Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

It started to rain so we went into this little tack room in the barn and sat on saddles that were draped over boards. Travis turned on the floor heater and said I could put my wet shirt on it to dry so I did and after five minutes we smelled something strange and we looked over at my shirt and it had totally melted away.

He gave me his T-shirt to wear. I scrunched up the bottom of it and stuck it through the neck hole.

When the rain stopped we went outside and tried walking along the fence without falling off. I liked activities where the main theme was just not to fall down. I love being with you, I told Travis and he said I smelled nice, like his baseball glove. Which he never uses any more. I thought of what Mrs. Klippenstein had told her husband when they were both young and healthy, before he became The Swearing Man. You are almost perfect, she told him.

You are almost perfect, I told Travis.

I’ve got pimples on my ass, he said. We went back to his house and made iced tea and frozen sausage things and lay on the cool concrete of his basement-bedroom floor listening to Lou Reed in the dark and in between the songs the far-off screams of little Mennonite children at play.

Everything was wrecked when his parents came home and we’d fallen asleep and the candle had burned down and the record was going around and around and his mom was up at the top of the stairs switching the lights off and on as a signal to us that our world had come to an end and I had to get out of her son’s room and leave.

We walked up the stairs into the shiny bright living room rubbing our eyes and going oh man, what time is it, and stuff like that and his mom looked at Travis and told him his dad needed him to install some carpet somewhere and that he should squeeze his pimples and I wondered which ones she meant.

Can I give her a ride home? he asked.

And his mom said I think she knows how to walk and I said yeah, I do. I just learned today. I went through their front door and set off this awful chimey thing that just went on and on. I could hear it halfway down the street.

When I got to my driveway my neighbour came out all pissed off with her screaming son on her hip. There were bubbles coming out of the kid’s mouth and my neighbour said he’d just eaten two of her Max Factor bath beads that she’d been saving for her anniversary night.

That’s too bad, I said.

My neighbour told me to just wait until I had kids.

And then what? I asked.

Well, then you’ll know true misery, she said. Oh, then?

My dad was at the kitchen table looking at his hands. You weren’t in school today? he asked.

Depends what you mean by school, I said. (Oh ho, clever. God, I’m a jerk.)

They say you’re failing grade twelve, he said.

No, they have it turned around, I said. (I’m making myself nauseous.) I went to my room, slammed the door shut and fired up a Sweet Cap. I took a marker and made a word bubble coming out of Christina’s mouth. FUCK YOUUUUUUUU! she said to that ugly old house off in the distance. I put on Broken English as loud as it would go without blowing the speakers and then stared at myself in my dresser mirror while I sat cross-legged on the bed inhaling carcinogens. I stared out the window and waved at a few RVs.

The tourists are coming in droves now to see how simple life can really be in Shitville. Travis has a job at the museum taking care of goats and sweeping out the windmill and erasing all the bad stuff tourist kids write on the blackboard in the fake one-room schoolhouse. He told me he wrote the word OBEY in huge letters across the length of the entire blackboard as a joke and The Mouth saw it and said he liked it. The Mouth is the grand vizier of the museum. Everything in this town, the school, the church, the museum, the chicken plant, is connected to everything else, like the sewers of Paris. There’s no separation of Church and State, just of reality and understanding, and The Mouth is behind the wheel of it all.

Sometimes Travis has to go sit behind a rope in the authentic replica housebarn pretending to be the husband of a fake pioneer girl in a long skirt and bonnet who rocks a Cabbage Patch doll in a cradle. He sits there reading the Bible with a candle. They’re supposed to smile at each other periodically.

The girl’s name is Adeline Ratzlaff and she once brought brass knuckles to school to beat the shit out of another girl for stealing her look which as far as I can remember was tight Great Scott jeans, Greb Kodiaks, tube top, Fawcett hair, and tons of base. Same as everyone else. Here comes Menno Girl. Travis has informed me that he wants to start a shunning booth for the American tourists. Like a kissing booth, he said, only — yeah, yeah, I told him, I think I get it.

When my record stopped I heard the garage door open and then the car back out of the driveway and take off down the highway, probably going to America for coffee. I stretched out on my bed and stared at Christina. There were many things left not to do today. I went into the kitchen for a look in the fridge. I sat at the table and drew on a piece of paper. My dad had written something on it:

Qualifications of a leader/elder.

Personal — v. 2, 3

Family — v. 4, 5

Church — v. 5, 6

World — v.7

I wondered how our lives might change if my dad became a world leader.

I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines. I gave up and turned the piece of paper over and put it back on the table where my dad had left it. I returned to my bedroom.

I lay in my bed and tried to fight my evening face ache by methodically relaxing every single muscle in my body. It didn’t work. I felt like Frankenstein, like I had bolts in my forehead and a giant chin I could barely move. I decided to get up and go for a walk down the number twelve to the museum to see if Travis could get a break and hang out with me for a while. I put on my strappy Jesus sandals and my cut-offs and a pink halter top. Then I put on a ton of eye makeup and pulled my hair back into a really tight ponytail so I looked like a badly aging Hungarian gymnast.

I left a note for my dad: Don’t you think we should fix the window? I’ll go to school tomorrow. Who was Samuel Champlain again? xoxo nomi. I liked to ask my dad questions about Canadian history because it made him happy to talk about it.

Travis and his fake wife were smoking a joint behind the sod hut and laughing as though they were enjoying themselves.

What are you doing? I asked.

We’re on break, said the girl.

I wasn’t talking to you, I said.

Nomi, relax, said Travis. Toke? He held his breath and passed me the roach. He started coughing and then he asked me what was with the eye makeup.

Can we go for a walk? I asked. He said sure and got up and said later to the girl. We walked off towards the windmill and he took my hand and said don’t be mad.

You’re not having some weird thing with her are you? I asked.

God, no, he said. We were on a break. What do you expect?

I was stumped. Expect? Are you really going to Montreal? I asked him. Fuck, I don’t know, he said. I want to but I also want to be with you and I need money to go and my parents would freak out. I don’t know. It’s complicated.

Yeah, I said. We walked into the little barn where the goats live and he introduced me to them. We sat in a pile of hay and chucked black pellets of food into their pail.