Free All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews Page B

Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote “If you love someone, set them free” he can’t have been directing his advice at human beings.
    I went into the washroom Elf shares with her roommate when she has one (Melanie has gone home for a visit with her family) and looked around for signs of self-destruction. Nothing. Good. Even the cap on the toothpaste had been replaced and who, let alone a person wanting to die, would bother with that? I rubbed the wine line off my lips and brushed my teeth with my finger. I tried to wash away my smudged mascara and made it worse, ghoulish.
    I willed my hands to stop trembling and ruffled my hair a bit and prayed to a God I only half believed in. Why are we always told that God will answer our prayers if we believe in Him? Why can’t He ever make the first move? I prayed for wisdom. Grant me wisdom, God, I said, the way my father used to say
grant
when he was praying instead of
give
because it’s less demanding. Meek. I wondered if my father has inherited the earth because according to Scripture he should be running the entire show down here right now.
    Elf opened her eyes and smiled wearily, resigned to have woken once again but obviously disappointed. I heard her thinking: What fresh hell is this? Our favourite Dorothy Parker quote and one that makes us laugh every time we say it except this time. Really, it was only once that it made us laugh, the first time we heard it.
    She closed her eyes again and I said no! No, no, no, please keep them open. I asked her if she remembered Stockholm. The embassy, Elf? Remember? She’d invited me to hang out with her in Sweden for a week when I was pregnant with Will and we’d had a tragicomic experience at the Canadian embassy, where she’d been invited for lunch the day of her opening at the Stockholm Concert Hall. I went with her, dressed in some kind of enormous shimmering maternity dress I’d bought at Kmart or something, and spent most of the meal trying not to embarrass the Von Riesen family. We sat at a long white table in a white room with the ambassador and VIPs (who were also white) with names like Dahlberg and Gyllenborg and Lagerqvist. Elf was gorgeous, stunning in some simple European black thing, and a total pro at these fancy gigs. Everything about her was so sharp. So crisp and defined. I looked like one of those recentlydiscovered giant squids next to her, oozing around in slow motion and dropping food on myself. Elf chatted in German with an exquisitely handsome, well-dressed couple, about piano playing probably, while the ambassador’s aide asked me what I did in Canada. I’m trying to write rodeo books, I said, and you know (pointing at my stomach) having a baby. I was too emotional most of the time and had been vomiting up herring in Stockholm’s perfect streets and sweating in my polyester dress and I was nervous and doing stupid things like knocking over the ambassador’s wine with my huge stomach when I reached for a roll, and wrapping myself in the Manitoba flag so that Elfie could take my picture, and then pulling the flagpole over. I didn’t know how to answer the questions I was being asked, questions like: Have you also been blessed with the musical gene? What is it like being sister to a prodigy?
    Remember the egg? I said to Elf. She hadn’t opened her eyes. We’d been served some kind of egg, not a chicken egg. Something else. A small, white, slimy eyeball thing, an embryo bobbing in green brine, and as soon as I saw it I made a break for the washroom. When I came back to the table Elf could tell that I’d been crying again and she immediately went to work trying to make me feel better the way she had always done from the time she quoted her poet lovers to me, like it was her profession. She turned me into a hero. She started telling stories about me when I was a kid and how I was the brave, adventurous one and how they should all see me on a horse—had