I miss you. Nora and I went up to the top of the CN Tower yesterday. We’re trying to understand our new city from a bird’s-eye view. We put a loonie into a powerful set of binoculars but we still couldn’t see you. We went up to the rooftop bar at the Park Hyatt and I had a glass of twelve-dollar wine and we shared some olives and almonds. We gazed off a little despondently in a westerly direction. We miss you. Nora asked me if I regretted having children which shocked me and made me feel like a terrible mother, like I’d been giving her the impression that she was slowly crushing the life right out of me. But then she went on to say that she was thinking of never getting pregnant because she couldn’t bear the thought of her body housing an alien and ballooning into some grotesque caricature of womanhood. I hope she doesn’t have an eating disorder. I’ve read that eating disorders are often the fault of overbearing mothers, but I’m so underbearing it’s not even funny. Maybe she’s imagined an overbearing mother to compensate for my lack of bearing and it’s this imaginary pushy mother that’s caused her to have an eating disorder. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, not really. I shouldn’t try to blame something that doesn’t even exist on an imagined imaginary mother. I try to remember how skinny you were when you were her age. You still are!
So while we were out there on the rooftop bar an elderly suntanned man with a World Series ring, wearing white leather shoes and no socks, told Nora she was beautiful. He asked me if I was her sister. Ha ha, oh the oft-told jokes of stale old men on the make. He said Nora should be a model. I said well isn’t that flattering but no, she’s a dancer — with the words back off you transparent creep radiating unspoken from my assassin eyes. We walked all the way home singing mash-ups of old songs that both of us knew. It’s so cute when she says things like, what! You know “Torn Between Two Lovers”? She even let me hold her hand for a minute or two. She told me that I was surprisingly attractive considering my features, which made me want to break down and bawl with gratitude. Like any fourteen-year-old, she’s not exactly wildly indiscriminate with her compliments. Her feet are ravaged from dancing. They look like Grandpa Werner’s. Remember when he did puppet shows with them and made us scream? I massage them for her and afterwards my own hands are callused and raw from scraping them against her thorny feet. I asked her about her little Swedish boyfriend (to which she took exception, his name is Anders and he’s apparently ripped) and if they were able to communicate in any language. She said no, dreamily, like it was perfect that way. I wanted to ask her if she was having sex with him but I didn’t have the nerve. She’s not even fifteen. I couldn’t handle the answer. I’m a useless mother, my god.
So I called Will in New York last night and he told me he had rats in his apartment. He asked me how you were. He misses you too! Speaking of rats, I think, on top of the ants, we have mice, which I guess is comparatively speaking a relief. In Toronto they say that if you have mice you don’t have rats and vice versa because rats eat mice. I wonder if rats eat mourning doves. Lately I’ve been having a recurring dream where a rat gets stuck under my shirt and I can’t get it out of there and I have to pound away on my chest until the thing drops dead and bloodied onto the floor and I’m exhausted. The power keeps going out. I miss you like crazy.
Beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived, Y.
(That’s what Madame de Staël wrote at the end of a letter to some Chevalier guy, but now it’s what I’ve written to my Elfrieda.)
Write me back, Amps!
p. s. or pick up your goddamn phone.
p. p.s. Was talking to mom the other day. She says that you’re listening non-stop to Górecki’s Symphony Number Three? What is that one about?
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.
Dear Elf,
When will you write me back? One thing I’ve noticed about men is that they become uncomfortable and a bit angry when, after having sex with them, you cry your eyes out for a few hours and refuse to tell them why you’re upset.
Finbar and I are so incompatible. I only sleep with him because he wants to and he’s good-looking — I’m pathetic, I know. Louche. And I’m a horrible role model — a mother to a soon-to-be or already sexually active daughter. Seriously, who wants a mother who buys flavoured condoms from the machine at the Rivoli? (I was caught off guard and that’s all they had.) Although Nora doesn’t actually know about Finbar because I make sure that all our sad outings are brief and furtive and spaced far apart like eclipses. Just now, this second, telling you about this stuff makes me want to cry my eyes out. I think I might just do that. I’d like to fall in love again. I wish Dan and I didn’t fight so much — he’s a good dad to Nora when he’s not in Borneo. You’re so lucky to have Nic! He’s so lucky to have you! Say hi to him by the way. How’s his kayak?
Anders (N’s little Swedish boyfriend) just told me he’d blocked up the toilet, and that he’d messed up the washing machine when he tried to wash all his clothes in one go — why is he doing his laundry here??? — so now his clothes are locked in the machine, and the machine is leaking water into the towels he used to cover the floor. He indicated all of this with charades and drawings because of our language barrier.
It’s evening now. Nora and Anders have gone to a birthday party. Before they left I forced them to show me some dance moves, something they were working on at school, and they were reluctant at first but finally agreed to do a quick one and oh my god, it was amazing. They’re just kids but suddenly they were these world-weary though incredibly agile lovers swooning, then dying, then being reunited. They were so grave, so measured and yet free at the same time in all their movements. You have to come here to see them dance! When they were finished, bent and twisted into some kind of expressive shape which they held for an impossibly long time before standing up and bowing sweetly, I burst into applause — I was trying not to cry — and they were instantly transformed back into ordinary, awkward teens, shuffling out the door, bumping into each other, saying sorry, laughing nervously, holding hands shyly when a second ago it seemed like they were the original inventors of passion and grace. We’ve lost our power.