All My Puny Sorrows

by Miriam Toews

  Sometimes train whistles break through the silence of the day. Those dissonant chords that remind me of your mournful pounding on the keys when I screwed up my page-turning duties. Wait for the last measure, Dodo Brain! There are tracks close to our house. Sometimes I can hear the wheels rumbling on the rails. Sometimes I can feel the ground shake. It’s comforting. It’s a greeting or a proper goodbye. Mom would approve. You know how she is about hello and goodbye.

  Remember our neighbour Mrs. Steingart (the one you renamed Signora Giovanna) standing in the middle of our living room with her hands on her hips, glaring at mom for not being a good-enough housekeeper and dad for not being enough of a man and us for not being normal-enough children and how we were all lying, sitting, slumping with books in our hands, utterly oblivious to her admonishments, and she stomped off home saying we were only word people, we were a word family, one day we’d have to open our eyes. To what? A messy house? Now I remember her parting shot. Words won’t feed the admiral’s cat! It did give me pause, I may have looked up from my book, but only because of the words she’d used to compose her threat and not the threat itself.

  Remember the way mom used to swim beyond the wake and bob along to god knows where, the deep and choppy sea, until someone noticed and came to her rescue? What do words mean, Elf? Everything or nothing? They can’t just mean something. By the way, I finally checked out your beloved D. H. Lawrence. Remember when you expressed incredulity at my not having read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? God, you’re a snob sometimes. Well, I read it. And yeah, the sex was hot. I’d find time in my busy schedule of needlepoint and flower arranging to visit that guy in the woods too. I wonder if Frieda wrote those parts for D. H. and then just had to keep her mouth shut while he racked up the fame and lived in fancy hotels in France with hippie girls. Anyway, you’re right about the first paragraph. I want someone to project it on the front of my house in giant letters made of light and shadows. And if they flickered a bit, that would be the best. And of course they’d disappear in the sunshine because everything does. And that would be perfect.

  “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

  And thanks for keeping all my secrets. Remember that midnight cavalcade I led through the wilderness to get to the boys’ camp? You are now the official keeper of my secrets.

  You knew I didn’t have the guts to take you to Zurich, didn’t you? And you knew you weren’t coming to Toronto.

  I love you, Elf, I have to go. I have to trim the bushes that are engulfing our backyard. It’s so overgrown now that to get to the back lane we have to slither through this jungle on our stomachs with our rifles held high above our heads and this is not an easy thing for mom to do every day before she makes her rounds on Queen West.

  Arrivederci, Bella Elf!

  p.s. I’ve met a guy. We walk around and around the city talking and having late night Ping-Pong games and the first thing he told me about himself was how he’d been caught suddenly in crossfire in New Jersey. He’d been shot, wrong place at the wrong time, and he died in the ambulance and came back to life in the hospital, then died again, then finally came back to life for good but had to remain naked in an ice pack for two weeks until his heart was ready to start again. He walks me home every Wednesday night and kisses me on the cheek twice before he says good night because he used to live in Paris. Sometimes when we play tennis he jumps over the net and runs to kiss me, too. He has tinnitus which means his head is always humming. He also has an enlarged aorta. He writes his dreams down on his laptop first thing in the morning with a pillow over his head. It’s springtime now, I guess. Mom is at the stove stirring rib sauce and reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Julie called and I put her on speaker so mom could hear her too. How are things? I asked her. She told us that Winnipeg was so green now, the entire province. All of Manitoba just unbelievably green. Do you remember? And do you remember the light? And the warmth? And I told her yeah, I could almost picture that. Almost? she said. No, I said, I can. I see it. How it’s so green? she said. I had to think for a second or two. I closed my eyes. Yeah, I said, I know. It’s an amazing green. I remember now.

  Elf and I were on a plane. We were choosing chicken or beef, we’d forgotten to pre-order a vegetarian meal for Elf, and we were drinking wine out of little bottles and reading our horoscopes to each other from an old issue of People. She was wearing a striped raincoat, I think it was a Marc Jacobs, and high black boots. I wore Converse high-tops and a new short poncho. When I put the poncho on to show Elf she said farewell to arms. Well, we’d taken our jackets and ponchos off for the flight and put them in the overhead bin. Elf wore jeans that were oxblood, so the label said, a really dark red. And mine were ordinary blue and a little bit faded. Elf was tired and put her head on my shoulder and slept for most of the flight and I read. I didn’t really read but I tried to. It felt good to have Elf’s head on my shoulder. It was heavy. Her hair smelled like a grapefruit. The book I was reading or trying to read was a self-published genealogy of a Russian family from the Odessa region. When the plane landed we were in Zurich.

  Elf woke up and smiled sleepily and I said we’re here. She asked me how the book had been and I said well, detailed and full of names that only she would know how to pronounce. We took a cab to our hotel and put our stuff into the room and then walked a few blocks to a really nice restaurant that the woman at the front desk of the hotel had recommended. Before we went into the restaurant we took pictures of each other standing on a bridge. We asked a man walking past if he would take one of us together and he took three or four just to make sure we’d have a good one. He asked us if we were there on a holiday. We told him we were sisters.

  At dinner Elf told me stories about her trips to Europe, when she was a young prodigy. I told her some of mine. At first we laughed a lot, sort of nervously, but eventually we both relaxed and only laughed when things were funny. I ate a lot. I kept ordering new dishes. Elf didn’t eat as much but she liked the warm bread they kept bringing to us in a wooden basket. I remember apologizing to her for having dirty fingernails and she said it was no problem and besides I’d been working really hard lately. When she said that I cried a bit and she came around from her side of the table and gave me a hug. Some people in the restaurant looked at us hugging and smiled.

  I ordered another dessert and coffee. Eventually they told us the restaurant was closing. We walked slowly back to the hotel arm in arm like old-fashioned girls and lay down together in the huge white bed.

  Remember when we watched that solar eclipse? I asked her. You came to my school and dragged me out of Gunner’s English class to watch it with you.

  Yes, she said. It was so cold.

  Well, it was winter and we were lying in snow. In a field.

  Wearing welding helmets, she said, weren’t we?

  Yeah. Where did you get them from?

  I can’t remember. I guess some guy I knew in town.

  Wasn’t it amazing? I asked her.

  The eclipse? It really was, she said. The path of totality.

  What? I said. Is that what it’s called?

  Yeah, remember what dad said? She dropped her voice. The path of totality passed over Manitoba in the early afternoon.

  Oh right, you mean when he said it in that super serious tone?

  It was so funny. She laughed.

  The next one’s not supposed to be for another fifteen hundred years or something like that, I said.

  Then I guess I’ll miss it, said Elf.

  Yeah, I guess I will too.

  Maybe not, said Elf. Who knows?

  There was a skylight over our bed and we could see stars. Elfie took my hand. She put it on her heart and I felt its stro
ng and steady beat. We had an early appointment the next morning. Elf said it was like getting married or writing an exam.

  It’s torture to have to wait all day, she said. Let’s just get up, shower, and go.

  END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With regards to the writing of AMPS, I’m deeply grateful to my agent, Sarah Chalfant, and to my editor, Louise Dennys: serious pros. Whoah. To my oldest friends, Carol Loewen and Jacque Baskier, who continue to save my life and who will find this “acknowledgement” ridiculous. (And to Winnipeg, city of my dreams.) To my Toronto friends for rolling out the welcome mat. To the Rutherfords for their collective embrace! To my kids (you all know who you are—there aren’t any others, don’t worry, ha) who simply will not stop calling me on my bullshit. To my mother, Elvira Toews, Life Force! To Erik Rutherford for his sharp pencil, countless readings, and especially for his blind love. And finally, to my beautiful sister, Marjorie Anne Toews: comic genius, badly missed.

  MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of five previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction), The Flying Troutmans (winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize) and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.