So, I said, you dreamed at the sleep clinic?
Boy! she said. Did I ever. I had an epiphany.
Yeah? I said.
Well, you know how I hate cooking so much?
Yeah.
Well, I’ve been wondering about that. I’ve been wondering what I should do about that. So I had this dream last night and it came to me. Frozen food! Just a voice telling me that. So I figured out, from my dream, that I should go to the freezer aisles and get a lot of frozen food, pizzas, meatballs, perogies, chicken fingers, whatever, and stock my freezer and that’ll be the end of it. I won’t have to worry about cooking but I’ll still have food to eat. It just came to me like that, like a billboard: frozen food!
That sounds pretty good, I said. My mother was dreaming of survival. She was having survival dreams. She was having dreams that were telling her how to keep being alive. I wouldn’t tell her that frozen foods are full of sulphates, who cares, when she was deep into the cure.
I had a dream of my own. It wasn’t a Switzerland-scenario dream. Elfrieda and I were in her yellow kitchen next to the giant picture window talking and laughing about nothing. We were just pleasantly lost in a maze of words that didn’t mean much, telling stories and making each other laugh. We were there but then, in my dream, I wanted to tell Elf something more urgent, something about my work, about my fear of finishing my book and of how it would be received and then there was a pause in our chatter and Elf was yawning, and I thought now I will tell her this urgent thing but she put her hand up to stop me so I kept my mouth shut. She took my hand and she looked hard at me, she put her face closer to mine so I would really get what she was about to say, that she meant it, her eyelashes a black fringe, she was being serious, and I thought oh thank god, she’ll say something to make me feel better, braver, and then she said Yoyo, you’re on your own now. And my feeling in the dream was the feeling I had when I watched my neighbour’s video about her bird. The suddenness of it, something lost in a second forever. My sister was a dark blur moving towards a rectangle of light. But now after hearing my mom’s survival dream I think maybe this is my survival dream and it’s not a nightmare. It’s the beginning of my own cure. Because to survive something we first need to know what it is we’re surviving.
On Fridays we have family meetings. Sometimes Nora doesn’t come to the family meetings because she has better things to do — there is Anders, there are parties, she’s young. We give her the minutes from the meetings. I’m not sleeping around anymore. I’m embarrassed about it and Elf isn’t around anymore to remind me that I’m not a slut and that there’s no such thing okay Yoli, have I taught you nothing, please stop equating morality with outdated self-serving patriarchal notions of women’s sexuality.
Finbar called to ask if I had killed my sister and needed legal counsel and I told him no, she saved me the trouble. He apologized. He hadn’t known it was that serious. He said he was sorry. I thanked him. He said but we had something, right? I liked the way he put that. It might have been a hallucination but it was something. I said yes, and I thanked him again. We said goodbye forever, behaving like grown-ups. I live with my mother and my daughter. We stand outside on our various perches, on all three floors, and shout things at each other like the smoking women in Balconville. I don’t have time to sleep around. I have raccoons and dreams and water guns and grief and toxic moats and guilt and used condoms to pick up from the driveway.
My mother said I couldn’t tie off grief like a used condom and toss it in the garbage. I asked her what she knew of condoms and she told me she had been a social worker for a long time which is what she always says after surprising us with information we didn’t think she had. Yesterday I was walking through Trinity Bellwoods Park and discovered my mother lying on a bench, sleeping. I sat beside her for a while and read the paper. After ten or fifteen minutes I gently nudged her and said mom, it’s time to go home. She told me she loved sleeping outdoors. Is that true, I said, or were you out walking and suddenly overcome with exhaustion?
My sister gave me an emergency ladder once. It was the kind of ladder that you hook onto your upstairs window ledge and then climb down it if there’s a fire in your house. For years I stored it in the basement but now I’m beginning to understand the wisdom of keeping it on the second floor.
I phoned the hospital in Winnipeg and asked if I could please speak to the patient named Elfrieda Von Riesen. They told me she was not a patient there. I told the hospital well that’s strange because she definitely had been a patient there and the last thing I’d heard was that she wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital any time soon. They said well, they had no information regarding that. I told them I was tired of all their fripperies. They were sorry about that. I hung up.
And then it was almost Christmas already. Nic was going to join us. He was on the phone from Winnipeg. He had an idea for the headstone: And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.
What’s that? I said.
You don’t know? he said.
I don’t know every poem, I said.
It’s John Clare.
Did Elf like him?
Very much. It’s called “I Am!” He wrote it in a mental asylum.
No way, I said.
Pardon me?
Let’s not have everything tied up to lunacy, I said.
You mean for the inscription?
For everything.
Well, do you have suggestions?
When I got back to Toronto after Elf died I had wanted to take some of her ashes with me and keep them here but Nic didn’t like the idea of divvying her up so they’re all buried under an enormous tree in the Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. My mother had suggested that she be buried with our dad out in East Village and the cemetery guy had said sure, there was room for three if they were urns and not coffins (suggesting that my mom would eventually go in there too) but Nic said no way, Elf had said expressly that she did not want to be buried in East Village. That would be like giving the body of Louis Riel back to the Canadian government as a souvenir. What about your backyard? I asked Nic. After all, she was a homebody. He said very funny and that there were legal issues with a backyard burial. She wasn’t a cat. That’s true, I told him. He told me that I had done everything I could and that no one was to blame. I wasn’t sure about that. What about Zurich, I wondered. She would have died peacefully and not alone. That’s all she wanted. I had failed. We didn’t talk about that. I told him he had done everything possible too.
She was the one who got the pass, I said. You know how she would have been. She could talk her way out of the ward.
But I should have fought harder to have them keep her, he said.
You couldn’t have fought harder.
So no John Clare poem?
Maybe. But I don’t like the asylum connotations. Plus, if it’s a poet it should be a woman.
But most of the really great woman poets killed themselves so that has connotations too.
I know and that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid here, right, is labelling her even after death.
Yeah, true, so then we just have a blank stone?
Maybe, yeah, just her name and the dates.
Maybe.
So then the original idea of the poem still holds, though, in a way … let me lie. Just let me lie.
Beneath the grass and vaulted sky.