Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

What’s in there, I asked. She opened it up and showed me the contents: a lipstick and a gun, a plastic one. You’re all set, I said. Then she asked me if I knew Jesus drank wine. I said no and she said see, nobody knows the bad side of Jesus. I walked across the yard with her hanging on my leg. The only way I could get her to let go was by agreeing to make my famous face. And then pretend my face wouldn’t go back to normal and get all panicky about it. It was a routine, I guess. An uninspired one but it cracked her up.

She had a carton of chocolate milk with her and she told me to watch as she drank the whole thing in one gulp. When she was finished she said listen to this and started jumping up and down and sure enough I could hear the chocolate milk sloshing around inside her stomach.

My life is an embarrassment of riches. On the way to Abe’s Hill I passed The Mouth and his wife going for a bike ride. Hello Nomi, said The Mouth. Vo est deet, he said in the non-romance language of our people. He had so many large grey teeth. Some were jagged, some pointy, like a mountain range. His wife mimed some kind of weak acknowledgment. I exhaled a little louder than usual. It was about all I could muster in terms of a greeting. That’s your mother tongue, he said, referring to the bit of unwritten language he’d just laid on me. He wanted people to speak it all the time. English pained him.

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.

It’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.