Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I conjured up all sorts of reasons for him to be there every Sunday other than the real one, which seemed to be that it fulfilled a need to be reminded of his powerlessness, over and over and over again.

Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don’t like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.

A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.

I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits.

But I suppose there are ways to leave if you know the terrain. My mom and my sister easily made tracks when it was time to split. (Mr. Quiring has advised me to “lay off the jive talk.” It just happens sometimes. I can’t control it. I’m Sybil. I used to do it to entertain my mom and my sister, calling them child and talking about the pusher man and all that stuff, you know, funkifying — to make them laugh. I was just a kid imitating Tash’s records. So now, when I talk about them, I sometimes become Curtis Mayfield. I don’t really know why it happens. I’ll try to curb it.)

My mother, Trudie Dora Nickel née Rosenfeldt, has gone away. Irrefutable fact, although where she is is up to me, right? I mean I don’t know but who cares — that’s not how stories work around here. Every day at Happy Family Farms a few birds somehow manage to escape and fly away. Some of them end up dead in the ditches.

Like I said, I don’t know where she is, but I imagine different scenarios. The scenarios that I imagine most often involve my mother, with passport in hand, travelling around the world. That’s why I was so profoundly disappointed to find her passport in her top drawer. That discovery posed the hateful question of where she might be if not somewhere in the world.

I use drugs and my imagination to block that question.

She left seven weeks after my sister, Natasha Dawn Nickel, left with Ian, Mr. Quiring’s nephew. Different people have different theories but they don’t talk about them as a rule. I believe that they’re all alive and that one day we will be together except possibly without Ian. Tash and Ian may be rearing their own love child somewhere in northern California right now. I could be the aunt of somebody named Tolerance. My mother might be an activity director on a cruise ship. She likes water and she likes activities. She’s a Cancer. Did she pack warm clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not. Did she pack any clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not. A detail that falls into the same disturbing category as the one about her passport still being in her dresser drawer.

I’m only mentioning these things because they weigh on me. Not because I let them control my life. Or this story. Who cares about facts, right? We’re talking about miracles. Jesus died on a cross to save our sins and three days later he rose up from the grave and pushed a giant boulder away from the opening of the cave they’d put him in. Good enough.

Ilike to ride my bike to the border and stare at America. I like to ride my bike to train crossings in empty fields and watch graffiti fly past me at a hundred miles an hour. It really is the perfect way to view art. I silently thank the disenfranchised kids from Detroit or St. Louis for providing some colour in my life. I’ve often wanted to send a message back to them.

Nomi from Nowhere says hello.

But the train doesn’t stop here and I don’t have any spray paint. At night, I like to go to Purple City. It’s when you stare at the giant caged light in front of the post office for exactly sixty seconds and then you stare at all the lights in people’s houses and every single one is purple. The moon and the stars, if there are any, are also purple. Nobody but me and Lids knows about it. We are the only two residents of Purple City.

I like to ride my bike to the old fairground and smoke in the rodeo announcers’ booth and look at the things written on the walls. THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. DON’T WAIT TIL PAYDAY. WHO ARE THE PEOPLE WHO TIE KNOTS IN BARBED WIRE FENCES? MY FAMILY DOES NOT HAVE A DISEASE RIDDLED HISTORY AND I AM ESSENTIALLY NORMAL. IS THERE A CRIMEA RIVER? I USED TO LIVE HERE.

That last one is my favourite. I often wonder if my sister wrote it, and if so did she write it before she left, or did she come back. But it could have been someone else.

I like to ride my bike on the highway and hang on to the back of RVs with American plates going seventy-five miles an hour. I once caught a ride all the way to Falcon Lake on the back of an Airstream trailer from California. A little girl stared at me through the back window and held up stuff to show me. A pinwheel, a stuffed bear, a drawing she’d made, a tiara. I’d nod and smile, my hair whipping all over my face in the wind, and she’d go off to get something else. Her parents must have wondered why she was so quiet back there. When they stopped at a gas station I rode away and the California girl waved goodbye to me and made her bear wave goodbye too.

When Tash was twelve one of her molars came out and she put it in a glass on the bathroom counter so she wouldn’t lose it and a while later I came in from playing kick the can and filled the glass up with water and drank it and accidentally swallowed her tooth. It’s still in my stomach, my doctor, an irritable man, is sure of it. And it’ll probably stay there forever, like the image of the little California girl waving goodbye in her tiara, which makes me happy.

I’ve decided to walk around today and say goodbye to people despite the fact that I’m not going anywhere.

Bye Gloria, I said to Gloria.

She said hey, we used to play soccer together when we were, what, five, right? She reminded me of the only two rules that the coach had given us: No hugging and no picking flowers. All I remembered was him lining us up against the snow fence and kicking frozen balls at us while we scrambled, screaming, to get out of the way.

I laughed for way too long and then she told me I could have my Coke for free because her manager was gone.

Right arm, I said. (I wished I hadn’t.) Gloria had given herself an anarchy tattoo, near her wrist.

Is that a promise ring, I asked her.

Oh this, she said, holding out her hand.

Yeah, I guess, technically, she said.

To who, I asked.

Marvin Fast, she said.

Seriously? I asked.

I guess, she said, and laughed hard.

Marvin Fast used to chase me home from school and whip me with branches and then the next day he’d give me five bucks, I said.

Really, she asked. That must have been after he was run over with a combine and had his neck broken.

Well, congratulations, I said.

Ew, she said, it’s not official.

Where are you going, she asked.

Well, I said, starters the city. It wasn’t true, just a thing I liked to hear myself say. She nodded and said the big schmake eh? Good luck.

The city was the dark side, the whale’s stomach. It flickered off and on in the distance like pain. It was the worst thing that could happen to you. If you go for any length of time you don’t come back, and if you don’t come back you forfeit your place in heaven’s lineup.

Hey, she said, is that a picture of you in the new building? I should have said no but I waited one beat too long for a convincing lie. She was referring to a photograph taken of me as a young volunteer at the museum village. I’d been a butter churner. I stood in the hot sun in front of the hot outdoor bread oven robotically pushing a broom handle up and down in a ceramic jug of cream while Americans took pictures of me for the folks back home.