Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

Travis is putting blinds up today for his dad. We sat in his dad’s work truck on my driveway and he told me that I should go on the Pill. I thought yeah, probably. Good idea. Travis had quit school to work for his dad and learn things on his own. He had just turned eighteen. I liked to tell him things that reinforced his idea that school was ridiculous.

I told him that my English teacher didn’t know what a codpiece was. He called them grossly enlarged sex organs. Codpieces were the height of fashion in Shakespeare’s time, said Travis. He says height of fashion in a way that bugs me. I told him that my biology teacher, while teaching us about the reproductive system, pointed at the penis on the overhead and mumbled er, no function. Simians, said Travis. I made a mental note to look up codpiece and simian in the dictionary when I got home. Then off he went to hang blinds. I had to go to a farmer’s field with my history class and pick rocks. It was supposed to help us appreciate how excellent our current lives were.

In the field a few of us spelled out SOS with the rocks although nothing but a crop-duster flew over us and we almost died choking on the poison. It was so hot our eyes dried out to the horrific extent that we couldn’t blink and Mr. Quiring had to open up the first aid kit for drops.

I found a note blowing around the field that had been torn in half, right down the middle. It said: I’m sittin in I want to get drunk but I have no flo’? kid here at S.H. that name’s Andrew. I ugly but the point are bitching that guys. So one day you with some sexy off, ha ha. Well shit face, me and Sherise ways I guess I’m just my sister for a while if you forgot my pants hope you won’t ght you should ditch you could do so much She always a bitch, you don’t do what erv, walking around She’s gonna trap your thing!! I’m just biz, I’m your gurl here or not. I’ll always playboy. Your gurl!

A couple of us looked around for the other half but the wind must have blown it to another town. I knew exactly what your gurl was talking about because I also only ever said half of what I meant and only half of that made any sense, which is, I admit, a generous appraisal of my communication skills.

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don’t know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.

When we got back to school our principal told us he had cancelled the Queen City Kids from playing in our cafeteria on the last day of school because a number of large parents had complained about the negative ramifications. Instead, we were given tablets that turned our mouths pink to indicate cavities. Hard to keep up with the changes around here.

After school I went home and had a nap. When I woke up I discovered bite marks on my arm. I bit my arm, experimentally, and the patterns matched. I wondered if this was the beginning of insanity. My Christina’s World poster fell on my head again because Ray disapproved of tacks in the wall. I got pink shit from my mouth all over my Noah’s Ark pillowcase. I thought to myself: The world can be divided into two types of people. That’s where I stopped. Travis had suggested I broaden my horizons and attempt to finish my thoughts. He said I should make a list of ways to improve. Oh that’ll help, I thought.

1. Topics chosen for conversations: To be filled in later.

2. Plan of action: Read books by philosophers ( The Outsider by Albert Camus).

3. Form opinions about news stories, possibly read world news section.

4. Become really funny.

5. Pin down current definition of existentialism.

6. Career options: School superintendent, city planner, stone breaker, freelance detective, underwater explorer.

7. Personality development: Read Jung, Adler, Freud. Listen to The Jam.

I went into the living room and stared at the piles of newspapers. I read: Summer, 1982, is the season of the nautical stripe.

I went back into my bedroom and knelt at my bed the way I did when I was a kid. I folded my hands and pressed the top knuckle joints of my thumbs hard into my forehead. Dear God. I don’t know what I want or who I am. Apparently you do. Um…that’s great. Never mind. You have a terrible reputation here. You should know that. Oh, but I guess you do know that. Save me now. Or when it’s convenient. We could run away together. This is stupid. What am I doing? I guess this is a prayer. I feel like an idiot, but I guess you knew that already, too. My sister said that god is music. Goodbye. Amen. I lay in my bed and waited for that thick, sweet feeling to wash over me, for that unreal semi-conscious state where the story begins and takes on a life of its own and all you have to do is close your eyes and give in and let go and give in and let go and go and go and go.

Trudie lost her job in the crying room when the wife of Uncle Hands, my Aunt Gonad, snuck up on us one morning and caught us grooving to The Knack instead of to her husband.

For a while Uncle Hands made my mom take a bunch of girls, including me and Tash, to the foul-smelling Rest Haven, to sing hymns for The Oldest Mennonites in the World. They sat hunched over in wheelchairs with trays and gas tanks and as we filed past some of them would moan and reach out and try to grab us with spotted papery hands from another century. One man in particular would smack his wet lips together about forty times and wave his one good hand around until the nurse made us go over there and sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and he’d sing along but not with words or melody. The grip some of them had was amazing and terrifying. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to drag me along home to heaven with them or if they were desperate for me to pull them back to safety, to a life of running and playing and independent breathing. A nicely dressed woman who seemed functional and completely out of place there sometimes came out of her room to listen to us sing and one time when we were just about to leave I went up to her and said hello, my name is Nomi, and she told me to go to hell.

Tash and I begged Trudie not to take us there ever again and she knew what we were talking about. I guess that’ll be my life eventually. First about fifty years of killing chickens and then the Rest Haven. What a relief that will be. I’ll probably also be the type of old woman to tell friendly little girls to go to hell.

After the Rest Haven, Trudie got that job as the church librarian. She liked people a lot, anthropologically speaking, so it wasn’t too bad at first. She enjoyed helping them find just the book they were looking for. Would you like three weeks for that? she’d ask them. Two weeks was the standard time, but my mom wanted them to be able to finish the books without getting anxious about the due date.

Sometimes she’d let me and Tash skip out of church upstairs and hang out with her, putting books on shelves, sticking numbers on their spines, reading. We read every single Sugar Creek Gang book, stories about a group of mischievous Christian children. Bad things happen. They get into trouble. But always, always, they learn something about sin and forgiveness at the end. We read books by Billy Graham, and books about staying quiet and clean when your husband comes home from work, and books about punishing your children.

It was okay. I liked the way the library smelled and the way the rads would hiss and clank and scare the shit out of us. For some reason, when we were in the library, Tash and I often pretended that we were German spies and we called ourselves Platzy and Strassy. We’d hide bits of information in books and then give each other clues about how to find them. There are probably still little notes stuck in Billy Graham books that say things like: I was brutally tortured for several hours this afternoon but I am fine. Let’s meet for drinks at the Über-Swank at eight. Platzy.