Read All My Puny Sorrows Online
Authors: Miriam Toews
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women, #Amish & Mennonite
God, he says. He hasn’t talked to Claudio. He doesn’t know, all he knows is that touring terrifies her before she goes and then makes her feel exhilarated when she’s actually doing it. I tell him I have to go back to Toronto quickly. Will has to get back to New York for his exams and Dan is still in Borneo and I can’t leave Nora by herself, unsupervised, for longer than a
day or two. As soon as her classes end I’ll come back here with her and we can spend the summer. I’ll see Elf every day if she’s not on tour. He understands and says he’s got everything under control and there are airplanes, right? And telephones.
We go back upstairs and my mother is telling Elf about her Scrabble ratings. She’s got an average of thirteen hundred and something and Elf is nodding, impressed, pretending she hasn’t heard it before. My mother tells Elf she made the word
cunt
the other day at the club. It’s a valid word! she says. Were you challenged? asks Elf. Nah, says my mom, the young guy I was playing with was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look at me, this old grandma laying down a dirty word. Elf smiles. She’s not saying much, though. But what is there to say? How is she feeling? Is this impromptu gathering a grotesque, fake sideshow in her opinion? Does she wonder what exactly we’re celebrating? Her failure to properly execute her plan to die? Or is she genuinely happy and relieved to be here?
C’mon, Elf! I think. Stop your hands from shaking and say something. Address your nation and let us know there’s reason to have faith in the future. Yes, there are airplanes and telephones.
I want to ask Elf if she’s afraid. I’m short of breath again. I’m smiling and trying to cover up my panic and discreetly suck oxygen into my lungs. I’d like to take Elf with me back to Toronto. I’d like for us all, my mother, my sister, my kids, Nic, Julie, her kids—even Dan and Finbar and Radek—to live in a tiny isolated community in a remote part of the world where all we have to look at is each other and we are only ever a few metres apart. It would be like an old Mennonite community in Siberia but with happiness.
Eventually we all leave. Elf is sitting at the piano, her hands moving soundlessly across the keys. When she gets up from the bench to say goodbye to my mom and me there are tears on her face. My mother lives only a few blocks away and decides to walk. She says she needs the exercise. Elf and I watch her cross the street safely, like a kid, and we all wave.
I tell Elf I love her, that I will miss her, but that I’ll be back in Winnipeg soon. Can I see her in Toronto when she’s there playing? Maybe, she says. But she’ll only be there for sixteen hours. She’ll rehearse, sleep, eat, perform, go back to the hotel, sleep, get up early to fly away. Rosamund, Claudio’s assistant, will be travelling with her this time. She tells me she loves me too. That she wants to know more about Toronto, my life there, and she asks me to write her letters, not e-mails but old-fashioned letters that will come to her in the mail in envelopes with stamps on them. I tell her I will, definitely, and will she write me back? She says she will, absolutely. Rock-solid.
I’m holding her wrists, my fingers encircle her tiny bones, and I squeeze hard until she says ouch and I apologize and let go. We don’t talk about the meaning of life, about scars, about stitches, or the number of words that we have or promises that we’ve made in the faraway past.
Then I drive around the perimeter of the city like a dog marking its territory, over bridges and under bridges, the way I used to stalk the edges of my small hometown. This is mine. Nothing bad will happen here if I patrol the streets like a crazed vigilante. Welcome to Winnipeg, the population will not change. I drop in on Julie and tell her I’m leaving early the next morning now, and I agree to call her as soon as I’m back in Toronto and I stop in at Radek’s and say goodbye and I thank him for the
food and for the shelter from the storm and when he scratches his head and says yeah but … I shrug and shrug and smile and back away and continue to thank him for his sweetness, for his grace, for his time.
I drive my mother’s car like it’s a Panzer and the streets are my enemy, and I’m feeling bad and stupid and mean. I think about setting up an appointment with a therapist when I get back to Toronto but tell myself I can’t afford it. I’ll work harder, that’s all. Besides, what would I talk about with a therapist? When my father killed himself I went to see one and he suggested I write my father a letter. It wasn’t clear what I was supposed to say in the letter. I thanked the therapist and left thinking but my father is dead now. He won’t receive this letter. What’s the point? Can I just have my one hundred and fifty-five dollars back to buy some Chardonnay and a bag of weed?
When I get back to my mother’s apartment she is sleeping, snoring very loudly, and season something of
The Wire
is blaring on her TV set and a small space heater is making noise too and the ice is still tearing itself apart on the river that runs beneath her. I stand next to her bed and look at her for a while wondering if her sleep is peaceful, if it’s the only relief she knows. I go into the spare bedroom and lie down in my clothes on top of the covers. It seems futile now to undress and go to bed in a serious way because I have to get up soon and go to the airport. I fall asleep and then wake up to a commotion in the living room. My mother is up and talking to a man.
The story is: My mom woke up and went out onto the balcony for a look at the night sky and while she was doing that she
happened to see this man, Shelby, parking his truck in the parking lot. She suddenly had a plan. She called down to Shelby to see if he’d be interested in hauling her old electric organ over to Julie’s house for her kids to practise on. She really needed someone with a truck. She would pay him. He said sure. They had a conversation in the middle of the night with her standing in her nightgown on the balcony like Juliet’s nursemaid. Now Shelby was in the apartment measuring the organ and wondering how he’d carry it down to the truck.
My mother said oh good, Yoyo, you’re up.
So Shelby and I carried the organ to his truck and my mother held the apartment doors open with her nightgown flapping wildly in the wind. It started to rain. Soon it was pouring. My mother ran upstairs to get a garbage bag to cover the organ while it was in the truck being driven to Julie’s house in the middle of the night. I asked my mother if Julie was expecting this delivery at this time and she said no, but we would deal with that when we got there.
Shelby and my mother and I squeezed into the cab of his truck and delivered the organ to Julie’s house. She and her kids were fast asleep and not answering the door, so we carried it into the shed in the yard and put a sign on her door telling her that we had brought an organ to her house and that it was in the shed. We drove back to my mother’s apartment block and she gave Shelby fifty dollars for his help. We said good night to Shelby and stood in her apartment dripping water all over the kitchen floor. There was also water all over the bathroom floor, and the river was forecast to spill its banks and lightning continued to rent the air.
Well, said my mother, that’s done at least.
I understood her need to accomplish something, however strange, something with clear rising action and a successful ending. She said she would try to get a little sleep before I had to leave but to wake her up first. I was wide awake so I went downstairs to the apartment building’s exercise room and stood on the treadmill. I pushed the start button and began to run. I was wearing chunky boots and tight jeans and my hair was spraying water all over the treadmill and onto the floor. I saw the empty swimming pool outside the glass patio doors and the list of Pool Rules written in cursive, and a thin red line against the horizon. I ran until I was drenched with sweat, gasping for air, until I pushed a button that said Cool Down, and I walked slowly on the machine, gripping the handlebars.
Dear Elf,
A handwritten letter, as commanded, as promised. We have an ant infestation. This happened while I was in Winnipeg. Our landlord believes it has something to do with the degree of filth in our apartment but I suspect it has more to do with the degree of natural decay in the universe. We’re not that filthy anyway, just messy. I’ve put little white plastic trays filled with poison all over the apartment. Will has gone back to New York. He can’t wait to see you and Nic this summer. He managed to keep
Nora alive but the place is a disaster. Apparently mess doesn’t “scan” for either one of them. Nora has a boyfriend now, apparently, a guy in one of her classes who is also here on a scholarship, from Sweden. When I got home a boy was cooking an omelette in the kitchen. There were bags from Whole Foods all over the place. Whole Foods is an expensive healthy grocery store that I never shop at. I go to a place called No Frills. This stranger in my kitchen couldn’t speak English so I had no idea what he was doing there and I had to wait until later that evening, when Nora showed up, to find out. In the meantime I went out for several long walks and in between smiled at him and pointed at a few things, nodding, etc.
I have a little room off my bedroom where I had planned to sit and work but I never go in there, it’s too cold. So I write at the dining room table or in bed. I like to listen to the mourning doves when I wake up early. They make me sad and happy and nostalgic I guess for my childhood, our childhood, and the prairies and that feeling of waking up with nothing to do but play. Do you know I used to wake up singing for a while there when I was about nine and ten? When you were in that bedroom with the wooden walls and that Mikhail Baryshnikov poster called When Push Comes to Shove. Where is that guy these days anyway? And was it his dancing you loved so much, or his body, or the fact that he left everything behind in Russia with no hope of ever returning, just for his art? Anyway, apparently mourning doves are being shot and eaten these days. Can you believe it? When I heard about it I felt the same way I
did when I heard that Joe Strummer had died. The music of my youth. When you’re fifteen and you wake up in the morning to mourning doves singing
and
The Clash you know you’re in Heaven. Anyway, Joe Strummer is dead and mourning doves are being eaten. What does that say about one’s childhood? Who is left to lead us out of the wilderness?
I don’t know a lot of people here. The only call I ever get is from a recorded voice saying Hello! Has your debt become uncontrollable? The last time it happened I whispered yes, yes, it has, and then quickly hung up like a hostage sending a cryptic message to my would-be rescuers. I’ve cashed in that RRSP thing that dad gave us a million years ago and have already spent my half of the house sale on rent in this city and yesterday my landlord told me it’s going up to some number I’ve never even heard of.
Finbar, the lawyer, is texting again. He says he’s worked through some stuff and thinks it’s okay if he and I get together again in spite of my peripatetic lifestyle. He admires my hamstrings. I have a sixth toe now. Okay, it’s a bunion. Sometimes, if I’m doing a lot of walking, it throbs like a little penis on the side of my foot. I also have some weird golf ball–sized thing growing on the back of my heel which I think is called Haglund’s deformity. Our dog had one of those once, remember, and Uncle Ray gave her one of his horse tranquilizers and then hacked it off with that gutting knife? I just remember you carrying her around for a couple of weeks because she couldn’t walk afterwards. Or you put her in that little wagon and
pulled her everywhere. Would you do that for me if my deformity gets out of hand? Also, I was in a little accident the other day, did I tell you about that? Just a tiny fender-bender but with insurance here in Ontario being very expensive and blah blah and still having Manitoba insurance (whoops) I’m not sure that I’ll be covered and I might have to pay a million dollars to the woman for her totally unscathed BMW SUV. She actually got out of her car and took a picture of her absolutely pristine bumper with her cellphone while I stood there (in my cut-offs and green windbreaker, holding a six of Heinekens) saying c’mon, you are NOT serious.
Nora and I are conducting a bit of an experiment. We’re attempting to make eye contact with Torontonians. It’s frustrating. People are startled when we look at them and quickly look away or somehow will themselves not to even look in the first place. We’ve noticed that some people visibly will turn their heads away from us and even their shoulders so they’re not tempted to look. Today Nora and I went for a quick walk in our neighbourhood (Little Malta) and of the sixty-eight people we passed on the sidewalk only seven of them returned our gaze and of those seven only one smiled and it might not have been a real smile but a grimace due to gas. Nora and I pretend to be indifferent to it, but it hurts! We’ve wondered if it’s because of how we dress or if we emit some kind of vibe that makes people not want to have any contact at all with us or if we seem desperate or dangerous or weird. Well, I have to run to pick up Nora from a rehearsal and get her to a dentist appointment on time. In the meantime, I’ll be
thinking of you and missing you and … floating on the wings of nothingness.
Your humble and obedient servant, Y (see? I have read the letters of your poet lovers).
Elf is not answering the phone. I call my mother and she says yes, that’s true, she’s not. Well, sometimes she does, well, actually, no, I guess she doesn’t. Well, sometimes, yes, sometimes but mostly not. Really not at all. Once in a blue moon, but basically no, she doesn’t.
I can’t bear to hear my mother waffle like this between hope and despair. My mother tells me that if she’s there, at Elf’s place, when the phone rings she does encourage Elf to answer it but even then it’s a struggle and mostly Elf wins and the phone goes unanswered.
I can hear the trumpets sounding on her laptop indicating that another Scrabble game is about to begin.
Dear Elf,
Today I went for a long walk and ended up watching ducks dive headfirst into Grenadier Pond in High Park. I wondered for how long they could hold their breath and I counted seventy-eight seconds before one came up for air. What is it for humans? A minute? Today I heard a pretty good conversation on the streetcar. This guy got on and he was swearing his head off, really foul stuff like that fucking bitch can suck my cock if she fucking thinks … and the streetcar driver said hey, whoah, you can’t swear
like that on the streetcar and the guy stopped and looked at him and then he said he was really sorry, really sorry, he understood, and he got off at the next stop and started swearing again as soon as he’d stepped off the streetcar.
I miss you. Nora and I went up to the top of the CN Tower yesterday. We’re trying to understand our new city from a bird’s-eye view. We put a loonie into a powerful set of binoculars but we still couldn’t see you. We went up to the rooftop bar at the Park Hyatt and I had a glass of twelve-dollar wine and we shared some olives and almonds. We gazed off a little despondently in a westerly direction.
We
miss you. Nora asked me if I regretted having children which shocked me and made me feel like a terrible mother, like I’d been giving her the impression that she was slowly crushing the life right out of me. But then she went on to say that she was thinking of never getting pregnant because she couldn’t bear the thought of her body housing an alien and ballooning into some grotesque caricature of womanhood. I hope she doesn’t have an eating disorder. I’ve read that eating disorders are often the fault of overbearing mothers, but I’m so underbearing it’s not even funny. Maybe she’s imagined an overbearing mother to compensate for my lack of bearing and it’s this imaginary pushy mother that’s caused her to have an eating disorder. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, not really. I shouldn’t try to blame something that doesn’t even exist on an imagined imaginary mother. I try to remember how skinny you were when you were her age. You still are!
So while we were out there on the rooftop bar an elderly suntanned man with a World Series ring, wearing
white leather shoes and no socks, told Nora she was beautiful. He asked me if I was her sister. Ha ha, oh the oft-told jokes of stale old men on the make. He said Nora should be a model. I said well isn’t that flattering but no, she’s a dancer—with the words back off you transparent creep radiating unspoken from my assassin eyes. We walked all the way home singing mash-ups of old songs that both of us knew. It’s so cute when she says things like, what! You know “Torn Between Two Lovers”? She even let me hold her hand for a minute or two. She told me that I was surprisingly attractive considering my features, which made me want to break down and bawl with gratitude. Like any fourteen-year-old, she’s not exactly wildly indiscriminate with her compliments. Her feet are ravaged from dancing. They look like Grandpa Werner’s. Remember when he did puppet shows with them and made us scream? I massage them for her and afterwards my own hands are callused and raw from scraping them against her thorny feet. I asked her about her little Swedish boyfriend (to which she took exception, his name is Anders and he’s apparently ripped) and if they were able to communicate in any language. She said no, dreamily, like it was perfect that way. I wanted to ask her if she was having sex with him but I didn’t have the nerve. She’s not even fifteen. I couldn’t handle the answer. I’m a useless mother, my god.
So I called Will in New York last night and he told me he had rats in his apartment. He asked me how you were. He misses you too! Speaking of rats, I think, on top of the ants, we have mice, which I guess is comparatively speaking a relief. In Toronto they say that if you have
mice you don’t have rats and vice versa because rats eat mice. I wonder if rats eat mourning doves. Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream where a rat gets stuck under my shirt and I can’t get it out of there and I have to pound away on my chest until the thing drops dead and bloodied onto the floor and I’m exhausted. The power keeps going out. I miss you like crazy.
Beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived, Y.
(That’s what Madame de Staël wrote at the end of a letter to some Chevalier guy, but now it’s what I’ve written to my Elfrieda.)
Write me back, Amps!
p.s. or pick up your goddamn phone.
p.p.s. Was talking to mom the other day. She says that you’re listening non-stop to Górecki’s Symphony Number Three? What is that one about?