All My Puny Sorrows

NINE

WHEN ELF WENT AWAY TO EUROPE my mother decided to emancipate herself as well and enrolled in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist. By this time the church elders had washed their hands of the Von Riesen women. When she graduated she turned the spare bedroom into an office and a steady stream of sad and angry Mennonites came to our house, usually in secret because therapy was seen as lower even than bestiality because at least bestiality is somewhat understandable in isolated farming communities. Sometimes my mother didn’t get paid by her clients with money. They were often farmers and poor mechanics and housewives with no income of their own. So sometimes Elf and I would come home to find frozen sides of beef in the hallway or chickens in the garage and piles of eggs on the bench in the entrance. Sometimes a man would be in the driveway lying under our car and fixing the transmission or a strange woman would be mowing the lawn or watering the flowers with a gaggle of children traipsing along behind her.

Our mother found it impossible to ask her clients for payment if they couldn’t afford it but the clients insisted on paying her back somehow. One day Elf and I came home from somewhere and found two large bullets on the kitchen table. We asked our mother why they were there and she said one of her clients had asked her to keep them for her so she wouldn’t be tempted to fire them into her head. But how could she fire two bullets into her own head? Elf asked. The other one was for her daughter, our mother said. So she wouldn’t be leaving her alone.

Elf and I went into the yard and sat on the rusty swing set. Elf explained the situation to me. Why doesn’t the woman just run away with her daughter? I asked Elf. She didn’t answer me. I asked again. Why doesn’t the woman just run a— Elf cut me off. It doesn’t work that way, she said. More people kill themselves in jail than attempt to escape. Would you kill me first before you killed yourself if we were in terrible danger? I asked her. Well, I don’t know, she said, it would depend on the type of danger. Would you want me to?

When my mother and her sister Tina were kids they decided to race each other on bicycles and rather than call off the race or waste time going around a massive semi truck that was blocking their path they skidded under it and came out on the other side, unscathed and laughing.

One winter evening when Elf was sixteen and I was ten she organized a political debate of party candidates. She made lecterns out of cardboard boxes festooned with party paraphernalia and used our mother’s Scrabble timer to keep our speeches under control. My father was the Conservative candidate, my mother was the Liberal candidate, Elf was the NDP candidate and I was a Communist. Although I couldn’t say I was a Communist because of my parents’ awful associations with Russia. Elf had once announced at dinnertime that she had a crush on Joe Zuken, the leader of the Communists in Winnipeg, and my mother had to Heimlich my father who began to choke to death on this news. After my mother had rescued him he said he wished she hadn’t because if Elf was planning to marry (a crush had already led to marriage) Joe Zuken then he, my father, was finished with this tawdry life. Anyway, I had to say I was an Independent. We debated the pros and cons of women’s rights and of euthanasia. Elf won, hands down. She was prepared and fervent. She had statistics to back her points and a tone that was relentlessly persuasive but always measured and respectful. She was eloquent and funny and she won.

Mind you, the judges were friends that she’d made at the music conservatory in Winnipeg and she’d paid for their efforts, secretly, with beer. She was in love with one of them, I could tell. He wore a rope belt and a paint-splattered T-shirt. He sat cross-legged and barefoot in my father’s reading chair. Elf had made sure that a sliver of her blue, lacy bra was peeking out from her V-neck sweater. He couldn’t stop looking at her, he shifted in his seat but his eyes never strayed, until my father cleared his throat loudly and said I say, sir, Your Honour in the green La-Z-Boy, are you hearing a word of what the others of us are saying?

The airplane lands. My mother and my aunt Tina are waiting. They’re standing at the bottom of the escalator, arms linked, watching me as I float down to meet them. They look like tiny twins to me, fierce, grim-faced, getting down to the business of bearing another cross. They smile at me, murmur Plautdietsch words of endearment, and then I’m in their arms, so strong. We embrace and say nothing. I don’t have a suitcase, we don’t have to wait, and we walk quickly to the car.

My mother is driving fast, as usual, but this time I don’t ask her to slow down. My aunt Tina is in the back seat staring out the window. I have one hand on my mother’s shoulder and the other slung over the back seat, holding on to Tina’s hand, so we’re a human chain. Are Mennonites a depressed people or is it just us? My aunt Tina lost Leni, her daughter, my cousin, to suicide seven years ago, three years after my father killed himself. We’ve been here before. Everything is a repeat, another take.

Nic is at the hospital. He’s on his cellphone. We wave a little and nod. Julie has shown up too. I hug her and whisper thanks in her ear and she squeezes hard. We go in by twos, no larger groups allowed. My mother and my aunt go in together. I’m talking to Will on my cell. He asks me to tell Elf something but I can’t make out what it is because he’s whispering. Will? I ask. Hang on, he says. I wait and it’s quiet on his end. Will? I can hear him crying. Just that I love her, he finally manages to say and hangs up. When they come out my mother is calm, she won’t cry now, she shrugs and shakes her head and Nic puts his arm around her shoulders and she leans into him, her head against his chest. He guides her to a chair and she sits down and stares into the middle distance, saying a few words to herself, or a prayer. I can see the marks on her arm where the dog’s teeth ripped open her skin. Two holes, like a vampire bite. Aunt Tina goes to get us coffee.

Julie and I are a team and we pull up chairs to flank my sister and we hold her hands and say nothing because we have nothing to say. There is a tube in Elf’s throat and a machine that breathes for her. We look at her and she looks at us and shrugs the way my mother did. How many words do we have left? She closes her eyes and then opens them again and pulls her hand out of mine so that she can tap her forehead. I don’t know what she means. That she’s crazy? She’s forgotten something? Her head hurts? I kiss her cheek. A Neil Young song is playing over the sound system that’s been set up here in the intensive care ward. He won’t stop searching for a heart of gold.

Elf taps her nose, draws imaginary circles around her eyes. Julie says she wants her glasses, that’s what she means. Right? Elf’s chin drops slightly, a nod. I get up and look for them. I go out of the room and ask the nurse if she has Elf’s glasses. She doesn’t. Julie volunteers to look for them, to ask Nic or my mother if they have them. She kisses Elf on the cheek, whispers something to her that makes her eyes fill with tears, maybe she says Elf, you’re the best, and leaves.

Here we are. I’m relieved that Elf wants her glasses. That there is something she wants to see. She has bright white bandages on her wrists that look like sweatbands. They’re only missing the Nike swoosh. Tubes are taped to her face. I use the edge of my shirt sleeve to wipe the tear that’s sliding down her cheek. I tell her I love her. One corner of her mouth is pulled to the side to accommodate the hose. I remember when she took breathing lessons, something called the Alexander Technique, and how I made fun of her. You have to learn how to breathe? She told me yes, there was a right way and a wrong way. She offered to teach me how to breathe properly using my diaphragm from deep within me but I lost interest quickly. She’d tried to be my piano teacher too, but that was a disaster. And to teach me Spanish. She told me how to say I have a little man when I should have said I’m a bit hungry.

I leave Emergency to find my mother and my aunt who are drinking black coffee in the cafeteria. My aunt Tina is older by a few years but otherwise they are almost the same person. They both have snow-white bobs, flashing cat eyes, a million wrinkles each and really strong grips. They’re barely five feet tall. When they see me they both call out my name and make room between them and pull me onto a chair and put their arms around me and my aunt tells me she loves me and my mother tells me she loves me and I tell them I love them too. I can barely breathe. I’m jealous of my own mother for having her sister near her at a time like this. When my father died Tina came then also to be with my mother and my sister and me, and bought each of us a dozen pairs of white cotton panties so we wouldn’t have to worry about mundane things like laundry while we were planning a funeral. When my mother had her bypass surgery Tina came then too and took me to Costco and we pushed a giant cart around an enormous warehouse buying my mother a year’s supply of ketchup and toilet paper and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which has recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth. During her recovery Tina bathed her sister gently, laughing, immodest, the way I helped my sister shower when she was too weak from starving herself to do it alone. My mother a Rubenesque bundle of flesh and scars, a disciple of life, and my sister a wraith. How does one give birth to the other?

Nic is talking to a doctor. I can see him through the glass wall beside the door of Elf’s room. He’s wearing a blue shirt with a collar, pants that are not jeans and black sneakers. One hand is on his forehead while he speaks and the other against the glass wall, his fingers splayed like a fan. I want to hear what the doctor is saying and I tell Elf that I’ll be right back but when I get to where Nic and the doctor are standing the doctor has walked away and Nic is simply standing there alone propping himself up against glass. When he sees me he takes his hand off his forehead and asks me how I am. He tells me that the doctor has said Elf will probably be all right and they will know in a few hours or tomorrow morning. She has harmed her throat, he says, and may not be able to talk at all or not very well and there may be some organ damage to be determined down the line but she’ll live.

When I was fourteen Elf came home for Christmas. She had just been at Juilliard on some kind of special scholarship. Amazing things were happening. She had a top agent and gigs lined up all over the world. Elf and I were sitting on the floor of the bathroom and she was crying inconsolably and I was trying to get her to stop crying and come to dinner. The table was set and all of our relatives from my father’s side were seated already. We had candles, turkey, singing, the celebration of the birth of a messiah that I still believed in. Elf told me she couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t do it. What? I said. She couldn’t stand it, the appearance of happiness, the forced enthusiasm, and everything a performance. I mean, if Jesus actually died on a cross with nails in his hands and feet to save us shouldn’t we do more to express our gratitude than devour a turkey one evening in the dead of winter? She wanted me to laugh and help her to carry out some type of desperado action, to pry open the bathroom window and push her through to freedom. Let’s just go have Christmas, you and me, at the pool hall, she said. I was begging her to dry her tears and wash her face and join us at the table. I told her that everyone was waiting for her. She told me she didn’t care, she couldn’t do it, I should tell them she wasn’t joining us. I told her she had to, it’s Christmas! And she laughed then sobbed, and told me I was funny but no, she wouldn’t join us at the table.

I continued to beg, please, please, please get up and wash your face and put on your new Red Alert lipstick and come to the table. Our mother came to the door and knocked softly and said honey? Girls? Are you in there? We’re ready to eat. Elf banged her head against the bathroom wall and it scared me. Don’t do that, I whispered, and she did it again. Girls? said our mother. What’s going on in there? Are you okay? I said yeah, yeah, we’re fine, we’ll be right there. I had Elf in a headlock and she was trying to pull out of it but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted my sister to stop smashing her head against ceramic tiles and come to the dinner table. I wanted to see her weird eyes flash happiness while she told hilarious stories using the occasional French or Italian word about the city and about concert halls and all things sophisticated. I wanted my younger cousins to stare at her unabashedly with great admiration and envy, and for Elf then to put her arm around my shoulder. I wanted her to be her intoxicating, razor-sharp self and I wanted to sit next to her and feel the heat she radiated, the energy of a fearless leader, a girl who moved easily in the world, my older sister.

I waited for our mother to leave. I still had Elf in a headlock. She kicked her legs out and made animal noises. I told her that I would kill myself if she didn’t come to the table. She stopped moaning and looked at me and furrowed her brow as though we were actors and I’d deviated from the script and ruined the take.

Our father once had a plan to sell placemats to truck-stop restaurants. He had designed these placemats himself and had thousands of them printed. The placemats were intended to educate diners on Canadian history while they chewed on their Denver sandwiches. The facts were presented in cartoon form, drawn by my father, with word bubbles, and jokes and riddles. They were meant to appeal to kids and adults alike. But most of all they were meant to educate what my father believed to be an ignorant and indifferent public. What’s more interesting than our own history? he’d exclaim. It truly pained him to see his fellow Canadians drive quickly past historical plaques, dismiss Canadian content rules, fail citizen tests and screw up the words to our national anthem at hockey games. Things have happened here, he would say.

One year between Christmas and New Year’s my father took the train to Ottawa to do research in the government archives and to attend Lester Pearson’s funeral. He was thirty-seven years old, an elementary school teacher from a small prairie town. He stood outside the legislative building in the cold with thousands of others to pay his respects. While he was standing there he began a conversation with the man standing next to him. The man eventually invited my father to his home for a New Year’s Eve party and that was the first time my father had ever been to a New Year’s Eve party in his life. It was a very fancy house, said my father. In a very fancy neighbourhood called the Glebe. My father was moved by the stranger’s kindness. Later, when he came home and told the story, a type of hush fell over us. I remember being afraid he would start to cry. What I took from the story was that my father had lost his leader and that he needed a friend. He had always believed that one day he’d meet his hero, Lester B. Pearson, in the flesh and that they’d have a conversation about Canada. My mother had asked him if he’d had a glass of champagne at the party and he said no, oh no Lottie, of course not. I was only seven or eight when he told us this story. Elf and my mother and I sat in awe of my father that evening when he described it all to us, a state funeral and a New Year’s Eve party all in one night. But it made me feel uneasy in ways I couldn’t describe at the time. I had never seen him cry before, and he didn’t actually, I just knew that he wanted to, and that’s the memory that always comes back to me first.

The summer when I was maybe nine years old he asked me if I wanted to go on the road with him from truck stop to truck stop all over Manitoba and Ontario while he tried to sell his placemats. I was game and away we went. I remember having only one outfit for this journey, an orange terry towel T-shirt, cut-offs and my North Star runners. I had a stack of Famous Five books. I never brushed my teeth and I ate pancakes and Oh Henry! bars for every meal. At night my father and I would stay in cheap motels and I’d fill our ice bucket and suck on chunks of ice and watch TV while my father slept and snored. When I was tired I’d put the chain lock on the door and slowly open and close it a few times to make sure it held.

He wasn’t making any sales. He gave me placemats to draw on when I got bored in the car. He started to get discouraged and I sang goofy songs to cheer him up like “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I didn’t want to go into the restaurants with him anymore because it was too embarrassing. He was so friendly, so sincere. All he wanted to do was educate people about Canada. He was willing to take very little money for a box of placemats, then he was willing to give them away for free. Even then restaurant managers and gas station owners would stare at them for a minute or two and shake their heads, no, they didn’t think they wanted them.

My teeth were fuzzy and my orange T-shirt was filthy. My father was defeated and we went home. We’d been away for about a week. When we got home my mother was in the kitchen laughing with some friends of hers and Elf was practising her piano. This seemed always to be the scenario. He told my mom and her friends what had happened, but not with many words, more with his eyes and his shoulders. He went to his bedroom.

I sat down with my mom and her friends and told them a colourful story of our time on the road. I made them laugh. Elf stopped playing the piano and came to the kitchen to find out what was going on. I told her what had happened. She didn’t laugh at all. She said oh no, oh no, that’s awful. Is he okay?

Who? I asked her.

Dad!

She went to her bedroom too, and closed the door on us for a long time. I think it was dark before she came out because the fire station siren had sounded twice, once for kids to go inside for dinner at six o’clock and once for them to go inside for bed at nine o’clock. I’m not sure how long my dad stayed in his room.

My father forced the town hall to give him money to open up a library. They didn’t want to. They thought it was a waste of money and dangerous and unmanly of my father to talk about it. He tried to convince them. It was forty degrees below zero. It was dinnertime. I asked my mom: hey, where’s dad? She told me he was out knocking on people’s doors to try to get them to sign the petition for a library. For weeks my father would walk the streets of East Village with his clipboard and ballpoint pens knocking on doors and begging for support. He went out at dinnertime when everyone was at home. It was dark. He went to every house in town. Sometimes my mom helped him. When he came home his glasses would fog up as soon as he stepped into the house. My mom tried to convince him to wear long johns, it was the coldest winter in history, but he refused to. She had to karate-chop his legs to get the blood circulating. Why do you hate long johns so much? she’d ask him.

Finally he had enough signatures and he brought them to the town hall and they said all right already, go start your little library. They gave him a tiny, mildewed room in an old abandoned school and enough money to get some second-hand shelves and books to fill them. He was the happiest man in the world. He hired my sister to be the librarian and she was very thorough. She made an index card for every book. She included many details. She was a teenager with long straight black hair and enormous glasses and she kept things very organized. The two of them went off to work together. They had a million plans.

I look at Elf through the glass wall of the ICU and wave. She is watching me and Nic talk about her internal organs. She’s wearing an Alarm T-shirt that I gave her years ago one summer when we were both living in London, me in a dirty house full of punks and she in a pristine flat in Notting Hill with a diplomat of some sort who wasn’t Italian but liked to call Venice Venezia and Naples Napoli.

So she’ll live, I say to Nic. He nods and takes a deep breath and in the space of that breath is framed the question we need to ask ourselves.

I’m sitting on concrete steps outside the hospital and talking to my kids on the phone with the latest on Elf. Will has finished classes now and tells me he is willing to go back to Toronto to stay, again, with Nora whose big school dance recital is coming up while I’m in Winnipeg. But he’s starting a job in Queens in a couple of weeks doing landscape work for a guy his dad knows so he can’t stay forever. And he says he’ll do it, but asks me: can you please just give N a pep talk about not living like an animal?

Julie has gone back to work. She left me two cigarettes wrapped in tinfoil. Just then I get a text from Dan from Borneo. I need you. I text him back. What? Are you okay, Dan? He texts me back. Sorry, pushed send too soon. I need you to sign the divorce papers.

I delete it and light one of the cigarettes that Julie gave me and blow smoke gently, concentrating on my breath, on soft shapes. I tell myself to think, to focus. I briefly consider texting Radek but I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I get up and walk to the river for a look. The ice is gone now. The river is quieter. It’s probably okay to put a canoe into it now if that’s your only way home.

Now I’m sitting in the “family room” with my mother and my aunt. Nic has gone to get some food. My mother is recommending a book to my aunt. I know of the book. She is describing it as delightful. She asks me if I’ve heard of it and I say yeah, but I don’t want to read it. My mother tells me it’s a feel-good book, sometimes we need them, and I don’t say anything. What are you currently reading, Yoli? asks my aunt. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, I tell her. A French writer, dead, not the singer from Quebec. Where’s yours? my mother asks. And I say my feel-good book? And she says no, your manuscript. Still in a plastic Safeway bag? I nod and roll my eyes. My aunt asks me how many words I have and I tell her I don’t know, I can’t remember how to check on my computer. I don’t want to talk about it. My mother tells Tina that she doesn’t like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she’s sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it! Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place. My cellphone vibrates and I look at the text. It’s Nic telling me that he’s in the cafeteria and that he just talked to Claudio. Claudio’s dealt with everything, the venues, the insurance, and just generally calling off the tour. Tina jumps in with her own variation on the theme of sadness. I text Nic back and say good, angry? Nic texts back no, concerned, helpful, stressed maybe, coming to Winnipeg from Budapest to see her.

My mother says that when she reads my rodeo stories she gets sad thinking that I have so much sadness in me that I make all those teenage heroines so sad. Why can’t they ever get the first-place ribbon? she asks. I tell her no, no, everyone has all that sadness in them, it’s not just me, and the writing helps to organize it, so no big deal. I text Nic back: When? He texts back immediately. Tomorrow. Claudio’s putting out a press release, saying it’s exhaustion and a request for privacy. My mother says ah, okay, but still … I wonder about you carrying that sorrow around with you, where it came from … and I finally understand what she needs to hear and that she’s talking about not just me but Elf too and I tell her that my sorrow was not created by her, that my childhood was a joyful thing, an island in the sun, that her mothering is impeccable, that she is not to blame.

I’m alone with Elfrieda. The sun is disappearing. The day before the day before my father killed himself he took my hand in his and said Yoli, it feels to me as though the lights are going out. We were sitting by a fountain in a park at noon.

Nic sat with Elf for hours and has gone home now. He’s furious because a neighbour of theirs saw Elf being loaded into the ambulance covered in blood and told a few other neighbours and now a reporter has called Nic asking about Elf’s condition. My mother and my aunt are also at home, resting. I tell Elf that we’re all meeting for dinner at Colosseo and that I wish she could be there with us. The tube is still in her throat and she can’t answer but if she could what would she say? I ask her if she can imagine life getting better. I ask her if her heart is broken. If life is torturing her. I tell her that I would help her if I could but I can’t. I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t want to kill her. I put my hands over my face in the half-light of her room. I’m afraid and when I think of my fear my knees start shaking again but the sound of her breathing machine is comforting and rhythmic. I offer to sing and a corner of her mouth moves, barely. I don’t know what to sing. I think for a minute and Elf looks at me as if she’s saying well? What’s it gonna be? I sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar. I’m dying of fear. Elf and I used to belt this one out together, a passionate ballad sung by Mary Magdalene about her new crush, Jesus. She’s a prostitute, jaded, and can’t believe how this barefoot, bearded guy undoes her. She wants him and she tries to normalize the idea of wanting to date Jesus by claiming he’s just another man, after all. I sing it quietly while the light fades and Elf disappears into the darkness of her glass room. Finally it’s completely dark in the room and I’ve stopped singing and the only sound is the artificial breathing of the respirator. Elf picks up the pad of paper lying on her stomach and writes something on it and passes it to me. How do you go on? she has written. I squint at the words for a minute or two. I hold them up to the tiny red light on her respirator to get a better look. I pass the paper back to her. She shakes her head and I return the pad of paper to her stomach. We both close our eyes and time passes. Five minutes? Half an hour?

Elf, I say, are you awake? Her eyes stay closed. Elf, I say. She doesn’t respond. I look at my cellphone. There are no messages. I look at the nurses through the glass. They’re in their brightly lit area, talking and laughing and taking notes but I can’t hear them. Elf, I say. Open your eyes. Still no reaction. I put my head gently down onto her stomach where the glass piano is. Elf, I whisper. I don’t know what to do.

We are silent.

Elf, I whisper again. How do you think Nic feels? Do you know what you’re doing? You’re killing people.

Now Elf shifts slightly and puts her hand on my head. I sit up and look at her. Her eyes are open. For once, she looks alarmed. She shakes her head, no, no, no.

Does it make you happy to think of Nic or mom finding your dead body? I’m whispering now too. I’ve become her torturer and I’m so ashamed. I’m so angry and so afraid. I don’t want the nurses to hear me. Elf twists my hand hard and it hurts. Her hands are strong still, from playing. I twist back and she makes a small noise that manages to escape the tube that’s rammed down her throat.

A nurse comes into the room and says oh, she hadn’t seen me sitting there in the dark. She’s new so we introduce ourselves. She turns the light on and sees that both Elf and I are crying and apologizes and switches it off again. I’m overwhelmed by this small act of compassion. She offers to come back in a bit.

No, no, I say, it’s fine now.

I don’t look at Elf. I can feel her begging me not to leave and I pick up all my stuff and say okay, well, see you later, not sure when I’ll be back. I don’t look at her, she can’t speak, she can’t protest because of the tube, and I walk out of the room.

I get as far as the parking lot and then I run back to Elf’s room. I rush in and apologize and she puts her arms up to hug me. I catch my breath as she holds me. I sit up after a minute or two and she taps her heart. You love me? I say. She nods. But there’s more that she wants to say. I pick up the pad of paper that has fallen to the floor and she writes that she is sorry too. She doesn’t want to kill anybody but herself. I know, I say, I nod. I’m afraid of dying alone, she writes, and I nod again. Then she writes the word Switzerland on the paper and circles it and passes it to me. I smile and fold the paper until it’s the size of a pill and put it back into my bag. Let me think, I tell her. Give me time to think.