All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  I don’t know a lot of people here. The only call I ever get is from a recorded voice saying Hello! Has your debt become uncontrollable? The last time it happened I whispered yes, yes, it has, and then quickly hung up like a hostage sending a cryptic message to my would-be rescuers. I’ve cashed in that RRSP thing that dad gave us a million years ago and have already spent my half of the house sale on rent in this city and yesterday my landlord told me it’s going up to some number I’ve never even heard of.

  Finbar, the lawyer, is texting again. He says he’s worked through some stuff and thinks it’s okay if he and I get together again in spite of my peripatetic lifestyle. He admires my hamstrings. I have a sixth toe now. Okay, it’s a bunion. Sometimes, if I’m doing a lot of walking, it throbs like a little penis on the side of my foot. I also have some weird golf ball–sized thing growing on the back of my heel which I think is called Haglund’s deformity. Our dog had one of those once, remember, and Uncle Ray gave her one of his horse tranquilizers and then hacked it off with that gutting knife? I just remember you carrying her around for a couple of weeks because she couldn’t walk afterwards. Or you put her in that little wagon and pulled her everywhere. Would you do that for me if my deformity gets out of hand? Also, I was in a little accident the other day, did I tell you about that? Just a tiny fender-bender but with insurance here in Ontario being very expensive and blah blah and still having Manitoba insurance (whoops) I’m not sure that I’ll be covered and I might have to pay a million dollars to the woman for her totally unscathed BMW SUV. She actually got out of her car and took a picture of her absolutely pristine bumper with her cellphone while I stood there (in my cut-offs and green windbreaker, holding a six of Heinekens) saying c’mon, you are NOT serious.

  Nora and I are conducting a bit of an experiment. We’re attempting to make eye contact with Torontonians. It’s frustrating. People are startled when we look at them and quickly look away or somehow will themselves not to even look in the first place. We’ve noticed that some people visibly will turn their heads away from us and even their shoulders so they’re not tempted to look. Today Nora and I went for a quick walk in our neighbourhood (Little Malta) and of the sixty-eight people we passed on the sidewalk only seven of them returned our gaze and of those seven only one smiled and it might not have been a real smile but a grimace due to gas. Nora and I pretend to be indifferent to it, but it hurts! We’ve wondered if it’s because of how we dress or if we emit some kind of vibe that makes people not want to have any contact at all with us or if we seem desperate or dangerous or weird. Well, I have to run to pick up Nora from a rehearsal and get her to a dentist appointment on time. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking of you and missing you and … floating on the wings of nothingness.

  Your humble and obedient servant, Y (see? I have read the letters of your poet lovers).

  Elf is not answering the phone. I call my mother and she says yes, that’s true, she’s not. Well, sometimes she does, well, actually, no, I guess she doesn’t. Well, sometimes, yes, sometimes but mostly not. Really not at all. Once in a blue moon, but basically no, she doesn’t.

  I can’t bear to hear my mother waffle like this between hope and despair. My mother tells me that if she’s there, at Elf’s place, when the phone rings she does encourage Elf to answer it but even then it’s a struggle and mostly Elf wins and the phone goes unanswered.

  I can hear the trumpets sounding on her laptop indicating that another Scrabble game is about to begin.

  Dear Elf,

  Today I went for a long walk and ended up watching ducks dive headfirst into Grenadier Pond in High Park. I wondered for how long they could hold their breath and I counted seventy-eight seconds before one came up for air. What is it for humans? A minute? Today I heard a pretty good conversation on the streetcar. This guy got on and he was swearing his head off, really foul stuff like that fucking bitch can suck my cock if she fucking thinks … and the streetcar driver said hey, whoah, you can’t swear like that on the streetcar and the guy stopped and looked at him and then he said he was really sorry, really sorry, he understood, and he got off at the next stop and started swearing again as soon as he’d stepped off the streetcar.

  I miss you. Nora and I went up to the top of the CN Tower yesterday. We’re trying to understand our new city from a bird’s-eye view. We put a loonie into a powerful set of binoculars but we still couldn’t see you. We went up to the rooftop bar at the Park Hyatt and I had a glass of twelve-dollar wine and we shared some olives and almonds. We gazed off a little despondently in a westerly direction. We miss you. Nora asked me if I regretted having children which shocked me and made me feel like a terrible mother, like I’d been giving her the impression that she was slowly crushing the life right out of me. But then she went on to say that she was thinking of never getting pregnant because she couldn’t bear the thought of her body housing an alien and ballooning into some grotesque caricature of womanhood. I hope she doesn’t have an eating disorder. I’ve read that eating disorders are often the fault of overbearing mothers, but I’m so underbearing it’s not even funny. Maybe she’s imagined an overbearing mother to compensate for my lack of bearing and it’s this imaginary pushy mother that’s caused her to have an eating disorder. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, not really. I shouldn’t try to blame something that doesn’t even exist on an imagined imaginary mother. I try to remember how skinny you were when you were her age. You still are!

  So while we were out there on the rooftop bar an elderly suntanned man with a World Series ring, wearing white leather shoes and no socks, told Nora she was beautiful. He asked me if I was her sister. Ha ha, oh the oft-told jokes of stale old men on the make. He said Nora should be a model. I said well isn’t that flattering but no, she’s a dancer—with the words back off you transparent creep radiating unspoken from my assassin eyes. We walked all the way home singing mash-ups of old songs that both of us knew. It’s so cute when she says things like, what! You know “Torn Between Two Lovers”? She even let me hold her hand for a minute or two. She told me that I was surprisingly attractive considering my features, which made me want to break down and bawl with gratitude. Like any fourteen-year-old, she’s not exactly wildly indiscriminate with her compliments. Her feet are ravaged from dancing. They look like Grandpa Werner’s. Remember when he did puppet shows with them and made us scream? I massage them for her and afterwards my own hands are callused and raw from scraping them against her thorny feet. I asked her about her little Swedish boyfriend (to which she took exception, his name is Anders and he’s apparently ripped) and if they were able to communicate in any language. She said no, dreamily, like it was perfect that way. I wanted to ask her if she was having sex with him but I didn’t have the nerve. She’s not even fifteen. I couldn’t handle the answer. I’m a useless mother, my god.

  So I called Will in New York last night and he told me he had rats in his apartment. He asked me how you were. He misses you too! Speaking of rats, I think, on top of the ants, we have mice, which I guess is comparatively speaking a relief. In Toronto they say that if you have mice you don’t have rats and vice versa because rats eat mice. I wonder if rats eat mourning doves. Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream where a rat gets stuck under my shirt and I can’t get it out of there and I have to pound away on my chest until the thing drops dead and bloodied onto the floor and I’m exhausted. The power keeps going out. I miss you like crazy.

  Beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived, Y.

  (That’s what Madame de Staël wrote at the end of a letter to some Chevalier guy, but now it’s what I’ve written to my Elfrieda.)

  Write me back, Amps!

  p.s. or pick up your goddamn phone.

  p.p.s. Was talking to mom the other day. She says that you’re listening non-stop to Górecki’s Symphony Number Three? What is that one about?

  Answering or not answering the phone has become symbolic of El
f’s ability to cope with life. Elf has told my mother that the sound of a ringing phone has, for her, Hitchcockian implications and we both say ah, yeah, right, hmmmm … over the phone. I spoke to my mother this afternoon. She bore news. She told me that her sister Tina is on her way to Winnipeg for a visit and to spend time with Elf. She’s driving her van across the country from Vancouver to help my mother who is exhausted, I can tell, but not admitting to it. I asked her but why, is it that bad? She said it’s not that bad but it’s also not that good. I asked her how exactly Elf was doing and she said well, you know, the same really.

  Somewhere in between not bad and not good, I said.

  That’s about the long and the short of it, she said. She’s not doing the tour.

  What? Really?

  That’s what she says today.

  I asked her if Elf was getting my letters and she said she didn’t know, she’d ask. I phoned Nic at work and left a message for him to call me back. I phoned Will in Brooklyn and asked him how he was doing and he whispered fine, fine, yeah. He was in the library. He is always in a library or occupying Wall Street when I call him. He asked how things were. I told him great, good. He whispered how’s Elf? And I whispered back pretty good, fine, yeah.

  Someone has been sawing off all the branches of the tree outside my dining room window. I like to sit in my T-shirt and panties at the dining room table first thing in the morning and listen to the un-eaten mourning doves and write. The branches covered virtually the entire window and prevented the neighbours from seeing me sitting here in my underwear. But now the branches are coming away one by one and revealing me to my neighbours slowly like a puzzle taking shape.

  Dear Elf,

  When will you write me back? One thing I’ve noticed about men is that they become uncomfortable and a bit angry when, after having sex with them, you cry your eyes out for a few hours and refuse to tell them why you’re upset.

  Finbar and I are so incompatible. I only sleep with him because he wants to and he’s good-looking—I’m pathetic, I know. Louche. And I’m a horrible role model—a mother to a soon-to-be or already sexually active daughter. Seriously, who wants a mother who buys flavoured condoms from the machine at the Rivoli? (I was caught off guard and that’s all they had.) Although Nora doesn’t actually know about Finbar because I make sure that all our sad outings are brief and furtive and spaced far apart like eclipses. Just now, this second, telling you about this stuff makes me want to cry my eyes out. I think I might just do that. I’d like to fall in love again. I wish Dan and I didn’t fight so much—he’s a good dad to Nora when he’s not in Borneo. You’re so lucky to have Nic! He’s so lucky to have you! Say hi to him by the way. How’s his kayak?

  Anders (N’s little Swedish boyfriend) just told me he’d blocked up the toilet, and that he’d messed up the washing machine when he tried to wash all his clothes in one go—why is he doing his laundry here???—so now his clothes are locked in the machine, and the machine is leaking water into the towels he used to cover the floor. He indicated all of this with charades and drawings because of our language barrier.

  It’s evening now. Nora and Anders have gone to a birthday party. Before they left I forced them to show me some dance moves, something they were working on at school, and they were reluctant at first but finally agreed to do a quick one and oh my god, it was amazing. They’re just kids but suddenly they were these world-weary though incredibly agile lovers swooning, then dying, then being reunited. They were so grave, so measured and yet free at the same time in all their movements. You have to come here to see them dance! When they were finished, bent and twisted into some kind of expressive shape which they held for an impossibly long time before standing up and bowing sweetly, I burst into applause—I was trying not to cry—and they were instantly transformed back into ordinary, awkward teens, shuffling out the door, bumping into each other, saying sorry, laughing nervously, holding hands shyly when a second ago it seemed like they were the original inventors of passion and grace. We’ve lost our power.

  I was trying to edit my stupid novel with the lights off but the only key I can hit in the dark without missing is the delete key. Maybe it’s a sign. By the way, I checked Wikipedia to see what it said about Górecki’s Third Symphony. It’s also called The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and it’s about the ties between a mother and a child. Have you seen her lately? Did she tell you that she finally found her lost hearing aid in the dryer?

  I should go now and make my rounds, as the Hiebert kids (remember their station wagon and the garbage bags of pot plants?) used to say when they were selling drugs. I’ve unblocked the toilet but I still have to figure out how to fix the washing machine so it doesn’t flood the basement and wash us all into Lake Ontario.

  I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner (to quote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra). Yoli.

  p.s. There’s a hill in Toronto, which is exciting. You have to walk up it if you’re going north and down it if you’re going south. The shore of Lake Ontario used to come up far higher. It would have been lapping at this third floor window of mine up until about 13,000 years ago. Then it was known as Lake Iroquois and when the ice dam melted the water drained away and became its present size, so small in comparison, a shadow of its former self. There’s a road in north Toronto called Davenport that follows the Native trail that used to run along the ancient shoreline. I’m sure it was called something other than Davenport then, or maybe davenport was a word dreamed into being by the First Nations people who became tired of sitting on rocks and in canoes and imagined something softer, with springs. Did you know that the various parts of the earth, the continents, are moving closer together at the same speed that fingernails grow? Or are they moving farther apart? Now I can’t remember but anyway it’s the pace I am interested in. And its relation to grief, which you could say, in this context, passes quickly or lasts forever.

  p.p.s. Sometimes when I’m working on my book I close my eyes and imagine that I’m in Winnipeg meeting you at some café, maybe the Black Sheep on Ellice Avenue. I can see you smiling now as I walk up the street. You’ve got us a table by the window, there’s a small pile of library books beside you, French ones, and you’ve ordered me a flat white and you’re wearing a half-sexy/half-ironic miniskirt and billowing artist smock and you’re knocking your green marker against your teeth while you smile at me like you’ve got something to tell me, something that will make me laugh. Today I’m working with my front door wide open because it’s so warm. A condo is going up across the street so it’s very loud. Every five minutes a guy yells heads up and then a few seconds later there’s a massive crash and another dust cloud. I miss you, Elf.

  It’s been almost two weeks since I said goodbye to my sister in the doorway of her home in Winnipeg and promised to write letters. Now it’s May, the day of Elfrieda’s opening concert at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It’s back on. She changed her mind again. Nic called me yesterday to say the rehearsal had gone very well and Elf seemed excited about opening night even if she looked a little drained.

  My mother phoned me today while I was walking through a muddy park next to the lake. When my cellphone rang I looked at it for a second before answering.

  She’s done it again, said my mother.

  I squatted in the mud. And said, tell me.

  My mother said that she and her sister Tina had gone to Elf’s place to say hi, even though Elf had asked them politely to stay away so that she could prepare herself for the concert. Elf didn’t answer the door when they knocked. The door was locked but my mother had a key and let herself in. She found Elf lying on the floor in the bathroom. She had cut her wrists and she had drunk Javex. The bathroom reeked of bleach. Her breath and skin reeked of bleach. She was covered in blood. She was conscious, alive. She held out her arms to my mother. She begged my mother to take her to the train tracks. My mother held her and Tina called 911 and they came to take Elf back to the hospital.
She’s in Intensive Care now on a respirator because her throat has closed from drinking the bleach. Her wrists will be okay.

  I’m at the airport. I’m waiting for the plane to take me home to my sister and my mother. I bought cream at Lush to rub onto Elf’s body. She has a surprisingly beautiful body for a woman in her late forties. Her legs are slim and firm. She has muscular thighs. Her smile is an event. She laughs so hard. She makes me laugh so hard. She gets surprised. Her eyes open wide, comically, she can’t believe it. Her skin is pristine, smooth and pale. Her hair is so black and her eyes so green like they’re saying go, go, go! She doesn’t have horrible freckles and moles and facial hair like me and big bones poking out like twisted rebar at the dump. She’s petite and feminine. She’s glamorous and dark and jazzy like a French movie star. She loves me. She mocks sentimentality. She helps me stay calm. Her hands aren’t ravaged by time and her breasts don’t sag. They’re small, pert, like a girl’s. Her eyes are wet emeralds. Her eyelashes are too long. The snow weighs them down in the winter and she makes me cut them shorter with our mother’s sewing scissors so they don’t obscure her vision. I knocked over a tray of bath bombs the size of tennis balls, bright yellow, onto the floor and I couldn’t figure out how to pick them up. The woman said it was okay. I can’t remember now if I paid for the cream. I’m going home.