“No, really,” she said.
“Jonas only has to practice on the days he eats,” his dad said. “That’s what his old teacher used to say.”
“Jonas has really great technique,” Uppu said. “He’s going to get into a top conservatory.” She wiped at her mouth with the corner of the cloth napkin.
His dad laughed, but it came out like a single, heavy breath.
On the phone later Uppu said his parents were awful to him. “How do you do that?” she said. “Is that supposed to be modesty or something?”
“They just expect a lot from me,” he said.
“Still!” she said. “Are they ever nice to you?”
“Of course they’re nice to me,” he said, and it was true. They were nice in that they gave all their time for him—everything was for him, his dad’s new job at Ford, which was more money for a better viola teacher, for the test prep classes, his mom’s constant care, always remembering his exam dates better than he did. But he didn’t want to tell her this—it wouldn’t fit her definition of nice—and he didn’t want to tell her the other things, how his mom slept in the master bedroom and his dad slept in the guest room, how he had heard his dad once saying that he wished they’d had more than one child. How it was only rarely now his dad made his mom laugh; it used to be all the time, and when she laughed he could see why they were together, his dad’s jokes taking away his mom’s anxieties. Now his father drank more, and that made his mother worry more.
But they had both admired Uppu. She was good with them in the same way she was good with teachers, suddenly deferential and careful and talking with adult distance of college or the war or the problem with the lack of a truly mainstream media. His parents suggested that she come over again. When he did his math homework they wondered if he should call her for help. And even when he went to more and more church activities with her, they let it go. He would come back from church and they would ask how it was, and he would say fine, not freeing them of their impression that it was a normal church.
“Should we come with you?” his mom asked. He hated this, how she was always trying to be supportive, so eager to show him she cared, when really, he thought, she just didn’t have enough to worry about. In Los Gatos she had never fussed about whether doorknobs were polished, whether they had run out of extra meat in the extra freezer.
“He’ll pray for us heathens—they have to,” his dad said.
“Well, maybe we’ll come for Christmas,” his mom said.
“Maybe,” he said, but already he knew he would find an excuse. He couldn’t have said why, but the idea of them at Uppu’s church was preposterous.
* * *
At church he began singing along with the hymns—those strangely minor melodies, like songs of mourning—but quietly, as if disinterested. Uppu always sang, simply, stolidly, like singing was a task that had to be done and must be made the best of. He had been coming to church all winter now, and he recognized everyone, or, at least, they all recognized him. He knew the Jankkilas, and the Hillukas, and that they were cousins, and that you could tell them apart by their chins. He met the woman who ate marshmallows during church.
“So where are you from?” she asked.
“Same suburb as the Rovaniemis,” he said, “just north of the mall?”
“No, before that,” she said, and finally he realized she just wanted to know that he was Chinese from Malaysia, so he said that.
“You speak very good English,” she said.
“They live in their own little world,” Uppu said in the car. “Sorry that always happens to you.”
“It’s just Peggy,” he said.
“No,” she said, “Peggy just says what everyone else thinks. It’s the fat lady’s job.”
She always talked like this, as if everyone at church was an idiot, but then again it was the same tack she took with people at school. She said he could stop coming to church any day now, but he said he didn’t really mind. He started actually listening to the sermons. Uppu suggested he ignore them but he found this very difficult, especially if her dad began to cry. And sometimes her father seemed to be speaking straight to him—not that he ever made eye contact with him, but Jonas began to have an uncomfortable feeling that all the bits about unbelief were directed at him, and all the bits about the sins of the flesh. That phrase, the sins of the flesh, began to follow him like a specter—the entire phrase was so humiliating, so revolting, that for it to be associated with him seemed unimaginable, and a few days after hearing a sermon about selling your faith cheaply for the lusts of the world he found himself trying to reclasp Uppu’s bra, which was difficult, much more difficult than undoing it in the first place. Her skin took on a broil, like she had been hit.
“Sorry,” he said, “it just—it feels weird.”
She pulled on her sweater and turned her back to him. “Uppu?” he said. He reached out for her.
“You don’t want to touch me, don’t touch me,” she said. Her ears were a perfectly bright red.
He tried to hug her, but she didn’t move. He held her like that for a long time, until she reached out and took hold of his hand.
Now when they hung out they abided by a new and unspoken code—they retreated into an earlier stage, where they kissed carefully and slowly and then stopped, Uppu sometimes pushing at the rules; maybe, he sensed, trying to tease him beyond them. She had a way, for instance, of running her finger along the band of his boxers, or unbuttoning his jeans, and then suddenly stopping, as if he had told her to stop, as if to say, That’s where your overboard conscience gets you.
One night song services were at her parents’ house. “You don’t have to come,” she said, but he went. Like every Sunday, it was strange to see her how the church saw her—her hair hanging simply, her clothing modest, her socks clean and matched, polite, shaking hands, slicing cucumbers, setting out the nice spoons, the nice coffee china.
In the quiet between songs, he suggested a hymn. He could feel Uppu looking at him. He could feel her parents’ small smiles.
“What was that all about,” Uppu said afterward. She said it like she was teasing, but she wasn’t.
“It’s just a song,” he said.
“Okay,” she said skeptically. Later, when he was talking to someone, she stood very close behind him, like they were a couple. While he stood there she put her hand on his lower back. He felt the trace of her thumb along his spine. When he leaned back into her hand, she took it away.
* * *
Undoubtedly everything between them was weird now. In only a few months Uppu was, quote unquote, being dragged over her dead and dying body to a church college in Finland for a year, and he’d be at Michigan, and because he could not bear to acknowledge this future and because Uppu said she was trying to store up positive memories to get her through the sunless land, they did not talk of it. At school they behaved relatively the same—for so long they had maintained an outer facade of platonic friendship that they kept easily to it—but now when they disappeared at lunch out to her car he could tell she was equally unsure what to do. She seemed edgy. Usually she stole things from the lunch his mom had packed him, but now she just ate her apple and unrolled the window and threw the core at someone’s For Sale sign. She had good aim.
“Is everything okay?” he said.
“Sure.”
“I mean, what’s going on with us?” he asked.
“We’re just not, you know,” she said.
“You’re okay?” he ventured. He ate the rice from his rice compartment.
“You know,” she said, “some days I think it’s incredible I haven’t left it yet, and some days it’s like I know in my deepest place that I can never leave it, that I’ll always come back, that this is just a phase, I just think I’m so cool right now and one day I’ll wake up and realize what an idiot I am. So I think ultimately, maybe, my problem is just that I’m too self-aware, like I get my own future too much, I get how dumb I’m being right now.” She said this
all very quickly, as if it was something she had been thinking for too long.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m such a coward,” she said sadly. She took his lunch bag, began rifling through it.
With only a week left of school—the air warming so that he could smell, he thought, dirt—she drove them off campus during lunch.
“Um,” he said, “can I ask where we’re going?”
“America’s Roller Coast,” she said. She smiled at him. She squeezed his hand.
It took two hours to get there, and once they were there she refused to follow the person waving a red flag. She cut in line, and she insisted on riding only the same huge coasters, again and again, and on one ride she looked at him just as he was sure he was about to vomit, but seeing her eyes on him sustained him through the moment. When they finally left it was dark—his feet hurt, he had a sunburn along his hairline. They scouted out the car. She didn’t put her seat belt on, just sat with the keys in her lap.
“Jonas,” she said. She turned and looked at him, and as always, he couldn’t fully meet her eyes, and he looked at the sun setting behind the skeletons of the coasters.
She climbed out of her seat and undid his seat belt and made room for herself next to him. She put her head on his shoulder. “Don’t let me go.”
“Uppu,” he said, and he readjusted his body, put his arm around her. She felt pliable, and she smelled of sun and sweat. He kissed her forehead, he kissed the top of her nose, he kissed her mouth, they kissed. He pulled at her pants, and she pulled at them with him, and then they pulled at his, hurriedly. The lot around them was emptying, the sky was nearly dark, there was the distant sound of people yelling about rides, about where their cars were. Someone had to find a bathroom. He pushed those things away, he thought only of Uppu. He questioned nothing, what they were doing, or why, or where they were, or why she had a condom in her purse.
When the sex was over she lay over him like a child in a parent’s arms, their shirts still on. Finally she climbed over to the driver’s seat. She got dressed and unrolled the window. He didn’t know what to do with the used condom. He found a yellow napkin in the glove box and wrapped it in the napkin like something dead. He put his clothing on, quickly.
“Well,” she said, as they pulled away, as they got back on the highway.
“Yeah,” he said.
When the car hit eighty she took the napkin he’d been holding and let it slip out the window. She took his hand.
* * *
The night of his graduation party it rained, and the celebrators huddled under the tent his parents had set up, and ran from the tent to the open back door, or stood in the garage and looked at his father’s gardening tools hung along the walls. His aunt and uncle had flown in from California, and a few neighbors had come, and his stand partner, and his viola teacher, but there were just the ten of them or so, until the Rovaniemis showed up; Brita came, and all her boys, and Leena and her toddler, and Paula and Anni, and Pirjo and Warren, and Uppu, and soon where there had been ten people there were at least twenty, plus whining kids, all trying to fit into the garage and under the food tent, and his mother was frantically frying more shrimp in the kitchen, running back and forth with an umbrella, carrying aluminum foil pans of shrimp and calamari that the Rovaniemis looked at before picking out a few of the miniature cakes. Uppu stood next to the food with his father, talking about what, he didn’t know—probably making studying in Finland seem like a great opportunity, and tonight his dad would say, You should study abroad like Uppu.
Pirjo came up to shake his hand. She handed him a new Bible. Inside, someone had written, To Jonas, with hope.
“We’ll keep seeing you around, I hope,” she said.
“Sure, I mean, I’ll only be a half an hour away.” Behind her he could see Uppu, his father laughing at something she’d said, the way he never laughed anymore. He was getting drunk, too, and he set his hand by accident into a bowl of rice and his fingers came up covered in bits of white grains and Uppu laughed and he laughed.
“At church, I mean,” Pirjo said. He felt mortified, like there was some larger thing that was required of him but, being so immature, he was unable to do it.
She hugged him. His mother came by, carrying a six-pack of beer. He wished she wasn’t doing that, he wanted to tell her not to do that.
“You must be so proud of Jonas,” Pirjo said, her arm still around his shoulders.
“He tries,” his mother said.
The Rovaniemis left and their relatives went home and they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu’s graduation, though then the entire church showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waving their limbs like beetles on their backs. There was no beer. Paula was in the kitchen, her hair pulled back in a tight bun, racing trays back and forth. At some point Pirjo rounded everyone up and made them sing. She insisted that Uppu pick her favorite song and Uppu reluctantly did, the one with dramatic words, the fiery hearts quenched by blood, the seas of love.
Jonas watched her sing with everyone, her eyebrows furrowed and earnest for a minute.
Uppu’s nephews were clinging to his knees—Jonas taught them how to draw a tank—when Pirjo came to him with more cake and pulla.
“She’ll be gone in a week,” Pirjo said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“She’ll be back before you know it, though,” she said. He blushed at this implication. Thinking about blushing made him blush more. “Well,” she said, sipping her coffee, “while there’s life, there’s hope.”
“Mrs. Rovaniemi—”
“Pirjo.”
“No,” he said, “but—” For strength he took a bite of cake.
“Tank,” the little boy said, and tugged at his pants.
“In a minute,” Pirjo said, and she shooed him away. “Yes?” she said, to him again. She looked at him intently.
“I’m—”
“Well?” she said.
“I don’t know. I feel—” He searched for how he felt; at the moment he felt anxious about Uppu. “I don’t feel great,” he said. He crumpled a napkin in his hand, suddenly saw Uppu unrolling the car window, the napkin flying out of her fingers. “Things,” he said, “things I’ve done.”
“Oh, Jonas,” she said. She didn’t reach out to touch him. “I know,” she said. “I know. We’re just human, we make mistakes. That’s why we’re so lucky—” She frowned hard to stop her tears, and her face was suddenly ugly. She wiped at an eye. “Jonas,” she said, her voice quiet but certain, “would you like to have the sin of unbelief forgiven?”
He looked down at his cake.
“Sure,” he said, and she hugged him, and he tried to hang on to the cake behind her back as she said, in his ear, the words, the absolution, so familiar now but still so strange—in Jesus’s name and blood. As she hugged him he felt her small shoulders shaking, like holding a frog cupped in his hand, and then he began to cry, too, crying through a lifetime of never being good enough and a lifetime of not being loved enough and the kindness of her, and the want of Uppu, and the want of this life, and he cried because now it seemed he might have it. Everything, he realized, could be had now.
Pirjo let go of him and stood back, handed him a napkin—it was blue and white, for Finland—and they both blew their noses, and laughed a little.
Uppu’s father appeared, eyebrows raised.
“Jonas has just received the grace of repentance,” Pirjo said quietly, and Warren said, “I’m so glad to hear that.” He shook Jonas’s hand. “God’s Peace, Jonas,” he said.
Uppu came by, Leena’s toddler on her hip like he wasn’t a toddler. “What’s going on here,” she said. Jonas wiped his glasses, put them back on.
“Jonas has just received the grace of repentance,” Pirjo said.
Uppu looked like she was going to
laugh. “What,” she said again. “Really?” She looked at him. She looked for something in his face.
“Yes,” he said. He felt himself smiling, trying not to smile, smiling.
“Okay,” she said. She nodded. “Okay.” She turned around, and she began to walk, in her slow, calm Uppu way that meant she was the most dangerous—it reminded him of when she had told him, for instance, that you always walked, you never ran, when you were about to leave a store with something stolen in your pocket—and she went to the top of the piano, where all of the graduation cards were. She began taking out the money, the tens, the occasional twenties. She took the checks. He walked up to her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Please leave me alone,” she said quietly. He put his hand on her arm. She removed his hand from her arm.
He left her alone. In the dining room people came up to him and more people shook his hand. Everyone was very bright and very happy and Peggy Maki hugged him so that he felt how huge her breasts were—massive—but he kept listening for the sound of Uppu.
By the time everyone was leaving no one could find her. “She’ll show,” Pirjo said, “she’s probably outside with someone.”
He called her, ten times, twelve times, but she didn’t pick up. Finally he left, he drove home, he climbed into bed, his happiness mixed with terror. Part of him felt like he would sleep like a baby, and part of him feared he would never sleep again—he could not believe he had joined the church, he could believe he had joined the church. He was a believer. He could marry Uppu. Except Uppu was mad at him—but he remembered what she had said to him, in the car, that she would always come back, that she always did.
The next morning was Sunday and his mom brought him the house phone. It felt solid and clunky in his hand.
“Jonas,” Pirjo said, “God’s Peace.”
“God’s Peace,” he said, feeling like he was in a play, saying a part he didn’t know.
“Sorry to bother you. I found your number in the phone book.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
“Uppu isn’t there, is she?”
“No, why?”
We Sinners Page 15