Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I remember walking through the town at night, barefoot and in my pyjamas, holding my mother’s hand. Tash had left and I had woken up screaming, yet again, and Trudie said she couldn’t take it any more. And my dad was standing in the doorway of my room begging her not to do it. May I please have the keys to the car, she asked him. May I? Please? And he said no, Trudie, don’t go there. Please don’t go there. And then the next thing I remember is walking down the quiet street in my pyjamas. And walking up the front path of my uncle’s house and my mom banging away on the door until my aunt finally came and opened it and asked my mom if she was insane, like her daughter, meaning Tash, not me, and my mom said don’t you ever speak that way about my daughter again. And then The Mouth was there and my mom asked me to sit in the grass but it was wet and I said no. Trudie, said The Mouth, what’s going on here? What are you doing? And then she told him to apologize to me. She said tell Nomi you’re sorry. She kept pointing at me and I just stared at the white pillars in front of The Mouth’s house until my vision blurred. Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit right out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.

The Mouth stood there, right in the centre of the pillars, with his eyes closed and his head tilted up to the sky. She just went on and on. Now tell Nomi you’re sorry and ask her to forgive you. Right now, Hans. You will not go back inside without apologizing.

Then Trudie was quiet for one or two seconds and I could hear crickets and I thought, now we’ll go home. But then she said: No? No? No? You won’t apologize? That’s good. That’s good. Because you know what? I will never forgive you. Nomi will never forgive you. It would bring you too much joy, wouldn’t it, you smug monster, you…ask away. Apologize. Forget it. Forget it! I wanted to tell Trudie I would forgive him, that she was wrong, and then The Mouth told his wife to go into the house and phone my dad. Tell that man to come and get his wife, he said. He told my mom his heart wept for her. Then he went into his house. I sat on the curb waiting for my dad while my mom threw rocks at her brother’s house and screamed profanities that I had never heard before.

After school Travis came back without the poncho and apologized. I told him he was full of shit sometimes and he said yeah he knew that but I could give niceness a whirl.

You’re the kind of guy who in a simple robbery would panic and pull the trigger and end up wrecking a whole bunch of lives including your own, I told him.

Are you ever gonna take that hood off? he asked. We drove out of town in silence towards a different town called Anola.

I wanted to ask him if he was planning to truss me up and kill me in the bushes but I was too pissed off to open my mouth. We kept driving. Travis was singing with the radio…and I was breathing in dust from the gravel road until we got to this even smaller dirt road and we followed that for a while and then he pulled into this clearing in the bush that had a log cabin in the middle of it. He parked by the cabin and looked at me.

So? I said.

It’s my parents’ snowmobile pad. It’s got a fireplace.

Great, I said. Fires are good.

And a bed and shit, said Travis.

Ohhhhh, I said. We both stared at the cabin. I guess this is where we’ll come when…yeah. It’s good? I took his hand and said yeah, it’s pretty nice.

He asked me if I’d want to take my hood off and I said no thanks, I liked it that way. I told him I thought the chemicals had probably successfully tricked my body. He glanced in the general direction of my barren uterus and nodded. We sat there staring at the cabin holding hands and wondering and trying to find something good on the radio.

We drove back to town slowly. I leaned against his shoulder and stuck my feet out the window, and we shared my last cigarette. He called me baby. Here, baby, he said when he passed the cigarette over my head. Wouldn’t it be so great if we could just keep driving and driving? I asked. He kissed my hair. He said yeah, someday we would. The Cars were playing on the radio. Everything was so nice. The air was a perfect temperature and smelled so good. All I could see was blue sky and smoke. Then he had to go and lay a carpet with his dad.

Everything my mother did after that night when she stoned her brother’s house and called him really bad names seemed mysterious and troubling. I think now I’d call it grief. It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness. Trudie started going for long walks at night. During the day, at home, she’d still do things like housework and cooking but she almost entirely stopped speaking. I came home from wherever one afternoon to find her and my dad standing in the middle of the kitchen in each other’s arms with tears streaming down their faces.

What’s wrong? I asked. And they said nothing is wrong and smiled and told me not to worry about a single thing. The kids at school had been talking to me about Trudie, wondering if she was a vampire or completely insane or what.

Why does she walk around like that at night, they’d ask.

I’d shrug. How the hell would I know, I’d say.

One day there was no supper and I got mad. What a spoiled little shit, eh? Anyway, I told her: Mom, we have to eat every day. And she said to me you know you’re absolutely right and then she went over to the calendar and wrote the word EAT in every square, every day of every week of every month. There, she said when she was finished. That should help. When my dad came home from school he looked at the calendar, stared at it for five or ten minutes, quietly flipping the pages of the months, and then went and sat down beside my mom on the couch and took her hand and stared with her, catatonically, out the picture window at the world of sky and highway.

Somehow I managed to find the time to wander aimlessly around town and stare at stuff with a new expression I’d been working on that suggested a complex combination of hostility and hopelessness mingled with sad longing and redemptive love.

If I had a magic wand I would walk down Main Street and go ting —you’re now CBGBs. Ting —you’re an angry street vendor. Ting —you’re Lou Reed. Hey Nomi. Hey Lou. Tour with me. You got it, man.

The Mouth had put up a new sign in front of the church. YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE…GOD. I stopped and stared at the sign. I couldn’t believe it. This was an entirely new approach. It wasn’t even a verse. It was supposed to be funny. It was The Mouth making threats and using God as a dummy. The man was insane. My new expression fell apart entirely and I stood there with my mouth open and my hand on my heart. It could have been the heat or the pot or the excitement of being with Travis or overtiredness or the effects of my body thinking it was pregnant when it wasn’t but I started to cry and couldn’t stop. Why couldn’t the sign say: And you shall be like a spring whose waters fail not. Why not offer some goddamn encouragement?

I got up and walked around to the side of the church where The Mouth had his office and banged on the door. I kicked the door and then I threw rocks at the window.

I screamed: Let me in! Let me in right now! I guess he wasn’t there. Or if he was, he was too busy with damnation work to see me. I walked back to the sign and kicked the shit out of it so that by the time I was finished black letters lay randomly on the ground next to twisted pieces of plastic. I sat on the curb breathing heavily and stared at the two cars that passed in a time span of at least fifteen minutes. How much for a blow job? one of the occupants inquired. A man with a six-inch reinforced heel on one of his shoes walked past me very, very slowly and asked me in the mother tongue if I was waiting for a parade. I shook my head and smiled. He patted my hair and said: And she being desolate shall sit upon the ground. I watched him disappear into Jesus’ arms at the end of Main Street.