The Bus Trip

By Venla Mäkelä

It's 1976, Finland. A businessman organizes bus trips, transporting women from the south to the northern countryside to meet eligible bachelors at a dance. After seeing the - somewhat suspicious - ad in the local paper, Helmi, mid-forties, owner of a women's clothing store, decides to book the trip. But only because her dangerously naive shopgirl, Karin, is going. On a freezing December morning thirteen women climb into the old bus, driven by the tour organizer, Gunnar. The bus will take the women six hundred kilometers north in search of love. During the trip Helmi, who has never married, ponders her past relationships. Why didn't they ever work out? And why has her boutique lost so many customers the last two years?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Venla Mäkelä
• Release date: Dec 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370258819

Venla Mäkelä

Venla Mäkelä writes screenplays and fiction.She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Book preview

The Bus Trip

Venla Mäkelä

Copyright 2016 by Venla Mäkelä

Smashwords Edition

In 1976 a businessman in Finland organized bus trips, transporting women from the southern towns to the northern countryside to meet eligible bachelors.

Chapter 1

The atmosphere in the Kultala Ladies’ Clothing Store was static. Helmi Kultala, the owner of the boutique, helped a customer try on a striped dress. A few feet away the shopgirl, Karin—hardly a girl anymore, at thirty-two—cut a complicated Christmas decoration for the shop window. Scissors crunched thin red cardboard, then clattered to the floor when Karin dropped them. She was a large and clumsy woman with an astonishing ability to put just the two wrong garments together. Helmi corrected her, always patiently, undressing and redressing the store mannequins while explaining why she did what she did. Karin never took offense, just nodded. Style can be learned but it’s so much easier if you’re born with it, Helmi often thought. Occasionally though, Karin’s odd matching of clothing produced a smashing outcome. About a year ago she had paired a hunter green skirt with a silver belt and orange pumps, and all the items sold out within a few days. Karin was a good worker, and pleasantly quiet.

Helmi tugged the dress fabric at the customer’s waist. People said Helmi resembled Coco Chanel, and she liked to think it was true. At forty-six she still had a tiny waist and delicate ankles, unlike the present customer who was shaped like a turnip. Helmi, sensing the woman’s apprehension, said, The seam can be opened. We only need a quarter of a centimeter and it will fit perfectly.

The woman sucked in her round belly—it didn’t move much—and stared into her own eyes in the mirror. Helmi knew she was desperate to compose a polite refusal.

The woman said, I’m just... I usually gain weight around Christmas. Two or three kilos.

We have a professional alteration service. They’ll fix it in a day. In fact, in just an hour.

Right, the woman said, her voice thin.

You know, we have new dresses coming in next week, Helmi said. There’s one that I think might be just right for you.

I need a dress for the Christmas party, the woman said. This weekend.

Ah, Helmi said, letting go of the fabric. She unzipped the back of the dress and pushed the fitting-room curtain aside. The woman stepped in, and Helmi yanked the curtain closed.

Karin finished cutting the red cardboard and unfolded it, revealing an accordion line of elves, then took a roll of tape and climbed into the display window.

The customer left without buying anything. Helmi watched the woman hurry down the dark street, snow powdering up with gusts of wind. Probably going to the Halonen clothing store next, or to Sokos department store. Fine—she would end up wearing the same outfit with at least three other women at the party.

Karin had taped the elves onto the window. A silvery shadow of her fingerprint was left on the tape, the halo of the street light emphasizing it. Irritated, Helmi cut a very red apple in eight pieces and slowly ate a sliver. Outside on the street people passed by, going home; it was near five in the afternoon. A man with dark hair—a Greek restaurateur, Helmi knew—walked by. Too lightly dressed, no overcoat, his shirt sleeves pulled up. Paint stains on his clothes and hair, unshaven. He saw Helmi and smiled, his teeth white and even, waved with a half-eaten meat pie in his hand, so hot that steam curled around it. Helmi nodded stiffly, turned away. The man’s appearance made her think of dirty eighteenth-century pirates. Helmi bit into another apple slice, and the sourness of it made the front of her ears tingle. The Greek had appeared about a month ago. He always smiled at her—he smiled at everybody—trying to start conversations in terrible Finnish, his hands moving wildly.

Karin started folding knit tops. Helmi grabbed the local newspaper. The town of Kotka, population 40,000, on the southeast coast of Finland, was a cluster of factories: steel, paper, glass. In certain parts a pungent stench of pulp permanently stamped the air. The downtown, on an island, was surrounded by dockyards in nearly every direction. Helmi’s large apartment was just two blocks from the boutique, in a large Art Nouveau-style building on a hill, and it had a view of the international harbor. Giant ships from all over the world glided in and out of the narrow bay to the Gulf of Finland, day after day. The Greek must have arrived on one of the ships—how else would someone from the Mediterranean ever end up in Kotka?

There were two newspapers in town, the Social Democratic Party paper, and the National Coalition Party paper. Factory workers, artists and intellectuals subscribed to the Social Democratic paper, and businessmen and factory bosses the other. Helmi ordered both papers simply because she had a lot of time to read. Both papers were thin and had mainly the same stories—from a different political angle though, of course—and the same ads. She herself advertised in both. She also read the Helsinki newspaper to get a bigger picture.

She skimmed through one of the papers, suddenly stopping. Ha! she said, heard herself sound almost like a parrot and cleared her throat.

Karin turned to see.

Listen! ‘Attention Ladies,’ Helmi read, enthralled. ‘Attention Ladies. Men in the countryside and small towns in the north are desperate to meet women. A bus will be on the market square tomorrow, Thursday. Come see the photos, get to know the men beforehand. Take a trip to meet the men at a dance over the weekend. Reserve a seat tomorrow. Departure on Friday.’ She put the paper down. What an earth does this mean?

Karin shrugged, amused. Helmi read the ad again. ‘Attention Ladies. Men in the countryside and small towns in the north are desperate to meet women. A bus will be on the market square tomorrow, Thursday.’

There was an intense silence when they both pondered the ad. What if it was not a joke? Certainly it was. But what if it wasn’t, and what if among the men that special someone could be found? What if?

It’s a joke, Helmi said.

Yes, of course—

Some idiot joke.

Yeah. College kids, Karin said and smiled a little.

Completely ridiculous, Helmi said.

Helmi had never married. She was wealthy enough and had earned her own living since she was sixteen. The men she had loved a lot hadn’t loved her enough, and the men who had loved her enough she hadn’t loved at all. Her business had been very successful, until recently. She wasn’t quite sure what the matter was—perhaps it was the economy? She frequently followed British Harper’s Bazaar, and French and Italian Vogue, and German Burda—she had to go to Helsinki to get the magazines, but that was not a problem as she could visit friends, see exhibitions and do some shopping, and have her hair cut on the same trip. Helsinki was only two hours away, and Helmi had a good car, a ’73 Citroen, painted a rich chocolate-syrup shade.

The world was changing very fast, way faster than it used to. Younger women didn’t come to the store that often anymore, or if they did they rolled up pants legs and pulled knitted jumpsuits or dresses on backwards and giggled, then left without buying anything, leaving the fitting room a mess. Those knitted jumpsuits—they had sold like hotcakes just a few years ago, and one still saw them in magazines, just last month’s Vogue had had a gold-sequined one. So what was so funny? The shop window mannequins were perhaps a bit dated, as they had not been replaced since the mid-sixties. Helmi decided she would go to Helsinki and get new ones, those white ones with no head, slightly angular, so popular nowadays. She suddenly remembered she hadn’t checked out Karin’s display yet and stepped out to the street.

The below-zero frost burned her ankles. The way Karin had placed the male mannequin right behind the female—was his arm perhaps too high, making him look like he was about to strangle her? Would have to fix that. Otherwise pretty good. Perhaps add some jewelry, and a handbag or two.

It had started to snow, tiny icicles poking Helmi’s cheeks like pinpricks. Dark figures passed by, thick scarves wrapped around their necks and mouths, wool caps pulled down snugly on their heads, hurrying home, glancing at Helmi. Everybody seemed to wear black or gray.

Helmi went back in, her skin frozen waxy. She stomped snow off her feet and glanced at the thermometer by the door. Eighteen below zero Celsius. And this would go on God only knew how many months.

*

At exactly six o’clock Helmi and Karin stepped out of the store. Helmi turned the Closed sign to the street and locked the door. They walked up the street, holding their collars tightly. Finnish winter was especially cruel on the coast. The soles of Helmi’s Italian boots felt like damp lettuce. Dirty snow was piled into a four-foot-high embankment between the street and the pavement. The sidewalk had been scraped clean of snow with a metal scoop, leaving occasional porcelain-like, slippery slices of ice. One of these days she’d slip and break her leg. She glanced at Karin’s boots, which had thick rubbery soles. Where did you get those boots? she asked.

At Halonen, Karin said.

Helmi nodded. Her store didn’t carry Karin’s size in shoes, and not very often in clothing either. It seemed to Helmi people were getting larger, overall; teenagers always towering over their parents. In twenty years people would be giants.

The women passed a new business, the Greek’s restaurant. A hand-written banner in the window said Grand opening this Friday, welcome! Inside in the brightly lit dining room the Greek was arranging small square tables, pushing and pulling. He glanced at the women and stopped, smiled and waved. The women nodded and walked