A Complicated Kindness (11 page)

fourteen

M
y mom was loving her library job, it seemed. And my dad was loving her. And Tash was loving Ian. And I was loving Tash. But there was a vibe happening in the house. I didn’t know exactly what it was. I was too young to understand philosophical shifts. There was a look in everybody’s eyes that I couldn’t explain. Like they could see something that I couldn’t see. Like I was four years old again and lying in the back seat of the car pretending to be asleep while the rest of my family sat together in the front and said things that I couldn’t quite make out. One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can’t help but think of the good times we’re having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c’mon now honey. Oh super duper, I thought, now my dad has started mourning the future too.

Tash started staying out really late with Ian and when she did come home she went straight to her bedroom and slammed the door. The Mouth came by often to talk with my parents. He’d bring Aunt Gonad with him sometimes and my mom would get out the TV trays and make tea and The Mouth would sit down on the couch with his legs crossed so that one of his pant legs rode way, way up his leg and exposed a shiny, hairless shin. Pure bone. I would occasionally stroll through the living
room and glance surreptitiously at his leg just to freak myself out but that was long ago. I remember wanting to tell Tash about it one evening, it was the type of grotesque detail that could almost make her smile, but when I knocked on her bedroom door she said piss off, Swivelhead. And that was long ago too.

When I was a kid I was afraid of the dark and one night I thought I saw Jesus standing at the foot of my bed with a baseball bat poised to smash my head in for a lie I’d told Rhonda Henzel that day and forgotten to ask forgiveness for. I ran to my parents’ room and hid under the bed and eventually fell asleep.

When they came to bed I woke up and heard my mom asking my dad where everything had gone and I remember wondering if we’d been robbed. I think I’m losing Tash, she said, and began to cry. And I heard my dad, in his wordless way, shift around in the bed to offer what comfort he could in the form of his arm. I waited for them to fall asleep and then I went back to my bedroom and slept with the light on all night. The next day my dad and I went to church and my mom told him she couldn’t go with him because she wasn’t feeling well. My dad stood staring at the closed bedroom door. I could see his outline in the dark, from the living room. Then he knocked on Tash’s door and said Tash: It’s time to get up. And she told him to go to hell.

If I had a clue as to what constituted an ending I’d say that that day marked the beginning of the end. My dad and I walked to church together holding hands. Afterwards, we walked back home. And I listened while he talked to me about the half-lives of isotopes. Take radon, he told me. For it to break down into its daughter nucleus, polonium 218, requires 3.82 days. Others take only seconds.

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I felt happy knowing he was happy about something even if it was about something breaking down.

And potassium, on the other hand? he said. To break down into argon?

I’d hum.

Nomi, he’d ask. Are you with me? It takes fifty billion years! Fifty billion years to find a little stability. A molecule’s worth.

I laughed, and then I realized that I had just laughed the type of laugh my mother often laughed. It was the kind of laugh a person laughs before consuming two or three bottles of Aspirin. And I had another thought: that Tash had stopped laughing for a good reason. And that she was the sanest person in our family. But that didn’t make any sense at all.

When someone complimented Tash she’d suck in her cheeks to keep herself from smiling because she enjoyed looking pissed off and dangerous. I liked the way the shadows fell on her face when she did that. She looked like Sophia Loren. When I did it I looked like Alexander Solzhenitsyn after all those years in solitary confinement. Ray had his book.

I went to the garage and sat on the cold cement floor and opened and closed the garage door with a little black box that said
STANLEY
on it. When we first got the automatic door opener I loved to roll under the door and clear it at the last second. It was fun to think I could be sliced in half if I made even one tiny tactical error, until my sister told me the door was designed to stop as soon as it made the slightest contact with any surface, even flesh. Thanks for ruining my fun. I remember the way her knees looked while she stood on the driveway saying to me as I rolled under the door, don’t let’s be the kind of family that fights about who gets to kill themselves next.

When Tash was four and I was a fat baby, she threw herself out of a tree and broke her elbow in two places. She thought that God had let it happen. My mom told her that God had saved her life. She could just as easily have broken her neck and died. Then she had wanted to throw me out of a tree to test God’s love and my mom said no, there are such things as accidents.

These were simple, barely considered statements that Trudie threw out like confetti and forgot in a second that she’d said but they stuck to me like the kind of wood tick that crawls through your ear into your brain and lays eggs. What did she mean,
accidents?
What about God knowing how many grains of sand there were on every single beach? What about him knowing what we’ll do before we do it? Obviously if my sister were to throw me out of a tree there would be an ending ordained by God. He’d have known that she was going to do it and he’d also have known what the outcome would be. If Tash felt like throwing me out of a tree, wasn’t that because God was making her feel like throwing me out of a tree, and for her not to follow through on that feeling, wasn’t that a sin? Wasn’t Satan speaking through my mother when she was preventing Tash from throwing me out of a tree and following God’s will? Technically, I should have been thrown from that tree.

I remained in the garage but moved from the floor to the top of the freezer to get away from the ants. I realized while lying down on it that my body could easily fit inside. I imagined Tash walking up to me, in frayed cut-offs with cotton balls between her toes, saying: No, it wouldn’t. It’s designed to hold casseroles and pork chops and things. Don’t let’s be the kind of family discovered in freezers.

My sister once gave me a Valentine’s card that said Jim Jones loves you. It had a rainbow decal inside that I stuck into the exact centre of our large picture window.

When my dad saw it he asked me what it was. A rainbow, I said. He said no…no and shook his head. He gave me a razor blade and a wet cloth. My dad wasn’t big on overt symbols of hope. His famous line was: Let’s not call it a celebration. He said that when his school was planning a twenty-year anniversary thing and the kids were making up the invitations for the general public to come and eat a sandwich and look and marvel at how things hadn’t changed, he suggested they use the words Twenty Years: A Retrospective.

Trudie had said but honey, I think celebration sounds nice and Ray had said yes, it does sound nice. Tash had suggested Twenty Years: A Long, Arduous Journey, which my dad had liked and didn’t realize until later that she’d been joking.

On long drives Tash would be forced to share her thoughts with me in the back seat of the car. Her big thing was noticing things nobody else had, like: Ever noticed how nobody names their kid Cain any more? Ever noticed how Mom and Dad can say
open house
and
come and go
and
do
but never
party?
We had parents who couldn’t say
party.
We were in the car on a long, boring trip somewhere. We thought of ways to make them say
party.

Okay, said Tash, we’ll do word association. I say
birthday,
Mom, what do you say?
Cake?
said my mom.
Suit?
Then I tried: Okay, Dad, this is more like a fill-in-the-blanks game. I go to a restaurant, the hostess person comes up to me and says how many people in your…? My dad said
family? Car?
Tash said god and rolled down the window just far enough for her to put her head through it. When my dad said Tash, please don’t do that, please get your head back inside the car, she closed the window even tighter around her neck so it looked like she
would eventually pinch it right off and her head would go sailing off into the sky like a lost balloon. Her hair was whipping around wildly and her lips were stretched back and turning blue in the wind and she slowly dug her thumbnail into her arm until she’d engraved in herself a little bleeding crescent moon. That was how badly she needed to hear my parents say
party.
Finally my dad stopped the car somewhere around the exit to Falcon Lake and we waited for Tash to sit properly in the back seat. That took about five or ten minutes. My mom said: Honey, we were playing along. We were only teasing you. I had to get out of the car and go around to give Tash a sip of my Coke, so she wouldn’t dehydrate in the sun. I don’t know why it meant so much to her. Everything always did. I sometimes wonder if they’d said
party
that day if things could have been different. Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and bang, you’re an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing.

fifteen

I
t was an idea, more than anything, that started the whole thing. It was the seventies then, and although our town was a secret town (The Mouth suggested that when we look in the mirror there should be no reflection because who we are is something that we cannot see), some of the less oppressed teenagers were able to pick up signals from the outside on their invisible radars. Tash especially.

The Mouth came to our house one evening to tell my sister that her physical self was irrelevant. She said okay, thanks for that. Thank you for coming over here to tell me that. And when he left, she shouted oh my god and got on the phone immediately to tell her friends about the latest Buddhist-tinged interpretation of the gospel according to The Mouth.

That was around the time our Aunt Gonad asked Tash to burn her
Jesus Christ Superstar
soundtrack. Tash could do a hilariously sexy version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” where she basically worked herself into a complete fake orgasm during that big crescendo. Ian could play it on the piano because every good or previously good Menno kid knew how to play the piano and she’d drape herself all over him and sing and moan while he banged out the tune and laughed his head off.

Please don’t
schput,
Ray would say. He never made a big scene. He’d go into the basement and practise his typing or work on his watercolours.

Tash was gone a lot of the time. In the summer she’d sleep till one or two in the afternoon and then get up and put on loud music and cool clothes and grab an apple or something from the fridge and leave. She had this thin silver chain that she wore low around her waist and sometimes when she walked out into the yard it would catch a ray of sunlight and the reflection was so bright and flashy it made me have to look away and I liked to think it was a message of some kind. Like, zap, I love you. Or something like that.

My parents and I would stand in the living room staring at her through the picture window. There she goes, my dad would say. Jingling the money in his pocket the way he did for an entire day and night when my mom left. And my mom would say well, it’s normal, honey, let’s not make too big a deal out of it or it will just get worse. But although my mom was philosophically cool about a lot of stuff, her eyes lingered on things, like Tash when she walked down the driveway and got into Ian’s van. I used to count the seconds that passed between the time Trudie would first fix her gaze on Tash as she left and the time she would turn to look at me all bright-eyed and smiling saying well, what’s next? Nine or ten seconds, usually. There’s very little turnaround time for a mother to go from careworn to (fake) enthusiastic but Trudie was a pro and I loved her for it and it didn’t occur to me then that that sort of bravura could have a shelf life. For all I knew Trudie was also taking heart from the quick laser reflection of sunlight off Tash’s silver waist chain.

It was around then, during the days of Tash’s silver-waist-chain period, that Mr. Quiring came to our house for a meeting with
Ray and Trudie about Tash skipping out of classes and not getting her assignments in and, quote, leading the class, when she was there, in mini-revolts that she thinks are humorous, etc. etc. He told Ray and Trudie that he considered himself to be a patient and long-suffering man but that it had to end somewhere. It does? Trudie had asked.

Ray was outside watering the flowers and Trudie was cooking something in the kitchen and I was…I don’t know what I was doing. I answered the door. Tash wasn’t at home. And my mom was flustered at first because she didn’t know what Mr. Quiring wanted or why he was there and he seemed a little nervous too, standing there in the front entrance. And then Ray came in, his hands all dirty, and Mr. Quiring asked if it was a good time to talk about Tash, and Ray and Trudie thought it was and I made tea and sat on the couch and listened.

But he was really nice about it and he told Trudie that he thought Tash had a lot of talent and a sharp intellect. And he said she had dramatic flair and that it was a shame there was no place in town where she could develop that. He was wearing sandals and jeans. And just those three things combined—saying that Tash had dramatic flair, expressing regret that it would probably never be realized in East Village, and wearing jeans and sandals—made him seem like the original hipster man, especially next to Ray who hadn’t even taken off his tie to do the gardening and had probably never used the word
flair
in his life except maybe to describe somebody with a flair for modesty. Ray seemed so much older than him but he isn’t really at all.

I would ask Mr. Quiring if he remembers all that but I don’t really want to have conversations about the past with anybody but myself. It prevents discrepancies from creeping in.

After Mr. Quiring left, Trudie slammed her cup down on the kitchen counter and told Ray that even Almon Quiring could see that Tash didn’t belong in this town. And Ray asked
her what he should do about that, take an Almon Quiring course on Natasha Nickel?

Even I knew the answer to that question. Uh, Dad, we all move to NYC? But I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes I think that Trudie blamed Ray for Tash leaving town with Ian because if Ray had agreed to leave first, had taken us all off to some other place, Tash wouldn’t have had anything to rebel against and would have stuck around.

But, on the other hand, sometimes I think that Trudie appreciated the fact that Tash had an awful lot of things to rebel against because if she didn’t she might not have developed her dramatic flair and pursued all sorts of adventures off in the city and in the world that Trudie herself more than anything also wanted to experience.

Anyway, from that day on, Trudie would periodically invoke Mr. Quiring’s name, telling Ray that at least there was one person in this town who could see that Tash wasn’t like everyone else. And Ray always agreed with her and said Mr. Quiring was absolutely right which didn’t leave Trudie any more or less frustrated.

Basically, I think that Trudie and Tash were kind of the same person. And maybe me and Ray are too. What was it Mr. Quiring told the guidance counsellor? Nomi’s problem is a general lack of self-esteem that feeds into an eroding sense of purpose. Yeah, okay, sounds right, I guess. I’m sure once I begin to spend nine hours a day separating chickens’ heads from their bodies I’ll feel a lot better and more useful.

My parents weren’t crazy about the fact that Tash was drinking and hanging out with Ian so much, sometimes until five or six in the morning, at the pits or in the bushes around Suicide Hill
or in any of the other rustic settings we young pioneers relied on to get us through the night, but it wasn’t that, really, that my mom was concerned about. Not really.

I do remember The Mouth coming to our house and my mom saying Hans, for crying out loud, what is it this time, and him saying Trudie, you know as well as I do that Tash’s been hitching rides to the city, and my mom saying something sassy like well, can you blame her and The Mouth telling her she was treading on thin ice. I didn’t know if he meant my mom or Tash or both of them and I didn’t know what
thin ice
meant exactly and when I asked my mom she said oh, it’s just the heat. Everybody’s cranky these days.

Later that evening we had supper at my grandma’s place and The Mouth was there also with his wife and kids, my first and third cousins, and my grandma said but where’s our Tash, and The Mouth cut my mom off and said Mother, this is a spectacular pot roast. I had never heard The Mouth use the word
spectacular
in any context whatsoever. I’d vaguely thought it was a sin to say
spectacular.
So while I was busy chewing over his use of that particular word, I hadn’t noticed that my mom was getting more and more pissed off with her brother and his habit of controlling every single aspect of her life. Which in fact was still not quite the thing that bothered her. She was used to that by then, obviously, and she could ride that out.

I did know that Tash and Ian had applied for library cards in the city, and were bringing home books not by Billy Graham or about the Sugar Creek Gang. And pamphlets about communism and Albania being a great place and if there’s one thing other than John Lennon that gets The Mouth’s back up, it’s communism because it was the reason why the Russians took everything away from the Mennos and sent us all packing when life had been so coarse and sweet back there on the banks of the Vistula.

Tash had learned the meaning of the word
metaphor,
and had started applying it to almost every aspect of her life, and ours. I heard my dad say to her: Tash, some things are real. Some things are nothing but what they are. And Tash asked him how he knew that and he said he didn’t know that, but he believed it. And some things are more than they appear to be. What things, she had asked. And my dad said he didn’t know exactly. I remember being frightened by that conversation and making a mental list of the things I knew, and then wondering if they were real or not.

That may have marked the beginning of my self-biting period. I wondered if Tash was possessed by the Devil. Suddenly, in comparison to loving metaphors and communism, it seemed tame and typical and status quo to be drinking at the pits, to be staying out all night with a boy, and to be storming around the house in a bra and panties swearing along with Marianne Faithfull and saying oh my god to everything anybody ever said to you. Why did my sister require more than that? What the heck was she doing with that library card of hers? She’d gone too far, I knew that much.