Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

What do you mean? she said. Look, I don’t think—

Jeremy Irons, for example. I bet he’d be able to, I said. Vladimir Putin? No way. I said the names of a few people we knew and said yes or no after each name. Then I said my friend’s name and paused. I stared at her with one exploding eye and she told me we shouldn’t talk about suicide anymore because it might rupture our friendship. I told her that we would talk about it forever. I told her that if she didn’t want her plane to crash she should go over all the ways that it could crash in her mind. She told me I might be having buried-anger issues and I told her oh, mind reader, do you fucking think so?

I tried to apologize, to ease the tension. I didn’t know what to say. I quoted Goethe the way my mother did from Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit … “suicide is an event of human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew” … but while I was saying the words my friend was checking her cellphone, calculatedly not listening to me. I had offended her. I didn’t blame her. I wanted to get back on track. Somewhere I had read that animals are an excellent neutral subject. I asked her if she had pets. She said I knew that she didn’t. I told her about Lefty. She was a border collie, right, I said to my friend. And you know when my kids were little they’d have all their friends over and they’d all be playing in the backyard and I’d check on them every once in a while, and then one time I looked through the window at them and they were all squeezed into one corner of the yard — but it was like they were oblivious to it and they just kept on playing — and do you know why? Because Lefty was a border collie. And border collies are herding dogs. It was in her nature to herd, so my kids and their friends eventually all became squished into the corner of the yard and Lefty had done what she was meant to do. She had no control over it. She had to herd. So do you understand why I’m fucking mad?

Afterwards I got drunk on Revolucion tequila. There are two crossed pistols on the bottle pointing towards the sky, to God, and I phoned my friend and whispered another apology into her machine. I was about to tell her that I did think she had what it took to kill herself but stopped myself mid-sentence and switched it to I think you have what it takes to endure.

I phoned Julie but her son told me she was at a movie with Judson and their grandma was babysitting. Tell her I love her, I said. And I love you too, and your sister. And your grandma. I love you all.

MY MOTHER IS HERE NOW IN TORONTO and the three of us, my mother, my daughter and I, are living in the house. The first time my mother saw the house was a few weeks ago late at night in the middle of an electrical storm. It was raining hard, horizontally, little pellets, and the night was a deep purple with lightning flashing like knives stabbing at the earth. I had parked the car in the driveway. Nora was in the back seat with a couple of her friends from school. My mother got out of the car and tried to open her umbrella but the wind was whipping it around and so she struggled for a bit while the rest of us stared at her through the car windows as though she was a mime doing a performance of some kind and then she finally gave up, to hell with it, and tossed the umbrella up into the air and let the wind have it altogether. We watched the umbrella fly up quickly like the Challenger and then down again, straight down, and then just seconds before it hit the ground it zoomed directly at my mother’s head but she dodged it and it hit the car. We were all getting out of the car by now, already drenched from one second in the rain, and then my mother managed to grab the umbrella and she walked it over to the moat beside the lane, the disgusting toxic garbage-filled moat surrounding the cinder-block car parts factory, and threw the umbrella in there. What phony baloney, she said. As if to say what fools we are to think we can escape the wrath of atmospheric disturbances. We stood laughing in the storm and watched the useless umbrella sink into the sludge. At some point, but not tonight, I’ll suggest to my mother that we put our garbage into the blue bin rather than the cesspool out back. Oh, right, I forgot that you believe in recycling, she’ll say. You know all that stuff goes to the same place. Recycling is just a government conspiracy meant to make us believe that we’re saving the earth so they can go about making nasty deals with mining companies to make an extra buck or two. Finally we made it into the house and found Nelson there high up on his ladder putting the final touches to my mom’s ceilings, rap music cranked and the intoxicating smell of weed.

My mother inspected every inch of the house slowly, carefully, grinning, drops of rain falling from the tip of her nose, sighing, running her hands down banisters, over walls, nodding at some feature, pointing silently at another, remembering a detail from her childhood, standing back and staring like she was at the Louvre and concluding that it had style, an odd charm, a warm vibe, that she saw us living here happily. Bravo! she said to me and we all, Nora and her school friends and even Nelson who had come down from his ladder to tag along with us for the house tour, high-fived and hugged.

I had put four bottles of beer in my fridge and my mom and Nelson and I toasted to our future or to the improbability of the moment, or just to its passing, or to private memories, or simply to the broader theme of shelter. The rain stopped for a few minutes and we all went out onto the second floor deck — the old, creaky one with broken Christmas lights hanging from it — to look at the sky and Nelson told us riddles about hurricanes and their eyes and the girls laughed and laughed, they thought he was hot, and my mother, with her back to us and her hands grasping the railing, was quiet and looking westward. Then, quite suddenly, she turned around and recited her favourite Wordsworth poem. I’d heard her do it before, but this time it ripped at my heart.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquility;

The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea:

Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder — everlastingly.

Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;

And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.

Whoah, said Nelson. You hear that? He was looking at the girls. You hear what grandma threw down? Shit! The girls clapped and asked her if it was a song or what and I held my bottle aloft and made a new toast, to the lees of life, I said, a callback to another poem my mother sometimes pulled from her hat but also to the Alfred Lord — referenced inscription in my mother’s old high school yearbook, the one beneath her photo: Lottie drinks life to its lees! She winked at me.

To the what? said Nora.

The girls had to pee and I suggested they do it into a cup and throw it under the front steps to keep the skunks away, like the renovation crew guys had recommended. Don’t worry about my mother, Nora told her friends, she’s a hippie. When she was a girl she had nothing to play with but the wind. You don’t have to pee into a cup. We have a washroom.

Nelson and my mother chatted briefly about poetry and the power of seas, their riptides and undercurrents, all of their invisible strength, and the girls eventually wandered off into the night. I went downstairs and had another look around my mother’s part of the house. She had insisted that all the bars come off the windows. My renovation crew had balked at this, they worried about her safety on the main floor. I won’t live in a prison, she said. They’re coming off. I wandered back into her living room. I took a pencil from my backpack and climbed up Nelson’s ladder, to the top, and wrote on a part of the ceiling that he would be painting over very soon, maybe even later that night. AMPS . I climbed down and then hollered up to my mother that we should go and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning the truck with my mother’s belongings would be arriving from Winnipeg and she and I would supervise the move, instructing the movers where, in which room, to put what and how to assemble certain pieces and then we would stay here in this place and live.