HELVI’S SAUNA

A Story by Jane Piirto

The cousins take off their shoes and hide them in Aunt Helvi’s closet, next to her quilted satin bedroom slippers.  “Shhh!” he may be up there,” Arnold says, peeking around the corner of the stairwell.

“Nah, he’s gone get drunk at Pestrollo’s Bar again,” says Marvin, who is thirteen, the oldest cousin still living in town.  At ten, Maxine believes Marvin because he knows all about the secret places and about the family.  Aunt Helvi says Marvin takes after Grandpa Millimaki, who died in the Depression, with skin cancer from the damp mines.  “Just like our father, a real leader,” Aunt Helvi says of Marvin.

The cousins creep up the narrow steps curving into the attic where Uncle Toivo lives, their wool-stockinged feet slipping on the clean gray painted steps. There are no rubber foot grips, and the steps are steep. “But he’ll fall down these steps sometime when he’s drunk,” Marvin says.  They get to the top and, sitting on the last two steps, Marvin looks around to the left, into Toivo’s room.  The children can smell the stale smoke.  “He’s gone,” Marvin whispers.

The cousins scramble up the rest of the way.  Five children enter Toivo’s room.  Just like last week, there lies the pile of dirty underwear in the corner.  Just like last week, there lie the magazines with pictures of bare-naked women in them, scattered about on top of the rumpled bed.  Just like last week, there lie   the jumboes of beer, empty, their caps in the ashtray overflowing with Camel butts.            

“Look at that big nail!” says Lila, the youngest on the expedition.  “Dummy, that’s a railroad spike,” says Arnold.  “Toivo works for the Section.  He drives those spikes into the railroad tracks with a big huge sledge hammer.”

Downstairs again, Aunt Helvi gathers the girl cousins for sauna with her.  Maxine’s father and mother go by themselves nowadays, since Maxine’s younger brother looked too long at Maxine’s mother’s hair.  Maxine herself stared at her father too long when she was eight, and from then on, she has joined the girl cousins on sauna Saturday.  Aunt Helvi takes them, usually, but sometimes they go with Liisa, the old maid down the street who comes over each week to take her bath.

The four girls and Aunt Helvi sit on the benches waiting to sweat up, tossing water on the rocks so the steam sizzles on the round stones and up through the sauna room.  “It’s too hot!” yelps one of the younger girls.  “Chicken!” someone replies.

“Sit on the lowest step,” says Aunt Helvi, always the teacher. “Or crouch on the floor.  Put a washcloth with cool water on your face.”

“Bet you can’t take it as hot as I can,” says Maxine’s cousin Sarah, issuing her weekly challenge.

“Bet I can,” Maxine answers.  “You have to climb up here, though, or it’s not fair.”

“Wait until I’m done, girls,” says Aunt Helvi.  “I can’t take it as hot as I used to when I was young and on the go all the  time. The girls—your aunts—and I used to have contests, too, to see which Millimaki sister could take it the hottest, but I never won.”

They soap themselves, giggling and bantering, feet in buckets, rinsing by splashing water in washcloths over each other; then they throw more water on the rocks, and sweat up again, four slippery little girls and their plump aunt in a white plastic shower cap, slapping each others’ shoulders with birch twigs.  Finally they pour buckets of cool water over their heads for the last rinse.  Sarah wins the contest because Maxine wants to get upstairs to see what the cousins will do next.

They dry off in the changing room, putting on the clean cotton underpants and long-sleeved cotton undershirts their mothers have packed for them in each family’s sauna bag, those duffle bags piled with fresh scratchy towels smelling like outside from clothesline drying, with extra cakes of pine soap and round cardboard boxes of sweet-smelling powder topped with huge fluffy pink or yellow puffs, with extra boxer shorts for the fathers and extra shower caps for the teenage girls who don’t want to get their hair wet because they have to go to the Youth Center dance or to a game later on.

Upstairs, pink and shiny-faced, with wet, slick hair, those of the family who have taken sauna already gather around the table in the eating kitchen.  The grown-ups are drinking egg coffee and eating fresh cardamom rolls one of the aunts brought.  There is strawberry pop for the kids.  They take big handfuls of the cold cuts and make sandwiches on Finnish rye bread baked by Aunt Helvi and Grandma that morning.  “I can make a bigger Dagwood than you,”says Sarah.  “Sure, anyone can,” says Maxine, “but can you eat it? Aunt Helvi says we have to eat everything we take ‘cause wasting food is a sin what with all the starving children.”

Uncle Toivo has come home by now.  He is drunk, as he is every Saturday night.  Maxine can see him outside, his pants bagging, his knees bent, his fist raised like a saluter’s in the war movies, gesturing.  They can hear him yelling at Uncle Paavo, who is shoveling snow, how Uncle Paavo is a crumbum, never did nothing, hid the car keys when they were kids and wouldn’t let Toivo use his car, always after the money, thinks he’s a big shot now he works in the furniture store and not underground.

Last Saturday Uncle Toivo had yelled at Maxine’s father, he should have stayed underground in the mines instead of letting them promote him to foreman, that’s all you’re after, money, think you’re a big shot now, hey? Uncle Toivo has a memory long as an elephant’s and he never lets his brothers and sisters forget when they did him wrong.  Every Saturday night he picks someone for a shout but they never shout back, though they look mad sometimes, as if Toivo is a little child having a temper tantrum, or as if they’re scared he’ll punch them.  Some of the uncles, married to the Millimaki sisters, and son-in-laws, don’t know how to talk to Uncle Toivo at all, and just laugh tolerantly or angrily when he starts in with his picking and yelling.  He has the gift of finding prick points in people and then jabbing and jabbing.

    The uncles go down for another sauna, together, with jumbos.  Their wives sit in the living room on upholstered chairs in the warm light of the fringed lamps, and talk.  Grandma, large and fat, sits near the lamp with the sewing stuff in compartments beneath its table, in the horsehair rocker, large and fat, laughing at all the little kids running, telling them “Don’ don’!” as they run by, rattling the china cabinet where the dishes only used when ministers would pay their Sunday calls, rest in elegant china stacks behind the glass.  Maxine has never seen anyone use those dishes, not even when the whole family is together for a wedding or a baptism.

The mothers talk quietly about each others’ kids, and they smile a lot, and Grandma grabs a squirmy child running by, to give him “nooka,” the eskimo kiss of rubbing noses.  “Gimme to nose,” she says, chuckling deep in her throat.  “Gimme nooka.” And the child reluctantly rubs noses with Grandma, for he would rather play than kiss.  He smells her clean skin, rosy and nearly unwrinkled, even though she is seventy.  Maxine has never had a real conversation with Grandma, because even though Grandma has been here in the Upper Peninsula for almost fifty years, she can’t speak English, and Maxine’s parents have never taught them Finnish, maybe because of the shame they themselves had felt when they entered school and had to endure the taunts of the other kids, who could speak English.  Teachers arbitrarily gave English names to the children who couldn’t speak, and were very firm that English be used.  “Finn kids can’t talk right,” the kids used to yell. Of course, they yelled the same thing to the Italian kids, whose parents had emigrated there, at about the same time as the Finns.

So the women talk in English to each other, and in Finnish to their parents, and to their spouses when they want to tell secrets.  The women seemed happy, chatting there softly, glad to be together there with the family, in this living room yellow and dim, as warm and inviting as fireplaces at ski lodges, as comforting as rocking chairs and hand-knitted mufflers.

Marvin leads the older cousins on a daring raid.  They sneak through the dark damp of the basement, skittering across the clotheswashing room, into the Cold Room, where they used to keep the milk, and where there is often some kalia, a fermented yeast drink made in mason jars.  Maxine’s father had told her that in the old days, when he was a child, the room was always filled with water, and he had to wear big rubber boots to get the milk cans which he would deliver to people before he went to school.  He told her some rich kids at the high school would laugh at him because he wore those big rubber swampers.

“Shhh!” Marvin warns, checking around the corner into the darkness. “They’re in the changing room, I can hear them!”

The children scamper into the furnace room and spread about behind the huge furnace, as round as a redwood, with its monster arms reaching up to the ceiling.  Marvin motions them on.  Tiptoeing, they shuffle into the wood room, where the smell of the woodpile for the sauna stove envelops them.  It is like being in a brand new house, thinks Maxine, like the one the uncles—except for Toivo, who always feels sick—and her father, are helping Uncle Heikki build on Sundays.  The children turn the corner, flattening themselves against the cold cement walls, inching along, like the French Underground.

There, through the half-open doorway, sit seven naked men, with wet, slick hair and pink skin, lined up on the orange bench against the whitewashed wall of the changing room, their heads bent forward above arms resting on their spread legs, their things hanging down loose.  Maxine closes her eyes hard.  She wouldn’t want Marvin and the cousins spying on her at sauna, seeing her nipples or anything.  But she never forgets that picture snapped before she shut her eyes, and she remembers, too, that Uncle Toivo had finally stopped yelling at his family, there, taking a sauna with his brothers and brothers-in-law, taking a bath together, drinking jumboes together.

At home, as on every Saturday night, with the streetlight making the icicles at the window look like the entrance to a crystal cave, Maxine and her sisters say their prayers, “Our father who art in heaven; forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those”; while their mother listens.  Then, with the three C’s, as their mother calls them, Clean body, Clean pajamas, Clean sheets, crisp and windblown, Maxine sleeps the sleep of Saturday night, dreamlessly, forgiven.

Uncle Toivo grabs his fork with his whole hand, under-handed, and he bends his head down to six inches from the plate.  He moves his mashed potatoes, turnips, turkey, dressing, salad, green beans, and cranberry sauce into a pile, smashes them so the mashed potatoes run red with cranberry juice and the salad runs tan with gravy, and he crushes two pieces of Finnish rye in his other hand.  He slurps the food into his mouth very rapidly, pushing with the bread, leaning his bent head sideways so his greasy hair almost touches the plate, rolling his eyes toward the speaker.

“Right, right! You betcha!” with the food running down onto his shirt, dampening his belly with stains and splashes.

Sometimes he sits up to chew a particularly difficult morsel,with his mouth open, masticating loudly, smacking until he swallows it. Then down with the head for another bout of shoveling.  He wipes his mouth on his tie during dinner, ignoring the napkin next to his plate. Usually he doesn’t wear a tie, though, and he wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

Maxine and her sister have set the table.  Then, when everyone is moving to take seats there, they watch where Uncle Toivo sits, and take the seats farthest from him, on the same side as he, so they won’t have to watch him chewing with his mouth open and talking at the same time.  Maxine and her sister complained about Toivo’s table manners once to their father, but their father said they shouldn’t talk that way about their uncle. Maxine’s mother said she’s noticed it too, but after all, this is a holiday, and God said we should love everyone, especially our own family.

“Didn’t the minister preach a nice sermon?” Aunt Helvi says, dabbing the side of her mouth with the corner of her white linen napkin.  “I always like sermons about Sisu and how the Finns have it.”

“I am getting so sick of hearing about Sisu,” says Maxine’s sister. “Why doesn’t he preach from the Bible, like other ministers?”

“Now, girls,” Aunt Helvi says.  “You need to know about your heritage and about the Winter War and how the Finns beat the Russians and fooled them on their white skis with white outfits on, and how the Finns are the only ones bordering Russia who aren’t communists, and about Sibelius and Saarinen and how we really have gumption and are stubborn and about Lemminkainen in the Kalevalabeing born out of the ocean and establishing the land of heroes from a tiny oak seed and the love of the maiden Siirila, or was that Heskimoinen, I never can keep his name straight?  Didn’t the choir sound nice?” she continues, turning her head to look at Maxine.  “Your cousin Helen is always such a good singer.  But of course we Millimakis have always been musical.  I wonder why you  didn’t join the choir this year, Maxine?  Too much to do in school, I suppose.  When I was teaching junior high I used to give homework, but not like nowadays. Of course I only teach second grade now, but a person has to move where her husband goes, doesn’t she?  We Millimaki women take care of our men, don’t we?

Maxine nods, Maxine’s father and mother nod, Maxine’s younger brother and older sister nod.  Aunt Helvi was always a great talker.  But a heart of gold, they all say, so everyone listens.  Aunt Helvi is the family historian and she knows all sixty of her nieces and nephews and what grades they are in, and no matter what their last names are now, she always calls them Millimakis.

“That’s a nice hat, Helvi,” Maxine’s mother says.

“Do you like it?  I got it at J.C. Penney’s for $6.59.  That’s dear for a hat but I do like blue velvet.  My ex —”  She  sighs.  “My ex used to say he liked me in royal blue, like a queen, he would say. But of course my hair was white prematurely and blue and white are the school colors and they always look good. Now with just Toivo at home and he doesn’t notice anything—.”  She gestures to Toivo, who is busy eating.

“Right! Right! You betcha!” he replies, his mouth full.

She continues.  “I got a letter from Esther last week.  Your cousin Tessa is going to get a scholarship for college,  she’s going to study domestic science at the Normal and be a teacher.”

Aunt Helvi still calls the state college, that is now called a “university,” “the Normal School.”

“Of course, Tessa was always one of the smartest Millimakis, just like you, Maxine, she reminds me of our mother.  Mother only went to second grade, then she immigrated and was a cleaning lady,can you imagine that, so young?  She worked for the mine bosses, but when they had the milk business she kept all the books in her head, just like a steel trap, she knows her math. Mother wanted to come for dinner, too, but she gets too tired, these diabetics have to watch everything they eat.”

Helvi pauses for a breath and a sip of coffee.  Everyone sits around the table dumbly nodding their heads at her torrents of words.

•

“Aunt Helvi is getting divorced,” Marvin tells Maxine.  “We can’t call Uncle Edward ‘Uncle’ anymore.”

Maxine is eight, just getting to the age when girls start sitting down and listening to their mothers and aunts talk.  The women talk for hours at sauna about Edward and Helvi.

“Edward was stepping out with that Italian woman who sells the liquor in his grocery store.”

“Mother, what is ‘stepping out’?”

“His family bosses Helvi around.”

“She packed her bags right up and came here home to the family where we love her.”

“No one in this family ever got a divorce.”

“And her a schoolteacher, too.  I say she should stick with him.”

“Imagine, Edward, acting like that!”

“He never did go to church.”

“The Finnish boys always liked the Italian girls.  And they won’t even set foot in a Lutheran church, you know.”

“Never go out with a Catholic, girls.  You have to give up your church.”

“Helvi, you’ll pull through.  You’re better off without such a man.  You can take care of Grandma and Toivo.”

“Unless Toivo finds himself a nice woman.”

“Who’d marry him?”

•

“Here, Maxine.  Take this envelope to the Laitinens on Jackpine Street, you know where they live?” Aunt Helvi says.  “Mr.Laitinen was hurt in the mines and they have six kids, you go to school with their girl, don’t you?  Don’t tell them who sent it.”    

Maxine puts the car into gear and drives Aunt Helvi to her bridge club.  “It’ll be good to see the girls again,” Aunt Helvi says, adjusting her royal blue pillbox hat.  “What with Mother in bed, and schoolteaching, I haven’t had time to go out gallivanting. Pick me up at nine thirty now.  A girl needs her beauty sleep.”  She chuckles.  “And here’s a dollar for gas.”

Maxine drives to the Carnegie Public Library, where the kids are studying, and gets her girlfriend Susu and they go to the drugstore and have a tin roof sundae, which Maxine  buys for them with her dollar.

Maxine and Susu walk down the sidewalk towards where the car is parked.  Across the street, staggering out of the Sunrise Bar, comes Uncle Toivo.  “Oh God, Susu! Don’t let him see me!  There’s my uncle, the town drunk!” Maxine hides behind her friend until Uncle Toivo lurches around the corner.  Maxine doesn’t talk much to her friends about Uncle Toivo. She wants to pretend he doesn’t exist.

“I have to go up to the Laitinens for a minute,” Maxine says, as she guns the car up the hill in second gear, past the town’s skyscrapers, the mine shafts, and then, in high, down Jackpine Street.  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Mrs. Laitinen?  This is for you,” handing her the envelope.  Mrs. Laitinen looks puzzled, then opens it.  Maxine can see Mr. Laitinen, his leg in a cast, watching Arthur Godfrey.  TV is snowy again tonight, and she can hardly see the figures on the screen.  It is 200 miles south to Green Bay, where the programs come from, and the signals aren’t good, but almost everyone has a television set anyway.  “How are you, Mr. Laitinen?” she asks.

“Frank!  There’s a hundred dollars here!”

“You’re the Millimaki girl, aren’t you?  I went to school with your uncle.  Why are you bringing us this money, though God knows we need it, him laid up and all.”

“You know I play the organ?  Well, the minister told me someone left it in the collection for you,” Maxine lies.  “So I told him I’d bring it to you.”  Maxine has told this lie before.

Maxine is cleaning house for Aunt Helvi one Saturday morning. Uncle Toivo, sober, comes up to her, puts his arm around her, asks her in his guttural voice, “Howshagoin’, Maxine?” He fingers her bra, almost snaps it.

The next summer, when her cousin from Waukegan is visiting, she tells Maxine that she thinks Uncle Toivo snapped her bra.  The cousin also tells Maxine about Uncle Toivo yelling and shouting, and about Aunt Helvi, how she cries at night when he is drunk. “He’s like a crazy man!  Do you think he beats up Aunt Helvi or anything?”

“No.  They’d kick him out of the family if they ever found out he laid a hand on Aunt Helvi. She’s just embarrassed to have you over visiting and you have to hear it.  He yells at all the aunts and uncles, who aren’t even his brothers and sisters.  You know how Aunt Helvi wants everything to be nice? She’s just ashamed about him, as if he’s her husband and not her dumb brother that everyone in the family knows is like that.”

Maxine has never wondered what it must be like, there in the family home, now that Grandma has died, with just Aunt Helvi and Uncle Toivo living there.  She asks her father what he thinks about Uncle Toivo.  Is he dangerous to Aunt Helvi?  “Oh, he’s a good boy when he’s sober,”  Maxine’s father says.  “He’s the black sheep, never finished school, so we have to take care of him, he had scarlet fever when he was a baby and was never right after.  Helvi needs a man to take care of, now she’s divorced.  All the Millimaki women do, it’s the best thing for her, taking care of Toivo.”

Maxine doesn’t tell him about the bra fingering

•

Maxine and her friends start going to certain bars to dance to rock and roll music and to drink beer.  They have just turned twenty-one, finally legal.  They go to the teacher’s college as commuters and they live at home. Their fathers are miners, and they can’t afford to go away to school.  Sometimes her friends want to go to the sleazy bars, where the town drunks hang out, but Maxine never goes with them, because she thinks she might see Uncle Toivo.  As it is, she looks all around in the bars they do go to, in case he might be there, and if she sees him slouched down over the bar with a cigarette and a long ash running over onto the bar, gesturing and talking to someone who seems embarrassed, she turns quickly and leaves before he sees her.

Marvin, whose father, along with Maxine’s, is the only other brother left in town, now the underground mines have been closing down and all the workers have been moving to Detroit and Waukegan to get work in the auto plants, also comes to the bars to dance and to drink beer, but when he sees Uncle Toivo, he goes up to him, pats him on the back, and says, in imitation, “Howshagoin’, Uncle Toivo?”

Marvin thinks Uncle Toivo is a joker and Marvin says Uncle Toivo used to let the best farts at sauna when he’d take the boys, like Aunt Helvi would take the girls.  Maxine is disgusted.  Marvin’s younger brother got a dog last year and named it Toivo “because it eats like a slob and pisses all over,” though they don’t tell Toivo that.  Toivo was very pleased at having a dog named after him, and he said he is going to leave all his money to Marvin’s brother.

“What money?” Maxine asks.“Oh, he’s a cagey one,” says Marvin. “He only pays ten dollars a week to keep up the house and for food and everything, and Aunt Helvi pays the rest. Sometimes she asks him to pay more, but he says she’s too big for her britches, these schoolteachers thinking they’re better than everyone else, so he won’t.  He’s got three insurance policies from Uncle Benny.  What can they do?  They can’t kick him out, y’know.”

Maxine asks her father if that is true.  “Well, it could be. I know he makes good money on the Section. Helvi’s never said anything to anyone, and even if she did, what could we do?  We can’t make him pay more if he doesn’t want to, and we can’t kick him out, he’s our brother after all.”  

Maxine is sitting at a table, on a date with a boy she is trying to impress.  She has her back to the door, which she almost never does. 

“Maxine!” she hears the guttural voice yell.  A large,       bearlike figure staggers over to her through the smoke.  “What you doin’ here?  This is a beer garden!”  Maxine thinks now the jig is up.  “I’m having a beer and dancing with my friends.  Jack, this is my uncle, Toivo.”

“How do you do, sir,” Jack says, standing up and extending his hand. “Won’t you join us?”  Maxine silently wishes, “No!”

“Sure t’ing.  Howshagoin’? Hot night, hey?” Toivo sits down. He starts to reach into his pants pocket, then has to stand up to do it because his pants are slung so low under his belly, and he pulls out a wet bill, folded and crumpled.

 “Here, Maxine, it’s a dollar,” Toivo says, extending the traditional gift of uncles and aunts to nieces and nephews.

“Thanks, Uncle Toivo,” Maxine says.  “It’s a twist, Chubby Checker.  Excuse us, Uncle Toivo,” she says, pulling Jack by the hand onto the dancing space.  She keeps Jack out there twisting for three or four numbers, until she sees Toivo rise and lurch out of the bar.

The dollar bill smells of urine.

Maxine comes into the house the next Thursday to pick up Aunt Helvi for evening services, where all the grandmothers, the old Finnish ladies in their black wool overcoats and black hats go each week.  When Maxine comes down the church basement to get Aunt Helvi, the ladies shake hands with her; their hands are translucent, and knobby from the hard work of their lifetimes.  All the old ladies are widows, their husbands died from accidents in the woods or in the mines, or from heart attacks, cancers, and other premature causes.  

    Aunt Helvi says she likes to go with the old people “because these were Mother’s friends, and besides, I can keep up on my Finnish.  Church doesn’t seem like church if it’s in English.”  Maxine remembers it’s been in English as long as she can remember; she herself can’t even talk Finn, except to say Merry Christmas and hello and stuff like that.

    When they get back, Maxine walks in to the house with Aunt Helvi to pick up her mother’s cake pan.  Uncle Toivo is sitting in Grandma’s horsehair rocker, where Maxine has never seen anyone but Grandma dare to sit, with a jumbo in his hand. When he sees Maxine, he jumps up and starts pointing and yelling.  He is drunk and not a good boy.  “Helvi, I saw her in the beer garden.  A nice Finnish girl with lipstick on and in tight pants, wiggling her hips!” He looms close, threatening, seems about to strike Maxine with his upraised fist.

    Aunt Helvi yells at him, “Leave Maxine alone!” and she pushes Maxine out the door ahead of her.  “That’s all he’s been able to talk about since last Saturday,” Aunt Helvi says. “I told him he must be crazy, nice Millimaki girls don’t go to beer gardens.”

    Maxine doesn’t say anything; it would take too long to explain how times have changed, and she admires Aunt Helvi and loves her and doesn’t want Aunt Helvi to be disappointed in her.  Besides, Aunt Helvi is getting deaf, and it is difficult to talk to her for very long.

    “Aren’t you afraid of him, Aunt Helvi?” Maxine asks.  “He’s so strong, and so angry.  Don’t you worry he’ll hurt you?”

    “Oh no, when he gets like that I just go upstairs and close my bedroom door and put my earplugs in.  He kicks for awhile but then he just falls asleep.  And he’s a good boy when he’s sober.”

•

    Maxine and her mother are taking a sauna.  It is Saturday night, and they are the only ones at sauna.  They came over early to put the small logs into the sauna stove so the water and the room would get good and hot, since Uncle Toivo doesn’t like to light the sauna anymore.  Then, after supper, they come back over,passing through the room where all the aunts used to sit and chat,saying hello to Aunt Helvi, who is watching Lawrence Welk. 

Aunt Helvi, now she’s retired, doesn’t go gallivanting anymore; she’s afraid, and she seems to have lost the old spirit. Her legs are encased in brown support stockings, rolled down, her feet in worn flannel bedroom slippers.  She is wearing a print housedress, and her hair is in curlers.  Maxine has never seen Aunt Helvi in curlers before.  Aunt Helvi says that Uncle Toivo is”gone to the store for some rolls,” but Maxine and her mother recognize that for what it is. Uncle Toivo is downtown in the bars.

Maxine and her mother lean back on the top shelf with their legs up, talking and sharing confidences, as they always do in the sauna when Maxine, her husband, and their children come “home” from the city, on vacation. The two women have sweated and grimaced, putting washcloths soaked in cold water to their noses, throwing water from ladles onto the smooth rocks gathered decades ago from the shores of Lake Superior.  “Bet I can take it hotter than you,” Maxine says to her mother in the old challenge, knowing she can’t; not a sauna regular like her mother, not a true Finn.

There, comfortable in the place where they’d always been able to tell their secrets, Maxine’s mother tells her something.  “Once I was down here alone on Saturday night,” she says. “Your father was out of town on a job and you kids, you were out with your friends.  I don’t like to miss my sauna, so I came alone.  It’s sure different now that everyone, even you kids, has moved, remember when the whole family would get together on Saturday? Anyway, Uncle Toivo came down to use the toilet down here, it sounded like a waterfall, and then I heard him clearing his throat like he does, all those nonfiltered Camels, hocking and spitting, you know what I mean?  Snorting?

“All of a sudden, there he was, right there in that doorway, silhouetted with the light in back of him, with his pants down.  He was drunk and weaving.  He looked at me up and down and said, ‘The guys on the railroad think I have the biggest dick alive.’

“First I was just so scared.  He’s big, and he stroked my hip once, and when he’s drunk he’s violent. I covered myself as best I could. He took a step towards me.  Then I just got so mad!  The nerve!  I told him go get himself out of here.  Immediately! I told him I’d tell Daddy and the rest of them what he’d done and they’d kick him out of the family.  He muttered, took a few steps toward me, and then he turned around and left.”

“Did you tell Daddy?” Maxine asks, her skin starting to prickle more and not only from the heat of the sauna.  She notices as if for the first time, her mother’s beauty, her smooth white Finnish skin preserved by years of saunas, unwrinkled and pale, even alabaster, shining with sweat.  She notices her mother’s breasts, full, not sagging, with pale pink nipples. Together, she and her mother in the sauna are like Vuorenjuuri’s painting of women at their bath.

“Oh no.  I’d never do that.  I don’t know what Daddy would have done.  Toivo always said, when he yelled at Daddy, that I was too good for Daddy and should have married him, Toivo, instead.  Can you imagine?  Besides, Toivo was drunk.  Still, every time I come to sauna I make sure to hook all the doors, even that one, from the hallway where we bring the wood in.  I had hooked the other one, but I forgot that one, and that’s where he came from.

Years later, Maxine dreams a sauna dream.  She is walking to Grandma’s house.  She turns the corner in a snowstorm and under the street light through the snow she can see a trail of vomit and urine, and marks from hands and knees.  Drunk’s tracks are not pretty, though the tracks are filling up with heavy snow by now. Maxine knows from the signs that her uncle has passed this way.  She gets through the wind and wet snow to Grandma’s house.  She enters.  She has come to beg Aunt Helvi to leave this ignorant drunk, even though he is her brother; why should a woman have more loyalty to a brother than to a husband? Uncle  Toivo is sprawled in a faded purple easy chair. He greets Maxine loudly, starting across the room to her.  She has begun to plead with Aunt Helvi to leave, to please, go out gallivanting again in your royal blue pill box hat, teach school, play bridge with the girls, go to church on Thursdays, send me with a hundred dollars to needy people.                     

“Howshagoin’?” he yells, slapping her back, feeling with his fingers for her bra strap, but she is a modern woman nowadays, and has given up wearing bras.  Maxine is so revolted by him, by his smell, his fat belly, with his shirt out of his pants—his baggy, filthy pants with urine stains, held up at the level of the top of the crack in his rear by a twisted leather belt—that she puts her hand to her nose as she steps away from him.  He is sputtering words she can’t understand, his speech defect aggravated by the liquor.  Aunt Helvi is sitting in her very neat print housedress, in thick support hose and wedgies, on the couch, telling him in an ever-louder deaf-person’s voice to “Leave Maxine alone!”

Then he starts grabbing Maxine’s shoulders.  As he turns her to him she can feel how strong he is, the result of those years driving spikes, very big, very tall.  She tries to pull away from him.  He puts his face a foot from hers and pulls her chin towards his so she is forced to face him.  Before she closes her eyes, she notices the beads of sweat on his forehead.  His breath is rank, overpowering, cigarettes and booze and bad teeth.  “You’ve always been pretty,” he slobbers.

Aunt Helvi yells his name—”Toivo!”—and he turns to Helvi to yell obscenities, loosening his grip a little—but then, quickly, his hand drops, to slide down the front of Maxine’s shirt and across to where her nipples are. She wrenches away from him.  She bends over, with her hands crossed in front of her, screaming, “Go away!”

He pulls her up again, fast.  His eyes move back and forth searching her shirt.  Then he grasps her even tighter and pushes her hand down to his crotch where she can feel him, large, hard.  She struggles to get away and he slaps her; then he grips her arms again, and she is powerless.  She knows she will have bruises.

Aunt Helvi is now up and pulling at his shirt, telling him to leave Maxine alone.  He mutters into Maxine’s ear an invitation for her—”Love me,” he says.  “I’m in this family too,” he says.  And she screams NO and swears at him in the Finnish curse words she knows, but he is very strong and she is afraid he will beat her, rape her, kill her.

He drags her to the changing room of the sauna.  Aunt Helvi is still struggling, her ankles turning on her wedgies, trying to pull him away from Maxine.  The light here is bright, brighter than the TV light upstairs, from the one l00-watt bulb hung on a cord from the wooden ceiling.  Helvi begs him to let Maxine go but he won’t.  She whispers in Maxine’s ear as Maxine bends over in a faint.  She says she has found the best way to stop him when he gets this way is to say he’ll be kicked out of the family.  Then he falls asleep in a minute or so.  

Helvi sits down on the orange bench and starts taking off her support hose, showing her garters.  Maxine yells, “If you don’t stop, we’ll kick you out of the family!” 

This is the ultimate threat.  He falls to his knees with tears in his eyes and keels over, falling asleep, snoring.

Maxine decides to take a sauna with Aunt Helvi for old times’ sake. They step across him, enter the sauna room, and begin the purifying ritual.  There are clean towels and new soap on the bench outside.  There is nothing to say.  All  family secrets surface.  They soap themselves silently, throwing more and more ladles of water onto the rocks, letting the steam do it, smacking themselves with birch branches tied in bundles.

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