by Miriam Toews
Her roommate, Melanie, says me neither from behind the curtain.
Elf turns to the curtain and says can I ask you to please mind your own business and Melanie tells her that she’s not here on business.
I leave them and go into the hallway and shuffle like a chain gang over to the little alcove that is fast becoming my favourite nook where I can sit alone and gaze down at the parking lot and out to the fields beyond it. We have a choice, I think to myself. We can take her at face value, as they say, and hope. Or we can assemble that elusive team now and I mean right now because she’s going home. I know it. She shall be released. I know that if she follows the rules and tells the nurses and the doctors that she’s feeling good, positive, not suicidal, not at all—are you kidding me? and be forced to say goodbye to the majesty of all of this?—that she will be home in time for dinner today.
I call Nic and he doesn’t answer. I go to the nurses’ station and am told that Janice is on her break. I ask if Elf is going to be discharged today and the nurse says who’s Elf and I say Elfrieda Von Riesen and the nurse says she doesn’t know and hasn’t heard.
I go back to Elf’s room and discover my mother singing a song to her in Plautdietsch. It’s called “Du.” Which means You. Elf is holding her hand. It’s a song about loving forever, even with the pain caused by loving so hard, a song she sang to us when we were kids.
Then things happen quickly. Janice comes back into Elf’s room. She’s smiling and she says hello all and tells us that Elf will probably be going home today just as soon as she’s seen the doctor and he gives her the green light. I imagine the doctor as Ben Kenobi passing Elf a sabre. My mother and I together say wow, that’s great, fantastic. Elf smiles at Janice and looks grateful.
Janice sits next to her on her bed and asks her if she’s really feeling well enough to go back home. We all know what she means. Elf says yes, definitely, she wants to get back to Nic and her real life. She’s combing her hair with her fingers. She’s willing to take the medication and will book follow-up appointments with her shrink. She’s ready. And she appreciates everything that’s been done for her while she’s been a patient here. She sounds like she’s giving a rehearsed speech at the Oscars. I give her a kiss on her cheek and say whew, that’s so great. That’s so great. My mother is sitting quietly with her hand on her heart, her eyes wide.
I’m panicking and confused. Janice says she’ll leave us alone for a bit while Elf gets her things together and I follow her out into the hallway. I ask her if it’s really a good idea that Elf goes home and she says she thinks it is and that she has no choice. She’s been admitted voluntarily, not against her will, so she can leave when she feels like it too. I ask her if it isn’t too soon and Janice says that it’s very important for the patient to feel empowered by being allowed to make big decisions.
Well, I said, a very big decision would be the decision to kill herself and nobody wants to let her make that one, right? Janice agrees and gets my point but says her hands are tied. And they really need the bed. And let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Let’s just see what happens, she says. And adds that she has a good feeling about it. She tells me that Elf wants to play tennis with me as soon as it warms up a bit and I don’t know how to respond to that.
I try calling Nic on the phone and this time he answers. I tell him that Elf is coming home today and he’s surprised. This was the first he’d heard of it. So what do we do? I say and he says he’ll call that person about the team immediately. He says he’ll leave work early and pick up groceries and meet us all back at the house later in the afternoon.
I go back into Elf’s room and find her up and out of bed, looking for her clothes. I help her put some of her things into a plastic bag and then realize that I’ve misplaced my own plastic bag, the one with my manuscript in it, but I am strangely calm, and I think fine, okay, all right.
But then my mother says hey Yoli, is this yours? She’s been sitting on it. She peeks inside and says oh, is this the new thing? I say yeah and she asks me how many words I have. For some reason this question makes me laugh. I shake my head. Elf tells her the first letter is amazing. My mother waits, smiling, for an answer. I don’t have an answer. She guides me out into the hallway, her hand on the small of my back. She’s so short and she smells so good, like coconut milk. She hugs me in the hallway and tells me everything will be all right. I love that she tells me this again and again but I wonder sometimes if she thinks I’m an idiot. Regardless, she’s my mother and that’s what mothers say. Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music. I remember humming that refrain over and over, singing myself to sleep with those lyrics in the days before my father kneeled in the path of a fast-moving train.
That evening we celebrate Elf’s homecoming with spicy Indian food and good wine and Nic’s special stash of Armagnac that my mother gave him for Christmas two years ago. Elf is smiling, a little shy, beautiful and serene, as though she alone holds the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Her hands shake only slightly and she’s wearing a pale pink scarf around her throat. She’s put a bit of makeup on the scar above her eye. Her pants are too big on her now but Nic has fashioned some kind of funky rope belt for her to wear. Nic is thrilled to have her home. He is calling her my love and my darling. My mom calls her honeybunch. I would like to give Elf a note right now that says we promised but I don’t have a Sharpie thick enough to make my point. Nic is talking about Chinese literature and learning Mandarin and Elf is thumbing through a novel he’s taken out of the library for her to read. There’s no mention of Paris or tennis.
Listen! I want to shout at her. If anyone’s gonna kill themselves it should be me. I’m a terrible mother for leaving my kids’ father and other father. I’m a terrible wife for sleeping with another man. Men. I’m floundering in a dying non-career. Look at this beautiful home that you have and this loving man loving you in it! Every major city in the world happily throws thousands of dollars at you to play the piano and every man who ever meets you falls hard in love with you and becomes obsessed with you for life. Maybe it’s because you’ve perfected life that you are now ready to leave it behind. What else is there left to do? But I’m finding it hard to make eye contact with Elfrieda. She’s not looking at me. She barely lifts her head from the novel Nic has given her.
My mother is tired from her trip and basically from all time since Anno Domini but also refreshed and happy just to see Elf at home. Apparently she got stranded out at sea again this time. It happens to her every time she goes to an ocean. She just bobs along on her back enjoying the sun and the undulating waves and then gets too far out and can’t get back and has to be rescued. She doesn’t panic at all, just sort of slowly drifts away from the shore and waits to be noticed or missed. Her big thing is going out beyond the wake where it’s calm and she can bob in the moonlight far out at sea. That’s her biggest pleasure. Our family is trying to escape everything all at once, even gravity, even the shoreline. We don’t even know what we’re running away from. Maybe we’re just restless people. Maybe we’re adventurers. Maybe we’re terrified. Maybe we’re crazy. Maybe Planet Earth is not our real home. In Jamaica, my mom had to be dragged, laughing her head off, back to shore by three shirtless fishermen after she went flying off a banana boat and couldn’t manage to climb back onto it.
Nic goes into the kitchen to get more drinks and I follow him and whisper what about the team, is it happening? He and I go downstairs on the pretence of getting more beer from the basement fridge and he tells me that this team is more mythical than anything. Apparently, with budget cuts and changes in policy and … He’s speaking but my mind drifts as I stare at the spine of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book lying all by itself randomly on the concrete basement floor as if it has been thrown down in a hurry … It’s not really an option but he’ll continue to pursue other possibiliti
es. I go to the book and pick it up and hand it to Nic. But possibilities of what? I ask him. What are we talking about? He takes the book, says I know, really, and breathes out heavily. In the meantime he’s made arrangements with Margaret, a friend of theirs, to stay with Elf for a few hours every day and my mother too will obviously visit every day. I know, I say, but Elf’s supposedly going on a five-city tour in two weeks. Look at her, do you honestly think she can tour? Have you talked to Claudio?
God, he says. He hasn’t talked to Claudio. He doesn’t know, all he knows is that touring terrifies her before she goes and then makes her feel exhilarated when she’s actually doing it. I tell him I have to go back to Toronto quickly. Will has to get back to New York for his exams and Dan is still in Borneo and I can’t leave Nora by herself, unsupervised, for longer than a day or two. As soon as her classes end I’ll come back here with her and we can spend the summer. I’ll see Elf every day if she’s not on tour. He understands and says he’s got everything under control and there are airplanes, right? And telephones.
We go back upstairs and my mother is telling Elf about her Scrabble ratings. She’s got an average of thirteen hundred and something and Elf is nodding, impressed, pretending she hasn’t heard it before. My mother tells Elf she made the word cunt the other day at the club. It’s a valid word! she says. Were you challenged? asks Elf. Nah, says my mom, the young guy I was playing with was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look at me, this old grandma laying down a dirty word. Elf smiles. She’s not saying much, though. But what is there to say? How is she feeling? Is this impromptu gathering a grotesque, fake sideshow in her opinion? Does she wonder what exactly we’re celebrating? Her failure to properly execute her plan to die? Or is she genuinely happy and relieved to be here?
C’mon, Elf! I think. Stop your hands from shaking and say something. Address your nation and let us know there’s reason to have faith in the future. Yes, there are airplanes and telephones.
I want to ask Elf if she’s afraid. I’m short of breath again. I’m smiling and trying to cover up my panic and discreetly suck oxygen into my lungs. I’d like to take Elf with me back to Toronto. I’d like for us all, my mother, my sister, my kids, Nic, Julie, her kids—even Dan and Finbar and Radek—to live in a tiny isolated community in a remote part of the world where all we have to look at is each other and we are only ever a few metres apart. It would be like an old Mennonite community in Siberia but with happiness.
Eventually we all leave. Elf is sitting at the piano, her hands moving soundlessly across the keys. When she gets up from the bench to say goodbye to my mom and me there are tears on her face. My mother lives only a few blocks away and decides to walk. She says she needs the exercise. Elf and I watch her cross the street safely, like a kid, and we all wave.
I tell Elf I love her, that I will miss her, but that I’ll be back in Winnipeg soon. Can I see her in Toronto when she’s there playing? Maybe, she says. But she’ll only be there for sixteen hours. She’ll rehearse, sleep, eat, perform, go back to the hotel, sleep, get up early to fly away. Rosamund, Claudio’s assistant, will be travelling with her this time. She tells me she loves me too. That she wants to know more about Toronto, my life there, and she asks me to write her letters, not e-mails but old-fashioned letters that will come to her in the mail in envelopes with stamps on them. I tell her I will, definitely, and will she write me back? She says she will, absolutely. Rock-solid.
I’m holding her wrists, my fingers encircle her tiny bones, and I squeeze hard until she says ouch and I apologize and let go. We don’t talk about the meaning of life, about scars, about stitches, or the number of words that we have or promises that we’ve made in the faraway past.
Then I drive around the perimeter of the city like a dog marking its territory, over bridges and under bridges, the way I used to stalk the edges of my small hometown. This is mine. Nothing bad will happen here if I patrol the streets like a crazed vigilante. Welcome to Winnipeg, the population will not change. I drop in on Julie and tell her I’m leaving early the next morning now, and I agree to call her as soon as I’m back in Toronto and I stop in at Radek’s and say goodbye and I thank him for the food and for the shelter from the storm and when he scratches his head and says yeah but … I shrug and shrug and smile and back away and continue to thank him for his sweetness, for his grace, for his time.
I drive my mother’s car like it’s a Panzer and the streets are my enemy, and I’m feeling bad and stupid and mean. I think about setting up an appointment with a therapist when I get back to Toronto but tell myself I can’t afford it. I’ll work harder, that’s all. Besides, what would I talk about with a therapist? When my father killed himself I went to see one and he suggested I write my father a letter. It wasn’t clear what I was supposed to say in the letter. I thanked the therapist and left thinking but my father is dead now. He won’t receive this letter. What’s the point? Can I just have my one hundred and fifty-five dollars back to buy some Chardonnay and a bag of weed?
When I get back to my mother’s apartment she is sleeping, snoring very loudly, and season something of The Wire is blaring on her TV set and a small space heater is making noise too and the ice is still tearing itself apart on the river that runs beneath her. I stand next to her bed and look at her for a while wondering if her sleep is peaceful, if it’s the only relief she knows. I go into the spare bedroom and lie down in my clothes on top of the covers. It seems futile now to undress and go to bed in a serious way because I have to get up soon and go to the airport. I fall asleep and then wake up to a commotion in the living room. My mother is up and talking to a man.
The story is: My mom woke up and went out onto the balcony for a look at the night sky and while she was doing that she happened to see this man, Shelby, parking his truck in the parking lot. She suddenly had a plan. She called down to Shelby to see if he’d be interested in hauling her old electric organ over to Julie’s house for her kids to practise on. She really needed someone with a truck. She would pay him. He said sure. They had a conversation in the middle of the night with her standing in her nightgown on the balcony like Juliet’s nursemaid. Now Shelby was in the apartment measuring the organ and wondering how he’d carry it down to the truck.
My mother said oh good, Yoyo, you’re up.
So Shelby and I carried the organ to his truck and my mother held the apartment doors open with her nightgown flapping wildly in the wind. It started to rain. Soon it was pouring. My mother ran upstairs to get a garbage bag to cover the organ while it was in the truck being driven to Julie’s house in the middle of the night. I asked my mother if Julie was expecting this delivery at this time and she said no, but we would deal with that when we got there.
Shelby and my mother and I squeezed into the cab of his truck and delivered the organ to Julie’s house. She and her kids were fast asleep and not answering the door, so we carried it into the shed in the yard and put a sign on her door telling her that we had brought an organ to her house and that it was in the shed. We drove back to my mother’s apartment block and she gave Shelby fifty dollars for his help. We said good night to Shelby and stood in her apartment dripping water all over the kitchen floor. There was also water all over the bathroom floor, and the river was forecast to spill its banks and lightning continued to rent the air.
Well, said my mother, that’s done at least.
I understood her need to accomplish something, however strange, something with clear rising action and a successful ending. She said she would try to get a little sleep before I had to leave but to wake her up first. I was wide awake so I went downstairs to the apartment building’s exercise room and stood on the treadmill. I pushed the start button and began to run. I was wearing chunky boots and tight jeans and my hair was spraying water all over the treadmill and onto the floor. I saw the empty swimming pool outside the glass patio doors and the list of Pool Rules written in cursive, and a thin red line against the horizon. I ran until I was drenched with sweat, gasping for air, unt
il I pushed a button that said Cool Down, and I walked slowly on the machine, gripping the handlebars.
EIGHT
Dear Elf,
A handwritten letter, as commanded, as promised. We have an ant infestation. This happened while I was in Winnipeg. Our landlord believes it has something to do with the degree of filth in our apartment but I suspect it has more to do with the degree of natural decay in the universe. We’re not that filthy anyway, just messy. I’ve put little white plastic trays filled with poison all over the apartment. Will has gone back to New York. He can’t wait to see you and Nic this summer. He managed to keep Nora alive but the place is a disaster. Apparently mess doesn’t “scan” for either one of them. Nora has a boyfriend now, apparently, a guy in one of her classes who is also here on a scholarship, from Sweden. When I got home a boy was cooking an omelette in the kitchen. There were bags from Whole Foods all over the place. Whole Foods is an expensive healthy grocery store that I never shop at. I go to a place called No Frills. This stranger in my kitchen couldn’t speak English so I had no idea what he was doing there and I had to wait until later that evening, when Nora showed up, to find out. In the meantime I went out for several long walks and in between smiled at him and pointed at a few things, nodding, etc.
I have a little room off my bedroom where I had planned to sit and work but I never go in there, it’s too cold. So I write at the dining room table or in bed. I like to listen to the mourning doves when I wake up early. They make me sad and happy and nostalgic I guess for my childhood, our childhood, and the prairies and that feeling of waking up with nothing to do but play. Do you know I used to wake up singing for a while there when I was about nine and ten? When you were in that bedroom with the wooden walls and that Mikhail Baryshnikov poster called When Push Comes to Shove. Where is that guy these days anyway? And was it his dancing you loved so much, or his body, or the fact that he left everything behind in Russia with no hope of ever returning, just for his art? Anyway, apparently mourning doves are being shot and eaten these days. Can you believe it? When I heard about it I felt the same way I did when I heard that Joe Strummer had died. The music of my youth. When you’re fifteen and you wake up in the morning to mourning doves singing and The Clash you know you’re in Heaven. Anyway, Joe Strummer is dead and mourning doves are being eaten. What does that say about one’s childhood? Who is left to lead us out of the wilderness?