eleven
It’s easy to revere you in absentia. To think of you as having a master plan. Did I just say that?
I stayed on top of the hill for a long time. I told myself when it cooled down I would go home but it took a long time to cool down. I spelled Travis’s name in the dirt. I practised my new signature, which Travis had helped to design. It was basically a capital N and then a straight line similar to the one on a dead person’s heart machine. That part of it bugged me but Travis said it was enigmatic. I tried out a few fancier signatures. They didn’t work. Tash had warned me about trying too hard. There had been an a in my name a long time ago. Naomi. But when I was born Tash couldn’t say it. We were Natasha and Naomi.
We were going to live together in Prague because Tash said it was the place to be. We were sitting in my grandma’s tree and she told me that there were tiny colonies of Mennonites in a place called Kazakhstan. Stalin put them there during the war, to help with the hard labour. They have twenty kids to a family. Say it, she said. Say Kazakhstan. I said it and she said no, really say it. Like a knife, slicing. It’s my favourite word now. It’s so conducive, she said. Conducive was another one of her favourite words, although she never said something was conducive to something else, just that it was conducive. I practised saying Kazakhstan until I got it just right.
Someday we’ll go there, Nomi, she said. We’ll liberate those kids and take them with us to Prague so they can sit at outdoor cafés with their cute Czech lovers and laugh and drink. I had wanted to laugh and drink, only not with hordes of liberated Mennonite children, but I nodded anyway and said okay.
It did finally cool down — with a northerly breeze that can be so refreshing if it’s not also carrying with it the odour of deceased poultry — so I went home.
I saw Mr. Quiring on the boulevard, with his little son, but he was busy tying his shoe and didn’t notice me. I thought it was a little late for the son to be up but I guess Mr. Quiring knew what he was doing. Maybe he was on a night walk. Trudie used to take me on night walks when I was really little and we’d talk about the moon and the stars and what we’d have for our “night lunch” before going to bed.
I had an imaginary friend then who hated me and was trying to kill me. The night walks with Trudie helped me to forget my problems.
When I got home I found my dad in his yellow lawn chair. Practising your sitting? I asked. He shrugged like a Mafia don with his eyes closed like he had to do what he had to do. I hated to admit it, but Travis was right. I could imagine my dad standing forever with his finger in a dike saving a town that only mocked him in return. And not knowing it. Or knowing it but not caring. Or knowing it but not knowing what else to do.
I went to my room and put on Keith Jarrett quietly and lay on my bed. I got up and walked to the kitchen for a drink of water and saw that my dad had come inside to have a staring contest with the kitchen table. I got my water and said good night to him and he said good night to me but in a way that made me think he wouldn’t actually make it through the night. I thought: He’s going to go to Minnesota for a coffee. I can tell. He’ll be driving around in another country listening to religious radio while what’s left of his family sleeps.
I went back to my room and lay down on my bed. I stared at the old bloodstain that was near my pillow halfway up the wall and considered, like always, getting a cloth and wiping it off. It, the blood, had originally come from my face after I fell off my bike and landed in gravel.
I’d been careening home on my little bike with a giant box of Kotex pads for Tash who had, ten minutes earlier, hissed at me from inside the bathroom instructions to take the money from off Dad’s dresser and get the shit she needed before she filled the entire fuckin’ bowl. Those boxes were huge, the size of a small refrigerator, and I had this one balanced on my handlebars completely obliterating my view and I hit the curb with my front tire and skidded out of control and landed face-first in somebody’s pebbly driveway while Tash’s pads sailed off into the middle of the road and once again blood poured from my face.
When I got home, finally, after making separate trips each with the bike and the box, Tash said geez, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life stranded on the fuckin’ can and I went into my bedroom and lay on my bed picking out bits of gravel and congealed blood from my face and smearing them onto the wall above my pillow in a way that resembled the Mandarin language. If you look closely at my right cheek you can see a whole bunch of very tiny holes that look like an Aero bar. It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.
Trudie had her kids and her husband and her books. She had a car and nightgowns and white lace curtains. She had friends. She had equanimity. Everything was good. She lived in a town where every single person knew who she was and where she came from and sometimes that made her crazy but most of the time she liked that because it made her feel like she was a part of something. She believed in God and heaven.
She talked about her dead father a lot, my grandpa. His name was Nicodemus. They’d been very close even though at times he couldn’t remember her name. Even when he was young and healthy he sometimes had problems remembering the names of his fourteen children. Half of them died when they were babies. We have his old, crumbling bible on a shelf in the den and inside it is a place to write about important events like births and deaths. Nicodemus did all the writing but you can see that there were times when my grandma would correct things for him. He’d thought that his son Peter’s first name was Walter but in fact it was Albert. Walter had been the name of an older child of theirs who had died. My grandma twice crossed out Walter and wrote in Albert, next to Peter, in the birth section and then again in the death section. In one place she had crossed out his Mina and written in Minty. She also corrected his Gorge and Hellen.
I think that my grandpa, Nicodemus, was my mother’s hero. She missed him. She missed sliding down the stairs in a cookie sheet and having him time her with his pocket watch. She missed watching him run around the yard on stilts and then knock on her second-storey window. He had taught her how to drive at the age of thirteen by sending her off alone in the car on a short business trip to Ontario. She loved to drive. Trudie and Ray were always going for drives, little piles of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum wrappers sitting on the seat between them. Going to little towns near the border and having lunch or dessert, or just coffee.