by Miriam Toews
I don’t know, I said. She’d do it herself, take the stuff.
Yeah, said Julie, but you wouldn’t have prevented her from killing herself.
I know …
And not only that, you would have provided her with the stuff to do it.
Yeah, I know …
So you’d be accessories or whatever.
Hmmm, yeah, I said, I know … Julie poured more wine into our glasses and we sat quietly for a while.
I know, I said. Nic and my mom could say goodbye to her and then leave and then I’d give her the stuff myself so it would seem like I was the only one responsible … they’d be totally off the hook. I don’t know …
But my gut instinct is that you shouldn’t do it.
Yeah, but she’ll do it anyway. That’s my gut instinct.
She might not though, I mean, she might … there might be some change.
Maybe, yeah.
Julie went in to answer her phone. I sat on her porch and waited. I banished mental images of my father’s broken body on the tracks by staring hard at the details of Julie’s porch. The door, the peeling yellow paint, the torn screen, the bicycles, the roller skates, the bag of fresh soil, the tiny ceramic elephant. I wondered what a sign would be, a sign pointing in a direction. I decided that if nobody walked down the sidewalk in the next ten seconds it was probably not a good idea to take Elf to Switzerland. It was very late, however, and cold and who would walk by? I counted to ten silently. A cat walked past. Confusing. I checked my phone and saw that Dan had e-mailed me and the subject heading was Remorse. My thumb hovered over various buttons on my phone and then I pushed delete and counted again to ten but before I’d finished Julie had come back outside and poured more wine.
It was late. Neighbours were switching out their lights. Bottles were being smashed in the back lanes. We decided to go inside and play a song on the organ that my mother had inexplicably delivered to Julie’s house in the middle of the night, that rainy night, weeks ago. David Bowie’s “Memory of a Free Festival.”
We both kind of sang, mumbled the lyrics, stumbled through. The sound of the organ fit with the elegiac tone of the song. We knew the song backwards and forwards, just not well. We held back, sang it comically and half-heartedly. I think that we both wanted to give ourselves up to the song, to sing it earnestly and boldly, the way it sat in our memories, but it was so late, the kids were sleeping, we were tired, and it was so late.
I was in the underground car park at the Ste. Odile Hospital screaming at a man who was standing next to his wife who was holding a young child. I had dropped my mother and my aunt off at the entrance to the intensive care ward and was attempting to park the car in a very tight space. I heard a guy saying hey, what the hell is your problem? I got out of the car and asked him what he meant. He said I was really close to his car, if I scraped his car or touched his car with my door or anything, my side-view mirror, there’d be hell to pay.
Hell to pay? I said. Did you actually just tell me there would be hell to pay if I touched your fucking car?
The guy was standing there with his wife and kid and they were all staring at me. I began to speak in a really loud voice. It wasn’t a scream, but it was crazy. I told him that I was about to go upstairs to see if my sister was dead or alive and that the spaces were really small, had he noticed that, and had I actually touched his stupid car, no, I hadn’t, my car was exactly between the lines, look at it, look at it, and had he ever loved a person more than a car or anyone other than himself?
I turned to his wife and asked her how she could be married to a man like this, how she could share a bed with this monster and conceive a child with him, the one she was holding in her arms, and I told her my own mother was upstairs trying to understand why her daughter wanted to die and that my aunt was also upstairs trying to understand why her daughter had wanted to die and that sometimes in life there were things we had to wonder about, things other than cars.
I was close to them. I persisted with my insane line of questioning. How can you be married to this man? Can’t you all see that my car isn’t touching your car?
They stared at me. The woman backed away from me with her child and said something to her husband who eventually shook his head violently to one side like he was trying to get water out of his ear and then walked away and joined his wife and kid.
I watched them leave. I crouched down beside my car, not close to his, and squatted there, trying to get my breath back. Then I went inside and got into the elevator and pushed a button, the one that would take me to Elf and the others. The man’s wife was in the elevator but the man and the kid weren’t there.
I’m sorry, I said to her, about all that. I waved in the direction of somewhere else. I’m sure you’ve got your own thing going on here. I’m really sorry, okay?
She stared at the floor numbers blinking on and off. I wanted to tell her that she had to tell me that it was okay, that she had to forgive me. That was how it worked. I told her again that I was really sorry. I’m so stressed out, I whispered. She stared at the numbers. We were going up. She got out, finally, without having said a word. I watched her walk away, down the corridor, she shifted her heavy purse from one shoulder to the other, and then the elevator doors closed.
My aunt was standing in the little vestibule next to the ICU ward in her purple track suit and her shiny white Reeboks. They were so small, like a child’s. She was holding a pencil. She was doing a sudoku. When she saw me she put the newspaper on the chair and gave me a hug. She told me that my mother was with Elfrieda, that Nicolas had just been there but had to go to work to deal with a valve problem, and that Elfrieda was awake and off the respirator. She told me she was going to get a coffee, did I want one? She asked me if I was all right. I told her what I had done, that I had told an innocent woman that her child had been conceived with a monster, and other things, and she told me it was okay, it was understandable.
But I just wanted that woman to tell me that too, I said.
My aunt nodded and told me that the woman would tell me that but probably not for a while, maybe years, and then only silently, in her thoughts, so I wouldn’t hear it but one day I’d be walking down some street and feel a kind of lightness come over me, like I could walk for miles, and that would be the moment when the woman from the parking lot had suddenly understood my horrible outburst, that it had nothing to do with her or her husband or her child, and that it was okay.
Forgiveness, sort of. Got that? said my aunt.
Okay, I said, so when I feel the lightness coming over me, on a street … I’m walking and …
Yes, said my aunt. Cream and no sugar, right?
She hustled off in her sportswear to find coffee and I looked at my mother and my sister through the glass wall. Elf’s eyes were closed, my mother was reading aloud to her. I couldn’t tell what book it was. She had a new sweater on, it had geese flying on it, she must have borrowed it from my aunt. My sister was so thin I imagined that I could see the outline of her heart. I went back to the waiting area and sat down and took my aunt’s sudoku and tried to finish it. I said how the hell do these fucking things work? to myself, but loudly, and a man looked at me and flared his nostrils. I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up my mother and my aunt were gone.
I went to see Elf and she was alone in her room, staring up at the ceiling. I sat next to her and took her hand. It was dry and I reminded myself to bring hand cream next time. It smelled like burnt hair in there. I put my head down, way down, like I was trying not to be carsick, and I didn’t say anything. Elf told me that we were a painting.
You can talk! I said.
She told me that her throat was healing. She asked me if I knew of Edvard Munch’s painting The Sick Child. No, I said, but is this it? She said yeah, that it was inspired by Munch’s dying sister. I told her but you’re not dying. Look at you, you’re talking now. She asked me why we had to be humans. I put my head back down, way down, towards the floor.
Okay, okay, she said. Don’t do that. You look so defeated.
I said well for god’s sake, Elfie, how do you think I should look?
I need you to be okay, she said. I need you to—
Are you fucking kidding me? I said. You need me to be okay? Oh my god. Oh my god. Look at you!
Okay, said Elf. Shhhh. Please. Let’s not talk. I’m sorry.
Have you ever thought about what I might need? I said. Has it occurred to you ever in your life that I’m the one that’s colossally fucked up and could use some sisterly support every once in a while? Have you ever got on an airplane every two weeks to rush to my side when I’m feeling like shit and wanting to die? Has it ever occurred to you that I’m not okay, that everything in my life is embarrassing, that I got knocked up twice by two different guys and had two divorces and two affairs that were—are—not only a nightmare but also a cliché and that I’m broke and writing a shitty little book about boats that nobody wants to publish and sleeping around with men who … fucking ooze nicotine into their sheets from their entire bodies so they leave outlines like dead—
What? said Elf.
Has it ever occurred to you that I have also lost my father to suicide, that I also am having a hard time getting over it, and that I also am trying to find meaning in my pathetic, stupid life and that I also often think the whole thing is a ridiculous farce and that the only intelligent response to it is suicide but that I pull back from that conclusion because it creates a certain onus that is unpalatable? Like you’re fucking Virginia Woolf or one of those guys, way too cool to live or too smart or too in tune with the tragedy of it all or whatever, you want to create some bullshit legacy for yourself as brilliant and doomed—
Yolandi, said Elf. I told you—
You have this amazing guy who loves your ass off, an amazing career that the whole world respects and gives you shitloads of cash for, plus you could quit any time and just be labelled mysterious and eccentric and then go live in fucking Paris in the Marais or whatever that stupid … fucking … arrondissement— No, don’t try talking, don’t correct me with your superior knowledge of French, you have an amazing natural fucking beauty that never seems to fade, an amazing house that magically cleans itself—
I have a cleaning lady, Yo, said Elf. You have a very low-grade understanding of despair, by the way.
An amazing cleaning lady, I said, okay? You have a mother who thinks the sun shines out of your ass.
Yoli, said Elf.
Okay, so dad died. Whatever! He loved you! You have … What is your major fucking problem anyway?
Plus, said Elf, I have an amazing sister. But can you … shhhh.
I am not! I said. I’m a total fuck-up! Can you not understand that? Can you not understand that I need your help! That maybe you’re here for a reason which is to be a goddamn sister to me?
Yoli, she said. She sat up in her bed now and was whispering hard, livid. You do not understand a fucking thing, okay? You have had my goddamn help all along. I had to be perfect so you could fuck up and you were more than happy to do it. One of us had to show some fucking empathy, do you know that word, it’s a good one, you should learn it, one of us had to show some fucking empathy towards dad and all his acres of existential sadness. Who was that person? Was it you? Was it mom? No! It was me. Just so you could go waltzing around—
I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I said. Now you’re comparing yourself to Jesus Christ? You didn’t have to be anything. You chose to be on his team.
Because nobody else would be, said Elf.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t have empathy, I said. That means we chose life, or some semblance of it. You happen to be more like him than us—which is lucky for you in a million ways—but that doesn’t mean we didn’t fucking care.
Oh so you’re saying I’m doomed.
I am not saying you’re doomed! You’re saying you’re doomed. I’m saying you didn’t have to be anything. And since when do you swear?
Yes, I did have to be something, said Elf. Have you ever heard of family dynamics? And don’t you think I’m scared shitless?
Well then what is this all about? Why are you here? Some kind of preemptive strike? Do the thing you most fear in order to overcome your fear of doing it in the first place? I’m afraid of killing myself so I think I’ll just kill myself and then I’ll be able to go on living without fear … oh wait! This one’s a little different. The logisitics are a bit—
Yoli, I’m trying to explain to you this incredible pressure I’ve felt to …
Quit then! Stop being perfect! That doesn’t mean you die, you moron. Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful? Get fat and start smoking and play the piano badly. Whatever! At least you know that you will eventually get what you want most in life—
What do I want most in life?
Death!
Yoli.
So why don’t you just wait for it to happen. Exercise some patience and all your dreams will come true. Guaranteed. What I want most in life is completely unattainable and everybody knows it.
What’s that? Elf said. Legalized marijuana?
True love, I said. And yet I’m sticking around unreasonably and knowing it’s impossible because who knows? I want to find out. I live hopefully.
Well, Yoli, your logic is skewed. You’re contradicting yourself. You are quite certain that your dream of true love, whatever that is, will never come true but on the off-chance that it might come true you will stick around to find out. I know that my so-called dream of death will come true so therefore, according to your own argument, I should be free to leave. There’s nothing to find out. No big surprises in the wings and nothing to hope for.
That’s not what I said!
I think it is.
Listen, I said. Don’t you think that mom has suffered enough with dad and all that shit and now, what, you love the perverse idea of a fucking encore?
Yoli, that’s so cruel. That’s beyond—
You’re just dying for a curtain call, aren’t you?
I’m not perfect, said Elf. I didn’t mean—
Yeah, I’ll say! I said. If you were perfect you’d stick around. See how life goes, how the kids do, do you ever think about Will and Nora and what this all means to—
Yolandi, shut up now, said Elf. Of course I do. I think about them all the time.
Bullshit! I said. If you thought of them, ever, just once—
Yolandi, stop it.
Stop what? I said. Stop making sense? Stop telling the truth? Sense drives you crazy?
You tell me, said Elf.
We stopped talking for a long, long time. A long time. Nurses came and went attaching and detaching things. Hundreds of thousands of babies were born while we weren’t talking. The continents continued to separate at the same pace as fingernails growing.
Yoli, look, she said finally. Can you just talk to me?
About what? I asked her.
Anything, she said.
Sure, I said, but you ask me to talk like you have some kind of hidden script you want me to follow and then when I veer from it—because I don’t even know what it is in the first place—you’re like no, no, don’t talk. You don’t want me to talk about the past because it’s too painful because there were good times, there was life, and it might persuade you to change your mind and you don’t want me to talk about the future because you don’t see one and so what—okay, I’ll talk about this second. I just inhaled. The sun moved behind a cloud. I exhaled. You’re in bed. A second is passing. Another one. Oh … and another one! I’m inhaling again.
She put her hand up and I took it. I held it, like we were champions of something stupid but hard-won, like a whistling tournament, but at a World Championship level. Just then Claudio appeared at the door carrying an extravagant bouquet of flowers. Ciao! He was wearing a patterned blue scarf, folded flat into his woollen coat. His black leather shoes glistened. Yolandi, you look beautiful!
(I love Claudio.) He kissed me on both cheeks. Elfrieda, my darling, and he kissed her forehead just above the new scar. Claudio, I’m so sorry, she said. He spoke to her in Italian, ma cosa ti è successo, tesoro, but she shook her head, no, don’t, as though the language of her heart had no place here or that it reminded her of beauty and love and laughter and those things were bullets now, sharp teeth and shards of glass and cheap plastic toys you step on in the nighttime.
Elfrieda, we are together here, that’s all that matters. He put the flowers on the side table and took her hand. You rescued me from Budapest, he said. He said he liked the way Budapest was beautiful and elegant and crumbling, decaying, plucky and sad, but when he spent too long there, everything started to depress him. And he said he had meetings, lunches, dinners, and he began to feel crumbling, decaying, and sad. He told us he sat in a warm hot spring that exploded from the ground, the way he had as a young man, surrounded by art nouveau architecture, it was like bathing in a cathedral. The sky was pink. The scent of lilacs filled the air. Fat Russian gangsters in tiny bathing suits played chess while their bleached blond wives hung scowling from their necks and arms festooned with gold and silver. Barbarians!
Claudio spoke English well, only a faint trace of his Italian accent. Those Russians are the descendants of the guys who slaughtered the Mennonites, I thought. Now they wear bikini trunks. Then he told us he had been standing on one of the bridges over the Danube and looking down he saw a guy sitting on the riverbank. Is it blue? I said. No, it’s filthy I’m afraid, and not at all blue. Is it beautiful? I asked. Well, yes, it could be described as beautiful.
That’s true, Elf said.
Well there was this tramp, or—do you call them hobos?
Do you know that hobo is an acronym for Homeward Bound? I said to Elf.
Yes, she said. From Woody Guthrie. I’m surprised that you know that.
I also know that there’s a Hobo Museum in Britt, Ohio, I said. I love reading their newsletter, especially posts from Nowhere Man and Mad Mary. When somebody dies they say he caught the Westbound.