by Miriam Toews
Elf smiled faintly and said to say hi to him and Nora. She asked what had been happening the last time I checked out the live feed of his protest. Honey, is this a hard day for you? asked my mom. We both looked at her. They were batting balloons around and some of them were lying in sleeping bags, I said. The cops came and then left again so who knows. Will said they’ll leave if the cops ask them to. What crime bill? asked my mom. Having to do with prisons and policing, I said. He’s an anarchist now.
Will is? said my mom. Oh no!
No, no, I’m kidding, I said, unsure if I was or wasn’t. I had forgotten about my mother’s Russian association with murderous anarchists. She excused herself to use the bathroom and I whispered to Elf just let me think, okay? And you think too, like really think.
Yo, I have thought, said Elf. That’s all I’ve been doing. Is it not obvious?
I know, I said, but can’t you just think about it a bit longer? Or then stop thinking and start just observing things around you. I can’t do it without Nic being there, definitely not—plus this is so crazy. It’s not—
Why not? said Elf. I’m not his child. I can go with or without his permission. Obviously I want him to be there with us but he would never let it happen. We could go now while he’s away.
No way.
What do you mean just observing? It’s impossible not to have thoughts. Even if they’re superficial that doesn’t mean there isn’t some form of brain activity—
I know, I said, but don’t you want him to—
Hey why don’t I get some lunch from the cafeteria and bring it here, said my mom. We hadn’t noticed she was back from the washroom. We can have lunch in here, the three of us! And I’ll check on Tina on my way back.
They won’t let you, said Elf. I’m supposed to go to the cafeteria at mealtimes.
I’ll hide it, said my mom. I’ll smuggle it in.
Let me go, I said. You can barely breathe. They’ll end up admitting you too. And I have a backpack for stashing the food.
A nurse came in with an enormous bouquet of flowers. These came for you just now, said the nurse. Aren’t they beautiful?
Oh, they are! said my mother. Wow! I nodded and smiled and leaned over to smell them.
From Joanna and Ekko. Is Ekko her husband or something? I asked. Elf nodded. The nurse said she’d try to find a vase big enough for the flowers. I thanked her profusely. I was trying to get her to approve of at least one of our miscreant members.
Well these are a lovely addition to the room, don’t you think, Elf, said my mom. How thoughtful of them!
Look at these blue ones, I said. How do you get blue flowers?
Honey, said my mom. Blue flowers do exist in nature. They’re symbols of something, I think. In poetry.
Oh really? I said.
Of inspiration, maybe, or of the infinite, said my mother. Die blaue blume.
Can you take them out? said Elf. Can you take them away?
I flew into my aunt’s room, said hi, ta-dah! I put the giant bouquet onto her bedside table and she laughed. My goodness! How delightful! she said. They’re from Elf, I said.
I told her I was sorry about the latest developments, that Elf and my mom and I were going to have a quick lunch and then my mom and I would both come back here, to her ward, and visit properly. She waved off any urgency, meh, relax, if your mother can do it I can do it, and laughed again. She was talking about the surgery. She held up her arm, the one with the plaster cast, and said it was really bugging her. Did I want to write something on it? I wrote I love you, Auntie Tina! She looked at it and told me she loved me too. She asked me to get her a pen or a stir stick or something that she could stick into her cast so she could scratch her arm. It was driving her nuts. What are these numbers? I asked her. She told me she had written down Sheila’s and Esther’s cellphone numbers on her cast. Sheila and Esther were her daughters, my cousins. They were older than me and Leni, their sister who died, and often babysat us by giving us giant bags of red Twizzlers as hush money and sneaking out with their boyfriends. Leni and I would wait for them to leave and then go out and wander around town by ourselves until we’d eaten all the Twizzlers and the bedtime siren had gone off at the fire hall. Tina asked me to bring her a Starbucks coffee—but don’t tell the nurses. Just sneak it in. Small black. I told her I was a mule already, no problem, she could count on me.
I went over to the nurses’ desk and asked if they knew when she’d have her surgery. Tomorrow morning at six, they told me. With Dr. Kevorkian. At least that’s what it sounded like to me. I went back to my aunt’s bed. So, tomorrow! I said. I sounded hysterical to myself.
Yup, said my aunt. Going under the knife. They’ve been drawing on my body, mapping it all out. Cut along the dotted line. What a hoot.
I asked her about my cousins, her kids, were they both coming.
Sheila called, she said, and she and Frank are getting here this afternoon.
I quickly e-mailed Sheila from my BlackBerry and told her to send me her flight info and I’d pick them up at the airport. Frank was my uncle, Tina’s stalwart and jokey husband. He could barely walk from diabetes but he was game to travel here to be by Tina’s side. I kissed my aunt and she held me tightly, incredible strength for a pre-op heart patient, and looked me in the eye. Yolandi, she said, give my love to Elfrieda. Tell her I love her and tell her that I know she loves me too. She needs to hear that.
I promised I would and turned to go.
Also! called my aunt from her bed. We are Loewens! (That was their maiden name—my mother’s and Tina’s.) That means lions!
I smiled and nodded—and I murmured to the nurse passing me that my aunt was the king of the jungle so please handle her with care. The nurse laughed and squeezed my arm. Nurses in cardio are far more playful and friendly than they are in psych.
If you have to end up in the hospital, try to focus all your pain in your heart rather than your head.
THIRTEEN
AIRPORT, CAR DOOR, BUY A SHOWER CURTAIN, get divorced. I spoke aloud to myself. I stood in the elevator and pounded on the letter M until the damn thing lit up and we were on our way down to the main floor. Airport, car door, get divorced. There was something else I’d forgotten. I texted Julie and asked if she could meet me at the Corydon Bar and Grill in one hour, we’d have tequila shooters because an ancient Chatelaine magazine in the cardio waiting room had said that it’s important to celebrate a divorce rather than feel shame and guilt and remorse, and then come with me on my errand run. She texted back that she was at the Legion with posties, at a meat raffle, drunk already, but that I could pick her up any time.
I bought a couple of egg salad sandwiches, a ham sandwich, a couple of apples and a bag of chips—none of us ate chips—and a giant bottle of water and one small black Starbucks coffee. Took the elevator back up to cardio and thought, while I was standing there leaning against the wall with my face against its cool shiny steel, that I should try to find Benito Zetina Morelos and ask him what he thought about killing my sister. I needed someone to tell me what to do.
Benito Zetina Morelos was my old philosophy professor. I was in his medical bioethics class at the same time I was giving my notes to Jason the mechanic in CanLit. Benito Zetina Morelos was the expert on this stuff, he was on CBC panels all the time, talking about euthanasia, about all sorts of things having to do with the right to die, basically. He’d gone to Oxford. Once, in his class, he started talking about a Mennonite Rhodes scholar who was studying with him at Oxford and who couldn’t handle the freedom, this was the sixties or seventies, and got wildly involved with drugs and ended up dead. This was actually my cousin, one of my four thousand cousins, and my mother had told me about his misadventures when I was a kid, and there was Benito Zetina Morelos using him to illustrate how hard it is to go from one extreme to another. We were pretty certain he’d died of a drug overdose, but nobody knew for sure because his parents were so heartbroken they didn’t want an autopsy, they just wanted his body to co
me home where it belonged and be buried in the plain cemetery of our tiny, country Mennonite church. Now I desperately needed Benito Zetina Morelos’s advice. Since taking his course I had bumped into him a few times in Winnipeg, walking his dog and reading at the same time. If he didn’t have his dog with him he’d walk around the Kelvin High School track, around and around, always reading, often with a pen in his mouth. All right, airport, car door, divorce papers, Benito Zetina Morelos. Shower curtain!
I arrived at my aunt’s floor, gave her the coffee, kissed her again and high-fived, we made some jokes about the unpredictability of life and how hilarious it all can be from a certain angle—or any angle. She made a reference to Isosceles: what if he had laughed at every one of them, every angle. And I took off for Psych 2.
We had our secret lunch in Elf’s room. My mother sat calmly. I paced while I ate and Elf had maybe three tiny bites of her sandwich, firing at me with her eyes while she chewed, her brow furrowed and hair a wild nest. A pastor from my parents’ old Mennonite church in East Village had come to the hospital to visit Elf while my mother and I were away. Somehow he had managed to talk his way in past the nurses’ desk. He had heard, probably from the successful family in the waiting room, that Elf was in the hospital. He told her that if she would give her life to God she wouldn’t have any pain. She would want to live. And to deny that was to sin egregiously. Could they pray together for her soul?
Oh my god! I said. Holy fuck!
Elf is livid, said my mother, looking directly at my sister. Aren’t you? My mother sat directly in the path of a shaft of sunlight breaking through the caged window, an areola of gold surrounding her, radiating heat. She wanted Elf to show her rage, to use her prodigious verbal skills to tear this little creep to ribbons, even now that he had left.
What did you do? I asked Elf. I hope you told him to go fuck himself. You should have screamed rape.
Yoli, said my mom.
Seriously, I said.
I recited a poem, said Elf.
What? I said. A poem? You should have strangled him with your panties!
Philip Larkin, she said. I don’t have any panties. They’ve taken them away from me.
Can you recite it for us now? asked my mom. Elf groaned and shook her head.
C’mon, Elf, I said. I wanna hear it. Did he know it was Larkin?
Are you crazy? asked my mom.
C’mon, Elf, just say the poem.
“What are days for?” asked Elf.
What do you mean? I said.
“Days are where we live.”
What? I said.
Yoli, said my mom, shhh, that’s the poem. Let her say it already.
“They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?”
That’s cool, Elf, I said. I like that.
Yoli, said my mom, for Pete’s sake, there’s a second verse. Listen. Elf, go on.
“Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.”
Hmm, I said. Well, there you go. What did he say to that?
Nothing, said Elf.
Tell her why nothing, said my mom. She shook like old times. She covered her mouth.
Because by the end of it I had taken off all my clothes, said Elf.
He left pretty quickly, said my mom.
That’s so crazy! I said. Oh my god, that’s fucking amazing!
I was trying to be like you, she said. It was all I had.
Get out, I said, that’s all you. You’re unbelievable. Fucking amazing!
Yoli, said my mom. Enough already, good grief, with the swearing. Now I see where Will and Nora get it from.
A striptease to a Larkin poem, I said. Fucking brilliant!
Eventually my mom told me I should go and do the things I needed to do—oh yeah, my divorce!—and she’d stay for a while and take a cab home. On my way out I spoke to Elf’s nurse.
Please don’t let anybody other than family in to see Elf, I said. And you won’t let her go any time soon, will you?
No, of course not! she said. She’ll be here for a while, considering everything that’s happened. And by the way, that was an anomaly, that guy. He said he was her pastor and sailed right on by. I’m sorry.
Oh my god, I thought, the nurse actually apologized. No problem, I said, Elf dealt with it. But please don’t let her go.
We won’t, said the nurse, don’t worry, okay? Her eyes were kind and deeply set. I could have stared at them all afternoon, for the rest of my life.
Okay, thank you, I said, because there’s nobody at her place. Her husband is in Spain and there’s nobody there.
This was a refrain in my family. We were a Greek chorus. How many times would I beg hospitals not to let my people go? Elf and I begged and begged and begged the hospital in East Village not to let our father go but they let him go anyway and then he was gone for good. We are only family. And the doctors are busy packing as many appointments into a day as they can to pay for the next cycling holiday in the Pyrenees. The nurse reassured me. Nicolas, she said, had already talked to her, she knew he had gone to Spain, and she promised that Elfrieda wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. I struggled to stop myself from throwing my arms around her and telling her I loved her.
On the way out of the hospital I checked the messages on my phone. Dan was furious with Nora. Apparently she had somehow broken into his e-mail and put out a mass letter to all of his contacts declaring that he was gay and that it felt so good to finally tell the truth and that he hoped everyone would understand and let nothing change between them. Somehow, my ex implied in his message to me, it was my fault that our daughter had got a bit drunk with her friends and made a “bad choice.”
Those were ALL my contacts, he wrote. Work too. Everyone. And she’s just laughing about it and won’t apologize. Like mother, like daughter.
I texted him back and said but are you gay, really?
He texted back: Are you thirteen years old, really?
I texted back: Also, what work?
He texted back: It has nothing to do with rodeos so perhaps it’s beyond your realm of comprehension.
I texted back: Maybe she’s angry with you for always being in Borneo. How’s the surf? And then quickly turned off my cell.
I googled: can writing a novel kill you? And found nothing useful. I sped to my hippie lawyer’s office—he had a pierced ear and a goatee and lived in Wolseley, the same neighbourhood as Julie—and failed to get out of the car through the driver’s side, swore, slid across and ran inside and said I had four minutes to sign the papers and that nothing in the world would give me more joy than to scrawl my stupid name in triplicate on this particular document. I whipped out my Visa card and said let’s pay for this right now and seal the deal. I guess this is the cost of freedom! My lawyer’s secretary laughed but I could tell she pitied me. I was going insane. I ran back to my car, again failed to open the driver’s door, banged on the window and swore quietly into the wind which was turning into something other than a gentle breeze, maybe into a mistral, the wind that can make you crazy, so that in France you can be acquitted if you kill someone while it’s blowing. I ran around and slid in through the passenger side and sped to Jason the mechanic, my last night’s boyfriend. I drove directly into the garage, threw it into park and once again forgot about the door that never opens and slumped in my seat, defeated.
Jason emerged from under the hood of an SUV and opened the passenger door for me and said come here. I slid out headfirst like a newborn and he hugged me, and I told him about the driver’s door and that I had to be at the airport in twelve minutes to pick up my cousin Sheila and my uncle Frank who were flying in to be with my aunt, their mom and wife, who suddenly had to have heart surgery, and that I’d just officially gotten divorced. Jason rubbed my back. He told me that divorce was one of life’s to
p stressors—that and a death in the family— because it’s like a death, and that it was okay with him if I cried. He gave me a loaner to pick up my relatives and said he’d have the door fixed later in the afternoon, no worries, no charge.
I had forgotten about Julie. I sped to the Legion on Notre Dame. Horrible music was playing on the loaner car radio but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. She was sitting on the curb waiting for me, inebriated and holding on to a bunch of frozen steaks. She got in and I told her I was divorced. I know that, she said. No, but now—I just signed the papers—it’s a done deal. Congrassulations, she said. She tried to turn the radio off.
How does it feel?
To be officially divorced? I asked.
Officially divorced, she said. Those are two awful words. They shouldn’t even be words.
Last night I dreamt I heard a man telling me that a petroglyph dog equals eternal love.
I’ve heard that too, she said. How’s Elf?
Same, I said.
Are you still thinking of killing her? said Julie.
It’s not killing her. It’s helping her.
I know, said Julie, but are you?
Don’t tell anyone, I said. Elf hasn’t mentioned it to Nic or my mom. She just wants me to take her to Switzerland, the two of us.
Oh geez, said Julie, will you? Hey, what’s wrong with your eyes?
I told her I had to track down my one-time philosophy professor, Benito Zetina Morelos.
That sounds like a Bolaño novel, she said. Do you have his e-mail or his phone number? She took my hand and held it. I shook my head and told her I had to go to Kelvin High School and find him at the track, maybe. Tonight, she said, you should stay at my place and let me make a steak for you. I have wine. I think you really need protein. I can’t, I said, I have to get my mom and my cousin and my uncle to the hospital for six a.m., that’s when my aunt is having her surgery. And they’re all staying at my mom’s. Okay then tomorrow night, she said. I don’t think you should do the Switzerland thing. I don’t know, I said. Just because something’s legal doesn’t make it right, she said. Yeah, yeah, I said, but the core of the argument for it is maximizing individual autonomy and minimizing human suffering. Doesn’t that sound right? Are you hot? she said. She held a frozen steak to my forehead.
