Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I would ask Mr. Quiring if he remembers all that but I don’t really want to have conversations about the past with anybody but myself. It prevents discrepancies from creeping in.

After Mr. Quiring left, Trudie slammed her cup down on the kitchen counter and told Ray that even Almon Quiring could see that Tash didn’t belong in this town. And Ray asked her what he should do about that, take an Almon Quiring course on Natasha Nickel?

Even I knew the answer to that question. Uh, Dad, we all move to NYC? But I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes I think that Trudie blamed Ray for Tash leaving town with Ian because if Ray had agreed to leave first, had taken us all off to some other place, Tash wouldn’t have had anything to rebel against and would have stuck around.

But, on the other hand, sometimes I think that Trudie appreciated the fact that Tash had an awful lot of things to rebel against because if she didn’t she might not have developed her dramatic flair and pursued all sorts of adventures off in the city and in the world that Trudie herself more than anything also wanted to experience.

Anyway, from that day on, Trudie would periodically invoke Mr. Quiring’s name, telling Ray that at least there was one person in this town who could see that Tash wasn’t like everyone else. And Ray always agreed with her and said Mr. Quiring was absolutely right which didn’t leave Trudie any more or less frustrated.

Basically, I think that Trudie and Tash were kind of the same person. And maybe me and Ray are too. What was it Mr. Quiring told the guidance counsellor? Nomi’s problem is a general lack of self-esteem that feeds into an eroding sense of purpose. Yeah, okay, sounds right, I guess. I’m sure once I begin to spend nine hours a day separating chickens’ heads from their bodies I’ll feel a lot better and more useful.

My parents weren’t crazy about the fact that Tash was drinking and hanging out with Ian so much, sometimes until five or six in the morning, at the pits or in the bushes around Suicide Hill or in any of the other rustic settings we young pioneers relied on to get us through the night, but it wasn’t that, really, that my mom was concerned about. Not really.

I do remember The Mouth coming to our house and my mom saying Hans, for crying out loud, what is it this time, and him saying Trudie, you know as well as I do that Tash’s been hitching rides to the city, and my mom saying something sassy like well, can you blame her and The Mouth telling her she was treading on thin ice. I didn’t know if he meant my mom or Tash or both of them and I didn’t know what thin ice meant exactly and when I asked my mom she said oh, it’s just the heat. Everybody’s cranky these days.

Later that evening we had supper at my grandma’s place and The Mouth was there also with his wife and kids, my first and third cousins, and my grandma said but where’s our Tash, and The Mouth cut my mom off and said Mother, this is a spectacular pot roast. I had never heard The Mouth use the word spectacular in any context whatsoever. I’d vaguely thought it was a sin to say spectacular. So while I was busy chewing over his use of that particular word, I hadn’t noticed that my mom was getting more and more pissed off with her brother and his habit of controlling every single aspect of her life. Which in fact was still not quite the thing that bothered her. She was used to that by then, obviously, and she could ride that out.

I did know that Tash and Ian had applied for library cards in the city, and were bringing home books not by Billy Graham or about the Sugar Creek Gang. And pamphlets about communism and Albania being a great place and if there’s one thing other than John Lennon that gets The Mouth’s back up, it’s communism because it was the reason why the Russians took everything away from the Mennos and sent us all packing when life had been so coarse and sweet back there on the banks of the Vistula.

Tash had learned the meaning of the word metaphor, and had started applying it to almost every aspect of her life, and ours. I heard my dad say to her: Tash, some things are real. Some things are nothing but what they are. And Tash asked him how he knew that and he said he didn’t know that, but he believed it. And some things are more than they appear to be. What things, she had asked. And my dad said he didn’t know exactly. I remember being frightened by that conversation and making a mental list of the things I knew, and then wondering if they were real or not.

That may have marked the beginning of my self-biting period. I wondered if Tash was possessed by the Devil. Suddenly, in comparison to loving metaphors and communism, it seemed tame and typical and status quo to be drinking at the pits, to be staying out all night with a boy, and to be storming around the house in a bra and panties swearing along with Marianne Faithfull and saying oh my god to everything anybody ever said to you. Why did my sister require more than that? What the heck was she doing with that library card of hers? She’d gone too far, I knew that much.

This evening I tried to explain to Travis how it was that he found me lying on the shoulder of Highway 23. It’s my chain, I said. It’s faulty. It happened to me frequently. One second you’re flying down the highway to America, the next you’ve got your Wrangler flare pant leg caught in the chain and you’re down, stuck pinned to the road staring up at the clouds and picking gravel out of your skin, waiting for someone to come along and rescue you.

Usually it was a farmer passing by. He’d get my pant leg out of the chain and throw my bike in the back and give me a ride to the border. Once I got to shift gears for a carny named Snake. Now! he’d say. It was fun. He made me wear one of his hats with the carnival logo on it so if someone saw me riding with him they’d think I was a co-worker and not report him. He told me he was on antibiotics because he’d gotten the clap from the cotton-candy girl. He told me that a kid like me could make twenty-five cents per rat at any fairgrounds if I knew how to swing a bat. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He told me he could not afford one more felony. I said man, tell me about it, although I was only ten and had never heard the word felony before. It sounded like a pretty girl’s name to me.

Travis put my bike into his dad’s truck and asked me why I didn’t tuck my pant leg into my sock. Somebody might see me, I said. I’d rather fall.

I made Travis promise me that he would never become the type of person who tucked his pant leg into his sock while riding a bike and he said I was superficial but he knew what I meant. He said he’d take off his pants and ride around in his underwear first.

Where would you put your pants, I asked. You’re not gonna have a carrier!

What’s wrong with a carrier, he asked and I said no, no carriers. Carriers are for little kids.

Well, then he said he’d get a clip for his pant leg and I said no, no clips, and he said my bike etiquette was extreme. I felt like an idiot for feeling good about knowing how to look on a bike. I had to get my driver’s licence soon.

He asked me if I felt weird lying beside the road under my bike. Now that you mention it, I said. He drove us to a field and we smoked a joint and climbed into the back of the truck where we could stretch out and stare at the sky. Just another hard surface to lie on while contemplating infinity.

Let’s talk more about bikes, I said. We talked about when we were kids and dressed up our bikes for the July 1 parade, which included a contest.

You don’t want to win though, I said. He agreed. (In this town, if you win something you’re dead.) Hey, we actually agreed on one thing, I said.