A Complicated Kindness

nine

Travis is teaching me how to drive. He likes to teach me things. Consider this: Our people’s contribution to civilization is the housebarn — a dwelling in which people are encouraged to sleep with livestock. Or this: The word written on the cap of the guy on the Players cigarette pack is HERO. We go out to fields and take shots at each other’s heads with dried-up turds.

Travis wavers between hippie and punk. When we play soccer he often wears a Pistols T-shirt and his Patrick “football” shoes. Last night we drove to La Broquerie in his dad’s work truck and bought a bottle of Black Tower at Chez Felix. There are lots of small French villages scattered around here. During the war all the French men had to go off to fight, but the Mennonites didn’t because Mennonites are conscientious objectors (man, can they object), and so while the French guys were off fighting in Europe, the Mennonites went and bought up a lot of their farmland really cheap from the women left behind who were desperate for money to feed their kids and just survive until their husbands and sons came home.

I found out all this stuff by riding my bike into the neighbouring villages several years ago when I was a curious, hopeful child and asking them what they thought of Mennonites. I compiled all the information and then tried to hand it in for a social studies assignment and was rudely rebuffed by Mr. Petkau, who said it wasn’t relevant.

Not relevant to what, I’d asked him and he asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of the semester sitting in the hallway. When I said yes he goose-stepped me out the door and called me wicked.

I had once tried to hand in an essay titled “How Menno Lost His Faith in the Real World (Possible Reasons),” which was similarly rejected.

Anyway, it was bad form on the part of the Mennos, but me and Travis are trying to make up for it now by buying really large amounts of booze off the French since we can’t buy it here. Wealthier Mennonites, even though they’re not technically supposed to be wealthy, do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don’t apply to them when they’re on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn.

After the driving lesson we went into Travis’s basement bedroom to drink the wine and listen to Cheap Trick again. He showed me his Joy of Sex book including charcoal sketches of elated, naked hippies with armpit hair. We read that armpits can be extremely erotic. He had a bargain tub of Vick’s Vaseline on the top shelf of his closet. And a gerbil named Soul who was on antibiotics for a tail infection. He asked me if I was cold and I said no, I just shiver sometimes.

We talked about some things. That he’d had an operation to pin his ears back when he was eleven. I looked closely at his ears. They looked quite good. He thought they were slowly growing out again and would one day need to be re-pinned. I told him they looked perfect to me. Everything about him looked perfect to me. Everything. Most of the time I couldn’t even believe that somebody like me, the person immortalized in celluloid as a pioneer with her head on fire, was sitting in the bedroom of a guy like Travis. He told me he loves to wear sweaters together with shorts. And hockey socks with Greb Kodiaks. These are some of his favourite combinations. He asked me what some of my favourite combinations were.

What do you mean, I asked. Like, opposites? His questions always made me nervous because I knew he appreciated creative answers.

He played songs for me on his guitar. Bob Dylan and Neil Young and James Taylor. I didn’t like the pauses in between the songs because I didn’t know what to say other than that was nice, play another one. Sometimes I said wow, crazy. I lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling thinking about Tash, and also the feasibility of blowing up a laundry bag and floating away on it from a place like Alcatraz. Travis was singing Dylan’s “You’re a Big Girl Now,” in a soft voice that kept getting softer and softer until it finally stopped. His fingers were long with square tips. He also wore a thin piece of leather around his wrist.

Tash phoned a couple of times after she left and then stopped calling altogether. A lot of teenagers hit the road in the seventies looking for peace and free love and ended up on communes and being brainwashed and having a whole bunch of babies with bearded men who enjoyed thinking of themselves as new messiahs. But I don’t believe that happened to her because that would be way too similar to how this place, this town, came to be, and she never had anything good to say about it. We’re a national joke, she’d say. Seriously, she’d say, we’re the joke town in the joke province in the joke country. Everybody mocks us and the more they do the more The Mouth goes: We won’t give in! We’ll fight the good fight! We’ll keep the faith! We’ll ban more books! We’ll burn more records! Have you ever noticed how the media make us out to be religious freaks with no fashion sense and shit? Oh my god, it’s humiliating beyond belief! My mom and dad and I would sit at the kitchen table and listen to her rant and when she was done my mom would put her arm around Tash and say stuff like: Have a warm bath.

I have some things of hers. Piano books I can’t play. Her metronome. Her collection of Lee jean labels, her old Seventeens, her Lives of Girls and Women, and her Lady Schick. My dad and I used to have heart attacks when the phone rang but not quite as much any more. We’ve become a little sluggish. The phone hardly ever rings. I mentioned that fact once to Ray and he said that didn’t mean people weren’t calling us.

I think that is exactly what it means, Dad, I told him. I worried that he was hearing voices. Then I worried that I wasn’t hearing voices.

One weekend, we were both sick with the flu, we lay around the house the entire time hardly moving, hardly talking, and the phone didn’t ring except for once on Sunday evening and it sounded like an alarm and Ray said: Whoah, sensory overload. He said I laughed too hard at that one, that my reaction discouraged him from future attempts at humour because I’d either (a) built him up to a standard where he’d be too paralyzed to perform for fear of failure, or (b) been insincere. He told me that he thought my laughter was tinged with desperation. That I so lacked stimulation that any little thing would set me off inappropriately.

Hey, I said, you’re a lot of fun. I love the way you don’t analyze simple moments to death and he said what simple moments. And then, the way he does after confirming that life really is all about pain and suffering, he cheered up. He spun a disc. He played table football with me. He polished his shoes. He turned up the volume on Hymn Sing.

After Tash and Trudie left, The Mouth of Darkness came over to pray with us and told us we couldn’t live in crisis forever. Right Nomi? he said.

I wanted to say no, I thought I could with very little effort. He stuck his arm out and said shake? It was like putting my hand into a bowl of warm mashed potatoes or a freshly pissed diaper. I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to.

He slapped my dad on the back and my dad’s face froze into a grimace he’d been trying to pass off as a jocular grin, the manly type.

Well, he said, I need to check the level of softener salt in my tank but I do appreciate your visit that’s for sure.

The funny thing is that it wasn’t even a lie. My dad did need to check things like water softener the way other people needed blood transfusions. He checked and double-checked things all the time. He was the kind of person who secretly took his pulse at various points throughout the day. Two fingers held flat on the inside of his wrist. Yes, hmm, still here, well. I had mixed feelings about it. Oh, it was disconcerting, yes. Often instead of hello he’d say to me: Oh good, you’re here. The gap between our feelings, his and mine, on that particular point was immeasurable. But again, I was never entirely sure what he meant by here.

I like to sit on my driveway and push the melting asphalt around with my fingers. Sometimes I buy bags of little fake seashells and stick them in there. I like the cracking sound when a car drives over them. I can imagine I’m in some Latin American capital where they celebrate good things with random gunfire.

My dad came riding up on his Red Glider and said what are the youth of today up to, and I said how could I possibly know the answer to that question.

Well, he said. He reached into his pocket and then held his hand out to me and said here, have some chalk. It resembled a cigarette. When I was a kid I ate chalk and clay and sand, if it were a fine grain. I was one of those people. I only ate white chalk. There was so much of it around the house. I tried the coloured stuff but it had an oily taste. I also tried paper, but didn’t enjoy it.

My dad gazed into the neighbour’s yard. Looks like the little girl’s got herself a new two-wheeler, he said.

We say bicycle now, Dad, I said. Or, sometimes, bike. He put the front tire of his Red Glider into a concrete stand by the garage, took the pant clip off his leg and saluted me before going into the house. I had never seen him salute before. Were we saluting now? Was this some new playful thing we were doing now? God, Ray deserves a better daughter than me. He deserves Laura Ingalls Wilder saluting him back exuberantly, clicking her heels even, and saying oh, Father, and gazing at him the way a daughter should. I took the chalk and wrote in tiny, tiny letters on the driveway: Dad, don’t think I’m not saluting you when I’m not saluting you. And then I scuffed it out with my foot before anybody would see it.

I used almost the entire length of the driveway to write my favourite quote in chalk. LIFE BEING WHAT IT IS, ONE DREAMS OF REVENGE. It’s by Gauguin.

My neighbour came out to look at it. She’s an unhappy housewife with the flattest ass I’ve ever seen. Swaths of fabric allocated for a person’s butt billow emptily around hers like a sail. She walked slowly up the driveway, reading out loud in a voice like a little kid just learning how to. Then she said Go Gwin, eh? I said Gauguin. She asked me how I would feel living in a house with all primary colours. I said I didn’t know. She said seriously, how would you feel, so I said not great I guess. Then she folded her arms and looked at me and said: It. Sucks. Bag. Really, I asked. That bad? Hey, she said, where’re you from? Crazyville? I smiled and nodded. What do you call those colours, she asked me. She was pointing at our house. My mother called them salmon and sky, I said. Tash called them flesh and vein. She hated them. Well, said my neighbour, what do you call them? I looked at my house and shrugged. I don’t know, I said. I’ve never thought about it. She left and I surveyed my chalk work. I realized I enjoyed the sound of my favourite quote more than anything.

I never dreamed of revenge.

I sat on the driveway pushing tar into the cracks until I was in a shadow I couldn’t move out of. I walked to Abe’s Hill, the big pile of dirt on the edge of town named after the mayor, and smoked a Sweet Cap and watched the dusk move in and the lights come on in the faraway city. The magical kingdom.

The lights of the city came on, slowly at first, and then faster, like they were giving in, like the people in charge of turning on the lights were thinking all right already, it’s dark, let’s just get this night over with.

When I got home I found a book on my crate next to my bed. It was The Screwtape Letters. My dad had written something inside it. For Nomi, that it may inspire, love Dad. I thought: Letters from Satan?

My dad’s favourite writers were C.S. Lewis and W.B. Yeats. He said they were deft wordsmiths. He once told me he enjoyed the sensation of being pulled along by the mysterious fullness of initials. I whispered thanks Dad and then stared at my Christina’s World poster.

I lay on my bed thinking about Travis, about his large-pored green hands and his favourite combinations and the way he always reminded me to signal when I turned. Nomi, he said, you just need to wake up to the fact that other people need to know where you’re going. But there’s nobody behind me, I told him. And he said, reassuringly, that someday there may be.

I put on Tash’s Keith Jarrett record and watched the needle wobble around and around, six inches from my head. I liked the way he moaned when he played the piano. I decided to like anybody who would allow their moans to be taped and distributed to the world. I wanted the world to hear my moans, I thought. And then realized that I would have to also learn how to play an instrument brilliantly. Wake up to the fact, I said out loud. I don’t know why. I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.