Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Yolandi? said Joanna. Are you okay?

Sorry, I said, hi. I’m sorry. Sorry.

Are you—

Yeah, flowers. Good, thank you.

I PHONED MY MOTHER ON HER CELL but there was no answer. I saw an orderly who had once been the lead singer of a local punk band. He was stacking trays and whistling next to a poster that listed the symptoms of Flesh Eating Disease.

I went outside into the sunshine and walked all the way back, along the river, to my mother’s apartment. Well, I tried to walk along the river the whole way but was stopped by a group of young people piling sandbags around an apartment block. The river’s flooding again, they said. It was a bit of a party for them. A day off school.

My mother and Aunt Tina weren’t at the apartment but there was a note saying they had gone to East Village to visit Signora Bertolucci, whose real name was Agata Warkentine but who was always referred to, by everyone other than Elf, as Mrs. Ernst Warkentine. Even funeral announcements in East Village omitted the given first name of a woman to ensure she’d forever and ever (and ever and ever) be known only as her husband’s wife. They had taken my aunt’s van. Then I remembered that I had left the car in the underground parking lot and so I walked back, this time not along the river but through the dusty city streets, to the hospital.

I went up to the sixth floor to check on Elf again but Nic was there and they were staring deeply into each other’s eyes and the curtain was half closed and the nurses all pretended not to notice me or were busy calling 911 to get me the hell out of there so I left again and this time went all the way down to the underground parking lot to get the car and drive it back to my mother’s apartment. A part of me had been hoping that maybe the woman I screamed at would have written in the dust on my back windshield that she forgave me but she hadn’t.

My mother and my aunt were still not back from visiting Signora Bertolucci. I googled things on my mom’s laptop. I was trying to find out more about these drugs, Seconal and Nembutal. I scrolled down the various subject headings that Google had for helping people to die. I was worried about cops taking me in for questioning and tracking my history on this computer. I kept googling. I paused for a second when I read: Is it possible to help someone die with magic? And I felt good about myself, proud, when I didn’t click on it. Elf would congratulate me too. Let’s be rational, Yolandi! The phone rang. It was my mother. She was at the hospital. I asked her how Elf was doing. She told me that Elf was having her blood tested. For what? She wasn’t sure. But there was something else. My aunt had fainted.

At the hospital? I asked.

Well, no, she fainted in East Village first, at Mrs. Ernst Warkentine’s, but she came to quickly and I got her to lie down for a while and then she had something to eat and after that she seemed fine again. But now …

You’re at the hospital? I asked again.

Yes, we drove here directly to see Elf but on the way, out by Deacon’s corner, Tina passed out again in the van.

What? That’s so strange.

I know. And so I just drove up to Emergency here immediately and now they’ve admitted her. And they’ve put a cast on her arm. She broke it when she fainted.

Auntie Tina?

Yes, she’s having some kind of pain in her chest. She’s in acute cardiology, on the fifth floor.

Seriously?

Yes, so …

Okay, I said.

I hung up. I called right back and apologized. I meant to say okay, I’ll be right there. My mother laughed. I laughed a bit too. I knew she was holding back tears. I told her again that I’d be right there and she whispered something I couldn’t make out. Had she said what’s the difference? My mother has been in and out of Emergency a thousand times with her own heart and breathing issues but this was the first time Tina had landed there as far as I knew.

On the way back to the hospital I thought about my crazy outburst in the parking lot. It’s my past, I said out loud to nobody in the car. I had figured it out. I was Sigmund Freud. Mennonite men in church with tight collars and bulging necks accusing me of preposterous acts and damning me to some underground fire when I hadn’t done a thing. I was an innocent child. Elf was an innocent child. My father was an innocent child. My cousin was an innocent child. You can’t flagrantly march around the fronts of churches waving your arms in the air and scaring people with threats and accusations just because your family was slaughtered in Russia and you were forced to run and hide in a pile of manure when you were little. What you do at the pulpit would be considered lunatic behaviour on the street. You can’t go around terrorizing people and making them feel small and shitty and then call them evil when they destroy themselves. You will never walk down a street and feel a lightness come over you. You will never fly.

A heart attack comes from the pain of remembering. That was something I’d read somewhere, maybe in the Hobo Museum newsletter, which ended each obituary with “We’ll see you down the road!” So Elfrieda was reminding my aunt of her own daughter’s suicide? Of the agony that precedes it and the helplessness and terror she felt trying to prevent it from happening? Or does a heart attack come from clogged arteries and fat around the waist and a two-pack-a-day habit and trans fats, not memories of pain and horror and unbearable sorrow? Because maybe one causes the other. Cardiologists and shrinks should join forces and start new hospitals. I’ll get a petition going like my father did for a library and Elf did for Stevie Ray Vaughan being the world’s best guitarist. I’m quite sure the continents will fuse back together before cardiology and psychiatry join forces.

My aunt’s track suit and her tiny white runners were stuffed into a plastic bag that was labelled: Property of Ste. Odile Hospital . She and my mother were joking around in Plautdietsch, keeping their fear to themselves as usual. When I showed up they said ah, good, you’re here. We’re fighting about a word. Its meaning. I asked which word and they both started to laugh again.

There were already things written on Tina’s plaster cast. Phone numbers. And a Bible verse. The nurse came over and did some things to my aunt with needles and tubes. I asked if she’d had a heart attack and the nurse said no but a coronary event of some sort. She showed us a sketch of my aunt’s arteries. Two of them were severely blocked. My aunt said she desperately needed a Starbucks coffee from downstairs. The nurse said well, perhaps in a bit. Not now.

I told my aunt and my mother that I would go see Elf and then return to them with Starbucks coffee for everyone. They both commended my plan exuberantly, too exuberantly, as though I had just figured out how to storm the Bastille. I went to the sixth floor to tell Elf the news, that Auntie Tina was having a coronary event on the floor below her. Elf’s eyes opened wide and she tapped her throat.

Can’t talk? I said.

I was annoyed, crazy with misdirected rage, and not hiding it well. She shook her head. I asked where Nic was and she shook her head again.

I went out to ask the nurse why she couldn’t talk. The nurse said there had been some complications but hopefully she’d regain her voice by tomorrow or the next day. Having to do with the Javex? I said. The nurse looked away, down at her clipboard. She didn’t want me to say Javex. We’re not sure, she said. But what else could it be? I said. A choice of hers? You’ll have to talk to the doctor, she said. I’d love to, I said, but I think he’s taken a restraining order out on me. The nurse refused to look at me. We were a tainted family, deranged.