Mood is fed by climate, and everyone knows what happens in a closed environment when moods run unchecked by personal discipline. There has finally been thunder, audible through the panes of glass even if muffled by the concrete walls, and there has been lightning, high and far off, seen from the Green Room windows. Some hope it is the northern lights, but no… no one ever seems lucky enough to catch them here. This is only a sudden storm and a smell of ozone souring the milk in all the pitchers, leaving a thin, acidic odor of sadness rising from the coffee cups. But at dinner the rain adds some excitement, a little something to complain about.
Pearl is wearing a new dress, long and pleated, the slightest bit Grecian. She is telling a story to those sitting at her table about a rain forest, and endless rain, and inconveniences, and then abruptly about something else entirely, something seen in a museum, she can’t remember where. Anyway, it was a necklace of shimmering green beetle carapaces from some Polynesian island, which contributes to the delight of Mrs. Minder, who has taken the seat beside her.
“On the neck?” says Mrs. Minder, making a show of brushing the idea away from her own neck. “Would you actually wear beetles up there on the neck?”
“Just here,” says Pearl, tickling with one finger so that Mrs. Minder squeals.
At another table Julia chews the pale meat of her dinner. She is aware of Pearl, a stranger, and of the noises that Mrs. Minder makes. She notices when Pearl stops in midsentence, gratified by the sounds of Mary’s laughter, but then, in time, she also notices that Pearl is slightly less gratified by their seemingly random distribution. Julia stares down at her plate, posing in an unflattering angle, the flesh of her jaw hanging and heavy. What’s wrong now? Is she unsettled by thunder? Or annoyed by beetles? Maybe she doesn’t care for the food? Or maybe Julia, now accustomed to the routine of the place, resents the sudden change, the sudden sparkling at the next table over. Pearl makes Mrs. Minder laugh and Mrs. Minder’s laughter is loud and unforced. Julia waits with a mouth full of meat. She can’t seem to swallow. She’ll probably spit it into her napkin, which wouldn’t be out of character.
Pearl says, “And the whole time I expected them to put out their hairy legs and scuttle away. You simply wouldn’t believe they were dead, they were just too shiny and too beautiful.”
Julia lets her head sink down onto one shoulder in a way peculiar enough to call attention. And then the others see that hot, thick tears suddenly fall from Julia’s eyes and darken the shoulder of her green blouse, and that her mascara is leaving multiple black pollutions on her face. Such outbursts! They happen, they surely happen and she’s not the only one, and what can be done, anyway? But the trouble here now is the contagion of these tears. Those seated with Julia stop talking to one another. Some go on eating, even if embarrassed, but find their own throats similarly constricting with the sudden grief, the sympathy. They are feeling second-best. Each is wishing she had chosen the other table, Pearl’s table, where there is something new, where there is gaiety for no good reason, which they long for without being able to make it among themselves.
“There is nothing wrong with the meat,” says Anneli, the diet nurse, not unkindly the first time, but she repeats it with irritation when she sees that it is not just Julia but the whole table of up-patients around her now looking down at their napkins, squeezed tight in ringed fingers; a choking, a sighing around the half-chewed meat that not one of them will explain to her. Pearl’s table notices, goes quiet, and watches. And then Mrs. Minder, whose face is ordinarily so clear excepting the one wrinkle between her eyebrows, suddenly smiles, showing tiny even teeth, of which the front two are so discolored that they appear to have been capped in copper. And then as suddenly puts her hand up to stifle herself, her fingernails as clean as a baby’s and as curiously thin and sharp.
“Mrs. Minder,” says Anneli. “This is not funny.” (Even though she herself may smile, later, in relating it to others in the staff sauna.)
Pearl pushes back her chair and comes elaborately around the table to Julia, looking down appraisingly before crouching beside her so that the glass beads at the hem of her skirt click against the floor. Even crouching, she is imposing, because she’s wearing the absurdly tall pink fox fur hat. She smells of amber resin, and she is warm, and then Julia seems to enjoy the crying and the hot, fat tears. Her mouth is open slightly and her companions can see the grayish meat between her teeth. What is this? Most want to look away when Pearl, concerned, puts a finger to Julia’s gums and sweeps the meat into a napkin. But then they do look away, pointedly, when Julia takes the meaty napkin and presses it to her eyes.
“The portions are too large,” says Julia.
“Look, sweetheart,” says Pearl. “What’s your name? We’ll cut the meat up small and manageable, and if you want, I’ll even help you.” Pearl leans to pick up the fork from the floor where Julia dropped it.
“You’re not going to feed her!” says Mary Minder. But no one listens to her anymore, and, because they don’t, Julia smiles, and accepts Pearl’s help.
Pearl has brought a new game, a thinking game called Question, Challenge, and she teaches it later, in the Green Room. There are always a chosen few ladies around her, and always one in particular, sometimes the grossest, the most peculiar. Last year, this was Mrs. Minder. Now Pearl looks to Julia, the newcomer, and they sit side by side, to the open irritation of Mrs. Minder; she did not understand that abandonment is the fate of favorites. The kitchen has opened preserved milk and Mrs. Minder pours it from a steel pitcher. Trying to please, she turns the pitcher and holds it, handle first, to Pearl.
“Don’t gag me, you know I can’t stand it, darling.”
“Sorry, sorry!”
Julia accepts the milk herself.
“Listen,” Pearl says, slipping off her shoes and resting her feet on the ottoman, and for a moment those around her stop and hear the rain outside, the hissing of water on concrete, not realizing she wishes them to listen to her and nothing else. But there are voices beyond the rain, maybe. Or else it is the sound of the end of the late summer cough going around downstairs.
“First,” says Pearl, “I’ll think of something, anything, a thing or a place or a person, usually a thing, though, and I won’t tell you what. And then you, Mary Minder, you’ll say, It’s like a something. You might say, It’s like a cathedral, or It’s like a frog. And then someone else will say something completely different, It’s like a fruit salad, or whatever you choose. And then I, or whoever thought of the original thing, need to find the way to make it all true.”
“It’s like a bowl of agates from the beach,” says Mrs. Minder promptly.
“No, give me a moment to think of something, otherwise you’ll influence me,” says Pearl. “Okay, now I’m ready.”
“It’s like a bowl of agates from the beach,” says Mrs. Minder.
“It’s like a refrigerator,” says Julia.
“All right,” says Pearl, flexing her pretty bare toes to crack the joints. “I was thinking of the mill William talks about and talks about.” She lets her shimmering eyelids close, and says, “The new mill is like a bowl of agates because it shows man’s desire to gather up the products of nature. The new sawmill is like a refrigerator because it’s useful and reduces labor, compared to the past.”
“I love new games,” says Mrs. Minder. “I’m good at games.”
“Then think of something now,” says Pearl. “Julia, you go first.”
And Julia moves her hand on the arm of the sofa, and frowns that she is ready, fingering the fabric of her dress.
“It’s like a nail file,” says Pearl.
“It’s like a cane,” says Mrs. Minder.
“I was thinking of pyromania,” says Julia. “Pyromania is like a nail file because it’s abrasive and vain. Pyromania is like a cane because it’s a crutch for a sick person.”
“I don’t like this game,” says Mrs. Minder.
“Yes you do,” says Julia. “You just don’t understand it.”
At which Mary Minder frowns, nipping at her lips with her small dark teeth.
Sunny does not look in on Laimi; she had planned to, but after the train ride and the car ride and the long day, Laimi has gone up to her room and gone to bed without turning over the small red tag outside her door, the one she finds shameful and lazy, the one that means I would like to stay in my room, I would like to receive my dinner in bed. It is evening now and someone other than Sunny will be looking in on her later, because Sunny has buttoned up a raincoat and gone pedaling her bike along the paths. It’s only rain, she tells herself, it’s only rain, knowing that fairly soon it will be snow, and that snow might more easily discourage her from going through with the effort. Although why think about this now? In past years it has proved a better plan to avoid thinking of the snow, the shortened days, before they come.
But something is already different about this year, the atmosphere or the mix maybe, and some on the top floor are so passive that the ward maids nearly have to change the bed linens around them. So distasteful, especially here. It shouldn’t be allowed. But what can be done? Not much. Sunny has come to dislike those up-patients too indolent to move aside, the ones who won’t get out for some fresh air. Yes, it’s true: she dislikes them. This is an oddly liberating and reckless admission, because she has never said it outright before, having rarely applied this standard to anyone in her care during all these years. She had assumed, conveniently, that she couldn’t really know any of them, because personality would always be hidden behind the presentation of a patient, as far back from the center line where they met as Sunny herself. But was it really possible, to be so impartial? Oh, yes, seemingly it had been, before; she had not, for example, disliked her mother, nor resented her. She may have disliked some aspects of the life they were obliged to live, because of the circumstance, but that was entirely different. But here, now, this year, some go too far into self-indulgence, they won’t do much more than eat cookies and make conversation with the nurses… some of the ladies feel a compulsion to seek sympathy, and sometimes they develop a new tic, an elusive pain… and oh, the things that come up for review. The constipation, for example: constipation is a foolproof way of getting attention. Voi Jumalauta. An enema, some bowel salts, and a little assistance at the end of the process. Real need is one thing, but choosing frailty is another, and Sunny herself has seen real frailty, unchosen, and as a result she would do anything to comfort real physical pain, except cultivate and indulge it. Maybe this is what’s wrong: some are here only to have their pain—or their discomfort—cultivated and indulged. And so Sunny, on her bicycle, declines to think of enemas, not on her own time, not outside the building.
There must be some outlet for the exasperation of the healthy toward the infirm, especially if some improvement in the situation does not seem imminent, and Sunny will try to find an outlet in exercise, and will nearly always manage to keep her own frustrations out of sight. Now in autumn there are apples growing in the trees of what was once a small private orchard, grown over with berry bushes, that she has found near a few abandoned outbuildings at some distance from the hospital complex. It is a small recreation, a destination, to get off her bike and to turn the windfalls over with one foot, checking for wormholes in the slanting light. Those in reasonably good condition she takes to Mrs. Anderson and Sister Tutor. She doesn’t like to leave them rotting on the rain-soaked ground after seeing them swelling on the trees all summer; they are only getting to a good picking size now, but the branches are over her head. And so she turns over the windfalls, in grass that is long and wet and full of slow insects boring slow holes through the green-and-red-streaked skins.
Where else to go? There aren’t that many directions that lead anywhere in particular in the length of time she’d like to ride, perhaps an hour, possibly two. She crosses the bridge and follows the path along the coast in the direction of the long way around, toward the town and harbor, far away. Conversely, all destinations will seem closer later, when they are snowbound, if one is willing to walk out over the ice.
On the way home she stops at the small house with a bag of windfalls and interrupts Mrs. Anderson stripping her own bed—there is a laundry exchange, of course, but one must do the work oneself, and evening is the time. Sister Tutor comes out of a bedroom less bare than one would imagine, padded with a warm rug hung on the north wall, below which a little collection of icons glints on a dresser. Hanging from a chain in the corner is a golden lamp in which a flame is burning, about which Mrs. Anderson won’t complain even though lately she is jumpy at the thought of fire. Sister Tutor’s orthodoxy may not be entirely popular in these Protestant times, but Mrs. Anderson would never criticize her friend for it. Religion is private. Enough said.
Yes, all right, she’ll take a cup of tea, to their surprise: often she says no thank you only out of habit. Mrs. Anderson is pleased and boils the kettle.
“I have new tea,” she calls from their kitchen. “Tea from India.”
“Oh,” says Sister Tutor in Finnish. “Nice!”
Mrs. Anderson takes gingersnaps from the jar and gives the top one, stale and soft, to Sister Tutor, whose teeth are not strong, and who holds the cookie over her lips in a small anticipatory kiss. They both look at Sunny. They’d never ask about her increasing bad moods directly, but she’s restless, obviously. What options are there? Uprooting herself can’t happen now. Change doesn’t come naturally when the world is ramping down for winter. Maybe she’s frustrated with the work, and the feelings will pass. They continue looking at her, across the table, Sister Tutor blinking over the gingersnap.
“I guess I’m restless tonight,” Sunny says.
They are happy with this.
“Maybe you ought to go into town this week?” says Mrs. Anderson.
“That’s a good idea!” says Sister Tutor. “It’s the herring market all week.”
“I don’t like herring much,” says Sunny.
“You don’t?” says Sister Tutor, nonplussed. “Are you sure?”
“There’s more than just herring,” says Mrs. Anderson. “It’s the season.”
“You like smoked fish, don’t you?” says Sister Tutor.
“Sometimes.”
“Anyway, take the bus to the train platform, and then it’s really only an hour and a quarter from there,” says Mrs. Anderson. “Sometimes you just need to get away.”
“Nurses in uniform ride for free,” says Sister Tutor. “The market will be full of people. And wool. And bread and candy, lots of things, and the man who carves birds.”
“No, he’s only there for Christmas at the joulumarkt.”
Sunny had accepted a ride last year in a car with some others who were going into town, quicker of course than the train and bus. It was snowy, and she sat in the middle of the backseat between two practical nurses, behind two silent orderlies who smoked cigarettes, barely cracking their windows, filling the built-in ashtrays. To her horror the driver had unexpectedly driven out over the frozen water, taking a shortcut not yet marked out for safety with markers of sawn branches. She had been nauseous with anxiety, feeling trapped, too firmly tucked away between the other nurses in their bulky town coats; she knew she would be unable to get out quickly if the ice cracked. She had expected the ice to fail, she’d waited for and expected the sharp terrifying sound, the tilt, the feel of ice water rising at her feet. She’d said nothing, though, staring ahead until they reached the opposite shore. She’d excused herself, and taken the train home alone.
“Maybe,” she says, but knows that the time needed to get there is too much when she’s only taking a day and a half off every week. And it seems, it often seems that she will never go into town again. Which is ridiculous.
The older women have learned how to be happy here, by doing what pleases them, slowly, if need be. But they are sympathetic anyway. Sister Tutor smiles as she stirs honey into her cup of tea. And Sunny wishes to be someone capable of enjoying stirring and stirring, someone more like Sister Tutor, a veteran nurse of the Balkan wars who somehow sleeps without nightmares.
They both watch Mrs. Anderson arrange the apples in a large glass bowl, where during the week the ripest will gather indents, the faint teeth marks of Sister Tutor’s optimistic attempts. If she wants apples, though, she’ll have to wait until Mrs. Anderson reduces them to applesauce, because tonight, even the cookies must be softened in her tea.
Somebody ought to yank those teeth out, thinks Sunny. But no: such a thought intrudes only because of what she’d seen earlier, at lunch, when two of the up-patients had proudly introduced new and unexpected dentures, dozens of beautiful teeth purchased abroad during the summer, for which both—one only partially, but the other more thoroughly—had elected to remove their natural (but weak!) teeth. Mrs. Minder, with her finger hovering, wanting to touch, had asked about the process. Was it painful? Oh, yes! Very painful. Did it take long? Not as long as you’d think. And the lady with the partial bridge had gone to her room to bring back a little jewel box containing her erstwhile upper incisors, each placed neatly into the box’s velvet slits intended for rings, and each, when drawn out by Mrs. Minder, on a long yellowed root, intact and relatively healthy in appearance.
Sunny, in passing, half-attentive, had glanced down and mistaken the teeth for hoarded pills. “What have you got?” she’d said, sharply. “Show me.”
Mrs. Minder had obligingly tipped what she held into Sunny’s palm, and Sunny, not expecting the dry touch of the parsnip-colored roots, had nearly thrown the teeth to the floor. But she hadn’t, she’d merely handed them back to their owner, and then stepped to the nearby sink to wash her hands, thoroughly and automatically. This must be some kind of a borrowed thought, like something contagious caught from the up-patients. Of course she’d never, ever suggest that Sister Tutor follow the example set by such as those, who love and hate themselves publicly in equal measure. If Sister Tutor wants her teeth pulled, then by all means pull them, thinks Sunny, pull them all and look for new ones, but do it under nobody’s influence but her own.