A Complicated Kindness (5 page)

seven

M
ain Street is as dead as ever. There’s a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he’s saying how the hell would I know? I’m just a carpenter. He looks like George Harrison in his Eastern religion period working for Ringling Brothers. Whatever amateur made the sign put a red circle on each of his cheeks to make him look healthy, I guess, but healthily ridiculous. On the other end is another giant billboard that says
SATAN IS REAL. CHOOSE NOW.

Main Street is bookended by two fields of dirt that never grow a crop. They lie in
perpetual fallow,
my dad told me. Those words haunt me still.

I can sense that Americans who come here think it’s strange. Main Streets should lead somewhere other than to eternal damnation. They should be connected to something earthly, like roads.

Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lanes of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not really
real. It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world. It was created as a kind of no-frills bunker in which to live austerely, shun wrongdoers and kill some time, and joy, before the Rapture. The idea is that if we can successfully deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, we’ll be first in line to enjoy the pleasures of the next world, forever. But I’ve never really understood what those pleasures will be. Nobody’s ever come right out and told me. I guess we’ll be able to float around asking people to punch us in the stomach as hard as they can and not experience any pain, which could be fun for one afternoon.

I once had a conversation with my typing teacher about eternal life. He wanted me to define specifically what it was about the world that I wanted to experience. Smoking, drinking, writhing on a dance floor to the Rolling Stones? Not exactly, I told him, although I did think highly of
Exile on Main Street.
Then what, he kept asking me. Crime, drugs, promiscuity? No, I said, that wasn’t it either. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wondering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out. I wanted to experience goodness and humanity outside of any religious framework. I remember making finger quotations in the air when I said
religious framework.
God, I’m an asshole. I told him that if I heard one more person say it wasn’t up to him or her to judge, it was up to God, while, at the same time, they were judging their freakin’ heads off every minute of every day (I mean basically they had judged that the
entire world
was evil), I would put a sawed-off. 22 in my mouth and pull the trigger. I told him I didn’t know what the big deal was about eternal life
anyway. It seemed creepy to want to live forever. And that’s when he threw me out. I’m not saying he was wrong or anything, I just couldn’t ever figure out what was going on. It seemed like we were in some kind of absurd avant-garde theatre, the way our conversations sometimes went.

I once suggested that it was a really risky gamble to bet everything we had in this world on the possibility of another world, and in five seconds he was leading the entire class in prayer.

Please Almighty Father, we just ask you to bring Nomi back within your fold. We just ask you for a miracle this afternoon, dear Jesus. (Was he praying to God, the
Father,
or Jesus Christ, the
Son?
If you’re going to terrorize the flock with spontaneous prayer, at least pray to whom it may concern.)

We’re kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions like getting dressed in the morning (thank God, Menno liked to cover up) and going to work or school, but that’s where it ends.

There’s not a lot of interest in the present tense here. And it’s only slightly disconcerting that everyone’s related. If a Mennonite couple divorces do they still get to be cousins? Oh yeah, hilarious. Tash once said to my mom: Oh, so it’s wrong to move any part of one’s body in time to music but it’s perfectly okay to penetrate members of one’s extended family? My mother told her not to be silly.

Silly
was Trudie’s ultimate crime. Okay, she’d say,
now
you’re being silly, and then we knew it was time to shape up. We’d gone too far.

The Mouth of Darkness loves the word
groovy
and the expression
simply put.
Simply put, we are not a groovy people. He’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. He’s not a fire-and-brimstone guy. That’s not really our speed. Too animated. Too much like dancing.

He reminds me of one of those statues on Easter Island. I’ve seen photos of him as a boy and even then he looked like unforgiving granite. Although my grandma once showed me a picture of him sitting in a canoe smiling, looking relaxed and happy, with the sun setting behind him. He’s holding his paddle straight up in the air like a spear. I often stare at that picture and wonder what he was thinking about and what happened to the happy little boy before he turned into The Mouth. Well, actually, that sounds really stupid, like the beginning of a lame flashback. Cue the spinning tunnel. I don’t really think about him that much. It would be like thinking about time, the nature of time. How it controls you, determines your destiny, and ultimately destroys you.

I do know, because everyone in town knows and doesn’t talk about it, that The Mouth had some very bad experiences in his life when he was younger (oh, hmm, tell me…and what’s
that
like?) and that after those experiences he came back to Shitville to rule with an iron fist. That might have been what that upheld paddle was all about. I think he had tried to rebel against the thing he came back later to stand for and while living in the city doing God knows what he…I’m not sure…a girl ditched him, I think. Wouldn’t have him as her sunbeam. After he’d opened his heart to her and then mistakenly asked her to marry him. (Flash for Uncle Hands…it was the period of
free love,
dude.) And he couldn’t write poetry like the Beats and was mocked for it. And for his clothing that tried too hard and his eagerness to be hip and his inability to shave properly (don’t ask me—Trudie told me this) and countless other crimes of youth and eventually he gave up and came back here full of renunciations and ideas of purging every last bastion of so-called fun in this place and a greatly renewed interest in death and a fresh loathing of the world. In a nutshell. If I’d been his ringside coach I would have said now please get back in there.
Re-enter the world. Just tone it down. Keep your mouth shut a little more often. Try again for the love of God Almighty!

A few months ago I was walking home from Travis’s place and The Mouth’s house was on the way. It was around three in the morning and the entire town was dead and dark except for the sparkly streets and car tops which were shiny from melting snow. Just as I was walking past his house a light came on in his kitchen, the little stove light, and for some reason I stopped on the sidewalk to look. I saw The Mouth pass by the window, slowly, in a faded green housecoat he’d only half-heartedly closed with what looked like an old tie. I stared at his profile as he stood with his hands on the stove, a little bent over, head down and motionless. He stood like that for a while. The only sound I heard was water dripping out of somebody’s drainpipe. Then he raised his head and walked, again, very, very slowly, to his fridge and he opened the top freezer section of it and took out a pail of ice cream. Maybe rainbow ice cream. Maybe Heavenly Hash. Then he took the pail and disappeared from view for a few seconds and then returned with a spoon and put the pail down on the stove, under the little light, and opened it up and started to eat. He ate and ate and ate, not like a pig or anything, just steadily and continuously for at least twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched him and thought every once in a while that now he’d quit and put the pail back and switch off the light and go to bed, but he didn’t. He kept eating the ice cream.

When he was finally finished he disappeared again for a few seconds and then came back and leaned his head against the top part of the stove, near the fan, the way he had earlier, like a guy completely defeated by life, with holes he could never fill with ice cream no matter how much he ate, and I almost started to cry thinking about poor The Mouth being dumped by the
city girl and just wanting to be able to write a poem that someone in the world would dig. I thought: He’s my uncle. I should love him. And then I walked the rest of the way home.

A while later, maybe a month or so, I noticed my mom leaning her head against the window over the kitchen sink in the very same way The Mouth had leaned his head against the fan part of his stove. She was watching the neighbour’s dog. She said: I envy that dog its freedom and obliviousness.

When I said obliviousness to what, she said: Hey, Nomi, how’d your friends like your new haircut? She was a master in the art of off-kilter conversations. I never knew where any of my questions would go, or if her answers were answers or clues or jokes or what. Some questions resulted in songs. Some in hugs and kisses. I needed a map.

When I was ten years old I had to memorize Bible verses in order to attend Blue Mountain Bible Camp. I’d stand in The Mouth’s office and say: In the beginning was the world and the world was with God and the world was God. And he’d correct me. No, Nomi, not world,
word. Word, word.
I’d try again. In the beginning was the world and the world—no, Nomi,
word,
not world. None of it made any sense to me.

I hadn’t even wanted to go to Bible camp. The only thing that appealed to me about the whole experience was the bus trip there and back because the route they took went through part of the city and I wanted to stare at the human beings who lived there. I’ve tried staring at people here but they just stare back, like babies. It’s not an aggressive stare or anything, just a completely unsocialized one. Most people around here are quiet and polite and a little stunned. Somehow all the problems of the world manage to get into our town but not the strategies to deal with them. We pray. And pray and pray and pray. If I could
live anywhere else in the world, anywhere, I would. Although my preference would be NYC.

My dad has never missed a Sunday. He’s received many awards for perfect attendance. But he never talks about it. At first I was embarrassed by it. Later, I realized the mortification would kill me if I didn’t change my attitude and so I began to imagine my dad as the noble captain of a sinking ship. Or, sometimes, as a faithful lover, waiting for a passionately planned rendezvous that would never happen.

I conjured up all sorts of reasons for him to be there every Sunday other than the real one, which seemed to be that it fulfilled a need to be reminded of his powerlessness, over and over and over again.

Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don’t like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.

A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.

I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits.

But I suppose there are ways to leave if you know the terrain. My mom and my sister easily made tracks when it was time to
split. (Mr. Quiring has advised me to “lay off the jive talk.” It just happens sometimes. I can’t control it. I’m Sybil. I used to do it to entertain my mom and my sister, calling them child and talking about the pusher man and all that stuff, you know, funkifying—to make them laugh. I was just a kid imitating Tash’s records. So now, when I talk about them, I sometimes become Curtis Mayfield. I don’t really know why it happens. I’ll try to curb it.)

My mother, Trudie Dora Nickel née Rosenfeldt, has gone away. Irrefutable fact, although where she is is up to me, right? I mean I don’t
know
but who cares—that’s not how stories work around here. Every day at Happy Family Farms a few birds somehow manage to escape and fly away. Some of them end up dead in the ditches.

Like I said, I don’t know where she is, but I imagine different scenarios. The scenarios that I imagine most often involve my mother, with passport in hand, travelling around the world. That’s why I was so profoundly disappointed to find her passport in her top drawer. That discovery posed the hateful question of where she might be if not somewhere in the world.

I use drugs and my imagination to block that question.

She left seven weeks after my sister, Natasha Dawn Nickel, left with Ian, Mr. Quiring’s nephew. Different people have different theories but they don’t talk about them as a rule. I believe that they’re all alive and that one day we will be together except possibly without Ian. Tash and Ian may be rearing their own love child somewhere in northern California right now. I could be the aunt of somebody named Tolerance. My mother might be an activity director on a cruise ship. She likes water and she likes activities. She’s a Cancer. Did she pack warm clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not. Did she pack
any
clothes for herself when she left? No, she did not.
A detail that falls into the same disturbing category as the one about her passport still being in her dresser drawer.