Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Julie and I are a team and we pull up chairs to flank my sister and we hold her hands and say nothing because we have nothing to say. There is a tube in Elf’s throat and a machine that breathes for her. We look at her and she looks at us and shrugs the way my mother did. How many words do we have left? She closes her eyes and then opens them again and pulls her hand out of mine so that she can tap her forehead. I don’t know what she means. That she’s crazy? She’s forgotten something? Her head hurts? I kiss her cheek. A Neil Young song is playing over the sound system that’s been set up here in the intensive care ward. He won’t stop searching for a heart of gold.

Elf taps her nose, draws imaginary circles around her eyes. Julie says she wants her glasses, that’s what she means. Right? Elf’s chin drops slightly, a nod. I get up and look for them. I go out of the room and ask the nurse if she has Elf’s glasses. She doesn’t. Julie volunteers to look for them, to ask Nic or my mother if they have them. She kisses Elf on the cheek, whispers something to her that makes her eyes fill with tears, maybe she says Elf, you’re the best, and leaves.

Here we are. I’m relieved that Elf wants her glasses. That there is something she wants to see. She has bright white bandages on her wrists that look like sweatbands. They’re only missing the Nike swoosh. Tubes are taped to her face. I use the edge of my shirt sleeve to wipe the tear that’s sliding down her cheek. I tell her I love her. One corner of her mouth is pulled to the side to accommodate the hose. I remember when she took breathing lessons, something called the Alexander Technique, and how I made fun of her. You have to learn how to breathe? She told me yes, there was a right way and a wrong way. She offered to teach me how to breathe properly using my diaphragm from deep within me but I lost interest quickly. She’d tried to be my piano teacher too, but that was a disaster. And to teach me Spanish. She told me how to say I have a little man when I should have said I’m a bit hungry.

I leave Emergency to find my mother and my aunt who are drinking black coffee in the cafeteria. My aunt Tina is older by a few years but otherwise they are almost the same person. They both have snow-white bobs, flashing cat eyes, a million wrinkles each and really strong grips. They’re barely five feet tall. When they see me they both call out my name and make room between them and pull me onto a chair and put their arms around me and my aunt tells me she loves me and my mother tells me she loves me and I tell them I love them too. I can barely breathe. I’m jealous of my own mother for having her sister near her at a time like this. When my father died Tina came then also to be with my mother and my sister and me, and bought each of us a dozen pairs of white cotton panties so we wouldn’t have to worry about mundane things like laundry while we were planning a funeral. When my mother had her bypass surgery Tina came then too and took me to Costco and we pushed a giant cart around an enormous warehouse buying my mother a year’s supply of ketchup and toilet paper and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which has recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth. During her recovery Tina bathed her sister gently, laughing, immodest, the way I helped my sister shower when she was too weak from starving herself to do it alone. My mother a Rubenesque bundle of flesh and scars, a disciple of life, and my sister a wraith. How does one give birth to the other?

Nic is talking to a doctor. I can see him through the glass wall beside the door of Elf’s room. He’s wearing a blue shirt with a collar, pants that are not jeans and black sneakers. One hand is on his forehead while he speaks and the other against the glass wall, his fingers splayed like a fan. I want to hear what the doctor is saying and I tell Elf that I’ll be right back but when I get to where Nic and the doctor are standing the doctor has walked away and Nic is simply standing there alone propping himself up against glass. When he sees me he takes his hand off his forehead and asks me how I am. He tells me that the doctor has said Elf will probably be all right and they will know in a few hours or tomorrow morning. She has harmed her throat, he says, and may not be able to talk at all or not very well and there may be some organ damage to be determined down the line but she’ll live.

When I was fourteen Elf came home for Christmas. She had just been at Juilliard on some kind of special scholarship. Amazing things were happening. She had a top agent and gigs lined up all over the world. Elf and I were sitting on the floor of the bathroom and she was crying inconsolably and I was trying to get her to stop crying and come to dinner. The table was set and all of our relatives from my father’s side were seated already. We had candles, turkey, singing, the celebration of the birth of a messiah that I still believed in. Elf told me she couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t do it. What? I said. She couldn’t stand it, the appearance of happiness, the forced enthusiasm, and everything a performance. I mean, if Jesus actually died on a cross with nails in his hands and feet to save us shouldn’t we do more to express our gratitude than devour a turkey one evening in the dead of winter? She wanted me to laugh and help her to carry out some type of desperado action, to pry open the bathroom window and push her through to freedom. Let’s just go have Christmas, you and me, at the pool hall, she said. I was begging her to dry her tears and wash her face and join us at the table. I told her that everyone was waiting for her. She told me she didn’t care, she couldn’t do it, I should tell them she wasn’t joining us. I told her she had to, it’s Christmas! And she laughed then sobbed, and told me I was funny but no, she wouldn’t join us at the table.

I continued to beg, please, please, please get up and wash your face and put on your new Red Alert lipstick and come to the table. Our mother came to the door and knocked softly and said honey? Girls? Are you in there? We’re ready to eat. Elf banged her head against the bathroom wall and it scared me. Don’t do that, I whispered, and she did it again. Girls? said our mother. What’s going on in there? Are you okay? I said yeah, yeah, we’re fine, we’ll be right there. I had Elf in a headlock and she was trying to pull out of it but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted my sister to stop smashing her head against ceramic tiles and come to the dinner table. I wanted to see her weird eyes flash happiness while she told hilarious stories using the occasional French or Italian word about the city and about concert halls and all things sophisticated. I wanted my younger cousins to stare at her unabashedly with great admiration and envy, and for Elf then to put her arm around my shoulder. I wanted her to be her intoxicating, razor-sharp self and I wanted to sit next to her and feel the heat she radiated, the energy of a fearless leader, a girl who moved easily in the world, my older sister.

I waited for our mother to leave. I still had Elf in a headlock. She kicked her legs out and made animal noises. I told her that I would kill myself if she didn’t come to the table. She stopped moaning and looked at me and furrowed her brow as though we were actors and I’d deviated from the script and ruined the take.

Our father once had a plan to sell placemats to truck-stop restaurants. He had designed these placemats himself and had thousands of them printed. The placemats were intended to educate diners on Canadian history while they chewed on their Denver sandwiches. The facts were presented in cartoon form, drawn by my father, with word bubbles, and jokes and riddles. They were meant to appeal to kids and adults alike. But most of all they were meant to educate what my father believed to be an ignorant and indifferent public. What’s more interesting than our own history? he’d exclaim. It truly pained him to see his fellow Canadians drive quickly past historical plaques, dismiss Canadian content rules, fail citizen tests and screw up the words to our national anthem at hockey games. Things have happened here, he would say.