Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

p. p.s. Was talking to mom the other day. She says that you’re listening non-stop to Górecki’s Symphony Number Three? What is that one about?

Answering or not answering the phone has become symbolic of Elf’s ability to cope with life. Elf has told my mother that the sound of a ringing phone has, for her, Hitchcockian implications and we both say ah, yeah, right, hmmmm … over the phone. I spoke to my mother this afternoon. She bore news. She told me that her sister Tina is on her way to Winnipeg for a visit and to spend time with Elf. She’s driving her van across the country from Vancouver to help my mother who is exhausted, I can tell, but not admitting to it. I asked her but why, is it that bad? She said it’s not that bad but it’s also not that good. I asked her how exactly Elf was doing and she said well, you know, the same really.

Somewhere in between not bad and not good, I said.

That’s about the long and the short of it, she said. She’s not doing the tour.

What? Really?

That’s what she says today.

I asked her if Elf was getting my letters and she said she didn’t know, she’d ask. I phoned Nic at work and left a message for him to call me back. I phoned Will in Brooklyn and asked him how he was doing and he whispered fine, fine, yeah. He was in the library. He is always in a library or occupying Wall Street when I call him. He asked how things were. I told him great, good. He whispered how’s Elf? And I whispered back pretty good, fine, yeah.

Someone has been sawing off all the branches of the tree outside my dining room window. I like to sit in my T-shirt and panties at the dining room table first thing in the morning and listen to the un-eaten mourning doves and write. The branches covered virtually the entire window and prevented the neighbours from seeing me sitting here in my underwear. But now the branches are coming away one by one and revealing me to my neighbours slowly like a puzzle taking shape.

Dear Elf,

When will you write me back? One thing I’ve noticed about men is that they become uncomfortable and a bit angry when, after having sex with them, you cry your eyes out for a few hours and refuse to tell them why you’re upset.

Finbar and I are so incompatible. I only sleep with him because he wants to and he’s good-looking — I’m pathetic, I know. Louche. And I’m a horrible role model — a mother to a soon-to-be or already sexually active daughter. Seriously, who wants a mother who buys flavoured condoms from the machine at the Rivoli? (I was caught off guard and that’s all they had.) Although Nora doesn’t actually know about Finbar because I make sure that all our sad outings are brief and furtive and spaced far apart like eclipses. Just now, this second, telling you about this stuff makes me want to cry my eyes out. I think I might just do that. I’d like to fall in love again. I wish Dan and I didn’t fight so much — he’s a good dad to Nora when he’s not in Borneo. You’re so lucky to have Nic! He’s so lucky to have you! Say hi to him by the way. How’s his kayak?

Anders (N’s little Swedish boyfriend) just told me he’d blocked up the toilet, and that he’d messed up the washing machine when he tried to wash all his clothes in one go — why is he doing his laundry here??? — so now his clothes are locked in the machine, and the machine is leaking water into the towels he used to cover the floor. He indicated all of this with charades and drawings because of our language barrier.

It’s evening now. Nora and Anders have gone to a birthday party. Before they left I forced them to show me some dance moves, something they were working on at school, and they were reluctant at first but finally agreed to do a quick one and oh my god, it was amazing. They’re just kids but suddenly they were these world-weary though incredibly agile lovers swooning, then dying, then being reunited. They were so grave, so measured and yet free at the same time in all their movements. You have to come here to see them dance! When they were finished, bent and twisted into some kind of expressive shape which they held for an impossibly long time before standing up and bowing sweetly, I burst into applause — I was trying not to cry — and they were instantly transformed back into ordinary, awkward teens, shuffling out the door, bumping into each other, saying sorry, laughing nervously, holding hands shyly when a second ago it seemed like they were the original inventors of passion and grace. We’ve lost our power.

I was trying to edit my stupid novel with the lights off but the only key I can hit in the dark without missing is the delete key. Maybe it’s a sign. By the way, I checked Wikipedia to see what it said about Górecki’s Third Symphony. It’s also called The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and it’s about the ties between a mother and a child. Have you seen her lately? Did she tell you that she finally found her lost hearing aid in the dryer?

I should go now and make my rounds, as the Hiebert kids (remember their station wagon and the garbage bags of pot plants?) used to say when they were selling drugs. I’ve unblocked the toilet but I still have to figure out how to fix the washing machine so it doesn’t flood the basement and wash us all into Lake Ontario.

I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner (to quote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra). Yoli.

p. s. There’s a hill in Toronto, which is exciting. You have to walk up it if you’re going north and down it if you’re going south. The shore of Lake Ontario used to come up far higher. It would have been lapping at this third floor window of mine up until about 13,000 years ago. Then it was known as Lake Iroquois and when the ice dam melted the water drained away and became its present size, so small in comparison, a shadow of its former self. There’s a road in north Toronto called Davenport that follows the Native trail that used to run along the ancient shoreline. I’m sure it was called something other than Davenport then, or maybe davenport was a word dreamed into being by the First Nations people who became tired of sitting on rocks and in canoes and imagined something softer, with springs. Did you know that the various parts of the earth, the continents, are moving closer together at the same speed that fingernails grow? Or are they moving farther apart? Now I can’t remember but anyway it’s the pace I am interested in. And its relation to grief, which you could say, in this context, passes quickly or lasts forever.

p. p.s. Sometimes when I’m working on my book I close my eyes and imagine that I’m in Winnipeg meeting you at some café, maybe the Black Sheep on Ellice Avenue. I can see you smiling now as I walk up the street. You’ve got us a table by the window, there’s a small pile of library books beside you, French ones, and you’ve ordered me a flat white and you’re wearing a half-sexy/half-ironic miniskirt and billowing artist smock and you’re knocking your green marker against your teeth while you smile at me like you’ve got something to tell me, something that will make me laugh. Today I’m working with my front door wide open because it’s so warm. A condo is going up across the street so it’s very loud. Every five minutes a guy yells heads up and then a few seconds later there’s a massive crash and another dust cloud. I miss you, Elf.

It’s been almost two weeks since I said goodbye to my sister in the doorway of her home in Winnipeg and promised to write letters. Now it’s May, the day of Elfrieda’s opening concert at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It’s back on. She changed her mind again. Nic called me yesterday to say the rehearsal had gone very well and Elf seemed excited about opening night even if she looked a little drained.