Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I heard my dad come home and knock quietly on Tash’s bedroom door and my mom saying it’s okay, honey, we’re in here, make yourself a sandwich, there’s fresh ham in the fridge.

I could hear Tash and my mom talking but I couldn’t make out the actual words. Then I heard my mom leave her room and go into the kitchen to talk to my dad. I got up and went into the hall and knocked on Tash’s door. She told me to come in. Her hospitality made me nervous. She was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her bed in her orange men’s shirt and white choker with the blue bead. It looked so pretty. She’d put a red T-shirt over her lamp so the room had a pink glow. Want to burn some incense? she asked me. Would you like to listen to a record? I sat down beside her and smiled. She looked at me. What’s wrong, she asked. I started laughing which is what I did back then when I was sad or freaked out. It was the kind of laugh that alarmed people. Nomi, she said, don’t. And she put her arms around me and said everything would work out. Everything’s gonna work out, man. I promise. I wouldn’t let her go. Nomi, she said, I know you’re crying. Please don’t cry. I whispered to her that I didn’t want her to go to hell, and she started laughing and said hell was a metaphor. I didn’t know what she meant of course, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me even if I had known. I was a believer and I was convinced that my sister was going down. God is love, Nomi, she said to me. That’s all you need to know, man. God is love. She was so doomed.

When Ian came to pick her up, I went into the living room to read the paper. I put the Irish Rovers on again, loud. Tash came into the living room and said oh my god, Nomi. But this time she was smiling. A really tender genuine smile that killed me. There was no sarcasm, no faking. I knew that something horrible was going to happen. She’d freed herself. That’s what a real smile meant. I knew it. She told me I could have her records.

My mom put some blankets and pillows into a garbage bag and carried it out to Ian’s truck. She put bread and fruit and the fresh ham she’d bought that day into a box and Ian carried that out.

I remembered my mom telling us about the Mennonites in Russia fleeing in the middle of the night, scrambling madly to find a place, any place, where they’d be free. All they needed, she said, was for people to tolerate their unique apartness . Nomi, find my purse, she told me. She could never leave it in the same place. I found it on the floor in the dining room and gave it to her and she took out two fifties and handed them to Tash.

Then it was time for them to leave. Ian shook my hand. He said: Stay cool, kiddo. He also shook my mom’s hand, but my mom said oh phooey and put her arms around him. He said hey thanks man. Then he went and sat in the truck while my mom and I took turns hugging Tash in the front entrance.

Again, Nomi? she’d say. Oh my god. We all laughed. My dad stayed in his bedroom. For a very long time, in the dark. He didn’t come out even for Hymn Sing.

I went into the washroom and took my first Pill out of its Monday slot. My body was now in the early stages of believing it was pregnant. I thought about the name Credence for a baby girl. It was way better than Nova. By the time she was in school CCR would have bitten the dust and it would be okay. Credence.

I lay on my bed remembering conversations and agonizing over things I’d said or hadn’t said until I heard my dad coming back upstairs and going into his room to his own large bed. We took turns lying on our beds, sneaking out at night, driving around in the dark, and pretending certain things existed just beyond our reach. I lay there imagining what it would be like to have another human being growing inside me. Would it panic? I heard my dad begin his special brand of snoring that sounded like he was being choked but refusing to die, all night long. It reached a frightening crescendo and then he stopped breathing — I counted to seventeen before he exploded back to life — and then started from the beginning again. I got up and went into his room and rolled him over and told him: Seventeen seconds this time Dad, you need to have that adenoid operation. You’re making me mental. Sorry, sorry, he said. But he was sound asleep. He lay there on his side curled up like a Cheesie with his hands stuck between his knees in prayer position. I pulled his blanket up around his shoulders. I noticed that he had some hairs growing on his shoulders. I imagined him living at the Rest Haven. I put my face next to his and whispered: Seven. Teen. Seconds. I sat on the bed and watched him for a while. I looked at the bird on his dresser. It had stopped dipping for the night. I looked out the window. I told myself those lacy white curtains would need washing someday. They were the same sad grey as the floors in my school. And as the artillery of teeth in The Mouth’s mouth.

It was two in the morning, maybe, or three or four, and Travis and I were bobbing around in the moonlight on an inner tube at the pits talking about how it feels to go crazy.

I think it’s a gradual loss of peripheral vision, he said. Oh no, I thought. I knew he wanted me to say something almost as brilliant, but not quite. What do you think? he asked. I know you’re not sleeping.

I opened my eyes. Is there something wrong with just bobbing? I asked him.

What do you think? he asked me again.

How it feels to go crazy? I asked.

Yeah.

I don’t know, I said. Sad and easy, I guess, like losing a friend? You say a few wrong things, you ignore the obvious, you act stupid in an unfunny way. Travis told me that Kafka or someone like that had said insanity could be defined as the attempt to reconcile one’s overwhelming urge to write things down with one’s overwhelming conviction that silence is the most appropriate response. Oh, I said. Okay.

Travis told me how one spring his Aunt Abilene went nuts and after her funeral The Mouth said that like children and retarded people who were not capable of making an informed decision to ask Jesus into their hearts, Abilene, although she’d not attended church since she was sixteen, would automatically make it to heaven. Wild eh? asked Travis. They stayed up all night seriously discussing, like they knew, where Abilene would park her ass for all eternity. So wild, wild ’s not the word, I said. Poor Abilene.

We drifted around in the darkness and quietly tried to harmonize on “Delta Dawn” which got stuck in our heads from talking about Abilene’s own mansion in the sky. Travis told me I had a loose commitment to the melody. I was preoccupied with the meaning of the lyrics, I told him. The line about walking to the station. I didn’t tell him I’d just had an awful feeling that the song was really about me. And then Travis said: Hey, it’s like you, Nomi. And even though tears in my throat were starting to suffocate me, in the nick of time I remembered Travis telling me once that I was boring when I was offended, and to be boring was the ultimate crime, and I put my head back and made a laughing sound. And I splashed him. And he splashed me back, conveniently, so that all the water on my face looked the same.

After that we tried thirty-nine times to stand together on the tube until we finally did. It was fun. I liked the falling part, and holding hands. Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together.

It was still early, my dad was asleep, and I didn’t so much want the night not to end as I wanted the next day not to begin so I walked over to Second Avenue to The Trampoline House, which was next door to the boarded-up bus depot, a disastrous experiment that had resulted only in people leaving. If you threw a dime into this coffee can they kept between the doors and took your shoes off you could jump for a while, at least until the next person with a dime showed up or until the family woke up.