Read All My Puny Sorrows Online
Authors: Miriam Toews
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women, #Amish & Mennonite
Amy, our next-door neighbour, came by with a basket of food, wine, cloth napkins and beautiful china dishes and silver cutlery. We had our Christmas Eve dinner in Emergency with everything laid out on my mother’s stomach. She was our table. She had always been our table. Nora carefully removed my mother’s oxygen mask for a second so she could have a sip of
her drink. The nurse had said one sip, because it’s Christmas, but my mother had two sips. Big ones. We drank champagne out of plastic sample cups and toasted once again to a straying notion of ourselves and to the lenient nurse who came around and smiled and to Elf and to my father and to my aunt Tina and to my cousin Leni. We sang “I Wonder as I Wander,” my mother’s favourite Christmas song.
Nora and I stayed late until my mother had fallen asleep for the night and then we went home. I stood on the second floor balcony in the night and watched it snow into the moat.
The next day I went to see my mother at the hospital. She had made friends already, she had been spooling out amusing anecdotes from behind her brown curtain for the benefit of her fellow patients, and Santa Claus apparently had made his rounds too. My mother was always dying, at least once a year. She’s worked a lot of emergency rooms like a stand-up comedian on tour, from Puerto Vallarta to Cairo to Winnipeg to Tucson to Toronto.
Move all the stuff off that chair, she said, and sit beside me. She laid her whodunit on her chest carefully face down and open so she wouldn’t lose her place. There’s something I want to tell you, she said. She held my hand. Her hand was warm, her grip was strong, like Tina’s.
I already know, I said. That you love me, that I bring you so much joy.
No, she said, I want to tell you something else.
It was Christmas Day. I phoned Julie. Merry Christmas, I said.
Merry Christmas to you too, she said.
It was the first time in both of our lives that we were alone on Christmas Day. We said really? Is that true? It was true. Her kids were with her ex, their father, and Will was with his girlfriend’s family in Mexico and Nora was at Dan’s place. He had finally returned from Borneo. And my mother was in the hospital. Should we drink together over the phone? she asked.
And suffer its deleterious effects? I said. I was quoting our old Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Skull. She had prayed, especially for Julie and me, that we would come to our senses and stop partying in the bushes with French boys. We couldn’t stop. It was too good. We wouldn’t stop! Our old Sunday school teacher told us that she loved us but that God loved us more. We told her to try harder. She told us that sinful women adorn their bodies and not their souls. Should we go naked? Julie had asked. When she left the room for Kleenex, Julie and I escaped out the fire exit. The last step on the ladder was still two storeys up from the ground and we had to jump the rest of the way down. We loved the way our soles hurt afterwards.
We sat in our living rooms drinking Scotch and talking and listening. Here’s to something, this panoply, I said. Yes, said Julie, this cock-eyed carousel. We lifted our glasses and tapped them against our phones. You’re the strongest person I know, I said. I didn’t tell her that I thought she had the right stuff to kill herself. I was trying to retrain my beliefs and change my template for success.
Is everything unbearable? she asked.
Nope, I said. What are we doing right now?
Well, that’s true, she said.
Whose birthday is it again? I asked.
That hippie kid, she said.
Looks like we weren’t invited to his party this year, I said. We agreed we wouldn’t have gone anyway. We should become Jewish.
Remember that guy outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon? she asked me.
Allan, I said. (Allan was a brilliant cellist once, on the verge of becoming a prodigy and going to Juilliard, and then he smashed his head on the dash of his car when it hit a cement truck on black ice and now he stands alone outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon asking people really politely for change. He’s still handsome. He seems sort of hollowed out but his eyes are really bright, the whites really white and the blues really blue, like Greek islands. He mumbles words and sometimes it seems like he’s laughing at everything like he’s just been thrown a surprise party. We don’t know who takes care of him.)
I dreamt I slept with him, said Julie. And I offered to be his girlfriend, she said. And take him home with me and take care of him but he didn’t want to. He was really sweet and was trying not to hurt my feelings. He showed me his blisters from the cello strings that would never go away. He asked me if he could borrow a pair of warm mittens though, that was all he wanted.
Did you feel rejected? I asked.
Yeah, she said, a bit. I wanted to comb his hair for him too, it was so tangled. And wash him.
Julie and I talked for hours and hours through the night until Boxing Day. We were really happy when Christmas was over. Then we really had something to toast.
May 3rd, 2011
Dear Elf,
Auntie Tina once told me that I’d be walking down the street one day and suddenly feel a lightness come over me, a feeling like I could walk forever, some magical strength, and that would mean I was being forgiven. I wish I had taken you to Zurich. I’m sorry. Auntie Tina said one day I’d be flying and not even know it.
Did I tell you about the hospital stuff with mom? I think I already did. She’s fine now, again, for a while. I had an embarrassing moment in the hospital that I haven’t told anybody about. At one point in Emergency mom grabbed my hand—you know the way she does, how it’s actually almost painful like she’s a Mafia don pretending to be nice—and said she had something to tell me. I figured for sure it would be what she always tells us when she’s dying in Emergency, that she loves me, that I’ve brought her so much happiness and all that, but instead she whispered to me that I had to stop getting drunk and phoning the hospital in Winnipeg. She told me that she had tracked my activities—it’s all her years and years of reading whodunits finally paying off—and she realized I was going out in the early evening to Wino Town, or whatever the liquor stores are called here, and buying myself a bag of booze and coming home and drinking alone and listening to Neil Young songs that remind me of you and working myself into a paroxysm of grief and rage and then pranking the hospital in Winnipeg by calling them and asking if I can speak to
you and then acting all incredulous when they tell me that you’re not there.
She held my hand really tightly the whole time and she locked her eyes to mine so I couldn’t escape, and I felt so ashamed and weak and stupid and crazy. And I started crying and nodding and saying I know, I have to stop, I’m so sorry. And I cried and cried. She didn’t actually know what I had said to the hospital just that she knew I was calling them on a regular basis because she was opening the phone bills and looking at all the Manitoba numbers—this is the problem of living with your mother, Elf, another problem you will never encounter—and then she just put all the pieces together. She asked me if I was trying to haunt the hospital which I thought was an interesting way of putting it, and I told her I didn’t know what I was doing, that it didn’t matter, that I was sorry, that I would stop. Then even though she was the one dying and all hooked up to different cables and power cords and things she pulled me into her massive bear hug and rocked me like a baby from her horizontal position in her little white bed and I was kind of hunched over her sobbing while my bag kept falling off my shoulder. She had her arms around me. I pretended she was you and dad and Leni and even Dan, all the people I’ve lost along the way, and then she whispered things to me, all about love, about kindness, and optimism and strength. And about you. About our family.
How we can all fight really hard, but how we can also acknowledge defeat and stop fighting and call a spade a spade. I asked her what we do when a spade isn’t a spade
and she told me that sometimes there are things like that in life, spades that aren’t spades, and that we can leave them that way. I told her but I’m a writer, it’s hard for me to leave those spades so undefined, and she said she understood, she liked mysteries to be solved too, God knows, and words to be attached to feelings. She tapped her whodunit, the one lying on her chest, the one protecting her heart, that somehow with all this hugging hadn’t moved an inch. She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, sags eventually—because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either—and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. It means goodbye, it means going to Rotterdam when you weren’t expecting to and having no way of telling anyone you won’t be back for a while.
Well, I’ve stopped pranking the hospital, you’ll be relieved to know. Remember that time I thought it would be a real kick-ass idea to go to school with some of mom’s pantyhose pulled over my face and you quietly whispered into my ear on your way out of the house: Swivelhead, attempt to be cool. You have no idea how often I evoke those words. Essentially, it’s what mom was trying to tell me in the hospital.
So she recovered, as she does, and to celebrate she and Nora and I took a trip to NYC to see Will and Zoe. They took us to MOMA, to a show where everyone was naked and in pain. It was the Marina Abramovic
show. It was the talk of the town. All of us gallery-goers huddled in one room wondering how we’d get to the next one. There was only a narrow doorway that we had to pass through, but there were two suffering, naked people standing face to face in the doorway so we would all have to take turns squishing up against them as we went through. Nobody made a move to go through the doorway. The kids and I had lost track of mom when she was wandering around looking at things. We were whispering about certain celebrities we saw in the room. Nora knew them all, they were fashion designers and actors, but the rest of us were clueless. All the people were clustered together getting restless, and murmuring and wanting to move to the next room but wondering how to get through the door. Then Will said hey, there’s grandma, and we looked towards the narrow doorway where the naked man and woman stood facing each other. Nobody had gone through it yet. Then we saw mom in her purple cords and windbreaker standing at the doorway with her hands on her hips. Oh my god, said Nora, she’s going through. She went sideways through the doorway and her stomach grazed the man’s penis. Then she stopped in the middle, right there between the man and the woman, she didn’t hurry through at all, she was savouring it. She looked up at the naked man’s face, into his eyes, he was expressionless, and she smiled at him and nodded. She was greeting him, politely. Then she somehow turned around in that tight space to face the woman and she looked into her eyes too and smiled and nodded and then she smiled back at all of us huddled in the first room as if to say all right, people,
let’s go, follow me, and she stepped through and one by one the rest of us followed her.
On our last day in NYC mom took us all out for a giant steak at a place in Brooklyn, close to where Will and Zoe live. It was late and dark when we left the steakhouse. We walked along the streets singing. We tried to remember all the things the mother is going to do for her crying baby in the mockingbird song. We finally remembered them all. Nora and mom and I linked arms and Nora sang a Weepies song called “Somebody Loved.” Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.
Sometimes train whistles break through the silence of the day. Those dissonant chords that remind me of your mournful pounding on the keys when I screwed up my page-turning duties. Wait for the last measure, Dodo Brain! There are tracks close to our house. Sometimes I can hear the wheels rumbling on the rails. Sometimes I can feel the ground shake. It’s comforting. It’s a greeting or a proper goodbye. Mom would approve. You know how she is about hello and goodbye.
Remember our neighbour Mrs. Steingart (the one you renamed Signora Giovanna) standing in the middle of our living room with her hands on her hips, glaring at mom for not being a good-enough housekeeper and dad for not being enough of a man and us for not being
normal-enough children and how we were all lying, sitting, slumping with books in our hands, utterly oblivious to her admonishments, and she stomped off home saying we were only word people, we were a word family, one day we’d have to open our eyes. To what? A messy house? Now I remember her parting shot. Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat! It did give me pause, I may have looked up from my book, but only because of the words she’d used to compose her threat and not the threat itself.
Remember the way mom used to swim beyond the wake and bob along to god knows where, the deep and choppy sea, until someone noticed and came to her rescue? What do words mean, Elf? Everything or nothing? They can’t just mean
something
. By the way, I finally checked out your beloved D. H. Lawrence. Remember when you expressed incredulity at my not having read
Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
God, you’re a snob sometimes. Well, I read it. And yeah, the sex was hot. I’d find time in my busy schedule of needlepoint and flower arranging to visit that guy in the woods too. I wonder if Frieda wrote those parts for D. H. and then just had to keep her mouth shut while he racked up the fame and lived in fancy hotels in France with hippie girls. Anyway, you’re right about the first paragraph. I want someone to project it on the front of my house in giant letters made of light and shadows. And if they flickered a bit, that would be the best. And of course they’d disappear in the sunshine because everything does. And that would be perfect.
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the
ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
And thanks for keeping all my secrets. Remember that midnight cavalcade I led through the wilderness to get to the boys’ camp? You are now the official keeper of my secrets.
You knew I didn’t have the guts to take you to Zurich, didn’t you? And you knew you weren’t coming to Toronto.
I love you, Elf, I have to go. I have to trim the bushes that are engulfing our backyard. It’s so overgrown now that to get to the back lane we have to slither through this jungle on our stomachs with our rifles held high above our heads and this is not an easy thing for mom to do every day before she makes her rounds on Queen West.
Arrivederci, Bella Elf!
p.s. I’ve met a guy. We walk around and around the city talking and having late night Ping-Pong games and the first thing he told me about himself was how he’d been caught suddenly in crossfire in New Jersey. He’d been shot, wrong place at the wrong time, and he died in the ambulance and came back to life in the hospital, then died again, then finally came back to life for good but had to remain naked in an ice pack for two weeks until his heart was ready to start again. He walks me home every Wednesday night and kisses me on the cheek twice
before he says good night because he used to live in Paris. Sometimes when we play tennis he jumps over the net and runs to kiss me, too. He has tinnitus which means his head is always humming. He also has an enlarged aorta. He writes his dreams down on his laptop first thing in the morning with a pillow over his head. It’s springtime now, I guess. Mom is at the stove stirring rib sauce and reading Raymond Chandler’s
The Long Goodbye
. Julie called and I put her on speaker so mom could hear her too. How are things? I asked her. She told us that Winnipeg was so green now, the entire province. All of Manitoba just unbelievably green. Do you remember? And do you remember the light? And the warmth? And I told her yeah, I could almost picture that. Almost? she said. No, I said, I can. I see it. How it’s so green? she said. I had to think for a second or two. I closed my eyes. Yeah, I said, I know. It’s an amazing green. I remember now.