Excerpt from Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

Excerpt from Chapter Four

Late summer passes slowly under a dark blue sky that merges in the distance with the sea. It’s peaceful, yet in these last clear weeks before the convalescent season wil begin, in the three weeks following Julia’s arrival, someone begins to creep down into the kitchen at night and stoke the industrial stove, whose long metal surfaces, new and appealing, are the special responsibility of Mrs. Anderson, the Swedish-speaking kitchen supervisor. First once, then twice, and now three times she has either discovered the stove already glowing in the morning, its belly full of leaping blue and orange flame, hot and wasteful, or was told of it by the girl whose early-morning job is to stoke both the stove and the wood-and peat-fired baking oven first thing in the morning before boiling gallons of water and popping in loaves for the staff breakfast. It would be fair to say Mrs. Anderson had privately wondered at first whether she or someone else could have forgotten to rake down the embers the night before . . . but no, the fire had clearly been fed, and anyone working in a kitchen knows the routine, the dangers there encountered, no one would purposefully leave the vents open, everyone is careful because everyone knows of someone who has been badly or even mortally burned ( usually of course a young woman with too much skirt , too much swinging hair) and she has even, herself, see a kitchen on fire, and it was even more frightening than you can imagine. This careful, competent Mrs. Anderson would not leave anything burning, and the girls know they aren’t to feed the flames again until the start of the day shift.

            And there are signs of smoked fish and meat sizzled, herring and ham taken from the cooler and eaten from the pan directly with a small sharp knife.

            Aside from this real risk of fire it is not nice to think of the intrusion, the theft of meat, and the waste of wood, all of which go against her affable institutional grain. It is not nice to think of someone coming into the kitchen, silent feet on the hard cold flooring, rustling in the kindling cupboard . . . mostly, it is the breach of the normal way of doing things that disturbs Mrs. Anderson.

            The lines of authority leading to and from the kitchen don’t necessarily cross those of the wards, but Mrs. Anderson comes to Sunny because, well, what if it’s a patient? It would need to be somebody pretty ambulatory, wouldn’t it? She leans forward. The braided bun in her dark gold and gray hair is , as always, canted to the side of her head, over the ear, a little habit begun in girlhood that is still girlish even now.

            “Right,” says Sunny from the yellow desk chair in her office. Mrs. Anderson is sitting in the second chair, resting after coming across from the third building, a vast white square containing all the domestic workrooms, the laundry and the needle rooms, the staff kahvila, the kitchen and the kitchen dorms. (Where Mrs. Anderson does not live. She herself lives a little way off in the pines, in a house that was there already when Suvanto came to be built. She lives there with sister Tutor, and she likes it very well.)

            Sunny looks through her calendar.

            “I hope you’re not angry that I ask you,” says Mrs. Anderson, slightly disappointed that she isn’t more outraged. “It may be an accident. Maybe Kusti should take a look at the stove…”

            “But three times means it’s not an accident.” Sunny glances over at her magnifiers. “And you would know, if something is out of place.”

            “Who’s doing it, I wonder,” says Mrs. Anderson, well pleased by this, putting her glasses on to better participate in the moment. Sunny slides the calendar between neat stacks of papers and files, turning it with her fingertips and pointing. Mrs. Anderson notes with approval that Sunny ‘s nails are buffed and smooth, well tended despite the rigors of constant obligatory hand washing.

            “Mark for me when you think the three times were,” she says.

            Mrs. Anderson makes three careful x’s by the appropriate dates while Sunny turns aside on her wheeled chair and pours two cups of coffee from a pot left standing on a side table, snug in a cozy given by one of the knitting up-patients.

            Mrs. Anderson takes sugar and is further pleased to sit like this, for the moment. It is early in the morning and she likes having a few minutes of quiet conversation. And also she and Sister Tutor have spoken between themselves about Sunny, as they do in fact about everyone, in their own little living room. Both agree she lives too much in the professional way, too courteous and too removed, too reserved even here, where reserve is the norm. It’s unnatural for an American. It could make her crazy, over time. They agree that she might benefit from interaction, especially here in the woods without access to outside friends. Because imagine, just imagine spending all your time up on that floor; she really shouldn’t be willing to take those upstairs ladies seriously. They’re patients, remember, not friends, and furthermore they are not, Mrs. Anderson might privately suggest, entirely normal.

            Living here is not easy, they agree; Sister Tutor lived abroad, and even taught abroad for years and years, and she remembers that feeling of being foreign. She remembers the thrill, also the exasperation, but most of all she remembers coming back and seeing, with new perspective, that it can be every hard to make friends here.

            “So,” says Sunny, “why not lock the kitchen after a certain hour?”

            “I lock some cupboards overnight already,” says Mrs. Anderson, who like anyone at her level carries a ring of keys audibly on her person, and Sunny nods absently without asking which ones: anything resembling spirits, anything expensive, and the knives.

            “You have your master key, then?” And sunny has hers as well, not on her daily ring but on a heavy chain licked in her bottom drawer. She’ll switch it over now.

            Mrs. Anderson hesitates.

            “Well, good-bye,” she says.

            Sunny, smiling distantly, nods and says, “See you.”

            Alone afterward, Sunny lifts her blotter and beneath it is the Suvanto plan. As an aid to memory she looks to think again of which centers are too populated all night, preventing passage by patients, looking, perhaps, with special attention at the routes one might take down from her own top floor. It was not possible to go invisibly past the lit nurses’ stations in the centers of the wards, to the main stairs, during sleeping hours. Or possible, but not all that likely.

from Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman. Copyright © 2010 by Maile Chapman. All rights reserved.