fifteen
It was an idea, more than anything, that started the whole thing. It was the seventies then, and although our town was a secret town (The Mouth suggested that when we look in the mirror there should be no reflection because who we are is something that we cannot see), some of the less oppressed teenagers were able to pick up signals from the outside on their invisible radars. Tash especially.
The Mouth came to our house one evening to tell my sister that her physical self was irrelevant. She said okay, thanks for that. Thank you for coming over here to tell me that. And when he left, she shouted oh my god and got on the phone immediately to tell her friends about the latest Buddhist-tinged interpretation of the gospel according to The Mouth.
That was around the time our Aunt Gonad asked Tash to burn her Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. Tash could do a hilariously sexy version of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” where she basically worked herself into a complete fake orgasm during that big crescendo. Ian could play it on the piano because every good or previously good Menno kid knew how to play the piano and she’d drape herself all over him and sing and moan while he banged out the tune and laughed his head off.
Please don’t schput, Ray would say. He never made a big scene. He’d go into the basement and practise his typing or work on his watercolours.
Tash was gone a lot of the time. In the summer she’d sleep till one or two in the afternoon and then get up and put on loud music and cool clothes and grab an apple or something from the fridge and leave. She had this thin silver chain that she wore low around her waist and sometimes when she walked out into the yard it would catch a ray of sunlight and the reflection was so bright and flashy it made me have to look away and I liked to think it was a message of some kind. Like, zap, I love you. Or something like that.
My parents and I would stand in the living room staring at her through the picture window. There she goes, my dad would say. Jingling the money in his pocket the way he did for an entire day and night when my mom left. And my mom would say well, it’s normal, honey, let’s not make too big a deal out of it or it will just get worse. But although my mom was philosophically cool about a lot of stuff, her eyes lingered on things, like Tash when she walked down the driveway and got into Ian’s van. I used to count the seconds that passed between the time Trudie would first fix her gaze on Tash as she left and the time she would turn to look at me all bright-eyed and smiling saying well, what’s next? Nine or ten seconds, usually. There’s very little turnaround time for a mother to go from careworn to (fake) enthusiastic but Trudie was a pro and I loved her for it and it didn’t occur to me then that that sort of bravura could have a shelf life. For all I knew Trudie was also taking heart from the quick laser reflection of sunlight off Tash’s silver waist chain.
It was around then, during the days of Tash’s silver-waist-chain period, that Mr. Quiring came to our house for a meeting with Ray and Trudie about Tash skipping out of classes and not getting her assignments in and, quote, leading the class, when she was there, in mini-revolts that she thinks are humorous, etc. etc. He told Ray and Trudie that he considered himself to be a patient and long-suffering man but that it had to end somewhere. It does? Trudie had asked.
Ray was outside watering the flowers and Trudie was cooking something in the kitchen and I was…I don’t know what I was doing. I answered the door. Tash wasn’t at home. And my mom was flustered at first because she didn’t know what Mr. Quiring wanted or why he was there and he seemed a little nervous too, standing there in the front entrance. And then Ray came in, his hands all dirty, and Mr. Quiring asked if it was a good time to talk about Tash, and Ray and Trudie thought it was and I made tea and sat on the couch and listened.
But he was really nice about it and he told Trudie that he thought Tash had a lot of talent and a sharp intellect. And he said she had dramatic flair and that it was a shame there was no place in town where she could develop that. He was wearing sandals and jeans. And just those three things combined — saying that Tash had dramatic flair, expressing regret that it would probably never be realized in East Village, and wearing jeans and sandals — made him seem like the original hipster man, especially next to Ray who hadn’t even taken off his tie to do the gardening and had probably never used the word flair in his life except maybe to describe somebody with a flair for modesty. Ray seemed so much older than him but he isn’t really at all.
I would ask Mr. Quiring if he remembers all that but I don’t really want to have conversations about the past with anybody but myself. It prevents discrepancies from creeping in.
After Mr. Quiring left, Trudie slammed her cup down on the kitchen counter and told Ray that even Almon Quiring could see that Tash didn’t belong in this town. And Ray asked her what he should do about that, take an Almon Quiring course on Natasha Nickel?
Even I knew the answer to that question. Uh, Dad, we all move to NYC? But I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes I think that Trudie blamed Ray for Tash leaving town with Ian because if Ray had agreed to leave first, had taken us all off to some other place, Tash wouldn’t have had anything to rebel against and would have stuck around.
But, on the other hand, sometimes I think that Trudie appreciated the fact that Tash had an awful lot of things to rebel against because if she didn’t she might not have developed her dramatic flair and pursued all sorts of adventures off in the city and in the world that Trudie herself more than anything also wanted to experience.
Anyway, from that day on, Trudie would periodically invoke Mr. Quiring’s name, telling Ray that at least there was one person in this town who could see that Tash wasn’t like everyone else. And Ray always agreed with her and said Mr. Quiring was absolutely right which didn’t leave Trudie any more or less frustrated.
Basically, I think that Trudie and Tash were kind of the same person. And maybe me and Ray are too. What was it Mr. Quiring told the guidance counsellor? Nomi’s problem is a general lack of self-esteem that feeds into an eroding sense of purpose. Yeah, okay, sounds right, I guess. I’m sure once I begin to spend nine hours a day separating chickens’ heads from their bodies I’ll feel a lot better and more useful.
My parents weren’t crazy about the fact that Tash was drinking and hanging out with Ian so much, sometimes until five or six in the morning, at the pits or in the bushes around Suicide Hill or in any of the other rustic settings we young pioneers relied on to get us through the night, but it wasn’t that, really, that my mom was concerned about. Not really.
I do remember The Mouth coming to our house and my mom saying Hans, for crying out loud, what is it this time, and him saying Trudie, you know as well as I do that Tash’s been hitching rides to the city, and my mom saying something sassy like well, can you blame her and The Mouth telling her she was treading on thin ice. I didn’t know if he meant my mom or Tash or both of them and I didn’t know what thin ice meant exactly and when I asked my mom she said oh, it’s just the heat. Everybody’s cranky these days.