All My Puny Sorrows (5 page)

That was the first time I met Janice. I had been standing next to Elf’s stretcher in the emergency room. Her broken backpack hung on the IV unit next to her. I was sliding my hands back and forth on the steel railing that held her in and I was crying. Elf took my hand, weakly, like an old dying person, and looked deeply into my eyes.

Yoli, she said, I hate you.

I bent to kiss her and whispered that I knew that, I was aware of it. I hate you too, I said.

It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and
we were enemies who loved each other. We held each other tenderly, awkwardly, because she was in a bed attached to things.

Janice—she had that furry creature hanging from her belt loop even then—tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could talk to me for a minute. I told Elf I’d be right back and Janice and I walked over to a little beige family room and she passed me a box of Kleenex and told me that I had done the right thing by calling the ambulance and that Elf didn’t really hate me. That feeling can be broken down, she said. Right? Let’s consider the components. She hates that you saved her life. I know, I said, but thanks. Janice hugged me. A close, hard hug from a stranger is a potent thing. She left me alone in the beige room. I tore away at my fingernails and cuticles until I bled.

When I went back to Elf she was still in Emergency. She told me she’d just overheard a great line, just great. What was it? I asked her. She quoted: We are very much amazed at what little intelligence there is to be found in Ms. Von R. Who said that? I asked her. She pointed at a doctor who was scribbling something at the circular desk in the middle of all the dying people. He was dressed like a ten-year-old in skater shorts and an oversized T-shirt like he’d just come from an audition for
Degrassi High
. Who the hell did he say that to? I asked. That other nurse, said Elf. He figures that because I’m not grateful for having my life saved I must be stupid. Asshole, I said, did he talk to you? Yeah, sort of, said Elf, it was more of an interrogation. C’mon Yolandi, you know how they are.

Equating intelligence with the desire to live?

Yeah, she said, or decency.

This time her method wasn’t starving, it was pills. Elf had left a note, ripped from the same type of lined yellow legal pad she had used years ago to design her exceptional signature AMPS, expressing her hope that God would receive her, no time left for making one’s mark, and a list of names of all the people she loved. My mother read out the names to me over the phone. She told me that Elf had written them with a green marker. We were all there on the list. Please understand, she’d also written. Please let me go. I love you all. My mother told me there was some quote on the page as well, but she couldn’t make it out. Somebody named David Hume? she said. But she said it like
whom
which didn’t make any difference anyway. Wait, I thought, so Elf does believe in God?

Where did she get all those pills? I asked my mom.

Nobody knows, said my mom. Maybe she called 1-800-PILL. Who knows.

My mother had found her unconscious at home in her bed and by the time Elf came to in the hospital I had already flown from Toronto and was standing next to her when she opened her eyes. She smiled slowly, fully, like a child comprehending the structure of a joke for the first time in her life. You’re here, she said, and told me we had to stop meeting like this. She introduced me in a formal way, like we were at a consulate dinner, to the nurses in the emergency ward and to the woman hired to sit beside her bed on a chair and watch her every move.

This, she said, thrusting her chin out at me because her hands were tied down with cotton ribbons, is my younger sister, Yoyo.

It’s Yolandi, I said. Hi. I shook the woman’s hand.

She told me I looked like the older one. That happened all the time because Elf has curiously escaped the erosional side effects of living. Then Elf told me that she and the woman hired to watch her were having a discussion about Thomas Aquinas. Weren’t we? my sister said, smiling at the woman, who smiled grimly at me and shrugged. She wasn’t hired to make small talk about saints with suicide patients. Why Thomas Aquinas? I said, sitting down in the chair near to the woman. Elf strained to make eye contact with her, the guard, in the chair. There was still a lot of medication in her system, said the woman.

But not quite enough, said Elf. I began to protest. I’m kidding, Swiv, she said. Good grief.

When Elf fell asleep, I went out into the waiting room to find my mom. She was sitting next to a man with a black eye and reading a whodunit. I told her that Elf had been talking about Thomas Aquinas.

Yes, said my mom, she was talking about him to me too. In her delirium she asked me if I’d “Thomas Aquinas her” and later I thought about it and I decided that she must have meant would I forgive her.

And will you? I asked.

That’s not the point, said my mom. She doesn’t need forgiving. It’s not a sin.

But fifty billion people would disagree with you, I said.

Let them, said my mom.

That was three days ago. Since then my mother has shipped off to the Caribbean because Nic and I forced her to. All she had in her tiny suitcase were heart pills and whodunits. She keeps phoning from the ship to find out how Elf is. Yesterday she told me that a bartender on the ship had prayed for our
family in Spanish.
Dios, te proteja
. She told me to tell Elf that she had bought a CD for her from a guy on the street. A Colombian pianist. It might be a fake, I said. She told me she’d had a conversation with the captain of the ship about burials at sea. She told me she had been tossed out of bed on a stormy night but it hadn’t woken her up, that’s how tired she was. In the morning she woke up to discover that she had fallen and rolled all the way over to the balcony of her little cabin. I asked her if she could conceivably have rolled right off the balcony into the sea and she said no, even if she had wanted to the railings would have stopped her. And if the railings hadn’t stopped her she would only have fallen into one of the lifeboats hanging on the side of the ship. My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.

On my way out of the hospital I stopped at the front desk and asked Janice if it was true that Elf had fallen in the washroom that morning and Janice said that yes, she had. This was after she’d been moved from the emergency ward to the psych ward. They’d found her lying on the floor bleeding from her head and clutching her toothbrush in her fist the way you’d hold a paring knife if you were just about to plunge it into someone’s throat. Just then Janice had to go running off to restrain a patient who was using a pool cue to smash the television set in the activity room. Another nurse peered at Elf’s file. The nurse said that Elfrieda needed to start eating and then she’d have the strength not to fall down, and that she needed to be somewhat more aware of her surroundings.

I wanted to go back to Elf’s room and tell her this last thing the nurse had said in some attempt to get her to roll her eyes with me, to forge a small bond of mutual disdain at least. I also
wanted to tell her that there was a guy in the ward who hated TV as much as she did and maybe she could be friends with him. But she had asked me to leave and I wanted her to know that some of her requests were reasonable and that they could be granted, that I respected her wishes (sort of) and that in spite of being a psychiatric patient with her name misspelled and scribbled messily on a white board behind the nurses’ desk, she was still my wise albeit alarming older sister and I would listen. I walked away and crashed into a stainless steel trolley full of plastic trays of food. I apologized to two people shuffling past me in housecoats.

That shit’s inedible anyway, man, one of them said. I’d kick the tray over too if I was more coordinated.

Yeah, said the other guy. Yeah!

I said inedible, said the first guy.

I know, man. I heard you the first time.

Over all the other voices?

Ha, yeah, funny.

That’s what put you in the nuthouse?

No, it was stabbing that guy who broke into my shed.

Not the actual stabbing but the voices telling you to, though, right?

Yeah, you got it. The knife was real, though.

Yeah, that’s too bad. That’s the unfortunate piece of the story.

I liked these shuffling men. I really liked “unfortunate piece of the story.” I wanted to introduce these guys to Elf. I started to pick up the trays but the nurse said I shouldn’t. She’d get somebody, an orderly, to do it. I joked with the nurse that perhaps my sister’s lack of awareness of her surroundings
was a genetic thing I shared with her, ha, but I received no laugh, no smile, remembered the description I had once read of an angry woman’s mouth resembling a pencil with two sharpened ends, and left. As I took the stairs down, two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate, I silently apologized to Elf for leaving her there on her own and made a mental list of the things I’d bring the next day: dark chocolate, egg salad sandwich, Heidegger’s
On Time and Being
(we do not say time is and being is, we say there is time and there is being), fingernail clippers, clean panties, not scissors or gutting knives, amusing anecdotes.

I drove away in my mother’s beater Chevy, careening down Pembina Highway, a bleak section of asphalt and derelict strip malls, blasting towards nothing, really, other than
le foutoir
, as Elf put it, of my life. She loved to use elegant-sounding French words to describe the detritus, a way to balance things out maybe, to polish up the agony until it shines like Polaris, her guiding light and possibly her true home.

I saw a bedding store with a sale sign all lit up in the window and pulled into the parking lot. I stood for ten minutes staring at pillows—down-filled pillows, synthetic fibre–filled pillows and other pillows. I took a few from the shelves and squeezed them, held them against the wall and tried to rest my head on them, feel them out. The salesperson told me I could test them on the testing bed. She laid a protective piece of fabric over the pillow and I lay down and rested my head for a minute. The salesperson told me she’d be back after I’d had time to test the others thoroughly. I thanked her and closed my eyes. I had a short power nap. When I woke up, the sales clerk was standing next to me, smiling, and for a
second I remembered childhood and a certain peace that had accompanied it.

I bought Elf a shiny purple pillow the size of a rolled-up sleeping bag with silver dragonflies embroidered into the satin. I got back into my mom’s car and drove to the drive-through beer vendor at the Grant Park Inn and bought a two-four of Extra Old Stock, then stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of cigarettes, Player’s Extra Light. Whatever
extra
thing I could buy, I would. I bought an extra-big Oh Henry! bar too and drove to my mother’s high-rise apartment overlooking the Assiniboine River where I hunkered down with my supplies all ready to wait it out. It was spring breakup time when the ice on the river begins to thaw and crack and large frozen slabs grind and scrape against each other and make a horrible screaming noise as they’re dragged downstream by the current. Spring does not come easily to this city.

I stood on my mother’s balcony clutching the purple pillow with the silver dragonflies, shivering and smoking, plotting, thinking, trying to crack Elf’s secret code, the meaning of life, her life, the universe, time, being and drinking beer. I walked around the apartment looking at things belonging to my mother. I examined a photograph of my father taken two months before he died. He was watching Will play baseball in a park. Little League. He had on his big glasses. He looked relaxed. His arms were crossed and he was smiling. There was a photo of my mom with Nora when she was a baby, a newborn. They were looking deeply into one another’s eyes as though they were passing important secrets back and forth telepathically. I
looked at a photograph stuck to the fridge of Elf performing in Milan. She was wearing a long black dress hemmed with staples. Her shoulder blades poked through the fabric. Her hair was really glossy. It was flopping down around her face as she bent over the keys. Sometimes when Elf plays, her ass lifts right off the bench, just an inch or two. She called me after that gig from a hotel, sobbing, telling me how cold she was, how lonely. But you’re in Italy, I’d said. Your favourite place in the world. She told me her loneliness was visceral, a sack of rocks she carried from one room to the next, city to city.

I dialed my mom’s cellphone to see if she could get service on her ship. Nothing.

There was a note on the dining room table. It was my mother telling me to please return her DVDs when I got a chance. I knew she was totally burned out from trying to keep Elf alive. The day before she flew to Fort Lauderdale to get on that ship she was bitten by a Rottweiler belonging to the crazy neighbour down the hall and she hadn’t even noticed until the blood began to seep through her winter coat and she had to get stitches and a tetanus shot. At night it was all she could do to collapse in front of her TV and watch every episode of every season of
The Wire
, methodically, like a zombie, one after the other after the other, the volume cranked because she was half deaf, falling asleep while a messed-up kid from Baltimore spoke to her from the TV set, comforted her in his way and told her what she already knew, that a boy’s gotta make his own way in this motherfuckin’ world.

The morning she left for the airport my mother accidentally pulled down the shower rod and curtain, the whole works. She showered anyway and when she came out she was smiling,
her game face on, shiny and new and ready for an adventure. I asked her how it had worked without a curtain, wasn’t it … and she said no, no, it worked well, no problem at all. When I went into the bathroom there was an inch of water on the floor and everything, the toilet paper, the toiletries and makeup on the counter, all the clean towels, the artwork done by my kids, everything, was soaked. I realized that the idea of “working well” was a relative one for us and that in the context of our present lives my mother was right, it was absolutely fine, no problem. Elf was actually now safe, sort of, safer anyway while she was in the hospital than at home where she was alone most of the days while Nic was at work, so it was a good time for my mother to disappear for a couple of weeks and get some rest.