Fight Night(56)

I waited for Grandma’s stomach to shake. It didn’t shake. She’d grab me soon and say, Aha, gotcha! The nurses quietly went away. Grandma, Grandma, I said. I’ll give you a hundred bucks. Grandma! I said. Fight!





16.

Here’s a question for you, Dad. If three people go into a hospital and one of them dies, how many people will leave the hospital? If you’re our family, it’s still three. That’s the problem with our family. Or it’s the problem with problems. I’m not gonna sit around outside throwing clothespins into the bucket to make Grandma come back. Just put me in a pickle jar and run outside and play.

I have videos of Grandma on my cellphone. In one I asked her what will happen to her body after she dies. She says ahhhhh, my body! My body will become energy that will light your path. I can hear her yelling at the Raptors. Stay in it! Box out! Arms up! And I can hear her talking about those sharks that survive by playing dead. And about bioluminescence. And about Mom. And about you. And about fires inside us. And about fighting. And about Grandpa and Momo. And what fighting is, even when it’s making peace. Hoooooooooo. You never win games in the exact same way, always adjusting, changing, thinking. Defence is always key. You have to guard. Hoooooooo. Mom and Gord and I are still in the same house. It’s a bit of a disaster. I wrote to T pretending to be Grandma. I said greetings and salutations T! How goes the battle? He texted back and said WTF. Who this. ID or b block. I don’t know what to text next but I think that’s how love goes.

Lou is walking to Canada! I asked Mom if she’d want to bang Lou or at least be his girlfriend. She’s beautiful enough, I think, almost, to be his girlfriend. Mom said no. She said, Ew, Swiv, no. We’re cousins! That’s not normal. So believe it or not, now Mom has finally decided to take an interest in being normal. Better late than never! I asked Mom what on’ry means. You mean like in the song? she said. Poor on’ry people like you and like I ? She said she thought it meant all riled up. As in ornery, she said. Are we poor, ornery people? I asked her. She told me that from now on she was going to write her own plays and direct them. She says she just does not jive with directors even though the word is jibe. She’s still doing the play. I’m going to take care of Gord backstage so Mom can come flying back there and feed her between scenes. Gord is hilarious most of the time. And the rest of the time she’s a basket case. She really takes after Mom.

I read Grandma’s letter to Gord the other day. You’re a small thing and you must learn to fight. And today I saw one tiny blue pill on the floor under the table where Grandma sits. Bombs away, Swiv! I heard her say. Man, you should have seen how fast I fell to my knees.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m deeply grateful to Sarah Chalfant and Lynn Henry. And also to Erik! Underlined three times. And, finally, to my revolutionary mother, Elvira Toews, for teaching me, ceaselessly, when to fight and how to love.

Brief lines from the following works are gratefully quoted: here, from “And Death Shall Have no Dominion,” a poem by Dylan Thomas; here, from The Designated Mourner, a play by Wallace Shawn; here, from Guest of Reality, a novel by Par Lagerkvist; here, the line “what makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing—which is that life goes on” is a variation on a sentence from “Hiding in Plain Sight: Natalia Ginzburg’s Masterpiece,” an article by Cynthia Zara in the New Yorker, June 22, 2017; and here, from The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus.





A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Miriam Toews is the author of seven previous, bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. Her books have been widely published internationally, and adapted for stage and film. Among other honours, she is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.