A Complicated Kindness (9 page)

They had a daughter who was living in the Black Forest. She also enjoyed physical exercise. She used to be my Sunday-school teacher and she sometimes cried over us because she loved us and couldn’t bear to think of us in charred pieces. Our classroom window led onto the fire exit at the back of the church and we’d often escape when she left the room for felt-board supplies. She could really get a buzz on from arts and crafts, particularly the ancient art of gluing macaroni onto jars and spray-painting them gold. Isn’t it exciting, she told us, how many ways there are to serve Jesus? She once asked me and the other girls in our class if we were gymnasts, but really fat ones, would we think we could just go out and win an Olympic medal one day? No? Well, that’s what Christianity is all about, she said.

The Mouth’s wife never spoke. She was in charge of Brides of Christ so maybe she spoke then but what do you say to the Brides of Christ? I once liked one of their sons for a while and he and I would sit in the empty school buses when they were parked in a field for the summer and talk and sometimes hold hands or even kiss. We didn’t let the fact that we were cousins stop us from fooling around. We played Bus Driver and Lost Girl. He was the bus driver and I was the lost girl. I would have to let him kiss me if I wanted him to take me home.

After spring break he started liking another girl who stole STP motor-oil stickers for him to put on his banana seat, and he doubled her all over town until I gradually realized we were through.

The Mouth spoke. How’s your dad, Nomi, he asked. Why don’t you ask him, I said, and rode away.

I tried to ride my bike uphill but it didn’t work very well. I’d get about twenty feet up the hill and then roll backwards. Then I’d try again. It would have been a fun thing to do with someone else. It was very hard work. It made me think I should stop smoking. Instead, I left my bike at the bottom and trudged up the hill on foot.

It’s sad but I don’t know what I’d do without my cigarettes. I’ve tried to quit. I’ve tried to switch to cigarettes that have less tar, but I don’t think I’ll ever quite forget the feeling I get from a Sweet Cap. They’re my brand. It’s hard to explain but it feels good to own something, like a brand. When I go to the store to buy cigarettes I’ll think to myself oh there, I see my brand on the shelf, and it’s comforting. This your brand? the cashier will ask, and I’ll say yeah, those are mine. It’s like some people with their TV shows, the way they say I gotta get home for my show. Like it’s theirs. Like the way my dad owns
Hymn Sing.
I was always envious of people who had a show, something to do at the same time every day. Like my friend who got heck. Having a show, getting heck. What punctuation things like TV and punishment could bring to a disorderly life. That’s what my Sweet Caps do for me. They’re my commas and my periods, and they’ll probably be the end of me as well. I’ll try to quit when I’m forty. Who wants to smoke after that. Really, who wants to live after that? At forty, I’ll have worked for approximately twenty-three years chopping heads off chickens. It’ll be time.

eleven

I
t’s easy to revere you in absentia. To think of you as having a master plan. Did I just say that?

I stayed on top of the hill for a long time. I told myself when it cooled down I would go home but it took a long time to cool down. I spelled Travis’s name in the dirt. I practised my new signature, which Travis had helped to design. It was basically a capital
N
and then a straight line similar to the one on a dead person’s heart machine. That part of it bugged me but Travis said it was enigmatic. I tried out a few fancier signatures. They didn’t work. Tash had warned me about trying too hard. There had been an
a
in my name a long time ago.
Naomi.
But when I was born Tash couldn’t say it. We were Natasha and Naomi.

We were going to live together in Prague because Tash said it was the place to be. We were sitting in my grandma’s tree and she told me that there were tiny colonies of Mennonites in a place called Kazakhstan. Stalin put them there during the war, to help with the hard labour. They have twenty kids to a family. Say it, she said. Say Kazakhstan. I said it and she said no, really say it. Like a knife, slicing. It’s my favourite word now. It’s so conducive, she said.
Conducive
was another one of her favourite words, although she never said something was conducive to
something else, just that it was conducive. I practised saying Kazakhstan until I got it just right.

Someday we’ll go there, Nomi, she said. We’ll liberate those kids and take them with us to Prague so they can sit at outdoor cafés with their cute Czech lovers and laugh and drink. I had wanted to laugh and drink, only not with hordes of liberated Mennonite children, but I nodded anyway and said okay.

It did finally cool down—with a northerly breeze that can be so refreshing if it’s not also carrying with it the odour of deceased poultry—so I went home.

I saw Mr. Quiring on the boulevard, with his little son, but he was busy tying his shoe and didn’t notice me. I thought it was a little late for the son to be up but I guess Mr. Quiring knew what he was doing. Maybe he was on a night walk. Trudie used to take me on night walks when I was really little and we’d talk about the moon and the stars and what we’d have for our “night lunch” before going to bed.

I had an imaginary friend then who hated me and was trying to kill me. The night walks with Trudie helped me to forget my problems.

When I got home I found my dad in his yellow lawn chair. Practising your sitting? I asked. He shrugged like a Mafia don with his eyes closed like he had to do what he had to do. I hated to admit it, but Travis was right. I could imagine my dad standing forever with his finger in a dike saving a town that only mocked him in return. And not knowing it. Or knowing it but not caring. Or knowing it but not knowing what else to do.

I went to my room and put on Keith Jarrett quietly and lay on my bed. I got up and walked to the kitchen for a drink of water
and saw that my dad had come inside to have a staring contest with the kitchen table. I got my water and said good night to him and he said good night to me but in a way that made me think he wouldn’t actually make it through the night. I thought: He’s going to go to Minnesota for a coffee. I can tell. He’ll be driving around in another country listening to religious radio while what’s left of his family sleeps.

I went back to my room and lay down on my bed. I stared at the old bloodstain that was near my pillow halfway up the wall and considered, like always, getting a cloth and wiping it off. It, the blood, had originally come from my face after I fell off my bike and landed in gravel.

I’d been careening home on my little bike with a giant box of Kotex pads for Tash who had, ten minutes earlier, hissed at me from inside the bathroom instructions to take the money from off Dad’s dresser and get the shit she needed before she filled
the entire fuckin’ bowl.
Those boxes were huge, the size of a small refrigerator, and I had this one balanced on my handlebars completely obliterating my view and I hit the curb with my front tire and skidded out of control and landed face-first in somebody’s pebbly driveway while Tash’s pads sailed off into the middle of the road and once again blood poured from my face.

When I got home, finally, after making separate trips each with the bike and the box, Tash said geez, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life stranded on the fuckin’ can and I went into my bedroom and lay on my bed picking out bits of gravel and congealed blood from my face and smearing them onto the wall above my pillow in a way that resembled the Mandarin language. If you look closely at my right cheek you can see a whole bunch of very tiny holes that look like an Aero bar. It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time
I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment,
not
bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.

Trudie had her kids and her husband and her books. She had a car and nightgowns and white lace curtains. She had friends. She had equanimity. Everything was good. She lived in a town where every single person knew who she was and where she came from and sometimes that made her crazy but most of the time she liked that because it made her feel like she was a part of something. She believed in God and heaven.

She talked about her dead father a lot, my grandpa. His name was Nicodemus. They’d been very close even though at times he couldn’t remember her name. Even when he was young and healthy he sometimes had problems remembering the names of his fourteen children. Half of them died when they were babies. We have his old, crumbling bible on a shelf in the den and inside it is a place to write about important events like births and deaths. Nicodemus did all the writing but you can see that there were times when my grandma would correct things for him. He’d thought that his son Peter’s first name was Walter but in fact it was Albert. Walter had been the name of an older child of theirs who had died. My grandma twice crossed out Walter and wrote in Albert, next to Peter, in the birth section and then again in the death section. In one place she had crossed out his Mina and written in Minty. She also corrected his Gorge and Hellen.

I think that my grandpa, Nicodemus, was my mother’s hero. She missed him. She missed sliding down the stairs in a cookie sheet and having him time her with his pocket watch. She missed watching him run around the yard on stilts and then knock on her second-storey window. He had taught her
how to drive at the age of thirteen by sending her off alone in the car on a short business trip to Ontario. She loved to drive. Trudie and Ray were always going for drives, little piles of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum wrappers sitting on the seat between them. Going to little towns near the border and having lunch or dessert, or just coffee.

In church, she was one of the loudest singers. She knew all the words to all the hymns and when she sang she reminded me of a bird or a political prisoner who had just been released from her cage. When I was really small I put my head in her lap. I could see individual hairs poking through her nylons. She rubbed my back. During Communion the women washed each other’s feet without removing their nylons. Oh, she said, they dry in a jiffy. She’d snap her fingers. The men however did remove their socks and I saw my fair share of podiatric horror.

After church she’d say let’s go in a crisp, very unambiguous way. You were supposed to walk down the aisle to the back and shake hands with The Mouth and various laymen but she’d usually grab me and my sister’s hands and take us out the front door, next to the organ. She’d say whew, it’s so hot in there. I needed air.

We’d sit in the car and wait for my dad because he always went down the aisle to shake hands, the way you were supposed to, and it took a very long time. Often, our car would be the last one to leave the parking lot.

While we waited for my dad to finish inside, my mom would stare straight ahead with a funny little smile on her face. Sometimes my dad would come out and say I think I’ll walk home and she would say oh, now you tell me. The girls and I have been sitting here waiting for you. All right then, my dad would say, we’ll drive. No, my mom would say, it makes no difference now. You may as well walk if you want to. Should I, my dad would ask. Oh my god, my sister would say. Do you
want to, my mom would ask. I had planned to, my dad would say. Then do, she’d say. And so he would. He loved her ass off. That’s what I believe.

I may be a disappointment to Menno Simons but I would like him to know that I have carved, out of the raw material that he has provided, a new faith. I still believe that one day we’ll all be together, the four of us, in New York City. Lou Reed could live with us too. We would all sleep until noon, then play Frisbee in Central Park, then watch him play in clubs. We’d be his roadies. People would say hey, is that Lou Reed and his Mennonite family of roadies?

Trudie liked to talk about her childhood. Oh, I had the run of this place, she’d say, about the town. My mom’s family was one of the original ones to come here. My sister would laugh and say what place? This town is like a movie set. Nothing real is allowed to happen. It’s a ghost town. It’s Brigadoon.

My mom told her that we could have stayed in Russia and had our barns set on fire and our stomachs torn out. In war, she said, the oddballs are first on the chopping block.

Oh, is that an original thought? Tash would ask her.

I mean they left with next to nothing, my mom would say. Maybe a dozen buns. Or a few blankets. Most of them fled in the middle of the night. Okay, that’s a cliché—the middle of the night, Tash would say. People flee throughout the day as well.

A lot of the families were separated along the way, said my mom, or simply died and were left by the side of the road. There was no time to bury them. We’re lucky they let us come here.

My sister would say oh yeah, I feel so lucky. From Stalag 14 to Studio 54. My mom laughed at her when she said things like that and Tash would suck in her cheeks.

My grandma tried to get my mother to keep a cleaner house. Do you need motivation, she asked her. My mom said no, she didn’t need motivation because she didn’t care so fervently about a clean house. A clean house, my grandma said, is rather like a calling card. If the Rapture occurs while you’re out and the Lord God descends upon us and enters your home, he will know, by its cleanliness, that you are one of his sheep. And then what, asked my mom. And he will wait for you to return, said my grandma. And if my house is a mess, asked my mom. He’ll leave quietly, said my grandma. Oh, said my mom, I see. I never knew if she really did or if she only said she did, or if she was maintaining one of those infuriating airs of bemusement.

Our house stayed the same, in its level of disorder. My father would sigh, and escape into his world of isotopes and carbons. I learned that radioactive elements are by nature unstable and that they lose mass over time because of emissions from their nuclei.

But who cares? I’d ask my dad.

Well, he’d answer, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger. These radioactive elements decay in order to become more stable. I rather like that, he’d say. This is where the Second Law of Thermodynamics comes into play.
My dad and his Second Law.

Don’t talk, I’d say. I’d put my hand over his mouth.

My mom loved to play Dutch Blitz, which is a card game invented by the Amish people of Pennsylvania. We are offshoots of each other, although they are even more perturbed by the real world.

The game has to do with speed. Trudie often kept me up past midnight so she’d have someone to play Dutch Blitz with her. She was crazy for Dutch Blitz. One more game, she’d say
even though in between rounds, during the shuffling, I’d have put my head down on the table and closed my eyes. Sometimes Tash would come home while we were playing and say oh my god, you’re playing Dutch Blitz, and Trudie would say okay that’s it for me, thanks Nomi, that was fun. I think she used Dutch Blitz to keep herself awake until we were all safely in the house. But I didn’t know it at the time. She didn’t worry outwardly, ever. She hated public displays of agony, although there would come a day when she would have one.

One day The Mouth came over to our place and asked to speak to her alone outside on the driveway. She said oh for Pete’s sake, Hans, what’s the problem? Tash and I watched them from inside the house, through the living-room window. She sat on the trunk of the car with her back to us and The Mouth stood with his arms crossed, talking to her, and listening to her occasionally. Although we couldn’t see her talking. Sometimes her hands would swing upwards in that universal gesture of helplessness. Then she hunched over and rested her face in her hand. I could make out the keel of her spine pushing against her summer blouse. (I just employed the words
keel
and
blouse.
I’m seventy years old.) I asked Tash what they were talking about and she said how the frig would she know.

Once, while The Mouth was doing the talking, she turned around and looked at us and waved. She waved, I told Tash, and Tash said she wasn’t blind.

She’s happy, right? I asked Tash. Otherwise, why is she waving?

It’s involuntary, said Tash. Mothers wave. We’re supposed to smile. I smiled at my waving mother. Tash didn’t.

Is she crying? I said. Hey Tash, is she cry—…you should wave back.

He wants her to do something, said Tash. She blew a bubble with her own spit.

What? I asked. What do you mean? Tash pointed at them.

Look at that asshole, said Tash. Look at his goddamn…

Shhhh, I said. I put my hand over her mouth and she grabbed it away and told me to get lost. She stood up and said, okay, this is the tail end of a five-hundred-year experiment that has failed.

What? I asked.

What? she said, and got up to put on a record.

The Mouth seemed to want to talk some more but my mom had got off the trunk of the car and was slowly backing away from him, towards the house. She was nodding and looking over her shoulder at us as if to say that’s fine, okay, but now I have to get back to my kids. Eventually he left and she came inside. What did he want, I asked her and she said oh, pfff, nothing. Nothing? I asked. She smiled and went into the kitchen to fill a pot with water. I followed her. Nothing? I asked. He wants me to work in the library at the church, she said. Like, a job, I asked. Yes, she said. Will you, I asked. And she laughed in a way that bothered me. Well Nomi, she said, of course I will. And then smiled that big, fake spooky smile that I admired and hated at the same time.