by Miriam Toews
ten
I would like to have my grandfather here with me now, telling me even more about that time, perhaps dandling my father, Henry, on his knee. My father as a child, before the time he cried at Mrs. I.Q. Unger’s kitchen table. It’s interesting that my father, after a three-month depression spent in bed, became an egg producer! One would think he’d had enough of eggs. Or perhaps he realized their intrinsic value as they had kept not only him but his entire family alive in the years after his mother’s death. Perhaps the egg came to symbolize comfort for my father. Perhaps the business of selling reasonably priced quality eggs was, in my father’s mind, an act of kindness. It was my father’s uncle, the brother of his mother, the woman who died of a blood clot at the age of twenty-six, who gave him a loan to start his egg business after denying him a raise at his job at the feed-mill, after which sales at the feedmill plummeted.
As a young man, before I went to normal school (no jokes, please), I worked for my father, delivering eggs to restaurants in the city. How I hated it! Some of these upscale restaurants had the filthiest kitchens I’d ever seen. I’d make mental notes of these deplorable conditions, going to elaborate lengths all my life to avoid having to dine at those establishments. Even as an older man, as a grandfather, I remembered the conditions of certain restaurants (bug infestation, vermin, rodents, mould, rot, mildew, animal droppings), some of which are still operating today.
I recall a time I made Elvira laugh. It’s funny now because I hadn’t thought it very funny then, if you know what I mean, but Elvira had been through some hard times and needed a bit of relief, I imagine. On this occasion she had accompanied me on my egg-delivery duties and our last stop of the day was the CN train station on Main Street. After dropping off the eggs I crumpled up the carbon copy of the receipt and dropped it down a stairwell in the station. I said, Call your floor, please! For some reason Elvira found my imitation of an Eaton’s elevator lady hilarious, and it was some time before she could stop laughing and carry on any type of conversation. Of course, because I was me and not Benny Hill, I was more alarmed than flattered. I felt that her laughter was disproportionate to the strength of the joke, and I remember thinking I’d have to muzzle myself next time we were in public together to avoid the undue attention of strangers if she was going to laugh at the drop of a hat — or a carbon copy.
Later that same day, Elvira and I were enjoying Cokes in a local restaurant, and I guess I was talking a bit about my awful job, my hatred of chickens and eggs and so on, and in the course of this I must have mentioned the word “capons.” Elvira, knowing very little about chicken farming, asked me what a capon was. I was flustered by the question. Er, well, a chicken that’s … male, but … well, you know hens are females … er, and well, a rooster is … Elvira couldn’t contain her laughter. I have often wondered if she had known all along what a capon was and was simply having another go at me.
I have forgotten the time. I see red numbers on the clock radio but I don’t know what they mean, or what they signify. It is the “time” I know, but … I have forgotten my call again, or have forgotten to make my call. How will I know when to do it? What is wrong with right now? Well … am I agitated? Check my file! And make a note: Dwindling spirits — Will rally. By the way, the impatient nurse has left my room. Her parting words: You’re not helping yourself.
What I need to do at this time is follow Samuel de Champlain’s example and establish an Order of Good Cheer. Unfortunately, the only other patient I know is Hercules, and he weighs less than four pounds and is going home soon anyway.
In winter it was so cold that the apple cider froze in the barrels. At night the cold wind blew through the cracks ofthe crude log huts, while settlers, sick with scurvy, tossed and groaned in their rough beds. Each day brought more monotonous foods, more sickness and despair.
If I were to attempt to establish an Order here at the hospital, who would join? Apparently my days of establishing Orders of Good Cheer are over, as are Champlain’s. I always enjoyed that point in our studies. It was a favourite assignment of mine, a chance for my students to come up with extravagant costumes and often hilarious renditions of life in the early 1600s.
Put on a celebration of the Order of Good Cheer for the class. Dress in appropriate costumes, and perform songs and skits. Prepare some food the colonists at Port Royal might have eaten.
Every year the creativity and innovation of my students amazed me. I remember the year Jerry Goosen played the role of Champlain with such fiery intensity that he forced his scurvy-ridden settlers, at gunpoint, to “kneel” and “obey” and “now celebrate properly.” Naturally a few of the girls began to giggle and one or two boys, pretending to be drunk on apple cider, made vomiting sounds, which so infuriated our young Champlain that he fired off a round of caps from the gun that he had earlier assured me was empty, while screaming at top volume for the real fun to begin. Obviously he had taken the Order of Good Cheer literally. I quickly intervened and told poor Jerry that a very loose adaptation of events was all that was needed and certainly gunfire was unnecessary. But Jerry then reminded me that Champlain had had a tendency to fire off his rifle at strange times, particularly while battling with the Iroquois. Yes, Jerry, I said, but this is the Order of Good Cheer. These are Champlain’s own men! (And women: it wasn’t historically accurate that women would have been involved with the Order, but we made this adjustment to accommodate the girls in the class who refused to dress up as men.) Yes, I know, said Jerry, but I have to be fierce with my own men because later they come up with a plot to murder me, which I barely escape. It says so in the book. And why would they want to kill a man they liked?
And it was true. Unfortunately, my principal at the time reprimanded me for flagrant misuse of the classroom and questioned my motives in allowing my students to dress up and “play act with loaded guns.” Naturally I assured him that it wouldn’t happen again and that the students had learned a lot from the exercise. But I was upset by his reaction.
Tell him to blow it out his ear, Elvira said as she slid a bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with the usual chocolate syrup, banana slices, and chopped walnuts across the kitchen table. Eat this, you’ll feel better. Elvira and I, and later the girls, enjoyed this special dessert twice a day, after lunch and supper, for many, many years, and after the first bowl Elvira would always say, How ’bout another one? She could, when it came to ice cream, eat us all under the table. Some days I would come home from work to find her and her brother-in-law, Lorne (a diabetic!), hunkered over a tub of Heavenly Hash, spoons in hand, not even bothering with bowls, and competing for the soft, smooth ice cream that lined the outer edges of the cardboard container. Even in her early forties, when she announced that she was going on a diet consisting of half-grapefruits and dry whole wheat toast, and beginning an exercise regimen that involved riding her blue bicycle twice around the town perimeter, she refused to give up her ice cream desserts. She insisted that, with the addition of the banana slices and chopped walnuts, they provided her with a complete protein.
Elvira, I believe, was the exclusive member of her own Order of Good Cheer, and from time to time I would tentatively enter its domain. A certain freedom of spirit accompanied her through life, and with it, I believe, a sense of security in the world. I don’t know if she was born with it or if she acquired it over the years. Her home was generally a happy and prosperous one, and her parents loved her very much. She has told me many times that she felt that love consistently and that she carried it with her like a talisman through life. But there was sadness too, of course. Of the thirteen children (she was the thirteenth) born to her parents, six died before the age of two years and were buried all in a row with small stone markers in a cemetery not far from her home. Her mother, a quiet and pious woman, had not been her father’s first choice, apparently, and had been stood up by him a few times before they eventually married, only because the woman he had really wanted to marry was forbidden by her brothers to have anything to
do with him. He’d been a bit of a rascal in his youth, though a charming, irresistible one with a huge appetite for life and a generosity of spirit that became legendary in the town. Elvira’s mother, who had been pregnant for most of her married life, died of high blood pressure when Elvira was fifteen years old. Elvira finished her grade twelve in Winnipeg, at a private Mennonite Bible college, where she was known as a rebel: funny, wild, and independent. Her school yearbook describes her as “a girl who drinks life to the lees!” She told me it was the loneliest year of her life. She was so unhappy that she intentionally avoided crossing bridges so she wouldn’t be tempted to throw herself into the river and drown. Afterwards, her older brothers encouraged her to attend Bible school for a year in Omaha (birthplace of Marlon Brando, incidentally).
eleven
MR. TOEWS! IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU STOP WRITING NOW! The nurse is angry. Why? Am I littering? Am I clamouring for attention? YOU’RE ACTING LIKE A CHILD! Well, it wasn’t my idea to glue Popsicle sticks to a doily, was it?
As a child I felt it was my responsibility to be someone who would not bring more pain to my parents. I thought I had the ability to control my father’s quiet sadness and my mother’s drinking by bringing no extra hardship whatsoever to their lives. That school photograph of our kindergarten class was taken when I was five years old, shortly after my brother was born. I have said that my hair was slicked into place with that most universal of well-meaning gestures, a dab of my mother’s spit. It’s not true. My mother, that morning of the school photo, was sleeping late after a long night of drinking and crying, and my father, overwhelmed as usual, had left early for work. Before leaving he had left a bun with honey on a plate for me, and had laid out my favourite beige sweater with the horizontal stripes, the one seen in the photo, on the table beside the bun. I vaguely remember standing in front of the mirror and staring at myself for what seemed like hours, trying to muster up the courage to spit on my finger and rub it on my head.
I don’t recall having succeeded, but in the photo my hair is definitely slicked over to the side, and I imagine my teacher would have done it herself. I wonder what Elvira was doing that morning to prepare for the class photo. Chin-ups likely, considering how she seems to have muscled her way to the forefront of the shot.
I don’t remember my parents being especially happy, or if they were, for a fleeting moment here or there, I felt in my heart that it wouldn’t last, that it was unreliable, and I would become suspicious, wondering why it was there in the first place. My parent’s brief bouts of happiness always had a ring of doom to them, at least to me, and whenever they occurred, instead of revelling in them I would brace myself for the inevitable aftermath of gloom.
I have had feelings of deep joy in my life, feelings of contentment, and pride, but only twice, perhaps, in my life have I felt free. That is, free to enjoy the moment with nothing in my mind other than the feeling of being free.
The first time it happened, as I have mentioned earlier, was when, while experiencing the effects of ether, I imagined myself to be somersaulting through the hospital walls. But because it was a drug-induced feeling, I tend to discount its validity. Therefore my one and only taste of absolute freedom, as I recall, occurred while skating with Elvira at the old school in Bristol, six miles southwest of Steinbach. This was the site of my first teaching job, after graduating from normal school. The Bristol school had two rooms, four grades in each. I taught the lower grades, from one to four. In the winter, I built a skating rink in the field next to the school, where my students and I spent many happy hours at play. While I was teaching in Bristol, I lived at home with my parents in Steinbach, and Elvira lived in Winnipeg, in the residence at Grace Hospital, where she was studying to become a nurse.
She and I were supposedly dating at this time, although, at least for me, the quality of our dates left much to be desired. Our “dates” consisted of attending the Wednesday-evening service together at the new Mennonite church on Beverley Street, in the city’s west end. Afterwards, I would walk her home to her dorm and then drive all the way to Steinbach in my father’s car, thinking of the clever things I should have said but didn’t. I was only nineteen years old and I longed for more contact with Elvira, but nurses’ training in those days was a gruelling, rigid program that allowed very little free time. Dating, especially, was discouraged because hospitals were not interested in training women to become nurses if, in the process, they were going to fall in love and get married. In those days, most married women did not work outside the home. Elvira has told me that while she was in training, she and all the other young women had to report to their dorm mother when they required sanitary napkins. This way the natural cycle of each woman could be tracked and, during fertile days, their chores at the residence could be doubled in an effort to prevent them from leaving the hospital grounds on dates. Of course, if a woman required no sanitary napkins for any length of time, it was assumed that she was pregnant and she was immediately expelled from the program.
Occasionally, if she was very lucky, Elvira was allowed to leave the premises for a longer period than was required to attend a church service. On one of these occasions it was arranged that I would pick her up in the car that I had bought for my parents (but had to ask for permission to use) and bring her out to Bristol, where we would spend the evening skating together.
It was a night in February, I believe, and mild enough that she and I could hold hands without wearing gloves. There we were in the middle of nowhere, really, alone in a field, in the dark, gliding around and around and around, nineteen years old and so in love with each other. We could see the outline of the little school and the moon and the ice beneath us and each other and that was all. Our lives, in that moment, were perfect. I was a teacher, she would soon be a nurse, we would get married in the church we had attended all our lives, build a home, and have children.
But it was more than this and perhaps the opposite of it that contributed to my feeling of being free. I don’t know what it was exactly, if it was that I knew I would be leaving my parents’ home soon, or that I felt in that moment finally at home in the world, or if it was because I was in between lives in a way, not a child under my parents’ control, not too much anyway, and not yet a father and husband but just somehow existing outside of everybody’s expectations. I sometimes wonder if at that moment somebody had come and tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would be interested in walking away then, just walking off into the darkness alone, away from life as I knew it, with no plan whatsoever, what I would have said.
There was something about that feeling of absolute freedom that scared me and yet made me feel more alive than I’d ever felt before. I wonder if, later on in life, my rigid adherence to rules and conventional standards was a means of protecting myself from myself, from making sure I didn’t follow that little voice and walk away. Not because I didn’t love Elvira but because I also loved that feeling I had experienced on the ice.
Is it a self-destructive urge, I wonder, to want to walk away from everything you know and love, or not? Is depression in part a result of not feeling at home in this world, and blaming yourself for it? Is it similar to a battered woman’s belief that she is the cause of her own misery, that somehow she brought the abuse upon herself, and if only she were a better wife, it might stop? Does a depressed person say to himself, if only I were a better human being I wouldn’t feel depressed, or does he say, if only the world were a nicer place I might get out of bed?
Is depression nothing but anger turned inwards, as some say? Does it stem from a childhood loss? From a genetic propensity? From self-hatred? From an inability to be oneself? From having no purpose? From an inability to be free? From a fear of freedom? From the desire to be free and confined at the same time? From choking on a peanut as a two-year-old?
Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
I recall an article I read yesterday in the Free Press re a young man’s intervi
ew with the police. He had left his room and stabbed a fellow in the parking lot of his apartment block. I don’t know why I did it, he told the cops. My head was so full of thoughts I couldn’t make sense of anything. The only thing I felt was lonely. One minute I was lying in my bed trying to imagine the feeling of being loved by wrapping my own arms around myself, like this, and the next I’ve stabbed a man. I think I think too much, he said.
I had never planned for this to happen. I want to scream but I fear I’d only end up scaring myself further.
twelve
I dread my brother’s visits. I am supposed to talk to him about myself. I’m afraid I’ll say something that will get me in trouble. This is a hospital, not a hotel, and E. is in the city resting. They say. Write. This is my brother’s hospital. The girls say I’ll be out very soon.
Normally I encourage my students to go over their work with a fine-toothed comb several times before submitting it to me, but today I’ll not follow my own advice. I remember asking Elvira to readdress, legibly, the invitations to our wedding after she had scrawled out a dozen or so, eventually ending up doing it myself. One time, much to her annoyance, I insisted that she erase the drawing she had made, in a letter to her sister in California, of the floor plan of our new house and replace it with a more accurate representation of angles and square footage, where one inch equalled ten feet and so on. Had I that capacity for precision of thought today, well, I suppose I might not be writing this, if writing is the result of a need to make sense of things.
But now I can’t bring myself to read the slurred thoughts that managed to escape from my head and lurch across this page, and I don’t have an eraser or whiteout, or the time to redo it, so I’ll simply carry on. I was on the topic of freedom, as I recall, and if I wasn’t, well, then I am now. Goodness, this room is getting warm. Perhaps I’ll loosen my tie.