Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

On Fridays we have family meetings. Sometimes Nora doesn’t come to the family meetings because she has better things to do — there is Anders, there are parties, she’s young. We give her the minutes from the meetings. I’m not sleeping around anymore. I’m embarrassed about it and Elf isn’t around anymore to remind me that I’m not a slut and that there’s no such thing okay Yoli, have I taught you nothing, please stop equating morality with outdated self-serving patriarchal notions of women’s sexuality .

Finbar called to ask if I had killed my sister and needed legal counsel and I told him no, she saved me the trouble. He apologized. He hadn’t known it was that serious. He said he was sorry. I thanked him. He said but we had something, right? I liked the way he put that. It might have been a hallucination but it was something. I said yes, and I thanked him again. We said goodbye forever, behaving like grown-ups. I live with my mother and my daughter. We stand outside on our various perches, on all three floors, and shout things at each other like the smoking women in Balconville . I don’t have time to sleep around. I have raccoons and dreams and water guns and grief and toxic moats and guilt and used condoms to pick up from the driveway.

My mother said I couldn’t tie off grief like a used condom and toss it in the garbage. I asked her what she knew of condoms and she told me she had been a social worker for a long time which is what she always says after surprising us with information we didn’t think she had. Yesterday I was walking through Trinity Bellwoods Park and discovered my mother lying on a bench, sleeping. I sat beside her for a while and read the paper. After ten or fifteen minutes I gently nudged her and said mom, it’s time to go home. She told me she loved sleeping outdoors. Is that true, I said, or were you out walking and suddenly overcome with exhaustion?

My sister gave me an emergency ladder once. It was the kind of ladder that you hook onto your upstairs window ledge and then climb down it if there’s a fire in your house. For years I stored it in the basement but now I’m beginning to understand the wisdom of keeping it on the second floor.

I phoned the hospital in Winnipeg and asked if I could please speak to the patient named Elfrieda Von Riesen. They told me she was not a patient there. I told the hospital well that’s strange because she definitely had been a patient there and the last thing I’d heard was that she wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital any time soon. They said well, they had no information regarding that. I told them I was tired of all their fripperies. They were sorry about that. I hung up.

And then it was almost Christmas already. Nic was going to join us. He was on the phone from Winnipeg. He had an idea for the headstone: And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below; above, the vaulted sky .

What’s that? I said.

You don’t know? he said.

I don’t know every poem, I said.

It’s John Clare.

Did Elf like him?

Very much. It’s called “I Am!” He wrote it in a mental asylum.

No way, I said.

Pardon me?

Let’s not have everything tied up to lunacy, I said.

You mean for the inscription?

For everything.

Well, do you have suggestions?

When I got back to Toronto after Elf died I had wanted to take some of her ashes with me and keep them here but Nic didn’t like the idea of divvying her up so they’re all buried under an enormous tree in the Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. My mother had suggested that she be buried with our dad out in East Village and the cemetery guy had said sure, there was room for three if they were urns and not coffins (suggesting that my mom would eventually go in there too) but Nic said no way, Elf had said expressly that she did not want to be buried in East Village. That would be like giving the body of Louis Riel back to the Canadian government as a souvenir. What about your backyard? I asked Nic. After all, she was a homebody. He said very funny and that there were legal issues with a backyard burial. She wasn’t a cat. That’s true, I told him. He told me that I had done everything I could and that no one was to blame. I wasn’t sure about that. What about Zurich, I wondered. She would have died peacefully and not alone. That’s all she wanted. I had failed. We didn’t talk about that. I told him he had done everything possible too.

She was the one who got the pass, I said. You know how she would have been. She could talk her way out of the ward.

But I should have fought harder to have them keep her, he said.

You couldn’t have fought harder.

So no John Clare poem?

Maybe. But I don’t like the asylum connotations. Plus, if it’s a poet it should be a woman.

But most of the really great woman poets killed themselves so that has connotations too.

I know and that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid here, right, is labelling her even after death.

Yeah, true, so then we just have a blank stone?

Maybe, yeah, just her name and the dates.

Maybe.

So then the original idea of the poem still holds, though, in a way … let me lie. Just let me lie.

Beneath the grass and vaulted sky.

Do you ever have dreams about her? he said to me over the phone.

Yeah. Do you?

Yeah, indirectly. Like it’s summertime but the coldest summer on record, colder even than any winter has ever been. What are yours?

Well, the other night I dreamt that I was in a fishing village, some outport in Newfoundland or something, and I had to go to the grocery store to buy some meat and when I got there it was a dirt floor and there were lambs lying around everywhere. They weren’t small and white like in the Bible, they were dark grey and as big as a greyhound dog. But they were lambs. Some of them were dead, some were just barely alive. There was a guy with a knife. He was butchering them but he didn’t really know how to. He’d hack a hoof off or a tail or maybe a snout. He didn’t know what to do. I just stood there looking around at the lambs and then he said he’d had it. And then he made one more cut. And then he said no, it was the knife that had had it, like it was something almost living or just that it wasn’t sharp anymore and couldn’t cut properly, I wasn’t sure.

What does it mean? said Nic.

I don’t know, Carl Jung, I said.

But I did know. It was about Zurich.

You know what? Nic asked. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we put a line of music on her headstone and no words at all?

Nic and I talked on the phone for a long time about the line of music we could engrave on the stone, and the whole time I wanted to bring up Switzerland but didn’t know how to because if I told him Elf had asked me to take her to Switzerland that would be like telling him that she didn’t trust him to do it, or that he didn’t understand her, and I didn’t want him to feel those things. He was a man alone already. And besides, what was the point in bringing up Switzerland? I had to work it out for myself whether I was the lamb or the butcher or just the knife.

When Elfie was twelve she was finally chosen to play Mary in our church nativity pageant. She was very proud and nervous. She had been lobbying for the Mary role for years. C’mon, this part was made for me! I’m not sure our Sunday school teacher was finally convinced of that — a twenty-something virgin who didn’t talk much? — or just really tired of being harassed by Elf. But she gave her the part and said just please no strange surprises. Elf was well aware of her responsibilities, of being demure and tender and mild even though she’d been unconventionally impregnated by an invisible force and was now expected to raise the Messiah and all on a carpenter’s salary. I was six. I was supposed to be a shepherd, relegated to some back row where all us younger kids would stand with dishtowels on our heads or angel wings gaffered to our backs. I told my mother I refused to be a shepherd. I would be Mary’s sister, the baby’s aunt. My mother told me that the baby Jesus didn’t have an aunt in the nativity scene, that it didn’t make sense. But I am her sister, I said. I know, said my mother, but only in real life. I paused. But, I argued, Jesus had “wise men” and camels at his birth but no relatives? How much sense does that make? I know, said my mother, but the Bible says … Just this time, I told her. Elfie needs me. She’s got a new baby. I’m her sister, I’m going.