Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

Like, for instance, I said, that our main street has two dirt fields on either end of it is weird to me. Shouldn’t it lead somewhere?

That requires engineering, she said. I nodded. Any other goals? she asked.

I told her I’d like to be able to do one chin-up. One chin-up, she said. She looked at me. I mean that would be something, right, I said. Holding my entire self up by myself. Like, my self by myself. No? She was writing something down.

Nomi, she said. Talk to me about English.

English? I asked.

Your written assignments, she said. Forgetting about “Flight of Our People” for now. You’re having some problems getting them in?

I’m not having problems getting them in, I said. They’re not…

Mr. Quiring says the…

It’s just…I don’t know. She nodded. I blew my bangs out of my eyes. She looked at her watch. I shrugged. She wrote some more stuff down and then she stood up and said she had to see someone else.

Okay, I said. Well, thanks a lot. I stood up and she came around from behind her desk with her arms out like an extra in Night of the Living Dead.

Can I give you a hug? she asked.

I…it’s just…I mean philosophically a hug is a great thing, I said. But…I smiled and left quietly. It’s so good to talk to someone who cares. I had a doctor’s appointment after school.

On my way to my appointment I stopped in at Barkman’s and stared for ten minutes at a floor model of a plastic bird whose head goes up and down into a cup of water. I wondered if it would hurt Travis to know that I was more interested in plastic birds than in procuring the female hormone that would allow our love to “progress to the next level.”

How much is that, I asked Mr. Barkman. I thought maybe my dad would like it. It seemed like such a straightforward thing for that bird to be doing. Head in. Head out. It made sense. Mr. Barkman said it was six bucks so I bought it for my dad and Mr. Barkman gave me ten or fifteen Icy Cups and a parachute jumper on the house for taking it off his hands.

I left the store and bumped into two girls singing “Let My Love Open the Door” into microphones made from screwdrivers and tensor bandages.

There was a little kid, maybe three or four, walking down Main Street by herself with a doll’s stroller strapped to her butt. Every few steps she’d stop and sit down in it for a rest and then get back up and keep walking.

From the back all I could see was the stroller and two little legs. I wondered what she was thinking. I wonder what three-year-olds think. I wonder if somebody had told her she was too big for that stroller. I wonder if she felt the way I did about people who told you something that you knew was just not fuckin’ true and if she felt like screaming at them and hurting them and plunging herself into a chemically induced oblivion.

I admired this kid for keeping her cool. She just strapped herself into that doll stroller and took off walking, probably without a word. All the way down Main Street. She’ll show the whole town that no, in fact, she still fits into the damn doll stroller.

I took a shortcut to the clinic and bashed my head on the air conditioner coming out of the wall while reading the directions on the bird. Although you would expect the directions to a bird whose head went in and out of a glass of water to be fairly minimal, they weren’t.

When I got to the clinic all the chairs were taken by Hutterites, also not especially a groovy people except for the fact that they are allowed to wear only polka-dot clothing, and the women must wear kerchiefs and the men, beards. My dad buys eggs from them. They are another sub-sect of our larger clan, except they live in colonies. Kibbutz-style. We are all, though, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. The same door.

I sat on the floor and kept my face hidden in a big thick book of Bible stories for children. I thought to myself: Dear Jesus, please let me one day hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and turn all my grief into hits.

The doctor asked me if my dad knew about me going on the Pill and I said of course, you can phone him if you like. He should be at home right now — I can give you the number. I pointed at the phone on his desk and said go ahead. Then I stared at a dot on the wall and astrally projected myself into a Greenwich Village coffeehouse until the doctor said uh, that shouldn’t be necessary and my heart began to beat again.

I thought I had seen a book on his shelf that was titled How to Incorporate Mental Illness into Your Daily Routine. So, he really did understand us. Dr. Hunter was English. That’s what people in my town called anybody who wasn’t Mennonite. He might have been Estonian or Moravian for all I knew. In church The Mouth called him Brother Doctor Hunter and made snide comments about his fancy education. He had a reputation in town as a shit disturber because he believed in supplying birth control for the women here who by going forth to bed and multiplying often had ten or twelve or fifteen kids. He also liked to prescribe antidepressants. He’d written an article for the city paper that said our town has colossally huge numbers of depressed people. He talked about the emphasis here on sin, shame, death, fear, punishment and silence and somehow, God knows how, chalked that all up to feelings of sadness and galloping worthlessness.

The Mouth said the piece was fiction. He said we, the followers of Menno Simons, were used to being misunderstood by outsiders. He’d tried to shut his practice down a few times but that only strengthened Brother Doctor Hunter’s resolve. Either way, he wasn’t particularly cheerful about doling out birth control but then again he was a man on a mission, and missions aren’t supposed to be fun.

Any history of clotting?

Pardon me?

Blood clots.

No.

Do you smoke?

When I’m on fire.

Do you smoke?

Yeah.

Asinine.

Thanks.

I said that’s asinine.

Got it.

I have realized that my personal yearning to be in New York City, wandering around with Lou Reed in Greenwich Village, or whatever, is for me a painful, serious, all-consuming kind of thing and is for the rest of the world a joke. When you’re a Mennonite you can’t even yearn properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your innermost desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute.

Iwalked home down the number twelve sensing the beginnings of my nightly face ache, despite the fact it was the middle of the afternoon. Giant semis filled with pigs and chickens whipped past me at four thousand miles an hour three inches from my left arm. My right eye twitched from lack of stage-four sleep. I decided to cut across town and go to the hospital to tell Lids about my prescription.

When I got there I was dripping in sweat and the cut on my head from bashing it on the air conditioner had started to bleed a tiny bit. My eye also had not stopped twitching. The mean nurse saw me coming down the hall and made a Herculean effort to cut me off.

These are not visiting hours, she said.

Okay, I said, we won’t visit. I kept walking.

Lydia is rather agitated today, she said. She wants to be alone.

No, she doesn’t, I said. By then the nurse had clickety-clacked off to some other dire emergency.

Lids was wearing her so-called normal clothes instead of a hospital gown but she was fast asleep. Her hair was really greasy and she was wearing gloves. They were white and puckered on the sides and had pearl buttons at the wrists.