by Miriam Toews
Afterwards I got drunk on Revolucion tequila. There are two crossed pistols on the bottle pointing towards the sky, to God, and I phoned my friend and whispered another apology into her machine. I was about to tell her that I did think she had what it took to kill herself but stopped myself mid-sentence and switched it to I think you have what it takes to endure.
I phoned Julie but her son told me she was at a movie with Judson and their grandma was babysitting. Tell her I love her, I said. And I love you too, and your sister. And your grandma. I love you all.
NINETEEN
MY MOTHER IS HERE NOW IN TORONTO and the three of us, my mother, my daughter and I, are living in the house. The first time my mother saw the house was a few weeks ago late at night in the middle of an electrical storm. It was raining hard, horizontally, little pellets, and the night was a deep purple with lightning flashing like knives stabbing at the earth. I had parked the car in the driveway. Nora was in the back seat with a couple of her friends from school. My mother got out of the car and tried to open her umbrella but the wind was whipping it around and so she struggled for a bit while the rest of us stared at her through the car windows as though she was a mime doing a performance of some kind and then she finally gave up, to hell with it, and tossed the umbrella up into the air and let the wind have it altogether. We watched the umbrella fly up quickly like the Challenger and then down again, straight down, and then just seconds before it hit the ground it zoomed directly at my mother’s head but she dodged it and it hit the car. We were all getting out of the car by now, already drenched from one second in the rain, and then my mother managed to grab the umbrella and she walked it over to the moat beside the lane, the disgusting toxic garbage-filled moat surrounding the cinder-block car parts factory, and threw the umbrella in there. What phony baloney, she said. As if to say what fools we are to think we can escape the wrath of atmospheric disturbances. We stood laughing in the storm and watched the useless umbrella sink into the sludge. At some point, but not tonight, I’ll suggest to my mother that we put our garbage into the blue bin rather than the cesspool out back. Oh, right, I forgot that you believe in recycling, she’ll say. You know all that stuff goes to the same place. Recycling is just a government conspiracy meant to make us believe that we’re saving the earth so they can go about making nasty deals with mining companies to make an extra buck or two. Finally we made it into the house and found Nelson there high up on his ladder putting the final touches to my mom’s ceilings, rap music cranked and the intoxicating smell of weed.
My mother inspected every inch of the house slowly, carefully, grinning, drops of rain falling from the tip of her nose, sighing, running her hands down banisters, over walls, nodding at some feature, pointing silently at another, remembering a detail from her childhood, standing back and staring like she was at the Louvre and concluding that it had style, an odd charm, a warm vibe, that she saw us living here happily. Bravo! she said to me and we all, Nora and her school friends and even Nelson who had come down from his ladder to tag along with us for the house tour, high-fived and hugged.
I had put four bottles of beer in my fridge and my mom and Nelson and I toasted to our future or to the improbability of the moment, or just to its passing, or to private memories, or simply to the broader theme of shelter. The rain stopped for a few minutes and we all went out onto the second floor deck—the old, creaky one with broken Christmas lights hanging from it—to look at the sky and Nelson told us riddles about hurricanes and their eyes and the girls laughed and laughed, they thought he was hot, and my mother, with her back to us and her hands grasping the railing, was quiet and looking westward. Then, quite suddenly, she turned around and recited her favourite Wordsworth poem. I’d heard her do it before, but this time it ripped at my heart.
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
Whoah, said Nelson. You hear that? He was looking at the girls. You hear what grandma threw down? Shit! The girls clapped and asked her if it was a song or what and I held my bottle aloft and made a new toast, to the lees of life, I said, a callback to another poem my mother sometimes pulled from her hat but also to the Alfred Lord–referenced inscription in my mother’s old high school yearbook, the one beneath her photo: Lottie drinks life to its lees! She winked at me.
To the what? said Nora.
The girls had to pee and I suggested they do it into a cup and throw it under the front steps to keep the skunks away, like the renovation crew guys had recommended. Don’t worry about my mother, Nora told her friends, she’s a hippie. When she was a girl she had nothing to play with but the wind. You don’t have to pee into a cup. We have a washroom.
Nelson and my mother chatted briefly about poetry and the power of seas, their riptides and undercurrents, all of their invisible strength, and the girls eventually wandered off into the night. I went downstairs and had another look around my mother’s part of the house. She had insisted that all the bars come off the windows. My renovation crew had balked at this, they worried about her safety on the main floor. I won’t live in a prison, she said. They’re coming off. I wandered back into her living room. I took a pencil from my backpack and climbed up Nelson’s ladder, to the top, and wrote on a part of the ceiling that he would be painting over very soon, maybe even later that night. AMPS. I climbed down and then hollered up to my mother that we should go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning the truck with my mother’s belongings would be arriving from Winnipeg and she and I would supervise the move, instructing the movers where, in which room, to put what and how to assemble certain pieces and then we would stay here in this place and live.
My mother is wearing a patch over one eye. She’s sitting in a room full of old people who are all wearing a patch over one eye. I’ve come to pick her up. One man welcomes me to the pirates’ convention. It’s the left eye, for every one of them, that is patched over. We’re in a room at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto. I find my mother deep in conversation with a couple in matching windbreakers and she waves me over to make introductions. She explains that the cataract doctor does all left eyes one week and then all right eyes the next. She has been given six tiny bottles of eye drops with instructions for use.
For the next couple of weeks Nora and I take turns administering the drops. Our days are punctuated with these drops sessions. In between drops we have to wait a few minutes for my mother to absorb the hit. While we wait we play mad duets on the piano to pass the time. We play really fast. Sometimes we play my mother’s favourite hymns like “Children of the Heavenly Father” but at breakneck speed, which makes her laugh. Nora can play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in less than ten seconds and an even faster version of Handel’s Sarabande.
Six different types of drops, two or four or six drops from each bottle, three minutes in between drops, four times a day! We come at my mother with tiny bottles and she obediently removes her glasses and puts her head way back and pushes her soft white hair away from her eyes. When it’s over she sits at her computer playing online Scrabble with tears, real and manufactured, pouring down her face.
Invincible calm, I tell her.
Invincible calm, she repeats.
You will triumph, I say.
You will triumph, she answers.
A couple of days ago my mother came h
ome from a walk around the neighbourhood with news that put her in a jubilant mood.
I’ve found something out, she said. I went into the funeral home on the corner and found out that I can be cremated for fourteen hundred bucks. That’s everything included. And they’ve got a door-to-door policy. They’ll pick up my body and return it in a can.
She showed me her new shoes, a quality pair of black leather slip-ons that she’d bought at a trendy Queen West boutique. My mother is not a hipster or a style maven. She’s a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer, and who has rather suddenly moved to the trendy heart of the nation’s largest city to begin, as they say, a new chapter in her life. She doesn’t know anybody in Toronto but she loves the Blue Jays, which bonds her to strangers of all kinds. She is the absolute embodiment of resilience and good sportsmanship.
I’ve started making a shit list of shops and cafés on Queen West here in the “art and fashion district” who treat her with less respect and professional friendliness than they treat their younger and more glamorous clients. My mother doesn’t even notice, she’s jovial and curious and delighted and oblivious to snottiness. She’s a bit loud because of her mild deafness and she laughs a lot and has questions about everything and no embarrassment in asking. In her mind there is no reason why she and a group of beautiful film students hanging out at the Communist’s Daughter could not party together every night of the week. She is the antithesis of what the Queen West crowd would like themselves to be. She’s comfortable in her XXL pink cotton shorts and the T-shirt she won at a Scrabble tournament in Rhode Island. She would like to engage these pale, thin retail workers in conversation, she’d like to get their story, she’d like to know where the products come from, how they are chosen, how does one wear this, how does it wash, she’s trying to learn more about her new home and to become acquainted with her world, which makes their cold bony shoulder treatment of her that much more heartbreaking. And then I boycott them forever. So does Nora, even though it pains her a bit because she is young and fabulous and ultra-fashionable and would like to go into these shops occasionally but whatever, we smite you, snobs.
My mom’s already pals with the dry cleaner guy on King who knows me only as Lottie’s daughter and she chats every morning with Straight Up Cliff, the waving guy across the street. She even offered to give him, or his sons, my couch. Three large men, one with a fresh cut on his nose, came to our door this morning and told me that Lottie had told them I had a couch for them. No, I said. I don’t. A misunderstanding.
Can you not give my things away? I asked her later.
A guy wearing a shirt, tie, jacket, socks, shoes, hat and no pants, none, no underwear either, walked past our house and my mother saw him and ran to her bedroom for a pair of her sweats to give him. He thanked her and then wrapped them around his neck like a fluffy scarf and she told him well, that would work too. When I asked her if she wouldn’t miss those comfy sweats she told me that she’d stop giving my things away but that she’d do whatever she wanted with her things.
She’s joined a church, too, a Mennonite one on the Danforth, and they’ve asked her to become an elder. Is that some official thing? I asked her. Aren’t you one already? You’re quite old. She explained to me that there are only three elders in the church and that she is very honoured to have been asked. Back in our little hometown of East Village a woman would never have been asked to be an elder in the church. A woman wouldn’t have been asked (told) anything except to close her mouth and open her legs. She’ll think about it for a while. She zips around town on the TTC visiting cranky shut-ins from her church, singing hymns with them, helping them to prepare meals, making them laugh, making herself useful. The church people have come around and planted things in our hideous front yard. Flowers, shrubs, perennials, some decorative rocks. And Alexander, our next-door neighbour, has spread wood chips all around the yard too, so now our house has become a beautiful sort of community project.
We don’t talk about Switzerland or whether I should have taken my sister to Switzerland to help her die. I’m pretty sure Elf never mentioned Switzerland to my mother and I don’t dare ask her about it. In the evening, when her Samaritan work is done, my mother pours herself a honking big glass of red wine and watches her beloved Blue Jays get creamed again. Nora and I can hear her from the second and third floors shouting at her television on the main floor. Send him home! Hustle, man! We don’t flinch. We’re used to it. She’s been a Jays fan forever and knows the stats and the stories behind all the players. All right, that guy’s blown his rotator cuff, that guy’s throwing garbage, that guy tested positive for some hoohaw. The CL they just signed? Well, he’s on the DL with a pulled groin! They’re calling them up from Triple A!
My mother had something like a date a few weeks ago. She told the old fellow, as she called him (I think he’s ten years younger than she is), that what she’d like to do is get a glass of wine somewhere—this wine habit is something she’s quickly picked up in Toronto, she’s been buying a Merlot lately with a label that says DARE!—and then go to a Jays game. She invited me along and the whole time I chatted with the guy who was not that interested in baseball but, I found out, smokes two joints a day for his advanced arthritis. You’re dating a pothead, I told her. Meanwhile my mom watched the game like a scout, hunched over and beady-eyed, and recorded everything, hits and misses and runs and errors, into her programme. When the guy tried to talk to her, to ask her if she’d like a hot dog or something, she said C’MON UMP! WAKE UP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, SNIDER? TWO MEN OUT AND THE BASES LOADED! After the game, after we’d dropped off her date somewhere in the east end of the city, I asked her what kinds of things he did and she said she didn’t really know, he’d just got himself a phone though, so he wouldn’t have to call her from a pay phone anymore. He goes to the University of Toronto, she said. Cool, I said, what for? To shower, she said.
Late last night I went downstairs to say hi and she wasn’t there. There was a note on the table. Yoli, she’d written, I’ve gone to a lecture on Eritrea. There’s schaubel zup and schmooa kumpst in the fridge. I called her on her cellphone and when she finally answered I heard raucous voices and whooping in the background. Where are you? I asked her. It’s after eleven. She said hang on, hey guys, where am I? I heard a guy answer her and she told me she was at the Motorcycle Café on Queen Street and somewhere having a burger and watching the game. Extra innings. By yourself? I said and she told me no, no, there’s a huge gang of people here and then there was more laughing and yelling and eventually I couldn’t hear her at all.
I’m sitting on my couch, the one my mother tried to give away to the neighbours, and my tears are beginning to sting my eyes. A low point is when you can’t even depend on your tears not to hurt you. I’ve been next door, at the other neighbour’s. Her name is Amy. She’s a new mom, I see her almost every day, taking her baby for a walk. A month ago she found a fallen starling on the sidewalk and took it home to nurse it back to health. She built a little house for it in her back bedroom, with a branch and a Frisbee full of water, and put live earthworms in a bowl of dirt and she fed him baby food and apple sauce on the end of a tiny Popsicle stick and she played starling songs to him so he could learn how to sing in his language. After about three weeks of taking care of him she decided that the bird could be on his own now and should leave the nest she’d made for him and she opened the door of her back bedroom and the starling hopped onto her shoulder and then the two of them walked along the upstairs hallway, down the stairs, along the downstairs hallway towards the open back door and then suddenly the bird saw his chance, the rectangle of light from the open door, and he flew off. Amy passed her iPhone to me and said you want to see the bird flying away? My husband filmed it. The bird was a small dark blur flying through the air and out into the light and up, gone. He moved so fast. As I watched this
short video something inside of me smashed, it was so startling and irreversible that starling’s departure, and I was crying but trying not to, but it felt like I’d been tear-gassed.
———
Now I’m looking at a box of cards sent from Elf over the years. Every occasion remembered, all of them written in her trademark coloured felt markers. Look at all these exclamation points, I think. All these occasions—birthdays, Christmases, graduations—marked with emphatic endings. And then again. We reconfigure and we start again and we start again. We huddle in a field with our arms around each other, our helmets knocking, and we rework our strategy and then we run another play. When I was a kid I told Elf (or had I only told myself?) that I would keep her heart safe. I would keep it preserved forever in a silk bag like Mary Shelley did with the heart of her drowned poet husband or in my gym bag or in the top drawer of my dresser or tucked into that hole in that ancient tree in Barkman Park in our faraway hometown next to where I stashed my Sweet Caps. Now I’m crashing around my house searching for those felt-tipped markers. If I can find the pink one and the green one I’ll be okay until the morning. I search and then I give up searching.
Living with my mother is like living with Winnie the Pooh. She has many adventures, getting herself into and out of trouble guilelessly, and all of these adventures are accompanied by a few lines of gentle philosophy. There’s always a little bit more to learn every time you get your head stuck in a honey pot if you’re my mother.
She was out all night last night. This morning she showed up at the front door—she’d forgotten her keys—with her hair sticking up all over the place and her nightgown tucked into her pants. Oh good, you’re up! she said. I forgot my key!