Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

My mother is moving to Toronto to live with me and Nora.

Can I? she asked on the phone.

Please do, I said.

There was no debate, no discussion. It was time to circle our wagons. We’ve lost half our men and supplies are dwindling and winter is coming. We three ladies will live in this old wrecked house, the one that I just bought thanks to Elf.

I’M LYING ON AN AIR MATTRESS in an empty house in the middle of the night half listening to Nelson tell me about his babies, the ones here, the ones in Jamaica, and the grief that the baby mamas are giving him, which is why he has to work all night as well as all day. Nelson is standing on the top rung of a stepladder straining to reach the ceiling with his paintbrush. I’m not sleeping with Nelson. I’ve hired him to paint. I’m drifting in and out of consciousness trying to remember how a conversation went, one I had with Elf years ago. It was something like:

Hey, what’s that in your ear?

My ear? Nothing.

Yeah, there’s something in your ear, Yoli. Like semen or something …

I don’t have semen in my ear.

Yeah, it is! I’m pretty sure. Yeah, you’ve got semen in your ear!

It’s shampoo.

It’s not shampoo, come here.

Stop it!

Seriously, come here, let me check.

No.

Then what is it? Taste it.

It’s shampoo. I just had a shower.

How can you tell? Taste it.

Elfrieda, I don’t have to taste whatever is in my ear, which is shampoo, to know that it’s not semen because I haven’t been in any type of situation—

Ha! God, you’re a liar … Relax. I love that you have semen in your ear.

I am listening to Nelson tell me about his life while he paints fresh white over battered walls. My new house is falling apart but has good bones, according to my real estate agent. I’m afraid she means it literally. Yesterday I found a book in the kitchen cupboard, left behind by the previous creepy owner, called Serial Killers A to Z . My real estate agent hadn’t wanted to show me this house at all, it made her grimace and feel dirty, but I told her time is running out. My mother is coming.

The house is close to a polluted lake, wedged in between a funeral home, a mental hospital and a slaughterhouse. Something for each of us, said my mother over the phone when I’d described it to her. The walls are cracked, or missing or crumbling, the floors are wrecked, the stairs, every set of them, are broken, the bricks are disintegrating into red powder that floats around the house like volcanic ash and gets into your eyes and mouth, the roof needs replacing, the foundation is full of holes, the yard is overrun with weeds, and skunks live under the deck. Late one night I came upon a hooker (Will, since starting his second year of university, says to call them sex trade workers) and her client having a meeting and using my back fence for purchase. I said oh brother, the way my father would have if he’d ever encountered a lady of the night. On the tip of the prostitute’s nose was a red dime-sized scab as though she had originally decided to leave the house as a clown but then changed her mind back to prostitute. Every morning I pick up the used condoms and needles with a long stick and put them into a blue pail near the back gate, a gate that opens the wrong way and smashes me in the face several times a day. When the pail is full I’ll … I’m not sure. The so-called yard around the house is only dirt and garbage and the ground is saturated with poisonous lead from the surrounding factories.

I have four weeks before my mother arrives with her United Allied moving company monster truck to whip this sinkhole into shape. Nora will live on the top floor, in the attic with the squirrels, me on the second with the mice, and my mom on the main floor, close to the skunks. We will all be able to step out of our broken back screen doors, on different levels, and break into song like they do in La Bohème . This is where we’ve come to heal. As they say. There’s an abandoned cinder-block motor parts factory across the lane, behind the house. It blocks a lot of the western sky except if we go to the third floor roof, and then we can see almost all the way back to Winnipeg.

There’s a moat of sludge around the cinder-block factory and people throw garbage into it, cribs, broken tennis rackets, computers, soiled underwear, alarm clocks. Late at night two mysterious wordless men in hip waders stand in the sludge and vacuum it out of the moat so that it runs brown and toxic down the back lane south towards Adelaide, and on to King Street and finally to Lake Ontario where it will find its own. I’ve hired someone to attach a bedroom to the back of the house, one that is large and bright and warm and that will one day have a beautiful view onto a flower-strewn yard topped with blue skies and soaring hopes and dreams. For my mother.

One of the guys I’ve hired to repair the house has invited me out on a date sort of, to his support group for adult children of alcoholics. When I told him that my parents weren’t alcoholics he said it didn’t matter, we’ve all got our shit. Another one, who used to be a philosophy professor in Bucharest, has begun to urinate off the front steps and is encouraging all the other guys to do it too. He claims the smell of human urine will drive away the skunks. At night, after hot, humid days of negotiating various prices, always in cash with various men doing various things in, on top of and outside the house, I lie on this air mattress in our empty home and listen to Nelson tell me stories in the dulcet tones of his Jamaican birthplace of babies and women and work.

My right eye has exploded because it’s August. It has puffed out and gone dark around the border. I have an allergy to autumn, to shorter days and longer nights, to death. I had an argument today with a friend. She lured me out of my house on the pretence that I needed some fresh air, a change of scenery. That I had to move on. Baby steps.

It was a mistake.

We sat in a café called Saving Grace on Dundas and ordered eggs. She told me that she’s been worrying about me so much, it must be awful, everything I’ve been going through, and that in her opinion “to die by one’s own hand” is always a sin. Always. Because of the suffering it causes the survivors. I asked her what about all the people who suffer because of assholes who are alive? Is it a sin for the assholes to keep on living?

Okay, she said, but we’re here on this earth, and even if we didn’t choose to be, we inherit all kinds of duties, to the people who raise us and to the people who love us. I mean, everyone has personal agonies, sure, but to die by one’s own hand, ironically enough, even though it’s an act of self-annihilation, seems to me the ultimate act of vanity. It’s just so incredibly selfish.

Can you please stop saying to die by one’s own hand? I asked.

Well, what should I say? she said.

Suicide! When someone’s murdered do you explain it as, oh, he died by the hand of another? This isn’t the freaking Count of Monte Cristo .

I just thought it was more delicate, she said.

And also, I said, selfish? How could it be selfish? Unless you’ve seen the agony first-hand you can’t really pass judgment.

Okay, she said, but if your sister had been thinking of how it would affect you when she—

AFFECT ME? I said. I’m sorry. People were looking at me. Listen, I said, I don’t think you understand. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but really how could you understand what another person’s suicide means? My friend asked the waitress for more coffee. I said that actually, now, I’d begun to measure a person’s character and integrity by their ability to kill themselves.