Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Is everything unbearable? she asked.

Nope, I said. What are we doing right now?

Well, that’s true, she said.

Whose birthday is it again? I asked.

That hippie kid, she said.

Looks like we weren’t invited to his party this year, I said. We agreed we wouldn’t have gone anyway. We should become Jewish.

Remember that guy outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon? she asked me.

Allan, I said. (Allan was a brilliant cellist once, on the verge of becoming a prodigy and going to Juilliard, and then he smashed his head on the dash of his car when it hit a cement truck on black ice and now he stands alone outside the 7-Eleven on Corydon asking people really politely for change. He’s still handsome. He seems sort of hollowed out but his eyes are really bright, the whites really white and the blues really blue, like Greek islands. He mumbles words and sometimes it seems like he’s laughing at everything like he’s just been thrown a surprise party. We don’t know who takes care of him.)

I dreamt I slept with him, said Julie. And I offered to be his girlfriend, she said. And take him home with me and take care of him but he didn’t want to. He was really sweet and was trying not to hurt my feelings. He showed me his blisters from the cello strings that would never go away. He asked me if he could borrow a pair of warm mittens though, that was all he wanted.

Did you feel rejected? I asked.

Yeah, she said, a bit. I wanted to comb his hair for him too, it was so tangled. And wash him.

Julie and I talked for hours and hours through the night until Boxing Day. We were really happy when Christmas was over. Then we really had something to toast.

May 3rd, 2011

Dear Elf,

Auntie Tina once told me that I’d be walking down the street one day and suddenly feel a lightness come over me, a feeling like I could walk forever, some magical strength, and that would mean I was being forgiven. I wish I had taken you to Zurich. I’m sorry. Auntie Tina said one day I’d be flying and not even know it.

Did I tell you about the hospital stuff with mom? I think I already did. She’s fine now, again, for a while. I had an embarrassing moment in the hospital that I haven’t told anybody about. At one point in Emergency mom grabbed my hand — you know the way she does, how it’s actually almost painful like she’s a Mafia don pretending to be nice — and said she had something to tell me. I figured for sure it would be what she always tells us when she’s dying in Emergency, that she loves me, that I’ve brought her so much happiness and all that, but instead she whispered to me that I had to stop getting drunk and phoning the hospital in Winnipeg. She told me that she had tracked my activities — it’s all her years and years of reading whodunits finally paying off — and she realized I was going out in the early evening to Wino Town, or whatever the liquor stores are called here, and buying myself a bag of booze and coming home and drinking alone and listening to Neil Young songs that remind me of you and working myself into a paroxysm of grief and rage and then pranking the hospital in Winnipeg by calling them and asking if I can speak to you and then acting all incredulous when they tell me that you’re not there.

She held my hand really tightly the whole time and she locked her eyes to mine so I couldn’t escape, and I felt so ashamed and weak and stupid and crazy. And I started crying and nodding and saying I know, I have to stop, I’m so sorry. And I cried and cried. She didn’t actually know what I had said to the hospital just that she knew I was calling them on a regular basis because she was opening the phone bills and looking at all the Manitoba numbers — this is the problem of living with your mother, Elf, another problem you will never encounter — and then she just put all the pieces together. She asked me if I was trying to haunt the hospital which I thought was an interesting way of putting it, and I told her I didn’t know what I was doing, that it didn’t matter, that I was sorry, that I would stop. Then even though she was the one dying and all hooked up to different cables and power cords and things she pulled me into her massive bear hug and rocked me like a baby from her horizontal position in her little white bed and I was kind of hunched over her sobbing while my bag kept falling off my shoulder. She had her arms around me. I pretended she was you and dad and Leni and even Dan, all the people I’ve lost along the way, and then she whispered things to me, all about love, about kindness, and optimism and strength. And about you. About our family.

How we can all fight really hard, but how we can also acknowledge defeat and stop fighting and call a spade a spade. I asked her what we do when a spade isn’t a spade and she told me that sometimes there are things like that in life, spades that aren’t spades, and that we can leave them that way. I told her but I’m a writer, it’s hard for me to leave those spades so undefined, and she said she understood, she liked mysteries to be solved too, God knows, and words to be attached to feelings. She tapped her whodunit, the one lying on her chest, the one protecting her heart, that somehow with all this hugging hadn’t moved an inch. She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, sags eventually — because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either — and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. It means goodbye, it means going to Rotterdam when you weren’t expecting to and having no way of telling anyone you won’t be back for a while.

Well, I’ve stopped pranking the hospital, you’ll be relieved to know. Remember that time I thought it would be a real kick-ass idea to go to school with some of mom’s pantyhose pulled over my face and you quietly whispered into my ear on your way out of the house: Swivelhead, attempt to be cool. You have no idea how often I evoke those words. Essentially, it’s what mom was trying to tell me in the hospital.

So she recovered, as she does, and to celebrate she and Nora and I took a trip to NYC to see Will and Zoe. They took us to MOMA, to a show where everyone was naked and in pain. It was the Marina Abramovic show. It was the talk of the town. All of us gallery-goers huddled in one room wondering how we’d get to the next one. There was only a narrow doorway that we had to pass through, but there were two suffering, naked people standing face to face in the doorway so we would all have to take turns squishing up against them as we went through. Nobody made a move to go through the doorway. The kids and I had lost track of mom when she was wandering around looking at things. We were whispering about certain celebrities we saw in the room. Nora knew them all, they were fashion designers and actors, but the rest of us were clueless. All the people were clustered together getting restless, and murmuring and wanting to move to the next room but wondering how to get through the door. Then Will said hey, there’s grandma, and we looked towards the narrow doorway where the naked man and woman stood facing each other. Nobody had gone through it yet. Then we saw mom in her purple cords and windbreaker standing at the doorway with her hands on her hips. Oh my god, said Nora, she’s going through. She went sideways through the doorway and her stomach grazed the man’s penis. Then she stopped in the middle, right there between the man and the woman, she didn’t hurry through at all, she was savouring it. She looked up at the naked man’s face, into his eyes, he was expressionless, and she smiled at him and nodded. She was greeting him, politely. Then she somehow turned around in that tight space to face the woman and she looked into her eyes too and smiled and nodded and then she smiled back at all of us huddled in the first room as if to say all right, people, let’s go, follow me, and she stepped through and one by one the rest of us followed her.