Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

You guys can’t do this, says Nic to the front, the bow, of the boat. His voice is low and stern, mano a mano . Nothing happens. The boys breathe in silence and the canoe gently bobs up and down a bit on top of them. Nic asks the boys if they have somebody waiting for them in Roseau River.

Yeah, everyone— I think it is the smaller one’s voice. We live there.

Okay, so how about this, says Nic. I’ll give you money for two bus tickets to Roseau River and you leave the canoe with me. I’ll bungee it to my car and keep it for you at my place and you can pick it up whenever it suits you, when you’re back in the city, or whatever. I’ll write down my address for you. How much are bus tickets to Roseau River? he asks.

There’s no response from under the canoe.

Tell you what, says Nic. I’m going to get my car now and drive it back here, so just hang on. Yoli, can you write down my address for these guys.

Probably around twenty bucks, says one of the boys. Twenty bucks each. Nic leaves to get his car and the boys fling the canoe down onto the grass again and sit down on top of it, waiting.

So what’s Roseau River like? I say. The boys shrug and stare off in the direction of the river. I am writing Nic’s address on a scrap of paper as he pulls up and parks. He hands the boys some money, enough cash for the bus tickets to Roseau River.

How about we drive you to the bus depot? he asks. The smaller boy says okay but the other boy says nah, we’ll get there ourselves. He leans over to take the cash from Nic, and the two begin to walk away towards Portage and Main, away from the river.

Hey, hang on, I call, you’ll need his address. I run after them and hand one of the boys the scrap of paper. He looks at it for a few seconds and puts it into his pocket and says c’mon to the other kid and they’re off, on their way to something they remember as being better than where they are.

Do you think they’ll buy bus tickets? I ask Nic. We’re driving back to his house with the canoe on the roof of the car.

Who knows, says Nic, but there was no way they were putting this thing into the river.

Do you think they’ll come back for the canoe?

Probably not, says Nic, but I hope so. It might be a borrowed canoe, if you get my drift.

You saved their lives, I say, and Nic waves it all away like he’d done earlier with the check from the restaurant, like he does with all falsely inflated proclamations that can’t be proven in a lab. My phone goes off and I read a text from Nora: I’ve been banned for like a lifetime from Winners for having a testers war with Mercedes. Will ripped the screen breaking in. No key. Xxxxoooo

I am talking to a police officer. I’ve been stopped on Sherbrook Street for texting while driving. I’m on my way over to Julie’s for a quick coffee before I have to pick up my mother at the airport. Somebody worth risking your life and your pocketbook for, I presume? says the cop. Pocketbook? I repeat. Well yes, I say, it’s my daughter. I just had to send her a quick message. But okay, sorry, the law and everything. How much is it?

Well, says the cop, one of the main things we hope the driver takes away from this particular lesson is the severity of the crime. The cost is administrative, minimal, but the offence itself is egregious, potentially.

That’s true, I say, um … How much is it?

He asks to see my car registration and when I show it to him — it’s my mother’s car — he slaps the roof and says no way! I play Scrabble with Lottie down at the Waverley Club. You’re her daughter? I smile too and say yep, one of them. Upshot of it all (that’s an archery term, by the way, meaning the last shot of the competition) is that the cop spends ten minutes telling me how crazy he is about Lottie — she kicks my ass, man, she kicks my ass every time! Are you aware of her vocabulary? — and then pulls out his pad to write me a ticket. Just doing my job, he says You know, you, my friend, are an asshole, I say. That’s seven letters, incidentally, a-s-s-h-o-l-e, a good bingo word.

The cop leans into the car. You’re not really supposed to call cops assholes. He sounds apologetic. We finally agree that he’ll give me a warning only and I promise to pull over next time I want to send someone a text and I won’t tell my mom that he’s been a bit of a jerk.

I sense she’s already slightly contemptuous of me being a cop, he says. She really hates authority, man, have you noticed?

I’ll pick my mother up at the airport later that evening. She will have taken a boat, a train, a plane, a cab and another plane and a car to get home. I picture it all in my mind, all the various legs of her journey, and am comforted by this effort of hers to come back to us.

Julie and I sit on her back steps and are quietly amused by the sweet antics of Shadow, the family dog she has joint custody of along with her kids. She has made us smoothies with mint from her garden and we eat the perogies and salad she’s managed to whip up magically in her chaotic kitchen that has bicycles and guitars in it. She used to play bass guitar in a band called Sons and Lovers. She has just bought this house and is in the process of fixing it up. She shows me a dildo she found wedged behind a cabinet in the bathroom.

I’m going to smoke a cigar, she says. Don’t tell Judson. Judson is a guy she’s been seeing on and off since splitting up with her husband. He says it’s a condition of our relationship that I don’t smoke, she says.

We laugh. We are tired. Too tired to confront conditions.

Shadow the dog is too old and arthritic to run but is still very excited by the idea of running so Julie plays a game she calls Run for Shadow and it involves her saying things like shed or fence and then running there herself while Shadow sits still in the yard and barks excitedly. When Julie has exhausted herself playing Run for Shadow she plops down beside me on the back steps and finishes her cigar.

Do you think you’re still suffering from your grandparents being massacred in Russia? I ask her.

Am I suffering? she asks. It was just my grandmother. She couldn’t run because she was nine months pregnant. My grandfather made it with the other kids.

Do you think that all that stuff can still affect us even now?

She shrugs and takes a big haul off her illicit cigar.

LONG HUGS AT THE AIRPORT. We have missed each other. One of us is slightly tanned and smells like coconut and is wearing a T-shirt with a Scrabble tile on it with the letter P . We don’t know about tomorrow. I smell fear and realize that it’s coming from me. It feels like I don’t have quite enough skin, that parts of me that should be covered are exposed. And we hold on to each other for longer than usual. On the way home we stop in on Nic, it’s too late to go to the hospital to see Elf, and my mother tells us of her latest adventure at sea and we laugh a lot, too much, and Nic sits on Elf’s piano bench while we talk, occasionally turning around to plunk on the keys tunelessly, and then we all head home to our beds. But strange things happen in the night. I have a dream about Elf. She’s been discharged but nobody can find her. She’s not at home. We can’t reach her. Then I dream that grass is growing everywhere inside my house, it’s tall, silky grass. It’s coming up through the stairs. I don’t know how to get rid of it and I’m worried. Then, in my dream, the solution comes to me: do nothing. And in an instant my anxiety is gone and I’m at peace. I also have a dream that I have a stone angel like Margaret Laurence’s, the same one, and I have to take care of it, keep it safe and warm. In my dream the stone angel lies beside me in my bed, the blanket pulled up to her chin, her eyes perpetually staring up at the ceiling.