Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

Hmmmm, she said. My son, I think.

But I mean which husband, I asked. First or second? Or both?

Not both, she said. I’m not sure. God will know. He’ll have a plan.

But, I said, what if…

How’s your dad, she asked. People asked me that a lot.

Great, I said, smiling back at her. He wasn’t great, he was on life support, but she didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to listen to the funeral announcements on the radio, so I left.

Goodbye, I wanted to say to her, I may not be back for a while. But that sounded ridiculous. I was pathetic. I couldn’t even follow through with my plan to say goodbye to people in the manner of a person going away for a long time. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it or maybe I was just a bad actor.

I decided to visit Lids in the hospital. I wouldn’t say goodbye to her.

When I got there she was lying on her tall bed with her eyes closed and a surgical mask tied around her face. She must have smelled fumes or something. Maybe from a car in the parking lot or somebody doing some painting two hundred miles away. There was a pile of papers on her stomach.

Hi there, I whispered. She opened her eyes and smiled and said come in.

What is this, I asked her, pointing at the papers.

Mr. Quiring brought them so I wouldn’t fall behind, she whispered. She pointed at her throat.

Can’t talk? I asked. She nodded.

Do you want these on your stomach? She shook her head and whispered that she couldn’t lift them.

The nurse just plunked them on your stomach? I asked. I picked them up and put them in the drawer of her bedside table.

Thank you for your poem the other day, I said. I wish you could come out and play.

Soon, she whispered.

Yeah, I said.

She pointed to a small piece of paper on the bedside table. I wrote another poem for you, she said. I picked it up and read the title: “C’mon, Get Normal.” I said thanks and told her I’d read it later when I was feeling odd.

She opened her eyes wide and looked at me. That meant I was supposed to talk about my life. I told her about some things, seeing Gloria, finding out that she was engaged to Marvin Fast. When I said Marvin Fast, Lids put her hand over her mouth and I said I know and started to laugh. The nurse came in and said she’d heard laughing. Maybe Lydia wasn’t as sick as she thought?

No, I said, that was me laughing.

Well, she said, I guess there’s something really funny going on in here. I told the nurse I had found a place for Lydia’s papers besides her stomach.

Oh, said the nurse. I thought she’d have been able to do that herself.

Well, I guess it’s not a good idea to make assumptions, I said.

Well, said the nurse, if you had twelve patients to take care of maybe you wouldn’t be quite as sure of yourself.

I’m not sure of myself, I said.

You sound very sure of yourself, said the nurse. She was fiddling around with things near Lids’s bed. It was the biggest sin in our town to be sure of yourself.

Lydia, said the nurse in a loud snippy voice, you didn’t eat your lunch. Lydia didn’t move a muscle or open her eyes. Lydia! said the nurse.

She needs it to be softer, I said, or it hurts to chew. She needs everything cooked an extra couple of minutes.

Oh really, said the nurse. Lydia needs a lot of things, doesn’t she?

Yes, I said, she does. The second biggest sin in town was to need a lot of things.

Isn’t that what a hosp—…I started but the nurse announced that both Lydia and I needed to have our wings clipped.

What? I get so mad. I go fucking insane sometimes with people like her. You know what? I said to the nurse. I don’t…

She put her hand up and told me she didn’t have the time or the patience to listen to my self-indulgent prattle. Lids had started making a low, moaning sound.

All I’m saying, I said, is that…

Whatever you’re saying is a lie, Ms. Nickel, your entire family is…cuckoo. She moved her index finger in small circles around her ear.

I picked up Lids’s apple-juice container and winged it at the nurse’s head and missed which was a good thing in some ways. Lids opened her eyes and stared at me. Apple juice trickled down the wall by the door. Sorry, I said. Sorry, I said again really loudly to the nurse. I’m sorry. Please…But she’d left the room.

First she told me I was as crazy as my mother and then she left the room. I put my hand over my mouth and looked at Lids who stared back at me with big eyes peering out from over her green surgical mask.

Oops, I said. Lids was shaking in her bed trying not to laugh. Next time, aim, she whispered. The nurse came back with another nurse and an orderly that me and Lids vaguely knew. He used to be in our school but then decided he’d rather be an orderly. He was the boy who had eaten his entire gym bag over the course of one year, in protest.

Hi, I said. He said hi back. He pointed at the wall. You? he asked.

Sorry, I said.

He shrugged. I’ll get her another one, he said.

Thanks man, I said.

Lids, he’s getting you another one, I told her. She smiled with her eyes closed. No big deal, said the orderly.

The other nurse asked me nicely to leave. The short-tempered nurse glared at me the whole time and I told her, lamely, to take a picture, it lasts longer, and Lids opened her eyes for a second to roll them at me. I shrugged. On my way out I stopped at the nurses’ desk and asked the nice one, the one who’d asked me to leave but to come back soon when the dust has settled, if they could please take good care of my friend and cook her food a little longer and keep the room warm and things off her stomach and the nurse nodded and smiled and assured me that she would try. She told me the short-tempered nurse was under a lot of stress and that next time I was upset about something I should see her, not the short-tempered nurse, personally, and we could try to fix it up. I wanted not to be overwhelmed by her kindness because it made me sad to be so happy about something like that but on the way out, walking into the sunshine, I felt like my chest was going to explode and I looked straight into the sun to give me something painful to concentrate on.

Travis is teaching me how to drive. He likes to teach me things. Consider this: Our people’s contribution to civilization is the housebarn — a dwelling in which people are encouraged to sleep with livestock. Or this: The word written on the cap of the guy on the Players cigarette pack is HERO. We go out to fields and take shots at each other’s heads with dried-up turds.

Travis wavers between hippie and punk. When we play soccer he often wears a Pistols T-shirt and his Patrick “football” shoes. Last night we drove to La Broquerie in his dad’s work truck and bought a bottle of Black Tower at Chez Felix. There are lots of small French villages scattered around here. During the war all the French men had to go off to fight, but the Mennonites didn’t because Mennonites are conscientious objectors ( man, can they object), and so while the French guys were off fighting in Europe, the Mennonites went and bought up a lot of their farmland really cheap from the women left behind who were desperate for money to feed their kids and just survive until their husbands and sons came home.

I found out all this stuff by riding my bike into the neighbouring villages several years ago when I was a curious, hopeful child and asking them what they thought of Mennonites. I compiled all the information and then tried to hand it in for a social studies assignment and was rudely rebuffed by Mr. Petkau, who said it wasn’t relevant.

Not relevant to what, I’d asked him and he asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of the semester sitting in the hallway. When I said yes he goose-stepped me out the door and called me wicked.