Free All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews Page A

and my dad couldn’t deal with it so my mom had to get out of the car and tell Elf we had to go. I remember her tugging on Elf’s arm while she was still kissing the boy. And then Elf finally got into the car sobbing her eyes out and the boy ran behind us for as long as he could like the farm dogs around East Village.
    Radek laughed. Do you have a photo of her? he asked. I took one out of my wallet and showed it to him. She was all huge green eyes and shiny black hair. She looks like an alien, doesn’t she?
    He said, She is beautiful.
    The first time I ate at Radek’s table I told him that I had been faithful to my husband and had raised children with him, and Radek smiled sweetly, nodding, as though he liked that woman, preferred her even, but you know, here
we
were. I’m so tired these days that often I put my head down on his table and fall asleep while he cleans up the dishes and then he picks me up and carries me to his bed and removes my clothing carefully, draping my jeans over his chair so that my lip balm doesn’t fall out of the pocket and roll under his bed into the dust, and he places my shirt over his lamp to cast an interesting aura, and he makes love to me very gently, like a gentle gentleman. Those are the words my grandmother used to describe my grandfather when I asked her what he’d been like as a husband. Gentle. It’s all I can think of too to describe Radek. When he comes he says something softly in Czech, one word. I like to play with the tips of his fingers, feeling the hard ridges and grooves that are formed from pushing down on his violin strings for five or six hours a day.
    He told me that once I barked like a dog in my sleep. I had a very vague recollection of doing it, of a dream I was having where everything I was feeling and everything I wanted to say about everything I was feeling came out, finally, as one lousy inchoate bark. Sometimes I think that I’m coming a little closer, at least in my dreams, to understanding Elf’s silences. When I was living alone in Montreal, heartbroken over a lost love, she sent me a quote from Paul Valéry. One word per letter, though, so it took me months to figure out.
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm
 … 
you will triumph
.

FIVE
    IT ’ S THE MORNING NOW and I’m hungover. My eyes are ringed with purple bags and smudged black mascara and there’s a thin crusty line of red wine on my lips. My hands are shaking. I’m drinking takeout coffee from Tim Hortons. Double double double double. My mother is on a ship. Nic is drowning in equations having to do with tapeworms. I brought Elf the things she asked for, the dark chocolate, the egg salad sandwich, the clean panties and the nail clippers. She was sleeping when I arrived. I knew she was alive because her glasses were resting on her chest and bobbing up and down like a tiny stranded lifeboat. Iput the purple dragonfly pillow next to her head and sat in the orange vinyl chair near the window and waited for her to wake up. I could see my mother’s beater Chevy way down below in the parking lot and I pushed the green button on her automatic starter to see how far away I could be from something to make it come to life. Nothing happened, no lights came on.
    I checked my BlackBerry. There were two messages from Dan. The first one contained an outline of my shortcomings as a wife and mother and the second an apology for the first. Alcohol, sadness, impulsive, regrettable behaviour. Those were his reasons. The staples of discord. I understood. Sometimes he sends me e-mails that are so formal they seem to have been drafted by a phalanx of lawyers and sometimes he sends me e-mails that are sort of a continuation of our conversations over the years, a kind of intimate banter about nothing as though this whole divorce thing is just a game. All the recriminations and apologies and attempts at understanding and attacks … I was guilty of these things too. Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay.