Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

I went over to the nurses’ desk and asked if they knew when she’d have her surgery. Tomorrow morning at six, they told me. With Dr. Kevorkian. At least that’s what it sounded like to me. I went back to my aunt’s bed. So, tomorrow! I said. I sounded hysterical to myself.

Yup, said my aunt. Going under the knife. They’ve been drawing on my body, mapping it all out. Cut along the dotted line. What a hoot.

I asked her about my cousins, her kids, were they both coming.

Sheila called, she said, and she and Frank are getting here this afternoon.

I quickly e-mailed Sheila from my BlackBerry and told her to send me her flight info and I’d pick them up at the airport. Frank was my uncle, Tina’s stalwart and jokey husband. He could barely walk from diabetes but he was game to travel here to be by Tina’s side. I kissed my aunt and she held me tightly, incredible strength for a pre-op heart patient, and looked me in the eye. Yolandi, she said, give my love to Elfrieda. Tell her I love her and tell her that I know she loves me too. She needs to hear that.

I promised I would and turned to go.

Also! called my aunt from her bed. We are Loewens! (That was their maiden name — my mother’s and Tina’s.) That means lions!

I smiled and nodded — and I murmured to the nurse passing me that my aunt was the king of the jungle so please handle her with care. The nurse laughed and squeezed my arm. Nurses in cardio are far more playful and friendly than they are in psych.

If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.

AIRPORT, CAR DOOR, BUY A SHOWER CURTAIN, get divorced. I spoke aloud to myself. I stood in the elevator and pounded on the letter M until the damn thing lit up and we were on our way down to the main floor. Airport, car door, get divorced. There was something else I’d forgotten. I texted Julie and asked if she could meet me at the Corydon Bar and Grill in one hour, we’d have tequila shooters because an ancient Chatelaine magazine in the cardio waiting room had said that it’s important to celebrate a divorce rather than feel shame and guilt and remorse, and then come with me on my errand run. She texted back that she was at the Legion with posties, at a meat raffle, drunk already, but that I could pick her up any time.

I bought a couple of egg salad sandwiches, a ham sandwich, a couple of apples and a bag of chips — none of us ate chips — and a giant bottle of water and one small black Starbucks coffee. Took the elevator back up to cardio and thought, while I was standing there leaning against the wall with my face against its cool shiny steel, that I should try to find Benito Zetina Morelos and ask him what he thought about killing my sister. I needed someone to tell me what to do.

Benito Zetina Morelos was my old philosophy professor. I was in his medical bioethics class at the same time I was giving my notes to Jason the mechanic in CanLit. Benito Zetina Morelos was the expert on this stuff, he was on CBC panels all the time, talking about euthanasia, about all sorts of things having to do with the right to die, basically. He’d gone to Oxford. Once, in his class, he started talking about a Mennonite Rhodes scholar who was studying with him at Oxford and who couldn’t handle the freedom, this was the sixties or seventies, and got wildly involved with drugs and ended up dead. This was actually my cousin, one of my four thousand cousins, and my mother had told me about his misadventures when I was a kid, and there was Benito Zetina Morelos using him to illustrate how hard it is to go from one extreme to another. We were pretty certain he’d died of a drug overdose, but nobody knew for sure because his parents were so heartbroken they didn’t want an autopsy, they just wanted his body to come home where it belonged and be buried in the plain cemetery of our tiny, country Mennonite church. Now I desperately needed Benito Zetina Morelos’s advice. Since taking his course I had bumped into him a few times in Winnipeg, walking his dog and reading at the same time. If he didn’t have his dog with him he’d walk around the Kelvin High School track, around and around, always reading, often with a pen in his mouth. All right, airport, car door, divorce papers, Benito Zetina Morelos. Shower curtain!

I arrived at my aunt’s floor, gave her the coffee, kissed her again and high-fived, we made some jokes about the unpredictability of life and how hilarious it all can be from a certain angle — or any angle. She made a reference to Isosceles: what if he had laughed at every one of them, every angle. And I took off for Psych 2.

We had our secret lunch in Elf’s room. My mother sat calmly. I paced while I ate and Elf had maybe three tiny bites of her sandwich, firing at me with her eyes while she chewed, her brow furrowed and hair a wild nest. A pastor from my parents’ old Mennonite church in East Village had come to the hospital to visit Elf while my mother and I were away. Somehow he had managed to talk his way in past the nurses’ desk. He had heard, probably from the successful family in the waiting room, that Elf was in the hospital. He told her that if she would give her life to God she wouldn’t have any pain. She would want to live. And to deny that was to sin egregiously. Could they pray together for her soul?

Oh my god! I said. Holy fuck!

Elf is livid, said my mother, looking directly at my sister. Aren’t you? My mother sat directly in the path of a shaft of sunlight breaking through the caged window, an areola of gold surrounding her, radiating heat. She wanted Elf to show her rage, to use her prodigious verbal skills to tear this little creep to ribbons, even now that he had left.

What did you do? I asked Elf. I hope you told him to go fuck himself. You should have screamed rape.

Yoli, said my mom.

Seriously, I said.

I recited a poem, said Elf.

What? I said. A poem? You should have strangled him with your panties!

Philip Larkin, she said. I don’t have any panties. They’ve taken them away from me.

Can you recite it for us now? asked my mom. Elf groaned and shook her head.

C’mon, Elf, I said. I wanna hear it. Did he know it was Larkin?

Are you crazy? asked my mom.

C’mon, Elf, just say the poem.

“What are days for?” asked Elf.

What do you mean? I said.

“Days are where we live.”

What? I said.

Yoli, said my mom, shhh, that’s the poem. Let her say it already.

“They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?”

That’s cool, Elf, I said. I like that.

Yoli, said my mom, for Pete’s sake, there’s a second verse. Listen. Elf, go on.

“Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.”

Hmm, I said. Well, there you go. What did he say to that?

Nothing, said Elf.

Tell her why nothing, said my mom. She shook like old times. She covered her mouth.

Because by the end of it I had taken off all my clothes, said Elf.

He left pretty quickly, said my mom.

That’s so crazy! I said. Oh my god, that’s fucking amazing!

I was trying to be like you, she said. It was all I had.

Get out, I said, that’s all you. You’re unbelievable. Fucking amazing!

Yoli, said my mom. Enough already, good grief, with the swearing. Now I see where Will and Nora get it from.

A striptease to a Larkin poem, I said. Fucking brilliant!

Eventually my mom told me I should go and do the things I needed to do — oh yeah, my divorce! — and she’d stay for a while and take a cab home. On my way out I spoke to Elf’s nurse.