A Complicated Kindness (14 page)

eighteen

I
turned thirteen three days before Tash left town with Ian. The drama focused on her and Trudie, really. My dad and I hovered in the wings like stagehands, not entirely sure of what was going on but looking forward to it being over. They spent a lot of time speaking in code, it seemed.

I was sure my sister was a pusher. We’d seen a film in church called
Hey Preach, You’re Comin’ Through!
and it was all about a girl like Tash who’d gone bad and veered off the road less travelled onto a thoroughfare of sin.

Once, during this perceived pusher period, my dad and I went for a walk and I suggested to him that he hold my hand. He told me he hoped I could thrive from benign neglect, like an African violet.

Well, then I will, I said. And he told me I’d need more than his faint hopes to thrive like a plant. But he did take my hand, and that made me think things might work out, although I still didn’t know exactly what was wrong.

One night Ian dropped Tash off in the middle of the night. I heard his low voice and her soft laughter and the door open and close really, really quietly. I heard my mom open her bedroom door and head down the hall towards the kitchen. After that I couldn’t hear anything and I went back to sleep.

When I woke up a few hours later I went into the kitchen and read a note that was lying on the table: My mom had gone to do some shelving at the library, in the middle of the night, and my dad had gone for what he liked to call a toot, which to him meant a drive. Which made Tash almost wet her pants one day because in her circle
toot
meant toke. Tash, herself, was asleep on the couch.

I thought she must be in very big trouble this time and I wondered what would happen to her. Nothing bad had ever happened to us before so I didn’t even know what the consequences
could
be. I went into her room and pulled out her high school yearbook and stared at the black-and-white photographs of her classmates. I lay in her bed and imagined that Ian was lying on top of me, wiping the hair out of my eyes, cupping my face in his strong hands, and telling me how he shouldn’t be doing this but he just couldn’t help himself and we must never tell Tash. Never.

I went into the living room and played an Irish Rovers record loudly until she woke up screaming what the fuck is that? Oh my god! I was sitting in the big green chair, trying to be both sinister and casual. I slowly lowered the newspaper that I’d been pretending to read, and looked at her. So, I said, you’re awake. Perhaps now you’d be willing to answer a few questions? Oh my god, she said, and stumbled out of the room cursing. I had thought a little sketch comedy would soften her. You’ll burn in hell! I screamed. Forever! I thought I heard her laughing in her room, but I couldn’t be sure. I ran to my room and fell into my bed sobbing.

That morning Trudie came home to find both of her daughters crying in their bedrooms, only for entirely different reasons. I was convinced that Tash would fry like butter for her sins and she was…well.

I didn’t know why
she
was crying, until I heard my mom say honey, what is it? What’s wrong? And Tash said: I think I’ll go crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s all a fucking lie. It’s not right and it’s killing me. It’s killing me! Mom, it really is! And then something happened that took me completely by surprise. I heard my mom say, I know honey, I know it is. And then she began to cry also, not with the same intensity but with a pacing that made it seem like she knew what she was doing and I remember thinking to myself: Are they equally as sad? Why is my mom not angry? What is killing Tash? Drugs? Sinning? Books like
The Prophet
and
Siddhartha
and
Tropic of Cancer
? And when my mom said
I know it is,
did she mean she knew it, whatever it was, was killing Tash, or did she mean she knew it was all a lie. And I’m pretty sure that’s when my nightly face aches began. Like my head had suddenly been filled with ideas and suggestions that it couldn’t contain. Or maybe I was just choking. I was wrong about everything. I thought that what Tash meant when she said it wasn’t right and it was killing her was the pusher’s lifestyle that I’d imagined she’d been living. Selling drugs in the city, whoring around with a bad boy, cleaving to ideas of communism, telling Dad to go to hell. It was obvious to me. And after a while I started feeling good again because I realized that Tash was about to get back on track, that she had figured out she needed saving, and that God and Mom and Dad and The Mouth and everyone else who mattered would forgive her. And we could go back to being a normal family again, even with small amounts of desperate laughter.

I heard my dad come home and knock quietly on Tash’s bedroom door and my mom saying it’s okay, honey, we’re in here, make yourself a sandwich, there’s fresh ham in the fridge.

I could hear Tash and my mom talking but I couldn’t make out the actual words. Then I heard my mom leave her
room and go into the kitchen to talk to my dad. I got up and went into the hall and knocked on Tash’s door. She told me to come in. Her hospitality made me nervous. She was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her bed in her orange men’s shirt and white choker with the blue bead. It looked so pretty. She’d put a red T-shirt over her lamp so the room had a pink glow. Want to burn some incense? she asked me. Would you like to listen to a record? I sat down beside her and smiled. She looked at me. What’s wrong, she asked. I started laughing which is what I did back then when I was sad or freaked out. It was the kind of laugh that alarmed people. Nomi, she said, don’t. And she put her arms around me and said everything would work out. Everything’s gonna work out, man. I promise. I wouldn’t let her go. Nomi, she said, I know you’re crying. Please don’t cry. I whispered to her that I didn’t want her to go to hell, and she started laughing and said hell was a metaphor. I didn’t know what she meant of course, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me even if I had known. I was a believer and I was convinced that my sister was going down. God is love, Nomi, she said to me. That’s all you need to know, man. God is love. She was so doomed.

When Ian came to pick her up, I went into the living room to read the paper. I put the Irish Rovers on again, loud. Tash came into the living room and said oh my god, Nomi. But this time she was smiling. A really tender genuine smile that killed me. There was no sarcasm, no faking. I knew that something horrible was going to happen. She’d freed herself. That’s what a real smile meant. I knew it. She told me I could have her records.

My mom put some blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and carried it out to Ian’s truck. She put bread and fruit and the fresh ham she’d bought that day into a box and Ian carried that out.

I remembered my mom telling us about the Mennonites in Russia fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free. All they needed, she said, was for people to tolerate their unique
apartness
. Nomi, find my purse, she told me. She could never leave it in the same place. I found it on the floor in the dining room and gave it to her and she took out two fifties and handed them to Tash.

Then it was time for them to leave. Ian shook my hand. He said: Stay cool, kiddo. He also shook my mom’s hand, but my mom said oh phooey and put her arms around him. He said hey thanks man. Then he went and sat in the truck while my mom and I took turns hugging Tash in the front entrance.

Again, Nomi? she’d say. Oh my god. We all laughed. My dad stayed in his bedroom. For a very long time, in the dark. He didn’t come out even for
Hymn Sing.

I went into the washroom and took my first Pill out of its Monday slot. My body was now in the early stages of believing it was pregnant. I thought about the name Credence for a baby girl. It was way better than Nova. By the time she was in school CCR would have bitten the dust and it would be okay. Credence.

I lay on my bed remembering conversations and agonizing over things I’d said or hadn’t said until I heard my dad coming back upstairs and going into his room to his own large bed. We took turns lying on our beds, sneaking out at night, driving around in the dark, and pretending certain things existed just beyond our reach. I lay there imagining what it would be like to have another human being growing inside me. Would it panic? I heard my dad begin his special brand of snoring that sounded like he was being choked but refusing to die, all night long. It reached a frightening crescendo and then he stopped breathing—I counted to seventeen before he
exploded back to life—and then started from the beginning again. I got up and went into his room and rolled him over and told him: Seventeen seconds this time Dad, you need to have that adenoid operation. You’re making me mental. Sorry, sorry, he said. But he was sound asleep. He lay there on his side curled up like a Cheesie with his hands stuck between his knees in prayer position. I pulled his blanket up around his shoulders. I noticed that he had some hairs growing on his shoulders. I imagined him living at the Rest Haven. I put my face next to his and whispered: Seven. Teen. Seconds. I sat on the bed and watched him for a while. I looked at the bird on his dresser. It had stopped dipping for the night. I looked out the window. I told myself those lacy white curtains would need washing someday. They were the same sad grey as the floors in my school. And as the artillery of teeth in The Mouth’s mouth.

It was two in the morning, maybe, or three or four, and Travis and I were bobbing around in the moonlight on an inner tube at the pits talking about how it feels to go crazy.

I think it’s a gradual loss of peripheral vision, he said. Oh no, I thought. I knew he wanted me to say something almost as brilliant, but not quite. What do you think? he asked. I know you’re not sleeping.

I opened my eyes. Is there something wrong with just bobbing? I asked him.

What do you think? he asked me again.

How it feels to go crazy? I asked.

Yeah.

I don’t know, I said. Sad and easy, I guess, like losing a friend? You say a few wrong things, you ignore the obvious, you act stupid in an unfunny way. Travis told me that Kafka or someone like that had said insanity could be defined as the
attempt to reconcile one’s overwhelming urge to write things down with one’s overwhelming conviction that silence is the most appropriate response. Oh, I said. Okay.

Travis told me how one spring his Aunt Abilene went nuts and after her funeral The Mouth said that like children and retarded people who were not capable of making an informed decision to ask Jesus into their hearts, Abilene, although she’d not attended church since she was sixteen, would automatically make it to heaven. Wild eh? asked Travis. They stayed up all night seriously discussing, like they
knew,
where Abilene would park her ass for all eternity. So wild,
wild
’s not the word, I said. Poor Abilene.

We drifted around in the darkness and quietly tried to harmonize on “Delta Dawn” which got stuck in our heads from talking about Abilene’s own mansion in the sky. Travis told me I had a loose commitment to the melody. I was preoccupied with the meaning of the lyrics, I told him. The line about walking to the station. I didn’t tell him I’d just had an awful feeling that the song was really about me. And then Travis said: Hey, it’s like you, Nomi. And even though tears in my throat were starting to suffocate me, in the nick of time I remembered Travis telling me once that I was boring when I was offended, and to be boring was the ultimate crime, and I put my head back and made a laughing sound. And I splashed him. And he splashed me back, conveniently, so that all the water on my face looked the same.

After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hands. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.

nineteen

I
t was still early, my dad was asleep, and I didn’t so much want the night not to end as I wanted the next day not to begin so I walked over to Second Avenue to The Trampoline House, which was next door to the boarded-up bus depot, a disastrous experiment that had resulted only in people leaving. If you threw a dime into this coffee can they kept between the doors and took your shoes off you could jump for a while, at least until the next person with a dime showed up or until the family woke up.

It felt good to be alone, jumping, while the rest of the town remained unconscious, and I tried with every bounce to go higher and higher without knocking my head against the hydro wire. I tried to sort out my problems by putting them into categories. Travis. School. Environment. I wasn’t pretty enough to be the complex, silent girl and yet I never knew what to say. I didn’t want to be the ugly, quiet girl. There was no such thing as the ugly, mysterious girl. I could be the tortured, self-destructive girl. But where does that lead? I remembered a conversation I’d had with Tash on the same trampoline a hundred years ago when it only cost a nickel.

Tash:
What do you say to a boy you like when he passes you in the hall?

Me:
Hello?

Tash:
Nope.

Me:
Hi, how are you?

Tash:
Nooooo.

Me:
Okay.
Bonjour?

Tash:
(says nothing, gives me a look)

Me:
What then?

Tash:
Nothing.

I jumped up and down, hands at my side like a punk until I heard the Trampoline House people open their door and take their can with my dime inside which meant they were closed. I had to go to school in two hours and write a fifteen-hundred-word story that included a triggering point, a climax and a resolution. On my way home I came up with my first sentence: The administration passed her around for beatings like a hookah pipe at a Turkish wedding.

Which got panned by Mr. Quiring. No…no, he said. He tapped me hard on my forehead. He didn’t even bother reading the rest of it. So far in English I was not allowed to write about Kahlil Gibran, Marianne Faithfull lyrics, marigold seeds, Holden Caulfield, Nietzsche, Django, Nabokov, preternatural gifts for self-analysis, urges, blowtorches, and now Turkish weddings.

So what should I write about? I asked him. He sat on my desk and crossed his legs and clung to one knee with both hands like it was hurting him. I stared at his belt buckle. Hmmm…he said. Let’s use our imaginations. What do you see when you close your eyes? Nothing, I said. He frowned. Are you not upset when you get your paper back and everything is underlined in red, he asked. No, I said, not really, in the Bible the words of Je—

Get out, he said. I got up and walked away and he threw my pencil case at me. It hit me in the small of my back, near
my kidneys. I thanked him, picked it up, and left. I went into the doorless girls’ can and threw up, said hello to the stoners sitting on the sinks throwing wet toilet paper at the ceiling and walked out into the killer sunshine. It was 9:08 a.m.

Suddenly I wished I owned a dog. He and I would spend the day exploring some place off in the bush, maybe make a fire, roast a gopher he’d have caught. Fall gently asleep together in a pile of leaves. Maybe save a life. I decided to walk downtown and check out the latest old-man boots at the Style-Rite.

I saw my simple cousin Norm sitting at his lottery booth outside Economy Foods. When me and Tash were younger we weren’t allowed to sit on his lap. I waved from a distance and he said what he always says: Awwww, c’maawwwnn. I sat for a while with my other simple cousin, Jakie, at the post office and smoked a Sweet Cap. We watched sixteen Hutterites emerge from a parked Land Rover.

I shook hands with Jakie. That’s a big hand, I said, and he looked at it. Then I got him to tell me the day I was born. Thursday. I told him he was automatically saved. He nodded his head slowly for a really long time, like he was listening to music.

Jakie used to have a full-time position sitting on the bench with the high school boys’ basketball team. I never knew what that was all about. They just let him sit there during the games and at half-time he’d get up and shoot hoops with them. He’d always get up and do the three cheers thing with them too and then shake hands with the other team. He loved shaking hands. I never knew why he stopped doing the bench thing, unless it made some people nervous to have a forty-year-old guy in a ball cap sitting next to their kid. But the team didn’t mind at all. They sometimes let him go with them to away games.

I never made it to the Style-Rite. Jakie and I shared a bag of chips and a Coke and I got him to tell me the birthdays of everyone I knew. That’s cool, I told him, reaching out to take
his hand. I’m a character, he said. I asked him how many hours a day he sat at the post office and he stared off at something and said dogs love better, which made me wonder if he was psychic because I’d just been thinking about dogs. We shook hands again. And then again. When I said goodbye he looked away.

I passed the church and read the sign outside:
AND THEY SHALL GO FORTH, AND LOOK UPON THE CARCASSES OF THE MEN THAT HAVE TRANSGRESSED AGAINST ME: FOR THEIR WORM SHALL NOT DIE, NEITHER SHALL THEIR FIRE BE QUENCHED; AND THEY SHALL BE AN ABHORRING UNTO ALL FLESH.

How sweet. The Mouth must have been in a good mood when he dug up that ol’ chestnut. I walked down the shady side of Main Street thinking about triggering points.

There was a new sign in the Tomboy window.
COME ON IN AND CHECK OUT OUR NEW MEAT DEPARTMENT!
I stared at it for a while. And then I crossed the little parking lot and went in and walked to the back of the store and looked at the pieces of meat behind the glass. The butcher, who was also the man who opened the windows in church with a long stick that had a hook on the end of it, said hello and wondered if there was something he could do for me. I told him I was just checking out the meat.

Is this the new meat department? I asked.

That’s right, he said. We’ve expanded our selection. He spread his arms.

I nodded. It’s nice, I said. It’s very um…you have a lot of interesting meat products here.

Yes, he said, we’re very happy with it.

Yeah, I said. Well, me too. I smiled. He smiled.

Is there anything I can help you with, he asked me. He seemed much friendlier now than in church when he sombrely walked down the aisles unhooking windows with the broom handle.

Do you sell Klik? I asked him.

Klik? he said. You mean the luncheon meat? I nodded. Well, this here is fresh meat. This is the fresh meat area. Canned meats are in aisle four near the pet food.

Oh, right, I said. Yeah. I nodded. Sorry.

That’s okay, he said. He looked a little sad and I didn’t want to disappoint him so I asked for a pound of meat.

What kind of meat would you like? he asked.

Well, I said, um, just…meat that I could make for my dad. He likes meat. He enjoys meat.

Hmmm, said the butcher, how about a roast?

Yeah, that would be perfect, I said. I left the store with a giant roast gift-wrapped in brown paper and string. He’d written the price on it with a Magic Marker.

I stood at the new crosswalk for a long time with my arm out. I pushed the button to get the lights to flash. The crosswalk was a new concept in town. It was feared and loathed as an extravagant expense.

Nobody stopped, although a couple of guys in a truck slowed down long enough for me to hear them shout Nomi you doob.
Doobs
are what we call condoms around here. I don’t know why. Voices inside my head told me not to throw the roast at the truck.

I met Marina Dyck and Patty Pauls on Autumnwood Drive pulling the Funk kids in a wagon and they told me they were babysitting and I could come back with them to the Funk house for some Bundt cake and vodka from the hidden stash. We were there for a while watching TV and eating cake, but I was waiting for the vodka.

Then Marina said, oh the parents are coming home soon, you guys better go. So Patty and I took off in separate directions. About ten minutes later I was standing in the kitchen drinking
water looking out the window and I saw Pat going back over to the Funks’. Oh, I thought, I get it. I understand. I am a doob.

Ray came in from watering his flowers and sat down at the kitchen table. Hey Nomi, he said. I didn’t look at him. I fooled around with the taps. And then he asked me how my day had been and I asked him what he saw when he closed his eyes. Obviously nothing, he said.

I think he figured out that I was crying because I didn’t say anything and I still wasn’t looking at him and he’d said to me in his tragically cheerful voice: How about accompanying me to the nuisance grounds.

We say
dump
now, Raymond, I told him. For Ray the dump is consolation. He appreciates specific areas of waste as opposed to the type of wide-range, free-floating mess that has taken up too much of his life.

Tash once told me that Ray had proposed to my mom at the sewage lagoon behind the parka factory outside of town.

Help me unload some of those old two-by-fours from your playhouse and that rusty bed frame taking up room in the garage, he said. Ray has a way of offering comfort in a well-meaning but ridiculous way. He tends to go overboard in the same spirit as people who overwater thirsty plants.

I remember my mother tearfully telling him that she had to go to the morgue to identify her sister after her horse-and-buggy accident and Ray walked over to her and put his arms around her and said don’t let it be an entirely negative experience, honey. He couldn’t understand why my mom had peeled out of the driveway. Tash and I watched him walk outside and stare in befuddlement at the blackies her tires had left behind, like there’d be clues.

It was nice seeing Ray’s tanned hairy arms draped over the wheel, like he was in control of something. I put the visor down
for him so he wouldn’t have to squint and he said how do you like that. Simple things that make life easier, like visors, don’t figure into his world.

What was my first word? I asked him, and he said:
Don’t.
I asked him what my second word was but he couldn’t remember. I think I’d have made something up if I was him. Like
go.

Hey, I said, I bought a roast today but I lost it on the way home. I’d forgotten it at the Funks’ when we left in that big hurry.

Oh, really? said Ray. That’s okay. Roasts are an awful lot of work.

Actually they’re not, I said. The butcher said they were easy. You put them in before you go to church and when you come home they’re done.

Well, said my dad. They’re easy to lose.

Well, no, I said. Only complete idiots lose roasts. He told me I wouldn’t believe the amount of meat he’d lost in his life. Yeah, yeah, I said, and stared out the window.

We can always get another roast, Nome, he said. I didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes.

Right? asked my dad. He turned to look at me briefly and I opened my eyes and noticed him smiling so I smiled back at him and said yes, he was right.

We were supposed to pay a dollar to get into the dump but the guy there knew Ray and waved him right in. VIP? I asked him. Well, he said, he hadn’t wanted to brag but he never has to pay when he goes into the dump. Then he told me that he sometimes cleans up at the dump late at night after the guy at the gate goes home and the dump people liked that.

You clean up the dump? I asked him. At night?

No, no, he said.

Yeah you do, I said.

Well, yes, he said, I do.

That’s cool though, I said thinking Jesus, let’s not be the kind of family that tidies up the dump at night. The dump is the dump though Dad, I said. The central idea at work in a dump is that it’s not a clean place.

Ray said: Well, yes, but I organize the garbage in a way I feel makes sense. I patted him on the arm. Not so much to encourage him, but because I needed to feel something solid right then.

Being there was kind of nice though, like the beach but less oppressive. Smoky with thousands of seagulls, which was odd, like they were lost, and a pair of gloves my dad gave me that had little rubber bumps on them for grip. I liked the way he rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist.

We talked a bit about eyebrows and their purpose. Then other hair topics. He said if he kept losing hair he’d have a forehead he could show movies on.

Like a drive-in? I asked him.

He said yeah, he’d stand out in a field and get paid.

You could sit, I said.

I’d have to sit, he agreed.

In your lawn chair, I added.

Yes, Nomi, in my lawn chair, he said. He knows I have an irrational hatred of his lawn chair. We saw a little red cowboy boot sticking out of a heap of badly organized garbage that did not make sense and my dad said to me whoah, remember Misty? Misty was a palomino I used to barrel-race in rodeos before I accepted boys and drugs into my heart.

That horse could turn on a dime, said my dad.

Yeah, I said. Powerful hindquarters.

You used to take those corners like Mario Andretti, he said, staring off dreamily at acres of decomposing trash.

Well, I said, it was fun. My dad used to shout, take it home Nomi! on the final stretch of the race. Remember when you’d yell, take it home Nomi! I asked him. He looked at me.

I did say that, didn’t I? I nodded. Was that wrong?

No, no, it was funny, I said. I remembered him leaning up against the log fence of the corral in his suit and tie and jacket. The only person in town formally dressed for a rodeo. A kid had come up to him once and asked him if he was one of those clowns that distract the bull while the cowboy escapes.

He nodded and stared at the boot. Should it be there? I asked him. He shook his head but didn’t move the boot. I knew he wanted to move it more than anything. He was working really hard to appear normal, for my sake.

Let’s move it, I said.