All My Puny Sorrows (19 page)

Claudio hugged me. He said he had to run, he had a car waiting outside, but we’d meet again. His cellphone rang.
Arrivederci
, Claudio, I said. And thanks, thank you,
grazie
for the beautiful flowers.

When I came back into the room, Elf said, I know. Don’t be mad. And don’t preach, okay? Gift of life. You sounded like an old Mennonite, like what’s his name.

I’m not mad, I said. I am an old Mennonite. So are you. You’re so resentful of everything.

That’s true, said Elf. That’s very true.

Yeah, but of what exactly?

Elf said nothing.

Hey, I said. I had a dream that I was leaving everyone I knew, that everyone I knew and loved had gathered together on a sunny afternoon to wave goodbye to me. I didn’t want to go then, when I saw them all gathered and was reminded of their love, but I had to go.

Elf asked me, Did you see me in that dream? I said yes, of course, you were there too, smiling and waving. Elf asked me if I had ever read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I said no. This is the first line, she said, and recited it: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.”

Okay, I said, interesting. And then how does it go?

Read it yourself, she said. I can’t believe you haven’t read it. Maybe instead of poring over the Hobo Museum newsletter you could revisit an old classic.

I told her that it seemed like we were having some kind of
Karate Kid
conversation here, was she trying to impart wisdom or something? You’re still lecturing me on what to read, I said. That’s good. Elf told me her throat was sore, she couldn’t talk anymore. Yeah, okay, sure, I said.

You don’t believe me, she whispered.

Yeah, yeah, of course I do.

We were quiet. Elf drifted in and out of sleep or something resembling sleep. I sat on the chair next to her. I imagined running headlong through the glass walls and shattering them to smithereens. The day before my father died he dreamed that
he had somersaulted boyishly through concrete walls. Over and over and over and over and out!

I had my manuscript with me, still in the plastic Safeway bag. I took it out of my bag and wrote
A Life Time of Resentment
on the cover. Then I crossed that out and wrote
A Devotion to Sadness
(which according to Chateaubriand in his
The Genius of Christianity
is “the noblest achievement of civilization” so take that Mennonite busybodies who tell me in sanctimonious singsong and with bland pat-a-cake faces that my father’s suicide was
evil
) then
Smithereens
, then
Untitled
. Then
Entitled
. Then I crossed it all out and sketched Elf in her bed.

I watched Elf sleep and I watched the nurses scurry around and laugh with each other behind their desk. I knew they couldn’t stand having Elf there, a failed suicide. A nutcase. They were terse with her and no doctor ever came to talk to us. I went to the counter and asked if I could speak to Elf’s psychiatrist. They told me that he had been called away to an emergency. I left the room and went downstairs to find my mother and my aunt and to text Nora in Toronto. I couldn’t find them in the cafeteria and Nora wasn’t texting back. I went back up to Intensive Care and there was Elf’s doctor. He was standing at the nurses’ desk. He was wearing a visor, like a jeweller. He was wearing ankle socks. He was the psychiatrist. I walked over to him and introduced myself and asked him if he had talked with Elfrieda lately.

I tried to, he said, but she wouldn’t speak.

Sometimes she doesn’t, that’s true. But she’s willing to write things down on paper.

I don’t have time for reading while I’m on the job, he said. He smiled and two of the nurses giggled like they were standing next to Elvis in
Girls! Girls! Girls!

Yeah, I said. Ha. But I mean—

Look, he said. I’m not interested in passing a notebook back and forth between us and waiting while she scribbles things down. It’s ridiculous.

I know, I said. I understand. It can be laborious but I’m just, I mean, you’re a shrink, right, so you must have seen this sort of thing before?

Of course I understand it, he said, I just don’t have time for it.

No? I ask.

Look, he says, if she wants to get better she’ll have to make an attempt to communicate normally. That’s all I’m saying.

I know, I said, that’s … But she’s a psych patient, right? I mean isn’t she supposed to have some eccentricities? I mean doesn’t she—isn’t it challenging for you? I mean, like, in the field of psychotherapy. Wouldn’t you welcome this opportunity to really apply all of your studies to—

Excuse me, you’re who again? he said.

I told you. I’m her sister. My name’s Yolandi. I honestly believe that her silence is a way of her unfitting herself for the real world, do you know what I mean? You can’t take it personally. It’s her way—

Of course I know what you mean, he said. I’m not sure that I agree with you but of course I understand you. I’m telling you that I don’t have time for a silly game that—

Silly game? I said. Sorry, I said, but did you just call it a silly game?

He was walking away from me. Wait! I said. Wait. Wait, wait. A silly game? The shrink stopped and turned to look at me.

After just one visit with her you’re refusing to help? I said. You’re some kind of esteemed psychiatrist. You’re just fucking
dismissing her out of hand right in front of her? My sister is vulnerable. She’s tortured. She’s your patient! She’s begging for help but wants to assert one small vestige of individual power over her life. Surely even a first-year psych student would understand the significance of that stance. Are you not … do you not have any professional curiosity, even? Are you alive or what the fuck?

I’ll have to ask you to keep your voice down, said one of his nurses from behind her bunker. She aimed a semi-automatic machine gun at my head. The shrink spread his legs and folded his arms and stared at me while I ranted. He smiled at the nurse and shrugged and appeared to be enjoying himself, like I was a giant wave he was really looking forward to surfing later in the day after pounding back a pitcher of margaritas with his buddies.

Are you so hostile and impatient and complacent that you won’t even let her communicate with you with words written down on a piece of paper? I said. Why can’t you just do your job? I don’t want to argue but I mean are you honestly telling me that you won’t listen to her?

Listen, said the shrink. You’re not the first family member to take out your frustration on me. Okay? Are you finished? I’m sorry. He walked away, down the hallway and into a room.

Because, I shouted after him, if you won’t help her then who will?

I apologized to the nurses for causing a scene. I’m so angry, I said. I’m so desperate. I’m so terrified. I’m so angry. I don’t know what to do. I repeated these phrases. The nurses nodded
and one of them said yes, that’s understandable. Your sister isn’t co-operating and—

I cut her off. I said no, please. Please don’t blame it on my sister. I just can’t bear to hear that right now. She’s not evil. I was whispering. I willed myself not to raise my voice. I can’t take that right now, I said. I didn’t say she was evil, said the nurse, I said she wasn’t— I put my hands up around my head like I was trying on a new pair of headphones. I had lost my mind. I thanked them for their something or other and left Intensive Care.

I walked down six flights of stairs but on the second one my cell rang and I said hello. Hey Yolandi, said the voice on the other end. It’s Joanna. (Somebody from the orchestra.) I just wanted to tell you how very sorry we are about Elfrieda and I’m wondering if there’s anything we can do. I’d like to send something. I just don’t know what. Flowers?

Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don’t know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred percent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health—to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will be my failure, not yours. I am the professional. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain. I am absolutely committed to your care. (At this point I could hear Joanna saying Yolandi? Yolandi?) I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid. I love you. I want to cure you and I won’t stop trying to help you. You are my patient. I am your doctor. You are my patient. Imagine a doctor phoning
you at all hours of the day and night to tell you that he or she had been reading some new stuff on the subject of whatever and was really excited about how it might help you. Imagine a doctor calling you in an important meeting and saying listen, I’m so sorry to bother you but I’ve been thinking really hard about your problems and I’d like to try something completely new. I need to see you immediately! I’m absolutely committed to your care! I think this might help you. I won’t give up on you.

Yolandi? said Joanna. Are you okay?

Sorry, I said, hi. I’m sorry. Sorry.

Are you—

Yeah, flowers. Good, thank you.

I PHONED MY MOTHER ON HER CELL
but there was no answer. I saw an orderly who had once been the lead singer of a local punk band. He was stacking trays and whistling next to a poster that listed the symptoms of Flesh Eating Disease.

I went outside into the sunshine and walked all the way back, along the river, to my mother’s apartment. Well, I tried to walk along the river the whole way but was stopped by a group of young people piling sandbags around an apartment block. The river’s flooding again, they said. It was a bit of a party for them. A day off school.

My mother and Aunt Tina weren’t at the apartment but there was a note saying they had gone to East Village to visit Signora Bertolucci, whose real name was Agata Warkentine but who was always referred to, by everyone other than Elf, as Mrs. Ernst Warkentine. Even funeral announcements in East Village omitted the given first name of a woman to ensure she’d forever and ever (and ever and ever) be known only as her husband’s wife. They had taken my aunt’s van. Then I remembered that I had left the car in the underground parking lot and so I walked back, this time not along the river but through the dusty city streets, to the hospital.

I went up to the sixth floor to check on Elf again but Nic was there and they were staring deeply into each other’s eyes and the curtain was half closed and the nurses all pretended not to notice me or were busy calling 911 to get me the hell out of there so I left again and this time went all the way down to the underground parking lot to get the car and drive it back to my mother’s apartment. A part of me had been hoping that maybe the woman I screamed at would have written in the dust on my back windshield that she forgave me but she hadn’t.

My mother and my aunt were still not back from visiting Signora Bertolucci. I googled things on my mom’s laptop. I was trying to find out more about these drugs, Seconal and Nembutal. I scrolled down the various subject headings that Google had for helping people to die. I was worried about cops taking me in for questioning and tracking my history on this computer. I kept googling. I paused for a second when I read:
Is it possible to help someone die with magic?
And I felt good
about myself, proud, when I didn’t click on it. Elf would congratulate me too. Let’s be rational, Yolandi! The phone rang. It was my mother. She was at the hospital. I asked her how Elf was doing. She told me that Elf was having her blood tested. For what? She wasn’t sure. But there was something else. My aunt had fainted.

At the hospital? I asked.

Well, no, she fainted in East Village first, at Mrs. Ernst Warkentine’s, but she came to quickly and I got her to lie down for a while and then she had something to eat and after that she seemed fine again. But now …

You’re at the hospital? I asked again.

Yes, we drove here directly to see Elf but on the way, out by Deacon’s corner, Tina passed out again in the van.

What? That’s so strange.

I know. And so I just drove up to Emergency here immediately and now they’ve admitted her. And they’ve put a cast on her arm. She broke it when she fainted.

Auntie Tina?

Yes, she’s having some kind of pain in her chest. She’s in acute cardiology, on the fifth floor.

Seriously?

Yes, so …

Okay, I said.

I hung up. I called right back and apologized. I meant to say okay, I’ll be right there. My mother laughed. I laughed a bit too. I knew she was holding back tears. I told her again that I’d be right there and she whispered something I couldn’t make out. Had she said what’s the difference? My mother has been in and out of Emergency a thousand times with her own heart
and breathing issues but this was the first time Tina had landed there as far as I knew.

On the way back to the hospital I thought about my crazy outburst in the parking lot. It’s my past, I said out loud to nobody in the car. I had figured it out. I was Sigmund Freud. Mennonite men in church with tight collars and bulging necks accusing me of preposterous acts and damning me to some underground fire when I hadn’t done a thing. I was an innocent child. Elf was an innocent child. My father was an innocent child. My cousin was an innocent child. You can’t flagrantly march around the fronts of churches waving your arms in the air and scaring people with threats and accusations just because your family was slaughtered in Russia and you were forced to run and hide in a pile of manure when you were little. What you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behaviour on the street. You can’t go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them
evil
when they destroy themselves. You will never walk down a street and feel a lightness come over you. You will never fly.

A heart attack comes from the pain of remembering. That was something I’d read somewhere, maybe in the Hobo Museum newsletter, which ended each obituary with “We’ll see you down the road!” So Elfrieda was reminding my aunt of her own daughter’s suicide? Of the agony that precedes it and the helplessness and terror she felt trying to prevent it from happening? Or does a heart attack come from clogged arteries and fat around the waist and a two-pack-a-day habit and trans fats, not memories of pain and horror and unbearable sorrow? Because maybe one causes the other. Cardiologists and shrinks should join forces and start new hospitals. I’ll get a petition going like my father
did for a library and Elf did for Stevie Ray Vaughan being the world’s best guitarist. I’m quite sure the continents will fuse back together before cardiology and psychiatry join forces.