All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  Okay, says Elf. Okay.

  She’s cringing because she feels like an idiot. These words, Janice’s tone. But Janice is Mother Teresa compared with the other psych nurses and Elf is lucky not to have been thrown naked into the empty concrete room with the drain in the middle of the floor.

  How are you, Yolandi? says Janice. She gives me a hug too. Good, fine, I say. Thank you. Worried. A bit.

  Of course you are, says Janice. She looks pointedly at Elf who turns away.

  Elfrieda? Janice really wants Elf to look at her. I clear my throat and Elf sighs and twists her head around slowly to make eye contact with Janice. Elf is deeply pissed off, mostly with herself for botching things, but she’s trying really hard to be polite because “good form” is her mantra. It used to be “love” but the more she said it the more it sounded like something doomed, like a wax effigy, and that had made her panic and weep. Then stop saying it! I’d tell her. I know, Yoli, I know, she’d say, but still. Still what? I’d ask. Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she’d read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of forty-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly see, and although he was told that life would be amazing for him then, after the operation it was awful. The world depressed him, its flaws, its duplicity, its rot and grime and sadness, everything hideous now made manifest, everything drab and flaking. He sank into a depression and quickly died. That’s me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she’d always been able to see but she told me she’d never adjusted to the light, she’d just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn’t taken. Reality was a rusty leg trap. Look, I said, then just stop saying “love” over and over, okay? Just don’t do it. But Yoli, you don’t understand, she said. You can’t understand. Which wasn’t true, entirely. I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word. Why do we keep having these exasperating conversations? I would ask. They’re not conversations! she’d say. We’re working things out. We’re working things out.

  Elfreida, Janice says, my brother saw you playing in Los Angeles and said he wept for two hours afterwards. Elf doesn’t say anything. Gratitude or something like that is expected of her but she doesn’t budge. The three of us are quiet in the room. Elf is examining the hem of her blanket and smoothing out its creases. I’m imagining two hours of weeping. Janice finally clears her throat loudly and both Elf and I are startled.

  Do you have concerts coming up? asks Janice.

  Yes, ostensibly … Elf says. She’s whispering. I’m afraid she’ll stop talking altogether.

  She has a five-city tour actually, I say. Starting … when, Elf? Elf shrugs. Soon, I say, in a few weeks. Mozart. Elf. Is it Mozart?

  Sometimes my sister stops talking. Our father did it too, once for a whole year. Then, after watching a vaudeville show in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he started talking again as though he had never stopped. At first it scared me when Elf did it until I realized that her mood hadn’t really changed, she’d just gone silent. She’d write notes to us.

  But when Elf plays concerts she talks a lot afterwards about mundane things, earthly things, every little thing, she yabbers away talking for hours and hours like she’s trying to ground herself, to stay, to come back from wherever it was the music took her.

  Piano scales were the musical soundtrack to my youth. I could do anything to Elf when she practised her scales and she wouldn’t notice. I could put raisins on the keys and she’d flick them off unperturbed as her fingers zoomed up and down the entire length of the piano. I could lie on top of the piano in a sexy pose and sing I am a V-A-M-P like Cher and she wouldn’t miss a single note, her eyes never left the keys except when they closed in rapturous ecstasy for a second or two and then the pace of the music would change and Elf would open her eyes wide and fling herself at the piano like a leopard onto a snake, a savage assault as though the piano were both her lover and most mortal enemy.

  She did eventually come home again from Norway and a bunch of other places. She moved back home with my parents and stayed in bed and cried for hours at a time or stared at the wall. There were dark circles around her eyes and she was sombre, listless and then strangely exuberant and then despondent again. By that time I had moved away from East Village to Winnipeg and had two kids with two different guys … as a type of social experiment. Just kidding. As a type of social failure. And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.

  I’d visit my parents and Elf, with my little kids in tow, Will was four and Nora was a baby, and I’d lie in the bed next to Elf and we’d look at each other and smile and hold each other while the kids crawled around on top of us. She wrote letters to me during that time. Long, funny letters about death, about strength, about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and the intricacy of despair on pink stationery in coloured felt-tipped markers. Then, after a few months, she slowly got her health back. She started playing the piano again and doing a few concerts and then she met a guy, Nic, who adored her and now they live together in Winnipeg, which means Muddy Waters, number one on the Exotic City Index—the coldest city in the world and yet the hottest, the farthest from the sun and yet the brightest, where two fierce, wild rivers meet to join forces and conquer man. Nic took piano lessons from Elf for a few months. That’s how they met, but Nic admitted later that the only reason he took piano lessons from her was so that he could sit next to her on the little bench and have her gently place his fingers on the keys. He even bought her a new piano bench, although as soon as she saw it she commanded that he rip off its soft padding—What the heck is that doing there?—as if playing music is about comfort.

  Nic loves Elf’s odd requests, each one is like a holiday for him. Nic is a very precise guy. He believes in textbooks and manuals and recipes and hat and collar sizes. He can’t stand the wonky looseness of “small,” “medium” or “large.” When Elf suggested he learn to play around the notes he almost lost his mind to bliss and the craziness of it all. And he’s not a Mennonite, which is important—in a man—for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to harvest her soul and shackle her to shame. Nic is a medical scientist. I think he’s trying to rid the world of stomach parasites but I’m not exactly sure. My mother tells her friends he’s working on a cure for diarrhea. She’s skeptical of cures. And Nic, she’ll say, I do see dead people. And I converse with them. They’re as alive to me as the living, perhaps more so. How does “your science” explain that? Nic and Elf always talk about living in Paris because there’s some kind of lab there where he could work and because they both love to speak French and argue politics and wear scarves all year round and console themselves with old-world beauty, but so far they’re still here in Muddy Waters, the Paris of the Northwest Passage.

  Elf has beautiful hands, not ravaged by time or sun because she doesn’t go out much. But the hospital has taken her rings. I don’t know why. I guess you could choke on a ring if you decided to swallow it, or pound it against your head for several weeks non-stop until you did some damage. You could throw it into a fast river and dive for it.

  How are you feeling right now? Janice is saying.

  If I squint across the room at Elf I can change her eyes into dark forests and her lashes into tangled branches. Her green eyes are replicas of my father’s, spooky and beautiful and unprotected from the raw bloodiness of the world.

  Fine. She smiles feebly. Dick Riculous.

  I’m sorry? says Janice.

  She’s quoting our mother, I say. She says things like that. Chuck you Farley. You know. She means ridiculous.

  Elfrieda, you’re not being ridiculed, okay? says Janice. Right? Yoli, are you ridiculing Elf?

  No, I say, not at all.

  And neither am I, says Janice. Okay?

  Neither am I, says a voice unexp
ectedly from behind the curtain, her roommate.

  Janice smiles patiently. Thanks, Melanie, she calls out.

  Any time, says Melanie.

  So we can safely say you are not ridiculous, Elfrieda.

  Well, it’s called self-ridicule, whispers Elf, but so quietly that Janice doesn’t hear it.

  Was it good seeing Nic and your mother? asks Janice. Elf nods obediently. And isn’t it great to see Yolandi? You must miss her now that she’s not in Winnipeg.

  Janice turns to look at me with some kind of look, I don’t know, and I feel the need to apologize. Nobody moves away from Winnipeg, especially to Toronto, and escapes condemnation. It’s like the opposite of the Welcome Wagon. It’s like leaving the Crips for the Bloods. Elf rolls her eyes and touches the stitches in her head with her finger, one after the other. She’s counting them. Some clanking sounds are emanating from the hallway and a man is moaning. I want you to know that you’re safe here, Elfrieda, says Janice. Elf nods and looks longingly at the slab of Plexiglas next to her bed, the window.

  How about if I give the two of you some time to yourselves, says Janice.

  She leaves and I smile at Elf and she says come here, Swiv, and I get up and walk two steps to her bed and I sit on the edge of it and flop on top of her and she smoothes my hair and sighs under the weight of my head. I go back and sit on my orange vinyl visitor chair and blow my nose and stare at her.

  Yolandi, she says, I can’t do it.

  I know, I say. You’ve made that point.

  I can’t do the tour. There’s no way I can do the tour.

  I know, I say. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry. None of it matters.

  I really can’t do the tour, she says.

  You don’t have to do anything, I reassure her again. Claudio will understand.

  No, says Elf, he’ll be upset.

  Only because you’re not … because you’re here … He’ll just want you to feel better. He knows about all this stuff. Friend first, agent second, that’s what he always says, right? He’s weathered your storms before, Elfie, he’ll do it again.

  And so will Maurice be angry, says Elf, he’ll go crazy. He’s been planning this for years.

  Who’s Maurice …?

  And remember Andras, the guy you met in Stockholm … when you saw me play?

  Yeah, so?

  I just can’t do this tour, Yolandi, says Elf. He’s coming all the way from Jerusalem.

  Who is?

  Isaak. And a bunch of other people.

  So what? I say. All those guys will understand and if they don’t it doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. Remember what mom used to say? “Shred the guilt.” Remember?

  She asks me what that horrible sound is and I tell her I think it’s dishes falling onto the concrete floor in the corridor, but she asks me if somebody is being shackled out there in the hallway and I say no, of course not and she begins to tell me that it happens, she’s seen it, that she’s terrified, have I heard of Bedlam, and she doesn’t want to let anybody down. She says how sorry she is and I tell her nobody is angry, we want her to be okay, to live. She asks me how Will and Nora are, my kids, and I tell her fine, fine, and she covers her face with her hands. I tell her that she and I could mock life together, it’s a joke anyway, agreed, okay? Agreed! But we don’t have to die. We’ll be soldiers together. We’ll be like conjoined twins. All the time, even when we’re in different cities. I’m desperate for words.

  A chaplain comes into the room and asks Elfrieda if she is Elfrieda Von Riesen and Elf says no. The chaplain peers at her in wonderment and then tells me he could have sworn that Elf was Elfrieda Von Riesen, the pianist.

  No, I say. Wrong person. The chaplain apologizes for bothering us and leaves.

  Who would do that? I ask.

  Do what? says Elf.

  Just ask another person in a hospital if she’s who they think she is. Aren’t chaplains supposed to be more discreet?

  I don’t know, says Elf. It’s normal.

  I don’t think it is, I say. I think it’s totally unprofessional.

  Things are always bad for you if they’re unprofessional. You always say oh, that’s so unprofessional as though there’s some definition of professional that’s also a moral imperative for how to behave. I don’t even know what professional is anymore.

  You know what I mean, I say.

  Just stop lying to me about what life is, Elf says.

  Fine, Elf, I’ll stop lying to you if you stop trying to kill yourself.

  Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin, that she’s afraid it will push through and she’ll bleed to death. But mostly she’s terrified that it will break inside her. I ask her what kind of piano it is and she tells me that it’s an old upright Heintzman that used to be a player piano but that the player mechanism has been removed and the whole thing has been turned into glass, even the keys. Everything. When she hears bottles being thrown into the back of a garbage truck or wind chimes or even a certain type of bird singing she immediately thinks it’s the piano breaking.

  A child laughed this morning, she says, a little girl here visiting her father, but I didn’t know it was laughter, I thought it was the sound of glass shattering and I clutched my stomach thinking oh no, this is it.

  I nod and smile and tell her that I’d be terrified of breakage too if I had a glass piano inside me.

  So you understand? she asks.

  I do, I say. I honestly, honestly do. I mean, what would happen if it broke?

  Thank you, Yoli.

  Hey, are you hungry? I ask her. Is there anything I can do for you?

  She smiles, no, nothing.

  THREE

  ELFRIEDA IS SO THIN, her face so pale, that when she opens her eyes it is like a surprise attack, like one of those air raids that turns night to day. I ask her if she remembers that time she and I sang a really slow aching version of “Wild Horses” for a group of elderly Mennonite nursing home residents. Our mother had asked us to participate in the seventy-fifth wedding celebration of the town’s oldest married couple and we had thought the song was killer cool and entirely appropriate for the occasion. Elf played it on the piano and I sat next to her and we both sang our hearts out to our bewildered audience who sat around in wheelchairs or stood leaning hard on canes and walkers.

  I thought the memory would make her laugh but it makes her ask me to leave. She realized before I even did that I was spinning out this anecdote because it represented something else and more than the sum of its parts. Yoli, she says, I know what you’re doing.

  I promise I won’t talk about the past if it causes her pain. I won’t talk about anything if she doesn’t want me to, as long as I can stay.

  Please go now, she says.

  I tell her I could read to her the way she used to read to me when I was sick. She would read Shelley and Blake, her poet lovers she called them, mimicking their voices, male and British, clearing her throat … “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples.” The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the waves are dancing fast and bright. How about I sing? Or I could dance. Like a wave. I could whistle. I could do impersonations. I could stand on my head. I could read Heidegger’s Being and Time to her. In German. Anything! What’s that thing again, that word?

  Dasein, whispers Elf. She half smiles. Being there.

  Yeah, that! Please! I sit down and then stand up again. C’mon, I say. You like books with being in the title, don’t you? Please. I sit down next to her again and then put my head on her stomach. What was that quote on your wall? I ask.

  What quote? she says.

  On your bedroom wall, when we were kids.

  You put the fist in pacifist?

  No, no … that other one, about time. Something about the horizon of being.

  B
e careful, she says.

  The piano?

  Yes. She puts her hands gently on my head and keeps them there as though she is resting them on a pregnant belly. I can feel their heat. I hear her stomach rumble. I smell the Ivory Snow scent of her T-shirt that she has on inside out. She massages my temples and then pushes me off her. She says she doesn’t remember the quote. She tells me that time is a force and we must allow it to do its work, must respect its power. I consider arguing that she herself is disrespecting that power by attempting to sidestep it but then realize she might already have made note of that and is talking to herself as much as she is talking to me. There is nothing to add. I hear her whisper yet another apology and I begin to hum a Beatles song about love and need.

  Remember Caitlin Thomas? I say.

  Elf says nothing.

  And remember how she barged drunkenly into Dylan’s hospital room at St. Vincent’s in New York City where he was dying of alcohol poisoning and threw herself on top of his beleaguered body begging him to stay, goading him to fight, to be a man, to love her, to speak, to stand, to stop dying for god’s sake. My sister says she appreciates being compared to Dylan Thomas but apologizes and asks me again to leave, she needs to think. I tell her all right, I’ll leave but I’ll be back tomorrow. She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named—when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion towards the people who invented the concept of “telling time.” How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.

  But Elf, I say, just because you have no use for the systems that help us measure our lives doesn’t mean that our lives don’t need measuring.