Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

And then he asked me if I preferred the people I loved not to be around when I talked to them and I paused because I was confused but he understood my pause to be a dramatically flirtatious pause, maybe, and so when I finally did say no he said okay, good, and we sat there kicking snow and watching our breath evaporate and wondering, at least I was, what came next.

What did come next was a bunch of kids running up to us and saying it’s the countdown, it’s the countdown, like one minute to midnight, come on, come on, so me and Travis got up and walked over to where a different bunch of kids were pretending to throw this other kid, Kurt, or Little Metal Boy as he was often called, into the fire as a sacrifice to the Devil, and other kids, the feathered girls, loud and drunk as usual, were counting down and everyone was talking with a Scottish accent and Janine passed me a hash pipe and just as I was sucking back on it I got kicked in the face by Kurt’s flailing leg and the pipe rammed into the roof of my mouth and tore the skin and my eyes started filling up with tears and Travis put his arm around my shoulders and said happy new year and I whispered happy new year to you too while swallowing mouthfuls of my own blood and when Travis leaned over to kiss me I shook my head slowly but not enough for him to notice and then passed out in the snow.

Afterwards Travis told me I had fallen without a sound. Just like the explosion of chicken blood in my mom’s Jackson Pollock painting. That’s what snow is good for. That must be why Menno “I love the nightlife” Simons picked this place to wait out the rapture, a place where we could fall quietly and not bother anyone. I woke up a few hours later in the back of Travis’s dad’s work truck, with a carpet on top of me and Travis sitting cross-legged next to my head. His lips were blue and he could barely speak but what he said was: Oh Christ, thank fucking God you’re alive. I thought it was the most original thing I’d ever heard anyone say about me and I began to love him.

Trudie used to work in the crying room at church and we have these pictures of her and Tash and me hanging out in there and there’s this one picture of Travis stepping on my face. He was two or so with a giant diapered ass and I was just a baby lying on the floor and obviously in his way.

My mom used to unhook the wire at the back of the speaker in the crying room so she wouldn’t be able to hear the man, her brother, my Uncle Hans, who was The Mouth. Tash, when she was older, would bring in a transistor radio so we could listen to American stations while we helped my mom take care of the babies.

We had a lot of fun in the crying room. We could see the back of my dad’s head, on the men’s side, falling over and snapping back repeatedly while he tried to pay attention to the rebukes of Uncle Hands.

It was usually my job to watch out for mothers with screaming infants standing up in their pews because that meant they were headed our way and the radio had to be shut off so my mom wouldn’t get busted and disciplined by her brother’s notoriously harsh and badly dressed regime. This was the perilous line my father toed and still does, I guess. Torn — at least he was — between the woman he loves and the faith that keeps his motor running. Although with my mom gone, there’s not much of a conflict any more. I’d call the aura at our house a perversely peaceful one of hushed resignation. A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad’s socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh, unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you?

I never know if he’s joking when he says things like that or not. He always signs off his Christmas cards to people with: In Sin and Error, Pining…Raymond.

Ray has exceptionally large glasses, like an underwater mask, as if he never knows when he’ll have to do some welding or shield himself from a solar eclipse. When he blinks at me I’m reminded of the distant city lights, or of the Man from Atlantis or of somebody who has just emerged from a dark underground cell after thirty years of isolation. His glasses are square with thick grey frames and he takes them off frequently to breathe on them. Hah. Hah. Two short punchy breaths, one for each lens. Then he wipes them off with a handkerchief and holds them up to the light, squinting, to see if they’re clean. He still uses handkerchiefs. He buys them in packages of three at a store called Schlitzking Clothing. When I empty his pockets to do the laundry I’m always afraid I’ll find one.

Doing the laundry can be a really interesting and intriguing process. Emptying people’s pockets, noticing odours and stains and items, folding the clothes afterwards, opening drawers, putting everything away. If I were asked by the FBI to infiltrate the Kremlin I’d definitely get a job there doing the laundry. It’s where the drama starts. What a gold mine. Anyway. Last night when I got home my dad was sitting in his yellow lawn chair by the front door staring off at the number twelve highway. His eyes shone through his glasses like green Life Savers. They looked like something you’d want to dive for at the bottom of a swimming pool. Sometimes they’re so pretty they’re spooky and I have to ask him to shut them. You’re still up, I said. He said we need to talk about Nomi and where Nomi’s going. I stared at the highway too. I asked him do you mean me and he looked at me, puzzled. I reached out and patted his head slowly. It was a weird thing to do. He lifted his hand and put it on mine and we held our two hands there together on the side of his head, near his ear, as though we were attempting to prevent blood loss while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Then after a while I said Nomi’s going in the house and he didn’t let go of my hand right away. Like we were in a crappy play and he’d missed his cue.

Ray once built something. It was a garbage hutch, he told me. A few weeks after Trudie left he’d gone into the garage and started working on it. It took him a few days of straight building to get it finished. I was spending all of my free time listening to one song (Zeppelin’s “All My Love”—Trudie had liked it too) over and over in the living room and Ray was in the garage hammering and sawing away on his hutch.

We were little islands of grief. My grandma told me that after my grandpa died she had been very calm. Very, very calm. She bathed, she cleaned the house, she cooked, she graciously thanked people for coming around with their casseroles and condolences. Then, one day, she went to the post office to buy some stamps to send thank-you cards and the guy behind the counter told her she was short two cents and she didn’t have any more money on her, and the guy said oh well, too bad, no stamps then, and she said she’d been coming there for seventy-five years, he knew who she was, where she lived, who her children were, who her grandchildren were, whom she sent letters to, everything, couldn’t she give him the extra two pennies the next time she came in? No, sorry, he said. If he did it for her he’d have to do it for everyone. But not everyone is short two pennies, said my grandma. Nope, he said. No can do. He didn’t want to get into trouble. And my grandma went ballistic on him. She swore. She threw the spongy stamp licker thing at him, she drooled, she snarled, she screamed, she hit him with her purse, and then she left, scattering a stack of Eaton’s catalogues on her way out, walked home, felt good, surprisingly good, and sat on her back steps staring at her sugar beet field for the rest of the day. Said her pulse must have been around fifty, some all-time low.

Ray and I never really succumbed to that type of extreme. He built his hutch and I listened to Zeppelin. Inside, probably, our internal organs were chipping off and turning grey. But we never screamed. The big day finally came when Ray unveiled his hutch and dragged it down to the curb on my old Radio Flyer wagon. The next morning we got up really early to watch the garbagemen remove the cans from the hutch. We knew they’d marvel at it. Ray had painted it a kind of mauvey purple and had even laid a piece of Astroturf on the bottom. It had a board across it that kept the cans securely tucked in, and the board was painted a deep red, left over from some school project of his. Right on, Dad, I told him. That’s a stellar hutch. He told me that Trudie had always wanted him to make a hutch to keep the dogs and cats from tearing open the bags and spreading crap all over our yard. It would be nice, he’d quoted her as saying, to become the owner of a solid, simple hutch sometime before my throat wattles. We laughed. I’d told him it was a deluxe hutch, state-of-the-art. I knew he was trying really hard not to cry. Turns out the garbagemen thought the hutch was garbage, a colourful mess of boards and nails and outdoor carpeting, and threw the whole thing into the back of their truck. Ray wouldn’t let me run outside to tell them they were making a big mistake. He put his hand on my shoulder and said no, no. Don’t. He smiled and shook his head. And then he went into his bedroom and quietly shut the door. And I put on “All My Love” and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all of your love but do you have any more?