A Complicated Kindness (2 page)

She was a whiz with Klik, that canned meat that looks like crushed human flesh and comes with a built-on key you twist around to open the tin. I wish I had harder facts about her, a complete picture with high tone definition, but she was hard to pin down.

There was something seething away inside of her, something fierce and unpredictable, like a saw in a birthday cake. She played content like Jack Nicholson played crazy in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
but Ray truly was content to sit at the head of the table in his suit and tie and joke around with his two relatively normal daughters and fun-loving wife who had hazel eyes and sexy nighties and a passport with a glamorous black-and-white photo of herself tucked away in the top drawer of her dresser.

The place Trudie travelled to most often was the church basement. The women have to spend a lot of time there. If they don’t they go to hell. (Who’re you gonna serve? Missionaries in Botswana, or Satan? That’s right. Any questions? Didn’t think so.) Their job was to sew clothing and blankets for the missionaries and send it all overseas in barrels. Trudie hated it. She got into trouble for throwing a couple of romance novels into a barrel headed for Nicaragua. She was supposed to do all sorts of stuff at church, cook for weddings and funerals, quilt, teach Sunday school and just generally get her ass in humble helping gear. They were always calling her and asking her if she could spare some time to help out. It wasn’t really a question.
She’d go sometimes at the very last minute saying oh I should go, I should go right now.

It didn’t help that her brother was the Über-Schultz. It was like being the sister of Moammar Gaddafi or Joseph Stalin. You fall into line or you fall. My dad liked it when she went to help but he also liked it when she didn’t. It seemed like he could never figure out which Trudie he loved the best, the docile church basement lady in the moon boots or the rebellious chick with the sexy lingerie. I imagine that both of those extremes were just poses and that the real Trudie fell somewhere in between. But that’s the thing about this town—there’s no room for in between. You’re in or you’re out. You’re good or you’re bad. Actually, very good or very bad. Or very good at being very bad without being detected.

two

P
eople come to East Village from all over the world for a first-hand look at simple living. Most of the time Trudie refused even to acknowledge the fact that in the summer months we were on display as backward Jesus freaks. She’d wonder out loud what all these cars with American licence plates were doing in town. Faker, you do so know, Tash would say. Trudie hated thinking of herself as a citizen of the world’s most non-progressive community. When the Queen came to visit our town years ago for a glimpse backwards in time, Trudie said she wasn’t going to go. The Queen was half a block from our place and everyone in town was going and it was kind of a big deal to Ray for some reason and he had wanted Trudie to put on her dark blue dress and join him in the crowd but she said nah, she was going to stay at home and read. She said she wasn’t going to stand there like an idiot just to be called a local yokel by the sneering British press. Or have a picture of her taken with the caption: Unidentified Mennonite Woman unmoved by Queen’s visit to religious community. Please Trudie, said Ray, please accompany me. No, she said, take the girls. Which he did. And we met up with my mom’s brother-in-law, who had a stepladder that his kids and me and Tash took turns climbing to get a really good view of the Queen and
her entourage while the people behind us swore in the whimsical language of our people. It’s hard to take offence when you’re being called
upemmuhljefulle und siehn muhl blief ope,
or a
schlidunzich.

On the way home we met up with my mom, who told us that she had seen the Queen after all. Trudie had been sitting on top of Kliewer’s machine shop in her housecoat and Keds with a bunch of teenage boys and they’d had the best view in town. So, she said, are you happy now? I saw the Queen. She linked her arm through my dad’s and dragged him home. Tash and I exchanged looks that meant something like: Is our mother crazy in a cool, fun way or has she now stepped over the line into disturbing crazy that we’d like to see stop? Ray didn’t seem pleased or displeased, just confused. It was really typical of the way she’d do something for his sake but in her own vaguely defiant way. Half in the world, half out. She was like the funny kid in class who knows just how far to go with the sassing.

She hid her records in Tash’s old toy box in the basement. One time when I was around ten, Tash called up The Mouth and told him she’d found one of Trudie’s Kris Kristofferson eight-tracks and she was very afraid she was about to listen to it and The Mouth said okay, now, calm down, pray with me. Take the…item and put it in a paper bag. Staple the bag closed and bring it to me here, at the parsonage, and we will deal with it together. Satan is tempting you, do you know that? Yes, said Tash, he’s such an awful…man. (What exactly was he again? A fallen angel?) She started to cry. It was all fake. She and her friends, who were listening to the whole thing, rolled around on the floor killing themselves laughing, but I was horrified. She was so earmarked for damnation it wasn’t even funny. Later that day The Mouth came over to talk and pray with Trudie about her fondness for guys like Kristofferson and Billy Joel. He told her that in his dictionary
hell
comes after
rock ’n’ roll
.

There were so many bizarre categories of things we couldn’t do and things we could do and none of it has ever made any sense to me at all. Menno was on a cough-syrup binge when he drew up these lists of dos and don’ts and somehow, inexplicably, they’ve survived time and are now an integral part of our lives.

When I was ten years old my mom and I had a big discussion about the
Swiss Family Robinson
movie playing at the Rouge Cinema, on Main Street. I wanted to go. My best friend at the time, Agnes, was going but that was because her father smoked and was the town bartender before the purges occurred and The Mouth took over everything and closed the bar and the bus depot and the pool hall and swimming pool and forced all the teachers to follow an oddball curriculum that had nothing to do with the standard provincial guidelines. Our textbook could have been called
Proven Theories We Decry
. The only thing he couldn’t take down was the Rouge Cinema but I was never sure why not. Some back-room deal, I guess. A cut of the profits. Who knows. He may have left it there for the American tourists. Something for them to do in the evenings when the village closed. Or maybe he had a dream of someday showing the movie
Hazel’s People
non-stop. Or
Menno’s Reins.
Those were the films (we were discouraged from calling them
movies
) that we were shown on a regular basis.

If you think that those films were only propaganda, simplistic tales about a group of shy farmers overcoming world pressure to be normal and starting up their own whacked-out communities in harsh climates, you’d be right.

Agnes’s family had stopped going to church generations ago. It didn’t matter to them. They existed in a vacuum. In the town, but not of the town. They were awe-inspiring. The smell of tobacco that lingered in their house was like some kind of exotic perfume and the clanking of empty bottles was a rare and beautiful music.

Before the purges, when Agnes’s dad was working in the bar all night, I’d go over to her place and we always had to play very, very quietly because her dad had to sleep during the day. We usually played a game called hide-the-sponge, but there was no looking involved, just listening. The entire game took place in the downstairs bathroom and the point of it was to put the little green sponge into the cupboard under the sink without making any noise. While one person was putting the sponge into the cupboard, the other person perched on the toilet and listened very closely to see if the cupboard door had made a sound while being closed. If it had, the person listening would whisper
sound
and it would be the other person’s turn. Even though I abhor the silence of this town at night, I have to admit I was intrigued with the concept of playing as quietly as we could at the bartender’s house.

I had never been to the Rouge Cinema. It wasn’t the kind of place families like mine went to. But, damn, how I wanted to see the
Swiss Family Robinson.
My mom said she’d think about it and I said it’s this afternoon and she said she’d have liked a little more time. She talked to my dad about it and he of course just didn’t know. It was up to her. She walked around the house in her red down-filled slippers doing diversionary things while she figured out what to tell me. I followed her and said well? She asked me what it was about and I said I didn’t know. A family, I thought. That lives on an island and is trying to get off. She had a very serious expression on her face. What’s sinful about a family trying to survive and fight off things and get off an island, I asked her. She told me it wasn’t that, really. It was the problem of certain people seeing me at the cinema. I said I’d wear a disguise and she laughed and said this is utterly unreal. Just go. She said something in the old language that I think meant more or less to hell with it, except, of course, not. We couldn’t use the word
hell
casually, although my parents
would often say
oba, yo,
which could be loosely interpreted as meaning hell, yeah.

We weren’t even allowed to say
heck.
Agnes’s family said heck. When we burned her brother’s tree house down (another relatively quiet activity), and the tree, she said she would
get
heck. When I asked my mom what that meant she shook her head and asked me not to repeat it. I asked my friend, later, if she had gotten heck. And she said yes, and I remember feeling afraid and envious. Tobacco smoke, clanking bottles, and now getting,
receiving,
heck. What a paradise.

TVs were also on Menno’s shitlist, at least they would have been if he’d been around when they were invented. We didn’t get one until one of our cousins who was both a first and second cousin to us, and possibly an uncle and future in-law, was on
Reach for the Top,
a show about local high school kids answering questions in very short periods of time and winning prizes for the correct ones.

The whole thing—what was and what wasn’t allowed—was so random and absurd it was like playing hide-and-seek with two-year-olds. Billy Joel’s okay but the word
heck
isn’t.
Reach for the Top,
fine.
Swiss Family Robinson,
no way. The Mouth delivered a sermon once that he had dubbed “Situational Comedies: Harmless Fun?” Trudie couldn’t survive without
M*A*S*H.
The melodic “Suicide is Painless,” over the sound of helicopters, would tinkle out through the screen window around eight in the evening and into the backyard where I’d be unknotting the garden hose for Ray or burying birds or something and I’d always have this moment, this very brief moment, of thinking ah, now Trudie’s happy.

For some reason it was okay to watch
Batman,
even though he fought against man-eating plants and The Joker, which was a nickname that we knew indicated the presence of evil because it was a playing card. We weren’t really supposed to
watch
Bewitched
or
I Dream of Jeannie
because of the magic which meant Satanism, but we did anyway. Trudie said you couldn’t just wriggle your nose to make people trip and dishes fall and Tash said oh yeah, okay, but you can take a stick and tap a bush with it so it bursts into flames? Yeah, and check this out, in my right hand I hold five fish. In my other, a single loaf of bread. Now watch closely as I…My mom said hush and Tash said you hush. My mom said Tash. And Tash said Mom. And that was it. Her so-called discipline was so half-hearted.

One time on a comedy show, I can’t remember which one, the comedian wondered out loud if there would be sex in heaven and Tash, lying on her stomach, chin in her hands, said yes and it will be divine. I don’t know why I remember that exactly. It was more her deadpan expression that lingers in my mind, and the reaction of my parents afterwards. There was none. Their defences must have been down. They were tired. I hadn’t known if it was a joke or not. The very idea of using the words
sex
and
heaven
in the same sentence, I thought, would be grounds for…I didn’t know…a prayer session, maybe. Tears, verses, hugs, exorcisms.

I spent a large part of my childhood praying for Tash’s soul. I hid her
I’M WITH JESUS
shirt for almost two years because I knew she was wearing it insincerely and because I had inadvertently destroyed it by using my Magic Marker to put an arrow on it that went up instead of to the side. One time in church we were doing a call-and-response thing where The Mouth asks questions and the rest of us answer them in unison and every answer was supposed to be Jesus Christ but each time Tash said John Lennon instead. My mom was trying to drown her out with her Jesus Christs and then Tash started saying her John Lennons one beat ahead of Trudie’s Jesus Christs,
squeezing them in real fast, and I just put my head down on Trudie’s lap and prayed for Tash to hear Jesus knocking on the door of her pitch-black heart before she was cast into the burning pits of hell. In the car afterwards my mom said Tash was incorrigible and Tash said my mom was faking it for my dad’s sake and my dad said faking what? And Tash said faking being mad. And my dad said mad about what? About John Lennon, said Tash. Mom’s mad about John Lennon, asked my dad. Yeah, said Tash, Mom’s mad about John Lennon. God. You could
hear
her eyes rolling. And then my dad asked who John Lennon was and Tash requested permission to kill herself—and my mom looked happy, well, not unhappy, and my dad looked confused as usual.

I’m sure that was the day I first heard Tash call me
Swivelhead.
All I did back then it seems was look from Trudie to Ray to Tash back to Trudie to Ray to Tash and on and on trying desperately to understand what it was they were talking about, what the words coming out of their mouths
meant.
The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the
deal.
It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved. It was the one thing I counted on and I couldn’t understand why my own immediate family would make little feints and jabs in directions other than up, up, up to God.

Why was Tash so intent on derailing our chances and sabotaging our plans to be together for goddamn ever and why the hell couldn’t my parents see what was happening and rein that girl in? We were supposed to stay together, it was clear to me. That was the function, the ultimate purpose, the entire premise for the existence of the Nickel Family. That we remained together for all eternity. And it was so doable. It was
so close, we could almost touch it, in fact we were touching it. Living in East Village meant we were halfway there already. What more could a pious little Menno kid want?

There were other things you may not necessarily know or remember about my mother. She liked to pat her stomach, especially if she was standing in the middle of the kitchen staring at the cupboards trying to mentally prepare herself for plunging into some tedious domestic task.

Often when she said the word
yes,
in response to a question, she’d spread her arms out like a symphony conductor calling for a big sound from his musicians.

She liked a made bed.

She had an uncanny ability to predict the weather.

She’d snap towels viciously before folding them, often very close to our heads as we sat watching TV.

She didn’t believe in waiting for two hours after eating before going for a swim. “Do fish get out of the water after they’ve eaten?”

She drove too fast and whenever she parked she’d inch closer and closer to the wall or barricade in front of her until the hood of the car bumped against it. She called it Montreal parking. She’d never been to Montreal but she liked to say
Montreal
whenever she could so that everything, parking, hairstyles, sandwiches, were all, according to her, Montreal-style.