Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I once suggested that it was a really risky gamble to bet everything we had in this world on the possibility of another world, and in five seconds he was leading the entire class in prayer.

Please Almighty Father, we just ask you to bring Nomi back within your fold. We just ask you for a miracle this afternoon, dear Jesus. (Was he praying to God, the Father, or Jesus Christ, the Son? If you’re going to terrorize the flock with spontaneous prayer, at least pray to whom it may concern.)

We’re kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions like getting dressed in the morning (thank God, Menno liked to cover up) and going to work or school, but that’s where it ends.

There’s not a lot of interest in the present tense here. And it’s only slightly disconcerting that everyone’s related. If a Mennonite couple divorces do they still get to be cousins? Oh yeah, hilarious. Tash once said to my mom: Oh, so it’s wrong to move any part of one’s body in time to music but it’s perfectly okay to penetrate members of one’s extended family? My mother told her not to be silly.

Silly was Trudie’s ultimate crime. Okay, she’d say, now you’re being silly, and then we knew it was time to shape up. We’d gone too far.

The Mouth of Darkness loves the word groovy and the expression simply put. Simply put, we are not a groovy people. He’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. He’s not a fire-and-brimstone guy. That’s not really our speed. Too animated. Too much like dancing.

He reminds me of one of those statues on Easter Island. I’ve seen photos of him as a boy and even then he looked like unforgiving granite. Although my grandma once showed me a picture of him sitting in a canoe smiling, looking relaxed and happy, with the sun setting behind him. He’s holding his paddle straight up in the air like a spear. I often stare at that picture and wonder what he was thinking about and what happened to the happy little boy before he turned into The Mouth. Well, actually, that sounds really stupid, like the beginning of a lame flashback. Cue the spinning tunnel. I don’t really think about him that much. It would be like thinking about time, the nature of time. How it controls you, determines your destiny, and ultimately destroys you.

I do know, because everyone in town knows and doesn’t talk about it, that The Mouth had some very bad experiences in his life when he was younger (oh, hmm, tell me…and what’s that like?) and that after those experiences he came back to Shitville to rule with an iron fist. That might have been what that upheld paddle was all about. I think he had tried to rebel against the thing he came back later to stand for and while living in the city doing God knows what he…I’m not sure…a girl ditched him, I think. Wouldn’t have him as her sunbeam. After he’d opened his heart to her and then mistakenly asked her to marry him. (Flash for Uncle Hands…it was the period of free love, dude.) And he couldn’t write poetry like the Beats and was mocked for it. And for his clothing that tried too hard and his eagerness to be hip and his inability to shave properly (don’t ask me — Trudie told me this) and countless other crimes of youth and eventually he gave up and came back here full of renunciations and ideas of purging every last bastion of so-called fun in this place and a greatly renewed interest in death and a fresh loathing of the world. In a nutshell. If I’d been his ringside coach I would have said now please get back in there. Re-enter the world. Just tone it down. Keep your mouth shut a little more often. Try again for the love of God Almighty!

A few months ago I was walking home from Travis’s place and The Mouth’s house was on the way. It was around three in the morning and the entire town was dead and dark except for the sparkly streets and car tops which were shiny from melting snow. Just as I was walking past his house a light came on in his kitchen, the little stove light, and for some reason I stopped on the sidewalk to look. I saw The Mouth pass by the window, slowly, in a faded green housecoat he’d only half-heartedly closed with what looked like an old tie. I stared at his profile as he stood with his hands on the stove, a little bent over, head down and motionless. He stood like that for a while. The only sound I heard was water dripping out of somebody’s drainpipe. Then he raised his head and walked, again, very, very slowly, to his fridge and he opened the top freezer section of it and took out a pail of ice cream. Maybe rainbow ice cream. Maybe Heavenly Hash. Then he took the pail and disappeared from view for a few seconds and then returned with a spoon and put the pail down on the stove, under the little light, and opened it up and started to eat. He ate and ate and ate, not like a pig or anything, just steadily and continuously for at least twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched him and thought every once in a while that now he’d quit and put the pail back and switch off the light and go to bed, but he didn’t. He kept eating the ice cream.

When he was finally finished he disappeared again for a few seconds and then came back and leaned his head against the top part of the stove, near the fan, the way he had earlier, like a guy completely defeated by life, with holes he could never fill with ice cream no matter how much he ate, and I almost started to cry thinking about poor The Mouth being dumped by the city girl and just wanting to be able to write a poem that someone in the world would dig. I thought: He’s my uncle. I should love him. And then I walked the rest of the way home.

A while later, maybe a month or so, I noticed my mom leaning her head against the window over the kitchen sink in the very same way The Mouth had leaned his head against the fan part of his stove. She was watching the neighbour’s dog. She said: I envy that dog its freedom and obliviousness.

When I said obliviousness to what, she said: Hey, Nomi, how’d your friends like your new haircut? She was a master in the art of off-kilter conversations. I never knew where any of my questions would go, or if her answers were answers or clues or jokes or what. Some questions resulted in songs. Some in hugs and kisses. I needed a map.

When I was ten years old I had to memorize Bible verses in order to attend Blue Mountain Bible Camp. I’d stand in The Mouth’s office and say: In the beginning was the world and the world was with God and the world was God. And he’d correct me. No, Nomi, not world, word. Word, word. I’d try again. In the beginning was the world and the world — no, Nomi, word, not world. None of it made any sense to me.

I hadn’t even wanted to go to Bible camp. The only thing that appealed to me about the whole experience was the bus trip there and back because the route they took went through part of the city and I wanted to stare at the human beings who lived there. I’ve tried staring at people here but they just stare back, like babies. It’s not an aggressive stare or anything, just a completely unsocialized one. Most people around here are quiet and polite and a little stunned. Somehow all the problems of the world manage to get into our town but not the strategies to deal with them. We pray. And pray and pray and pray. If I could live anywhere else in the world, anywhere, I would. Although my preference would be NYC.

My dad has never missed a Sunday. He’s received many awards for perfect attendance. But he never talks about it. At first I was embarrassed by it. Later, I realized the mortification would kill me if I didn’t change my attitude and so I began to imagine my dad as the noble captain of a sinking ship. Or, sometimes, as a faithful lover, waiting for a passionately planned rendezvous that would never happen.