Free True by Riikka Pulkkinen

village.”
    Elsa nods. Suddenly I feel as if I’ve said something wrong.
    â€œYou’ll hardly need to do any heavy catering around here. My husband comes and goes, and you’re free to go where you like in your free time.”
    I don’t let my doubt show. When did stew go out of style?
    I glance surreptitiously at the man. Do I know him from somewhere? I realize that I’ve seen him in the newspaper. With a little effort I remember strolling through an exhibition of his incomprehensible paintings, which were too modern for me. I like old things, clear lines and faces that stay where they belong without breaking into pieces.
    Elsa drinks the rest of her coffee. I’m already infatuated with her. It was Elsa who I fell in love with in the beginning.
    She has thick brown hair and eyebrows that look like little fuzzy caterpillars. Her smile is funny, like she’s constantly, tirelessly looking for someone to play with, like she might say, without thinking, to anyone she was talking to, come on, let’s go in the kitchen and get ourselves a big slice of Bundt cake and have a fairy coffee party.
    I immediately think she’s the kind of person you have just one more cup of coffee with, bake an enormous batch of rolls with on a rainy evening, or sit and cool down with on the porch of a lakeshore sauna. She would suggest one more swim, challenge you to a race across the bay. After swimming she would comb her hair in the candlelight, reflected in the cracked cabin mirror, and give you both French braids. But in those years Elsa has disguised herself in objectivity. She is making a career, standing on a dais in a lecture hall presenting her theories, writing reports and staying up late composing articles for international journals.
    In those years, Elsa isn’t extravagant. She’s more assertive, adult, impenetrable. She thinks that a woman has to hide certain things about herself to be believed. Later she’ll get her playfulness back. When she turns forty, she’ll dance on the table. At her fiftieth birthday party she’ll make a Freud and a Jung out of cardboard and sit them down at the dinner table. At her sixtieth, she’ll end the night lying on the floor giggling.
    But in those years she is businesslike. She’s a scholar above all, then a mother, then a wife. Deep inside, at some level in the negative numbers, she’s hiding a young woman who swims across lakes, a girl who at the age of fourteen celebrated winning a ski race by pouring blueberry soup on her head. I can see that woman in spite of her zealous attempts to conceal her, and I fall in love with her immediately.
    THERE’S ONE THING I don’t yet know as I sit here across from Elsa and her husband. As summer makes its entrance outside the window and my spoon clinks in my coffee cup, I don’t know that I’m becoming a person Elsa will hate. Or if not hate, then at least disdain.
    But now she’s about to decide that I am the person she’ll choose. She’s slightly hesitant, wants to discuss the matter with her husband, deliberates between me and the well-wrinkled former nanny of five they interviewed earlier. I’m less experienced but she likes me better, she can’t deny it. The wrinkly one made her think of a matron in an old movie with a rolling pin in her hand. She’d like to give me the job.
    To confirm her decision she puts the little girl on my lap.
    The girl looks bedazzled and curious and gawky, as anyone does when they’re first tossed fresh into the world.
    She’s warm, heavy, and slightly damp. She smells like milk.
    She stretches her hand out toward me and takes hold of my nose without a moment’s hesitation, looking at me in amazement. She shifts her gaze to the plate of cookies and bends over them, squirming a little so that the back seam of my dress starts to tighten. Cookie, she says. I could give her back to her mother—I’m hot and sweat