Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

The doorbell rang. None of us moved. It rang again, twice. Oh, said Nic. Wait, I said, I’ll go. It was the guy from Tall Grass Bakery with the birthday cake my mom had ordered for Elf’s party. I thanked him and brought it into the living room and showed it to the gang. It was a delicate white cake, moist and light at the same time. There was a message for Elf written in icing, an emphatic wish for happiness. We all had a piece. Nic cut the slices carefully and served them to us on Elf’s plain white china and we ate the cake and watched the evening sun sparkle and refract on the blue glass bowls.

At the end of the evening when there was no more cake or sunlight, we left. Nic saw us all out and stood on the front step in his khaki shorts and old punk T-shirt, his weekend clothes, meant for relaxation and comfort. My mother asked him if he’d be all right and he opened his arms to her, his head bent very low to rest on her shoulder. Will asked him if he should stay, sleep over. Nic said no, no, waved it off, but thanked him. His parents, his brother, his friends from other places, all would be arriving in the next couple of days. Tonight he was alone.

Later at my mother’s apartment I opened up the package that Nic had given me as I left. It was a copy of a story Elf had written. I had no idea she’d been writing a book. She called it Italy in August . I peeked at a random page and read a short paragraph in which the protagonist expresses her all-consuming passion for Italy, that she wants to go there because it’s where her “fictional sisters” went. Then she listed some of these fictional sisters and the books they appear in, and how each one of them protected her in a way, pulled her up and out of life’s quicksand moments, the bullshit, the agony of being alive. Ah, so Elf had other sisters! For a second I felt jealous. They had helped her and I hadn’t. She loved these books and they loved her back. The jealousy passed. I had a strange feeling then, as though my grief could be diluted a bit, spread out amongst all of us women, us sisters, even though only one of us was real. I flipped through the manuscript to the end and read the very last paragraph.

Though it isn’t customary to say goodbye to the reader at the end of a book, I feel that I can’t end this account without also saying goodbye to you. It has turned out to be a book of goodbyes. I can only suppose I needed to say those goodbyes at length, to analyze the reasons for them and to understand them a little better. As you have been my companion on this journey, indeed my audience, the very reason for this exercise, I find myself suddenly bereft at the thought of parting ways with you too. As you have the advantage over me, in knowing more about my life than I will ever know about yours, I can only write in generalities when I wish you good fortune in all things in the future. As well as from the bottom of my heart, to bid you auf Wiedersehen and adieu . If there are tears in my eyes as I write this, they are for you. Arrivederci .

Will slept on the couch in the living room and Nora, my mother and I slept together that night in my mother’s giant bed. She swept all the things that were on it, whodunits, clothing, glasses, agenda, her laptop, onto the carpet, but we didn’t get much sleep. We talked late into the night and early into the next morning, about Elf, her inimitable style, about the past, about anything. Except the future, that was mortal combat territory. It was June and the sun rose early. For the last six weeks I’d been flying back and forth, back and forth, from the west to the east to the west to the east.

This is the strangest slumber party I’ve ever attended, said Nora.

Ain’t that the truth, said my mom.

We watched some World Cup soccer on TV, it was an endless tournament it seemed, on for months. We wept with the losers, we looked to them for guidance, how to deal, and turned away from the winners, they didn’t interest us in the least, and then Nora thought we should exchange shirts the way the players did after the game and my mom ended up wearing a tiny sweaty (still from tennis) T-shirt that said Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Nora in my old sweaty T-shirt that said Inland Concrete on it and me in my mother’s soft worn-out nightie from another era, a gift from my father. I imagined him choosing it for her at the Hudson’s Bay store on the corner of Portage and Memorial Boulevard. It was a tradition for my father to buy my mother a nightgown for Christmas. And almost always a lamp. Things needed to gird yourself against the night. Or one to help you sleep and one to help you stay awake, like pills. Sometimes Elf and I would help him pick out the nightgowns. Sometimes they were sweet, modest and flannel. Sometimes they were short and flimsy. I hadn’t really ever spent much time wondering about my dad’s frame of mind when he chose these nightgowns. Or maybe the influence Elf and I wielded over the process shifted over the years as we became women ourselves.

I lay in bed counting in my mind the number of times Elf had used the word goodbye in that short paragraph. Four times, plus another three times in different languages. Goodbye times seven. All right, Elf, all right. In the very early morning light I saw Nora and my mother sleeping, finally, on their sides and face to face, holding hands, all four hands entwined like a skein of wool, like a mating ball of garter snakes, so that whatever was inside them would be very well protected.

One evening when I was a child and Elf was a teenager and we were all together as a family in our little Mennonite town getting ready to eat our supper Elf went over to the dining room table and snorted through her nose and said hey, excuse me, but who’s the Mickey Mouse that set this table? It had been my father, put to work by our exasperated mother, who just before that had been reminding him of the year we were living in, how it had contained some groundbreaking denouement on the rights of women and other types of people. Our father rarely got angry at anyone but himself but this time he got a little huffy, saying how he’d gone and tried to be a modern man, by setting the table, only to be met with snide derision so why should he bother? Anyway, the thing about it is my memory of how Elf said who’s the Mickey Mouse that set this table? Those were the exact words that came to my mind when I saw her smashed-up face, after my mother insisted on seeing her body before it was cremated. It was a train, the thing that had smashed her face, just like the one that killed our father. She hadn’t waited for it long, apparently, her timing was good. Where does the violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones? Nic and I walked my mother up the aisle in the empty funeral home sanctuary and stood on either side of her with our arms linked tight as though we were about to perform a Russian folk dance. The funeral director had suggested to my mother that if she wanted to see my sister’s body then she should perhaps just look at her hand. He could have her up there in the wooden box entirely covered except for one slim, pale hand made visible. My mother disagreed with him. I will see my daughter’s face, she said. So there she was, the hole in her head sewn up like a homemade baseball and that’s when I thought who’s the Mickey Mouse that stitched up my sister’s face? And then, after about a minute of staring at her, hoping that she would blink or open her eyes and laugh at this absurd spectacle, I changed my mind and I felt a powerful, oceanic feeling of gratitude towards the funeral director who had tried so hard to restore my sister’s beauty for one last look from her mother.

Elfie left me her life insurance. She also left me, à la Virginia Woolf, a monthly sum of two thousand dollars for the next two years so that I can stay at home, in a room of my own, and write. So get to it, Swiv, she wrote in a little note she’d left just for me. Everything else, except for trust funds she’d set up for my kids and money for my mom so she could travel comfortably and buy herself powerful hearing aids and a spiffy new car, went to Nic. I’m going to use the life insurance money to buy a dilapidated fixer-upper house in Toronto. I think Elf would be pleased with my decision. Was she calling my bluff? Had she ever intended to come to Toronto? Had I ever intended to take her to Zurich?