Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

What? he said. How is that…I kissed him slowly on the mouth and closed my eyes and held his head so he couldn’t move it very well and I did it for a long time even when he tried to move me back a bit with his hands on my shoulders and remove my shirt and put on a record with one hand and switch off the light and move all the shit off his bed and get his guitar out of the way I kept kissing him and kissing him until I had stopped crying long enough for him not to notice.

He went upstairs and got me a glass of water and a pepperoni stick and told me I was bony and hot.

You’re beautiful, I told him, and…kind of mean. No, I didn’t say that last part. And he said he liked it when I took the initiative once in a while and I said well, baby, you really schteck me ohn, which in our town means, baby you light my fire (if Jesus really was watching over me he would have prevented me from saying such retarded things to people I was hoping to impress), and then I flicked the lights off and on while he did a Donna Summer routine for me that made me laugh hysterically and also worry about whether or not I was a manic depressive.

I have a feeling, a sneaking suspicion, that Mr. Quiring thinks I’m nuts.

I mean, just because he knows my family history and all that. The problems it caused. The messy endings. The whole town knows, right? How could they not? He’s probably thinking hey, this girl does have a legitimate claim. And I wouldn’t blame him or anything. How can you argue with the crazy genes? But don’t worry, I’m hanging in there, remembering to keep my pants on, etc., etc. My school assignments have helped me to focus and organize some of my thoughts. And soon I’ll be able to spend my pre — Rest Haven days murdering chickens which should help me to release some of my pent-up psychosis.

But still, it bugs me slightly to think that Mr. Quiring thinks I’m insane. Not that I can be bothered trying to convince him otherwise. Today in school he sat on my desk and told me it was against the law to mow your lawn on Sunday morning in East Village. Tell your dad, he said. You know he was out there at 7 a.m. the other Sunday mowing his lawn?

My mom was loving her library job, it seemed. And my dad was loving her. And Tash was loving Ian. And I was loving Tash. But there was a vibe happening in the house. I didn’t know exactly what it was. I was too young to understand philosophical shifts. There was a look in everybody’s eyes that I couldn’t explain. Like they could see something that I couldn’t see. Like I was four years old again and lying in the back seat of the car pretending to be asleep while the rest of my family sat together in the front and said things that I couldn’t quite make out. One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can’t help but think of the good times we’re having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c’mon now honey. Oh super duper, I thought, now my dad has started mourning the future too.

Tash started staying out really late with Ian and when she did come home she went straight to her bedroom and slammed the door. The Mouth came by often to talk with my parents. He’d bring Aunt Gonad with him sometimes and my mom would get out the TV trays and make tea and The Mouth would sit down on the couch with his legs crossed so that one of his pant legs rode way, way up his leg and exposed a shiny, hairless shin. Pure bone. I would occasionally stroll through the living room and glance surreptitiously at his leg just to freak myself out but that was long ago. I remember wanting to tell Tash about it one evening, it was the type of grotesque detail that could almost make her smile, but when I knocked on her bedroom door she said piss off, Swivelhead. And that was long ago too.

When I was a kid I was afraid of the dark and one night I thought I saw Jesus standing at the foot of my bed with a baseball bat poised to smash my head in for a lie I’d told Rhonda Henzel that day and forgotten to ask forgiveness for. I ran to my parents’ room and hid under the bed and eventually fell asleep.

When they came to bed I woke up and heard my mom asking my dad where everything had gone and I remember wondering if we’d been robbed. I think I’m losing Tash, she said, and began to cry. And I heard my dad, in his wordless way, shift around in the bed to offer what comfort he could in the form of his arm. I waited for them to fall asleep and then I went back to my bedroom and slept with the light on all night. The next day my dad and I went to church and my mom told him she couldn’t go with him because she wasn’t feeling well. My dad stood staring at the closed bedroom door. I could see his outline in the dark, from the living room. Then he knocked on Tash’s door and said Tash: It’s time to get up. And she told him to go to hell.

If I had a clue as to what constituted an ending I’d say that that day marked the beginning of the end. My dad and I walked to church together holding hands. Afterwards, we walked back home. And I listened while he talked to me about the half-lives of isotopes. Take radon, he told me. For it to break down into its daughter nucleus, polonium 218, requires 3.82 days. Others take only seconds.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I felt happy knowing he was happy about something even if it was about something breaking down.

And potassium, on the other hand? he said. To break down into argon?

I’d hum.

Nomi, he’d ask. Are you with me? It takes fifty billion years! Fifty billion years to find a little stability. A molecule’s worth.

I laughed, and then I realized that I had just laughed the type of laugh my mother often laughed. It was the kind of laugh a person laughs before consuming two or three bottles of Aspirin. And I had another thought: that Tash had stopped laughing for a good reason. And that she was the sanest person in our family. But that didn’t make any sense at all.

When someone complimented Tash she’d suck in her cheeks to keep herself from smiling because she enjoyed looking pissed off and dangerous. I liked the way the shadows fell on her face when she did that. She looked like Sophia Loren. When I did it I looked like Alexander Solzhenitsyn after all those years in solitary confinement. Ray had his book.

I went to the garage and sat on the cold cement floor and opened and closed the garage door with a little black box that said STANLEY on it. When we first got the automatic door opener I loved to roll under the door and clear it at the last second. It was fun to think I could be sliced in half if I made even one tiny tactical error, until my sister told me the door was designed to stop as soon as it made the slightest contact with any surface, even flesh. Thanks for ruining my fun. I remember the way her knees looked while she stood on the driveway saying to me as I rolled under the door, don’t let’s be the kind of family that fights about who gets to kill themselves next.

When Tash was four and I was a fat baby, she threw herself out of a tree and broke her elbow in two places. She thought that God had let it happen. My mom told her that God had saved her life. She could just as easily have broken her neck and died. Then she had wanted to throw me out of a tree to test God’s love and my mom said no, there are such things as accidents.

These were simple, barely considered statements that Trudie threw out like confetti and forgot in a second that she’d said but they stuck to me like the kind of wood tick that crawls through your ear into your brain and lays eggs. What did she mean, accidents? What about God knowing how many grains of sand there were on every single beach? What about him knowing what we’ll do before we do it? Obviously if my sister were to throw me out of a tree there would be an ending ordained by God. He’d have known that she was going to do it and he’d also have known what the outcome would be. If Tash felt like throwing me out of a tree, wasn’t that because God was making her feel like throwing me out of a tree, and for her not to follow through on that feeling, wasn’t that a sin? Wasn’t Satan speaking through my mother when she was preventing Tash from throwing me out of a tree and following God’s will? Technically, I should have been thrown from that tree.