All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews Page B

Toronto.
    Yeah, he is … to be closer to Nora, he says, except he’s in Borneo at the moment.
    Indefinitely? said Julie.
    No, not forever. I don’t know. Nora did tell him about Elf.
    And Barry’s putting Will through university in New York? asked Julie. (Barry is Will’s father. He’s loaded because he spends his time creating stochastic local volatility models for a bank and has a mysterious demeanour. We hardly talk.)
    Yeah … so far.
    How’s Nora liking dance? (Dance was the main reason we moved to Toronto. So Nora would be able to go to a certain ballet school, thanks to her scholarship since I wouldn’t have been able to pay for it otherwise.)
    She loves it but thinks she’s too fat.
    God, said Julie. When will that shit ever end.
    I caught her smoking.
    She’s smoking so she doesn’t eat?
    I guess so, I said. All the dancers are. I talked to her about it but …
    And Will loves New York? she asked.
    He really does, I said. And he’s a Marxist now, I think. He just says
Kapital
, doesn’t even use the
Das
.
    Cool.
    Yeah.
    Eventually I helped Julie manoeuvre her kids up to bed, half walking, half carrying, and said good night. She hadn’t received any type of suspension for insubordination unfortunately, so had to get up early to work the next morning. She put out her Canada Post–issued spiked boots and prepared the kids’ lunches. The spiked boots were useful for walking on ice. One winter during an ice storm, I found myself stranded on the slippery fishbowl bank of the Assiniboine. I had walked across the frozen river and had planned to climb up the bank to the sidewalk near the Osborne Street Bridge. It would have been a shortcut on my way downtown but instead I got stuck on the icy bank with smooth-soled shoes and was completely unable to get enough of a grip to climb up the steep embankment. I tried grabbing at the thin branches of trees that hung over the bank but inevitably they’d snap off and I’d slide back down to where I had started. I lay on my back on the ice wondering what to do, munching on a granola bar I’d found in my bag, and then I remembered Julie’s special shoes with spikes. I called her from my cellphone and she told me that she was actually nearby on her mail route and would come and rescue me. She showed up a few minutes later and took off her spiked shoes and threw them down to me so that I could put them onand finally climb up the bank. She stood on her mailbag so her feet wouldn’t get wet and smoked a cigarette while I clomped up the riverbank like Sir Edmund Hillary in her spiked shoes. Then we went for a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut. Rescue missions are occasionally very straightforward.
    I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.
    Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures—which are legion.
    The words “nothing bad has happened yet,” a lyric from a Loudon Wainwright song, knocked around in my head while I cruised past the house on Warsaw Avenue. This was the house where I started writing my teen rodeo