All My Puny Sorrows (29 page)

Will slept on the couch in the living room and Nora, my mother and I slept together that night in my mother’s giant bed. She swept all the things that were on it, whodunits, clothing, glasses, agenda, her laptop, onto the carpet, but we didn’t get much sleep. We talked late into the night and early into the next morning, about Elf, her inimitable style, about the past, about anything. Except the future, that was mortal combat territory. It was June and the sun rose early. For the last six weeks I’d been flying back and forth, back and forth, from the west to the east to the west to the east.

This is the strangest slumber party I’ve ever attended, said Nora.

Ain’t that the truth, said my mom.

We watched some World Cup soccer on TV, it was an endless tournament it seemed, on for months. We wept with the losers, we looked to them for guidance, how to deal, and turned away from the winners, they didn’t interest us in the least, and then Nora thought we should exchange shirts the way the players did after the game and my mom ended up wearing a tiny sweaty (still from tennis) T-shirt that said
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
and Nora in my old sweaty T-shirt that said
Inland Concrete
on it and me in my mother’s soft worn-out nightie from another era, a gift from my father. I imagined him choosing it for her at the Hudson’s Bay store on the corner of Portage and Memorial Boulevard. It was a tradition for my father to buy my mother a nightgown for Christmas. And almost always a lamp. Things needed to gird yourself against the night. Or one to help you sleep and one to help you stay awake, like pills. Sometimes Elf and I would help him pick out the nightgowns. Sometimes they were sweet, modest and flannel. Sometimes
they were short and flimsy. I hadn’t really ever spent much time wondering about my dad’s frame of mind when he chose these nightgowns. Or maybe the influence Elf and I wielded over the process shifted over the years as we became women ourselves.

I lay in bed counting in my mind the number of times Elf had used the word
goodbye
in that short paragraph. Four times, plus another three times in different languages. Goodbye times seven. All right, Elf, all right. In the very early morning light I saw Nora and my mother sleeping, finally, on their sides and face to face, holding hands, all four hands entwined like a skein of wool, like a mating ball of garter snakes, so that whatever was inside them would be very well protected.

One evening when I was a child and Elf was a teenager and we were all together as a family in our little Mennonite town getting ready to eat our supper Elf went over to the dining room table and snorted through her nose and said hey, excuse me, but who’s the Mickey Mouse that set this table? It had been my father, put to work by our exasperated mother, who just before that had been reminding him of the year we were living in, how it had contained some groundbreaking denouement on the rights of women and other types of people. Our father rarely got angry at anyone but himself but this time he got a little huffy, saying how he’d gone and tried to be a modern man, by setting the table, only to be met with snide derision so why should he bother? Anyway, the thing about it is my memory of how Elf said who’s the Mickey Mouse that set this table? Those were the exact words that came to my mind when I saw her smashed-up face, after my mother insisted on
seeing her body before it was cremated. It was a train, the thing that had smashed her face, just like the one that killed our father. She hadn’t waited for it long, apparently, her timing was good. Where does the violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones? Nic and I walked my mother up the aisle in the empty funeral home sanctuary and stood on either side of her with our arms linked tight as though we were about to perform a Russian folk dance. The funeral director had suggested to my mother that if she wanted to see my sister’s body then she should perhaps just look at her hand. He could have her up there in the wooden box entirely covered except for one slim, pale hand made visible. My mother disagreed with him. I will see my daughter’s face, she said. So there she was, the hole in her head sewn up like a homemade baseball and that’s when I thought who’s the Mickey Mouse that stitched up my sister’s face? And then, after about a minute of staring at her, hoping that she would blink or open her eyes and laugh at this absurd spectacle, I changed my mind and I felt a powerful, oceanic feeling of gratitude towards the funeral director who had tried so hard to restore my sister’s beauty for one last look from her mother.

Elfie left me her life insurance. She also left me, à la Virginia Woolf, a monthly sum of two thousand dollars for the next two years so that I can stay at home, in a room of my own, and write. So get to it, Swiv, she wrote in a little note she’d left just for me. Everything else, except for trust funds she’d set up for my kids and money for my mom so she could travel comfortably and buy herself powerful hearing aids and a spiffy new car,
went to Nic. I’m going to use the life insurance money to buy a dilapidated fixer-upper house in Toronto. I think Elf would be pleased with my decision. Was she calling my bluff? Had she ever intended to come to Toronto? Had I ever intended to take her to Zurich?

My mother is moving to Toronto to live with me and Nora.

Can I? she asked on the phone.

Please do, I said.

There was no debate, no discussion. It was time to circle our wagons. We’ve lost half our men and supplies are dwindling and winter is coming. We three ladies will live in this old wrecked house, the one that I just bought thanks to Elf.

I
’
M LYING ON AN AIR MATTRESS
in an empty house in the middle of the night half listening to Nelson tell me about his babies, the ones here, the ones in Jamaica, and the grief that the baby mamas are giving him, which is why he has to work all night as well as all day. Nelson is standing on the top rung of a stepladder straining to reach the ceiling with his paintbrush. I’m not sleeping with Nelson. I’ve hired him to paint. I’m drifting in and out of consciousness trying to remember how a conversation went, one I had with Elf years ago. It was something like:

Hey, what’s that in your ear?

My ear? Nothing.

Yeah, there’s something in your ear, Yoli. Like semen or something …

I don’t have semen in my ear.

Yeah, it is! I’m pretty sure. Yeah, you’ve got semen in your ear!

It’s shampoo.

It’s not shampoo, come here.

Stop it!

Seriously, come here, let me check.

No.

Then what is it? Taste it.

It’s shampoo. I just had a shower.

How can you tell? Taste it.

Elfrieda, I don’t have to taste whatever is in my ear, which is shampoo, to know that it’s not semen because I haven’t been in any type of situation—

Ha! God, you’re a liar … Relax. I love that you have semen in your ear.

I am listening to Nelson tell me about his life while he paints fresh white over battered walls. My new house is falling apart but has good bones, according to my real estate agent. I’m afraid she means it literally. Yesterday I found a book in the kitchen cupboard, left behind by the previous creepy owner, called
Serial Killers A to Z
. My real estate agent hadn’t wanted to show me this house at all, it made her grimace and feel dirty, but I told her time is running out. My mother is coming.

The house is close to a polluted lake, wedged in between a funeral home, a mental hospital and a slaughterhouse. Something for each of us, said my mother over the phone when I’d described it to her. The walls are cracked, or missing or crumbling, the floors are wrecked, the stairs, every set of them, are broken, the bricks are disintegrating into red powder that floats around the house like volcanic ash and gets into your eyes and mouth, the roof needs replacing, the foundation is full of holes, the yard is overrun with weeds, and skunks live under the deck. Late one night I came upon a hooker (Will, since starting his second year of university, says to call them sex trade workers) and her client having a meeting and using my back fence for purchase. I said oh brother, the way my father would have if he’d ever encountered a lady of the night. On the tip of the prostitute’s nose was a red dime-sized scab as though she had originally decided to leave the house as a clown but then changed her mind back to prostitute. Every morning I pick up the used condoms and needles with a long stick and put them into a blue pail near the back gate, a gate that opens the wrong way and smashes me in the face several times a day. When the pail is full I’ll … I’m not sure. The so-called yard around the house is only dirt and garbage and the ground is saturated with poisonous lead from the surrounding factories.

I have four weeks before my mother arrives with her United Allied moving company monster truck to whip this sinkhole into shape. Nora will live on the top floor, in the attic with the squirrels, me on the second with the mice, and my mom on the main floor, close to the skunks. We will all be able to step out of our broken back screen doors, on different levels, and break into song like they do in
La Bohème
. This is where we’ve come
to heal. As they say. There’s an abandoned cinder-block motor parts factory across the lane, behind the house. It blocks a lot of the western sky except if we go to the third floor roof, and then we can see almost all the way back to Winnipeg.

There’s a moat of sludge around the cinder-block factory and people throw garbage into it, cribs, broken tennis rackets, computers, soiled underwear, alarm clocks. Late at night two mysterious wordless men in hip waders stand in the sludge and vacuum it out of the moat so that it runs brown and toxic down the back lane south towards Adelaide, and on to King Street and finally to Lake Ontario where it will find its own. I’ve hired someone to attach a bedroom to the back of the house, one that is large and bright and warm and that will one day have a beautiful view onto a flower-strewn yard topped with blue skies and soaring hopes and dreams. For my mother.

One of the guys I’ve hired to repair the house has invited me out on a date sort of, to his support group for adult children of alcoholics. When I told him that my parents weren’t alcoholics he said it didn’t matter, we’ve all got our shit. Another one, who used to be a philosophy professor in Bucharest, has begun to urinate off the front steps and is encouraging all the other guys to do it too. He claims the smell of human urine will drive away the skunks. At night, after hot, humid days of negotiating various prices, always in cash with various men doing various things in, on top of and outside the house, I lie on this air mattress in our empty home and listen to Nelson tell me stories in the dulcet tones of his Jamaican birthplace of babies and women and work.

My right eye has exploded because it’s August. It has puffed out and gone dark around the border. I have an allergy to autumn, to shorter days and longer nights, to death. I had an argument today with a friend. She lured me out of my house on the pretence that I needed some fresh air, a change of scenery. That I had to move on. Baby steps.

It was a mistake.

We sat in a café called Saving Grace on Dundas and ordered eggs. She told me that she’s been worrying about me so much, it must be awful, everything I’ve been going through, and that in her opinion “to die by one’s own hand” is always a sin. Always. Because of the suffering it causes the survivors. I asked her what about all the people who suffer because of assholes who are alive? Is it a sin for the assholes to keep on living?

Okay, she said, but we’re here on this earth, and even if we didn’t choose to be, we inherit all kinds of duties, to the people who raise us and to the people who love us. I mean, everyone has personal agonies, sure, but to die by one’s own hand, ironically enough, even though it’s an act of self-annihilation, seems to me the ultimate act of vanity. It’s just so incredibly selfish.

Can you please stop saying to die by one’s own hand? I asked.

Well, what should I say? she said.

Suicide! When someone’s murdered do you explain it as, oh, he died by the hand of another? This isn’t the freaking
Count of Monte Cristo
.

I just thought it was more delicate, she said.

And also, I said, selfish? How could it be selfish? Unless you’ve seen the agony first-hand you can’t really pass judgment.

Okay, she said, but if your sister had been thinking of how it would affect you when she—

AFFECT ME? I said. I’m sorry. People were looking at me. Listen, I said, I don’t think you understand. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but really how could you understand what another person’s suicide means? My friend asked the waitress for more coffee. I said that actually, now, I’d begun to measure a person’s character and integrity by their ability to kill themselves.

What do you mean? she said. Look, I don’t think—

Jeremy Irons, for example. I bet he’d be able to, I said. Vladimir Putin? No way. I said the names of a few people we knew and said yes or no after each name. Then I said my friend’s name and paused. I stared at her with one exploding eye and she told me we shouldn’t talk about suicide anymore because it might rupture our friendship. I told her that we would talk about it forever. I told her that if she didn’t want her plane to crash she should go over all the ways that it could crash in her mind. She told me I might be having buried-anger issues and I told her oh, mind reader, do you fucking think so?

I tried to apologize, to ease the tension. I didn’t know what to say. I quoted Goethe the way my mother did from
Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit
 … “suicide is an event of human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew” … but while I was saying the words my friend was checking her cellphone, calculatedly not listening to me. I had offended her. I didn’t blame her. I wanted to get back on track. Somewhere I had read that animals are an excellent neutral subject. I asked her if she had pets. She said I knew that she didn’t. I told her about Lefty. She was a border collie, right, I said to my friend. And you know when my kids were little they’d have all their friends over and they’d all be playing in
the backyard and I’d check on them every once in a while, and then one time I looked through the window at them and they were all squeezed into one corner of the yard—but it was like they were oblivious to it and they just kept on playing—and do you know why? Because Lefty was a border collie. And border collies are herding dogs. It was in her nature to herd, so my kids and their friends eventually all became squished into the corner of the yard and Lefty had done what she was meant to do. She had no control over it. She had to herd. So do you understand why I’m fucking mad?