Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Oh my god, Elf whispered into my ear. Are we six? Don’t ever tell them I’ve had three different types of sex already, okay?

What do you mean, three ?

Elf told me that after the poet Shelley drowned, his body was cremated right there on the beach but his heart didn’t burn so his wife Mary kept it in a small silk bag in her desk. I asked her if it wouldn’t have rotted and begun to smell but she said no, it had calcified, like a skull, and that really it was only the remains of his heart. I told her that I would do that for her too, keep her heart with me in my desk or in my gym bag or my pencil case, somewhere very safe, and she hugged me and laughed and told me I was sweet but that really it was a romantic thing for lovers to do.

Before she disappeared behind the frosted glass doors of airport security Elf and I had played one last game of Concentration and in the midst of all that leg slapping and hand clapping she said, Swivelhead (that was her nickname for me because I was very often looking around for solid clues to what was going on and never finding them) you better write me letters. I said yeah, I will, but they’ll be boring. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said, I’ll try. No, Yoli, said Elf, better than that. She yanked on my arms. Please. You have to. I’m counting on you.

They were calling her flight and she released her grip, she was pulling away from me. Our parents stood stricken but acting brave, smiling big and dabbing at their eyes with tissues. So I said, I will, okay? Take a chill pill. All right, said Elf, I’m outta here … Also, don’t say “chill pill.” Adieu, Arrividerci! I know she was crying but she turned her head away at the very last second so I wouldn’t notice and I thought I should include that in a letter to her under Observations of Things Meant to be Hidden. On the way home from the airport my mother drove and my father lay in the back seat with his eyes closed. I sat next to my mother in the front. It was snowing. We couldn’t see anything except snowflakes in the headlights and a tiny bit of the road ahead. I thought the snowflakes looked like notes and signatures falling and swirling over the little stave of road we could see in front of us, one measure of music. My mother told me she would tap the brake slightly to see if it was still icy and before I could stop her we had spun out of control and landed upside down in the ditch.

Janice comes into the hospital room to talk with us. We know Janice from the other times. She’s a psych nurse and during her time off she loves to tango because, she says, tango is about the embrace. She wears light pink track suits. She has a small furry stuffed animal chained to her belt loop. It’s supposed to be something that makes the patients relax and smile. She comes into the room and gives Elf a hug and tells her that she’s happy to see her but unhappy to see her here. Again.

I know, I know, says Elf. I’m sorry. She rakes her fingers through her hair and sighs.

My cellphone buzzes and I reach into my bag to turn it off.

Hey, says Janice. It’s not about being sorry. Right? We don’t say sorry. You haven’t done anything bad or wrong. You’ve acted on a feeling. Right? You wanted to end your suffering. That’s understandable and we want to help you end your suffering in different ways. In healthy ways. Right, Elfrieda? Constructive ways? We’ll start again. She sits down on one of the orange chairs.

Okay, says Elf. Okay.

She’s cringing because she feels like an idiot. These words, Janice’s tone. But Janice is Mother Teresa compared with the other psych nurses and Elf is lucky not to have been thrown naked into the empty concrete room with the drain in the middle of the floor.

How are you, Yolandi? says Janice. She gives me a hug too. Good, fine, I say. Thank you. Worried. A bit.

Of course you are, says Janice. She looks pointedly at Elf who turns away.

Elfrieda? Janice really wants Elf to look at her. I clear my throat and Elf sighs and twists her head around slowly to make eye contact with Janice. Elf is deeply pissed off, mostly with herself for botching things, but she’s trying really hard to be polite because “good form” is her mantra. It used to be “love” but the more she said it the more it sounded like something doomed, like a wax effigy, and that had made her panic and weep. Then stop saying it! I’d tell her. I know, Yoli, I know, she’d say, but still. Still what? I’d ask. Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she’d read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of forty-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly see, and although he was told that life would be amazing for him then, after the operation it was awful. The world depressed him, its flaws, its duplicity, its rot and grime and sadness, everything hideous now made manifest, everything drab and flaking. He sank into a depression and quickly died. That’s me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she’d always been able to see but she told me she’d never adjusted to the light, she’d just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn’t taken. Reality was a rusty leg trap. Look, I said, then just stop saying “love” over and over, okay? Just don’t do it. But Yoli, you don’t understand, she said. You can’t understand. Which wasn’t true, entirely. I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word. Why do we keep having these exasperating conversations? I would ask. They’re not conversations! she’d say. We’re working things out. We’re working things out .

Elfreida, Janice says, my brother saw you playing in Los Angeles and said he wept for two hours afterwards. Elf doesn’t say anything. Gratitude or something like that is expected of her but she doesn’t budge. The three of us are quiet in the room. Elf is examining the hem of her blanket and smoothing out its creases. I’m imagining two hours of weeping. Janice finally clears her throat loudly and both Elf and I are startled.

Do you have concerts coming up? asks Janice.

Yes, ostensibly … Elf says. She’s whispering. I’m afraid she’ll stop talking altogether.

She has a five-city tour actually, I say. Starting … when, Elf? Elf shrugs. Soon, I say, in a few weeks. Mozart. Elf. Is it Mozart?

Sometimes my sister stops talking. Our father did it too, once for a whole year. Then, after watching a vaudeville show in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he started talking again as though he had never stopped. At first it scared me when Elf did it until I realized that her mood hadn’t really changed, she’d just gone silent. She’d write notes to us.

But when Elf plays concerts she talks a lot afterwards about mundane things, earthly things, every little thing, she yabbers away talking for hours and hours like she’s trying to ground herself, to stay, to come back from wherever it was the music took her.

Piano scales were the musical soundtrack to my youth. I could do anything to Elf when she practised her scales and she wouldn’t notice. I could put raisins on the keys and she’d flick them off unperturbed as her fingers zoomed up and down the entire length of the piano. I could lie on top of the piano in a sexy pose and sing I am a V-A-M-P like Cher and she wouldn’t miss a single note, her eyes never left the keys except when they closed in rapturous ecstasy for a second or two and then the pace of the music would change and Elf would open her eyes wide and fling herself at the piano like a leopard onto a snake, a savage assault as though the piano were both her lover and most mortal enemy.