Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

But then my mother says hey Yoli, is this yours? She’s been sitting on it. She peeks inside and says oh, is this the new thing? I say yeah and she asks me how many words I have. For some reason this question makes me laugh. I shake my head. Elf tells her the first letter is amazing. My mother waits, smiling, for an answer. I don’t have an answer. She guides me out into the hallway, her hand on the small of my back. She’s so short and she smells so good, like coconut milk. She hugs me in the hallway and tells me everything will be all right. I love that she tells me this again and again but I wonder sometimes if she thinks I’m an idiot. Regardless, she’s my mother and that’s what mothers say. Bob Marley says it too but he says every little thing gonna be all right and that strikes me as an appropriate qualifier even if all he was doing was getting enough syllables to match the music. I remember humming that refrain over and over, singing myself to sleep with those lyrics in the days before my father kneeled in the path of a fast-moving train.

That evening we celebrate Elf’s homecoming with spicy Indian food and good wine and Nic’s special stash of Armagnac that my mother gave him for Christmas two years ago. Elf is smiling, a little shy, beautiful and serene, as though she alone holds the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Her hands shake only slightly and she’s wearing a pale pink scarf around her throat. She’s put a bit of makeup on the scar above her eye. Her pants are too big on her now but Nic has fashioned some kind of funky rope belt for her to wear. Nic is thrilled to have her home. He is calling her my love and my darling. My mom calls her honeybunch. I would like to give Elf a note right now that says we promised but I don’t have a Sharpie thick enough to make my point. Nic is talking about Chinese literature and learning Mandarin and Elf is thumbing through a novel he’s taken out of the library for her to read. There’s no mention of Paris or tennis.

Listen! I want to shout at her. If anyone’s gonna kill themselves it should be me. I’m a terrible mother for leaving my kids’ father and other father. I’m a terrible wife for sleeping with another man. Men. I’m floundering in a dying non-career. Look at this beautiful home that you have and this loving man loving you in it! Every major city in the world happily throws thousands of dollars at you to play the piano and every man who ever meets you falls hard in love with you and becomes obsessed with you for life. Maybe it’s because you’ve perfected life that you are now ready to leave it behind. What else is there left to do? But I’m finding it hard to make eye contact with Elfrieda. She’s not looking at me. She barely lifts her head from the novel Nic has given her.

My mother is tired from her trip and basically from all time since Anno Domini but also refreshed and happy just to see Elf at home. Apparently she got stranded out at sea again this time. It happens to her every time she goes to an ocean. She just bobs along on her back enjoying the sun and the undulating waves and then gets too far out and can’t get back and has to be rescued. She doesn’t panic at all, just sort of slowly drifts away from the shore and waits to be noticed or missed. Her big thing is going out beyond the wake where it’s calm and she can bob in the moonlight far out at sea. That’s her biggest pleasure. Our family is trying to escape everything all at once, even gravity, even the shoreline. We don’t even know what we’re running away from. Maybe we’re just restless people. Maybe we’re adventurers. Maybe we’re terrified. Maybe we’re crazy. Maybe Planet Earth is not our real home. In Jamaica, my mom had to be dragged, laughing her head off, back to shore by three shirtless fishermen after she went flying off a banana boat and couldn’t manage to climb back onto it.

Nic goes into the kitchen to get more drinks and I follow him and whisper what about the team, is it happening? He and I go downstairs on the pretence of getting more beer from the basement fridge and he tells me that this team is more mythical than anything. Apparently, with budget cuts and changes in policy and … He’s speaking but my mind drifts as I stare at the spine of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire , a book lying all by itself randomly on the concrete basement floor as if it has been thrown down in a hurry … It’s not really an option but he’ll continue to pursue other possibilities. I go to the book and pick it up and hand it to Nic. But possibilities of what? I ask him. What are we talking about? He takes the book, says I know, really, and breathes out heavily. In the meantime he’s made arrangements with Margaret, a friend of theirs, to stay with Elf for a few hours every day and my mother too will obviously visit every day. I know, I say, but Elf’s supposedly going on a five-city tour in two weeks. Look at her, do you honestly think she can tour? Have you talked to Claudio?

God, he says. He hasn’t talked to Claudio. He doesn’t know, all he knows is that touring terrifies her before she goes and then makes her feel exhilarated when she’s actually doing it. I tell him I have to go back to Toronto quickly. Will has to get back to New York for his exams and Dan is still in Borneo and I can’t leave Nora by herself, unsupervised, for longer than a day or two. As soon as her classes end I’ll come back here with her and we can spend the summer. I’ll see Elf every day if she’s not on tour. He understands and says he’s got everything under control and there are airplanes, right? And telephones.

We go back upstairs and my mother is telling Elf about her Scrabble ratings. She’s got an average of thirteen hundred and something and Elf is nodding, impressed, pretending she hasn’t heard it before. My mother tells Elf she made the word cunt the other day at the club. It’s a valid word! she says. Were you challenged? asks Elf. Nah, says my mom, the young guy I was playing with was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look at me, this old grandma laying down a dirty word. Elf smiles. She’s not saying much, though. But what is there to say? How is she feeling? Is this impromptu gathering a grotesque, fake sideshow in her opinion? Does she wonder what exactly we’re celebrating? Her failure to properly execute her plan to die? Or is she genuinely happy and relieved to be here?

C’mon, Elf! I think. Stop your hands from shaking and say something. Address your nation and let us know there’s reason to have faith in the future. Yes, there are airplanes and telephones.

I want to ask Elf if she’s afraid. I’m short of breath again. I’m smiling and trying to cover up my panic and discreetly suck oxygen into my lungs. I’d like to take Elf with me back to Toronto. I’d like for us all, my mother, my sister, my kids, Nic, Julie, her kids — even Dan and Finbar and Radek — to live in a tiny isolated community in a remote part of the world where all we have to look at is each other and we are only ever a few metres apart. It would be like an old Mennonite community in Siberia but with happiness.

Eventually we all leave. Elf is sitting at the piano, her hands moving soundlessly across the keys. When she gets up from the bench to say goodbye to my mom and me there are tears on her face. My mother lives only a few blocks away and decides to walk. She says she needs the exercise. Elf and I watch her cross the street safely, like a kid, and we all wave.

I tell Elf I love her, that I will miss her, but that I’ll be back in Winnipeg soon. Can I see her in Toronto when she’s there playing? Maybe, she says. But she’ll only be there for sixteen hours. She’ll rehearse, sleep, eat, perform, go back to the hotel, sleep, get up early to fly away. Rosamund, Claudio’s assistant, will be travelling with her this time. She tells me she loves me too. That she wants to know more about Toronto, my life there, and she asks me to write her letters, not e-mails but old-fashioned letters that will come to her in the mail in envelopes with stamps on them. I tell her I will, definitely, and will she write me back? She says she will, absolutely. Rock-solid.