All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews Page A

and shuffle them over to her neighbour’s house in their pyjamas. She recently split up with her husband, a very tall sculptor and painter working in oils, and so takes advantage of the Canada Post health plan that pays for her to see a therapist. Nothing is awful in her life, she’s quite happy, she just likes the luxury of being able to talk about herself, her feelings, her goals, her hopes, her disappointments. Who wouldn’t? Her therapist, a Jungian, had told her that she was the most optimistic person he’d ever encountered in all his years of practising therapy and that Julie’s dreamless sleeps were a constant challenge for him.
    We sat on her porch and drank cheap red wine and ate cheese and crackers and talked about everything other than Elf, who was a subject like time in that I couldn’t grasp it but it had a mighty hold on
me
. Julie’s two kids are a boy and a girl ages eight and nine, who still love to hug people and sit on their laps. They were indoors watching
Shrek
and every five or ten minutes would come out onto the porch (every time that happened Julie would fling her lit cigarette into the grass so they wouldn’t see her smoking and then retrieve it later) and say oh my god, okay, guys? You have to see this. It’s like, it’s like … And then they’d argue with each other for a minute or two about what it was like, truly, and Julie and I would nod in utter amazement, Julie occasionally glancing at her dwindling cigarette in the front yard. Then suddenly with no warning they’dvanish like meadowlarks, darting back into the house to assume their positions on the couch.
    They think smoking causes AIDS , said Julie, retrieving her smouldering cigarette. We talked about how it didn’t matter how old or young they were, we obsessed over their well-being and suffered wildly, exquisitely, and blamed ourselves for every single nanosecond of unhappiness they experienced. We would sooner self-immolate than see our children’s eyes fill slowly with tears ever again. We talked about our ex-husbands and our old boyfriends and our fear of never being desired sexually ever, ever again and of dying alone and unloved in our own shit, with bedsores so deep they exposed our crumbly bones, and had we done anything right in our lives?
    Probably, we concluded. We had maintained our friendship, we would always be there for each other, and one day when all our children had grown up and left us to wallow in regret and melancholy and decrepitude and our parents had died from the accumulative grief and exhaustion of living and our husbands and lovers had all flown the coop or been banished from our doorsteps we would buy a house together in some beautiful countryside somewhere and chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Les Misérables
, reimagine our pasts and wait out the end of the world.
    Deal?
    Deal.
    We high-fived and rolled a joint. We were getting cold out there on the porch. We sat listening to the river break down and crack up a block away, and I wondered if those slabs of ice could fly, could ever be released and lifted right up fromall that roiling pressure and what it would be like to see a giant slab of ice winging its way over Portage Avenue on its way back home to the north. We stared up at the night, April crisp and clear, no stars. We watched as lights went out up and down the street and we peeked at Julie’s kids through the window, asleep on the sofa in flannel pyjamas, clutching remote controls to a thousand modern devices.
    So why isn’t Dan looking after Nora? asked Julie. (Dan is Nora’s father. He’s rambunctious and sentimental. We’re in the throes of a divorce.) It’s not like this isn’t an emergency. Didn’t he tell you you could always count on him in an emergency? Have you told him about Elf?
    He’s in Borneo or something, I said. With an aerialist.
    Must be nice. But I thought he was living in