Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

I went out into the hallway. He apologized for phoning me but said that neither Elf nor Nic were answering their phones or e-mails and he had to go over the details of the tour with Elf and there was still a contract to be signed.

Do you know where she is? he asked.

Not exactly, I said. Hey, aren’t you in Europe?

Yes, Paris. Listen, Yolandi, is it because she is doing her four-day meditation or is she on a kayaking trip with Nic?

I think, yeah, maybe …

The meditation thing?

Yeah.

Yolandi, please tell me everything is all right. I know Elf is unsteady as performance approaches. Is she well? Is she keeping it together? You know you can talk to me.

Um, maybe, I said. I’m not entirely sure.

You’re not sure? he said. Well, does Nic know how she is? Yolandi, this tour is months in the making. She has to be ready in less than three weeks.

Probably Nic knows, yeah, I said. A nurse came up to me and told me that cellphones were not allowed on the ward. I motioned to her that I’d be off the phone in a second, sorry, sorry.

Are you in Toronto? said Claudio. Elf said you’d moved.

Well, yeah, I did, I said. It was for Nora, so she could dance.

Ah, beautiful! Are you liking it?

It’s okay.

And Will? Where did you tell me he was studying?

New York.

Incredible! said Claudio. Please give them my regards.

Will do, I said. Thank you. I think I have to go though, I’m so sorry.

Not at all. Elf’s scheduled for Toronto on the eighth I think, said Claudio. She’ll probably have time for dinner.

Oh, that would be really great! I said. Yeah, I’ll see her then. The nurse glared at me from her desk and I turned my back to her. Hey listen, Claudio, I’ll find out where Elf is and get her to call you. My mom will know. Probably.

Yes, please do, Yolandi. I really must talk to her. I apologize for seeking reassurances from you.

No, no … don’t apologize.

You know what’s happened in the past, he said. I am sensitive to Elfrieda’s nervosa …

Yeah, we appreciate that, thanks.

Do not thank me, he said. Oh and don’t forget that there’s the rehearsal two days before the opening …

The nurse was beating a path over to me now. Got it, I said. Where are you again?

Paris, said Claudio.

Paris, I said. For a second I stood dreaming of love.

I hung up and went back into Elf’s room.

Booty call? she said.

Ha, yeah … I said. Hey, so are you missing your piano at all?

Elf looked out the window. Nic is dealing with that. I’ve already told you I can’t—

You have almost three weeks. Maybe …

Yolandi, why are you …

I’m not doing anything, Elfrieda.

The cellphone-hating nurse came into Elf’s room and said okay, two things: One, no phones on the ward. I’ve told you before. And two: No outside food. I noticed you brought her a sandwich. We want Elfrieda to eat with the other patients in the dining room.

Elf and I stared at her.

Elfrieda, said the nurse, can I get you to promise me that you’ll come to the dining room for dinner this evening?

Uh, well, said Elf, I mean I can … I’ll try. I’m not sure about you getting me to promise, though. She laughed.

I see, said the nurse. Is that a challenge?

What? No, said Elf. Not at all. I was just …

She was just joking around, I said.

Okay, that’s great, said the nurse. We like jokes. Jokes are a good indication that you’re feeling better, right?

Neither Elf nor I spoke. We couldn’t look at each other.

If you’re well enough to make a joke then I think you’re well enough to join the others for dinner, right? said the nurse. Isn’t that how it works?

I, uh … said Elf. Perhaps?

I guess so, I said.

I’m not sure, said Elf. I fail to understand the correlation between—

Yeah, yeah, I said. Dinner. I glanced at Elf.

Indeed, said the nurse. So, no cellphones? She was looking at me. No outside food?

Righto, I said. I gave her two thumbs up and smiled broadly.

The nurse left and Elf and I followed her with imaginary gunfire, blasting away with M-16s the way we did when we were girls and the burgermeister came to our house to tell our parents what Jezebels we were. We stopped firing and looked at each other.

Do you remember when you rescued me in my bedroom? I said. When I was naked and wedged between my bed and dresser?

Elf nodded. You were practising somersaults.

Do you remember when we went skateboarding in the hospital tunnel and those asshole boys locked me in the morgue and I was missing for like six hours and you were the one to find me all curled up on that stainless steel thing where they do autopsies?

Elf smiled and said oh no, don’t talk about those days.

Why? I like to remember them, Elf. I like thinking about you rescuing me.

Yoli, moaned Elf. Talk about now. Keep talking to me about Toronto, she said. She had tears in her eyes.

I told her that I was in the process of having my tattoo removed. Dan and I have the same one. We had them done by a biker in Winnipeg’s north end in our early days. And that having it removed now hurt more than I thought it would, but under the circumstances I was enjoying the pain and welcomed it. It felt like atonement of some kind. The biker who gave us the tattoos was a member of the Manitoba Warriors and lived in a house with a reinforced steel door that only opened from the inside. But wait, she said, then how did he get in? I don’t know, I said.

I told her that I’d paid him twenty bucks and a bag of weed to get the tattoo and that I had to pay a thousand dollars to have it removed, and that it would take at least a year and a half because you only got a tiny bit of it removed at each session so that it wouldn’t leave a big crater in your flesh. I told her the laser felt like an elastic band being snapped hard against my back about a hundred times. I had to wear goggles. Afterwards they put Polysporin on it and a bandage and gave me a mint and told me not to shower or exercise for two days and to continue putting Polysporin and fresh bandages on it twice a day for a week. I didn’t bother with any of that.

I turned around in my chair and lifted my shirt so that Elf could see the fading imprint of my tattoo. It was a jester, an old-fashioned harlequin. As I recall, it had meant, I think, that Dan and I together would slay hypocrisy and the duplicity of the world with jokes and magic. She smiled again and closed her eyes. She said it made her sad. I said it made me sad too, but happy. I went on about Toronto, about the kids, each anecdote taking on the shape of a circus tent in my mind. I talked about my hapless love life, about the e-mail I’d received from Finbar the hotshit lawyer telling me that he was calling it off, my life was too intense, too troubled, my family was nuts, I was too emotional. He was bailing, or pulling the plug, or cutting me loose, something watery like that. Throwing me back like one of those fish caught for sport alone and not for keeping.

Then out of the blue, like that volcano in Pompeii, Elf asked me if I’d take her to Switzerland.

“THERE WAS SOMETHING, I suppose, like a wild waterfall in the headlong, broken, plunging quality of Mary’s life. I stood and gazed at it roaring through the streets of Paris, visible only to me.”

Which is what Richard Holmes says about Mary Wollstonecraft when she’s in Paris “covering” the French Revolution. It’s in his book Footsteps , in which he follows difficult artistic people through their lives — though long after their deaths — and tries to figure them out, and therefore himself. I’m currently reading it desperately as though somewhere in its pages are contained the directions to hell’s only exit. It was my father and my sister who constantly beseeched my mother and me to read more, to find succour for life in books, to soothe our aches and pains with words and more words. Write it all down, my father would say when I went to him in tears about god knows what little injustice and here, read this, my sister would say chucking some tome at me when I asked her questions like, Is life a joke?