Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  I could only imagine where we were, and I imagined we were in one of the suburbs of the fabled Hartman childhood: Mamaroneck, I thought, or Cos Cob. The houses of Cos Cob were much dirtier and closer together than I had expected. I had expected Cos Cob to be a seaside resort. I had expected Cos Cob to be green, or at least greenish-brown. But this place was a hilly, dirty, poor version of Manhattan. Old women walked the streets in clothes that were mismatched and worn out, their faces hardened by years of food shopping. Block after block we passed mediocre cars and peeling paint and cryptic graffiti, first Skip Hartman and, ten seconds later, I.

  She went into a building in the heart of Cos Cob. The building was called Modernity Geriatric Center. I entered, and, based on the few trips I had made into Dante’s Inferno with Skip Hartman as my guide, I knew we were in the outermost ring of Hell. Here, there was no plaint that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal air to tremble, and so on. I looked around the lobby and recognized every old person sitting in a chair with bottomed-out expectations as one of those souls in the Inferno who had been born before the advent of Christ and whose only sin therefore was bad luck. Because these people could not worship God aright—or whatever the equivalent sin would be nowadays, which hell if I knew what that was—they were condemned to live for the remainder of eternity without hope. Even at the age of fifteen, I knew that was the best treatment a person could hope for in either Hell or an old age home.

  I slipped past the indifferent guard at the front desk and followed Skip up two flights of stairs. I walked down a corridor of foul odors peering into each room, until I saw what I was looking for: Skip Hartman sitting on the edge of a bed and saying to the tiny drooling white-haired person in it, “Hello, Daddy.”

  “Child, what month is it now?” he asked, in a little voice that resembled hers, only an octave higher.

  She smiled warmly at him. “Why, it is September, Daddy, of course.”

  “So it is.”

  She presented him with the bouquet of wildflowers. He grabbed it from her, embraced the stems, squeezed them to his narrow chest, sucked in the air that was directly above the blossoms, and squealed, “Ooooooh, September, these are beautiful flowers.”

  “I’m so glad you like them, Daddy. Shall I put them in a vase in the window where you can see them bright and splendid with the sunlight behind them?”

  “No!” he said in a panic. “Let me hold them!” He sucked in the air above the blossoms in a paroxysm. I thought he was going to eat them.

  “Yes, hold them,” she said. She reached forward with her hand and he cowered from it. When he saw that she meant only to touch his hair gently, he relaxed and stroked his flower stems and let her touch his hair.

  As regards hair, his head resembled that of a mature dandelion; not the full yellow dandelion, that is, but the sparse, balding white one whose hair is in danger of blowing off its head. Skip seemed respectful of this danger as she placed the small groupings of hair in an arrangement that could only have been meant to satisfy her own sense of order, since her father didn’t care and the other residents and staff of the Modernity Geriatric Center could not have been expected to notice.

  “Oh, September, you are touching my head,” the ancient man said softly.

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She smiled warmly again, and glanced in my direction, and gasped. “I knew it!”

  “You did?”

  “Daddy, this is the girl I’ve been telling you so much about.”

  “What is the girl?” He was nodding over his flowers.

  “Look up at her, Daddy. She is the child who asked me to call her by the name of her dead brother. Do you remember that story?”

  “No.”

  “Mary, come here where he can see you.”

  I said, “Shit, you had a father all this time?”

  “Yes, I know that I waited for too long to tell you. To introduce you to my father is a very big step for me.”

  I said, “Yeah, well getting screwed five times a week by a forty-year-old is a big step for me.”

  Skip said, “You were on the subway. And in the elevator.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I sensed your presence keenly. I did not understand. It troubled me. I am glad to know you were there, else I would have thought I was going crazy.”

  “Yeah, well good fucking thing you aren’t going crazy,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “September, you mustn’t forget me. Tell the little boy my name.”

  “Hoving Harrington Hartman, I would like you to meet Mary White.”

  “Hoving Harrington Hartman?” I said. “That’s your father’s name?”

  “Yes!” Hoving said.

  “You people are out of your minds!”

  “Come away from the doorway,” Skip said. “Go to him. Go to him and touch him. He likes the physical contact.”

  I walked toward him. “Hoving,” I said.

  He stared at me as I approached. “Hoving,” he said, laughing. I reached for his head.

  “Get away from me, you little pecker.”

  I vigorously mussed the tufts of white hair, and he shrieked. A stout old Jamaican nurse marched into the room and addressed us all as children: “What is going on in here?”

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” Skip said. “He doesn’t like to be touched.” The nurse left.

  We took him to the Modernity courtyard, where it was lightly raining. Surrounded on all four sides by the pale-yellow brick building, the three of us held hands and strolled up and down the narrow slate passageways through the vegetation. “Rhododendron,” Hoving recited. “Ivy, pachysandra, birch, clover.” I thought of the long, thin, inverted-asparagus penis that I had seen hanging down between his little thighs when Skip swaddled him in diapers and thermal underwear for the walk, and his chestnut testicles in their droopy double sack.

  “Crow, blue jay, seagull, starling, sparrow, cardinal, robin redbreast,” he said, far away, somnambulating through some lost age of Cos Cob.

  Skip said, “He used to be tall and proud and fiercely erudite.”

  “And so he will be again,” I said gravely.

  “What did you say that for?”

  “I don’t know. Because it sounds like something somebody would say.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “God, this is horrible,” Skip murmured. We continued to stroll gracefully as if she had not just said something worth stopping everything for.

  We brought him back to his room and Skip called a car for us.

  “September, what do you do now?” her father asked. “Do you teach?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you do, little child?”

  “I slave over a hot oven.”

  “Do you know what I do?”

  “What?”

  “I lie here.”

  “How extra sucky for you.”

  “Yes.”

  7 Soap as an Actual Yardstick of Civilization

  One Tuesday afternoon in the month of June of that year, Stephen Samuels and I sat in the kitchen having our usual difficulty settling into an algebra lesson. In order to teach me about the placement of coordinates on a Cartesian grid, he had drawn on a piece of paper a pair of perpendicular lines with arrows at their ends.

  “What are the arrows for?” I said.

  “They’re arrows, honey, don’t worry about it.”

  “You put arrows, so I want to know what the arrows are for because of my thirst for knowledge.”

  “The arrows represent that the lines extend to infinity.”

  “And what is infinity, out of curiosity?”

  “You don’t know what infinity is?”

  “No, so up yours.”

  “That which is larger than any measurable number.”

  “What?”

  “That which is larger than any measurable number.”

>   “I don’t believe you.”

  “It is not germane to our topic anyway.”

  “I don’t believe in our topic.”

  “How about this: could you shut your mouth you little twit because I want to just put the damn coordinates on the damn grid and be out of here and smoke myself a blunt because you are on my ultimate nerve today?”

  Skip Hartman stood in the doorway saying, “Would anybody like some milk and cookies?”

  “I was just teaching Ms. White here to understand the Cartesian grid.”

  “So I heard.”

  “She’s a difficult pupil.”

  “Yes.” Skip was not listening, really, and was distracted as she set two tall clear tumblers on the kitchen table, one for me and one for Stephen. She filled them with cold milk from a carton from the refrigerator. She brought a blue cylindrical tin down from a kitchen cabinet and removed the lid and presented Stephen and me with our favorite anthology of shortbreads. Stephen Samuels and I chose our shortbreads, dunked them liberally in our milks, held our shortbreads in our mouths, where we sucked the milk out of them, chewed, swallowed, and chose new shortbreads. Skip Hartman sat facing away from the table with her natural good posture that she didn’t even have to think about. She tapped the smooth tabletop quickly with three of her fingernails, which were coated with clear polish and clipped short for reasons I will not go into at this time.

  “September, would you stop tapping please?” Stephen said. Skip looked at him languidly and continued to tap.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

  She looked at me like, “You know what’s wrong,” and also like, “Don’t ask me what’s wrong when you know what’s wrong,” and like, “Don’t ever ask me what’s wrong.”

  “The maid quit, right?” I said.

  She nodded.

  In the last two years we had had five housecleaners, and that morning number five had caught a glimpse of a fairly typical nine A.M. on a Tuesday in the bedroom in Skip Hartman’s life with me.

  “Well, I’m sure the maid was a dear girl,” Stephen said, “but you cannot expect every single maid to overcome her narrow prejudices. I on the other hand know all I need to know to understand the relations between a mature woman such as yourself and a punky kid such as the little one here. What I’m saying, September, is that you pay me a beautiful amount of money to tutor the young one, and yet I find myself needful of persisting in my moonlighting career of marijuana sales amongst dangerous thugs in the park, whereas if I had just the teeniest supplement to my income for, say, cleaning a two-story apartment house on the Upper East Side once a week, I would then be able to enjoy the fine things without having to risk my neck every night.”

  “Oh, I don’t buy that marijuana dealer crap,” Skip said. “You need money to support your pot-smoking habit plain and simple. I will not give it to you and I cannot think of a thing I’d rather do less than allow you to clean my house.”

  “Mary, did you not see me selling marijuana in the park one day two and a half years ago?” Stephen said.

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  Skip said, “Oh, I just don’t care. You cannot clean my house. The end.”

  “Oh, please?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, please please please please please?”

  “Ah, the hell, I have no energy anymore for anything,” Skip said, and that is how Stephen Samuels became both tutor and maid to me, though I use the latter term liberally, if not downright communistically.

  On an average day in the life of Stephen Samuels, maid, he woke up at eleven A.M. in the basement apartment of his father’s West Village brownstone, which he insisted on leasing for $100 a month; cooked and ate a stack of pancakes; did a half dozen bong hits; threw on a pair of skintight black leggings, a hot-pink stretch T-shirt with scooped décolletage, a black velvet blazer, and black biker boots; and wandered uptown to our kitchen to teach me about force, which equals mass times acceleration. After two hours of that, with a twenty-minute lunch break in the middle, Stephen Samuels took the can of oven cleaner out from under the sink along with a pair of chiffon-yellow rubber housecleaning gloves and a rag of old Hartman shirt. Gloves on, he directed the nozzle of the aerosol can more or less toward the center of the cavern of the oven and pressed down firmly until a quarter of the can of goo had been spent into it. And there lay the goo in the oven.

  Then it was milk-and-cookies time, a time for Stephen and me to explore the nature of our friendship. Intimacy is protean, and we used our mutual devotion to soft, sodden, sugary biscuits as a springboard for meaning-making activity of inexhaustible nuance.

  While Stephen and I were giggling at the table, Skip came back from wherever it was that she ever came back from and announced, “It stinks in here.”

  “That’s the oven cleaner, honey,” Stephen said.

  “Well, the oven cleaner emits a penetrating odor that, I find, stinks, Stephen. When were you thinking of wiping it off?” She had stuck her head into the chamber of the oven, whence her voice came to us, muted and resounding. “Oh, this is how you purport to clean the oven? The crap is just lying here in a pile.”

  “We have here a very Hansel and Gretel situation at this moment in time,” Stephen whispered to me, indicating Witch Hartman, who, with but one small kick in the butt, would be in the oven.

  “This is bullshit in terms of oven-cleaning technique,” she called from within the oven walls. It gave me a little thrill to hear Skip Hartman use terms like crap and bullshit. While she continued as a rule to utter phrases of classical proportions, I noticed that since the advent of me in her verbal life she had been dipping more and more often into the trough of the vernacular. Still, even the most casual or vulgar remark from her lips seemed to carry with it the force of one of the major Western thinkers, such that bullshit! in her mouth felt like an instance of Socratic irony or something.

  Skip took up the chiffon-yellow rubber gloves that Stephen had strewn on the sink and slipped them over her hands. She wore a pale blue silk chemise and navy rayon slacks. “Considering how little you actually exerted yourself while wearing these, you managed to sweat monstrously in them,” Skip said, as she wadded up a sheet of The New York Times and began to smear the pale, foaming goo about the five walls and two racks of the oven.

  Stephen Samuels stood up from his biscuits. “I don’t like the insinuation!” he said, looming directly above Skip, who knelt on the floor. She looked up at him fearfully. “You clean that oven, bitch.” He stared down at her, eyes wide. She stared up at him. A few tears eased out from her eyes and down her face, which had turned a gentle shade of red. She said something quietly like “Oh” or “Oh no.” I didn’t understand what was happening. She averted her face from Stephen’s, vigorously spread the oven cleaner for another minute, stopped abruptly, stood up, and walked quickly from the room, wearing the gloves.

  Stephen stayed that night for dinner, which Skip Hartman cooked and served to him. He was expansive at the table. He spoke of the fierce border patrol of the American war on drugs, which, he explained, forced a local marijuana entrepreneur such as himself to rely on the domestic product, which became as a result the number-one cash crop in the entire U.S. of A. At a certain point Skip Hartman removed a wad of bills from her pants pocket, set it down in front of Stephen, and quickly left the kitchen once more.

  Though she continued to pay Stephen Samuels for cleaning the house, Skip Hartman was the only person in the house over the next few months who cleaned anything. Kept the place tidy and bright, in fact. These months were a time of great closeness for Stephen and me. Once, we were running along the upstairs hallway holding hands when we happened to pass the guest bathroom, where Skip Hartman was on her knees scouring the tub. We stood and watched her lean into the work. She was facing away from us, scouring with vigor, doing violence to the mold, mildew, and soap scum. She did not pause or turn around, though she must have heard our laughter and the pitter-patter of our feet on the rug. Then I
felt sad. I looked at Stephen and he looked sad. Sadness had descended upon the tableau. Skip rinsed the tub. She stood and turned and faced us. “I have no life anymore,” she said. “All I ever do is clean.”

  After that, Skip Hartman did almost no housecleaning for an entire year. And then what happened was what happens when there is a house that is yours over which to stand vigil and you do not stand vigil: dirt and dust and foul odors crept through the walls and floor and ceiling. I don’t think I had ever lived this way before. It was a bracing experience. I’m not saying that I learned anything from it, such as responsibility—hardly responsibility, or anything else.

  On a Friday afternoon in the summer of my seventeenth year, Dierdre showed up on my doorstep with a little male friend who was not Harry. Dierdre had grown a foot in the last two years, while her skin had remained the same size. Now her skin was stretched so tight over her muscles and bones that you could see everything that was happening beneath it. Her pale red eyebrows had grown thinner, as had the rest of her hair. As you followed the eyebrows out toward the edges of her face they ascended and ascended, dipping only at the outermost reaches of her head as if in coy allusion to the standard shape of an eyebrow. She wore a grayish threadbare T-shirt from which she had cut away part of the neck band. No bra. Her magnificent, jutting clavicle was on display, as were her pointy breasts, thinly covered by the T-shirt, as was part of the bony concavity between those lovely little breasts.

  The other person was, as I said, a little male of some kind. His body gave the impression of a lot of energy contained in a small area. He looked like a man but could also have been a boy who had aged quickly, the kind of person gifted with extraordinary bodily resiliency and health who must therefore work long and hard to damage himself where a simple night of drinking and sleep deprivation would suffice for a lesser man.

  “You remember Mittler,” Dierdre said. She had the cruel defiant stare from elementary school only more so, the kind of look that years of unarticulated fear and sadness work into the eyes and nose and mouth until the look is part of the hardware, part of the physical plant. The compact little man, Mittler, turned his head away, doleful.