Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Finbar, the lawyer, is texting again. He says he’s worked through some stuff and thinks it’s okay if he and I get together again in spite of my peripatetic lifestyle. He admires my hamstrings. I have a sixth toe now. Okay, it’s a bunion. Sometimes, if I’m doing a lot of walking, it throbs like a little penis on the side of my foot. I also have some weird golf ball — sized thing growing on the back of my heel which I think is called Haglund’s deformity. Our dog had one of those once, remember, and Uncle Ray gave her one of his horse tranquilizers and then hacked it off with that gutting knife? I just remember you carrying her around for a couple of weeks because she couldn’t walk afterwards. Or you put her in that little wagon and pulled her everywhere. Would you do that for me if my deformity gets out of hand? Also, I was in a little accident the other day, did I tell you about that? Just a tiny fender-bender but with insurance here in Ontario being very expensive and blah blah and still having Manitoba insurance (whoops) I’m not sure that I’ll be covered and I might have to pay a million dollars to the woman for her totally unscathed BMW SUV. She actually got out of her car and took a picture of her absolutely pristine bumper with her cellphone while I stood there (in my cut-offs and green windbreaker, holding a six of Heinekens) saying c’mon, you are NOT serious.

Nora and I are conducting a bit of an experiment. We’re attempting to make eye contact with Torontonians. It’s frustrating. People are startled when we look at them and quickly look away or somehow will themselves not to even look in the first place. We’ve noticed that some people visibly will turn their heads away from us and even their shoulders so they’re not tempted to look. Today Nora and I went for a quick walk in our neighbourhood (Little Malta) and of the sixty-eight people we passed on the sidewalk only seven of them returned our gaze and of those seven only one smiled and it might not have been a real smile but a grimace due to gas. Nora and I pretend to be indifferent to it, but it hurts! We’ve wondered if it’s because of how we dress or if we emit some kind of vibe that makes people not want to have any contact at all with us or if we seem desperate or dangerous or weird. Well, I have to run to pick up Nora from a rehearsal and get her to a dentist appointment on time. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking of you and missing you and … floating on the wings of nothingness.

Your humble and obedient servant, Y (see? I have read the letters of your poet lovers).

Elf is not answering the phone. I call my mother and she says yes, that’s true, she’s not. Well, sometimes she does, well, actually, no, I guess she doesn’t. Well, sometimes, yes, sometimes but mostly not. Really not at all. Once in a blue moon, but basically no, she doesn’t.

I can’t bear to hear my mother waffle like this between hope and despair. My mother tells me that if she’s there, at Elf’s place, when the phone rings she does encourage Elf to answer it but even then it’s a struggle and mostly Elf wins and the phone goes unanswered.

I can hear the trumpets sounding on her laptop indicating that another Scrabble game is about to begin.

Dear Elf,

Today I went for a long walk and ended up watching ducks dive headfirst into Grenadier Pond in High Park. I wondered for how long they could hold their breath and I counted seventy-eight seconds before one came up for air. What is it for humans? A minute? Today I heard a pretty good conversation on the streetcar. This guy got on and he was swearing his head off, really foul stuff like that fucking bitch can suck my cock if she fucking thinks … and the streetcar driver said hey, whoah, you can’t swear like that on the streetcar and the guy stopped and looked at him and then he said he was really sorry, really sorry, he understood, and he got off at the next stop and started swearing again as soon as he’d stepped off the streetcar.

I miss you. Nora and I went up to the top of the CN Tower yesterday. We’re trying to understand our new city from a bird’s-eye view. We put a loonie into a powerful set of binoculars but we still couldn’t see you. We went up to the rooftop bar at the Park Hyatt and I had a glass of twelve-dollar wine and we shared some olives and almonds. We gazed off a little despondently in a westerly direction. We miss you. Nora asked me if I regretted having children which shocked me and made me feel like a terrible mother, like I’d been giving her the impression that she was slowly crushing the life right out of me. But then she went on to say that she was thinking of never getting pregnant because she couldn’t bear the thought of her body housing an alien and ballooning into some grotesque caricature of womanhood. I hope she doesn’t have an eating disorder. I’ve read that eating disorders are often the fault of overbearing mothers, but I’m so underbearing it’s not even funny. Maybe she’s imagined an overbearing mother to compensate for my lack of bearing and it’s this imaginary pushy mother that’s caused her to have an eating disorder. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, not really. I shouldn’t try to blame something that doesn’t even exist on an imagined imaginary mother. I try to remember how skinny you were when you were her age. You still are!

So while we were out there on the rooftop bar an elderly suntanned man with a World Series ring, wearing white leather shoes and no socks, told Nora she was beautiful. He asked me if I was her sister. Ha ha, oh the oft-told jokes of stale old men on the make. He said Nora should be a model. I said well isn’t that flattering but no, she’s a dancer — with the words back off you transparent creep radiating unspoken from my assassin eyes. We walked all the way home singing mash-ups of old songs that both of us knew. It’s so cute when she says things like, what! You know “Torn Between Two Lovers”? She even let me hold her hand for a minute or two. She told me that I was surprisingly attractive considering my features, which made me want to break down and bawl with gratitude. Like any fourteen-year-old, she’s not exactly wildly indiscriminate with her compliments. Her feet are ravaged from dancing. They look like Grandpa Werner’s. Remember when he did puppet shows with them and made us scream? I massage them for her and afterwards my own hands are callused and raw from scraping them against her thorny feet. I asked her about her little Swedish boyfriend (to which she took exception, his name is Anders and he’s apparently ripped) and if they were able to communicate in any language. She said no, dreamily, like it was perfect that way. I wanted to ask her if she was having sex with him but I didn’t have the nerve. She’s not even fifteen. I couldn’t handle the answer. I’m a useless mother, my god.

So I called Will in New York last night and he told me he had rats in his apartment. He asked me how you were. He misses you too! Speaking of rats, I think, on top of the ants, we have mice, which I guess is comparatively speaking a relief. In Toronto they say that if you have mice you don’t have rats and vice versa because rats eat mice. I wonder if rats eat mourning doves. Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream where a rat gets stuck under my shirt and I can’t get it out of there and I have to pound away on my chest until the thing drops dead and bloodied onto the floor and I’m exhausted. The power keeps going out. I miss you like crazy.

Beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived, Y.

(That’s what Madame de Staël wrote at the end of a letter to some Chevalier guy, but now it’s what I’ve written to my Elfrieda.)

Write me back, Amps!

p. s. or pick up your goddamn phone.