All My Puny Sorrows (9 page)

When my sister was born my father planted a Russian olive shrub in the backyard. When I was born he planted a mountain ash. When we were kids Elf explained to me that the Russian olive was a tough shrub with four-inch thorns that managed to thrive in places where everything else died. She told me that the mountain ash was called a rowan in Europe and that it was used to ward off witches. So, she said. We’re protected from everything. Well, I said, you mean witches. We’re only protected from witches.

I left the room and wandered around the hallways and nodded at the nurses at the nurses’ station and walked into a linen closet by accident thinking it was a bathroom and out again, knocking over mops and cleaning products and muttering apologies, and back into Elf’s room, fresh smile, tears rubbed away, my face by now a lurid mess of colours and grime, and I’m trying to comfort myself. I’m singing, not really singing, the Boss (because he’s authoritative). “Thunder Road” … The anthemic tune that lit a fire in our plain girl hearts back in the eighties—serenading our own reflections with hairbrush microphones or
belting it into the wind from the backs of half-ton trucks or the tops of towering hay bales—and that I’m calling on to give me hope once again.

I collapsed back into the orange chair and asked Elf to tell me about something. She wanted to know about what and I said anything, just tell me about something. Tell me about your secret lovers. She told me that lovers are secret for the reason that they’re not spoken about and I nodded in agreement, that’s true, that’s intractable, I could take a page out of her book, but tell me anyway. Tell me about that guy, what was his name? Huge Boil. Elf grimaced and moaned and said Hugh Boyle was not a lover, he was a friend and I said so tell me about him, what was he like in bed? We didn’t go to bed, said Elf, and I said okay, no problem, where’d you do it? On the floor? The fire escape? She shook her head. Okay, what about that other guy, Penis Breath? Ah, now she smiled. Denis Brecht, she said, was lovely but is ancient history. I’m a married woman now. You are? I asked. When did you get married? Okay, she said, you know what I mean. I told her that I am actually a married woman but have no husband. You, I told her, are not a married woman but have a husband. Whatever, Yoli, she said. She yawned. It was sweet of you to come back but I’m the one who needs to apologize. No, no, c’mon, I said. You must meet so many suave men with exciting accents and encyclopedic knowledge of European civilization, I said. Are you being sarcastic? she wondered.

She asked me about the hotshit lawyer guy in Toronto and I shook my head.

What’s his name again? she said.

Finbar.

What? Oh my god, that’s right. Finbar! I can’t believe you’re sleeping with a lawyer, first of all, and then with a lawyer named Finbar.

What’s wrong with sleeping with a lawyer? I asked.

Well, nothing, she said, in theory. Just that you are, or were, is funny. She asked me if I was still seeing him and I told her I don’t know and then I spilled all the details of my shambolic existence, that Finbar is not the only guy and she said Yolandi! How many? And I said only two but I’m so tired and overwhelmed and ashamed that I honestly can’t remember if that’s true or not. And one of them is in love with you, actually, and is only sleeping with me by proxy. She asked me if Finbar knows about the other guy and who is he and again I just shook my head no, yes, I don’t think I told him. And besides he wouldn’t care, and I told her okay, I know, this isn’t my proudest moment or anything, it’s some weird animal reaction to sixteen years of monogamy with Dan, so okay I’ve become a two-bit whore, whatever, burn me to death and she pointed to herself and then held her arms out to the psych ward spilling out around her to indicate where she was, empathy and a joke, my big sister, I love her, and we laughed a bit. A tiny bit. Not laughing, really, at all. And she said she hopes I’m using protection and this struck me as hilarious, coming from her.

I remembered the sex talk she gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. She asked me if I knew what a hard-on was and I said yes and she said great! That was it, the extent of it, my terse navigational guide to the biggest minefield confronting humankind. I remembered the four of us, our family, when we were all young and sane and alive, when we didn’t have stitches in our heads and trembling hands, driving around in Winnipeg on
some big night out in the city, maybe checking out the Christmas lights or something, and I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what’s that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that’s from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn’t dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things he didn’t ever want to talk about and they were sex and Russia.

It was the first time I’d heard the word spoken, sex, and I had only a very vague notion of what it meant, that it had to do with hospitals. But more importantly, I remembered the look on Elf’s face in the car. She was proud of herself, she smiled and hummed, stared out the window at the world she hoped to conquer one day, she had shaken things up in the bomb shelter of our tiny Mennonite microcosm and rattled the cages a bit. She had been shushed by our mother, which had never, ever happened before. That day I became acutely aware of her new powers and I wanted to be her. From then on I’d walk her bike solemnly up and down the sidewalk from one end of First Street to the other. I could barely reach the handlebars. I didn’t even know how to ride a bike. I carried her textbooks up and down First Street too, shifting them wearily from one arm to the other, so great was my academic burden. I dabbed paint splotches on my dorky homemade jeans to look like her real ones and I practised looking soulful by pulling my bangs in front of my eyes and letting my lips go slack. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practised shooting myself in the head with an imaginary revolver, the way Elf did whenever she
sarcastically felt she couldn’t take it anymore. I thought it was brilliant. The timing, the quick beat between pulling the trigger and impact, and then jerking my head to the side. After a lot of practising I finally demonstrated to her that I’d mastered her very own signature move and she laughed and applauded and said well done, but that one’s over now. This is the new one. And she showed me some elaborate mime involving an imaginary noose, a snapping neck, a lolling head. By then I’d lost interest in the idea itself and let her have it.

Yes, I told her, I’m using protection. She told me I could still get pregnant if I wasn’t careful, that I wasn’t too old, and I told her yeah, then she could be an aunt again.

When Will and Nora were little she babysat them a lot, reading to them, drawing with them, riding the bus with them, turning them into heroes and helping them create cool, fun worlds where anything was possible while I lurched about from part-time job to university class trying simultaneously to “set my sights high” and “lower my expectations.” She still writes them letters and cards, or did until very recently, in different colours of ink, pink and green and orange, her distinct handwriting that reminded me of horses racing to the finish line, encouraging them to be brave, to enjoy life, to know how proud she is of them and how much she loves them.

I asked her if she would like it if I got pregnant, a ridiculous question implying that I’d do it, would immediately, that instant, get myself knocked up and have a baby if it would make her want to live. She answered with a sad smile, that gaze, the inconceivability of it all.

I asked her if she had had a nice visit with Nic last night, if she had eaten, if she had showered, if she had joined the
others in the common room, if she had answered the call to breakfast or engaged with any other individual in the ward that day. She begged me not to interrogate her and I apologized, and she reminded me that we were going to chuck the apologies for a while. Yeah but apologies are what keep us civilized, I said and she said no, not at all, apologies allow for all sorts of brutality. Think about the Catholic notion of confession and how it allows for entire slates of indiscretion to be wiped clean and—

Okay, I said.

Do you know what Nellie McClung said? she asked me.

I’m afraid not, I said, but do tell.

Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.

I like that, I said, but isn’t she talking about getting the vote for women? I just don’t get the reference in this context. I was apologizing for
nagging
you.

Yoli, she said, I’m just saying that apologies aren’t the bedrock of civilized society. All right! I said. I agree. But what
is
the bedrock of civilized society? Libraries, said Elf.

I thought about the fierce current of pride coursing through her veins, inherited from our father, buffeting or destroying, I didn’t know which, and then of Pavese’s last diary entry berating himself for not having the guts to kill himself. Even weak women (oh, go fly a kite, Pavese, as my mother would say) can do it, he writes, or something like that, and he concludes that the act requires humility, not pride.

Libraries, I said. Are you reading anything these days?

No. It’s too hard to think.

And yet thinking is all you’re doing.

I had started a book called
Am I a Redundant Human Being?

Oh, Elf, I said. C’mon, man.

Do you think all we are is what we remember? she said.

No, I don’t.

But Yoli, seriously … you answered so quickly, as if you just don’t want me to ask that kind of question, but can’t we at least consider it for a minute or two?

What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t remember what I am. I am what I dream. I am what I hope for. I am what I don’t remember. I am what other people want me to be. I am what my kids want me to be. I am what Mom wants me to be. I am what you want me to be. What do you want me to be? Don’t we need to stick around to find out what we are? What do you want me to be?

Oh I don’t know, said Elf. Tell me about your life in Toronto.

Well, I said, I write. I shop for food. I pay parking tickets. I watch Nora dance. Many times a day I ask myself questions. I walk around a lot. I often try to start conversations with people but it hardly ever works. People think I’m crazy. I came across a man playing his guitar in the park the other day and a lot of people, just people who happened to be in the park, were singing softly with him, so beautifully. I stopped to listen for a while.

What was the song? asked Elf.

I don’t know, I said. One line I remember was we all have holes in our hearts. Or maybe he said lives. We all have holes in our lives. And this impromptu choir of park people singing along with him, repeating the line we all have holes in our lives … we all have holes in our lives …

I took Elf’s hand and kissed it like a gentleman.

And then I thought that people like to talk about their pain and loneliness but in disguised ways. Or in ways that are sort of organized but not really. I realized that when I try to start conversations with people, just strangers on the street or in the grocery store, they think I’m exposing my pain or loneliness in the wrong way and they get nervous. But then I saw the impromptu choir repeating the line about everyone having holes in their lives, and so beautifully, so gently and with such acceptance and even joy, just acknowledging it, and I realized that there are ways to do it, just not the ones that I’d been trying.

So now you’re going to stop talking to random strangers? asked Elf.

I guess so, I said. That’s why you’re so lucky to have your piano.

Elf laughed. Don’t stop talking to strangers. You love talking to strangers. You’re just like dad. Remember when we’d be in restaurants or whatever and he’d be looking at people and wondering hey, what’s their story and then he’d go over and start talking?

Well, yeah, I said, but now that you mention it I was always a little bit embarrassed by it. I remember pulling dad away from strangers sometimes saying no, dad, it’s okay, you don’t have to talk to them. Nora and Will are probably mortified by me now.

Not probably, said Elf. They’re teenagers. What else? Tell me more about Toronto.

Well, I said, the other day when I was walking down a back lane near my place I saw this old couple trying to reach something that was near the top of their garage door. I got closer and saw that they were trying to erase some graffiti but I didn’t
know what it was. And then I saw that the man was standing on a really low stool, it was only six or seven inches off the ground, and the woman was standing behind him, like spotting him, holding on to his hips so he wouldn’t fall. I just wanted to cry. They were so old. And so concerned for each other, and just wanting to have a nice, clean garage. They were helping each other like that and the stool was only half a foot off the ground but it would have been a disaster if he’d fallen.

That’s beautiful, said Elf. Her eyes were closed. I hope their garage stays clean forever.

It won’t, I said. It’ll be covered in graffiti again soon.

Hmmm, said Elf.

But what’s so moving about this couple is that they keep trying to get rid of it. I guess they’ve been doing it all their lives, hoping against all odds that for once it’ll stay clean.

Yoli, said Elf, have you embedded some type of parable within this story? Something you hope I’ll
take away
?

You mean something about not giving up? I said.

That’s what I mean, said Elf.

Nope, I said. In fact, now that I think about it, the lesson one could take
away
from this particular anecdote is to stop risking your life in order to have a pristine garage.

Elf sighed heavily and held her hands out like a father welcoming a prodigal son, like
we don’t have to talk about this and the past is the past
. My cellphone rang and it was Elf’s agent, Claudio. She’d been with him since she was seventeen and studying in Oslo. He appeared at a concert of hers in Rome and afterwards, when she was out back behind the concert hall smoking and crying and trembling as she often did following performances, he walked up to her and held out his hand and told her it was
an honour to finally meet her. He had heard so much about her. He told her he would like to “represent” her and Elf said you mean you will pretend to be me? Claudio patiently explained the arrangement and asked Elf if perhaps he should be in contact with her parents. He asked her if she was all right, if he could call a cab for her, if she needed to eat. She was wearing her military jacket over her black concert dress and had kicked off her shoes and was sitting on the ground, crushing her cigarette into the asphalt, recovering, listening to this calm, debonair Italian man tell her she had an amazing future. I loved hearing Elf tell the story. And you decided right then to let him be your agent? I asked. No, she said, he insisted on flying to Manitoba first to meet mom and dad to ask their permission. Total class. I think he was the first real Italian ever to set foot in our town. Afterwards he said that some woman down the block, probably Mrs. Goosen, had gone over to mom and dad’s just to stare at him. She told him she had never been out of the town. She gazed at him and told him that she just couldn’t believe that she was standing in the same room as an Eye-talian! One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Elf didn’t know anything about Claudio’s personal life except that he visited his sick dad in Malfi once a month and loved to swim long distances. He swims across straits and narrows and channels. Often his face is swollen from jellyfish bites. He’s bailed Elf out in a million different ways.