All My Puny Sorrows (2 page)

Now, in our new house, my mother was restless and dreamy, my father slammed things around in the garage, I spent my days building volcanoes in the backyard or roaming the outskirts of our town, stalking the perimeter like a caged chimp, and Elf began work on “increasing her visibility.” She had been inspired by the ochre paintings on the rock, by their impermeability and their mixed message of hope, reverence, defiance and eternal aloneness. She decided she too would make her mark. She came up with a design that incorporated her initials E.V.R. (Elfrieda Von Riesen) and below those the initials A.M.P. Then, like a coiled snake, the letter
S
which covered, underlined
and
dissected the other letters. She showed me what it looked like, on a yellow legal notepad. Hmm, I said, I don’t get it. Well, she told me, the initials of my name are obviously the initials of my name and the A.M.P. stands for All My Puny … then the big
S
stands for Sorrows which encloses all the other letters. She made a fist with her right hand and punched the open palm of her left hand. She had a habit then of punctuating all her stellar ideas with a punch from herself to herself.

Hmm, well that’s … How’d you come up with it? I asked her. She told me that she’d gotten it from a poem by Samuel Coleridge who would definitely have been her boyfriend if she’d been born when she should have been born. Or if he had, I said.

She told me she was going to paint her symbol on various natural landmarks around our town.

What natural landmarks? I asked her.

Like the water tower, she said, and fences.

May I make a suggestion? I asked. She looked at me askance. We both knew there was nothing I could offer her in the way of making one’s mark in the world—that would be like some acolyte of Jesus saying hey, you managed to feed only five thousand people with one fish and two loaves of bread? Well, check
this
out!—but she was feeling magnanimous just then, the excitement of her achievement, and she nodded enthusiastically.

Don’t use your own initials, I said. Because everyone in town will know whose they are and then the fires of hell will raineth down on us, et cetera.

Our little Mennonite town was against overt symbols of hope and individual signature pieces. Our church pastor once accused Elf of luxuriating in the afflictions of her own wanton emotions to which she responded, bowing low with an extravagant sweep of her arm,
mea culpa
m’lord. Back then Elf was always starting campaigns. She conducted a door-to-door survey to see how many people in town would be interested in changing the name of it from East Village to Shangri-La and managed to get over a hundred signatures by telling people the name was from the Bible and meant a place of no pride.

Hmm, maybe, she said. I might just write
AMPS
, with a very large
S
. It’ll be more mysterious, she said. More
je ne sais quoi
.

Um … precisely.

But don’t you love it?

I do, I said. And your boyfriend Samuel Coleridge would be happy about it too.

She made a sudden karate-chop slice through the air and then stared into the distance as though she’d just heard the far-off rattle of enemy fire.

Yeah, she said, like objective sadness, which is something else.

Something else than what? I asked her.

Yoli, she said. Than subjective sadness obviously.

Oh, yeah, I said. I mean obviously.

There are still red spray-painted
AMPS
s in East Village today although they are fading. They are fading faster than the hearty Aboriginal ochre pictographs that inspired them.

Elfrieda has a fresh cut just above her left eyebrow. There are seven stitches holding her forehead together. The stitches are black and stiff and the ends poke out of her head like little antennae. I asked her how she got that cut and she told me that she fell in the washroom. Who knows if that’s true or false. We are women in our forties now. Much has happened and not happened. Elf said that in order for her to open her packages of pills—the ones given to her by the nurses—she would need a pair of scissors. Fat lie. I told her that I knew she wasn’t interested in taking the pills anyway, unless they were of such a volume that their combined effect would make her heart seize, so why would she need a pair of scissors to open the package? Also, she could use her hands to tear it open. But she won’t risk injuring her hands.

Elfrieda’s a concert pianist. When we were kids she would occasionally let me be her page-turner for the fast pieces that she hadn’t memorized. Page turning is a particular art. I had to be just ahead of her in the music and move like a snake when I turned the page so there was no crinkling and no sticking and no thwapping. Her words. She made me practise over and over,
her ear two inches from the page, listening. Heard it! she’d say. And I’d have to do it again until she was satisfied that I hadn’t made the slightest sound. I liked the idea of being ahead of her in something. I took real pride in creating a seamless passage for her from one page to the next. There’s a perfect moment for turning the page and if I was too early or too late Elfrieda would stop playing and howl. The last measure! she’d say. Only at the last measure! Then her arms and head would crash onto the keys and she’d hold her foot on the sustaining pedal so that her suffering would resonate eerily throughout the house.

Shortly after that camping incident and after Elf had gone around town with her red paint, making her mark, the bishop (the alpha Mennonite) came to our house for what he liked to call a visit. Sometimes he referred to himself as a cowboy and these encounters as “mending fences.” But in reality it was more of a raid. He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car (they never carpool because it’s not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car) and my father and I watched from the window as they parked in front of our house and got out of their cars and walked slowly towards us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line. My mother was in the kitchen washing dishes. She knew they were coming but was intentionally ignoring them, passing off their “visit” as a minor inconvenience that wouldn’t interfere too much with her day. (It was the same bishop who had reprimanded my mother for wearing a wedding dress that was too full and billowy at the bottom. How am I to interpret
this excess? he’d asked her.) My sister was somewhere in the house, probably working on her Black Panther look or re-piercing her ears with a potato and rubbing alcohol or staring down demons.

My father went to the door and ushered the men into our home. They all sat down in the living room and looked at the floor or occasionally at each other. My father stood alone with panicky eyes in the middle of the room, surrounded, like the sole remaining survivor of a strange game of dodge ball. My mother
should
have come out of the kitchen immediately, all bustle and warmth, and offered the men coffee or tea and some type of elaborate homemade pastry culled from
The Mennonite Treasury
cookbook, but instead she remained where she was, clanking dishes, whistling with a forced nonchalance, leaving my father to fight alone. They had argued about this before. Jake, she’d said, when they come here tell them it’s not a convenient time. They have no right to march into our home willy-nilly. He said he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it. So my mother had offered to do it and he had begged her not to until she agreed but said she wouldn’t bounce around waiting on them hand and foot while they laid out plans for her family’s crucifixion. This particular visit was about Elf planning to go to university to study music. She was only fifteen but the authorities had heard from a local snitch that Elf had “expressed an indiscreet longing to leave the community” and they were apoplectically suspicious of higher learning—especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book.

She’ll get ideas, said one of them to my father in our living room, to which he had no response but to nod in agreement and look longingly towards the kitchen where my mother was
staked out snapping her dishtowel at houseflies and pounding baby veal into schnitzel. I sat silently beside my father on the itchy davenport absorbing their “perfume of contempt” as my mother described it. I heard my mother call my name. I went into the kitchen and found her sitting on the counter, swinging her legs and chugging apple juice straight from the plastic jug. Where’s Elf? she asked me. I shrugged. How should I know? I hopped up on the counter next to her and she passed me the jug of apple juice. We heard murmuring from the living room, a combination of English and Plautdietsch, the vaguely Dutch sounding and unwritten medieval language spoken by all the old people in East Village. (I’m called “Jacob Von Riesen’s Yolandi” in Plautdietsch and when my mother introduces herself in Plautdietsch she says “I am of Jacob Von Riesen.”) Then after a minute or two had passed we heard the opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Opus 23. Elf was in the spare bedroom next to the front door where the piano was, where her life mostly took place in those days. The men stopped talking. The music got louder. It was Elf’s favourite piece, the soundtrack to her secret revolution perhaps. She’d been working on it for two years non-stop with a teacher from the conservatory in Winnipeg who drove to our house twice a week to give her lessons and my parents and I were familiar with every one of its nuances, its agony, its ecstasy, its total respect for the importance of the chaotic ramblings of an interior monologue. Elf had described it to us. Pianos weren’t even allowed in our town technically, too reminiscent of saloons and speakeasies and unbridled joy, but my parents snuck it into the house anyway because a doctor in the city had suggested that Elf be given a “creative outlet” for her energies
to prevent her from becoming “wild” and that word had sinister implications. Wild was the worst thing you could become in a community rigged for compliance. After a few years of having a secret piano, hastily covered with sheets and gunny sacks when the elders came to visit, my parents grew to love Elf’s playing and even made occasional requests along the way, like “Moon River” and “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Eventually the elders did find out that we were harbouring a piano in our house and there was a long discussion about it, of course, and some talk of a three-month or six-month excommunication for my father who offered to take it like a man but when he appeared to go down so willingly they decided to let it go (meting out punishment isn’t fun when the victim asks for it) as long as my parents oversaw that Elf was using the piano only as an instrument for the Lord.

My mother began to hum along, her body began to sway. The men in the living room remained silent, as though they were being reprimanded. Elf played louder, then quieter, then louder again. The birds stopped singing and the flies in the kitchen stopped slamming up against the windows. The air was still. She was at the centre of the spinning world. This was the moment Elf took control of her life. It was her debut as an adult woman and, although we didn’t know it at the time, her debut also as a world-class pianist. I like to think that in that moment it became clear to the men in the living room that she wouldn’t be able to stay, not after the expression of so much passion and tumult, and furthermore that to hold her there she would have to be burned at the stake or buried alive. It was the moment Elf left us. And it was the moment my father lost everything all at once: approval from the elders, his authority
as head of the household, and his daughter, who was now free and therefore dangerous.

The opus came to an end and we heard the piano top slam shut over the keys and the piano bench scrape the linoleum floor in the spare bedroom. Elf came into the kitchen and I passed her the jug of apple juice and she drank it all, finished it off and chucked the container into the garbage can. She punched a fist into her palm and said finally nailed it. We three stood in the kitchen while the men in suits filed out of our house in the order they had filed in and we heard the front door close softly and the men’s car engines start and the cars pull away from the curb and disappear. We waited for my father to join us in the kitchen but he had gone to his study. I’m still not sure whether or not Elf knew that the men were in the living room or even that the bishop and the elders had paid us a visit at all, or if it was just a coincidence that she chose that exact time to play the Rachmaninoff piece to fierce perfection.

But shortly after the visit from the bishop and his men Elf made a painting and put it in an old frame she’d found in the basement. She hung it in the middle of our living room wall right above the scratchy couch. It was a quote. It read:

Okay, but Elfie? said my mom.

No, said Elfie. It’s staying right there. It’s the words of Menno Simons! Aren’t we supposed to be following them?

Elfie’s new artwork hung in our living room for about a week until my father asked her: Well, kiddo, have you made your point? I’d really love to put mom’s embroidered steamship back in that spot. And by then her righteous indignation had blown over like so many of her wild personal storms.

ELFRIEDA DOESN
’
T DO INTERVIEWS
. One time she let me interview her for my cheesy class newspaper but that’s it. I was eleven and she was leaving home again, this time for good. She was on her way to Norway for a recital and to study with an old man she referred to as the Wizard of Oslo. She was seventeen. She’d finished high school early, at Christmas. She’d got honours everything and six scholarships to study the piano and a prize from the Governor General of Canada for highest marks which sent the elders into paroxysms of rage and fear. One day at dinner, a few weeks before she was due to leave,
Elf casually mentioned that while she was in Europe she might as well go to Russia to explore her roots and my father almost stopped breathing. You will not! he said. Yeah, I might, said Elf. Why not?