All My Puny Sorrows Read Online Free PDF Page B

Elfrieda if she is Elfrieda Von Riesen and Elf says no. The chaplain peers at her in wonderment and then tells me he could have sworn that Elf was Elfrieda Von Riesen, the pianist.
    No, I say. Wrong person. The chaplain apologizes for bothering us and leaves.
    Who would do that? I ask.
    Do what? says Elf.
    Just ask another person in a hospital if she’s who they think she is. Aren’t chaplains supposed to be more discreet?
    I don’t know, says Elf. It’s normal.
    I don’t think it is, I say. I think it’s totally unprofessional.
    Things are always bad for you if they’re unprofessional. You always say oh, that’s so unprofessional as though there’s some definition of professional that’s also a moral imperative for how to behave. I don’t even know what professional is anymore.
    You know what I mean, I say.
    Just stop lying to me about what life is, Elf says.
    Fine, Elf, I’ll stop lying to you if you stop trying to kill yourself.
    Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin, that she’s afraid it will push through and she’ll bleed to death. But mostly she’s terrified that it will break inside her. I ask her what kind of piano it is and she tells me that it’s an old upright Heintzman that used to be a player piano but that the player mechanism has been removed and the whole thing has been turned into glass, even the keys. Everything. When she hears bottles being thrown into the back of a garbage truck or wind chimes or even a certain type of bird singing she immediately thinks it’s the piano breaking.
    A child laughed this morning, she says, a little girl here visiting her father, but I didn’t know it was laughter, I thought it was the sound of glass shattering and I clutched my stomach thinking oh no, this is it.
    I nod and smile and tell her that I’d be terrified of breakage too if I had a glass piano inside me.
    So you understand? she asks.
    I do, I say. I honestly, honestly do. I mean, what would happen if it broke?
    Thank you, Yoli.
    Hey, are you hungry? I ask her. Is there anything I can do for you?
    She smiles, no, nothing.

THREE
    ELFRIEDA IS SO THIN , her face so pale, that when she opens her eyes it is like a surprise attack, like one of those air raids that turns night to day. I ask her if she remembers that time she and I sang a really slow aching version of “Wild Horses” for a group of elderly Mennonite nursing home residents. Our mother had asked us to participate in the seventy-fifth wedding celebration of the town’s oldest married couple and we had thought the song was killer cool and entirely appropriate for the occasion. Elf played it on the piano and I sat next to her and we both sang our hearts out to our bewildered audiencewho sat around in wheelchairs or stood leaning hard on canes and walkers.
    I thought the memory would make her laugh but it makes her ask me to leave. She realized before I even did that I was spinning out this anecdote because it represented something else and more than the sum of its parts. Yoli, she says, I know what you’re doing.
    I promise I won’t talk about the past if it causes her pain. I won’t talk about anything if she doesn’t want me to, as long as I can stay.
    Please go now, she says.
    I tell her I could read to her the way she used to read to me when I was sick. She would read Shelley and Blake, her poet lovers she called them, mimicking their voices, male and British, clearing her throat … “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples.”
The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the waves are dancing fast and bright
. How about I sing? Or I could dance. Like a wave. I could whistle. I could do impersonations. I could stand on my head. I could read Heidegger’s
Being and Time
to her. In German. Anything!