A complicated kindness, p.22
A Complicated Kindness, page 22
This weird thing happened to me while I waited for what I knew was not going to happen. I stared at stuff for a while and then I slowly started filling the car with my things trying not to make too much noise because it was still really early and people were sleeping and then the neighbour kid came out of her house in her summer nightgown and asked me if she could watch while I loaded the car and I said sure. She told me she was a sleepy snake. She asked if she could feel my head. She put her finger on her cheek and said she had a good idea.
Yeah? I said. Gonna clean your room? She said noooooo.
Gonna drink your milk? I asked. Noooooooo, she said. She started humming softly and dancing around the car in her little white nightie.
I have an idea, I have a good idea, she said, finger on her cheek the whole time. I dragged it out for a long time until I had loaded everything and was ready to go.
Come here, freak, I said. I spun her for a really long time in the front yard telling her shhhhhh whenever she shrieked or laughed. And after ten or fifteen minutes of spinning we both fell down on the wet grass and everything, the sky, the sun, the clouds, the branches overhead were swirling around and making me feel like throwing up so I closed my eyes and that’s when the odd thing happened. I started to see things in my town clearly, the pits, the fire on the water, Travis’s green hands playing his guitar, him whispering in my ear move with me, and the trampoline, and the old fairgrounds and the stuff written on the rodeo announcers’ booth and the lagoon and the cemetery, and the toboggan hut and the RK Ranch and the giant horses and my windowless school and my desk and American tourists and The Mouth and Main Street and the picnic table at the Sunset Diner, and Sheridan Klippenstein and everything, everything in town, the whole of East Village, and it didn’t seem so awful to me any more in that instant that I knew I’d probably never see it again except for every time I closed my eyes and then I saw my dad in his suit standing in front of the mirror at Schlitzking Clothing and his green eyes blinking behind his large glasses and a smile just beginning to form.
I thought about Menno Simons and what kind of childhood he must have had to want to lead people into a barren place to wait out the Rapture and block out the world and make them really believe that looking straight through a person like she wasn’t there, a person they’d loved like crazy all their lives, was the right thing to do. I thought about Lids in Eden having her brain electrified and I thought about that little piece of newspaper that had floated down into our town from some other place that had on it the words for the way things could have been. Which is what I’m calling my assignment. It’s got a nice ring to it even though it kind of reminds me of a Barbra Streisand song. I’ve put my name in the top right corner and I’ll be leaving it on your front porch. I’m assuming you’ll mark it INCOMPLETE, the word circled in red. I don’t need it back, Mr. Quiring, don’t worry. Feed it to the chickens. And please be kind to Lids.
It looks like I’m still trying to impress you with my story, as though it matters. I’m like a terminal patient still dreaming of the day I climb Everest. There’s a part of me that needs your approval and I don’t know why. Maybe it comes from being a teacher’s kid. Or maybe I just wanted you to think I was as creative as my sister. And maybe there’s a chance you’ll ask me to read my story to the class.
There were so many times I wanted to talk to you, but what could I say. Because in a whole bunch of perversely complicated ways I can understand your attraction to Trudie and hers to you but in another whole set of perversely complicated ways, I can’t. Where’s that guidance counsellor when I need her, eh?
You provided my family with an ending. You took to heart your own advice. You practised what you preached in class. Every story must have a beginning, middle and end. I’ve enclosed, with my “Flight of Our People” assignment, a copy of an excerpt from the last letter you wrote to your sad, sweet Trudie. Except that in this letter you don’t call her your sad, sweet Trudie any more. You don’t include any formal salutation at all. Seems a little harsh considering the “bottomless depths” of passion you originally felt. But things change. Stories unfold. Narrative arc and all that. You just begin.
I will tell Hans that you kept the key to Mrs. Klippenstein’s empty house and let yourself and several local men in, at night, to engage in adulterous activity. Whatever you say to refute my statements will not be believed, trust me.
You have a reputation in this town as being crazy, by which I mean demented, and your words are worthless. Will you reconsider?
Were you expecting her to take you back after calling her a nutcase and threatening to turn her over to The Mouth? You don’t think flowers would have been more effective?
I have a theory, though: It was grief that drew my mom to you and love that pulled her back. Love for Ray. And for me and for Tash. And for the perfect idea, at least, of us being together again. There are so many perfect ideas in this town. But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief. It does. Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is within our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church—there it was as it always has been, what a tradition—and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.
Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams. I could smell that hot June wind again—it was starting up for another day, blowing warm sweet promises, getting ready to break the hearts of all the Mennos in East Village one more time.
And that’s when the neighbour kid rolled over in the grass and put her arm around me and rubbed my bald head and I whispered thank you. I meant thank you to Ray for, in the midst of his own multitude of crap and bewilderment, knowing one true thing. That I would never have left him and that if I were ever to get out of that town, he would have to leave first. That’s two things, I heard him say. And the neighbour kid said you’re welcome, because she was a polite kid and thought I was talking to her. She was a good kid. We were all good kids. Amen. And then it was time for me to leave and for her to go home.
The idea of my mom leaving town to spare my dad the pain of having to choose between the church or her, knowing it would kill him, was the story I liked the best. The other possible ending to the story of my mom’s shunning was that it opened a door for her, a way out of this place, which raised the possibility that my mother had never really loved my father, or that she had loved him years ago but had since stopped loving him, or that she loved him but not more than the idea of being free. That it was just a convenient excuse. That could be the truth. I don’t know.
Did she have a thing with you because she was angry with Ray for keeping her in a town that she knew would inevitably break up her family? Did she live every day with the conundrum of wanting to raise her kids to be free and independent and of knowing that that’s just the kind of kid a town like this chews up and spits out every day like happy hour? The Mouth had suggested once that my mother might have killed herself out of guilt and regret. I think it was the ending he most enjoyed. The typically grim outcome that made sense to him.
Let’s be realistic, he said, which had made even my dad laugh out loud. But it did make me wonder. If she had planned to travel far away from this place why had she left her passport behind in the top drawer of her and my dad’s dresser? Was her body at the bottom of the Rat River, her hazel eyes wide open, staring in eternal mock horror at the flailing limbs of fifteen-year-olds being forced underwater in baptism by her brother, The Mouth? Or was she alive and well and selling Amway or something in some tourist town on the Eastern Seaboard? Or maybe she had finally managed to get to Israel and was working as a courier in Tel Aviv?
Had my dad really gone to pick garbage off mountains or was he also at the bottom of the Rat—no, I preferred the first story, the one about sacrifice and pain, because it presented opportunities, of being reunited, of being happy again, somewhere in the real world, our family, and because it was about everlasting love and that’s what I like to believe in. The stories that I have told myself are bleeding into a dream, finally, that is slowly coming true. I’ve learned, from living in this town, that stories are what matter, and that if we can believe them, I mean really believe them, we have a chance at redemption. East Village has given me the faith to believe in the possibility of a happy family reunion someday. Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life.
I put my leather bracelet between the doors of Clayton’s mom’s house and got back into the car. I knew she would find other ways of keeping Clayton alive in her imagination. I lit a Cap, pulled the seat up a little closer to the wheel, found a half-decent song on the radio, and drove.
That sounds good, right? Actually I haven’t dropped off the bracelet yet but I will. Soon. I’m pretty sure of that. I’ve got the car. All I have to do is sell the house. Good solid unfurnished bungalow. Perfect for families. Going cheap. Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.
acknowledgments
Hearty thanks to Michael Schellenberg and his all-star editing abilities that combine a Zenlike calm with heat-seeking missile precision and to Carolyn Swayze for gently reminding me that writers write and to Paul Tough for reading earlier versions and to Cheryl Cohen for shepherding a thousand details to safety and of course, as ever, to NCR for guarding all the exits.
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of two novels, Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award) and A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award), and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and has won the national magazine gold medal for humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Praise for A Complicated Kindness
“This sad, bittersweet and oddball novel stands apart from the crowd. For her moving portrayal of how family ties can be ripped apart, Toews deserves to be up there with other top-notch writers—Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel—who have come out of Canada over the past few years.”
—Scotland on Sunday
“A Complicated Kindness is a delight from beginning to end. The humour might be of the blackest sort (‘People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event.’), but the cumulative effect is liberating and defiantly joyful.”
—Daily Mail (UK)
“Toews, somewhat like Mordecai Richler, makes you feel the pain of her protagonist while elucidating the predicament of her people, always mixing a large dose of empathy with her iconoclastic sense of the ridiculous. When she’s funny, she’s wickedly so.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“There is so much here that’s accomplished and fine. The momentum of the narrative, the quality of the storytelling, the startling images, the brilliant rendering of a time and place, the observant, cataloguing eye of the writer, her great grace. But if I had to name Miriam Toews’s crowning achievement, it would be the creation of Nomi Nickel, who deserves to take her place beside Daisy Goodwill Flett and Pi Patel and Hagar Shipley as a brilliantly realized character for whom the reader comes to care; okay, comes to love.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Truly wonderful…one of the year’s exuberant reads. Toews recreates the stultifying world of an exasperated Mennonite teenager in a small town where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity…. Toews seduces the reader with her tenderness, astute observation and piquant humour. But then she turns the laughs she’s engendered in the reader like a knife.”
—Toronto Star
“A Complicated Kindness, at its core, is a depiction of the battle between hope and despair…yet along the way we are treated to an unforgettable summer with a heroine who loses everything but is ultimately able to hold on to life, to a sense of herself and to maintain her courage and optimism in the face of a world without any guaranteed happy endings.”
—The Georgia Straight
“There have been a lot of Holden Caulfield knockoffs since 1951, but few authors have been as successful as J. D. Salinger in channelling adolescent angst in a way that’s as charming as it is profound. Miriam Toews hits that elusive mark with her new novel. In fact, A Complicated Kindness just may be a future classic in its own right…. This is a wonderful book because it reminds us of the beauty and meaning in one small moment of one small life.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“In a novel full of original characters…Toews has created a feisty but appealing young heroine…. As an indictment against religious fundamentalism, A Complicated Kindness is timely. As a commentary on character, it is fresh and inventive, and as storytelling it is first rate.”
—The London Free Press
“Told with the slouchy, cool grace of a misfit teen, this sparkly novel is destined to become a coming-of-age classic.”
—Elle (UK)
“With uncanny accuracy, Toews captures the claustrophobia of a conservative Mennonite town. Over and over, she releases the tension of it with a direct comic hit.”
—Literary Review of Canada
“Wry and saturated with comic invention, A Complicated Kindness possesses one of the strongest fictional voices since Holden Caulfield vented his spleen.”
—Time Out (UK)
“Scathing, bittersweet and twistedly funny…. A strikingly fresh and offbeat voice.”
—The Seattle Times
Copyright © 2004 Miriam Toews
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Toews, Miriam, 1964–
A complicated kindness: a novel / Miriam Toews.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37115-7
I. Title.
PS8589.O6352C64 2007 C813'.54 C2006-907031-8
v1.0
Table of Contents
cover
title page
contents
dedication
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
acknowledgments
about the author
praise for a complicated kindness
copyright
Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
