the cabin where his brother had drowned. And when Warren had moved south to the car companies, like everyone else, his dad had frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he’d said over the crackle of a poorly connecting phone. When the Heresy of ’73 had come, they’d gone to opposite sides, his father and mother and six siblings to the more lenient Apostolics, but Warren—even then in love with Pirjo, whom he’d met that summer at a Finnish language camp—had followed Pirjo to the Laestadian side. “I’m sorry to hear that,” his father had said, and again two years later, when Warren had become engaged to Pirjo. Warren had thought of this when his father died. He’d stood at the grave, his own first son in his arms. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Not his father’s last words to him, but they might as well have been. A polite way to express disappointment, a cruel way. Better to yell, to throw lamps, to punch holes in the wall—all things his father had never done.
Pirjo tried to come up with proactive solutions—counting to ten, walking away. “What does it,” she asked, “what sets you off?”
Nels, he’d wanted to say, but he hesitated to say that. He was always slow to speak. He didn’t like to say things unless he was sure they were true. And probably it wasn’t Nels, not anymore, but that was when it had started. The big kids had been little and there had been the constant stink of pee that could not be masked by baking soda, and the sour smile on Nels’s face when it was clear from the sag of his pants that he’d shit in his underwear again. And then he’d lie, say he hadn’t, even in the van, when everyone could smell it. But now Nels was older, staunch, and stubborn. Now when he shook Nels, when he had his fist right by his face, when he held Nels up against a wall, Nels was only calm, steady, almost bored.
But it wasn’t only Nels, it could not have been just the one difficult kid. It was daily things, it was money, it was when he stopped at the gas station and the kids all chanted, “Get a treat, get a treat,” and when he came out with chips they grabbed for them like starving people. It was never having more than fifty bucks in the checking, the fear of having his credit card rejected, going to the zoo and having to buy two family memberships. Or maybe, more simply, just having nine children. But that was no excuse, he couldn’t act like he’d just woken up one day stuck with raising two sons and seven daughters. He knew that.
* * *
Warren stayed up late that night, looking through all the church books from the shelf. The Bible, Luther’s sermons, Laestadius’s Postillas. In the front of someone’s catechism he found what he was searching for, the exhortation to ministers from Timothy: “A bishop then must be blameless … not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous, one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; for if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?”
He brought the Bible to bed, opened it to Genesis, but he felt like a child, deciding to do every math problem in the book, even the ones that weren’t assigned, knowing before he began that he would fail.
“It’ll probably be John,” Pirjo said coolly. She fell promptly asleep, looking oddly like their own children when her eyes were closed, her hair the same weak blond as the little kids’, her foot twitching slightly. He wanted to kiss her shoulder, but he was afraid it would wake her and the gesture would seem calculated.
At work he couldn’t think. Shyam was gone—he was getting married in India and couldn’t move the date because it was fortuitous, according to astrologists, of all things, and then Shyam called that morning to have his vacation extended by two weeks. His boss had made it clear that Warren should have said no—it was only four, five days until quarterly taxes were due—but he could not seem to take the pressure seriously, and even staring at a spreadsheet that had been many days delayed he would be jolted suddenly by the possibility that the church board would ask him to be minister.
When he got home, Shyam’s spreadsheets under his arms, the big girls were fighting, teaming up against Pirjo.
“It’s just a phase we’re going through,” Brita was saying.
“I’m your mother—of course it’s my business.”
“Just relax, Mom,” Tiina said. “We’re just being teenagers.” Down the hall, Uppu began to cry in her crib.
“Oh, good,” Pirjo said, matching Tiina’s snideness. “Warren, did you hear that? We’ve got another fifteen years of kids yelling at us.”
“Out,” Warren said, and he pointed with a finger. “Everyone out,” he said, and he felt his jaw lock down. The girls left the room, sullenly. Pirjo put her hand on his pointing arm as she went to get the baby. He walked downstairs and he opened the door and he kicked the girls out. He locked the door. On the porch they sat quietly, like they always did. He stood and watched them, how their shoulders touched. Brita pointed to a spoon mislaid beneath a bush, and he followed her extended finger up and over the bush, over their unraked lawn and across to the neighbor’s colonial, where plump garbage bags held the only evidence of leaves. Brita leaned forward and reached for the spoon. She wiped it with her thumb. He appreciated suddenly that his daughters, too, lived in a house where a spoon appeared beneath a bush, absent of owner or incident, no one knowing who was responsible, who to blame, and its very appearance so normal as to be unworthy of note. He fel
t suddenly tender toward them again, his daughters. He didn’t know how to express these things, though, especially not to them. He didn’t know how to hold them anymore. He didn’t know what to say. How was he to apologize to them for having raised them in this kind of chaos? How did you say you were grateful—surprised, really—that they were bright and articulate and kind, when it had nothing to do with you? When he went back upstairs he wanted to say these things to Pirjo, to try them out on her, but she was in bed, snoring slightly, newspaper over her knees, coffee cooling.
As he fell asleep he thought briefly how strange it was to lead such separate lives—the work world, the home world—and how the one had nothing to do with the other. What do you do all day, Tiina had asked once. I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost, he had said, and for a second there’d been a visible path between the worlds, but it had closed just as quickly. Oh, she’d said, and turned away.
At work he thought about the same thing in reverse—what was it his colleagues thought of him, of his too-big family, did they think he was poor? He was poor, basically. Most likely, he decided, they only thought about how he didn’t show up at the bar after work, or maybe they didn’t think of him at all, the way he didn’t think of them. Like Shyam, who had worked under him for nearly ten years, whose most distinguishing features were a self-deprecating humor and a nervous habit of running his tongue over his teeth, suddenly announcing he was having an arranged marriage.
“You’ve got Shyam’s end under control, I assume,” his boss had said to him in the break room. Maybe he had seen Warren’s knee bobbing up and down.
“I will,” Warren had said. He’d considered saying, It’s not Shyam I’m anxious about. But it wasn’t as if he would ever tell his boss his real worries. What faith was he? Probably Presbyterian—probably some church with stately steeples where pastors wore white frocks.
On Friday he came home, the week supposed to be over but not over. He was late, he’d missed dinner—the bottom of the pot had been literally scraped—and inside he was reminded again of how Pirjo wanted him to put in the wood floors already. The paint was peeling off the plywood. But setting his briefcase next to the stash of backpacks, he could hear bickering from upstairs, the big girls fighting again, and he walked up slowly. He stood at the door to the girls’ room. Tiina had been wearing Brita’s jeans, it seemed, and stretching them out.
“They were sixty bucks,” Brita said, “and now they’re ruined.”
“Honey, you didn’t,” Pirjo said. “Sixty? Really?” Everyone was somehow in the bedroom, no one wanting to miss out on anything, even a fight. On the floor Uppu played with a necklace, put it in her mouth.
“Just give her back her jeans,” Warren said.
“Dude, just give them back,” Nels said, playing the placater.
“I never get anything,” Tiina said. “Brita gets everything.” Her voice rose higher—“It’s true, I never get anything.” This maddened him because it was not true; it was payday and already the money was gone. She was being hysterical, it was a kind of show—ramping it up for the little kids, making her petty grievances into something momentous.
“For shame,” Pirjo said. “How old are you?”
“Stop shaming me,” Tiina screamed, and she picked up the nearest pair of jeans and threw them at Pirjo, the jeans falling clumsily through the air—they were not very aerodynamic—and one of the legs hit Pirjo in the face. From the floor Uppu began to scream.
“Is that what you want?” Warren said. “That’s what you want, you want to hit your mother?” And he reached for Pirjo, he dragged her farther into the bedroom—which was disgusting in that teenage way, the floor strewn with clothing, and books, and plates with dried bits of egg, and empty glasses of pop, and vanilla deodorant, and everywhere the stench of a sweet berry body spray, the bunk beds he’d built scratched and the sides sagging—and he held Pirjo, the flab of her upper arms in his hands, he squeezed her arms too tight. “Go on,” he said to Tiina, through a mouth so tense the words could hardly come out, “go on, hit her, I’ll hold her, is that what you want, you want to hit her? I’ve got her, just take a swing.” Pirjo tried to pull away, but he hung on.
“Dad,” Nels said, “stop it.”
“I’m calling Howard,” Tiina cried hoarsely. “I’m calling the whole church board and I’m telling them you abuse us.”
“I never hit you,” he said.
“But you would,” she said, “but you want to,” and he turned, he wrested the screen from the window, and one by one he chucked anything within reach out into the night, into the bushes outside—books and shoes, posters, CDs (probably pop, probably rock), a sewing kit. He chucked a painting of a kneeling girl—“Dad, that’s mine,” Julia screamed—but it was too late, and it fell, like everything else, and they all listened to its fall, a hurry through the bushes, a stiff crack on the concrete of the porch.
* * *
When he woke the next morning, their bedroom was warm and quiet with bodies. Pirjo was snoring lightly, and Leena’s leg was wrapped about Uppu’s stomach, and Uppu’s arm was about Leena’s waist. There was the smell of them, of scalps, of unwashed hair. He could see, clearly, the dark and hardened bottoms of their feet.
He made himself shower and shave and dress and head downstairs. He didn’t want to see the wreckage but he knew he had to pick it up, before the neighbors saw. At the bottom of the stairs, though, he saw the big girls, Brita and Tiina and Paula. They were in their pajamas, big baggy shirts and soft shorts. Their feet were bare, their hair in tousles of ponytails. They were filling plastic grocery bags with books, not saying anything, their backs hunched, like they were picking strawberries.
He opened the door and stepped onto the cold concrete of the porch. He looked at the mess. Mostly everything had technically survived. The books were splayed awkwardly, pages loosened and bent, but you could still read them. The boom box was definitively dead. Julia’s painting was bent—he remembered now that she had made it in art class, the teacher saying at conferences, like the teachers always did, what talented children you have, how do you do it. The clothes all finely fallen over everything.
A minute passed in which they knew he was watching them. He couldn’t think of what to say. “Go eat some breakfast,” he said at last. “Please.” It came out scratchy. Paula and Brita stopped and looked at each other, but Tiina pushed past him toward the door, carrying her bag. The books were too heavy for the plastic and the bag was threatening to tear open. He reached an arm out toward her and she backed away sharply. “I got it,” he said, accidentally angrily, but she just walked past him, and he heard her feet stamping up the stairs.
* * *
By evening he was forgiven, but he didn’t feel forgiven. They had held a family meeting in the afternoon; like always, Nels picked the opening song and like always, he wanted to sing the closing hymn about night shadows, because it was only one verse long. They had all talked about the fight. He’d apologized. He’d cried, his heavy shoulders shaking, no noise, thumbs in the corner of his eyes. Everyone forgave him, and the girls asked for forgiveness too, slowly, deliberately, one by one. “Awkward moment,” Nels said when it was over. The little kids tried not to laugh, and Warren wished Nels wouldn’t joke like that. Then they talked about who was doing what chores, and who needed a violin bow, who had a recital coming up, and how from now on they would all do the chore assigned to them, and practice for lessons, at least fifteen minutes a day, each instrument—it’s just a little bit of time, Pirjo said, and after all the lessons cost so much.
But even though he had cried, even though they had said the words, he didn’t feel how he used to feel. He didn’t have that wash of ease, the feeling of a bill entirely paid off, every finite and immediate worry put in its ultimate, insignificant perspective. He knew that forgiveness wasn’t supposed to be about emotion, about how you felt—the absolution was no less real—but he remembered when the kids were little, wh
en they lived in the small house and there were just seven of them and they all slept in the same bedroom. Brita and Paula had slept in the same small twin, because they both peed the bed, and almost right away he’d woken Simon in the crib. But he’d gone, on his knees, from bed to bed. He remembered the stiff cotton of Tiina’s T-shirt. Will you forgive me, he had asked, will you forgive even me.
Remembering this, he got out of bed. He opened their bedroom door. “Brita?” he said now, into the room. “Tiina? Paula?” A little louder, he tried, “Julia?” He wondered if they were awake but pretending not to hear him. He moved farther into the room. Paula was closest to him, on the bottom bunk, and she slept like a doll, as if there were no difference between waking and sleeping but the closing of eyelids. Paula, he thought, what grade is she in? Sixth, because she had cried about needing new clothes for middle school, about not wanting to wear Tiina’s hand-me-downs. That was the last time he had really thought about her so particularly. It was funny how kids were like that, how they drew different amounts of your attention. You cared for them equally, but you didn’t show the care equally. You couldn’t—you only moved your attention from one crisis to the next.
He walked out of the room slowly, so the floor didn’t creak. He turned the doorknob steadily into place. In the hallway he stopped, stood. He prayed, silently.
May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.
He went to bed.
Like every Sunday they were late to church, but when they walked in someone had brought a tape player and placed it atop the pulpit. He found he couldn’t listen to the disembodied voice preaching from the front. The microphone, he noticed only now, was laid beside the speaker of the tape player, and this only added to the surreal nature of the service.
We Sinners Page 3