by Miriam Toews
I have said that Elvira, while in her forties, went on a grapefruit and toast diet and began to exercise. But that’s not all she did while in her forties. One day she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror and said, What will I choose? Freedom or insanity?
Those were her exact words. I know because she told me so herself years later. She may have told others too. For all I know it became a rallying cry for housewives all over town. Freedom or insanity! What can she have meant by freedom and what can she have meant by insanity?
But let me retrace my steps. By pretending to wonder what she meant I’m being coy. At the time, perhaps, I wondered. But today I know. There were things I expected of Elvira. I expected her to stay at home and be a housewife, to raise the children, to cook and clean, to accompany me to staff dos, to be somewhat involved in church activities, such as teaching Sunday school or attending Sewing Circle, to take care of my needs, and to be happy. More than anything, I needed her to be happy. I loved her, of course, and I truly believed that my expectations of her were fair and decent. She functioned and put on a brave front most of the time, but she wasn’t herself. I had squelched her spirit, which was the very thing I loved about her. She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others’ expectations of yourself.
Elvira looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and chose freedom. She resumed her nursing career with a part-time job in the Steinbach Hospital Emergency Room (just down the hall; I bled there) and supplemented that income by working nearly full time as a receptionist for the local chiropractor. She arranged for a cleaning lady to clean our house once a week, she taught the girls how to operate the washing machine and dryer, she stocked the freezer with TV dinners and huge vats of ice cream, she attended social work classes at the University of Manitoba (from which I had recently graduated with my Master of Education), and with her earnings from her two jobs she booked a summer trip for all of us to South America (where we almost fell off a cliff into the Amazon River) and just hoped and trusted that those of us who loved her would continue to, and if not … she’d take that risk.
When I think back to those days now I can’t believe how naive I was. I really thought that she had stopped loving me. I’d take the girls out for supper and put on a brave front, smiling and talkative, but I’d be thinking about Elvira and who she was meeting in these classes and would all this determination to be free result in her leaving me altogether. I was literally sick with anxiety. I didn’t think about the fact that I had taken courses at the university too, very recently, and had enjoyed them, or of the satisfaction that working gave me, or of my own distaste for household chores and cooking.
Eventually I realized that Elvira wasn’t leaving me and that she was much happier, and more affectionate, than before, and that the world hadn’t come to an end. Only a few years later, when she graduated with her Bachelor of Social Work, I was the proudest husband in the land. Later, at Rae and Jerry’s Steak House, the girls and I toasted to her success and she responded by thanking me for allowing her the freedom to go to school. But on the drive home I mulled over her comment and concluded that in fact I hadn’t allowed her to do anything, I had simply stood by and watched her do it, and that I wasn’t worthy of her gratitude, and that furthermore, she had managed to do what she had done in spite of me and not because of me. That night while we lay in bed waiting to fall asleep I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that she had only herself to thank, and that I would try to be more sensitive to her needs in the future. I wanted to tell her how proud I was of her and that I had been wrong in my previous evaluation of her role as my wife. I wanted to hold her and tell her how much I loved her and how grateful I was that she hadn’t left me.
I may as well have wanted to stop time or bicycle to the moon. I remember the pain in my jaw where the words had stopped and the pressure of tears pushing against the inside of my forehead and some deep, deep force from within me making sure that not one teardrop fell and that not one word was uttered. I was prisoner and warden simultaneously, longing to free myself with words while going to every effort to prevent the words from escaping the darkness of my mind.
Heard voices outside my door. Recognized them as belonging to sister and company. Feigned sleep, heard door open and close. Coast clear. Am wondering if people take literally the visiting hours sign. More work sure to be accomplished were sign changed to Visiting Minutes: 2-4.
thirteen
As I recall, I was talking about eggs when the subject of freedom popped into my head and scrambled my senses. I have a low opinion of eggs. I have always associated them with weakness and pain. Their smooth white shell belies the sickly yellow, often blood-streaked, once-living trickle that slops around inside, buffeted by a slimy coat of clotted, milky gauze, and served with toast and bacon.
Sometimes, to counter the tedium of delivering those vile eggs, I would entertain myself with bizarre thoughts. For instance, one day I compared myself to an egg and was disturbed by the similarities. I thought of my own reasonably pleasant exterior and the yolk for brains that splashed around inside me. This yolk, it seemed to me, would always remain the same. As long as I worked as an egg-delivery “boy” my yolk would never grow into a living thing and hatch! I would remain unformed forever, while smiling nicely to the world and trying not to crack before my time. But my time would never come, because, according to my reasoning at the time, or lack thereof, I had been taken from the nest too soon. How to self-incubate the embryonic rooster in my head and flap my wings and fly away! I’m as crazy as an egg, I thought. Who will keep me warm before I break?
I remember driving back and forth over the Norwood Bridge in my father’s truck saying to myself, I’m seventeen, I’m seventeen, because this was the only certain thing I knew about myself and I didn’t want to forget it. Somehow the idea of having existed for seventeen years comforted me, and soon I was calculating the number of months and then weeks and then days and trying to tell myself that the numbers were good, that they implied a lot of living, that I had managed to do it. This gave me the confidence to get off the bridge and head for home.
When I got there I went directly to my bed and lay down, muttering, I mustn’t break, I mustn’t break, and Careful with my head, careful with my head, until my mother came into my room and told me to be quiet because Reg was studying for a test in the next room and wasn’t to be disturbed. I wanted to speak to my father about quitting my job delivering eggs, but he wasn’t at home and besides I knew that I needed the money for tuition, although at that point I didn’t know exactly what I would be studying. Elvira was away at Bible school at this time, and I keenly missed her. I remember leaning over the edge of my bed to retrieve the last letter she’d written to me and thinking, Careful, don’t drop it, but I was referring to my head, not the letter. I lay back and began to cry, finally, and I thought, It’s over now, it’s pouring out of me, my shell has cracked and I will never have another chance.
That was the last thing I remember of myself as an egg. The next morning or four days later, nobody told me how long it had been, I woke up here in this hospital and was diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. Hmm, I said when the doctor told me. Are you hungry? he asked. Hmm, I replied again. I was busy thinking. He left the room and I sat up and looked out the window. I told myself that soon I’d go home and things would be back to normal. I would become a teacher and I would marry Elvira and my life would have some purpose. And that was when I began to think of assignments that would help bring history to life for my students. (Write a lively account of one man’s nervous breakdown!) I realized that by going over my life there on the bridge, all seventeen years of it, month by month, year by year, I was piling up the details in my mind, creating a type of solid base to stand on, and this somehow made my existence relevant to me, as though it had more weight than I had thought and more reason for being, that in fact it had come from something and not just materialized out of the blue.
&n
bsp; A few minutes later a nurse brought me some breakfast and said, I hope you like eggs!
Several days later my doctor, whose name sounded something like Ratatatat, rocketed into my hospital room — he was always in a frightful hurry — and said, Melvin, it’s time you went home, and so I did, leaving behind the various cards and tracts from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Corinthians that the nurses had left for me to read. As I walked home I began to see things in a different light, or rather a sort of gothic half-light. Thankfully I had stopped comparing myself to an egg, but my mind was still far from settled, though of course it may have been the medication they had put me on while in the hospital, medication I would take for the rest of my life. But things were not as they had been. Everything around me, cars, houses, clouds, trees, dogs, people, seemed to have grown while I was in the hospital. Everything but the sun, which seemed to have shrunk to the size of a pea. I walked towards my house very slowly, wondering what I would say when I got there and what would be said to me.
About a block from my house I stopped and sat on the grass beside the road and closed my eyes. My head seemed to grow as quickly and roundly as though it were a balloon being inflated, and I put my hands up to feel it. My head, of course, was the same size it had ever been, but, with my eyes tightly shut and my hands tentatively patting the air two feet out from where my head really was, and what with all the medicine coursing through my veins, I toppled over.
Moments later I opened my eyes and was surprised to see a familiar face looming over me. It was Reg, sent by my mother to meet me along the way, to make sure, though this wasn’t mentioned, that I didn’t walk away from the town altogether or begin to run up and down its streets as I was accustomed to doing.
Hello! I said, genuinely relieved to see the little guy. Get up and come home, he said, you’re in trouble.
Trouble! I thought. What have I done? As I stumbled home past overgrown houses and giant swaying sheds and trees the size of smoke stacks, I racked my head for clues. Had I lost a receipt book or dented my father’s truck? Had I, in my earlier state, said something nasty to one of my father’s major egg customers? Had I, during my stay in the hospital, introduced my parents to the doctors and nurses as Mr. and Mrs. Dumpty?
I found my family solemnly gathered around the kitchen table staring mournfully at a pink beef roast as though it were a recently deceased relative. My father looked up at me and pointed with his chin to an empty chair beside my sister. I took my place and, not knowing what else to do, began to stare also at the chunk of meat in the centre of the table. Finally, after a silent prayer, we began to eat. The only time my father prayed aloud was on the day before he died.
Nothing much was said during the meal, and I assumed that my brother had only been trying to frighten me with his comment. Later, however, my father asked me to come into the little room where he balanced his books. So …, he said in Low German, when you were at the hospital you mentioned to your doctor that Mother … His voice trailed off.
I didn’t know what he was referring to, so I cocked my head and waited for him to finish. He removed his glasses and placed them carefully on his desk. Then, with both hands, he began to rub his brow and temples and cheeks, and almost every other part of his face and neck. I noticed how tired he was, how tired he had always been.
That Mother …, I reminded him gently. But just as I said the words, it struck me. Of course, I thought, this was about her drinking. The doctor, who was really a psychiatrist from Winnipeg, and who may not have been aware of the implications of a small-town confession, had asked me if there was anything bothering me, anything untoward happening at home, anything that might be making me feel sad. At first I had simply said no, nothing. But he persisted, and finally, more out of a desperate need for him to stop questioning me than anything, I blurted out these words: Mother drinks. And then, because he had seemed so happy with my response, and because I hadn’t thought of any repercussions, as Father would later put it, I told the doctor that Mother wasn’t kind when she drank, and that mostly she wasn’t kind to me, and that I didn’t know why it had to be me, only that it always was and I had stopped hoping that it would ever change.
I looked at my father. My face was on fire and my hands were numb. I had shamed the family, I had jeopardized our status in the community, and my father’s livelihood. I had ruined my mother’s reputation and undermined my father’s efforts to cope by turning away from it.
I’m sorry, I whispered to my father.
That night I had the first dream of a series that would run all my life. I dreamt that our home was no longer our home and that we had to live elsewhere. These new homes varied in my dreams; sometimes they were bamboo houses on stilts, sometimes apartments in the city, sometimes underground parking lots. Once, it was a foul-smelling greenhouse with hanging ferns and piles of moist earth everywhere. Each time we moved, we ended up wanting to go back, but for whatever reason — the house had been sold, or we couldn’t afford moving costs — it was impossible to do so.
Sometimes Elvira, sensing that I’d had one of my dreams, would ask me in the morning: So? Where were we living last night?
Over the years, my dream expanded to include the “homelessness” of friends and casual acquaintances. Eventually nobody I knew was allowed to live in their homes. Everybody was living elsewhere, usually unhappily but not always, and wanting to return to their original homes.
I realize that this dream is quite obvious in its meaning: I’m looking for a home, or for a sense of home, or for my self, but I can’t find it. I rather doubt its uniqueness.
What is interesting about my dream is that it has come true. It has stopped being a dream with metaphorical significance and has become reality, as though the dream all those years had been an exercise in preparation for the real event. Perhaps God is trying to give me a sign. Or perhaps it was simply a premonition.
Everything’s in boxes. We’re moving to the city, apparently. I’m a little worried about it. Girls say it’ll be fine, hard at first, but okay later. Somebody’s looking after the yard. That’s good. They say: Mom’s in the city, she’s moving there. It’s the only way they’ll transfer you to a place where you’ll get the right care. If she goes home, they’ll find out and send you back there. She can’t take care of you on her own anymore, but nobody believes her.
That’s your fault for saying you are fine, they don’t say. They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn’t say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault? I’m sorry for the death of E. And the pilot. I keep saying it, but nobody will listen.
That evening, the evening I was discharged from the hospital, after my chat with Father and before the dream, I hung around a bit outside listening to the wind and the chickens, chewing on my thumbs and wondering what was to become of me. I sat on the back steps and penned a letter to Elvira.
Dear Elvira,
By now you’ve probably heard, from your brothers or from Roy or Martha, that I spent some time recently thinking I was an egg, and as a natural result of that, was hospitalized for incubation, I mean, observation. The upshot of it all is that I’m myself again, for what that’s worth, and I’ve decided I want to become a teacher. First an egg, now a teacher! I wish I had more of your ability to remain the same over a period of time. Of course I’ll have to begin my training soon, which would, I’m quite sure, necessitate a move to the city. How’s Uncle Sam? How are you enjoying your studies? Are you able to socialize as much as you like to? Things here are exactlythe same, except of course for my egg episode and that a new expansion is being added to the church. I think teaching will be right for me. I hope so anyway. Are you frightened by me now, or will our relationship remain secure? I feel quite all right now, and I imagine the worst is over. As Ever, M.
I didn’t know how to work in the fact that I had, by opening my mouth and uttering two words, ruined the lives of my parents and brother and sister, and so I just left the letter as it was and the next morning I mail
ed it to Omaha. My father had given me a few days off of work to rest up, and I didn’t want to spend all day at home with Mother.
I decided that I would build something out back behind the feed shed and try to think of ways to improve relations with my family. I should have wondered at that time about my father’s own bout of despair and about his three-month stay in bed after leaving the feedmill. But it didn’t occur to me then, or ever, to ask him. If only I’d kept my mouth shut, I repeated to myself as I hauled my tools and wood to the shed.
Who knows why, maybe it was the precariousness of my mind at that time, or because I was so determined to come up with a new life strategy, becoming a teacher, a better person, et cetera, or because I was young, or because I didn’t want to lose Elvira, or because I didn’t want to be crazy, or because I still wanted somehow to fit into my family, or because I still felt there was a slim chance I’d impress my parents with my industriousness and that this might erase the hurt I had caused them by talking to the doctor, but I came up with an altogether bad plan for the future: to keep my mouth shut. If, in the months and years to follow, I had only taken stock of the situation I would have realized that no undue hardship had fallen on my family. My father didn’t lose his egg business, and my mother’s reputation in the church and community hadn’t changed one bit. We weren’t excommunicated. My brother wasn’t tarred and feathered by local bullies or taken away by child welfare authorities. Nothing had changed. If I had known then what I know now, I would have known that there was no stronger power in this town than the power of denial.