This Is Not Your City (5 page)

 

IX. I thought about what I could put here for Mr. Samson, but I honestly don't do any physics. Not that I know of anyway, and I didn't understand it so well when we were learning it. I remember that gravity equals 9.8 meters over seconds squared, and that when something's falling as fast as it can possibly fall, that's called terminal velocity. Maybe you could tell him that I know about biology, even if I don't know physics. Like this:
K
ings
P
lay
C
ards
O
n
F
at
G
reen
S
tools:
K
ingdom
P
hylum
C
lass
O
rder
F
amily
G
enus
S
pecies
.

 

X. Once in the car I told Elsa about my mom, about how she was sick. We talked about it a bit, and then Elsa asked me if my mom had a relationship with God. It was the only time Elsa has ever mentioned God to me. She said maybe it would ease her pain. I asked my mom about it that night, even though I knew it was a bad idea. “He's been fucking me over, if that counts,” my mom said. “What's wrong with you?”

I want to tell Elsa what she said, but I'm worried I'll shock her, even though I've never seen Elsa shocked. I wonder if she'd have some suggestion, something I should say to my mom next, about God, or about Him having a plan, or about how things turn out okay in the end, or about not fighting so hard. I think of what Elsa could say to me, and I want to hear it from her, even if He doesn't, and things won't, and what else does my mom have left to do? Even if none of it's true, it would be nice to hear it from her, and believe it for a while, just as long as it takes to drive from Columbus back to her farm, and have it sound like a thing a friend would say to me, to have it sound like comfort.

 

XI. I think it was pretty soon after that that I saw you at the Kroger, in the aisle with all the cereals. You were buying Lucky
Charms, and it reminded me to ask about your kids. Then you asked about me, and you said it was a shame that I'd had to leave high school without finishing my last semester, when my mom got bad, and I said I guess, although I don't know what I'd do with a diploma anyway, since I'm not headed for college and I can't look for a job outside the house. And you said it would be a nice thing to have, it would just be an important, nice thing for me to have done. And then you told me to write this paper; you told me that you'd see what you could do.

I'm not telling you this because I think you've forgotten about it, but because it was a nice thing to have happen, it was just a kind idea for you to have had, and even if this paper doesn't turn out to be good enough, I wanted to say thank you.

 

XII. I've realized that I know lots more about biology. I know that my mom's hands are messed up because her synovium is swollen, which is the name for the lining around her joints. Her cells divide and divide and thicken the synovium and that's called pannus, and those cells release enzymes that eat bone and cartilage. I don't know if that has a name, but it means that her hands don't have the right shape anymore, because they're being digested from the inside, and even if the anti-inflammatories started working and she was in less pain, she'll never be able to use her fingers. I read somewhere, too, that pain travels through the body at exactly 350 feet per second, and for a long time I pictured the pain running from my mom's joints to her brain, over and over, racing with itself. Then I realized that the pain doesn't travel so much anymore as live there. It's settled on in, it's farming her bones, and it doesn't need to travel because it's never going anywhere.

I know that early-onset rheumatoid arthritis doesn't kill anybody, you just get older and your joints get more digested and there's nothing anybody can do for you. My mom's 45. She says, “I wish I had something that would kill me, sooner or later.” I said, “Don't say that,” and she said, “Wouldn't you, too? Or do you want to spend the next thirty years helping me off the toilet?” And of course I don't, but I can't ever, ever say that to her.

XIII. The other day I showed up at Elsa's house to pick her up and she was waiting on the porch, like always, but her arms were empty. She waved me out of the car and up the steps and it was exciting, the feel of the wood stairs under my feet, even though they're just steps and just wood and I know they're not really any different from porch steps anywhere else. “I don't have anything finished this week,” she said. “Nothing for the shops.”

I almost said, “You could have called me,” before I remembered that she couldn't. So I said, “That's okay,” and asked if I should come back in another three weeks.

“I'm sorry you came all this way,” she said, and I said I didn't mind. “Would you stay for some iced tea?” she asked. “Something to eat?” and I said I'd love to.

It was a nice day, sunny but not too hot, so it didn't feel strange that Elsa didn't invite me inside the house. I waited on the porch, and in a few minutes she came back out with two blue plates, glasses of iced tea balanced beside pieces of pie. The tea was kind of warm, no ice, and the pie was blueberry. We both sat on the porch railing, Elsa's skirt hitched up a bit, the forks clinking on the plates as we ate.

Please tell Mrs. Yarnell that I remember what she said in Life Skills/Home Economics about the Amish not keeping their kitchens clean the way a modern person would, and how we shouldn't buy their baking on market days if we valued our lives, but that I valued eating Elsa's pie on her porch along with my life and it's important to be polite. And also that the pie didn't make me sick or anything and that if Mrs. Yarnell could see the state of my kitchen at home she'd know it wasn't my place to be refusing anybody's pie.

I told Elsa the pie was good and she nodded at me. Every so often you could hear kids laughing inside the house, grasshoppers clicking in the yard. A fly kept trying to settle on the rim of my plate. Elsa stayed quiet until I was done eating and then she said, “You'll be all right.”

“What?”

“You'll be all right. Even if it doesn't seem so, sometimes. You're going to be fine.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Like who?”

“Like my friends. My mom's doctors. My English teacher.”

“That doesn't make it untrue.”

“It's just a thing people say. They don't see how things will possibly turn out okay, but they want you to think they believe in you. That they believe that things will.”

“It doesn't mean anything to me, whether you think I believe in you or not. Believe in you, what does that mean? You're not a ghost. You ate my pie.”

“Sorry.”

“For what? Eating my pie or being a fool? You're built for swimming,” she said. “That's all I meant. You can believe as not whether God made you that way as long as you know you're not built to sink. You'll swim in this life if you want to, and if everyone keeps telling you so it's because they can see you've got fins. And a strong tail. And a mouth like this,” she said, and pursed up her lips and went glub-glub like a fish, and I laughed. It was the first nice thing and the first joke she's told me, all at once, and the first pie and the first time talking on her porch, and I have hopes for seconds. Sometimes while I'm making dinner or piecing a quilt or writing this paper, I just sit and know that Elsa thinks I'm a fish, and that things turn out all right for all the swimming things in the world.

 

XIV. That just made me remember one more thing that Mr. Samson might like to read about. He taught us a lot about marine biology, so he might like to know that if I had the time to make any quilt I wanted, I would do a whole-cloth, the top all one color so if you saw it on a bed somewhere, you would think, how boring. But when you got up close, you'd see the trapunto stitching, the quilt top covered with animals in silver thread, one of everything that lives in the sea. Eels like snakes and the kind of jellyfish with tentacles that stretch for miles. Octopuses and giant squids, sharks and whales and coral and anemones and the kind of fish that live down where it's dark and have lanterns in front of their faces. I'd go to the library in Vernon and find pictures of everything, so I'd know what they all look like. I'd
stitch made-up things, too, so there would be sea monsters and mermaids and sirens and kelpies. I'd like to put in Mimic Octopuses, too, but I'd have to figure out how because what's special about them is that they can look like anything. The quilt would be thick with everything I could picture, hundreds of secret creatures I'll never see for real. But only up close. From far away, it wouldn't look like anything, it'd just look like this:

Ursula Kotilainen left the north on January second, a Sunday. She'd already been on the bus for two hours when a boy with acne and a wispy mustache got on in Sodankylä and sat in front of her. He wiped the condensation off the window and waved frantically to an old woman outside, shouted as the bus pulled away. At a highway rest stop outside Kemi, the boy stood outside the men's toilets puffing out great gouts of air, trying to step forward into the clouds before they disappeared. He had a strange, flat face, and as Ursula watched him choke with laughter at his own breath she thought there was something wrong with him. But it was the first time she'd seen the sun rise in over a month, and as she looked at the boy, at the haze of exhaust the idling bus exhaled, at her own breath, she could believe that there was warmth in the belly of the world.

Back on the bus, the boy introduced himself. She told him her name and he wrote it unevenly in the moisture on the window, with the R pointed backward. “You're pretty, Ursula,” he said.

She looked away; it wasn't true. He drew a heart around her name, and pressed his damp fingertip to the zipper at the collar of his coat. “Do you love me?” he asked.

“I don't know you,” Ursula said.

“Tell me you love me.”

“No.”

“I love you.” He was the first boy who had ever said this to Ursula, and the fact made her ashamed. He spoke like his tongue was swollen, as if he'd never learned to work it properly.

“No, you don't.”

“Tell me you love me back.” The boy unzipped his coat down to his belt. His face was flushed above the navy wool of his scarf and Ursula wondered for a moment if he might start crying, if he would howl the fourteen hours to Helsinki.

“I need to make up my mind. I'll tell you later,” she said, and pulled a textbook from her carry-on. The boy set himself to wiping the mist off the windows with his mittens. Mittens, not gloves, Ursula noticed, even though he had to be sixteen at least, and perhaps as old as she was, a few months past nineteen. Through the damp, streaked spaces he hollowed, Ursula could see nothing but pine forest, dark and relentless. She was already as far from home as she'd ever been.

By Helsinki it was morning again, the sun rising earlier than it had in Kemi, the streetlights flickering off as the bus reached downtown during rush hour. “Have you decided yet?” asked the boy.

“I'm sorry. It would be bad luck to lie.” Here in the south Ursula planned to get a degree, to meet men to whom she was not related, and to find a boyfriend. This damaged boy was not a good omen. It made her angry with him.

“So do you or don't you?”

“I don't.” Ursula pushed forward down the aisle of the bus and stumbled out squinting in the sun. The bus driver pulled her bags from the luggage compartment and set them on the sidewalk. A middle-aged man and a woman, the boy's parents, Ursula thought, hugged their son and took his suitcase. He looked over his mother's shoulder as she held him and glared at Ursula. “I still love
you
.”

“Don't,” she told him.

 

Ursula was entering the civil engineering program mid-year, too late to receive university housing; the department had found a studio she could afford in a neighborhood of gray apartment
blocks. Her neighbors on either side were Somali, resettled refugees. Ursula was not used to seeing black people; she thought they looked dark and strange against the snow, like holes in the world. When Ursula got off the tram in the evenings she'd pass a crowd of Somali boys playing on the sidewalk. They'd learned a Lappish song in school the same day they asked where she was from, and when she told them, they sang it to her.
Poro-tyttö,
they sang,
Reindeer Girl,
and laughed. The older boys still had an accent, and the language opened up in their mouths, loose and uneven. Ursula had an accent too, a northern one, but she spoke too seldom for most people to notice.