Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

I’m sorry, he said. All those years.

We brought him Kleenex. He stopped crying and then started again. Finally he let go of the banister and we said goodbye. I had the feeling that we would never see him again. I remembered the story of him discovering Elf, sitting outside in the back lane behind the concert in her long black dress and army jacket, smoking, crushing her cigarette into the asphalt, only seventeen.

Let’s not have forced gaiety this Christmas, said Nora, like it was a dish. We’ll have a tiny bit of it, I said. I remembered Elf bashing her head against the bathroom wall that Christmas Day when we were young. I can’t do it, she’d said.

Nic arrived late on a Thursday night. He looked thin. We were having our Christmas early so that Will and his new girlfriend Zoe could spend time with her family at a resort in Mexico and so that Nic could be with his family in Montreal. Zoe travelled everywhere with her accordion. She had played us some sad but hilarious songs. The accordion is the best instrument for mournful occasions because it is melancholy and beautiful and cumbersome and ridiculous at the same time. She had a new tattoo which reminded me of the one I was trying to erase. I had forgotten about it and now it was only a bluish smudge on my shoulder like a mild bruise. Over dinner we talked about secrets. I told everyone how Elf had kept my secrets. She was a crypt. Then everyone looked at me as if to say oh yeah, like what secrets?

Over dessert, my mother told us a story. She said she had a secret too, and she might as well tell it. We were all intrigued. Me especially.

Are you going to tell me who my real father is? I asked.

Yeah right, she said. No, it’s about a book. When my sister Tina was nineteen she was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls . One day I picked it up to have a look and she said oh no, you can’t read that book, it’s not for you. So I put it down.

How old were you? asked Nora.

Fifteen, same as you, said my mother. So one day, for some cockamamie reason, I was mad at Tina. Spitting mad, I don’t know why. She wasn’t at home that day and I saw her book lying on her bed and I took it and read the whole darn thing in one shot.

Wow, said Will, you really showed her.

I never told her, said my mother, but boy did that feel good. And wicked!

So what did you think of the book? asked Nic.

Oh, said my mother, I loved it! But I thought the sex was plain stupid.

Well, I said, you were only fifteen. (I glanced at Nora who made a face.)

We smiled. We ate our dessert.

Do you wish you’d told her? I asked.

Ha, said my mother. I wonder.

WILL AND ZOE HAD LEFT EARLY that morning for Mexico City and Nic for Montreal. Nora was Skyping with Anders who was back in Stockholm for the holidays. I was reading in my mother’s living room, a book that Will had given me for Christmas called Prison Notebooks . I put it on the floor and got up to make a call to Julie in Winnipeg. My mother was making odd noises. She lay on the couch close to the tree. Her breathing was different. It was shallow and she blew out of her mouth like an athlete after working out. She was dying. I called an ambulance and away we went to the hospital. Eventually they saved her life again by pounding on her chest and shooting her up with nitroglycerine and other strong chemicals that would blast through her recalcitrant veins and ease her overworked heart.

Wow! she said. That’s enough to jar your mother’s preserves, she told the paramedics, and one of them made her repeat it twice so he could tell his friends.

It was all familiar to me, the gurneys in Emergency, but hers was a cardio case not a head case so there were no lectures from the staff, no righteous psych nurse demanding of her: why won’t you behave? Nora came to the hospital. We sat on either side of my mother. She was lying behind a brown curtain, hooked up to machines and drips, sleeping. When she woke up she said, well this is a fine how do you do. Christmas Eve yet! She told us she had dreamt of Amelia Earhart.

The pilot? What about her? asked Nora. Did you solve the mystery of her disappearance in your dream? Then we’d be famous.

My mother said that in her dream a man had told her that Amelia Earhart was his favourite missing person. She cried just for a few seconds. She whispered that she was sorry, being here on Christmas, just like Elf had apologized to my uncle for being there in psych. We held her hands and told her meh, who cares, who cares. Nora told her we’d celebrate with the Ukrainians instead sometime in January.

Amy, our next-door neighbour, came by with a basket of food, wine, cloth napkins and beautiful china dishes and silver cutlery. We had our Christmas Eve dinner in Emergency with everything laid out on my mother’s stomach. She was our table. She had always been our table. Nora carefully removed my mother’s oxygen mask for a second so she could have a sip of her drink. The nurse had said one sip, because it’s Christmas, but my mother had two sips. Big ones. We drank champagne out of plastic sample cups and toasted once again to a straying notion of ourselves and to the lenient nurse who came around and smiled and to Elf and to my father and to my aunt Tina and to my cousin Leni. We sang “I Wonder as I Wander,” my mother’s favourite Christmas song.

Nora and I stayed late until my mother had fallen asleep for the night and then we went home. I stood on the second floor balcony in the night and watched it snow into the moat.

The next day I went to see my mother at the hospital. She had made friends already, she had been spooling out amusing anecdotes from behind her brown curtain for the benefit of her fellow patients, and Santa Claus apparently had made his rounds too. My mother was always dying, at least once a year. She’s worked a lot of emergency rooms like a stand-up comedian on tour, from Puerto Vallarta to Cairo to Winnipeg to Tucson to Toronto.

Move all the stuff off that chair, she said, and sit beside me. She laid her whodunit on her chest carefully face down and open so she wouldn’t lose her place. There’s something I want to tell you, she said. She held my hand. Her hand was warm, her grip was strong, like Tina’s.

I already know, I said. That you love me, that I bring you so much joy.

No, she said, I want to tell you something else.

It was Christmas Day. I phoned Julie. Merry Christmas, I said.

Merry Christmas to you too, she said.

It was the first time in both of our lives that we were alone on Christmas Day. We said really? Is that true? It was true. Her kids were with her ex, their father, and Will was with his girlfriend’s family in Mexico and Nora was at Dan’s place. He had finally returned from Borneo. And my mother was in the hospital. Should we drink together over the phone? she asked.

And suffer its deleterious effects? I said. I was quoting our old Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Skull. She had prayed, especially for Julie and me, that we would come to our senses and stop partying in the bushes with French boys. We couldn’t stop. It was too good. We wouldn’t stop! Our old Sunday school teacher told us that she loved us but that God loved us more. We told her to try harder. She told us that sinful women adorn their bodies and not their souls. Should we go naked? Julie had asked. When she left the room for Kleenex, Julie and I escaped out the fire exit. The last step on the ladder was still two storeys up from the ground and we had to jump the rest of the way down. We loved the way our soles hurt afterwards.

We sat in our living rooms drinking Scotch and talking and listening. Here’s to something, this panoply, I said. Yes, said Julie, this cock-eyed carousel. We lifted our glasses and tapped them against our phones. You’re the strongest person I know, I said. I didn’t tell her that I thought she had the right stuff to kill herself. I was trying to retrain my beliefs and change my template for success.