Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

In the morning I watched dust enter my room through a crack in my blind. No, I heard my sister saying, that dust has always been there. It’s the sunlight that illuminates it. I checked myself for bite marks. I wondered what it meant to bite yourself in your sleep. Would I soon begin to tear out clumps of hair? Would I be able to kill myself eventually without realizing it?

My dad and I used to dust with Lemon Pledge but when it ran out we stopped, although we talked about it a couple of times. Some pledge, my dad had said and I gave him credit for being funny intentionally.

Ray had already left for school. He had put his coffee cup on the counter, on top of the plate he’d used for his toast. I put them into the dishwasher and then I looked into the fridge to see if there was anything to make for supper. There was a knock on the door and I went over and opened it and the neighbour girl was standing there wearing her bathing suit and rubber boots.

Hello, I said, I have to go to school.

Can you play charades with me? she asked.

I said no, I didn’t have time, but she looked so sad and forlorn and kept saying please over and over so I said fine, quickly. I stepped outside and sat on the front step and she sat down in the grass.

Start, I said, hurry up. I’ll guess.

She didn’t move.

Are you doing it? I asked. She nodded.

Are you a…weird little kid? She shook her head.

Hmmmm, I said. Hang on. I went into the house and got my smokes and sat back down on the step and lit one up and said are you a rock? She shook her head. She was just sitting there in a vaguely square shape. God, I said. I blew smoke rings at her. Can’t you do some kind of action? She shook her head and started to giggle. Are you a book? I asked. She shook her head again. A fridge? She shook her head. Okay, forget it, I don’t know and I have to go to school now, I said. I threw my butt into the grass and went into the house and slammed the door.

Three seconds later she knocked again and I opened it and she told me she had been a Shreddie. Okay, I said, I’ll pour some milk over you and eat you, and she screamed and ran away. I thought probably I would not be a very good mother to Roy Orbison and Nova.

On the way to school I stopped to watch a group of twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys throw rocks into a new abattoir being built next to the junior high school on the other side of the highway. There was a twenty-foot wall of concrete cinder blocks around it and every day it got higher and higher, but the men were working from the inside so you couldn’t actually see them. I heard a loud clank like a rock had hit somebody’s hard hat and then an angry scream and five seconds later a bunch of the workers came flying out of an opening in the side and were throwing rocks back at us. Most of the kids had taken off but one of them got hit in the back and fell shrieking to the ground.

I went over to him and put my hand on his back and asked him if he was okay but he didn’t say anything because he was gasping for air.

Three or four of the construction workers came running up to us and they pulled him into a sitting position and said c’mon buddy, breathe. There were many occasions in this town where people encouraged others to breathe, it seemed. C’mon, c’mon, said one guy with no shirt. He was moving his hands around the boy’s chest, trying to get the air circulating inside him. There we go, he said. There we go.

The boy began to cough and cry. I picked his ball cap off the ground and put it on his head.

Do you know this guy, asked the construction worker. I shrugged. I know of him, I said. We all knew of each other.

I’ll take him to school, I said.

Hey kid, said the man, see what happens when you throw rocks? The kid nodded. Gonna do it again? asked the man. The kid nodded.

He means no, I said. He better mean no, said the worker. C’mon, I said, let’s go. The boy got up and we headed off in the direction of the junior high.

What’s your name? I asked.

Doft, he said.

Do you speak English? I asked. He shrugged. Are you from Paraguay? I asked. A lot of people who had left town for Paraguay for even more hardship and isolation than this place could provide, although we did our best, were moving back. The Paraguayan girls wore dresses over pants, and the boys wore suspenders and men’s shirts. He nodded.

Hey, I said, don’t cry. You’re gonna be okay. You had the wind knocked out of you, that’s all.

He wiped his nose with the side of his hand and pulled his cap down really low over his eyes. Do you smoke? I asked. It was all I had. He nodded. I handed him a Sweet Cap and lit it for him and we sat on the curb smoking with our backs to the front doors of the junior high. When I was finished I flicked my butt onto the road and Doft put his on the ground and jumped on it with both feet.

You should go in now, I said. I pointed to the door. Doft took his ball cap off and handed it to me. Please, he said.

His English wasn’t very good but then again none of ours really was. Then he did six or seven cartwheels in a row down the sidewalk and back again. I handed him his hat and said fuckin’ A, Doft. Bueno.

We waved at each other before he disappeared inside the school. I have made two children happy in the course of five minutes, I thought to myself.

I was moved in typing today for flippancy. Flippancy was the big sin. I should have realized the inherent gravity of fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjf the fox jumps over the log. And how will this help me to kill chickens faster?

On our report cards every letter of the alphabet signifies a different behaviour problem and I always without fail get a big red circle around the F for Flippant Attitude. But I don’t really give a fuck. (Oh, funny, eh?)

Travis had phoned me in the morning, before the Shreddie incident with my neighbour, and said he was mad at me for saying he looked like Ian Tyson when he holds his guitar so high up, which had put me in a bad mood. I just like them better held low, I said. He told me I was shallow. First about pant legs being tucked into socks and then about how a person holds his guitar. Well, what the hell am I supposed to think about, I asked him. I told him he was fishing around for stupid things to be mad at me for because he knew he’d said a stupid thing last night and couldn’t just apologize and tell me we’d never break up because he loved me more than life itself. And then I hung up.

Five seconds later I phoned him back and said I was sorry and he said he was too and asked me what I was wearing and I lied and said his Blumenort Jets sweatshirt.

At lunch it was raining so I didn’t go home. I went to the gym and sat way up in the bleachers and watched Rhinehart Bachenmeir shoot hoops. Man, he was good. He was conducive . That fast break and all that spinning around to the left, to the right, and his arc, stellar, beautiful like one of those marine-show dolphins. Dribbling between his legs making all those three-pointers and left-handed layups and slam dunks. What a pretty shooter. The only thing missing was the ball. I clapped anyway and he gave me the finger because I guess he thought he was alone with Kareem Abdul Jabar.

At 2:30 the guidance counsellor came to my class to tell me I should talk to her. We walked together in silence to her office next to the principal’s office and she pointed at a chair and said have a seat.

She asked me if I had any specific goals or aspirations for after high school and I smiled.

Hmmmm, I said. Lemme think. I told her I’d thought about becoming a city planner someday. She asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life spacing fire hydrants. No, I said, but I like looking at cities and thinking about them. She told me I needed exceptional math skills for that.