Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Thank you.

We had dinner in a tiny café on Provencher Boulevard close to the hospital and then we all went back to my mom’s place and played our Mennonite-sanctioned Dutch Blitz card game, screaming the word blitz when we won. My mom and my uncle Frank swore in Plautdietsch and everyone hollered and shrieked and cards flew, and my mom had to stop to catch her breath and use her nitro spray and my uncle had to shoot up with insulin. Afterwards I found enough clean linen and blankets to make up beds for Sheila and my uncle — I’d sleep on an air mattress — and I bid them all good night, we’d rally in the morning at five. Before she went to sleep Sheila and I sat on her bed and talked about our sisters, Leni and Elf, and their unfathomable sadness, and about our mothers, Lottie and Tina, and their perpetual optimism. What’s holding your leg together now? I asked her. Nuts and bolts and scrap metal and baling wire, she said. She showed me the scars that ran up and down the entire length of her crushed leg. She brought out a box of chocolates and we each had two. I’m sure your mom will be okay, I told her. She’s unbelievably tenacious. That’s true, said Sheila. She’s the Iggy Pop of old Mennonite ladies. We ate two more chocolates each. And then I zipped back to the hospital to see Elf.

I took my dad’s old bike, which my mom kept in her storage cage in the basement, and sped along the path that ran next to the exploding river. At the hospital I didn’t even bother locking it up, just flung it onto the grass next to the front doors of the Palaveri ward like I was a kid all over again and running late for the six p.m. start of The Wonderful World of Disney . The nurse at the desk said it was too late but I told her that I had some very important news that couldn’t wait. She didn’t believe me, that was obvious, but told me to go ahead anyway, she had no backup staff for fighting and was deep into the final chapters of The Da Vinci Code .

Elf was asleep on her side, her face to the wall, and I lifted the blanket and crawled in next to her. She had her back to me but her hand was resting there on her shoulder, like she’d been hugging herself as she fell asleep, and I touched it. I squeezed it softly and held it. I thought how strange it was that this limp, bony piece of flesh could produce such powerful music. I timed my breathing to hers, slow and steady. I closed my eyes and slept with her for a while, I think it was an hour or two or maybe only twenty minutes.

When Elf was a kid she walked and talked in her sleep all the time. My parents had to rig up booby traps by the doors so she wouldn’t leave the house altogether. I hummed a song about ducks swimming in the sea, a little song she had taught me when I was a kid. A song about bravery, about being a freak. She didn’t wake up. I don’t think she woke up. I didn’t want to leave but I knew I had to. When I left the nurse asked me to please respect the visiting hours in the future and I told her yes, I will. In the future I will respect everything. My dad’s bike was still there, damp in the dewy grass, and I picked it up, it seemed lighter than it had been and I looked to make sure it was the same bike, a faded red CCM three-speed, and it was the same one — how could there be two? it wasn’t a parade — and I hopped on and rode off into the rest of the night.

Everyone was asleep in my mom’s apartment waiting through dreams for tomorrow. I lay on an air mattress on the living room floor. There was a small blue bookshelf beside me. There was the obligatory collection of my Rhonda books (all inscribed with love and gratitude) on one of the shelves, stiff and quirkily CanLitty with their signature spines, and a slew of whodunits crammed in there next to them, well read and better loved. Some of them, the fatter ones, were cut in half or even threes and held together with rubber bands because my mom didn’t like to haul entire giant books around with her all over tarnation and she didn’t go anywhere without a book, or a partial book, in her big brown bag. Next to the whodunits were a few books written by other people she knew, sons and daughters of friends, people in her church, old classics and a book of poetry by Coleridge, Elf’s ex-boyfriend. I took it from the shelf and read a few poems, including this one:

In fancy (well I know)

From business wand’ring far and local cares,

Thou creepest round a dear-lov’d Sister’s bed

With noiseless step, and watchest the faint look,

Soothing each pang with fond solicitude,

And tenderest tones medicinal of love.

I too a SISTER had, an only Sister—

She lov’d me dearly, and I doted on her!

To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows

(As a sick Patient in his Nurse’s arms)

And of the heart those hidden maladies

That shrink asham’d from even Friendship’s eye.

O! I have woke at midnight, and have wept,

Because SHE WAS NOT! …

I had found Elf’s Coleridge poem! The one she’d taken her signature AMPS from. All my puny sorrows. I lay on the air mattress. I fell asleep, but not fully. It wasn’t a deep sleep and somewhere in the spaces between sleep and lucid dreaming and full consciousness I had an idea. An idea came to me. I would invite Elf to Toronto to stay with me for a while when she was released from the hospital. I’d be there to take her home with me for a visit. We could walk and talk and rest and there would be no pressure and I would be at home, working, sort of, so she wouldn’t be alone. And Nora would be there too. Then we could really examine this Zurich thing at length and if she still wanted to go it would be so easy to leave from Toronto instead of Winnipeg. Nobody else would have to know until it was over and then I’d figure out how to deal with all of that then.

In the morning we all crawled out of our beds and clustered like baby birds at the dining room table, poking at our food, hopping up and down for jam and salt and cream, goading one another on with fake enthusiasm. Piled into the car — Jason had dropped it off in visitor parking with the keys under the mat, the driver’s door opened now — and took off for our new clubhouse, the Ste. Odile Hospital. It was too early to see Elf but we all gathered around my aunt’s bed and hugged her and kissed her and told her this surgery thing would be a snap, a breeze, a walk in the park. Yeah, yeah, she knew that, good grief, enough of these morbid pep talks, let’s get the show on the road. Sheila gently massaged Tina’s arms and legs. My mother held her hand. My uncle Frank promised he’d have her Starbucks coffee ready and waiting for her after the surgery and she told us to go somewhere and relax for Pete’s sake. The anaesthetic was beginning to take effect. Tina’s eyes were glassy. Her words came more slowly. She had a mysterious expression on her face. They wheeled her into the operating room and we stood together under a fluorescent light, praying maybe, or maybe not, and not moving one way or another.

At a certain time — when Tina was still being operated on, having veins taken out of her leg and put into her chest, and the word from the doc was that everything was going very well — my mom and I and my cousin Sheila and my uncle Frank trekked over to psych to say good morning to Elf. We’d managed to find a wheelchair for my uncle — he hadn’t wanted to use it but we insisted and he tried to do a couple of wheelies down the hall. We filed past the nurses’ desk in psych like some pathetic army’s last line of defence and one of them said oh, um, how many of you are there? And my mother said there’s one of each of us. But, said the nurse, you can’t all go in at the same time. We know that, said my mom, and kept walking. We all fell in behind our field commander and marched (and wheeled) onward, ever onward.