All My Puny Sorrows (3 page)

My grandparents originally came from a tiny Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution. Terrible things happened to them there in the land of blood. Any hint of the place, the slightest mention of anything Russian, and my parents would start clawing the air.

Plautdietsch was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent, to shoulder their pain. My grandfather’s parents were murdered in a field beside their barn but their son, my father’s father, survived by burying himself in a pile of manure. Then, a few days later, he was put in a cattle car and taken with thousands of other Mennonites to Moscow and from there sent off to Canada. When Elf was born, he told my parents: Don’t teach your kids Plautdietsch if you want them to survive. When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.

Absurdities and lies, Yoli, said my mother. The worst thing you can do in life is be a bully.

My interview happened in the car on the way to the airport in Winnipeg. As usual, our parents were in the front seat, my dad was driving, and Elf and I were in the back. You’re never coming back, are you? I whispered to her. She told me that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. We looked at fields and
snow. She was wearing her white leather choker with the blue bead and an army jacket. We were driving over black ice.

Is that your question for the interview? she asked me.

Yeah, I said.

Yoli, she said. You should have prepared other questions.

Okay, I said, what’s so hot about playing the piano?

She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and the drama will build—I was writing it down as fast as I could—and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end.

Okay, I said, that should do it, well thanks for sort of answering my question, Weirdo.

Both choices are valid, she said. It depends where you want to leave your audience, happy and content, innocent again, like babies, or wild and restless and yearning for something they’ve barely known. Both are good.

Got it, thanks, I said. Who’s gonna be your page-turner now? Some Norwegian?

She took a book out of her army backpack—she was into military-issued everything like Patty Hearst and Che Guevara—and chucked it into my lap. When you’re finished with that horse series, she said, your real life starts here. She tapped the
book with her finger. She was referring to my obsession with
The Black Stallion
. Also, I had recently started horseback-riding lessons with my friend Julie and was on my way to becoming third-best barrel racer in the provincial Under Thirteen category, which contained only three members.

In a way I’m relieved that you’re going to Oslo, I said.

It was either that or hitchhike barefoot to the west coast, she said.

The roads are icy, said my father. See that semi in the ditch? He wanted to change the subject. Elf’s hitchhiking plan was a crazy idea he had buried. My mother had laughed and said hitchhiking barefoot to the west coast is a reasonable idea, maybe, but not in January. She didn’t believe in burying anything.

What is this? I was looking at the book Elf had given me.

Oh my god, Yolandi, she said. When you see the words “collected poems” on the cover of a book what do you think is inside the book?

Can you drive any faster? I asked my father. We don’t want her to miss her plane. I was trying to act tough but I truly believed that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away, to the extent that I had written a secret will, bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone. I had nothing else but my skateboard and my body to give to people but I attached a note of gratitude to my parents and a drawing of a motorcycle with the New Hampshire state motto: Live Free or Die.

And by the way, I said, I’m not reading those horse books anymore.

What are you reading then? my sister asked.

Adorno, I said.

She laughed. Oh, because you saw that I’m reading him? she asked.

Don’t say “reading him,” I said. You think you’re so big.

Yoli, said Elf, don’t say “you think you’re so big.” That’s what everyone around here says when somebody purports to know about something. I could say tomorrow is Thursday and you’d say “oh, you think you’re so big.” Don’t say it anymore. It’s déclassé.

Our mother said, Elf, c’mon, enough advice on how to live like a dilettante. You’ll be gone soon. We should be using this precious time to have fun! Elf sank back and explained that she was just trying to help me survive the world outside our hamlet. And also, she added,
dilettante
is the exact wrong word for you to have used in this situation. Okay, Elf, said my mom, but let’s just speak English or sing or something like that. She’d had fifteen brothers and sisters so she knew about keeping the peace. Our father suggested we play I Spy.

Oh my god, Elf whispered into my ear. Are we six? Don’t ever tell them I’ve had three different types of sex already, okay?

What do you mean,
three
?

Elf told me that after the poet Shelley drowned, his body was cremated right there on the beach but his heart didn’t burn so his wife Mary kept it in a small silk bag in her desk. I asked her if it wouldn’t have rotted and begun to smell but she said no, it had calcified, like a skull, and that really it was only the remains of his heart. I told her that I would do that for her too, keep her heart with me in my desk or in my gym bag or my pencil case, somewhere very safe, and she hugged me and laughed and told me I was sweet but that really it was a romantic thing for lovers to do.

Before she disappeared behind the frosted glass doors of airport security Elf and I had played one last game of Concentration and in the midst of all that leg slapping and hand clapping she said, Swivelhead (that was her nickname for me because I was very often looking around for solid clues to what was going on and never finding them) you better write me letters. I said yeah, I will, but they’ll be boring. Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life. Well, I said, I’ll try. No, Yoli, said Elf, better than that. She yanked on my arms. Please. You have to. I’m counting on you.

They were calling her flight and she released her grip, she was pulling away from me. Our parents stood stricken but acting brave, smiling big and dabbing at their eyes with tissues. So I said, I will, okay? Take a chill pill. All right, said Elf, I’m outta here … Also, don’t say “chill pill.”
Adieu, Arrividerci!
I know she was crying but she turned her head away at the very last second so I wouldn’t notice and I thought I should include that in a letter to her under Observations of Things Meant to be Hidden. On the way home from the airport my mother drove and my father lay in the back seat with his eyes closed. I sat next to my mother in the front. It was snowing. We couldn’t see anything except snowflakes in the headlights and a tiny bit of the road ahead. I thought the snowflakes looked like notes and signatures falling and swirling over the little stave of road we could see in front of us, one measure of music. My mother told me she would tap the brake slightly to see if it was still icy and before I could stop her we had spun out of control and landed upside down in the ditch.

Janice comes into the hospital room to talk with us. We know Janice from the other times. She’s a psych nurse and during her time off she loves to tango because, she says, tango is about the embrace. She wears light pink track suits. She has a small furry stuffed animal chained to her belt loop. It’s supposed to be something that makes the patients relax and smile. She comes into the room and gives Elf a hug and tells her that she’s happy to see her but unhappy to see her here. Again.

I know, I know, says Elf. I’m sorry. She rakes her fingers through her hair and sighs.

My cellphone buzzes and I reach into my bag to turn it off.

Hey, says Janice. It’s not about being sorry. Right? We don’t say sorry. You haven’t done anything bad or wrong. You’ve acted on a feeling. Right? You wanted to end your suffering. That’s understandable and we want to help you end your suffering in different ways. In healthy ways. Right, Elfrieda? Constructive ways? We’ll start again. She sits down on one of the orange chairs.

Okay, says Elf. Okay.

She’s cringing because she feels like an idiot. These words, Janice’s tone. But Janice is Mother Teresa compared with the other psych nurses and Elf is lucky not to have been thrown naked into the empty concrete room with the drain in the middle of the floor.

How are you, Yolandi? says Janice. She gives me a hug too. Good, fine, I say. Thank you. Worried. A bit.

Of course you are, says Janice. She looks pointedly at Elf who turns away.

Elfrieda? Janice really wants Elf to look at her. I clear my throat and Elf sighs and twists her head around slowly to make
eye contact with Janice. Elf is deeply pissed off, mostly with herself for botching things, but she’s trying really hard to be polite because “good form” is her mantra. It used to be “love” but the more she said it the more it sounded like something doomed, like a wax effigy, and that had made her panic and weep. Then stop saying it! I’d tell her. I know, Yoli, I know, she’d say, but still. Still what? I’d ask. Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she’d read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of forty-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly see, and although he was told that life would be amazing for him then, after the operation it was awful. The world depressed him, its flaws, its duplicity, its rot and grime and sadness, everything hideous now made manifest, everything drab and flaking. He sank into a depression and quickly died. That’s me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she’d always been able to see but she told me she’d never adjusted to the light, she’d just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn’t taken. Reality was a rusty leg trap. Look, I said, then just stop saying “love” over and over, okay? Just don’t do it. But Yoli, you don’t understand, she said. You can’t understand. Which wasn’t true, entirely. I understand that if you say a certain word over and over and it begins to make you feel bad then you should goddamn stop saying that word. Why do we keep having these exasperating conversations? I would ask. They’re not conversations! she’d say. We’re working things out. We’re working things
out
.

Elfreida, Janice says, my brother saw you playing in Los Angeles and said he wept for two hours afterwards. Elf doesn’t say anything. Gratitude or something like that is expected of
her but she doesn’t budge. The three of us are quiet in the room. Elf is examining the hem of her blanket and smoothing out its creases. I’m imagining two hours of weeping. Janice finally clears her throat loudly and both Elf and I are startled.

Do you have concerts coming up? asks Janice.

Yes, ostensibly … Elf says. She’s whispering. I’m afraid she’ll stop talking altogether.

She has a five-city tour actually, I say. Starting … when, Elf? Elf shrugs. Soon, I say, in a few weeks. Mozart. Elf. Is it Mozart?

Sometimes my sister stops talking. Our father did it too, once for a whole year. Then, after watching a vaudeville show in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he started talking again as though he had never stopped. At first it scared me when Elf did it until I realized that her mood hadn’t really changed, she’d just gone silent. She’d write notes to us.

But when Elf plays concerts she talks a lot afterwards about mundane things, earthly things, every little thing, she yabbers away talking for hours and hours like she’s trying to ground herself, to stay, to come back from wherever it was the music took her.

Piano scales were the musical soundtrack to my youth. I could do anything to Elf when she practised her scales and she wouldn’t notice. I could put raisins on the keys and she’d flick them off unperturbed as her fingers zoomed up and down the entire length of the piano. I could lie on top of the piano in a sexy pose and sing I am a V-A-M-P like Cher and she wouldn’t miss a single note, her eyes never left the keys except when they
closed in rapturous ecstasy for a second or two and then the pace of the music would change and Elf would open her eyes wide and fling herself at the piano like a leopard onto a snake, a savage assault as though the piano were both her lover and most mortal enemy.

She did eventually come home again from Norway and a bunch of other places. She moved back home with my parents and stayed in bed and cried for hours at a time or stared at the wall. There were dark circles around her eyes and she was sombre, listless and then strangely exuberant and then despondent again. By that time I had moved away from East Village to Winnipeg and had two kids with two different guys … as a type of social experiment. Just kidding. As a type of social failure. And I was scrambling around trying to make money and to study and master (and fail at mastering) the art of being an adult.

I’d visit my parents and Elf, with my little kids in tow, Will was four and Nora was a baby, and I’d lie in the bed next to Elf and we’d look at each other and smile and hold each other while the kids crawled around on top of us. She wrote letters to me during that time. Long, funny letters about death, about strength, about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and the intricacy of despair on pink stationery in coloured felt-tipped markers. Then, after a few months, she slowly got her health back. She started playing the piano again and doing a few concerts and then she met a guy, Nic, who adored her and now they live together in Winnipeg, which means Muddy Waters, number one on the Exotic City Index—the coldest city in the world and yet the hottest, the farthest from the sun and yet the brightest, where two fierce, wild rivers meet to join forces and conquer man. Nic took piano lessons from Elf for a few months. That’s how they
met, but Nic admitted later that the only reason he took piano lessons from her was so that he could sit next to her on the little bench and have her gently place his fingers on the keys. He even bought her a new piano bench, although as soon as she saw it she commanded that he rip off its soft padding—What the heck is
that
doing there?—as if playing music is about comfort.