All My Puny Sorrows (15 page)

My mother is driving fast, as usual, but this time I don’t ask her to slow down. My aunt Tina is in the back seat staring out the window. I have one hand on my mother’s shoulder and the other slung over the back seat, holding on to Tina’s hand, so we’re a human chain. Are Mennonites a depressed people or is it just us? My aunt Tina lost Leni, her daughter, my cousin, to suicide seven years ago, three years after my father killed himself. We’ve been here before. Everything is a repeat, another take.

Nic is at the hospital. He’s on his cellphone. We wave a little and nod. Julie has shown up too. I hug her and whisper thanks in her ear and she squeezes hard. We go in by twos, no larger groups
allowed. My mother and my aunt go in together. I’m talking to Will on my cell. He asks me to tell Elf something but I can’t make out what it is because he’s whispering. Will? I ask. Hang on, he says. I wait and it’s quiet on his end. Will? I can hear him crying. Just that I love her, he finally manages to say and hangs up. When they come out my mother is calm, she won’t cry now, she shrugs and shakes her head and Nic puts his arm around her shoulders and she leans into him, her head against his chest. He guides her to a chair and she sits down and stares into the middle distance, saying a few words to herself, or a prayer. I can see the marks on her arm where the dog’s teeth ripped open her skin. Two holes, like a vampire bite. Aunt Tina goes to get us coffee.

Julie and I are a team and we pull up chairs to flank my sister and we hold her hands and say nothing because we have nothing to say. There is a tube in Elf’s throat and a machine that breathes for her. We look at her and she looks at us and shrugs the way my mother did. How many words do we have left? She closes her eyes and then opens them again and pulls her hand out of mine so that she can tap her forehead. I don’t know what she means. That she’s crazy? She’s forgotten something? Her head hurts? I kiss her cheek. A Neil Young song is playing over the sound system that’s been set up here in the intensive care ward. He won’t stop searching for a heart of gold.

Elf taps her nose, draws imaginary circles around her eyes. Julie says she wants her glasses, that’s what she means. Right? Elf’s chin drops slightly, a nod. I get up and look for them. I go out of the room and ask the nurse if she has Elf’s glasses. She doesn’t. Julie volunteers to look for them, to ask Nic or my mother if they have them. She kisses Elf on the cheek, whispers
something to her that makes her eyes fill with tears, maybe she says Elf, you’re the best, and leaves.

Here we are. I’m relieved that Elf wants her glasses. That there is something she wants to see. She has bright white bandages on her wrists that look like sweatbands. They’re only missing the Nike swoosh. Tubes are taped to her face. I use the edge of my shirt sleeve to wipe the tear that’s sliding down her cheek. I tell her I love her. One corner of her mouth is pulled to the side to accommodate the hose. I remember when she took breathing lessons, something called the Alexander Technique, and how I made fun of her. You have to learn how to breathe? She told me yes, there was a right way and a wrong way. She offered to teach me how to breathe properly using my diaphragm from deep within me but I lost interest quickly. She’d tried to be my piano teacher too, but that was a disaster. And to teach me Spanish. She told me how to say I have a little man when I should have said I’m a bit hungry.

I leave Emergency to find my mother and my aunt who are drinking black coffee in the cafeteria. My aunt Tina is older by a few years but otherwise they are almost the same person. They both have snow-white bobs, flashing cat eyes, a million wrinkles each and really strong grips. They’re barely five feet tall. When they see me they both call out my name and make room between them and pull me onto a chair and put their arms around me and my aunt tells me she loves me and my mother tells me she loves me and I tell them I love them too. I can barely breathe. I’m jealous of my own mother for having her sister near her at a time like this. When my father died Tina came then also to be with my mother and my sister and me, and bought each of us a dozen pairs of white cotton panties so
we wouldn’t have to worry about mundane things like laundry while we were planning a funeral. When my mother had her bypass surgery Tina came then too and took me to Costco and we pushed a giant cart around an enormous warehouse buying my mother a year’s supply of ketchup and toilet paper and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which has recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth. During her recovery Tina bathed her sister gently, laughing, immodest, the way I helped my sister shower when she was too weak from starving herself to do it alone. My mother a Rubenesque bundle of flesh and scars, a disciple of life, and my sister a wraith. How does one give birth to the other?

Nic is talking to a doctor. I can see him through the glass wall beside the door of Elf’s room. He’s wearing a blue shirt with a collar, pants that are not jeans and black sneakers. One hand is on his forehead while he speaks and the other against the glass wall, his fingers splayed like a fan. I want to hear what the doctor is saying and I tell Elf that I’ll be right back but when I get to where Nic and the doctor are standing the doctor has walked away and Nic is simply standing there alone propping himself up against glass. When he sees me he takes his hand off his forehead and asks me how I am. He tells me that the doctor has said Elf will probably be all right and they will know in a few hours or tomorrow morning. She has harmed her throat, he says, and may not be able to talk at all or not very well and there may be some organ damage to be determined down the line but she’ll live.

When I was fourteen Elf came home for Christmas. She had just been at Juilliard on some kind of special scholarship. Amazing things were happening. She had a top agent and gigs lined up all over the world. Elf and I were sitting on the floor of the bathroom and she was crying inconsolably and I was trying to get her to stop crying and come to dinner. The table was set and all of our relatives from my father’s side were seated already. We had candles, turkey, singing, the celebration of the birth of a messiah that I still believed in. Elf told me she couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t do it. What? I said. She couldn’t stand it, the appearance of happiness, the forced enthusiasm, and everything a performance. I mean, if Jesus actually died on a cross with nails in his hands and feet to save us shouldn’t we do more to express our gratitude than devour a turkey one evening in the dead of winter? She wanted me to laugh and help her to carry out some type of desperado action, to pry open the bathroom window and push her through to freedom. Let’s just go have Christmas, you and me, at the pool hall, she said. I was begging her to dry her tears and wash her face and join us at the table. I told her that everyone was waiting for her. She told me she didn’t care, she couldn’t do it, I should tell them she wasn’t joining us. I told her she had to, it’s Christmas! And she laughed then sobbed, and told me I was funny but no, she wouldn’t join us at the table.

I continued to beg, please, please, please get up and wash your face and put on your new Red Alert lipstick and come to the table. Our mother came to the door and knocked softly and said honey? Girls? Are you in there? We’re ready to eat. Elf banged her head against the bathroom wall and it scared me. Don’t do that, I whispered, and she did it again. Girls? said our
mother. What’s going on in there? Are you okay? I said yeah, yeah, we’re fine, we’ll be right there. I had Elf in a headlock and she was trying to pull out of it but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted my sister to stop smashing her head against ceramic tiles and come to the dinner table. I wanted to see her weird eyes flash happiness while she told hilarious stories using the occasional French or Italian word about the city and about concert halls and all things sophisticated. I wanted my younger cousins to stare at her unabashedly with great admiration and envy, and for Elf then to put her arm around my shoulder. I wanted her to be her intoxicating, razor-sharp self and I wanted to sit next to her and feel the heat she radiated, the energy of a fearless leader, a girl who moved easily in the world, my older sister.

I waited for our mother to leave. I still had Elf in a headlock. She kicked her legs out and made animal noises. I told her that I would kill myself if she didn’t come to the table. She stopped moaning and looked at me and furrowed her brow as though we were actors and I’d deviated from the script and ruined the take.

Our father once had a plan to sell placemats to truck-stop restaurants. He had designed these placemats himself and had thousands of them printed. The placemats were intended to educate diners on Canadian history while they chewed on their Denver sandwiches. The facts were presented in cartoon form, drawn by my father, with word bubbles, and jokes and riddles. They were meant to appeal to kids and adults alike. But most of all they were meant to educate what my father believed to be an ignorant and indifferent public. What’s more interesting than
our own history? he’d exclaim. It truly pained him to see his fellow Canadians drive quickly past historical plaques, dismiss Canadian content rules, fail citizen tests and screw up the words to our national anthem at hockey games. Things have happened here, he would say.

One year between Christmas and New Year’s my father took the train to Ottawa to do research in the government archives and to attend Lester Pearson’s funeral. He was thirty-seven years old, an elementary school teacher from a small prairie town. He stood outside the legislative building in the cold with thousands of others to pay his respects. While he was standing there he began a conversation with the man standing next to him. The man eventually invited my father to his home for a New Year’s Eve party and that was the first time my father had ever been to a New Year’s Eve party in his life. It was a very fancy house, said my father. In a very fancy neighbourhood called the Glebe. My father was moved by the stranger’s kindness. Later, when he came home and told the story, a type of hush fell over us. I remember being afraid he would start to cry. What I took from the story was that my father had lost his leader and that he needed a friend. He had always believed that one day he’d meet his hero, Lester B. Pearson, in the flesh and that they’d have a conversation about Canada. My mother had asked him if he’d had a glass of champagne at the party and he said no, oh no Lottie, of course not. I was only seven or eight when he told us this story. Elf and my mother and I sat in awe of my father that evening when he described it all to us, a state funeral and a New Year’s Eve party all in one night. But it made me feel uneasy in ways I couldn’t describe at the time. I had never seen him cry before, and he didn’t actually, I just knew
that he wanted to, and that’s the memory that always comes back to me first.

The summer when I was maybe nine years old he asked me if I wanted to go on the road with him from truck stop to truck stop all over Manitoba and Ontario while he tried to sell his placemats. I was game and away we went. I remember having only one outfit for this journey, an orange terry towel T-shirt, cut-offs and my North Star runners. I had a stack of Famous Five books. I never brushed my teeth and I ate pancakes and Oh Henry! bars for every meal. At night my father and I would stay in cheap motels and I’d fill our ice bucket and suck on chunks of ice and watch TV while my father slept and snored. When I was tired I’d put the chain lock on the door and slowly open and close it a few times to make sure it held.

He wasn’t making any sales. He gave me placemats to draw on when I got bored in the car. He started to get discouraged and I sang goofy songs to cheer him up like “Pop Goes the Weasel” and “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I didn’t want to go into the restaurants with him anymore because it was too embarrassing. He was so friendly, so sincere. All he wanted to do was educate people about Canada. He was willing to take very little money for a box of placemats, then he was willing to give them away for free. Even then restaurant managers and gas station owners would stare at them for a minute or two and shake their heads, no, they didn’t think they wanted them.

My teeth were fuzzy and my orange T-shirt was filthy. My father was defeated and we went home. We’d been away for about a week. When we got home my mother was in the kitchen laughing with some friends of hers and Elf was practising her piano. This seemed always to be the scenario. He told my mom
and her friends what had happened, but not with many words, more with his eyes and his shoulders. He went to his bedroom.

I sat down with my mom and her friends and told them a colourful story of our time on the road. I made them laugh. Elf stopped playing the piano and came to the kitchen to find out what was going on. I told her what had happened. She didn’t laugh at all. She said oh no, oh no, that’s awful. Is he okay?

Who? I asked her.

Dad!

She went to her bedroom too, and closed the door on us for a long time. I think it was dark before she came out because the fire station siren had sounded twice, once for kids to go inside for dinner at six o’clock and once for them to go inside for bed at nine o’clock. I’m not sure how long my dad stayed in his room.

My father forced the town hall to give him money to open up a library. They didn’t want to. They thought it was a waste of money and dangerous and unmanly of my father to talk about it. He tried to convince them. It was forty degrees below zero. It was dinnertime. I asked my mom: hey, where’s dad? She told me he was out knocking on people’s doors to try to get them to sign the petition for a library. For weeks my father would walk the streets of East Village with his clipboard and ballpoint pens knocking on doors and begging for support. He went out at dinnertime when everyone was at home. It was dark. He went to every house in town. Sometimes my mom helped him. When he came home his glasses would fog up as soon as he stepped into the house. My mom tried to convince him to wear long
johns, it was the coldest winter in history, but he refused to. She had to karate-chop his legs to get the blood circulating. Why do you hate long johns so much? she’d ask him.