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.