All My Puny Sorrows (31 page)

Late last night I went downstairs to say hi and she wasn’t there. There was a note on the table. Yoli, she’d written, I’ve gone to a lecture on Eritrea. There’s schaubel zup and schmooa kumpst in the fridge. I called her on her cellphone and when she finally answered I heard raucous voices and whooping in the background. Where are you? I asked her. It’s after eleven. She said hang on, hey guys, where am I? I heard a guy answer her and she told me she was at the Motorcycle Café on Queen Street and somewhere having a burger and watching the game. Extra innings. By yourself? I said and she told me no, no, there’s a huge gang of people here and then there was more laughing and yelling and eventually I couldn’t hear her at all.

I’m sitting on my couch, the one my mother tried to give away to the neighbours, and my tears are beginning to sting my eyes. A low point is when you can’t even depend on your tears not to hurt you. I’ve been next door, at the other neighbour’s. Her name is Amy. She’s a new mom, I see her almost every day, taking her baby for a walk. A month ago she found a fallen starling on the sidewalk and took it home to nurse it back to health. She built a little house for it in her back bedroom, with a branch and a Frisbee full of water, and put live earthworms in a bowl of dirt and she fed him baby food and apple sauce on the end of a tiny Popsicle stick and she played starling songs to him so he could learn how to sing in his language. After about three weeks of taking care of him she decided that the bird could be on his own now and should leave the nest she’d made for him and she opened the door of her back bedroom and the starling hopped onto her shoulder and then the two of them walked
along the upstairs hallway, down the stairs, along the downstairs hallway towards the open back door and then suddenly the bird saw his chance, the rectangle of light from the open door, and he flew off. Amy passed her iPhone to me and said you want to see the bird flying away? My husband filmed it. The bird was a small dark blur flying through the air and out into the light and up, gone. He moved so fast. As I watched this short video something inside of me smashed, it was so startling and irreversible that starling’s departure, and I was crying but trying not to, but it felt like I’d been tear-gassed.

———

Now I’m looking at a box of cards sent from Elf over the years. Every occasion remembered, all of them written in her trademark coloured felt markers. Look at all these exclamation points, I think. All these occasions—birthdays, Christmases, graduations—marked with emphatic endings. And then again. We reconfigure and we start again and we start again. We huddle in a field with our arms around each other, our helmets knocking, and we rework our strategy and then we run another play. When I was a kid I told Elf (or had I only told myself?) that I would keep her heart safe. I would keep it preserved forever in a silk bag like Mary Shelley did with the heart of her drowned poet husband or in my gym bag or in the top drawer of my dresser or tucked into that hole in that ancient tree in Barkman Park in our faraway hometown next to where I stashed my Sweet Caps. Now I’m crashing around my house searching for those felt-tipped markers. If I can find the pink one and the green one I’ll be okay until the morning. I search and then I give up searching.

Living with my mother is like living with Winnie the Pooh. She has many adventures, getting herself into and out of trouble guilelessly, and all of these adventures are accompanied by a few lines of gentle philosophy. There’s always a little bit more to learn every time you get your head stuck in a honey pot if you’re my mother.

She was out all night last night. This morning she showed up at the front door—she’d forgotten her keys—with her hair sticking up all over the place and her nightgown tucked into her pants. Oh good, you’re up! she said. I forgot my key!

She had just returned from the sleep clinic where she spent the night with electrodes on her head, dreaming. The sleep technician got angry with her because she was reading her book. She told my mom she was there to sleep not to read, and my mom told her she couldn’t sleep without reading first. The sleep technician asked my mom to hand over her book—it’s a Raymond Chandler—and my mom laughed and said you have got to be kidding me, hand over my book. Not a chance. Then the sleep technician was a bit rough with her, yanking the sticky round electrodes off her head in the morning and not saying goodbye when my mom left. It drives my mom crazy when people don’t say hello and goodbye. It’s old school, she says. It’s the end of civilization when people don’t say hello or goodbye.

Apparently, said my mom, my heart stops beating ninety times an hour while I’m sleeping. You’ve got sleep apnea, I told her. Clearly, she said. She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at her reflection.

She showed me the apparatus that she’ll have to sleep with now, a giant plastic mask with a hose, which she’ll strap to her face and then breathe in moisture from a contraption that the
face mask is attached to. We have to get jugs of distilled water and keep the thing filled. She put the mask over her face and walked heavily towards me like Darth Vader. If somebody breaks into my bedroom while I’m wearing this thing, she said in a muffled voice, they won’t stick around for long. Then she breathed hard from behind the plastic and it filled up with condensation. She yanked it off. Too bad I’m not still wearing my patch, she said. I’d be a force to reckon with, wouldn’t I?

She opened her laptop for a quick game of online Scrabble. The last guy she played with was from France and he offered to show her a picture of his penis. She wrote him back
No merci. Do you have photographs of Paris?

I have just realized something. It’s not me who’s survived, who’s picked up and gone on, who’s saved my mother by bringing her to Toronto, it’s my mother … and she’s taken me with her.

So, I said, you dreamed at the sleep clinic?

Boy! she said. Did I ever. I had an epiphany.

Yeah? I said.

Well, you know how I hate cooking so much?

Yeah.

Well, I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been wondering what I should do about that. So I had this dream last night and it came to me. Frozen food! Just a voice telling me that. So I figured out, from my dream, that I should go to the freezer aisles and get a lot of frozen food, pizzas, meatballs, perogies, chicken fingers, whatever, and stock my freezer and that’ll be
the end of it. I won’t have to worry about cooking but I’ll still have food to eat. It just came to me like that, like a billboard: frozen food!

That sounds pretty good, I said. My mother was dreaming of survival. She was having survival dreams. She was having dreams that were telling her how to keep being alive. I wouldn’t tell her that frozen foods are full of sulphates, who cares, when she was deep into the cure.

I had a dream of my own. It wasn’t a Switzerland-scenario dream. Elfrieda and I were in her yellow kitchen next to the giant picture window talking and laughing about nothing. We were just pleasantly lost in a maze of words that didn’t mean much, telling stories and making each other laugh. We were there but then, in my dream, I wanted to tell Elf something more urgent, something about my work, about my fear of finishing my book and of how it would be received and then there was a pause in our chatter and Elf was yawning, and I thought now I will tell her this urgent thing but she put her hand up to stop me so I kept my mouth shut. She took my hand and she looked hard at me, she put her face closer to mine so I would really get what she was about to say, that she meant it, her eyelashes a black fringe, she was being serious, and I thought oh thank god, she’ll say something to make me feel better, braver, and then she said Yoyo, you’re on your own now. And my feeling in the dream was the feeling I had when I watched my neighbour’s video about her bird. The suddenness of it, something lost in a second forever. My sister was a dark blur moving towards a rectangle of light. But now after hearing my mom’s survival dream I think maybe
this is
my
survival dream and it’s not a nightmare. It’s the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we’re surviving.

On Fridays we have family meetings. Sometimes Nora doesn’t come to the family meetings because she has better things to do—there is Anders, there are parties, she’s young. We give her the minutes from the meetings. I’m not sleeping around anymore. I’m embarrassed about it and Elf isn’t around anymore to remind me that I’m not a slut and that
there’s no such thing okay Yoli, have I taught you nothing, please stop equating morality with outdated self-serving patriarchal notions of women’s sexuality
.

Finbar called to ask if I had killed my sister and needed legal counsel and I told him no, she saved me the trouble. He apologized. He hadn’t known it was that serious. He said he was sorry. I thanked him. He said but we had something, right? I liked the way he put that. It might have been a hallucination but it was something. I said yes, and I thanked him again. We said goodbye forever, behaving like grown-ups. I live with my mother and my daughter. We stand outside on our various perches, on all three floors, and shout things at each other like the smoking women in
Balconville
. I don’t have time to sleep around. I have raccoons and dreams and water guns and grief and toxic moats and guilt and used condoms to pick up from the driveway.

My mother said I couldn’t tie off grief like a used condom and toss it in the garbage. I asked her what she knew of condoms and she told me she had been a social worker for a long time which is what she always says after surprising us with information we didn’t think she had. Yesterday I was walking through
Trinity Bellwoods Park and discovered my mother lying on a bench, sleeping. I sat beside her for a while and read the paper. After ten or fifteen minutes I gently nudged her and said mom, it’s time to go home. She told me she loved sleeping outdoors. Is that true, I said, or were you out walking and suddenly overcome with exhaustion?

My sister gave me an emergency ladder once. It was the kind of ladder that you hook onto your upstairs window ledge and then climb down it if there’s a fire in your house. For years I stored it in the basement but now I’m beginning to understand the wisdom of keeping it on the second floor.

I phoned the hospital in Winnipeg and asked if I could please speak to the patient named Elfrieda Von Riesen. They told me she was not a patient there. I told the hospital well that’s strange because she definitely had been a patient there and the last thing I’d heard was that she wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital any time soon. They said well, they had no information regarding that. I told them I was tired of all their fripperies. They were sorry about that. I hung up.

And then it was almost Christmas already. Nic was going to join us. He was on the phone from Winnipeg. He had an idea for the headstone:
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below; above, the vaulted sky
.

What’s that? I said.

You don’t know? he said.

I don’t know every poem, I said.

It’s John Clare.

Did Elf like him?

Very much. It’s called “I Am!” He wrote it in a mental asylum.

No way, I said.

Pardon me?

Let’s not have everything tied up to lunacy, I said.

You mean for the inscription?

For everything.

Well, do you have suggestions?

When I got back to Toronto after Elf died I had wanted to take some of her ashes with me and keep them here but Nic didn’t like the idea of divvying her up so they’re all buried under an enormous tree in the Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. My mother had suggested that she be buried with our dad out in East Village and the cemetery guy had said sure, there was room for three if they were urns and not coffins (suggesting that my mom would eventually go in there too) but Nic said no way, Elf had said expressly that she did not want to be buried in East Village. That would be like giving the body of Louis Riel back to the Canadian government as a souvenir. What about your backyard? I asked Nic. After all, she was a homebody. He said very funny and that there were legal issues with a backyard burial. She wasn’t a cat. That’s true, I told him. He told me that I had done everything I could and that no one was to blame. I wasn’t sure about that. What about Zurich, I wondered. She would have died peacefully and not alone. That’s all she wanted. I had failed. We didn’t talk about that. I told him he had done everything possible too.

She was the one who got the pass, I said. You know how she would have been. She could talk her way out of the ward.

But I should have fought harder to have them keep her, he said.

You couldn’t have fought harder.

So no John Clare poem?

Maybe. But I don’t like the asylum connotations. Plus, if it’s a poet it should be a woman.

But most of the really great woman poets killed themselves so that has connotations too.

I know and that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid here, right, is labelling her even after death.

Yeah, true, so then we just have a blank stone?

Maybe, yeah, just her name and the dates.

Maybe.

So then the original idea of the poem still holds, though, in a way … let me lie. Just let me lie.

Beneath the grass and vaulted sky.

Do you ever have dreams about her? he said to me over the phone.

Yeah. Do you?

Yeah, indirectly. Like it’s summertime but the coldest summer on record, colder even than any winter has ever been. What are yours?

Well, the other night I dreamt that I was in a fishing village, some outport in Newfoundland or something, and I had to go to the grocery store to buy some meat and when I got there it was a dirt floor and there were lambs lying around everywhere.
They weren’t small and white like in the Bible, they were dark grey and as big as a greyhound dog. But they were lambs. Some of them were dead, some were just barely alive. There was a guy with a knife. He was butchering them but he didn’t really know how to. He’d hack a hoof off or a tail or maybe a snout. He didn’t know what to do. I just stood there looking around at the lambs and then he said he’d had it. And then he made one more cut. And then he said no, it was the knife that had had it, like it was something almost living or just that it wasn’t sharp anymore and couldn’t cut properly, I wasn’t sure.