All My Puny Sorrows (14 page)

Answering or not answering the phone has become symbolic of Elf’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.

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.

WHEN ELF WENT AWAY TO EUROPE
my mother decided to emancipate herself as well and enrolled in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist. By this time the church elders had washed their hands of the Von Riesen women. When she graduated she turned the spare bedroom into an office and a steady stream of sad and angry Mennonites came to our house, usually in secret because therapy was seen as lower even than bestiality because at least bestiality is somewhat understandable in isolated farming communities. Sometimes my mother didn’t get paid by her clients with money. They
were often farmers and poor mechanics and housewives with no income of their own. So sometimes Elf and I would come home to find frozen sides of beef in the hallway or chickens in the garage and piles of eggs on the bench in the entrance. Sometimes a man would be in the driveway lying under our car and fixing the transmission or a strange woman would be mowing the lawn or watering the flowers with a gaggle of children traipsing along behind her.

Our mother found it impossible to ask her clients for payment if they couldn’t afford it but the clients insisted on paying her back somehow. One day Elf and I came home from somewhere and found two large bullets on the kitchen table. We asked our mother why they were there and she said one of her clients had asked her to keep them for her so she wouldn’t be tempted to fire them into her head. But how could she fire two bullets into her own head? Elf asked. The other one was for her daughter, our mother said. So she wouldn’t be leaving her alone.

Elf and I went into the yard and sat on the rusty swing set. Elf explained the situation to me. Why doesn’t the woman just run away with her daughter? I asked Elf. She didn’t answer me. I asked again. Why doesn’t the woman just run a— Elf cut me off. It doesn’t work that way, she said. More people kill themselves in jail than attempt to escape. Would you kill me first before you killed yourself if we were in terrible danger? I asked her. Well, I don’t know, she said, it would depend on the type of danger. Would you want me to?

When my mother and her sister Tina were kids they decided to race each other on bicycles and rather than call off the race or waste time going around a massive semi truck that
was blocking their path they skidded under it and came out on the other side, unscathed and laughing.

One winter evening when Elf was sixteen and I was ten she organized a political debate of party candidates. She made lecterns out of cardboard boxes festooned with party paraphernalia and used our mother’s Scrabble timer to keep our speeches under control. My father was the Conservative candidate, my mother was the Liberal candidate, Elf was the NDP candidate and I was a Communist. Although I couldn’t say I was a Communist because of my parents’ awful associations with Russia. Elf had once announced at dinnertime that she had a crush on Joe Zuken, the leader of the Communists in Winnipeg, and my mother had to Heimlich my father who began to choke to death on this news. After my mother had rescued him he said he wished she hadn’t because if Elf was planning to marry (a crush had already led to marriage) Joe Zuken then he, my father, was finished with this tawdry life. Anyway, I had to say I was an Independent. We debated the pros and cons of women’s rights and of euthanasia. Elf won, hands down. She was prepared and fervent. She had statistics to back her points and a tone that was relentlessly persuasive but always measured and respectful. She was eloquent and funny and she won.

Mind you, the judges were friends that she’d made at the music conservatory in Winnipeg and she’d paid for their efforts, secretly, with beer. She was in love with one of them, I could tell. He wore a rope belt and a paint-splattered T-shirt. He sat cross-legged and barefoot in my father’s reading chair. Elf had made sure that a sliver of her blue, lacy bra was peeking
out from her V-neck sweater. He couldn’t stop looking at her, he shifted in his seat but his eyes never strayed, until my father cleared his throat loudly and said I say, sir, Your Honour in the green La-Z-Boy, are you hearing a word of what the others of us are saying?

The airplane lands. My mother and my aunt Tina are waiting. They’re standing at the bottom of the escalator, arms linked, watching me as I float down to meet them. They look like tiny twins to me, fierce, grim-faced, getting down to the business of bearing another cross. They smile at me, murmur Plautdietsch words of endearment, and then I’m in their arms, so strong. We embrace and say nothing. I don’t have a suitcase, we don’t have to wait, and we walk quickly to the car.