A Complicated Kindness Read online

  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.

  She believed in one-hundred-percent cotton. “It wrinkles badly but at least it breathes.”

  She loved the girliness of my dad’s eyelashes and his smile (oh, Ray’s smile!) and the way his arms got dark brown in the summer. One time she and my dad were talking together in the kitchen and Tash and I heard her say, god DAMN I love your sense of humour.

  She occasionally plucked hairs from her chin, which I couldn’t watch.

  She spoke to strangers whenever she had the opportunity to, mostly tourists here to see the village, and would usually get very excited about the various aspects of these strangers’ lives.

  In the winter she’d warm up my bed for me by lying in it for twenty minutes while I had my Saturday-night bath.

  She cried every single time she watched The Waltons.

  She made a lot of trips to the pencil sharpener in the basement because it said BOSTON on it.

  At one point in her life she thought about running for mayor of the town, but didn’t want to embarrass Ray.

  She sang hymns loudly, which embarrassed me.

  She was an expert on drawing horses, especially their rear ends. She’d doodle horses’ asses all over the phone book.

  She approached life happily, with her arms open. Which could have been a mistake.

  She loved white frilly curtains, or yellow ones if they were super bright.

  My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things.

  I have a recurring mental image of her. When I was about twelve Trudie decided to learn how to ride my first, second and third cousin Jerry’s motorcycle. He brought it over to our place and he showed her how to sit on it and start it and rev it up and where the brakes were and all that stuff and she said okay, yup, got it, got it, got it. She told me and Tash not to tell Ray because he’d worry. We sat in the grass next to the driveway eating home-made popsicles and watching. Sunlight was flashing off the chrome of the motorcycle and my mom was laughing. She was wearing fake denim pedal pushers and a pink terry-towel T-shirt. She’d wave to us and make faces while Jerry was giving her instructions. So then finally Jerry said okay, time to put this on. He plopped this giant helmet onto her head and she gave us this fake helpless look. Then it was time for her to ride.

  She kicked the stand back and then she slowly turned the motorcycle around so that she was facing the highway. She looked at Jerry and he nodded, huge grin on his face, and she took off. She shot off. I mean, she went from zero to sixty in about a second and then she careened off the driveway and onto the grass, hit a flowerpot and went flying over the handlebars. The thing that I keep remembering, though, is how she looked as she flew through the air. She stayed in the exact same sitting position that she’d been in on the motorcycle. Her legs were curved and spread a bit as though she were still straddling the thing and her arms and hands, the entire time that she was flying through the air, looked like they were still holding on to the handlebars. She looked like Evel Knievel jumping twenty cars or whatever but with an invisible motorcycle. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. It seemed to last forever.

  And then we were all up and running over to her where she lay in the grass, still laughing, and moaning, and Jerry felt awful and Trudie made us promise not to tell Ray which was difficult later on when he came home and wondered how she got that cast on her arm. She told him she’d fallen down the stairs running for the rinse cycle with a cup of softener in her hand and Tash told him the truth but made him promise not to tell her he knew.

  It’s not really a great or dignified recurring image to have of one’s absent mother, I guess, but I get a little thrill from the memory of her flying through the air in that odd phantom position. Later on that summer, when the cast was off, Trudie took me and Tash to the pits for a swim and she told us to go underwater and keep our eyes open. She told us that she was going to do a dive off this piece of board somebody had rigged up and that when we’d see her come under the water she’d be in a perfect frog position. And it was true. She looked exactly like a frog diving underwater.

  That’s another strong image I have of Trudie but not as s
trong as the one where she flies. The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad’s laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn’t. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad’s bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother’s black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.

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