She put her hand up and told me she didn’t have the time or the patience to listen to my self-indulgent prattle. Lids had started making a low, moaning sound.
All I’m saying, I said, is that…
Whatever you’re saying is a lie, Ms. Nickel, your entire family is…cuckoo. She moved her index finger in small circles around her ear.
I picked up Lids’s apple-juice container and winged it at the nurse’s head and missed which was a good thing in some ways. Lids opened her eyes and stared at me. Apple juice trickled down the wall by the door. Sorry, I said. Sorry, I said again really loudly to the nurse. I’m sorry. Please…But she’d left the room.
First she told me I was as crazy as my mother and then she left the room. I put my hand over my mouth and looked at Lids who stared back at me with big eyes peering out from over her green surgical mask.
Oops, I said. Lids was shaking in her bed trying not to laugh. Next time, aim, she whispered. The nurse came back with another nurse and an orderly that me and Lids vaguely knew. He used to be in our school but then decided he’d rather be an orderly. He was the boy who had eaten his entire gym bag over the course of one year, in protest.
Hi, I said. He said hi back. He pointed at the wall. You? he asked.
Sorry, I said.
He shrugged. I’ll get her another one, he said.
Thanks man, I said.
Lids, he’s getting you another one, I told her. She smiled with her eyes closed. No big deal, said the orderly.
The other nurse asked me nicely to leave. The short-tempered nurse glared at me the whole time and I told her, lamely, to take a picture, it lasts longer, and Lids opened her eyes for a second to roll them at me. I shrugged. On my way out I stopped at the nurses’ desk and asked the nice one, the one who’d asked me to leave but to come back soon when the dust has settled, if they could please take good care of my friend and cook her food a little longer and keep the room warm and things off her stomach and the nurse nodded and smiled and assured me that she would try. She told me the short-tempered nurse was under a lot of stress and that next time I was upset about something I should see her, not the short-tempered nurse, personally, and we could try to fix it up. I wanted not to be overwhelmed by her kindness because it made me sad to be so happy about something like that but on the way out, walking into the sunshine, I felt like my chest was going to explode and I looked straight into the sun to give me something painful to concentrate on.
nine
Travis is teaching me how to drive. He likes to teach me things. Consider this: Our people’s contribution to civilization is the housebarn — a dwelling in which people are encouraged to sleep with livestock. Or this: The word written on the cap of the guy on the Players cigarette pack is HERO. We go out to fields and take shots at each other’s heads with dried-up turds.
Travis wavers between hippie and punk. When we play soccer he often wears a Pistols T-shirt and his Patrick “football” shoes. Last night we drove to La Broquerie in his dad’s work truck and bought a bottle of Black Tower at Chez Felix. There are lots of small French villages scattered around here. During the war all the French men had to go off to fight, but the Mennonites didn’t because Mennonites are conscientious objectors (man, can they object), and so while the French guys were off fighting in Europe, the Mennonites went and bought up a lot of their farmland really cheap from the women left behind who were desperate for money to feed their kids and just survive until their husbands and sons came home.
I found out all this stuff by riding my bike into the neighbouring villages several years ago when I was a curious, hopeful child and asking them what they thought of Mennonites. I compiled all the information and then tried to hand it in for a social studies assignment and was rudely rebuffed by Mr. Petkau, who said it wasn’t relevant.
Not relevant to what, I’d asked him and he asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of the semester sitting in the hallway. When I said yes he goose-stepped me out the door and called me wicked.
I had once tried to hand in an essay titled “How Menno Lost His Faith in the Real World (Possible Reasons),” which was similarly rejected.
Anyway, it was bad form on the part of the Mennos, but me and Travis are trying to make up for it now by buying really large amounts of booze off the French since we can’t buy it here. Wealthier Mennonites, even though they’re not technically supposed to be wealthy, do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don’t apply to them when they’re on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn.
After the driving lesson we went into Travis’s basement bedroom to drink the wine and listen to Cheap Trick again. He showed me his Joy of Sex book including charcoal sketches of elated, naked hippies with armpit hair. We read that armpits can be extremely erotic. He had a bargain tub of Vick’s Vaseline on the top shelf of his closet. And a gerbil named Soul who was on antibiotics for a tail infection. He asked me if I was cold and I said no, I just shiver sometimes.
We talked about some things. That he’d had an operation to pin his ears back when he was eleven. I looked closely at his ears. They looked quite good. He thought they were slowly growing out again and would one day need to be re-pinned. I told him they looked perfect to me. Everything about him looked perfect to me. Everything. Most of the time I couldn’t even believe that somebody like me, the person immortalized in celluloid as a pioneer with her head on fire, was sitting in the bedroom of a guy like Travis. He told me he loves to wear sweaters together with shorts. And hockey socks with Greb Kodiaks. These are some of his favourite combinations. He asked me what some of my favourite combinations were.
What do you mean, I asked. Like, opposites? His questions always made me nervous because I knew he appreciated creative answers.
He played songs for me on his guitar. Bob Dylan and Neil Young and James Taylor. I didn’t like the pauses in between the songs because I didn’t know what to say other than that was nice, play another one. Sometimes I said wow, crazy. I lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling thinking about Tash, and also the feasibility of blowing up a laundry bag and floating away on it from a place like Alcatraz. Travis was singing Dylan’s “You’re a Big Girl Now,” in a soft voice that kept getting softer and softer until it finally stopped. His fingers were long with square tips. He also wore a thin piece of leather around his wrist.
Tash phoned a couple of times after she left and then stopped calling altogether. A lot of teenagers hit the road in the seventies looking for peace and free love and ended up on communes and being brainwashed and having a whole bunch of babies with bearded men who enjoyed thinking of themselves as new messiahs. But I don’t believe that happened to her because that would be way too similar to how this place, this town, came to be, and she never had anything good to say about it. We’re a national joke, she’d say. Seriously, she’d say, we’re the joke town in the joke province in the joke country. Everybody mocks us and the more they do the more The Mouth goes: We won’t give in! We’ll fight the good fight! We’ll keep the faith! We’ll ban more books! We’ll burn more records! Have you ever noticed how the media make us out to be religious freaks with no fashion sense and shit? Oh my god, it’s humiliating beyond belief! My mom and dad and I would sit at the kitchen table and listen to her rant and when she was done my mom would put her arm around Tash and say stuff like: Have a warm bath.