A Complicated Kindness

eight

I like to ride my bike to the border and stare at America. I like to ride my bike to train crossings in empty fields and watch graffiti fly past me at a hundred miles an hour. It really is the perfect way to view art. I silently thank the disenfranchised kids from Detroit or St. Louis for providing some colour in my life. I’ve often wanted to send a message back to them.

Nomi from Nowhere says hello.

But the train doesn’t stop here and I don’t have any spray paint. At night, I like to go to Purple City. It’s when you stare at the giant caged light in front of the post office for exactly sixty seconds and then you stare at all the lights in people’s houses and every single one is purple. The moon and the stars, if there are any, are also purple. Nobody but me and Lids knows about it. We are the only two residents of Purple City.

I like to ride my bike to the old fairground and smoke in the rodeo announcers’ booth and look at the things written on the walls. THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. DON’T WAIT TIL PAYDAY. WHO ARE THE PEOPLE WHO TIE KNOTS IN BARBED WIRE FENCES? MY FAMILY DOES NOT HAVE A DISEASE RIDDLED HISTORY AND I AM ESSENTIALLY NORMAL. IS THERE A CRIMEA RIVER? I USED TO LIVE HERE.

That last one is my favourite. I often wonder if my sister wrote it, and if so did she write it before she left, or did she come back. But it could have been someone else.

I like to ride my bike on the highway and hang on to the back of RVs with American plates going seventy-five miles an hour. I once caught a ride all the way to Falcon Lake on the back of an Airstream trailer from California. A little girl stared at me through the back window and held up stuff to show me. A pinwheel, a stuffed bear, a drawing she’d made, a tiara. I’d nod and smile, my hair whipping all over my face in the wind, and she’d go off to get something else. Her parents must have wondered why she was so quiet back there. When they stopped at a gas station I rode away and the California girl waved goodbye to me and made her bear wave goodbye too.

When Tash was twelve one of her molars came out and she put it in a glass on the bathroom counter so she wouldn’t lose it and a while later I came in from playing kick the can and filled the glass up with water and drank it and accidentally swallowed her tooth. It’s still in my stomach, my doctor, an irritable man, is sure of it. And it’ll probably stay there forever, like the image of the little California girl waving goodbye in her tiara, which makes me happy.

I’ve decided to walk around today and say goodbye to people despite the fact that I’m not going anywhere.

Bye Gloria, I said to Gloria.

She said hey, we used to play soccer together when we were, what, five, right? She reminded me of the only two rules that the coach had given us: No hugging and no picking flowers. All I remembered was him lining us up against the snow fence and kicking frozen balls at us while we scrambled, screaming, to get out of the way.

I laughed for way too long and then she told me I could have my Coke for free because her manager was gone.

Right arm, I said. (I wished I hadn’t.) Gloria had given herself an anarchy tattoo, near her wrist.

Is that a promise ring, I asked her.

Oh this, she said, holding out her hand.

Yeah, I guess, technically, she said.

To who, I asked.

Marvin Fast, she said.

Seriously? I asked.

I guess, she said, and laughed hard.

Marvin Fast used to chase me home from school and whip me with branches and then the next day he’d give me five bucks, I said.

Really, she asked. That must have been after he was run over with a combine and had his neck broken.

Well, congratulations, I said.

Ew, she said, it’s not official.

Where are you going, she asked.

Well, I said, starters the city. It wasn’t true, just a thing I liked to hear myself say. She nodded and said the big schmake eh? Good luck.

The city was the dark side, the whale’s stomach. It flickered off and on in the distance like pain. It was the worst thing that could happen to you. If you go for any length of time you don’t come back, and if you don’t come back you forfeit your place in heaven’s lineup.

Hey, she said, is that a picture of you in the new building? I should have said no but I waited one beat too long for a convincing lie. She was referring to a photograph taken of me as a young volunteer at the museum village. I’d been a butter churner. I stood in the hot sun in front of the hot outdoor bread oven robotically pushing a broom handle up and down in a ceramic jug of cream while Americans took pictures of me for the folks back home.

One day I lit up a smoke and my bonnet, which protruded from my face stiffly like a pipe, caught on fire. The entrance of the tunnel leading to my face was in flames. I tried to untie it but couldn’t. I screamed and ran in circles around my ceramic urn until a quick-thinking tourist grabbed me from behind and plunged my head into a barrel of rainwater in front of the old general store. It was so vaudeville. I imagine everyone moving really fast and jerky in black and white.

Yes, yeah, that’s me, I said. Gloria scanned my face. No scars though, she said. I wanted to scream: THAT’S WHERE YOU ARE SO UNBELIEVABLY WRONG!

Yeah, well, I said. What’s a little inferno in your bonnet. The photo had been taken while I’d been on fire, before the dunking. It had been framed and mounted in the archival area of the new building, where you paid to go in. I don’t know why. The caption is: Young Pioneer, Naomi Nickel, learns valuable lesson.

Hey, said Gloria, do you hang out at the pits now?

Yeah, sometimes, I said. I shrugged.

No offence, she said, but I always thought you were straight-edge.

Mmm, yeah, well I was for a long time, I answered.

She said oh and smiled.

I could smell the wind coming through the open window behind her and it was like a present or a compliment or something. The sweetest winds blow over us Mennos sometimes, when the poultry massacre stops long enough for us to smell them, and they can literally stop you dead in your tracks and break your heart. It’s the certain smell of that wind and the sudden whoosh of heat that just undoes me. It’s a June wind, mostly. An embrace. (Did I just say embrace? Asshole.) I could smell it now.

You know what would have been nice, asked Gloria.

What, I said.

It would have been nice, she said wistfully, if our stoner periods had coincided.

I nodded again and smiled and said yeah, it would have been. I thought about taking her hand but other things happened instead. I wanted to stay in Gloria’s store and talk to her about soccer and anarchy and Marvin Fast and our childhood but I’d already walked over to the door and put my hand on it and said goodbye and it would have seemed pathetic of me to change my course. Walking along Main Street felt ominous. It was way too bright. This is what an autopsy must feel like, I thought. I could feel the sun burning holes in my retinas.

I walked past Tomboy and there was a new sign up in the window that said COME ON IN AND BURST A BALLOON. I wasn’t sure what it meant. A man in a cowboy hat carrying a baby walked past me and I said goodbye. The baby waved.

The wind was my best friend but I couldn’t smell it any more and I was glad because it was killing me. I said goodbye to everyone I passed and trudged towards the outstretched arms of George Harrison.

When I got to the lights I turned left on Second Avenue, past the post office. I dropped in on Mrs. Peters. She gave me home-made popcorn balls and I gave her the opportunity to talk about her dead son who, if he were alive, would be my age. I was her barometer. Although I was a girl, she used me to imagine what her son would be like if he hadn’t drowned when he was four years old. This had been going on for a while. It started in church when I was five or six and she leaned over one day and whispered: You fidget like my Clayton.

I saw his body in the coffin at Wohlgemuth Funeral Chapel. He wore light blue seersucker overall shorts and a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar and flat buttons with tiny yellow ducks on them. His hair was blond and slicked over to one side, and he had a bored expression on his face. There was a tiny scar near his left eye. I asked Mrs. Peters if I could touch his arm and she said yes. I asked her if she was sad, and she said yes again. I stared at him for a long time. I moved my small grubby hand slowly up and down his cool forearm. I think I felt him move, I told her. She said no. Other people came to look at him. She hugged them but they didn’t talk. She asked me if I was needed at home. I didn’t understand the question, and said nothing. Finally she suggested that I go home for supper because it would be dark soon.

She had chocolate puffed wheat balls this time. Clayton had loved them. She was older than most parents of kids my age. Even her husband had died, or been called home, and her other children lived in Bolivia and Akron, Pennsylvania. I changed a light bulb for her and cut her bangs after she wet them in the kitchen sink. She had all-white appliances in her kitchen because she said that coloured stoves and fridges were pre-sins, like pre-cancerous cells. Same with touch-tone telephones and soft-top cars.

I can’t believe he’d be graduating from high school already, she said. What will you do afterwards, she asked me.

I moved her wet hair to one side like Clayton’s. I don’t know, I said. (I did know. Hello, abattoir!)

No, I don’t imagine he’d have known either, she said.

Was he like that, I asked.

In some ways, she said. But not in others. I nodded. She told me she liked her hair to be asymmetrical.

That’s a good choice, I said. That’s my signature cut.

Clayton would have liked this too, she said. She was pointing at a thin piece of leather I’d tied around my wrist.

Yeah? I said.

She said yes, he would have. Very much.

When I was done cutting she got up and looked at herself in the toaster. Perfect, she said. Thank you.

She got a broom out of the pantry and started sweeping up the bits of feathery white hair.

What do you do these days, she asked me.

I didn’t want to tell her the truth. I didn’t want her to imagine Clayton doing what I did. Well, I said. I walk around a lot.

Do you enjoy it, she asked me.

Sometimes, I said.

Clayton liked to run, she said. She told me how he’d been running down the sidewalk one day and had tripped on his new shoes which she’d bought a couple of sizes too big, for the savings. He had a hole in his head the size of an Aspirin, she said. At the hospital he’d been so brave. When they asked him his name he’d said: My name is Clayton. Clayton Peters. The real Batman.

What did they say when he said that, I asked.

They said next time he was in such a hurry he should take the…what did they call it?

The Batmobile, I said.

That’s right, she said. The Batmobile.

Did he get stitches, I asked.

Yes, she said, right here. She touched her temple.

How many, I asked. She loved to answer questions about Clayton.

Was it three or four, she wondered. Three, I think, she said. I lifted my shoulders and held them for a few seconds near my ears before letting them drop.

She said something in the odd unwritten language of our people, a language that is said to sound vaguely Yiddish.

Can you translate that, I asked.

She thought. Then she said: I don’t know. I just don’t know. To the point of knowing I will never not know as much about something as what I don’t know about him.

She smiled. I can’t wait to see him in heaven, she said.

I said yeah and looked at my feet. Will he recognize you, I asked.

Of course he will, Nomi, he’s my son.

But I mean you’ll have aged, right, I asked.

Oh no, she said, I’ll be young again.

But I mean, how young, I asked. Young like when you had Clayton? Or young like…

Don’t worry, she said, we’ll recognize each other. God will make sure of that.

Who would you say hi to first, your husband or your son, I asked.

Oh, now that’s a good question, she said.

What if you had remarried, I asked her. And that husband had died too, and then when you got to heaven there would be your son, your first husband and your second husband. That could be awkward, eh? Like, who would you live with?

Hmmmm, she said. My son, I think.

But I mean which husband, I asked. First or second? Or both?

Not both, she said. I’m not sure. God will know. He’ll have a plan.

But, I said, what if…

How’s your dad, she asked. People asked me that a lot.

Great, I said, smiling back at her. He wasn’t great, he was on life support, but she didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to listen to the funeral announcements on the radio, so I left.

Goodbye, I wanted to say to her, I may not be back for a while. But that sounded ridiculous. I was pathetic. I couldn’t even follow through with my plan to say goodbye to people in the manner of a person going away for a long time. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it or maybe I was just a bad actor.

I decided to visit Lids in the hospital. I wouldn’t say goodbye to her.

When I got there she was lying on her tall bed with her eyes closed and a surgical mask tied around her face. She must have smelled fumes or something. Maybe from a car in the parking lot or somebody doing some painting two hundred miles away. There was a pile of papers on her stomach.

Hi there, I whispered. She opened her eyes and smiled and said come in.

What is this, I asked her, pointing at the papers.

Mr. Quiring brought them so I wouldn’t fall behind, she whispered. She pointed at her throat.

Can’t talk? I asked. She nodded.

Do you want these on your stomach? She shook her head and whispered that she couldn’t lift them.

The nurse just plunked them on your stomach? I asked. I picked them up and put them in the drawer of her bedside table.

Thank you for your poem the other day, I said. I wish you could come out and play.

Soon, she whispered.

Yeah, I said.

She pointed to a small piece of paper on the bedside table. I wrote another poem for you, she said. I picked it up and read the title: “C’mon, Get Normal.” I said thanks and told her I’d read it later when I was feeling odd.

She opened her eyes wide and looked at me. That meant I was supposed to talk about my life. I told her about some things, seeing Gloria, finding out that she was engaged to Marvin Fast. When I said Marvin Fast, Lids put her hand over her mouth and I said I know and started to laugh. The nurse came in and said she’d heard laughing. Maybe Lydia wasn’t as sick as she thought?

No, I said, that was me laughing.

Well, she said, I guess there’s something really funny going on in here. I told the nurse I had found a place for Lydia’s papers besides her stomach.

Oh, said the nurse. I thought she’d have been able to do that herself.

Well, I guess it’s not a good idea to make assumptions, I said.

Well, said the nurse, if you had twelve patients to take care of maybe you wouldn’t be quite as sure of yourself.

I’m not sure of myself, I said.

You sound very sure of yourself, said the nurse. She was fiddling around with things near Lids’s bed. It was the biggest sin in our town to be sure of yourself.

Lydia, said the nurse in a loud snippy voice, you didn’t eat your lunch. Lydia didn’t move a muscle or open her eyes. Lydia! said the nurse.

She needs it to be softer, I said, or it hurts to chew. She needs everything cooked an extra couple of minutes.

Oh really, said the nurse. Lydia needs a lot of things, doesn’t she?

Yes, I said, she does. The second biggest sin in town was to need a lot of things.

Isn’t that what a hosp—…I started but the nurse announced that both Lydia and I needed to have our wings clipped.

What? I get so mad. I go fucking insane sometimes with people like her. You know what? I said to the nurse. I don’t…

She put her hand up and told me she didn’t have the time or the patience to listen to my self-indulgent prattle. Lids had started making a low, moaning sound.

All I’m saying, I said, is that…

Whatever you’re saying is a lie, Ms. Nickel, your entire family is…cuckoo. She moved her index finger in small circles around her ear.

I picked up Lids’s apple-juice container and winged it at the nurse’s head and missed which was a good thing in some ways. Lids opened her eyes and stared at me. Apple juice trickled down the wall by the door. Sorry, I said. Sorry, I said again really loudly to the nurse. I’m sorry. Please…But she’d left the room.

First she told me I was as crazy as my mother and then she left the room. I put my hand over my mouth and looked at Lids who stared back at me with big eyes peering out from over her green surgical mask.

Oops, I said. Lids was shaking in her bed trying not to laugh. Next time, aim, she whispered. The nurse came back with another nurse and an orderly that me and Lids vaguely knew. He used to be in our school but then decided he’d rather be an orderly. He was the boy who had eaten his entire gym bag over the course of one year, in protest.

Hi, I said. He said hi back. He pointed at the wall. You? he asked.

Sorry, I said.

He shrugged. I’ll get her another one, he said.

Thanks man, I said.

Lids, he’s getting you another one, I told her. She smiled with her eyes closed. No big deal, said the orderly.

The other nurse asked me nicely to leave. The short-tempered nurse glared at me the whole time and I told her, lamely, to take a picture, it lasts longer, and Lids opened her eyes for a second to roll them at me. I shrugged. On my way out I stopped at the nurses’ desk and asked the nice one, the one who’d asked me to leave but to come back soon when the dust has settled, if they could please take good care of my friend and cook her food a little longer and keep the room warm and things off her stomach and the nurse nodded and smiled and assured me that she would try. She told me the short-tempered nurse was under a lot of stress and that next time I was upset about something I should see her, not the short-tempered nurse, personally, and we could try to fix it up. I wanted not to be overwhelmed by her kindness because it made me sad to be so happy about something like that but on the way out, walking into the sunshine, I felt like my chest was going to explode and I looked straight into the sun to give me something painful to concentrate on.