All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

Remember the egg? I said to Elf. She hadn’t opened her eyes. We’d been served some kind of egg, not a chicken egg. Something else. A small, white, slimy eyeball thing, an embryo bobbing in green brine, and as soon as I saw it I made a break for the washroom. When I came back to the table Elf could tell that I’d been crying again and she immediately went to work trying to make me feel better the way she had always done from the time she quoted her poet lovers to me, like it was her profession. She turned me into a hero. She started telling stories about me when I was a kid and how I was the brave, adventurous one and how they should all see me on a horse—had they heard of barrel racing?—that I was the toughest girl in town, and that nobody made her laugh harder and that all her piano performances, really, were inspired by my life, by the wild, free rhythm of my life, combined with its delicacy, its defiance (which I knew was shorthand for being messed up but unable to admit it), or something like that. That she tried to play her piano the way I lived my life: freely, joyfully, honestly (shorthand for: like a cheerful halfwit with no social skills). She told all these people that the baby tucked away inside me was going to be the most richly blessed kid in the universe for having me as its mother and that I wrote beautiful rodeo books and that I was her best friend. All lies, except for maybe the very, very last part.

  Elfrieda! Do you remember that day? She opened her eyes, finally, and nodded. I told her she had always looked out for me in situations like that one. She smiled, a big open smile. I pointed to the dragonfly pillow next to her head and told her that I’d brought her a gift. She seemed so inordinately happy about it. For me? Thank you! It’s beautiful! She held it close to her body and thanked me again, more than she should have. It’s just a pillow, I said. She asked me what I had in the plastic Safeway bag that I’d been dragging around with me all over town, and I told her it was my novel, a bunch of marked-up pages held together with an elastic band.

  A new Rodeo book?

  No, the book book. The real book.

  You’ve finally written it? That’s great! She asked me if I’d read to her from it and I said no. Just a paragraph? No. A sentence? No. Half a sentence! One word? No. A letter? I said okay, that I would read the first letter of the novel. She smiled and closed her eyes and sort of burrowed into her bed like she was preparing herself for a delicious treat. I asked her if she was ready and she nodded, still smiling, eyes closed. I stood and cleared my throat and paused and then began to read.

  L.

  She sighed and lifted her chin to the ceiling, opened her eyes and told me it was beautiful, BEAUTIFUL, and true, the best thing I’d written yet. I thanked her and shoved the page back into the plastic Safeway bag.

  She asked me well, can you at least tell me what it’s about, in a word? I told her yeah, sisters. And I glared at her and then I began to cry, inconsolable, for a good twenty minutes curled up in that torn vinyl chair by the window and she reached out and touched my foot, my calf, she stroked my leg, the part of it she could reach from the bed, and told me she was so sorry. I asked her what she was sorry for but she didn’t say anything. I asked her again, my voice sounded harsh and vindictive, what was she sorry for? I slapped my hand against the reinforced window, quadruple paned to prevent jumpers from crashing through it, and it startled her. But again she answered me with silence and those huge green eyes fringed with ridiculously long lashes, dusky, haunted like my father’s with pupils sunken ships in all that green.

  I didn’t give her the satisfaction of hearing me tell her I understand, that it’s okay, that I forgive her, that she doesn’t need to be forgiven, that I’ll always love her, that I’ll keep her heart in my pencil case. I looked away and calmly took out my BlackBerry to check for more important messages. Will had texted: Nora is completely unreasonable. When are you back? How’s Elf? Do you know where my basketball needle is? I texted back: Yes. Not sure. Alive. Try the junk drawer. Love you. I googled “suicide gene” but cancelled the search at the last second. I didn’t want to know. Plus, I already knew.

  People ask: but how does this happen? To think that even with all the security measures we employ these days to keep things out—fences and motion detectors and cameras and sunscreen and vitamins and deadbolts and chains and bike helmets and spinning classes and guards and gates—we can have secret killers lurking within us? That we can turn on our happy selves the way tumours invade healthy, wholesome organs, the way “normal” moms suddenly throw their infants off the balcony is … who wants to think about that shit?

  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 Da
n, 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’r
e 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.