A Complicated Kindness (3 page)

She believed in one-hundred-percent cotton. “It wrinkles badly but at least it breathes.”

She loved the girliness of my dad’s eyelashes and his smile
(oh, Ray’s smile!)
and the way his arms got dark brown in the summer. One time she and my dad were talking together in the kitchen and Tash and I heard her say, god DAMN I love your sense of humour.

She occasionally plucked hairs from her chin, which I couldn’t watch.

She spoke to strangers whenever she had the opportunity to, mostly tourists here to see the
village,
and would usually get very excited about the various aspects of these strangers’ lives.

In the winter she’d warm up my bed for me by lying in it for twenty minutes while I had my Saturday-night bath.

She cried every single time she watched
The Waltons.

She made a lot of trips to the pencil sharpener in the basement because it said
BOSTON
on it.

At one point in her life she thought about running for mayor of the town, but didn’t want to embarrass Ray.

She sang hymns loudly, which embarrassed me.

She was an expert on drawing horses, especially their rear ends. She’d doodle horses’ asses all over the phone book.

She approached life happily, with her arms open. Which could have been a mistake.

She loved white frilly curtains, or yellow ones if they were super bright.

My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things.

I have a recurring mental image of her. When I was about twelve Trudie decided to learn how to ride my first, second
and
third cousin Jerry’s motorcycle. He brought it over to our place and he showed her how to sit on it and start it and rev it up and where the brakes were and all that stuff and she said okay, yup, got it, got it, got it. She told me and Tash not to tell Ray because he’d worry. We sat in the grass next to the driveway eating home-made popsicles and watching. Sunlight was flashing off the chrome of the motorcycle and my mom was laughing. She was wearing fake denim pedal pushers and a
pink terry-towel T-shirt. She’d wave to us and make faces while Jerry was giving her instructions. So then finally Jerry said okay, time to put this on. He plopped this giant helmet onto her head and she gave us this fake helpless look. Then it was time for her to ride.

She kicked the stand back and then she slowly turned the motorcycle around so that she was facing the highway. She looked at Jerry and he nodded, huge grin on his face, and she took off. She shot off. I mean, she went from zero to sixty in about a second and then she careened off the driveway and onto the grass, hit a flowerpot and went flying over the handlebars. The thing that I keep remembering, though, is how she looked as she flew through the air. She stayed in the exact same sitting position that she’d been in on the motorcycle. Her legs were curved and spread a bit as though she were still straddling the thing and her arms and hands, the entire time that she was flying through the air, looked like they were still holding on to the handlebars. She looked like Evel Knievel jumping twenty cars or whatever but with an invisible motorcycle. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. It seemed to last forever.

And then we were all up and running over to her where she lay in the grass, still laughing, and moaning, and Jerry felt awful and Trudie made us promise not to tell Ray which was difficult later on when he came home and wondered how she got that cast on her arm. She told him she’d fallen down the stairs running for the rinse cycle with a cup of softener in her hand and Tash told him the truth but made him promise not to tell her he knew.

It’s not really a great or dignified recurring image to have of one’s absent mother, I guess, but I get a little thrill from the memory of her flying through the air in that odd phantom position. Later on that summer, when the cast was off, Trudie took me and Tash to the pits for a swim and she told us to go
underwater and keep our eyes open. She told us that she was going to do a dive off this piece of board somebody had rigged up and that when we’d see her come under the water she’d be in a perfect frog position. And it was true. She looked exactly like a frog diving underwater.

That’s another strong image I have of Trudie but not as strong as the one where she flies. The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad’s laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn’t. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad’s bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother’s black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.

three

I
met Travis five months ago at a New Year’s Eve party at Suicide Hill. Good Mennonites don’t technically celebrate the arrival of yet another year of being imprisoned in this world. It’s a frustrating night for them. But we weren’t good Mennonites.

Somebody had made a big fire and sparks were flying around nicely and people were laughing and coughing. Some were necking in the bushes. A few others were playing flashlight tag in the old Russian cemetery next to the hill. One or two were vomiting in the snow and I could vaguely hear Christine McVie singing “Oh Daddy” from someone’s car speaker. I was standing around with some girls from school talking about resolutions when Travis and this other guy, Regan, walked up to us and asked if they could smoke us up.

We all shrugged, non-committal, flipped our hair, bored to death. Enh, said Janine, the verbal one. After sharing the joint me and Travis started a conversation and the other people went over to the fire. You’re Tash’s sister, right, he asked.

I said yeah.

That’s bullshit, man, he said, referring I think to Tash not being around any more.

I shrugged.

You smell like patchouli, he said.

I smiled. We smoked. We looked up at the stars. We shook from cold.

What’s your name again, he asked.

Nomi, I said.

He was wearing an army jacket with lots of pockets, and Greb Kodiaks. He’d cut the fingers off his gloves.

You like reggae, right, he asked.

Kinda, I said. Some of it. And he said he did too. And then we just started talking about music because that was sort of the test of potential. Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly. And then somehow Travis mentioned the name of Lou Reed without acting like a fawning dork about it and I knew then that I wanted to be his girlfriend so I stopped talking for a while and tried to act demure by keeping my lips a certain way.

Be mysterious, I told myself. I’d been going after that laughing-on-the-outside, crying-on-the-inside look for a while. It all had to do with the eyes and the mouth and certain pauses in your speech. It’s kind of tragic and romantic. I wasn’t very good at it but I liked the bullshit bravado of it, you know, the
effort
of trying to cover something up and show it at the same time.

You said Nomi, right, asked Travis. Yeah, I said, and your name again? Travis, he said. Right. Travis, Travis, I said, making a big exaggerated point of trying to remember. I’d known his name for years. After that we slowly walked towards the bushes and into this little clearing and then we sat down on a fallen tree and his arms were around me and he said talk to me, Nomi, so I started stupidly rambling on and on about the first thing that came to my mind.

I heard something once that I liked and I think about it a lot, I said.

Yeah? said Travis. What did you hear?

Well, I said, these two people, a guy and a girl, were standing on a dark street in some town somewhere and the girl really liked the guy and had thought about him all the time, about being with him, having a relationship, everything, and the guy, I don’t know, he might have liked the girl, he was a little older and way cooler, and they just happened to meet each other on the street around ten at night, both of them on their way home from somewhere, and the boy said to the girl, hey, hi, how’s it going, you’re uh…and the girl said uh, yeah, hey, and the guy said so talk to me, and the girl paused and smiled and then she said but you’re here. So, I said to Travis, like I had just concluded a lecture on the makings of the A-bomb or something. Do you know what I mean? He said yeah, yeah, he did. He asked me why I liked that and I said I didn’t know, it seemed emblematic of something or other, and he said but he was there and I was talking to him and I said yeah, that was true.

And then he asked me if I preferred the people I loved not to be around when I talked to them and I paused because I was confused but he understood my pause to be a dramatically flirtatious pause, maybe, and so when I finally did say no he said okay, good, and we sat there kicking snow and watching our breath evaporate and wondering, at least I was, what came next.

What did come next was a bunch of kids running up to us and saying it’s the countdown, it’s the countdown, like one minute to midnight, come on, come on, so me and Travis got up and walked over to where a different bunch of kids were pretending to throw this other kid, Kurt, or Little Metal Boy as he was often called, into the fire as a sacrifice to the Devil, and other kids, the feathered girls, loud and drunk as usual, were counting down and everyone was talking with a Scottish accent
and Janine passed me a hash pipe and just as I was sucking back on it I got kicked in the face by Kurt’s flailing leg and the pipe rammed into the roof of my mouth and tore the skin and my eyes started filling up with tears and Travis put his arm around my shoulders and said happy new year and I whispered happy new year to you too while swallowing mouthfuls of my own blood and when Travis leaned over to kiss me I shook my head slowly but not enough for him to notice and then passed out in the snow.

Afterwards Travis told me I had fallen without a sound. Just like the explosion of chicken blood in my mom’s Jackson Pollock painting. That’s what snow is good for. That must be why Menno “I love the nightlife” Simons picked this place to wait out the rapture, a place where we could fall quietly and not bother anyone. I woke up a few hours later in the back of Travis’s dad’s work truck, with a carpet on top of me and Travis sitting cross-legged next to my head. His lips were blue and he could barely speak but what he said was: Oh Christ, thank fucking God you’re alive. I thought it was the most original thing I’d ever heard anyone say about me and I began to love him.

Trudie used to work in the crying room at church and we have these pictures of her and Tash and me hanging out in there and there’s this one picture of Travis stepping on my face. He was two or so with a giant diapered ass and I was just a baby lying on the floor and obviously in his way.

My mom used to unhook the wire at the back of the speaker in the crying room so she wouldn’t be able to hear
the man,
her brother, my Uncle Hans, who was The Mouth. Tash, when she was older, would bring in a transistor radio so we could listen to American stations while we helped my mom take care of the babies.

We had a lot of fun in the crying room. We could see the back of my dad’s head, on the men’s side, falling over and snapping back repeatedly while he tried to pay attention to the rebukes of Uncle Hands.

It was usually my job to watch out for mothers with screaming infants standing up in their pews because that meant they were headed our way and the radio had to be shut off so my mom wouldn’t get busted and disciplined by her brother’s notoriously harsh and badly dressed regime. This was the perilous line my father toed and still does, I guess. Torn—at least he was—between the woman he loves and the faith that keeps his motor running. Although with my mom gone, there’s not much of a conflict any more. I’d call the aura at our house a perversely peaceful one of hushed resignation. A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad’s socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh, unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you?

I never know if he’s joking when he says things like that or not. He always signs off his Christmas cards to people with: In Sin and Error, Pining…Raymond.

four

R
ay has exceptionally large glasses, like an underwater mask, as if he never knows when he’ll have to do some welding or shield himself from a solar eclipse. When he blinks at me I’m reminded of the distant city lights, or of the Man from Atlantis or of somebody who has just emerged from a dark underground cell after thirty years of isolation. His glasses are square with thick grey frames and he takes them off frequently to breathe on them. Hah. Hah. Two short punchy breaths, one for each lens. Then he wipes them off with a handkerchief and holds them up to the light, squinting, to see if they’re clean. He still uses handkerchiefs. He buys them in packages of three at a store called Schlitzking Clothing. When I empty his pockets to do the laundry I’m always afraid I’ll find one.

Doing the laundry can be a really interesting and intriguing process. Emptying people’s pockets, noticing odours and stains and items, folding the clothes afterwards, opening drawers, putting everything away. If I were asked by the FBI to infiltrate the Kremlin I’d definitely get a job there doing the laundry. It’s where the drama starts. What a gold mine. Anyway. Last night when I got home my dad was sitting in his yellow lawn chair by the front door staring off at the number twelve highway. His eyes shone through his glasses like green Life
Savers. They looked like something you’d want to dive for at the bottom of a swimming pool. Sometimes they’re so pretty they’re spooky and I have to ask him to shut them. You’re still up, I said. He said we need to talk about Nomi and where Nomi’s going. I stared at the highway too. I asked him do you mean me and he looked at me, puzzled. I reached out and patted his head slowly. It was a weird thing to do. He lifted his hand and put it on mine and we held our two hands there together on the side of his head, near his ear, as though we were attempting to prevent blood loss while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Then after a while I said Nomi’s going in the house and he didn’t let go of my hand right away. Like we were in a crappy play and he’d missed his cue.

Ray once built something. It was a garbage hutch, he told me. A few weeks after Trudie left he’d gone into the garage and started working on it. It took him a few days of straight building to get it finished. I was spending all of my free time listening to one song (Zeppelin’s “All My Love”—Trudie had liked it too) over and over in the living room and Ray was in the garage hammering and sawing away on his hutch.

We were little islands of grief. My grandma told me that after my grandpa died she had been very calm. Very, very calm. She bathed, she cleaned the house, she cooked, she graciously thanked people for coming around with their casseroles and condolences. Then, one day, she went to the post office to buy some stamps to send thank-you cards and the guy behind the counter told her she was short two cents and she didn’t have any more money on her, and the guy said oh well, too bad, no stamps then, and she said she’d been coming there for seventy-five years, he knew who she was, where she lived, who her children were, who her grandchildren were, whom she sent
letters to, everything, couldn’t she give him the extra two pennies the next time she came in? No, sorry, he said. If he did it for her he’d have to do it for everyone. But not everyone is short two pennies, said my grandma. Nope, he said. No can do. He didn’t want to get into trouble. And my grandma went ballistic on him. She swore. She threw the spongy stamp licker thing at him, she drooled, she snarled, she screamed, she hit him with her purse, and then she left, scattering a stack of Eaton’s catalogues on her way out, walked home, felt good, surprisingly good, and sat on her back steps staring at her sugar beet field for the rest of the day. Said her pulse must have been around fifty, some all-time low.

Ray and I never really succumbed to that type of extreme. He built his hutch and I listened to Zeppelin. Inside, probably, our internal organs were chipping off and turning grey. But we never screamed. The big day finally came when Ray unveiled his hutch and dragged it down to the curb on my old Radio Flyer wagon. The next morning we got up really early to watch the garbagemen remove the cans from the hutch. We knew they’d marvel at it. Ray had painted it a kind of mauvey purple and had even laid a piece of Astroturf on the bottom. It had a board across it that kept the cans securely tucked in, and the board was painted a deep red, left over from some school project of his. Right on, Dad, I told him. That’s a stellar hutch. He told me that Trudie had always wanted him to make a hutch to keep the dogs and cats from tearing open the bags and spreading crap all over our yard. It would be nice, he’d quoted her as saying, to become the owner of a solid, simple hutch sometime before my throat wattles. We laughed. I’d told him it was a deluxe hutch, state-of-the-art. I knew he was trying really hard not to cry. Turns out the garbagemen thought the hutch was garbage, a colourful mess of boards and nails and outdoor carpeting, and threw the whole thing into the back of their
truck. Ray wouldn’t let me run outside to tell them they were making a big mistake. He put his hand on my shoulder and said no, no. Don’t. He smiled and shook his head. And then he went into his bedroom and quietly shut the door. And I put on “All My Love” and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all of your love but do you have any more?

I’ve been experimenting with some vegetarian meals, something called Survival Casserole. A couple of days ago Ray came in and stood in the kitchen and assessed the stuff I had simmering in a pan on the stove. We’ve been eating an awful lot of vegetables lately, he said. I shrugged. Do you mean horribly many, I asked. Yes, he said, that’s what I mean. I found a streak of blood in an egg yesterday, I said. They’re very good, though, vegetables, he added. In what way, I asked. Well, he said. Well was his trademark answer to all of life’s questions. They’ll make you live longer, anyway, I told him. He tilted his head and frowned. Or does it just seem that way, he said. That’s quite funny, Dad. He resented vegetables for prolonging his life. I told him we could have pear nectar for supper. It was thick, like a meal. Cooking’s not your forte, is it, he asked. I put my wooden spoon on the counter. Do you want meat, I asked. I can’t make meat. That’s fine, he said. That’s A-OK. He likes saying things like A-OK. Things like
legal beagle
and
bean counter
and
shutterbug.
One time I asked him if he had some kind of aversion to saying the real words. What’s wrong with
lawyer, accountant, photographer,
I asked him. Nothing’s wrong with them, he said. But he looked sad when he said it like he was a kid playing in a puddle and I’d told him to stop fooling around.

Trudie hadn’t seemed to mind his word thing but it’s always made me crazy. I should try to be more indifferent to it.
I know I would be if I wasn’t so wild with the knowledge that he’s doing it to seem jivey and laid-back for my sake. He refers to me and my friend Lydia Voth as Tom and Huck. What are Tom and Huck up to? What adventures do Tom and Huck have planned for today?
You mean besides rafting down the Mississippi with a huge man called Injun Joe?

I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay! he shouted. All right! We have to get you a stick! We have to get tape! I’ll be waiting in the car!

These days Tom and Huck don’t have much planned because Tom, or is she Huck, is in the hospital with an illness that has not been diagnosed. Nobody seems to know what’s wrong with Lydia. Parts of her body keep breaking down. Yesterday when I popped in to see her she told me she was feeling more and more like less and less and then she laughed her head off for a while until it became too painful. She can’t stand the way her socks clutch at her ankles or the way things like lights sometimes hum in her head. She looks like she’s lit up from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern. Her cheeks glow red and her eyes are bright, bright electric blue, and her hair is no longer blonde, it’s yellow, like penicillin. I lay down beside her in the bed and read to her from one of her old Black Stallion books. She’s the same age as me but she likes those books. She doesn’t care.

She asked me if it was really hot outside, and I said yeah, killer. It’s shimmering. She nodded.

How’s the job? she asked. I had a part-time job washing cars at Dyck Dodge but I hadn’t been there for a while because I hated the way the tops of my rubber boots chafed at my calves. I showed Lids the raw skin on my legs and she frowned. Basically, I could go in whenever I wanted to and get paid under the table by the guy in the showroom, whose fascination was
held by girls who wear short shorts and wield hoses. It’s a loose arrangement that surely will not prepare me for a rigid schedule of killing at the plant.

Have you and Travis done it yet, she asked. No, no, no, no, no, God, I said. I waved my arms around like a ref saying no basket. She nodded again.

I will probably, she gasped, never know the pleasure, gasp, of a man. She closed her eyes and smiled.

Lydia was straight-edge but completely, disarmingly, nonjudgmental. We had nothing in common. I just liked her weird evanescence and the way she did the most unbelievably nerdy things without knowing it or if she did know it she didn’t care at all.

One time she came with me to a Halloween party at the pits and every girl was dressed up like a hooker except for Lydia who was a brown paper package tied up with string, from
The Sound of Music
. In the summer she wore knee socks and orthopedic shoes and a lime-green windbreaker. Sometimes her ears couldn’t take loud noises and her eyes couldn’t take small print and she’d tell me she couldn’t talk but would I talk because if I spoke quietly she would listen to me and she would be
thinking
about what I was saying. And it’s true, she did think about what I said. Sometimes I’d say stuff one day and the next time I saw her she’d refer to it and ask me if I was still feeling the same way or if things had changed. Nobody our age did that. We talked about the stuff that was going on, the things we did, not the way we felt. But Lids had no real action in her life, only feelings and thoughts. She lived in her head and that’s why it glowed.

She was a decent, kind, sweet person. I guess that’s why she had to go to the hospital. I told her stuff, boring everyday stuff about my life, and she liked it. She’d laugh. I liked the way she assumed that the two of us could be friends even though she was a good Christian girl and I was a sad, cynical pothead.

Do you want me to comb your hair for you, I asked her. No, she said, it hurts too much. Can I rub in your moisturizer, I asked her. No, she said, that hurts too. She had a thin layer of white Noxzema skin cream covering her face.

Should I wipe it off with a soft wet cloth, I asked her. No, she said, I’ll be okay like this. Are you tired, I asked. She smiled. Should I go, I asked. She shook her head. Can I get you an extra blanket, I asked. Lydia likes extra blankets because she feels cool breezes all the time. Sometimes she asks me to feel the walls for her to find out where the air is coming from. If I’m in a patient mood I feel all the walls all over and then pretend to find the wall with the breeze and then move her bed as far away from it as possible. Sometimes I say Lids, there are no cool breezes in here at all. She likes rooms to be incubator-hot. Sometimes she wears winter scarves around her neck in the summer. I asked her again if she wanted an extra blanket. Her eyes were still closed. She shook her head.

A nurse came in and said: How’s the princess and the pea? But not in a nice way. I stared at her. She’d said that because Lydia was lying on a bed that had two mattresses on it instead of one because just one was too hard for her bones. It’s a beautiful day, said the nurse, and a young healthy girl like Lydia should be outside in the fresh air. Right, Lydia, she asked. Right, Lydia? Lydia opened her eyes and smiled and nodded and then closed them again. The nurse sighed. I would kill her on my way out of the hospital. My friendship with Lids was often about protection. Or it was a shared desperation. Or it was about recognizing the familiar flickering embers of each other’s dying souls. When it was time for me to go, Lids pointed to the table next to her bed. She’d written a poem for me about two girls playing together within some castle’s walls. In the left margin she’d experimented with various spellings of the word
requiem.
My mother would have drawn a horse’s ass.