A Complicated Kindness (13 page)

He means no, I said. He better mean no, said the worker. C’mon, I said, let’s go. The boy got up and we headed off in the direction of the junior high.

What’s your name? I asked.

Doft, he said.

Do you speak English? I asked. He shrugged. Are you from Paraguay? I asked. A lot of people who had left town for Paraguay for even more hardship and isolation than this place could provide, although we did our best, were moving back. The Paraguayan girls wore dresses over pants, and the boys wore suspenders and men’s shirts. He nodded.

Hey, I said, don’t cry. You’re gonna be okay. You had the wind knocked out of you, that’s all.

He wiped his nose with the side of his hand and pulled his cap down really low over his eyes. Do you smoke? I asked. It was all I had. He nodded. I handed him a Sweet Cap and lit it for him and we sat on the curb smoking with our backs to the front doors of the junior high. When I was finished I flicked my butt onto the road and Doft put his on the ground and jumped on it with both feet.

You should go in now, I said. I pointed to the door. Doft took his ball cap off and handed it to me. Please, he said.

His English wasn’t very good but then again none of ours really was. Then he did six or seven cartwheels in a row down the sidewalk and back again. I handed him his hat and said fuckin’ A, Doft.
Bueno.

We waved at each other before he disappeared inside the school. I have made two children happy in the course of five minutes, I thought to myself.

I was moved in typing today for flippancy. Flippancy was the big sin. I should have realized the inherent gravity of fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjf the fox jumps over the log. And
how
will this help me to kill chickens faster?

On our report cards every letter of the alphabet signifies a different behaviour problem and I always without fail get a big red circle around the
F
for Flippant Attitude. But I don’t really give a fuck. (Oh, funny, eh?)

Travis had phoned me in the morning, before the Shreddie incident with my neighbour, and said he was mad at me for saying he looked like Ian Tyson when he holds his guitar so high up, which had put me in a bad mood. I just like them better held low, I said. He told me I was shallow. First about pant legs being tucked into socks and then about how a person holds his guitar. Well, what the hell am I supposed to think about, I asked him. I told him he was fishing around for stupid things to be mad at me for because he knew
he’d
said a stupid thing last night and couldn’t just apologize and tell me we’d never break up because he loved me more than life itself. And then I hung up.

Five seconds later I phoned him back and said I was sorry and he said he was too and asked me what I was wearing and I lied and said his Blumenort Jets sweatshirt.

At lunch it was raining so I didn’t go home. I went to the gym and sat way up in the bleachers and watched Rhinehart Bachenmeir shoot hoops. Man, he was good. He was
conducive
. That fast break and all that spinning around to the left, to the right, and his arc, stellar, beautiful like one of those marine-show dolphins. Dribbling between his legs making all those three-pointers and left-handed layups and slam dunks. What a pretty shooter. The only thing missing was the ball. I clapped anyway and he gave me the finger because I guess he thought he was alone with Kareem Abdul Jabar.

At 2:30 the guidance counsellor came to my class to tell me I should talk to her. We walked together in silence to her office next to the principal’s office and she pointed at a chair and said have a seat.

She asked me if I had any specific goals or aspirations for after high school and I smiled.

Hmmmm, I said. Lemme think. I told her I’d thought about becoming a city planner someday. She asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life spacing fire hydrants. No, I said, but I like looking at cities and thinking about them. She told me I needed exceptional math skills for that.

Like, for instance, I said, that our main street has two dirt fields on either end of it is weird to me. Shouldn’t it lead somewhere?

That requires engineering, she said. I nodded. Any other goals? she asked.

I told her I’d like to be able to do one chin-up. One chin-up, she said. She looked at me. I mean that would be something, right, I said. Holding my entire self up by myself. Like, my self by myself. No? She was writing something down.

Nomi, she said. Talk to me about English.

English? I asked.

Your written assignments, she said. Forgetting about “Flight of Our People” for now. You’re having some problems getting them in?

I’m not having problems getting them in, I said. They’re not…

Mr. Quiring says the…

It’s just…I don’t know. She nodded. I blew my bangs out of my eyes. She looked at her watch. I shrugged. She wrote some more stuff down and then she stood up and said she had to see someone else.

Okay, I said. Well, thanks a lot. I stood up and she came around from behind her desk with her arms out like an extra in
Night of the Living Dead.

Can I give you a hug? she asked.

I…it’s just…I mean philosophically a hug is a great thing, I said. But…I smiled and left quietly. It’s so good to talk to someone who cares. I had a doctor’s appointment after school.

On my way to my appointment I stopped in at Barkman’s and stared for ten minutes at a floor model of a plastic bird whose head goes up and down into a cup of water. I wondered if it would hurt Travis to know that I was more interested in plastic birds than in procuring the female hormone that would allow our love to “progress to the next level.”

How much is that, I asked Mr. Barkman. I thought maybe my dad would like it. It seemed like such a straightforward thing for that bird to be doing. Head in. Head out. It made sense. Mr. Barkman said it was six bucks so I bought it for my dad and Mr. Barkman gave me ten or fifteen Icy Cups and a parachute jumper on the house for taking it off his hands.

I left the store and bumped into two girls singing “Let My Love Open the Door” into microphones made from screwdrivers and tensor bandages.

There was a little kid, maybe three or four, walking down Main Street by herself with a doll’s stroller strapped to her butt. Every few steps she’d stop and sit down in it for a rest and then get back up and keep walking.

From the back all I could see was the stroller and two little legs. I wondered what she was thinking. I wonder what three-year-olds think. I wonder if somebody had told her she was too big for that stroller. I wonder if she felt the way I did about people who told you something that you knew was just not fuckin’ true and if she felt like screaming at them and hurting them and plunging herself into a chemically induced oblivion.

I admired this kid for keeping her cool. She just strapped herself into that doll stroller and took off walking, probably without a word. All the way down Main Street. She’ll show the whole town that no, in fact, she still fits into the damn doll stroller.

I took a shortcut to the clinic and bashed my head on the air conditioner coming out of the wall while reading the directions on the bird. Although you would expect the directions to a bird whose head went in and out of a glass of water to be fairly minimal, they weren’t.

When I got to the clinic all the chairs were taken by Hutterites, also not especially a groovy people except for the fact that they are allowed to wear only polka-dot clothing, and the women must wear kerchiefs and the men, beards. My dad buys eggs from them. They are another sub-sect of our larger clan, except they live in colonies. Kibbutz-style. We are all, though, knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door. The same door.

I sat on the floor and kept my face hidden in a big thick
book of Bible stories for children. I thought to myself: Dear Jesus, please let me one day hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and turn all my grief into hits.

The doctor asked me if my dad knew about me going on the Pill and I said of course, you can phone him if you like. He should be at home right now—I can give you the number. I pointed at the phone on his desk and said go ahead. Then I stared at a dot on the wall and astrally projected myself into a Greenwich Village coffeehouse until the doctor said uh, that shouldn’t be necessary and my heart began to beat again.

I thought I had seen a book on his shelf that was titled
How to Incorporate Mental Illness into Your Daily Routine.
So, he really did understand us. Dr. Hunter was English. That’s what people in my town called anybody who wasn’t Mennonite. He might have been Estonian or Moravian for all I knew. In church The Mouth called him Brother Doctor Hunter and made snide comments about his fancy education. He had a reputation in town as a shit disturber because he believed in supplying birth control for the women here who by going forth to bed and multiplying often had ten or twelve or fifteen kids. He also liked to prescribe antidepressants. He’d written an article for the city paper that said our town has colossally huge numbers of depressed people. He talked about the emphasis here on sin, shame, death, fear, punishment and silence and somehow,
God knows how,
chalked that all up to feelings of sadness and galloping worthlessness.

The Mouth said the piece was fiction. He said we, the followers of Menno Simons, were used to being misunderstood by outsiders. He’d tried to shut his practice down a few times but that only strengthened Brother Doctor Hunter’s resolve. Either way, he wasn’t particularly cheerful about doling out
birth control but then again he was a man on a mission, and missions aren’t supposed to be fun.

Any history of clotting?

Pardon me?

Blood clots.

No.

Do you smoke?

When I’m on fire.

Do you smoke?

Yeah.

Asinine.

Thanks.

I said that’s asinine.

Got it.

I have realized that my personal yearning to be in New York City, wandering around with Lou Reed in Greenwich Village, or whatever, is for me a painful, serious, all-consuming kind of thing and is for the rest of the world a joke. When you’re a Mennonite you can’t even yearn properly for the world because the world turns that yearning into comedy. It’s a funny premise for a movie, that’s all. Mennonite girl in New York City. Amish family goes to Soho. It’s terribly depressing to realize that your innermost desires are being tested in Hollywood for laughs per minute.

seventeen

I
walked home down the number twelve sensing the beginnings of my nightly face ache, despite the fact it was the middle of the afternoon. Giant semis filled with pigs and chickens whipped past me at four thousand miles an hour three inches from my left arm. My right eye twitched from lack of stage-four sleep. I decided to cut across town and go to the hospital to tell Lids about my prescription.

When I got there I was dripping in sweat and the cut on my head from bashing it on the air conditioner had started to bleed a tiny bit. My eye also had not stopped twitching. The mean nurse saw me coming down the hall and made a Herculean effort to cut me off.

These are not visiting hours, she said.

Okay, I said, we won’t visit. I kept walking.

Lydia is rather agitated today, she said. She wants to be alone.

No, she doesn’t, I said. By then the nurse had clickety-clacked off to some other dire emergency.

Lids was wearing her so-called normal clothes instead of a hospital gown but she was fast asleep. Her hair was really greasy and she was wearing gloves. They were white and puckered on the sides and had pearl buttons at the wrists.

I sat down in the chair next to her bed and started flipping through
The Black Stallion.
I wondered if there was a way I could wash her hair for her while she was sleeping so she wouldn’t feel the pain but then with the heat of the room and my own personal fatigue and everything else I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up Lids was quietly singing “Shine a Light,” the Stones song from
Exile on Main Street
(an album named for the Mennonite people if there ever was one), and staring at me. It was one of the songs she liked because it talked about the good Lord.

I smiled and said hey, hi, you’re up. Her eyes were even brighter than the last time I’d seen her. Remember when we were Georgina and Alberta: Granny Sleuths? she asked.

Yeah, I said. That was fun. We’d had healing powers. When our gym teacher hurt girls in our class, emotionally, by saying cruel things to them, we could heal them with our powers. For one whole year girls would come running up to us in the hall to tell us what Ms. Weins had said to them in gym and then we would heal them with our powers.

We talked about stuff, about how she was feeling, how I was doing, ordinary things, and then I told her I’d just got the prescription for the Pill. Lids didn’t agree with premarital sex but she told me congratulations and said she meant it. I hope it all works out, she said. It probably won’t, I answered. She nodded.

She asked to see the prescription and I showed it to her and she held it in her gloved hands and stared at it for a long time and then said wow. I know, I said. It was kind of embarrassing and sad. I don’t know why.

You know you have a little blood on the side of your face? she said. I told her about the air conditioner. I showed her the bird I’d bought for Ray.

That is so sweet, she said. She said she missed Ray asking her what she knew for sure. Whaddya know for sure, Miss
Voth? Lids’s parents were nice, quiet people. They didn’t really believe in medicine or banks or social insurance numbers, just miracles. They were trying to cure Lids with tomato juice, gallons and gallons of it. Dr. Hunter didn’t get along with them. Lids had once heard him talking to a nurse about her parents and he had called them
those holy roller shitsqueaks.
Lids told me they were fighting over her soul.

How’s school going, she asked me.

Meh, I said. I shrugged. I told her I had learned that it was illegal to mow your lawn on Sunday morning. Then I asked her if I could wash her hair if I did it really, really gently so that she’d feel hardly anything at all, just warm soft water and a light tender touch of my hand.

At first she didn’t want me to. She touched her head like it was a premature newborn and said she knew it was awful but it hurt so much and I told her again how ultra, ultra gentle I’d be and that I’d stop as soon as it began to hurt and she finally agreed.

The logistics of the thing got pretty complicated. We had to strategize for about half an hour as to how to actually do it. She’d already used up her “air” by walking twice to the bathroom that day so we had to somehow do it with her in bed. Eventually we decided that she would lie diagonally across the bed with her head resting on my legs. I’d have a bowl of warm water right under her head, on the floor, between my feet, and I’d just kind of cup the water in my hands to rinse out the shampoo and it would all run back into the bowl.

It all worked out more or less. I could tell Lids was in pain but the whole time we hummed “Shine a Light” together over and over like a calming mantra and eventually it was done. Although there was quite a lot of water on the floor. After cleaning that up I patted her head a bit, gently, so that her hair would dry faster and we also debated the idea of putting a scarf
or something over her head so she wouldn’t catch a cold. But then I told her that her hair would never dry with a scarf on and that colds come from viruses not wet hair. That sounded kind of bossy to me, though, and I told her I was sorry, and she said no, no, don’t be.

Mmmm, I said, sticking my nose close to her head, smells like apples. Then I thought hey, how about blow-drying it dry, and Lids said she didn’t have a blow-dryer. I had wanted to comb it but she said no way. At least it was clean and soft and smelled good.

Does that make you feel any better? I asked her. She smiled and nodded and closed her eyes. It made me feel better.

I asked her if she wanted me to read some more from
The Black Stallion
and she said no, that was okay, she just wanted to sleep. Then her voice was gone for good, or for the time being. She touched her throat and grimaced apologetically. I said okay.

I didn’t want to go but I didn’t know what to do next. I stood next to her holding on to my prescription and stupid dipping bird. The apple scent wafted up from her hair. She opened her eyes and whispered one word: Travis. And then she pointed at the prescription.

Oh, I said, I have to wait a couple of weeks before the thing kicks in. She nodded and smiled again and then I kissed her on her bright red cheek and said I’d see her soon and that I loved her.

When Lids was in her feeling-good periods we’d walk each other exactly halfway home. Halfway was this spot in an empty lot on Main Street, next to the feed mill that looks like a ship, and on that spot we’d kiss each other goodbye like two French girls, once on each cheek and then a third time.

I left the hospital and trudged towards Main Street and when I got to the halfway spot in the empty lot I stopped and lit a Sweet Cap.

I walked up my driveway and waved to my dad who was warming up his yellow lawn chair for a little highway staring adventure. He lifted his hand like he was pushing against water. Like, rapids.

I was officially on the Pill.

Hey, I said.

Oh good, he said. You’re here. He told me he was planning to take down the badminton net. Since my mom left he’d walked into it about thirty or forty times. He’d just head on out the door to work, eyes down, brain stuck in reverse, and boing…into the net.

Probably a good idea, I said. And I’m thinking of selling some of my tools, what do you think?

Well…I began.

Say, said my dad, could you stomach a walk downtown? Would you be at all interested in helping me buy a suit?
Was he on speed?

We had a nice walk to Schlitzking Clothing. We didn’t take the long way. We could hear families in their houses, talking and clanking and playing the piano. We heard an entire family harmonizing to “How Great Thou Art.” I felt like holding his hand but that would’ve been pathetic.

At the red light on Main Street and First my dad looked at me from behind his wall of glass like he was surprised I was still there. Waiting for a different shade of green? I asked him. When we got to Schlitzking Clothing an extremely thin man in a three-piece suit took out a measuring tape and told my dad to stand in front of the mirror. I sat on the floor in the back and looked at the different styles of Stanfields underwear for a while. Then I took out my Pill directions for perusal.

My geography teacher walked out of a changing room wearing a lemon-yellow ensemble that included not one natural fibre.

Oh, he said when he saw me. I stared at him. A couple of weeks ago he’d slammed me into the lockers for not standing at attention properly during the anthem. I’d told him I wasn’t into individual nations, man, and he’d said I was a lunatic.

I looked at his tiny feet sticking out from under all that piss-yellow Fortrel and then I moved my eyes up slowly to his face.

It’s you, I said.

What do you think of this fabric? he asked.

I squinted at him. Why would he ask a lunatic for her opinion?

It’s worsted in such a way that it breathes, I said. You’ll enjoy its versatility.

I went back to my medical information. I learned that my body would think it was pregnant.

There would now be yet another part of myself that would not know what was really going on.

I overheard my dad and Mr. Schlitzking talking. Mr. Schlitzking was stroking my dad’s shoulders from behind and saying eh? Who’s calling the shots now? My dad blinked at himself in the mirror. Let’s take a walk over to the sock table, said Mr. Schlitzking, and my dad followed him to the back of the store where I was sitting. He looked at me like this was all my fault.

Well, he said, I have socks at home.

He does, I said.

No, said Mr. Schlitzking, I mean socks for this particular suit.

Well, said my dad…and then Mr. Schlitzking said: You think they’re not looking at your socks? He rested his chin on his collarbone for dramatic effect and then said: They’re looking at your socks.

My geography teacher came out of the change room wearing a mint-green leisure suit with chocolate-brown outer stitching.

Oh hello, he said to my dad. My dad said hello. Looking forward to the summer holidays? asked my geography teacher.

No, said my dad.

Any vacation plans? asked my geography teacher.

None, said my dad.

The beach? asked my geography teacher.

Never, said my dad.

I tried to imagine my dad at the beach. I saw a man in a yellow lawn chair wearing a black suit and tie and reading
Notes from the Underground.
He smiled and looked at me. Shall we? he asked.

We went home with a suit and socks he’d never take out of the package. On the way we stopped for an ice-cream cone at the Sunset and sat down at a picnic table next to the takeout window. We were quiet, just licking our cones and staring off at the sky, listening to the crickets.

Nomi, said my dad.

Yeah? I said. He had a grim expression on his face. His brow was furrowed. Yeah? I said again.

You think they’re not looking at your socks? he asked. I nodded gravely. They’re looking at your socks, we said in unison.

On the way home my dad asked me if I minded the way he was. He was mournful like he’d been drinking too much wine which he never did because what would Jesus do without his blood? Sobriety was enough to make my dad’s world spin. I punched him in the shoulder. I sang the whole theme song to
The Partridge Family
and poked him in the stomach. C’mon get happy. Oh, cut it out, he said. Then we walked in silence.
Finally my dad said: Really, I’m not much of a father. No, you are, I said. No, he said. He shook his head. You are too, I said. I dabble in parenthood, he said. No you don’t, I said.
Deusant,
he whispered. It was his favourite curse. His only curse, actually, but it covered a lot of territory because it meant thousand.

When we got home I gave him the dipping bird and he cleared the spare change off his dresser and put it there, next to a picture of my mother. Well, he said. This is quite a surprise. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much.

We sat on the end of his bed watching the bird dip its head in and out of the glass of water.

How do you like that? he said. He patted me on the knee. Then he went downstairs to watch
Hymn Sing,
his favourite show, where a group of men and women in black suits and long dresses stand in even lines on risers singing hymns for half an hour. You can watch it with me if you like, he’d said from halfway down the hall. Hmm, I thought. And leave the bird? In
Hymn Sing
the words bounce along on the bottom of the screen in case you want to sing along, but my dad never does. He just watches. But why would you want to sing along to “He Was Nailed to the Cross for Me”?

I went into my room. I threw a T-shirt over my lamp, lit some of Tash’s incense and put on a Bob Marley album. I played “Redemption Song” about twenty times.