Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

We weren’t even allowed to say heck. Agnes’s family said heck. When we burned her brother’s tree house down (another relatively quiet activity), and the tree, she said she would get heck. When I asked my mom what that meant she shook her head and asked me not to repeat it. I asked my friend, later, if she had gotten heck. And she said yes, and I remember feeling afraid and envious. Tobacco smoke, clanking bottles, and now getting, receiving, heck. What a paradise.

TVs were also on Menno’s shitlist, at least they would have been if he’d been around when they were invented. We didn’t get one until one of our cousins who was both a first and second cousin to us, and possibly an uncle and future in-law, was on Reach for the Top, a show about local high school kids answering questions in very short periods of time and winning prizes for the correct ones.

The whole thing — what was and what wasn’t allowed — was so random and absurd it was like playing hide-and-seek with two-year-olds. Billy Joel’s okay but the word heck isn’t. Reach for the Top, fine. Swiss Family Robinson, no way. The Mouth delivered a sermon once that he had dubbed “Situational Comedies: Harmless Fun?” Trudie couldn’t survive without M*A*S*H. The melodic “Suicide is Painless,” over the sound of helicopters, would tinkle out through the screen window around eight in the evening and into the backyard where I’d be unknotting the garden hose for Ray or burying birds or something and I’d always have this moment, this very brief moment, of thinking ah, now Trudie’s happy.

For some reason it was okay to watch Batman, even though he fought against man-eating plants and The Joker, which was a nickname that we knew indicated the presence of evil because it was a playing card. We weren’t really supposed to watch Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie because of the magic which meant Satanism, but we did anyway. Trudie said you couldn’t just wriggle your nose to make people trip and dishes fall and Tash said oh yeah, okay, but you can take a stick and tap a bush with it so it bursts into flames? Yeah, and check this out, in my right hand I hold five fish. In my other, a single loaf of bread. Now watch closely as I…My mom said hush and Tash said you hush. My mom said Tash. And Tash said Mom. And that was it. Her so-called discipline was so half-hearted.

One time on a comedy show, I can’t remember which one, the comedian wondered out loud if there would be sex in heaven and Tash, lying on her stomach, chin in her hands, said yes and it will be divine. I don’t know why I remember that exactly. It was more her deadpan expression that lingers in my mind, and the reaction of my parents afterwards. There was none. Their defences must have been down. They were tired. I hadn’t known if it was a joke or not. The very idea of using the words sex and heaven in the same sentence, I thought, would be grounds for…I didn’t know…a prayer session, maybe. Tears, verses, hugs, exorcisms.

I spent a large part of my childhood praying for Tash’s soul. I hid her I’M WITH JESUS shirt for almost two years because I knew she was wearing it insincerely and because I had inadvertently destroyed it by using my Magic Marker to put an arrow on it that went up instead of to the side. One time in church we were doing a call-and-response thing where The Mouth asks questions and the rest of us answer them in unison and every answer was supposed to be Jesus Christ but each time Tash said John Lennon instead. My mom was trying to drown her out with her Jesus Christs and then Tash started saying her John Lennons one beat ahead of Trudie’s Jesus Christs, squeezing them in real fast, and I just put my head down on Trudie’s lap and prayed for Tash to hear Jesus knocking on the door of her pitch-black heart before she was cast into the burning pits of hell. In the car afterwards my mom said Tash was incorrigible and Tash said my mom was faking it for my dad’s sake and my dad said faking what? And Tash said faking being mad. And my dad said mad about what? About John Lennon, said Tash. Mom’s mad about John Lennon, asked my dad. Yeah, said Tash, Mom’s mad about John Lennon. God. You could hear her eyes rolling. And then my dad asked who John Lennon was and Tash requested permission to kill herself — and my mom looked happy, well, not unhappy, and my dad looked confused as usual.

I’m sure that was the day I first heard Tash call me Swivelhead. All I did back then it seems was look from Trudie to Ray to Tash back to Trudie to Ray to Tash and on and on trying desperately to understand what it was they were talking about, what the words coming out of their mouths meant. The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved. It was the one thing I counted on and I couldn’t understand why my own immediate family would make little feints and jabs in directions other than up, up, up to God.

Why was Tash so intent on derailing our chances and sabotaging our plans to be together for goddamn ever and why the hell couldn’t my parents see what was happening and rein that girl in? We were supposed to stay together, it was clear to me. That was the function, the ultimate purpose, the entire premise for the existence of the Nickel Family. That we remained together for all eternity. And it was so doable. It was so close, we could almost touch it, in fact we were touching it. Living in East Village meant we were halfway there already. What more could a pious little Menno kid want?

There were other things you may not necessarily know or remember about my mother. She liked to pat her stomach, especially if she was standing in the middle of the kitchen staring at the cupboards trying to mentally prepare herself for plunging into some tedious domestic task.

Often when she said the word yes, in response to a question, she’d spread her arms out like a symphony conductor calling for a big sound from his musicians.

She liked a made bed.

She had an uncanny ability to predict the weather.

She’d snap towels viciously before folding them, often very close to our heads as we sat watching TV.

She didn’t believe in waiting for two hours after eating before going for a swim. “Do fish get out of the water after they’ve eaten?”

She drove too fast and whenever she parked she’d inch closer and closer to the wall or barricade in front of her until the hood of the car bumped against it. She called it Montreal parking. She’d never been to Montreal but she liked to say Montreal whenever she could so that everything, parking, hairstyles, sandwiches, were all, according to her, Montreal-style.

She believed in one-hundred-percent cotton. “It wrinkles badly but at least it breathes.”

She loved the girliness of my dad’s eyelashes and his smile (oh, Ray’s smile!) and the way his arms got dark brown in the summer. One time she and my dad were talking together in the kitchen and Tash and I heard her say, god DAMN I love your sense of humour.

She occasionally plucked hairs from her chin, which I couldn’t watch.

She spoke to strangers whenever she had the opportunity to, mostly tourists here to see the village, and would usually get very excited about the various aspects of these strangers’ lives.

In the winter she’d warm up my bed for me by lying in it for twenty minutes while I had my Saturday-night bath.

She cried every single time she watched The Waltons.