Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

L.

She sighed and lifted her chin to the ceiling, opened her eyes and told me it was beautiful, BEAUTIFUL, and true, the best thing I’d written yet. I thanked her and shoved the page back into the plastic Safeway bag.

She asked me well, can you at least tell me what it’s about, in a word? I told her yeah, sisters. And I glared at her and then I began to cry, inconsolable, for a good twenty minutes curled up in that torn vinyl chair by the window and she reached out and touched my foot, my calf, she stroked my leg, the part of it she could reach from the bed, and told me she was so sorry. I asked her what she was sorry for but she didn’t say anything. I asked her again, my voice sounded harsh and vindictive, what was she sorry for? I slapped my hand against the reinforced window, quadruple paned to prevent jumpers from crashing through it, and it startled her. But again she answered me with silence and those huge green eyes fringed with ridiculously long lashes, dusky, haunted like my father’s with pupils sunken ships in all that green.

I didn’t give her the satisfaction of hearing me tell her I understand, that it’s okay, that I forgive her, that she doesn’t need to be forgiven, that I’ll always love her, that I’ll keep her heart in my pencil case. I looked away and calmly took out my BlackBerry to check for more important messages. Will had texted: Nora is completely unreasonable. When are you back? How’s Elf? Do you know where my basketball needle is? I texted back: Yes. Not sure. Alive. Try the junk drawer. Love you . I googled “suicide gene” but cancelled the search at the last second. I didn’t want to know. Plus, I already knew.

People ask: but how does this happen? To think that even with all the security measures we employ these days to keep things out — fences and motion detectors and cameras and sunscreen and vitamins and deadbolts and chains and bike helmets and spinning classes and guards and gates — we can have secret killers lurking within us? That we can turn on our happy selves the way tumours invade healthy, wholesome organs, the way “normal” moms suddenly throw their infants off the balcony is … who wants to think about that shit?

When my sister was born my father planted a Russian olive shrub in the backyard. When I was born he planted a mountain ash. When we were kids Elf explained to me that the Russian olive was a tough shrub with four-inch thorns that managed to thrive in places where everything else died. She told me that the mountain ash was called a rowan in Europe and that it was used to ward off witches. So, she said. We’re protected from everything. Well, I said, you mean witches. We’re only protected from witches.

I left the room and wandered around the hallways and nodded at the nurses at the nurses’ station and walked into a linen closet by accident thinking it was a bathroom and out again, knocking over mops and cleaning products and muttering apologies, and back into Elf’s room, fresh smile, tears rubbed away, my face by now a lurid mess of colours and grime, and I’m trying to comfort myself. I’m singing, not really singing, the Boss (because he’s authoritative). “Thunder Road” … The anthemic tune that lit a fire in our plain girl hearts back in the eighties — serenading our own reflections with hairbrush microphones or belting it into the wind from the backs of half-ton trucks or the tops of towering hay bales — and that I’m calling on to give me hope once again.

I collapsed back into the orange chair and asked Elf to tell me about something. She wanted to know about what and I said anything, just tell me about something. Tell me about your secret lovers. She told me that lovers are secret for the reason that they’re not spoken about and I nodded in agreement, that’s true, that’s intractable, I could take a page out of her book, but tell me anyway. Tell me about that guy, what was his name? Huge Boil. Elf grimaced and moaned and said Hugh Boyle was not a lover, he was a friend and I said so tell me about him, what was he like in bed? We didn’t go to bed, said Elf, and I said okay, no problem, where’d you do it? On the floor? The fire escape? She shook her head. Okay, what about that other guy, Penis Breath? Ah, now she smiled. Denis Brecht, she said, was lovely but is ancient history. I’m a married woman now. You are? I asked. When did you get married? Okay, she said, you know what I mean. I told her that I am actually a married woman but have no husband. You, I told her, are not a married woman but have a husband. Whatever, Yoli, she said. She yawned. It was sweet of you to come back but I’m the one who needs to apologize. No, no, c’mon, I said. You must meet so many suave men with exciting accents and encyclopedic knowledge of European civilization, I said. Are you being sarcastic? she wondered.

She asked me about the hotshit lawyer guy in Toronto and I shook my head.

What’s his name again? she said.

Finbar.

What? Oh my god, that’s right. Finbar! I can’t believe you’re sleeping with a lawyer, first of all, and then with a lawyer named Finbar.

What’s wrong with sleeping with a lawyer? I asked.

Well, nothing, she said, in theory. Just that you are, or were, is funny. She asked me if I was still seeing him and I told her I don’t know and then I spilled all the details of my shambolic existence, that Finbar is not the only guy and she said Yolandi! How many? And I said only two but I’m so tired and overwhelmed and ashamed that I honestly can’t remember if that’s true or not. And one of them is in love with you, actually, and is only sleeping with me by proxy. She asked me if Finbar knows about the other guy and who is he and again I just shook my head no, yes, I don’t think I told him. And besides he wouldn’t care, and I told her okay, I know, this isn’t my proudest moment or anything, it’s some weird animal reaction to sixteen years of monogamy with Dan, so okay I’ve become a two-bit whore, whatever, burn me to death and she pointed to herself and then held her arms out to the psych ward spilling out around her to indicate where she was, empathy and a joke, my big sister, I love her, and we laughed a bit. A tiny bit. Not laughing, really, at all. And she said she hopes I’m using protection and this struck me as hilarious, coming from her.

I remembered the sex talk she gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. She asked me if I knew what a hard-on was and I said yes and she said great! That was it, the extent of it, my terse navigational guide to the biggest minefield confronting humankind. I remembered the four of us, our family, when we were all young and sane and alive, when we didn’t have stitches in our heads and trembling hands, driving around in Winnipeg on some big night out in the city, maybe checking out the Christmas lights or something, and I was just learning how to read and was reading every sign out loud, practising, and when I saw Cockburn Avenue I said Cock Burn Avenue and then asked what’s that? And Elf, she must have been eleven or twelve, said that’s from too much sex and my mother said shhhh from the front passenger seat and we didn’t dare look over at my dad who clutched the wheel and peered out the windshield like a sniper tracking his target. There were two things he didn’t ever want to talk about and they were sex and Russia.

It was the first time I’d heard the word spoken, sex, and I had only a very vague notion of what it meant, that it had to do with hospitals. But more importantly, I remembered the look on Elf’s face in the car. She was proud of herself, she smiled and hummed, stared out the window at the world she hoped to conquer one day, she had shaken things up in the bomb shelter of our tiny Mennonite microcosm and rattled the cages a bit. She had been shushed by our mother, which had never, ever happened before. That day I became acutely aware of her new powers and I wanted to be her. From then on I’d walk her bike solemnly up and down the sidewalk from one end of First Street to the other. I could barely reach the handlebars. I didn’t even know how to ride a bike. I carried her textbooks up and down First Street too, shifting them wearily from one arm to the other, so great was my academic burden. I dabbed paint splotches on my dorky homemade jeans to look like her real ones and I practised looking soulful by pulling my bangs in front of my eyes and letting my lips go slack. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and practised shooting myself in the head with an imaginary revolver, the way Elf did whenever she sarcastically felt she couldn’t take it anymore. I thought it was brilliant. The timing, the quick beat between pulling the trigger and impact, and then jerking my head to the side. After a lot of practising I finally demonstrated to her that I’d mastered her very own signature move and she laughed and applauded and said well done, but that one’s over now. This is the new one. And she showed me some elaborate mime involving an imaginary noose, a snapping neck, a lolling head. By then I’d lost interest in the idea itself and let her have it.