All My Puny Sorrows

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 home 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!

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 and 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.

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.