Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Late last night I went downstairs to say hi and she wasn’t there. There was a note on the table. Yoli, she’d written, I’ve gone to a lecture on Eritrea. There’s schaubel zup and schmooa kumpst in the fridge. I called her on her cellphone and when she finally answered I heard raucous voices and whooping in the background. Where are you? I asked her. It’s after eleven. She said hang on, hey guys, where am I? I heard a guy answer her and she told me she was at the Motorcycle Café on Queen Street and somewhere having a burger and watching the game. Extra innings. By yourself? I said and she told me no, no, there’s a huge gang of people here and then there was more laughing and yelling and eventually I couldn’t hear her at all.

I’m sitting on my couch, the one my mother tried to give away to the neighbours, and my tears are beginning to sting my eyes. A low point is when you can’t even depend on your tears not to hurt you. I’ve been next door, at the other neighbour’s. Her name is Amy. She’s a new mom, I see her almost every day, taking her baby for a walk. A month ago she found a fallen starling on the sidewalk and took it home to nurse it back to health. She built a little house for it in her back bedroom, with a branch and a Frisbee full of water, and put live earthworms in a bowl of dirt and she fed him baby food and apple sauce on the end of a tiny Popsicle stick and she played starling songs to him so he could learn how to sing in his language. After about three weeks of taking care of him she decided that the bird could be on his own now and should leave the nest she’d made for him and she opened the door of her back bedroom and the starling hopped onto her shoulder and then the two of them walked along the upstairs hallway, down the stairs, along the downstairs hallway towards the open back door and then suddenly the bird saw his chance, the rectangle of light from the open door, and he flew off. Amy passed her iPhone to me and said you want to see the bird flying away? My husband filmed it. The bird was a small dark blur flying through the air and out into the light and up, gone. He moved so fast. As I watched this short video something inside of me smashed, it was so startling and irreversible that starling’s departure, and I was crying but trying not to, but it felt like I’d been tear-gassed.

——

Now I’m looking at a box of cards sent from Elf over the years. Every occasion remembered, all of them written in her trademark coloured felt markers. Look at all these exclamation points, I think. All these occasions — birthdays, Christmases, graduations — marked with emphatic endings. And then again. We reconfigure and we start again and we start again. We huddle in a field with our arms around each other, our helmets knocking, and we rework our strategy and then we run another play. When I was a kid I told Elf (or had I only told myself?) that I would keep her heart safe. I would keep it preserved forever in a silk bag like Mary Shelley did with the heart of her drowned poet husband or in my gym bag or in the top drawer of my dresser or tucked into that hole in that ancient tree in Barkman Park in our faraway hometown next to where I stashed my Sweet Caps. Now I’m crashing around my house searching for those felt-tipped markers. If I can find the pink one and the green one I’ll be okay until the morning. I search and then I give up searching.

Living with my mother is like living with Winnie the Pooh. She has many adventures, getting herself into and out of trouble guilelessly, and all of these adventures are accompanied by a few lines of gentle philosophy. There’s always a little bit more to learn every time you get your head stuck in a honey pot if you’re my mother.

She was out all night last night. This morning she showed up at the front door — she’d forgotten her keys — with her hair sticking up all over the place and her nightgown tucked into her pants. Oh good, you’re up! she said. I forgot my key!

She had just returned from the sleep clinic where she spent the night with electrodes on her head, dreaming. The sleep technician got angry with her because she was reading her book. She told my mom she was there to sleep not to read, and my mom told her she couldn’t sleep without reading first. The sleep technician asked my mom to hand over her book — it’s a Raymond Chandler — and my mom laughed and said you have got to be kidding me, hand over my book. Not a chance. Then the sleep technician was a bit rough with her, yanking the sticky round electrodes off her head in the morning and not saying goodbye when my mom left. It drives my mom crazy when people don’t say hello and goodbye. It’s old school, she says. It’s the end of civilization when people don’t say hello or goodbye.

Apparently, said my mom, my heart stops beating ninety times an hour while I’m sleeping. You’ve got sleep apnea, I told her. Clearly, she said. She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed at her reflection.

She showed me the apparatus that she’ll have to sleep with now, a giant plastic mask with a hose, which she’ll strap to her face and then breathe in moisture from a contraption that the face mask is attached to. We have to get jugs of distilled water and keep the thing filled. She put the mask over her face and walked heavily towards me like Darth Vader. If somebody breaks into my bedroom while I’m wearing this thing, she said in a muffled voice, they won’t stick around for long. Then she breathed hard from behind the plastic and it filled up with condensation. She yanked it off. Too bad I’m not still wearing my patch, she said. I’d be a force to reckon with, wouldn’t I?

She opened her laptop for a quick game of online Scrabble. The last guy she played with was from France and he offered to show her a picture of his penis. She wrote him back No merci. Do you have photographs of Paris?

I have just realized something. It’s not me who’s survived, who’s picked up and gone on, who’s saved my mother by bringing her to Toronto, it’s my mother … and she’s taken me with her.

So, I said, you dreamed at the sleep clinic?

Boy! she said. Did I ever. I had an epiphany.

Yeah? I said.

Well, you know how I hate cooking so much?

Yeah.

Well, I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been wondering what I should do about that. So I had this dream last night and it came to me. Frozen food! Just a voice telling me that. So I figured out, from my dream, that I should go to the freezer aisles and get a lot of frozen food, pizzas, meatballs, perogies, chicken fingers, whatever, and stock my freezer and that’ll be the end of it. I won’t have to worry about cooking but I’ll still have food to eat. It just came to me like that, like a billboard: frozen food!

That sounds pretty good, I said. My mother was dreaming of survival. She was having survival dreams. She was having dreams that were telling her how to keep being alive. I wouldn’t tell her that frozen foods are full of sulphates, who cares, when she was deep into the cure.

I had a dream of my own. It wasn’t a Switzerland-scenario dream. Elfrieda and I were in her yellow kitchen next to the giant picture window talking and laughing about nothing. We were just pleasantly lost in a maze of words that didn’t mean much, telling stories and making each other laugh. We were there but then, in my dream, I wanted to tell Elf something more urgent, something about my work, about my fear of finishing my book and of how it would be received and then there was a pause in our chatter and Elf was yawning, and I thought now I will tell her this urgent thing but she put her hand up to stop me so I kept my mouth shut. She took my hand and she looked hard at me, she put her face closer to mine so I would really get what she was about to say, that she meant it, her eyelashes a black fringe, she was being serious, and I thought oh thank god, she’ll say something to make me feel better, braver, and then she said Yoyo, you’re on your own now. And my feeling in the dream was the feeling I had when I watched my neighbour’s video about her bird. The suddenness of it, something lost in a second forever. My sister was a dark blur moving towards a rectangle of light. But now after hearing my mom’s survival dream I think maybe this is my survival dream and it’s not a nightmare. It’s the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we’re surviving.