Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

We sat on her porch and drank cheap red wine and ate cheese and crackers and talked about everything other than Elf, who was a subject like time in that I couldn’t grasp it but it had a mighty hold on me . Julie’s two kids are a boy and a girl ages eight and nine, who still love to hug people and sit on their laps. They were indoors watching Shrek and every five or ten minutes would come out onto the porch (every time that happened Julie would fling her lit cigarette into the grass so they wouldn’t see her smoking and then retrieve it later) and say oh my god, okay, guys? You have to see this. It’s like, it’s like … And then they’d argue with each other for a minute or two about what it was like, truly, and Julie and I would nod in utter amazement, Julie occasionally glancing at her dwindling cigarette in the front yard. Then suddenly with no warning they’d vanish like meadowlarks, darting back into the house to assume their positions on the couch.

They think smoking causes AIDS, said Julie, retrieving her smouldering cigarette. We talked about how it didn’t matter how old or young they were, we obsessed over their well-being and suffered wildly, exquisitely, and blamed ourselves for every single nanosecond of unhappiness they experienced. We would sooner self-immolate than see our children’s eyes fill slowly with tears ever again. We talked about our ex-husbands and our old boyfriends and our fear of never being desired sexually ever, ever again and of dying alone and unloved in our own shit, with bedsores so deep they exposed our crumbly bones, and had we done anything right in our lives?

Probably, we concluded. We had maintained our friendship, we would always be there for each other, and one day when all our children had grown up and left us to wallow in regret and melancholy and decrepitude and our parents had died from the accumulative grief and exhaustion of living and our husbands and lovers had all flown the coop or been banished from our doorsteps we would buy a house together in some beautiful countryside somewhere and chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Misérables , reimagine our pasts and wait out the end of the world.

Deal?

Deal.

We high-fived and rolled a joint. We were getting cold out there on the porch. We sat listening to the river break down and crack up a block away, and I wondered if those slabs of ice could fly, could ever be released and lifted right up from all that roiling pressure and what it would be like to see a giant slab of ice winging its way over Portage Avenue on its way back home to the north. We stared up at the night, April crisp and clear, no stars. We watched as lights went out up and down the street and we peeked at Julie’s kids through the window, asleep on the sofa in flannel pyjamas, clutching remote controls to a thousand modern devices.

So why isn’t Dan looking after Nora? asked Julie. (Dan is Nora’s father. He’s rambunctious and sentimental. We’re in the throes of a divorce.) It’s not like this isn’t an emergency. Didn’t he tell you you could always count on him in an emergency? Have you told him about Elf?

He’s in Borneo or something, I said. With an aerialist.

Must be nice. But I thought he was living in Toronto.

Yeah, he is … to be closer to Nora, he says, except he’s in Borneo at the moment.

Indefinitely? said Julie.

No, not forever. I don’t know. Nora did tell him about Elf.

And Barry’s putting Will through university in New York? asked Julie. (Barry is Will’s father. He’s loaded because he spends his time creating stochastic local volatility models for a bank and has a mysterious demeanour. We hardly talk.)

Yeah … so far.

How’s Nora liking dance? (Dance was the main reason we moved to Toronto. So Nora would be able to go to a certain ballet school, thanks to her scholarship since I wouldn’t have been able to pay for it otherwise.)

She loves it but thinks she’s too fat.

God, said Julie. When will that shit ever end.

I caught her smoking.

She’s smoking so she doesn’t eat?

I guess so, I said. All the dancers are. I talked to her about it but …

And Will loves New York? she asked.

He really does, I said. And he’s a Marxist now, I think. He just says Kapital , doesn’t even use the Das .

Cool.

Yeah.

Eventually I helped Julie manoeuvre her kids up to bed, half walking, half carrying, and said good night. She hadn’t received any type of suspension for insubordination unfortunately, so had to get up early to work the next morning. She put out her Canada Post — issued spiked boots and prepared the kids’ lunches. The spiked boots were useful for walking on ice. One winter during an ice storm, I found myself stranded on the slippery fishbowl bank of the Assiniboine. I had walked across the frozen river and had planned to climb up the bank to the sidewalk near the Osborne Street Bridge. It would have been a shortcut on my way downtown but instead I got stuck on the icy bank with smooth-soled shoes and was completely unable to get enough of a grip to climb up the steep embankment. I tried grabbing at the thin branches of trees that hung over the bank but inevitably they’d snap off and I’d slide back down to where I had started. I lay on my back on the ice wondering what to do, munching on a granola bar I’d found in my bag, and then I remembered Julie’s special shoes with spikes. I called her from my cellphone and she told me that she was actually nearby on her mail route and would come and rescue me. She showed up a few minutes later and took off her spiked shoes and threw them down to me so that I could put them on and finally climb up the bank. She stood on her mailbag so her feet wouldn’t get wet and smoked a cigarette while I clomped up the riverbank like Sir Edmund Hillary in her spiked shoes. Then we went for a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut. Rescue missions are occasionally very straightforward.

I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.

Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures — which are legion.

The words “nothing bad has happened yet,” a lyric from a Loudon Wainwright song, knocked around in my head while I cruised past the house on Warsaw Avenue. This was the house where I started writing my teen rodeo novels which did okay for a while, well enough to help with the mortgage payments and buy groceries. There are nine of them so far. The Rodeo Rhonda series. But it’s time for Rhonda’s world to change, according to my publisher. More teenagers live in cities now and can’t relate to barrel racers and broncobusters. My editor is being very patient with me these days while I work on my “literary book.” She said she’s quite happy to wait for Rodeo Rhonda number ten while I “expand my oeuvre.” The new owner was in the process of painting a thick layer of austere white over the original red and yellow that Dan and I had painted it years ago on a goofy whim when we were broke but happy and fearless and oh so confident in our love, our future, the kingdom of our newly minted family and our unshakable footing in the world. The fence hadn’t been repainted yet, it glowed a cheerful yellow in the dusky light, and I could still make out the decals that Nora had stamped all over it, sweet images of frogs and cars and half moons and blazing suns with happy faces. A little metal sign we’d bought on some family road trip that said Beware: Peculiar Dog Lives Here was still screwed to the gate. Sometimes people say at this point: I don’t know what happened. I don’t know where we went wrong.