Read All My Puny Sorrows Online
Authors: Miriam Toews
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women, #Amish & Mennonite
Answering or not answering the phone has become symbolic of Elf’s ability to cope with life. Elf has told my mother that the sound of a ringing phone has, for her, Hitchcockian implications and we both say ah, yeah, right, hmmmm … over the phone. I spoke to my mother this afternoon. She bore news. She told me that her sister Tina is on her way to Winnipeg for a visit and to spend time with Elf. She’s driving her van across the country from Vancouver to help my mother who is exhausted, I can tell, but not admitting to it. I asked her but why, is it that bad? She said it’s not that bad but it’s also not that good. I asked
her how exactly Elf was doing and she said well, you know, the same really.
Somewhere in between not bad and not good, I said.
That’s about the long and the short of it, she said. She’s not doing the tour.
What? Really?
That’s what she says today.
I asked her if Elf was getting my letters and she said she didn’t know, she’d ask. I phoned Nic at work and left a message for him to call me back. I phoned Will in Brooklyn and asked him how he was doing and he whispered fine, fine, yeah. He was in the library. He is always in a library or occupying Wall Street when I call him. He asked how things were. I told him great, good. He whispered how’s Elf? And I whispered back pretty good, fine, yeah.
Someone has been sawing off all the branches of the tree outside my dining room window. I like to sit in my T-shirt and panties at the dining room table first thing in the morning and listen to the un-eaten mourning doves and write. The branches covered virtually the entire window and prevented the neighbours from seeing me sitting here in my underwear. But now the branches are coming away one by one and revealing me to my neighbours slowly like a puzzle taking shape.
Dear Elf,
When will you write me back? One thing I’ve noticed about men is that they become uncomfortable and a bit angry when, after having sex with them, you cry your eyes out for a few hours and refuse to tell them why you’re upset.
Finbar and I are so incompatible. I only sleep with him because he wants to and he’s good-looking—I’m pathetic, I know. Louche. And I’m a horrible role model—a mother to a soon-to-be or already sexually active daughter. Seriously, who wants a mother who buys flavoured condoms from the machine at the Rivoli? (I was caught off guard and that’s all they had.) Although Nora doesn’t actually know about Finbar because I make sure that all our sad outings are brief and furtive and spaced far apart like eclipses. Just now, this second, telling you about this stuff makes me want to cry my eyes out. I think I might just do that. I’d like to fall in love again. I wish Dan and I didn’t fight so much—he’s a good dad to Nora when he’s not in Borneo. You’re so lucky to have Nic! He’s so lucky to have you! Say hi to him by the way. How’s his kayak?
Anders (N’s little Swedish boyfriend) just told me he’d blocked up the toilet, and that he’d messed up the washing machine when he tried to wash all his clothes in one go—why is he doing his laundry here???—so now his clothes are locked in the machine, and the machine is leaking water into the towels he used to cover the floor. He indicated all of this with charades and drawings because of our language barrier.
It’s evening now. Nora and Anders have gone to a birthday party. Before they left I forced them to show me some dance moves, something they were working on at school, and they were reluctant at first but finally agreed to do a quick one and oh my god, it was amazing. They’re just kids but suddenly they were these world-weary
though incredibly agile lovers swooning, then dying, then being reunited. They were so grave, so measured and yet free at the same time in all their movements. You have to come here to see them dance! When they were finished, bent and twisted into some kind of expressive shape which they held for an impossibly long time before standing up and bowing sweetly, I burst into applause—I was trying not to cry—and they were instantly transformed back into ordinary, awkward teens, shuffling out the door, bumping into each other, saying sorry, laughing nervously, holding hands shyly when a second ago it seemed like they were the original inventors of passion and grace. We’ve lost our power.
I was trying to edit my stupid novel with the lights off but the only key I can hit in the dark without missing is the delete key. Maybe it’s a sign. By the way, I checked Wikipedia to see what it said about Górecki’s Third Symphony. It’s also called
The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
and it’s about the ties between a mother and a child. Have you seen her lately? Did she tell you that she finally found her lost hearing aid in the dryer?
I should go now and make my rounds, as the Hiebert kids (remember their station wagon and the garbage bags of pot plants?) used to say when they were selling drugs. I’ve unblocked the toilet but I still have to figure out how to fix the washing machine so it doesn’t flood the basement and wash us all into Lake Ontario.
I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner (to quote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra). Yoli.
p.s. There’s a hill in Toronto, which is exciting. You have to walk up it if you’re going north and down it if you’re going south. The shore of Lake Ontario used to come up far higher. It would have been lapping at this third floor window of mine up until about 13,000 years ago. Then it was known as Lake Iroquois and when the ice dam melted the water drained away and became its present size, so small in comparison, a shadow of its former self. There’s a road in north Toronto called Davenport that follows the Native trail that used to run along the ancient shoreline. I’m sure it was called something other than Davenport then, or maybe davenport was a word dreamed into being by the First Nations people who became tired of sitting on rocks and in canoes and imagined something softer, with springs. Did you know that the various parts of the earth, the continents, are moving closer together at the same speed that fingernails grow? Or are they moving farther apart? Now I can’t remember but anyway it’s the pace I am interested in. And its relation to grief, which you could say, in this context, passes quickly or lasts forever.
p.p.s. Sometimes when I’m working on my book I close my eyes and imagine that I’m in Winnipeg meeting you at some café, maybe the Black Sheep on Ellice Avenue. I can see you smiling now as I walk up the street. You’ve got us a table by the window, there’s a small pile of library books beside you, French ones, and you’ve ordered me a flat white and you’re wearing a half-sexy/half-ironic miniskirt and billowing artist smock and you’re knocking your green marker against your teeth while you smile at me like
you’ve got something to tell me, something that will make me laugh. Today I’m working with my front door wide open because it’s so warm. A condo is going up across the street so it’s very loud. Every five minutes a guy yells heads up and then a few seconds later there’s a massive crash and another dust cloud. I miss you, Elf.
It’s been almost two weeks since I said goodbye to my sister in the doorway of her home in Winnipeg and promised to write letters. Now it’s May, the day of Elfrieda’s opening concert at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It’s back on. She changed her mind again. Nic called me yesterday to say the rehearsal had gone very well and Elf seemed excited about opening night even if she looked a little drained.
My mother phoned me today while I was walking through a muddy park next to the lake. When my cellphone rang I looked at it for a second before answering.
She’s done it again, said my mother.
I squatted in the mud. And said, tell me.
My mother said that she and her sister Tina had gone to Elf’s place to say hi, even though Elf had asked them politely to stay away so that she could prepare herself for the concert. Elf didn’t answer the door when they knocked. The door was locked but my mother had a key and let herself in. She found Elf lying on the floor in the bathroom. She had cut her wrists and she had drunk Javex. The bathroom reeked of bleach. Her breath and skin reeked of bleach. She was covered in blood.
She was conscious, alive. She held out her arms to my mother. She begged my mother to take her to the train tracks. My mother held her and Tina called 911 and they came to take Elf back to the hospital. She’s in Intensive Care now on a respirator because her throat has closed from drinking the bleach. Her wrists will be okay.
I’m at the airport. I’m waiting for the plane to take me home to my sister and my mother. I bought cream at Lush to rub onto Elf’s body. She has a surprisingly beautiful body for a woman in her late forties. Her legs are slim and firm. She has muscular thighs. Her smile is an event. She laughs so hard. She makes me laugh so hard. She gets surprised. Her eyes open wide, comically, she can’t believe it. Her skin is pristine, smooth and pale. Her hair is so black and her eyes so green like they’re saying go, go, go! She doesn’t have horrible freckles and moles and facial hair like me and big bones poking out like twisted rebar at the dump. She’s petite and feminine. She’s glamorous and dark and jazzy like a French movie star. She loves me. She mocks sentimentality. She helps me stay calm. Her hands aren’t ravaged by time and her breasts don’t sag. They’re small, pert, like a girl’s. Her eyes are wet emeralds. Her eyelashes are too long. The snow weighs them down in the winter and she makes me cut them shorter with our mother’s sewing scissors so they don’t obscure her vision. I knocked over a tray of bath bombs the size of tennis balls, bright yellow, onto the floor and I couldn’t figure out how to pick them up. The woman said it was okay. I can’t remember now if I paid for the cream. I’m going home.
WHEN ELF WENT AWAY TO EUROPE
my mother decided to emancipate herself as well and enrolled in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist. By this time the church elders had washed their hands of the Von Riesen women. When she graduated she turned the spare bedroom into an office and a steady stream of sad and angry Mennonites came to our house, usually in secret because therapy was seen as lower even than bestiality because at least bestiality is somewhat understandable in isolated farming communities. Sometimes my mother didn’t get paid by her clients with money. They
were often farmers and poor mechanics and housewives with no income of their own. So sometimes Elf and I would come home to find frozen sides of beef in the hallway or chickens in the garage and piles of eggs on the bench in the entrance. Sometimes a man would be in the driveway lying under our car and fixing the transmission or a strange woman would be mowing the lawn or watering the flowers with a gaggle of children traipsing along behind her.
Our mother found it impossible to ask her clients for payment if they couldn’t afford it but the clients insisted on paying her back somehow. One day Elf and I came home from somewhere and found two large bullets on the kitchen table. We asked our mother why they were there and she said one of her clients had asked her to keep them for her so she wouldn’t be tempted to fire them into her head. But how could she fire two bullets into her own head? Elf asked. The other one was for her daughter, our mother said. So she wouldn’t be leaving her alone.
Elf and I went into the yard and sat on the rusty swing set. Elf explained the situation to me. Why doesn’t the woman just run away with her daughter? I asked Elf. She didn’t answer me. I asked again. Why doesn’t the woman just run a— Elf cut me off. It doesn’t work that way, she said. More people kill themselves in jail than attempt to escape. Would you kill me first before you killed yourself if we were in terrible danger? I asked her. Well, I don’t know, she said, it would depend on the type of danger. Would you want me to?
When my mother and her sister Tina were kids they decided to race each other on bicycles and rather than call off the race or waste time going around a massive semi truck that
was blocking their path they skidded under it and came out on the other side, unscathed and laughing.
One winter evening when Elf was sixteen and I was ten she organized a political debate of party candidates. She made lecterns out of cardboard boxes festooned with party paraphernalia and used our mother’s Scrabble timer to keep our speeches under control. My father was the Conservative candidate, my mother was the Liberal candidate, Elf was the NDP candidate and I was a Communist. Although I couldn’t say I was a Communist because of my parents’ awful associations with Russia. Elf had once announced at dinnertime that she had a crush on Joe Zuken, the leader of the Communists in Winnipeg, and my mother had to Heimlich my father who began to choke to death on this news. After my mother had rescued him he said he wished she hadn’t because if Elf was planning to marry (a crush had already led to marriage) Joe Zuken then he, my father, was finished with this tawdry life. Anyway, I had to say I was an Independent. We debated the pros and cons of women’s rights and of euthanasia. Elf won, hands down. She was prepared and fervent. She had statistics to back her points and a tone that was relentlessly persuasive but always measured and respectful. She was eloquent and funny and she won.
Mind you, the judges were friends that she’d made at the music conservatory in Winnipeg and she’d paid for their efforts, secretly, with beer. She was in love with one of them, I could tell. He wore a rope belt and a paint-splattered T-shirt. He sat cross-legged and barefoot in my father’s reading chair. Elf had made sure that a sliver of her blue, lacy bra was peeking
out from her V-neck sweater. He couldn’t stop looking at her, he shifted in his seat but his eyes never strayed, until my father cleared his throat loudly and said I say, sir, Your Honour in the green La-Z-Boy, are you hearing a word of what the others of us are saying?
The airplane lands. My mother and my aunt Tina are waiting. They’re standing at the bottom of the escalator, arms linked, watching me as I float down to meet them. They look like tiny twins to me, fierce, grim-faced, getting down to the business of bearing another cross. They smile at me, murmur Plautdietsch words of endearment, and then I’m in their arms, so strong. We embrace and say nothing. I don’t have a suitcase, we don’t have to wait, and we walk quickly to the car.