A Complicated Kindness

Travis teaches Nomi how to drive, as “he likes to teach [her] things” (68). They go into the next village to buy alcohol, and Nomi relates the history of Mennonite men buying up French villagers’ property while their men were away during World War II. They go back to Travis’s house and talk, and then he plays guitar while she listens; Nomi feels nervous because she worries about impressing him.

Tash phoned a few times after leaving, but then the communication stopped, leaving Nomi to speculate on her whereabouts; she doesn’t think Tash would end up in a commune like many young people in the seventies because they’re too much like a Mennonite community.

Without Tash and Trudie, the Nickel household is in a quiet equilibrium; Nomi thinks of the time they both had the flu, and there was no speech or movement in the house for days. The Mouth visited and encouraged them not to live in perpetual crisis, which Nomi agreed to without believing. She thinks she should be a better daughter to her father, especially when she feels embarrassed of him or doesn’t know how to relate to him.

While she’s sitting in the driveway, Ray comes home and gives her a piece of chalk. She uses it to write her favorite quote from Guagin: “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge” (73). Nomi loves the quote but has never had cause to feel that way. She goes up to her room and listens to records, thinking of Travis, her father, and her empty future.

Travis accuses Nomi of lying about her mother and father’s attraction while they are in his truck, leading to a fight in which he compares Ray to the child with his thumb in a dike to save the town. They are waiting outside the Golden Comb’s place; he comes out and sells them some pot, and Nomi reflects that he’s one of the few people who can live on his own terms in East Village.

She reflects on Bert, an acquaintance, while watching him drive his car up and down Main Street. His parents were excommunicated for alcoholism, so he was raised by his grandmother. Once, he drove Nomi around and told her that cigarettes and alcohol were his parents. Now he has a French girlfriend whom Nomi calls Brass Knuckle Girl, and Nomi has a recurring dream about their relationship, which she sees as “beautiful and doomed” (80). She has heard that they have a suicide pact.

She brings it up while hanging out with Travis, and he thinks she’s insane. She falls asleep in a field with Travis and wakes up to rain and Travis gone. She confronts him in his truck, insulting his guitar playing and saying that even cows and horses bunch together for safety during a storm. When she gets home, she sees Ray cleaning the roof during the thunderstorm and urges him to come down.

After conversing with her young neighbor, Nomi runs into The Mouth and his wife. She notices that The Mouth’s wife never speaks. The Mouth asks how Ray is doing, and Nomi tells him to ask him himself.

At the top of Alder Hill, Nomi muses that cigarettes give her life a sense of punctuation. She says she will quit at 40, which is when she will have worked for “twenty-three years chopping heads off chickens. It’ll be time.” (85).

Nomi stays on the hill, thinking of Tash until it cools down outside. She goes home and finds Ray sitting outside alone; seeing him there makes her realize Travis is right about him, that he would stand “forever with his finger in a dike saving a town that only mocked him in return” (87). She knows that he will likely drive around all night, as he often does.

Nomi thinks of her mother’s love/hate relationship with the town and with religion. After church, the rest of the family would wait outside for Ray as he shook everyone’s hand, as was customary. In the wake of Trudie’s departure, she’s made her own religion: that the family will be together again someday.

She recalls a time The Mouth came over and had an argument with Trudie outside while the girls watched. Nomi and Tash speculate on what they’re arguing about; it is clear that Trudie is very upset. When Trudie comes back inside, she tells Nomi that The Mouth asked her to work in the church library. Nomi knows that there’s more to it, but not what it could be.

Once, Trudie took Tash with her to volunteer at a boys’ camp while Nomi stayed home and cared for Ray. At camp, Tash had a fling with a boy whom she later found out lied to her about seeing her again; Nomi knows all this from reading the diary Tash left behind. She also found a note to Tash from Trudie that indicates that Trudie knew Tash would leave home.

Nomi meets up with Travis while he’s working for his father, and he suggests she get on birth control. She agrees to it. At school, she finds half of a torn-up note in a field, which resonates with her as someone who only feels half understood. She goes home and tries to make a list of ways to improve (Travis’s idea). She tries to pray, but she’s caught up in how self-conscious and stupid it makes her feel, so she goes to sleep instead.

Trudie lost her job taking care of infants at church when The Mouth’s wife discovered her listening to the radio during service. After that, she is tasked with visiting and leading hymn singing at Rest Haven, the retirement community. She takes Tash and Nomi with her until they beg not to go anymore; now, Nomi thinks her eventual fate is to become a Rest Haven resident. After that, Trudie worked at the church library, which she seemed to enjoy; The Mouth told her he was happy to see her being “a good soldier of Christ” (104).

At this time, Tash was starting to rebel, dating Ian and getting her ears pierced behind everyone’s back. She had her own ideas and pursued them in defiance of the church and town custom, which Nomi deeply admired.

In Travis’s bedroom, Nomi tries to make jokes, but Travis thinks she misunderstands him. He says she should rename herself Nomi Grass (after Gunter Grass), and she thinks about how her family would never be able to find her if she did. He tries to mess around with her, and she tells him to play “Fire and Rain” while she draws him. When the song is finished, Travis is disappointed that she has drawn “the Grass family” (107) and she kisses him at length to keep from having to explain herself and so he won’t notice she’s crying.

Nomi thinks about Mr. Quiring, whom she suspects thinks Nomi is insane—and for good reason. She has been using her English assignments to work through her thoughts; meanwhile, he is taking the opportunity as her teacher to criticize Ray’s behavior.

When Trudie worked at the library, things seemed to be going well, but Nomi detected that something was going on in the house that her younger self couldn’t understand. One night, she had a nightmare and hid under her parents’ bed before they went to sleep; she overheard her mother start crying and admitting that she was losing touch with Tash. The next morning, Tash refused to go to church, so Ray and Nomi went alone; looking back, Nomi sees that as the clearest moment of an ending to their family.

While sitting in the garage, Nomi recalls when Tash gave her a rainbow sticker that she put on her window. Ray made her remove it, as he “wasn’t big on overt symbols of hope” (113). Tash and Nomi found it very frustrating that Ray was so against things like a celebration. Once, they tried to get him to say party by playing a word association game on a car ride; it became so frustrating that Tash stuck her head out the window, rolled it up, and refused to do anything until Ray stopped the car. Looking back, Nomi wonders if things would be different if Ray had just said party.