All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  She had just returned from the sleep clinic where she spent the night with electrodes on her head, dreaming. The sleep technician got angry with her because she was reading her book. She told my mom she was there to sleep not to read, and my mom told her she couldn’t sleep without reading first. The sleep technician asked my mom to hand over her book—it’s a Raymond Chandler—and my mom laughed and said you have got to be kidding me, hand over my book. Not a chance. Then the sleep technician was a bit rough with her, yanking the sticky round electrodes off her head in the morning and not saying goodbye when my mom left. It drives my mom crazy when people don’t say hello and goodbye. It’s old school, she says. It’s the end of civilization when people don’t say hello or goodbye.

  Apparently, said my mom, my heart stops beating ninety times an hour while I’m sleeping. You’ve got sleep apnea, I told her. Clearly, she said. She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at her reflection.

  She showed me the apparatus that she’ll have to sleep with now, a giant plastic mask with a hose, which she’ll strap to her face and then breathe in moisture from a contraption that the face mask is attached to. We have to get jugs of distilled water and keep the thing filled. She put the mask over her face and walked heavily towards me like Darth Vader. If somebody breaks into my bedroom while I’m wearing this thing, she said in a muffled voice, they won’t stick around for long. Then she breathed hard from behind the plastic and it filled up with condensation. She yanked it off. Too bad I’m not still wearing my patch, she said. I’d be a force to reckon with, wouldn’t I?

  She opened her laptop for a quick game of online Scrabble. The last guy she played with was from France and he offered to show her a picture of his penis. She wrote him back No merci. Do you have photographs of Paris?

  I have just realized something. It’s not me who’s survived, who’s picked up and gone on, who’s saved my mother by bringing her to Toronto, it’s my mother … and she’s taken me with her.

  So, I said, you dreamed at the sleep clinic?

  Boy! she said. Did I ever. I had an epiphany.

  Yeah? I said.

  Well, you know how I hate cooking so much?

  Yeah.

  Well, I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been wondering what I should do about that. So I had this dream last night and it came to me. Frozen food! Just a voice telling me that. So I figured out, from my dream, that I should go to the freezer aisles and get a lot of frozen food, pizzas, meatballs, perogies, chicken fingers, whatever, and stock my freezer and that’ll be the end of it. I won’t have to worry about cooking but I’ll still have food to eat. It just came to me like that, like a billboard: frozen food!

  That sounds pretty good, I said. My mother was dreaming of survival. She was having survival dreams. She was having dreams that were telling her how to keep being alive. I wouldn’t tell her that frozen foods are full of sulphates, who cares, when she was deep into the cure.

  I had a dream of my own. It wasn’t a Switzerland-scenario dream. Elfrieda and I were in her yellow kitchen next to the giant picture window talking and laughing about nothing. We were just pleasantly lost in a maze of words that didn’t mean much, telling stories and making each other laugh. We were there but then, in my dream, I wanted to tell Elf something more urgent, something about my work, about my fear of finishing my book and of how it would be received and then there was a pause in our chatter and Elf was yawning, and I thought now I will tell her this urgent thing but she put her hand up to stop me so I kept my mouth shut. She took my hand and she looked hard at me, she put her face closer to mine so I would really get what she was about to say, that she meant it, her eyelashes a black fringe, she was being serious, and I thought oh thank god, she’ll say something to make me feel better, braver, and then she said Yoyo, you’re on your own now. And my feeling in the dream was the feeling I had when I watched my neighbour’s video about her bird. The suddenness of it, something lost in a second forever. My sister was a dark blur moving towards a rectangle of light. But now after hearing my mom’s survival dream I think maybe this is my survival dream and it’s not a nightmare. It’s the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we’re surviving.

  On Fridays we have family meetings. Sometimes Nora doesn’t come to the family meetings because she has better things to do—there is Anders, there are parties, she’s young. We give her the minutes from the meetings. I’m not sleeping around anymore. I’m embarrassed about it and Elf isn’t around anymore to remind me that I’m not a slut and that there’s no such thing okay Yoli, have I taught you nothing, please stop equating morality with outdated self-serving patriarchal notions of women’s sexuality.

  Finbar called to ask if I had killed my sister and needed legal counsel and I told him no, she saved me the trouble. He apologized. He hadn’t known it was that serious. He said he was sorry. I thanked him. He said but we had something, right? I liked the way he put that. It might have been a hallucination but it was something. I said yes, and I thanked him again. We said goodbye forever, behaving like grown-ups. I live with my mother and my daughter. We stand outside on our various perches, on all three floors, and shout things at each other like the smoking women in Balconville. I don’t have time to sleep around. I have raccoons and dreams and water guns and grief and toxic moats and guilt and used condoms to pick up from the driveway.

  My mother said I couldn’t tie off grief like a used condom and toss it in the garbage. I asked her what she knew of condoms and she told me she had been a social worker for a long time which is what she always says after surprising us with information we didn’t think she had. Yesterday I was walking through Trinity Bellwoods Park and discovered my mother lying on a bench, sleeping. I sat beside her for a while and read the paper. After ten or fifteen minutes I gently nudged her and said mom, it’s time to go home. She told me she loved sleeping outdoors. Is that true, I said, or were you out walking and suddenly overcome with exhaustion?

  My sister gave me an emergency ladder once. It was the kind of ladder that you hook onto your upstairs window ledge and then climb down it if there’s a fire in your house. For years I stored it in the basement but now I’m beginning to understand the wisdom of keeping it on the second floor.

  I phoned the hospital in Winnipeg and asked if I could please speak to the patient named Elfrieda Von Riesen. They told me she was not a patient there. I told the hospital well that’s strange because she definitely had been a patient there and the last thing I’d heard was that she wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital any time soon. They said well, they had no information regarding that. I told them I was tired of all their fripperies. They were sorry about that. I hung up.

  And then it was almost Christmas already. Nic was going to join us. He was on the phone from Winnipeg. He had an idea for the headstone: And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.

  What’s that? I said.

  You don’t know? he said.

  I don’t know every poem, I said.

  It’s John Clare.

  Did Elf like him?

  Very much. It’s called “I Am!” He wrote it in a mental asylum.

  No way, I said.

  Pardon me?

  Let’s not have everything tied up to lunacy, I said.

  You mean for the inscription?

  For everything.

  Well, do you have suggestions?

  When I got back to Toronto after Elf died I had wanted to take some of her ashes with me and keep them here but Nic didn’t like the idea of divvying her up so they’re all buried under an enormous tree in the Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. My mother had suggested that she be buried with our dad out in East Village and the cemetery guy had said sure, there was room for three if they were urns and not coffins (suggesting that my mom would eventually go in there too) but Nic said no way, Elf had said expressly that she did not want to be buried in
East Village. That would be like giving the body of Louis Riel back to the Canadian government as a souvenir. What about your backyard? I asked Nic. After all, she was a homebody. He said very funny and that there were legal issues with a backyard burial. She wasn’t a cat. That’s true, I told him. He told me that I had done everything I could and that no one was to blame. I wasn’t sure about that. What about Zurich, I wondered. She would have died peacefully and not alone. That’s all she wanted. I had failed. We didn’t talk about that. I told him he had done everything possible too.

  She was the one who got the pass, I said. You know how she would have been. She could talk her way out of the ward.

  But I should have fought harder to have them keep her, he said.

  You couldn’t have fought harder.

  So no John Clare poem?

  Maybe. But I don’t like the asylum connotations. Plus, if it’s a poet it should be a woman.

  But most of the really great woman poets killed themselves so that has connotations too.

  I know and that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid here, right, is labelling her even after death.

  Yeah, true, so then we just have a blank stone?

  Maybe, yeah, just her name and the dates.

  Maybe.

  So then the original idea of the poem still holds, though, in a way … let me lie. Just let me lie.

  Beneath the grass and vaulted sky.

  Do you ever have dreams about her? he said to me over the phone.

  Yeah. Do you?

  Yeah, indirectly. Like it’s summertime but the coldest summer on record, colder even than any winter has ever been. What are yours?

  Well, the other night I dreamt that I was in a fishing village, some outport in Newfoundland or something, and I had to go to the grocery store to buy some meat and when I got there it was a dirt floor and there were lambs lying around everywhere. They weren’t small and white like in the Bible, they were dark grey and as big as a greyhound dog. But they were lambs. Some of them were dead, some were just barely alive. There was a guy with a knife. He was butchering them but he didn’t really know how to. He’d hack a hoof off or a tail or maybe a snout. He didn’t know what to do. I just stood there looking around at the lambs and then he said he’d had it. And then he made one more cut. And then he said no, it was the knife that had had it, like it was something almost living or just that it wasn’t sharp anymore and couldn’t cut properly, I wasn’t sure.

  What does it mean? said Nic.

  I don’t know, Carl Jung, I said.

  But I did know. It was about Zurich.

  You know what? Nic asked. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we put a line of music on her headstone and no words at all?

  Nic and I talked on the phone for a long time about the line of music we could engrave on the stone, and the whole time I wanted to bring up Switzerland but didn’t know how to because if I told him Elf had asked me to take her to Switzerland that would be like telling him that she didn’t trust him to do it, or that he didn’t understand her, and I didn’t want him to feel those things. He was a man alone already. And besides, what was the point in bringing up Switzerland? I had to work it out for myself whether I was the lamb or the butcher or just the knife.

  When Elfie was twelve she was finally chosen to play Mary in our church nativity pageant. She was very proud and nervous. She had been lobbying for the Mary role for years. C’mon, this part was made for me! I’m not sure our Sunday school teacher was finally convinced of that—a twenty-something virgin who didn’t talk much?—or just really tired of being harassed by Elf. But she gave her the part and said just please no strange surprises. Elf was well aware of her responsibilities, of being demure and tender and mild even though she’d been unconventionally impregnated by an invisible force and was now expected to raise the Messiah and all on a carpenter’s salary. I was six. I was supposed to be a shepherd, relegated to some back row where all us younger kids would stand with dishtowels on our heads or angel wings gaffered to our backs. I told my mother I refused to be a shepherd. I would be Mary’s sister, the baby’s aunt. My mother told me that the baby Jesus didn’t have an aunt in the nativity scene, that it didn’t make sense. But I am her sister, I said. I know, said my mother, but only in real life. I paused. But, I argued, Jesus had “wise men” and camels at his birth but no relatives? How much sense does that make? I know, said my mother, but the Bible says … Just this time, I told her. Elfie needs me. She’s got a new baby. I’m her sister, I’m going.

  My mother didn’t bother to fight with me. I put together my sister/aunt costume, a flowered sheet, and trudged off to rehearsals with Elf who was a bit embarrassed by me but she’d gotten used to that a long time ago and only sighed wearily once. The pageant director phoned my mom a few times to complain. She told my mother she couldn’t convince me to budge from Elfie’s side, that I had just wedged myself in there between her and Joseph and wasn’t moving, and the boy playing Joseph was getting really annoyed by it. Jesus doesn’t have a pushy aunt in this thing, he said. It’s not in the Bible. My mother told the pageant director she had no advice for her. I got to play my sister’s sister and everybody tried hard to ignore me but I knew I’d been there and more importantly so did Elf who was a fantastically demure Mary, just sitting there placidly and holy, while I bustled around a bit making sure the kid was breathing, the cradle was secure, the straw was fluffed, Joseph wasn’t swearing out loud, all the things a good aunt would do when her sister has a baby.

  We had to get a Christmas tree. Nora and I went to the No Frills parking lot across the street from the Runnymede Library on Bloor Street West and bought the biggest, most beautiful tree in the lot. The tree had plastic straps around it, keeping it skinny and portable, but the guy who sold it to us said it would puff out when we took them off. He tied it to the roof of our car. He called it the Everest of trees. We drove home with the tree and lugged it into the house through my mother’s back door. It took up the whole living room. As we took off the straps it kept getting bigger and bigger. Needles were everywhere. It was much too big but we loved it. My mom sat knitting me a black boat-necked sweater in her easy chair while Nora and I tried to put up the tree. Nora played the new Kanye West record on her laptop. My mother asked her what it was. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, said Nora. She sang some of the lyrics along with Kanye. Honey, said my mom, you’re not a monster. I know, Grandma, said Nora. Thanks. My mother sat in her easy chair knitting and nodding in time to Kanye.

  We were trying to get the tree to stand in the stand without falling over. Nora was balanced on the arm of the couch wearing leather mittens and holding the top of the tree. She had strands of Christmas lights around her neck all ready to go. I was lying on the floor trying to get those metal screws to go into the stump of the tree. My mother was sitting in her chair saying to the left, to the right, now the left, no the right. Kanye West was rapping about what he needed badly. We couldn’t get it straight. Then we thought we had it.

  Nora, let go, I said. I let go too. The tree started to fall over to the left and Nora grabbed it before it crashed onto the piano. My mother laughed. There was flour on her forehead and chin. She had been baking tarts earlier on. I got back down on the floor and swore and Nora held the top with her mittened hand and my mother said hey, the tree wanted to lean, we should let it.

  What, I said, just let it lean against the piano and have it like that?

  No, said Nora, do you see people just leaning their trees against stuff? No, you don’t.

  We kept trying. Then we thought maybe we should get a rope and tie the tree to the curtain rod. We could disguise the rope to make it look more Christmassy.

  Ah, the Christmas Rope, said Nora. A beautiful new Von Riesen family tradition.

  It’s really a big tree, isn’t it, said my mother.

  One more time, I said. We worked and worked to make it stand straight and on its own without a rope. Back away now, I told Nora. We both moved slowly away from the tree a
nd it was standing alone, there it was. O happy day. We had succeeded in doing something normal. The ceiling was very high but the top of the tree was touching it. We breathed. We eyed it for a while. Okay, I think it’s good, I said. Let’s have some wine, said my mother.

  I opened a bottle and we went to the dining room table and sat there and toasted to our success. We lifted our glasses high, even Nora had a bit of wine, and said things about Christmas, about ourselves, like here’s to us. Our shoulders dropped. We were proud. We were covered in pine needles and the room smelled so good. My mother gazed towards the tree. Nora and I had turned our backs on it. We were sipping our wine. Then my mother shouted and Nora and I turned around in slo-mo, Kanye got loud again, and we watched the tree fall. It fell slowly at first, discreetly, like it was having a heart attack in public and it didn’t want this to be happening but it was happening. Then it picked up speed and as it crashed to the floor it took things with it, a painting of two boys playing in puddles, the television, the books on top of the piano, a sculpture of a girl in a dress being shy, an almost empty coffee cup and a large plant. It finished falling and lay still on the floor.

  Hoo boy, said my mother. Head count, said Nora. We toasted to ourselves again and laughed hard. My mother just couldn’t stop. Then Nora and I went back to help our fallen comrade and finally, finally made him stand alone for good in the living room without a rope.

  Claudio stopped by for a visit. He stood on the front porch, snow on his shoulders and cap, cradling gifts, perfectly wrapped. I thought I would see Elf behind him, shaking off her boots, big green eyes sparkling. He pulled a bottle of Italian wine out of his coat. We sat in my mother’s living room next to the piano. My mother plays hymns on it. A lot of Elf’s old piano books from her early years are piled on top.

  Claudio put the gifts under the tree and handed my mother a bag. These are letters of condolence from a few of Elf’s colleagues, he said. And from fans. Wow, that’s quite a tree.