Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

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.

One summer when I was eleven and Tash was fourteen, she and my mom went away for two weeks to work at a Christian camp on an island in the Lake of the Woods. You’ll be able to take care of Dad, won’t you, she asked me. How hard can it be, I said. Yeah, said Ray, throw a piece of meat in the cage every once in a while.

Tash was really excited because it was a boys’ camp. My mom was going to work in the infirmary and Tash was just going to fool around and look hot and drive guys crazy.

That’s when my dad and I developed the alphabet routine that has served us so well since. I started with Alphaghetti and then moved on to Bread and Cake. After that, my dad took us out to the Sunset Diner for a break and because I couldn’t think of a D.

Tash came home from the camp and told me she had had the most amazing romance with a junior counsellor named Mason McClury. God, even that name, she said. He was nuts about her and kept leaving his group of nine-year-olds asleep in their cabin so they could go skinny-dipping together. But, okay, I said. Weren’t you like the only girl on the island that whole summer? She hissed at me and held up her hand like a claw. It reminded me of when we used to play White Fang in the backyard.

She told me that when she and my mom had left the island on the camp boat, Mason had stood on the dock blowing her kisses and then, oh my god it was so sweet, he dove into the water in his clothes and pretended to swim out to the boat because he couldn’t let her go. Did he make it to the boat, I asked. No, obviously not, she said. It had a motor on it. It was a gesture, Nomi. Like, of love. She told me that Mason had promised to write her and that they’d somehow hook up together in the future, when he got off the island at the end of summer.

When fall came around he still hadn’t written and Tash said that he’d probably lost her address, that was so like him, but that he had told her he played basketball for his school team and that he was from a small town and sometimes his team played our boys’ team and so she started going to all the games even though she hated sports and one time his town’s team was there and she asked all these people if they knew Mason McClury and they said no, who’s he? And she sat there for the whole game pretending to cheer for our team and smiling a lot and trying not to cry hot tears of shame. And when she walked home along the highway she thought about what it would feel like to throw herself in front of a livestock truck. She wondered who would miss her, really, and concluded no one. She didn’t tell me any of that, actually. I read it in her diary. I was impressed with hot tears of shame .

After that I tried to be really nice to her and when she went places I’d say why do you have to go or I sure hope you’re coming back, but she wondered what my problem was. And then she burned her diary in this ceremony that indicated the end of her little-girl period and threw the ashes into the Rat River, a properly embittered woman.

Recently, in the top drawer of her dresser, I found a little card and envelope with her name on it. Natasha, my love, “And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire with good things and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” I wish you joy, peace and contentment. My thoughts will be continually with you, and they will be thoughts of love and goodwill. I will picture you in safety and beauty. Mom.

Puzzling. Had Trudie known all along that Tash would one day leave? Or had Trudie been fooling around with the idea of leaving herself and then stashed this card into Tash’s dresser. If so, where was my card? But also, Tash left months before my mom did which would mean…I don’t know. Either my mom was saying goodbye to Tash, knowing she was on her way out of town, and Tash either didn’t find the card before she left or found it and forgot it OR my mom was saying goodbye to Tash long before she herself actually left. A dress rehearsal. Before she had the guts to really leave? Before she felt she had to leave for Ray’s sake? It’s raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.