I was trying to edit my stupid novel with the lights off but the only key I can hit in the dark without missing is the delete key. Maybe it’s a sign. By the way, I checked Wikipedia to see what it said about Górecki’s Third Symphony. It’s also called The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and it’s about the ties between a mother and a child. Have you seen her lately? Did she tell you that she finally found her lost hearing aid in the dryer?
I should go now and make my rounds, as the Hiebert kids (remember their station wagon and the garbage bags of pot plants?) used to say when they were selling drugs. I’ve unblocked the toilet but I still have to figure out how to fix the washing machine so it doesn’t flood the basement and wash us all into Lake Ontario.
I will now have done with the ball, and I will moreover go and dress for dinner (to quote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra). Yoli.
p. s. There’s a hill in Toronto, which is exciting. You have to walk up it if you’re going north and down it if you’re going south. The shore of Lake Ontario used to come up far higher. It would have been lapping at this third floor window of mine up until about 13,000 years ago. Then it was known as Lake Iroquois and when the ice dam melted the water drained away and became its present size, so small in comparison, a shadow of its former self. There’s a road in north Toronto called Davenport that follows the Native trail that used to run along the ancient shoreline. I’m sure it was called something other than Davenport then, or maybe davenport was a word dreamed into being by the First Nations people who became tired of sitting on rocks and in canoes and imagined something softer, with springs. Did you know that the various parts of the earth, the continents, are moving closer together at the same speed that fingernails grow? Or are they moving farther apart? Now I can’t remember but anyway it’s the pace I am interested in. And its relation to grief, which you could say, in this context, passes quickly or lasts forever.
p. p.s. Sometimes when I’m working on my book I close my eyes and imagine that I’m in Winnipeg meeting you at some café, maybe the Black Sheep on Ellice Avenue. I can see you smiling now as I walk up the street. You’ve got us a table by the window, there’s a small pile of library books beside you, French ones, and you’ve ordered me a flat white and you’re wearing a half-sexy/half-ironic miniskirt and billowing artist smock and you’re knocking your green marker against your teeth while you smile at me like you’ve got something to tell me, something that will make me laugh. Today I’m working with my front door wide open because it’s so warm. A condo is going up across the street so it’s very loud. Every five minutes a guy yells heads up and then a few seconds later there’s a massive crash and another dust cloud. I miss you, Elf.
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.
NINE
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.