Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I’ve been experimenting with some vegetarian meals, something called Survival Casserole. A couple of days ago Ray came in and stood in the kitchen and assessed the stuff I had simmering in a pan on the stove. We’ve been eating an awful lot of vegetables lately, he said. I shrugged. Do you mean horribly many, I asked. Yes, he said, that’s what I mean. I found a streak of blood in an egg yesterday, I said. They’re very good, though, vegetables, he added. In what way, I asked. Well, he said. Well was his trademark answer to all of life’s questions. They’ll make you live longer, anyway, I told him. He tilted his head and frowned. Or does it just seem that way, he said. That’s quite funny, Dad. He resented vegetables for prolonging his life. I told him we could have pear nectar for supper. It was thick, like a meal. Cooking’s not your forte, is it, he asked. I put my wooden spoon on the counter. Do you want meat, I asked. I can’t make meat. That’s fine, he said. That’s A-OK. He likes saying things like A-OK. Things like legal beagle and bean counter and shutterbug. One time I asked him if he had some kind of aversion to saying the real words. What’s wrong with lawyer, accountant, photographer, I asked him. Nothing’s wrong with them, he said. But he looked sad when he said it like he was a kid playing in a puddle and I’d told him to stop fooling around.

Trudie hadn’t seemed to mind his word thing but it’s always made me crazy. I should try to be more indifferent to it. I know I would be if I wasn’t so wild with the knowledge that he’s doing it to seem jivey and laid-back for my sake. He refers to me and my friend Lydia Voth as Tom and Huck. What are Tom and Huck up to? What adventures do Tom and Huck have planned for today? You mean besides rafting down the Mississippi with a huge man called Injun Joe?

I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay! he shouted. All right! We have to get you a stick! We have to get tape! I’ll be waiting in the car!

These days Tom and Huck don’t have much planned because Tom, or is she Huck, is in the hospital with an illness that has not been diagnosed. Nobody seems to know what’s wrong with Lydia. Parts of her body keep breaking down. Yesterday when I popped in to see her she told me she was feeling more and more like less and less and then she laughed her head off for a while until it became too painful. She can’t stand the way her socks clutch at her ankles or the way things like lights sometimes hum in her head. She looks like she’s lit up from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern. Her cheeks glow red and her eyes are bright, bright electric blue, and her hair is no longer blonde, it’s yellow, like penicillin. I lay down beside her in the bed and read to her from one of her old Black Stallion books. She’s the same age as me but she likes those books. She doesn’t care.

She asked me if it was really hot outside, and I said yeah, killer. It’s shimmering. She nodded.

How’s the job? she asked. I had a part-time job washing cars at Dyck Dodge but I hadn’t been there for a while because I hated the way the tops of my rubber boots chafed at my calves. I showed Lids the raw skin on my legs and she frowned. Basically, I could go in whenever I wanted to and get paid under the table by the guy in the showroom, whose fascination was held by girls who wear short shorts and wield hoses. It’s a loose arrangement that surely will not prepare me for a rigid schedule of killing at the plant.

Have you and Travis done it yet, she asked. No, no, no, no, no, God, I said. I waved my arms around like a ref saying no basket. She nodded again.

I will probably, she gasped, never know the pleasure, gasp, of a man. She closed her eyes and smiled.

Lydia was straight-edge but completely, disarmingly, nonjudgmental. We had nothing in common. I just liked her weird evanescence and the way she did the most unbelievably nerdy things without knowing it or if she did know it she didn’t care at all.

One time she came with me to a Halloween party at the pits and every girl was dressed up like a hooker except for Lydia who was a brown paper package tied up with string, from The Sound of Music . In the summer she wore knee socks and orthopedic shoes and a lime-green windbreaker. Sometimes her ears couldn’t take loud noises and her eyes couldn’t take small print and she’d tell me she couldn’t talk but would I talk because if I spoke quietly she would listen to me and she would be thinking about what I was saying. And it’s true, she did think about what I said. Sometimes I’d say stuff one day and the next time I saw her she’d refer to it and ask me if I was still feeling the same way or if things had changed. Nobody our age did that. We talked about the stuff that was going on, the things we did, not the way we felt. But Lids had no real action in her life, only feelings and thoughts. She lived in her head and that’s why it glowed.

She was a decent, kind, sweet person. I guess that’s why she had to go to the hospital. I told her stuff, boring everyday stuff about my life, and she liked it. She’d laugh. I liked the way she assumed that the two of us could be friends even though she was a good Christian girl and I was a sad, cynical pothead.

Do you want me to comb your hair for you, I asked her. No, she said, it hurts too much. Can I rub in your moisturizer, I asked her. No, she said, that hurts too. She had a thin layer of white Noxzema skin cream covering her face.

Should I wipe it off with a soft wet cloth, I asked her. No, she said, I’ll be okay like this. Are you tired, I asked. She smiled. Should I go, I asked. She shook her head. Can I get you an extra blanket, I asked. Lydia likes extra blankets because she feels cool breezes all the time. Sometimes she asks me to feel the walls for her to find out where the air is coming from. If I’m in a patient mood I feel all the walls all over and then pretend to find the wall with the breeze and then move her bed as far away from it as possible. Sometimes I say Lids, there are no cool breezes in here at all. She likes rooms to be incubator-hot. Sometimes she wears winter scarves around her neck in the summer. I asked her again if she wanted an extra blanket. Her eyes were still closed. She shook her head.

A nurse came in and said: How’s the princess and the pea? But not in a nice way. I stared at her. She’d said that because Lydia was lying on a bed that had two mattresses on it instead of one because just one was too hard for her bones. It’s a beautiful day, said the nurse, and a young healthy girl like Lydia should be outside in the fresh air. Right, Lydia, she asked. Right, Lydia? Lydia opened her eyes and smiled and nodded and then closed them again. The nurse sighed. I would kill her on my way out of the hospital. My friendship with Lids was often about protection. Or it was a shared desperation. Or it was about recognizing the familiar flickering embers of each other’s dying souls. When it was time for me to go, Lids pointed to the table next to her bed. She’d written a poem for me about two girls playing together within some castle’s walls. In the left margin she’d experimented with various spellings of the word requiem. My mother would have drawn a horse’s ass.

After supper me and Travis drove around town and ended up at the pits. Saturday nights you’d have a hundred or more kids down there drinking, dropping, smoking, swearing, screwing, fighting, swimming, home-made-tattooing, passing out and throwing up right up until an hour or so before church the next morning when everyone would be back in the pew with Mom and Dad wearing nice (ugly) dresses and buttoned-up shirts flipping through Deuteronomy and harmonizing to “The Old Rugged Cross.”