Free All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

and grappa. People made fun of her. It was a bit embarrassing for me too.
    Ah, but she was only creating excitement, said Radek, yes? Being funny and sophisticated!
    Yeah, I can see that now, I told him, but at the time … you know. A town like ours is not the best place to work on your comedy routine. Our house was once shot at.
    What? said Radek. Because of Elfrieda?
    I don’t know, I said. We never found out. A lot of people made fun of our dad too for riding his bike all the time and wearing a suit every single day and reading books. That made Elf cry. She would get really angry. She would fight with people, mostly with words, trying to defend him. When she went away to Oslo to study music she sent me tapes of herself talking about her life in the city, and then she was studying with some guy in Amsterdam and after that a woman in Helsinki. I listened to the tapes over and over in the dark and pretended she was there with me. I had them memorized, every inflection, every breath, and I talked along with her, over her, even her little chuckles. I had memorized it all.
    Radek poured us each another glass of wine and said he was thinking of something Northrop Frye had said about the energy it takes to get out of a place and how you must then move forward on that momentum to keep creating, to keep reinventing. Would I agree?
    I would agree, yes, I said. Is it even
legal
to disagree with Northrop Frye?
    Of course, said Radek, perhaps you—
    I know, I know, I was just kidding. But I do agree.
    You missed your sister, said Radek succinctly.
    Yeah, but it was more than that. I didn’t really want her to come back. I don’t know if I was conscious of that at the time but I knew, somehow, that she had to stay away. And yet at the same time I felt I needed her in order to survive that place, so I was really busy and anxious trying to figure out for myself how to be brave when she was gone. She played tennis a lot with me when she came back to visit. We played in the dark. Blind Tennis. It was fun but we lost a lot of balls. She told me I had to listen very carefully when we played Blind Tennis, that was the thing. We laughed our heads off in the dark and screamed when we got hit with the ball. When she played the piano I could tell what her mood was. She got all the top scholarships in school, she was even on some TV quiz show, but a lot of things made her mad. People not trying hard enough made her so mad. Bad form made her crazy. When the pastor and his old guys from our church came to our house to tell our parents they shouldn’t let Elf go away to study because she’d get big ideas, she lit his revival tent on fire that night and the cops came to our house …
    Oh my, said Radek.
    But first, when the church guys were at our house she played Rachmaninoff in the other room. My mom and I were hiding in the kitchen. And it was like the more pressure they applied to my dad, the deeper she screamed. Well, screamed with the piano. She drove them away with her brilliance andher rage, like Jesus with the money changers or you know like Dustin Hoffman in
Straw Dogs
 …
    Like sunlight to vampires, said Radek.
    They were such simple, brutish men, it was like playing for an audience of mastodons … She didn’t—
    Which piece was it? asked Radek.
    G Minor, Opus 23.
    What happened when the police came to your house?
    My parents wouldn’t let them put her into juvenile detention or send her away to the Christian reprogramming camp in the woods, I think it was just a threat anyway, but we all went on a long road trip to Fresno, California, to get away from the police and when we came back they’d forgotten about it. Elf convinced a boy in Fresno to be her boyfriend while we were there and he tried to hide in the trunk of our car on the day we were leaving but our father felt the extra weight when we drove off and stopped to get rid of him. Elf and this boy started making out like crazy after my dad hauled him out of the trunk