All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  You might want to keep your distance, Nora said. She was setting the table. We tasted Claudio’s Italian wine and we toasted to Christmas, to the birth of a tiny Saviour (we’re waiting), to family, to Elfrieda.

  Okay, let’s sit down, said my mom. Claudio asked us how we were doing and we told him we were okay. How was he doing? He was still in shock, he said. He had honestly thought music would save her life. Well, said my mother, it probably did, for as long as she was alive.

  He told us that a guy named Jaap Zeldenthuis had filled in for Elf on the tour.

  He’s not Elfrieda Von Riesen but I think he did pretty well given the short notice, said Claudio. Critics noticed a few rhythmic vagaries in his playing, a certain waywardness. But it’s all right, Jaap was performing with jet lag. I was pleased with Elfrieda’s obituary in the Guardian. I liked it because it’s about what is special about her playing, its colour and warmth, and not just the usual stuff about her rigour and discipline. Bild was good too, very beautiful, and Le Monde. It bothers me that the other papers made a big problem of her health issues, an obituary must not read like another sensational headline story. Did you see them?

  My mother made a dismissive noise. Pffft. No, I didn’t, she said. I used to read those things but not anymore.

  I read them, I said, and you’re right.

  There was a heavy silence in the room. We stared at the tree for a while and then Claudio said I must tell you that in the gifts there is a video recording of Elfrieda’s last rehearsal. He told us that Elfrieda had given the best performance of her life that day, that she had played beyond herself, as if there was no physical barrier between herself and the piano and she could express her emotions at will, and when she was finished the orchestra stood and applauded her for five minutes. Elfrieda buried her face in her hands and wept, and then half of the musicians also wept, and now Claudio was crying too as he told us this. We thanked him for telling us the story, and for the video, and we promised we’d watch it. We all hugged him at the front door and he held on to the banister. He wouldn’t leave.

  I’m sorry, he said. All those years.

  We brought him Kleenex. He stopped crying and then started again. Finally he let go of the banister and we said goodbye. I had the feeling that we would never see him again. I remembered the story of him discovering Elf, sitting outside in the back lane behind the concert in her long black dress and army jacket, smoking, crushing her cigarette into the asphalt, only seventeen.

  Let’s not have forced gaiety this Christmas, said Nora, like it was a dish. We’ll have a tiny bit of it, I said. I remembered Elf bashing her head against the bathroom wall that Christmas Day when we were young. I can’t do it, she’d said.

  Nic arrived late on a Thursday night. He looked thin. We were having our Christmas early so that Will and his new girlfriend Zoe could spend time with her family at a resort in Mexico and so that Nic could be with his family in Montreal. Zoe travelled everywhere with her accordion. She had played us some sad but hilarious songs. The accordion is the best instrument for mournful occasions because it is melancholy and beautiful and cumbersome and ridiculous at the same time. She had a new tattoo which reminded me of the one I was trying to erase. I had forgotten about it and now it was only a bluish smudge on my shoulder like a mild bruise. Over dinner we talked about secrets. I told everyone how Elf had kept my secrets. She was a crypt. Then everyone looked at me as if to say oh yeah, like what secrets?

  Over dessert, my mother told us a story. She said she had a secret too, and she might as well tell it. We were all intrigued. Me especially.

  Are you going to tell me who my real father is? I asked.

  Yeah right, she said. No, it’s about a book. When my sister Tina was nineteen she was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. One day I picked it up to have a look and she said oh no, you can’t read that book, it’s not for you. So I put it down.

  How old were you? asked Nora.

  Fifteen, same as you, said my mother. So one day, for some cockamamie reason, I was mad at Tina. Spitting mad, I don’t know why. She wasn’t at home that day and I saw her book lying on her bed and I took it and read the whole darn thing in one shot.

  Wow, said Will, you really showed her.

  I never told her, said my mother, but boy did that feel good. And wicked!

  So what did you think of the book? asked Nic.

  Oh, said my mother, I loved it! But I thought the sex was plain stupid.

  Well, I said, you were only fifteen. (I glanced at Nora who made a face.)

  We smiled. We ate our dessert.

  Do you wish you’d told her? I asked.

  Ha, said my mother. I wonder.

  TWENTY

  WILL AND ZOE HAD LEFT EARLY that morning for Mexico City and Nic for Montreal. Nora was Skyping with Anders who was back in Stockholm for the holidays. I was reading in my mother’s living room, a book that Will had given me for Christmas called Prison Notebooks. I put it on the floor and got up to make a call to Julie in Winnipeg. My mother was making odd noises. She lay on the couch close to the tree. Her breathing was different. It was shallow and she blew out of her mouth like an athlete after working out. She was dying. I called an ambulance and away we went to the hospital. Eventually they saved her life again by pounding on her chest and shooting her up with nitroglycerine and other strong chemicals that would blast through her recalcitrant veins and ease her overworked heart.

  Wow! she said. That’s enough to jar your mother’s preserves, she told the paramedics, and one of them made her repeat it twice so he could tell his friends.

  It was all familiar to me, the gurneys in Emergency, but hers was a cardio case not a head case so there were no lectures from the staff, no righteous psych nurse demanding of her: why won’t you behave? Nora came to the hospital. We sat on either side of my mother. She was lying behind a brown curtain, hooked up to machines and drips, sleeping. When she woke up she said, well this is a fine how do you do. Christmas Eve yet! She told us she had dreamt of Amelia Earhart.

  The pilot? What about her? asked Nora. Did you solve the mystery of her disappearance in your dream? Then we’d be famous.

  My mother said that in her dream a man had told her that Amelia Earhart was his favourite missing person. She cried just for a few seconds. She whispered that she was sorry, being here on Christmas, just like Elf had apologized to my uncle for being there in psych. We held her hands and told her meh, who cares, who cares. Nora told her we’d celebrate with the Ukrainians instead sometime in January.

  Amy, our next-door neighbour, came by with a basket of food, wine, cloth napkins and beautiful china dishes and silver cutlery. We had our Christmas Eve dinner in Emergency with everything laid out on my mother’s stomach. She was our table. She had always been our table. Nora carefully removed my mother’s oxygen mask for a second so she could have a sip of her drink. The nurse had said one sip, because it’s Christmas, but my mother had two sips. Big ones. We drank champagne out of plastic sample cups and toasted once again to a straying notion of ourselves and to the lenient nurse who came around and smiled and to Elf and to my father and to my aunt Tina and to my cousin Leni. We sang “I Wonder as I Wander,” my mother’s favourite Christmas song.

  Nora and I stayed late until my mother had fallen asleep for the night and then we went home. I stood on the second floor balcony in the night and watched it snow into the moat.

  The next day I went to see my mother at the hospital. She had made friends already, she had been spooling out amusing anecdotes from behind her brown curtain for the benefit of her fellow patients, and Santa Claus apparently had made his rounds too. My mother was always dying, at least once a year. She’s worked a lot of emergency rooms like a stand-up comedian on tour, from Puerto Vallarta to Cairo to Winnipeg to Tucson to Toronto.

  Move all the stuff off that chair, she said, and sit beside me. She laid her whodunit on her chest carefully face down and open so she wouldn’t lose her place. There’s something I want to tell
you, she said. She held my hand. Her hand was warm, her grip was strong, like Tina’s.

  I already know, I said. That you love me, that I bring you so much joy.

  No, she said, I want to tell you something else.

  It was Christmas Day. I phoned Julie. Merry Christmas, I said.

  Merry Christmas to you too, she said.

  It was the first time in both of our lives that we were alone on Christmas Day. We said really? Is that true? It was true. Her kids were with her ex, their father, and Will was with his girlfriend’s family in Mexico and Nora was at Dan’s place. He had finally returned from Borneo. And my mother was in the hospital. Should we drink together over the phone? she asked.

  And suffer its deleterious effects? I said. I was quoting our old Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Skull. She had prayed, especially for Julie and me, that we would come to our senses and stop partying in the bushes with French boys. We couldn’t stop. It was too good. We wouldn’t stop! Our old Sunday school teacher told us that she loved us but that God loved us more. We told her to try harder. She told us that sinful women adorn their bodies and not their souls. Should we go naked? Julie had asked. When she left the room for Kleenex, Julie and I escaped out the fire exit. The last step on the ladder was still two storeys up from the ground and we had to jump the rest of the way down. We loved the way our soles hurt afterwards.

  We sat in our living rooms drinking Scotch and talking and listening. Here’s to something, this panoply, I said. Yes, said Julie, this cock-eyed carousel. We lifted our glasses and tapped them against our phones. You’re the strongest person I know, I said. I didn’t tell her that I thought she had the right stuff to kill herself. I was trying to retrain my beliefs and change my template for success.

  Is everything unbearable? she asked.

  Nope, I said. What are we doing right now?

  Well, that’s true, she said.

  Whose birthday is it again? I asked.

  That hippie kid, she said.

  Looks like we weren’t invited to his party this year, I said. We agreed we wouldn’t have gone anyway. We should become Jewish.

  Remember that guy outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon? she asked me.

  Allan, I said. (Allan was a brilliant cellist once, on the verge of becoming a prodigy and going to Juilliard, and then he smashed his head on the dash of his car when it hit a cement truck on black ice and now he stands alone outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon asking people really politely for change. He’s still handsome. He seems sort of hollowed out but his eyes are really bright, the whites really white and the blues really blue, like Greek islands. He mumbles words and sometimes it seems like he’s laughing at everything like he’s just been thrown a surprise party. We don’t know who takes care of him.)

  I dreamt I slept with him, said Julie. And I offered to be his girlfriend, she said. And take him home with me and take care of him but he didn’t want to. He was really sweet and was trying not to hurt my feelings. He showed me his blisters from the cello strings that would never go away. He asked me if he could borrow a pair of warm mittens though, that was all he wanted.

  Did you feel rejected? I asked.

  Yeah, she said, a bit. I wanted to comb his hair for him too, it was so tangled. And wash him.

  Julie and I talked for hours and hours through the night until Boxing Day. We were really happy when Christmas was over. Then we really had something to toast.

  May 3rd, 2011

  Dear Elf,

  Auntie Tina once told me that I’d be walking down the street one day and suddenly feel a lightness come over me, a feeling like I could walk forever, some magical strength, and that would mean I was being forgiven. I wish I had taken you to Zurich. I’m sorry. Auntie Tina said one day I’d be flying and not even know it.

  Did I tell you about the hospital stuff with mom? I think I already did. She’s fine now, again, for a while. I had an embarrassing moment in the hospital that I haven’t told anybody about. At one point in Emergency mom grabbed my hand—you know the way she does, how it’s actually almost painful like she’s a Mafia don pretending to be nice—and said she had something to tell me. I figured for sure it would be what she always tells us when she’s dying in Emergency, that she loves me, that I’ve brought her so much happiness and all that, but instead she whispered to me that I had to stop getting drunk and phoning the hospital in Winnipeg. She told me that she had tracked my activities—it’s all her years and years of reading whodunits finally paying off—and she realized I was going out in the early evening to Wino Town, or whatever the liquor stores are called here, and buying myself a bag of booze and coming home and drinking alone and listening to Neil Young songs that remind me of you and working myself into a paroxysm of grief and rage and then pranking the hospital in Winnipeg by calling them and asking if I can speak to you and then acting all incredulous when they tell me that you’re not there.

  She held my hand really tightly the whole time and she locked her eyes to mine so I couldn’t escape, and I felt so ashamed and weak and stupid and crazy. And I started crying and nodding and saying I know, I have to stop, I’m so sorry. And I cried and cried. She didn’t actually know what I had said to the hospital just that she knew I was calling them on a regular basis because she was opening the phone bills and looking at all the Manitoba numbers—this is the problem of living with your mother, Elf, another problem you will never encounter—and then she just put all the pieces together. She asked me if I was trying to haunt the hospital which I thought was an interesting way of putting it, and I told her I didn’t know what I was doing, that it didn’t matter, that I was sorry, that I would stop. Then even though she was the one dying and all hooked up to different cables and power cords and things she pulled me into her massive bear hug and rocked me like a baby from her horizontal position in her little white bed and I was kind of hunched over her sobbing while my bag kept falling off my shoulder. She had her arms around me. I pretended she was you and dad and Leni and even Dan, all the people I’ve lost along the way, and then she whispered things to me, all about love, about kindness, and optimism and strength. And about you. About our family.

  How we can all fight really hard, but how we can also acknowledge defeat and stop fighting and call a spade a spade. I asked her what we do when a spade isn’t a spade and she told me that sometimes there are things like that in life, spades that aren’t spades, and that we can leave them that way. I told her but I’m a writer, it’s hard for me to leave those spades so undefined, and she said she understood, she liked mysteries to be solved too, God knows, and words to be attached to feelings. She tapped her whodunit, the one lying on her chest, the one protecting her heart, that somehow with all this hugging hadn’t moved an inch. She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, sags eventually—because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either—and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. It means goodbye, it means going to Rotterdam when you weren’t expecting to and having no way of telling anyone you won’t be back for a while.

  Well, I’ve stopped pranking the hospital, you’ll be relieved to know. Remember that time I thought it would be a real kick-ass idea to go to school with some of mom’s pantyhose pulled over my face and you quietly whispered into my ear on your way out of the house: Swivelhead, attempt to be cool. You have no idea how often I evoke those words. Essentially, it’s what mom was trying to tell me in the hospital.

  So she recovered, as she does, and to celebrate she and Nora and I took a trip to NYC to see Will and Zoe. They took us to MOMA, to a show where everyone was naked and in pain. It was the Marina Abramovic show. It was the talk of the town. All of us gallery-goers huddled in one room wondering how we’d get to the next one. There was only a narrow doorway that we had to pass through, but there were two
suffering, naked people standing face to face in the doorway so we would all have to take turns squishing up against them as we went through. Nobody made a move to go through the doorway. The kids and I had lost track of mom when she was wandering around looking at things. We were whispering about certain celebrities we saw in the room. Nora knew them all, they were fashion designers and actors, but the rest of us were clueless. All the people were clustered together getting restless, and murmuring and wanting to move to the next room but wondering how to get through the door. Then Will said hey, there’s grandma, and we looked towards the narrow doorway where the naked man and woman stood facing each other. Nobody had gone through it yet. Then we saw mom in her purple cords and windbreaker standing at the doorway with her hands on her hips. Oh my god, said Nora, she’s going through. She went sideways through the doorway and her stomach grazed the man’s penis. Then she stopped in the middle, right there between the man and the woman, she didn’t hurry through at all, she was savouring it. She looked up at the naked man’s face, into his eyes, he was expressionless, and she smiled at him and nodded. She was greeting him, politely. Then she somehow turned around in that tight space to face the woman and she looked into her eyes too and smiled and nodded and then she smiled back at all of us huddled in the first room as if to say all right, people, let’s go, follow me, and she stepped through and one by one the rest of us followed her.

  On our last day in NYC mom took us all out for a giant steak at a place in Brooklyn, close to where Will and Zoe live. It was late and dark when we left the steakhouse. We walked along the streets singing. We tried to remember all the things the mother is going to do for her crying baby in the mockingbird song. We finally remembered them all. Nora and mom and I linked arms and Nora sang a Weepies song called “Somebody Loved.” Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.