All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  About when Janice will be available? What do you mean not authorized?

  You’ll have to call back later, I’m sorry.

  But don’t you have a system or something for finding Janice?

  I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.

  Can you page her?

  Have a good day.

  Wait, wait.

  I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.

  You could make an exception.

  I’m sorry? (She couldn’t hear me over the ice.)

  I just want to hear my sister’s voice.

  I thought you wanted to talk with Janice.

  I know, but you said that—

  I’d really recommend that you try again later.

  Why doesn’t my sister want to talk to me?

  I didn’t say she didn’t want to talk to you. I said she’d prefer not to come to the common room to answer the call. If I had to bring the phone to patients every time they got a call I wouldn’t have time for anything else. And we’d rather have patients make an effort to connect with family rather than the other way around.

  Oh.

  I’d really recommend that you try again later.

  I agreed, sure, why not.

  I hung up and threw the phone into the river. I didn’t throw the phone into the river. I stopped myself at the last second and muffled something like an already muffled scream. I decided I’d rather set the hospital on fire. I’d prefer not to have my soul crushed. Bartleby the Scrivener preferred not to until he preferred not to work, not to eat, not to do anything, and died under a tree. Robert Walser also died under a tree. James Joyce and Carl Jung died in Zurich. Our father died beside trees on iron rails. The police gave my mother a bag of his belongings afterwards, the things he’d had on him when he died. Somehow his glasses didn’t break, maybe they flew off his face into soft clover, or maybe he had carefully removed them and put them down on the ground, but when she took them out of the plastic bag they crumbled in her hands. His watch too. Time. Smash it. His wedding rings were bashed and nearly all of his two hundred and six bones broken.

  He had seventy-seven dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.

  FOUR

  NIC WAS GOING TO SEE ELF in the evening after he got home from work and afterwards he and I would meet for a beer, we would stare at each other, embattled and bewildered, and talk about our next move. We were trying to assemble a team of caregivers who would work with Elf when she was released from the hospital.

  Nic had very gently suggested to Elf that an element of co-operation was a key factor in her journey towards health. She wasn’t into the idea. Obviously. She said the only thing she saw when she heard the word team was four runaway horses. There’s no I in team, is there Yoli? She was quoting our high school basketball coach and she said that expression had always terrified her. What would this team do with her? she asked. What would Elf do with the team? Make lists? Set goals? Embrace life? Start a journal? Turn that frown upside down? She kept unearthing huge fundamental problems with the whole concept. Oh my god, Nicolas, she’d said. Journey? Health? Listen to yourself. I had also been listening to Nic and thought it sounded pretty good but Elf was up in arms, gnashing her teeth against the smarmy self-help racket that existed only to sell books and anaesthetize the vulnerable and allow the so-called “helping” profession to bask in self-congratulation for having done what they could. They’d make lists! They’d set goals! They’d encourage their patients to do one “fun” thing a day! (Oh you should have heard the derision in Elf’s voice when she said the word fun like she’d just spit out the word Eichmann or Mengele.)

  The experts involved had the hardest time understanding our family’s extreme hostility to the entire health network. We had the hardest time understanding our family’s extreme hostility to the entire health network. When my mother had her lawn mower accident and was lying there in the grass next to two of her toes and the paramedics leapt out of their ambulance and ran over to her she looked at them and said what on earth are you guys doing here? When the doctor told my mother that I’d need a tonsillectomy she told him, yeah we can probably do that ourselves at home but thanks.

  Mostly we just didn’t want Elf to be left alone. Nic would have to get back to his work eradicating the runs and I would eventually have to return home to Toronto to relieve Will of his babysitting duties so that he could get back to his classes on overthrowing the one percent. In the Mohawk language, Toronto is spelled Tkaronto and means “trees standing in water.” (I appreciate that our Canadian cities were named after things like mud and trees and water, especially when they are now given such monikers by overachievers as the Financial Hub or the Technology Centre or the Publishing Capital or the Most Cosmopolitan City in the World.) But in the meantime, this evening, I was going to share a bottle of wine with Julie, on the front porch of her rickety house in Wolseley, an inner-city neighbourhood where massive elm trees create a cathedral ceiling of speckled shade, while her kids watched a video inside.

  Julie and I grew up together in East Village. We’re second cousins and our mothers are also best friends. (For that matter, Elf and I are also cousins, and sisters, but to understand this you have to know that only eighteen or so initiative-taking Mennonites came to Canada from Russia to get away from the Anarchist army, so … you know.) Julie and I bathed together as children, invented a game called Hide the Soap and experimented touching tongues with each other when it slowly became horrifyingly clear to us that it would be a thing we’d have to do a lot of in the future if we were to have normal lives with boys and men.

  Julie’s a letter carrier, a hard-core postie who walks fifteen miles a day with two twenty-pound bags of mail on each of her shoulders. When it rains she opens one of those green mailboxes you see on corners with a key from a giant metal ring and sits inside it, smoking and listening to BBC News podcasts on her headphones. She’s been reprimanded several times by her supervisor for that and countless other acts of insubordination, like rolling up the waistband of her Canada Post–issued “skort” to make it sexier. Sometimes she gets a one-day or a two-day or a three-day suspension, depending on the severity of her crime, and that’s fine with her because then she can hang out with her kids before they go to school rather than having to wake them in the dark and shuffle them over to her neighbour’s house in their pyjamas. She recently split up with her husband, a very tall sculptor and painter working in oils, and so takes advantage of the Canada Post health plan that pays for her to see a therapist. Nothing is awful in her life, she’s quite happy, she just likes the luxury of being able to talk about herself, her feelings, her goals, her hopes, her disappointments. Who wouldn’t? Her therapist, a Jungian, had told her that she was the most optimistic person he’d ever encountered in all his years of practising therapy and that Julie’s dreamless sleeps were a constant challenge for him.

  We sat on her porch and drank cheap red wine and ate cheese and crackers and talked about everything other than Elf, who was a subject like time in that I couldn’t grasp it but it had a mighty hold on me. Julie’s two kids are a boy and a girl ages eight and nine, who still love to hug people and sit on their laps. They were indoors watching Shrek and every five or ten minutes would come out onto the porch (every time that happened Julie would fling her lit cigarette into the grass so they wouldn’t see her smoking and then retrieve it later) and say oh my god, okay, guys? You have to see this. It’s like, it’s like … And then they’d argue with each other for a minute or two about what it was like, truly, and Julie and I would nod in utter amazement, Julie occasionally glancing at her dwindling cigarette in the front yard. Then suddenly with no warning they’d vanish like meadowlarks, darting back into the house to assume their positions on the couch.

  They think smoking causes AIDS, said Julie, retrieving her smouldering cigarette. We talked about how it didn’t matter how old or young they were, w
e obsessed over their well-being and suffered wildly, exquisitely, and blamed ourselves for every single nanosecond of unhappiness they experienced. We would sooner self-immolate than see our children’s eyes fill slowly with tears ever again. We talked about our ex-husbands and our old boyfriends and our fear of never being desired sexually ever, ever again and of dying alone and unloved in our own shit, with bedsores so deep they exposed our crumbly bones, and had we done anything right in our lives?

  Probably, we concluded. We had maintained our friendship, we would always be there for each other, and one day when all our children had grown up and left us to wallow in regret and melancholy and decrepitude and our parents had died from the accumulative grief and exhaustion of living and our husbands and lovers had all flown the coop or been banished from our doorsteps we would buy a house together in some beautiful countryside somewhere and chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Misérables, reimagine our pasts and wait out the end of the world.

  Deal?

  Deal.

  We high-fived and rolled a joint. We were getting cold out there on the porch. We sat listening to the river break down and crack up a block away, and I wondered if those slabs of ice could fly, could ever be released and lifted right up from all that roiling pressure and what it would be like to see a giant slab of ice winging its way over Portage Avenue on its way back home to the north. We stared up at the night, April crisp and clear, no stars. We watched as lights went out up and down the street and we peeked at Julie’s kids through the window, asleep on the sofa in flannel pyjamas, clutching remote controls to a thousand modern devices.

  So why isn’t Dan looking after Nora? asked Julie. (Dan is Nora’s father. He’s rambunctious and sentimental. We’re in the throes of a divorce.) It’s not like this isn’t an emergency. Didn’t he tell you you could always count on him in an emergency? Have you told him about Elf?

  He’s in Borneo or something, I said. With an aerialist.

  Must be nice. But I thought he was living in Toronto.

  Yeah, he is … to be closer to Nora, he says, except he’s in Borneo at the moment.

  Indefinitely? said Julie.

  No, not forever. I don’t know. Nora did tell him about Elf.

  And Barry’s putting Will through university in New York? asked Julie. (Barry is Will’s father. He’s loaded because he spends his time creating stochastic local volatility models for a bank and has a mysterious demeanour. We hardly talk.)

  Yeah … so far.

  How’s Nora liking dance? (Dance was the main reason we moved to Toronto. So Nora would be able to go to a certain ballet school, thanks to her scholarship since I wouldn’t have been able to pay for it otherwise.)

  She loves it but thinks she’s too fat.

  God, said Julie. When will that shit ever end.

  I caught her smoking.

  She’s smoking so she doesn’t eat?

  I guess so, I said. All the dancers are. I talked to her about it but …

  And Will loves New York? she asked.

  He really does, I said. And he’s a Marxist now, I think. He just says Kapital, doesn’t even use the Das.

  Cool.

  Yeah.

  Eventually I helped Julie manoeuvre her kids up to bed, half walking, half carrying, and said good night. She hadn’t received any type of suspension for insubordination unfortunately, so had to get up early to work the next morning. She put out her Canada Post–issued spiked boots and prepared the kids’ lunches. The spiked boots were useful for walking on ice. One winter during an ice storm, I found myself stranded on the slippery fishbowl bank of the Assiniboine. I had walked across the frozen river and had planned to climb up the bank to the sidewalk near the Osborne Street Bridge. It would have been a shortcut on my way downtown but instead I got stuck on the icy bank with smooth-soled shoes and was completely unable to get enough of a grip to climb up the steep embankment. I tried grabbing at the thin branches of trees that hung over the bank but inevitably they’d snap off and I’d slide back down to where I had started. I lay on my back on the ice wondering what to do, munching on a granola bar I’d found in my bag, and then I remembered Julie’s special shoes with spikes. I called her from my cellphone and she told me that she was actually nearby on her mail route and would come and rescue me. She showed up a few minutes later and took off her spiked shoes and threw them down to me so that I could put them on and finally climb up the bank. She stood on her mailbag so her feet wouldn’t get wet and smoked a cigarette while I clomped up the riverbank like Sir Edmund Hillary in her spiked shoes. Then we went for a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut. Rescue missions are occasionally very straightforward.

  I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.

  Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures—which are legion.

  The words “nothing bad has happened yet,” a lyric from a Loudon Wainwright song, knocked around in my head while I cruised past the house on Warsaw Avenue. This was the house where I started writing my teen rodeo novels which did okay for a while, well enough to help with the mortgage payments and buy groceries. There are nine of them so far. The Rodeo Rhonda series. But it’s time for Rhonda’s world to change, according to my publisher. More teenagers live in cities now and can’t relate to barrel racers and broncobusters. My editor is being very patient with me these days while I work on my “literary book.” She said she’s quite happy to wait for Rodeo Rhonda number ten while I “expand my oeuvre.” The new owner was in the process of painting a thick layer of austere white over the original red and yellow that Dan and I had painted it years ago on a goofy whim when we were broke but happy and fearless and oh so confident in our love, our future, the kingdom of our newly minted family and our unshakable footing in the world. The fence hadn’t been repainted yet, it glowed a cheerful yellow in the dusky light, and I could still make out the decals that Nora had stamped all over it, sweet images of frogs and cars and half moons and blazing suns with happy faces. A little metal sign we’d bought on some family road trip that said Beware: Peculiar Dog Lives Here was still screwed to the gate. Sometimes people say at this point: I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where we went wrong.

  I went to Nic and Elf’s house and parked in their driveway. It was finally dark. I watched Nic through the window for a minute as he sat, also in darkness, staring at his barely glowing computer. It was time for us to talk about Elfrieda, our nightly conference that would leave us no closer to a solution but would at least reinforce our solidarity in the cause of keeping her alive. We sat in the living room among piles of music books and Mandarin novels, Nic’s latest fascination, sipping herbal tea from the last of their clean cups, and exchanged thoughts like: She seemed slightly more upbeat today, more willing to engage in conversation, didn’t you think? Well, yeah, maybe … What about that fresh cut? That fall? Do you know, is she taking her meds? She says she is but … The nurse told me today that we weren’t supposed to bring her food from the outside, that if she was hungry she was supposed to get out of bed and walk to the communal eating area at regular mealtimes. Ye
ah … but she won’t. She’ll just starve. Well, they won’t let her do that. No, you’re sure? Hmmm …

  We still hadn’t heard back from the “team” of psychiatric home care workers and were beginning to wonder if it actually existed. We wanted to know how often the team would be able to visit or how much it would cost. We agreed that the cost didn’t matter and Nic said he’d call the contact person again the next morning from work and I offered to try once again to meet with Elf’s psychiatrist, which was like trying to meet with the head of the Gambino family. I wasn’t even sure if he existed. Or at least, I said, I would talk to one of the senior nurses who was familiar with Elf’s case history, and basically beg anyone who would listen not to let her go home until we had this other plan in place or until she really, seriously had turned a corner, as they say.

  And what about the tour? I said.

  Fuck the tour, said Nic.

  Yeah, I said. I agree with you. But we’ve got to deal with it. She’s worried about letting everyone down.

  I know. Nic stood up and grabbed a piece of paper off the piano. Messages for Elfrieda, he said. Jean-Louis, Felix, Theodor, Hans, Andrea, I don’t know half these people.

  Have you told Claudio?

  No. No … He’s been leaving messages though. The Free Press wants to do a profile for a music anthology, and BBC Music Magazine wants to do something as well. Ha!

  Nic returned to the table and leaned his chin on folded hands. His eyes were bloodshot. His whole face seemed kind of bloodshot. He smiled, because he was brave.

  Tired? I asked.

  Epically, he said.

  He got up to put on a record, vinyl was his thing now. He liked the step-by-stepness of it, the process. He held the record the way people hold records, not with his fingers but with his palms. He blew on it. The music was a soft whisper, one acoustic guitar, no voices. When he came back to the table he asked me to look at his eyes.