Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “Like back and forth between Fifty-ninth Street and One-hundred-tenth.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once.”

  I sprang up from the bed and jumped on Mittler. He jabbed me in the breast again.

  “Ow. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to hit a woman there?”

  “You’re not a woman.”

  “But I have tits and you poked them twice.”

  “Teach you to jump on me.”

  I jumped on him again and he hit me in the arm, hard. I mean really hard, so tears came to my eyes.

  “I’m leaving. I’ll call Miss Hartman so I can come back and finish when you’re not here.” He left.

  I opened the bedroom window and leaned out to watch Mittler exit the house. He took the stairs in two long jumps, cut straight across the sidewalk, slid between two parked cars, and made a perpendicular turn to the right. Down in the street itself, he walked in a westerly direction toward the park. He was the most strictly linear walker I have ever seen. The rain began as I watched him. It was the dense kind of rain that comes down in long continuous columns rather than individual droplets. Mittler was soaked in a matter of seconds. He kept walking as if nothing different were happening in the natural world around him. He went steadily away from my house with his linear walk and his light blue valise of cleaning tools. I wondered if stoical people like him were allowed to enjoy the feeling of the rain on their faces. I thought of a song my father used to sing about an umbrella salesman:

  Pitter-patter goes the rain

  He’ll mend your umbrella

  And blow out his brain.

  It was eleven A.M. I was agitated and could think of nothing to do. This was standard for eleven A.M. of that period of my life. Some people would make food in this situation. I had seen people make food often enough—women, mostly—and it didn’t appear to be a waste of time. I thought I could manage a grilled cheese sandwich. Because I was fearing the stretch of time between eleven A.M. and whatever came after eleven A.M., I took the most circuitous route to the kitchen, making stops in all the other rooms of the house. I also crawled on my hands and knees instead of walking upright. As I crawled along the hard brown floor from room to room, a stinky smell gathered in my nostrils. It was the smell of Mittler’s cleaning fluids, of which he had left a thick, drying coat on every surface in the house, the way a dog might leave urine. As I crawled headfirst down the carpeted stairs, my eyes teared up and my nose ran and the skin on the palms of my hands first tingled and then burned. The knees of my pants became damp and the skin underneath them began to burn also.

  I crawled back upstairs and changed clothes again and walked down to the kitchen on my hind legs in a pair of stiff, thick-soled hiking boots that had cost Skip Hartman $300 and that I had not used for hiking. In our household we liked good, supportive shoes, even if the hiking boots turned out to be overkill in terms of footwear to make grilled cheese in. I couldn’t eat the sandwich because every time I opened my mouth it filled up with the taste of bleach and ammonia. I was angry with Mittler. I had expected more from him. As I was about to throw the grilled cheese in the garbage, Skip walked in.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.” It was 11:38 A.M. Her eyes and nose began to water.

  “You’re a child,” she explained. “From now on I mustn’t let you sway me in decisions better left to an adult, such as whom to hire to clean.”

  “Ah, but you must.”

  “First I hire Stephen Samuels, who cleans not at all, then I hire Mittler, who cleans too much.”

  “It’s not Mittler’s fault. I distracted him.”

  “Did you now?”

  I know that I have tried to document the expressive activities of Skip Hartman’s hair and face, but I think I have not yet spoken in particular of her nose, correct? It was a straight, medium-sized, practical nose that had the slight advantage over her hair of being an organ of both expressive and perceptive capacities. She tilted her head back now and vertically scrunched her nose. She seemed to be trying to sniff out events other than cleaning that had taken place in the house while she was gone. “And what exactly did you do to distract him?”

  “I threatened him.”

  “Threatened him how?”

  “Verbally.”

  “Mittler’s fired.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “But you didn’t even tell me Tommy and Myra are moving!”

  “Oh, dear heavens. I did not tell you. I wonder why I did not tell you. That was an egregious oversight, to be sure. I suppose I don’t much like your aunt and uncle.”

  “But they’re the only people I have in the world.”

  “They’re the only people you have in the world?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about—”

  “Yeah?”

  “What about—us?”

  “Us?”

  “What about me?”

  I could think of nothing to say. Skip’s mouth hung open. Without knowing it, I think, she turned her thumbs out away from her body to show me, below the short sleeves of her lavender silk T-shirt, her taut, creamy inner forearms, and this little argument ended as many of ours did: in the kitchen, in a piteous embrace.

  8 I Am Fucked

  We had made it to the end of another summer when Skip Hartman glided to the curb near our house in her black high-gloss Porsche. I climbed in next to her. Skip Hartman in her brown leather driving gear, in profile in her car by the curb giving me an ominous look like a one-eyed jack, sweet indulgent reader, was at her most manly.

  There was a satchel of fine luncheon meats and cheeses and fruits and fruit juices and liquors in the broad sense of the term on the buttery leather shelf behind the two seats of the Porsche. This satchel and its contents were a part of the pleasure of the orderliness of a life with Skip Hartman. The orderliness, in turn, was a fortification against terrible events like the end of summer.

  Driving out of the city, Skip said, “Stephen was very angry when I told him we had found another housecleaner.”

  “So?”

  “He refuses to tutor you. He feels betrayed.”

  “He needs to learn responsibility,” I said.

  “The passenger seat: a center of moral authority. Joseph told me this termination has really sent Stephen into a tailspin.”

  “So screw him.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

  It was a cool day in mid-September. Maybe the leaves on the trees were changing color—I didn’t notice. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t making conversation with Skip Hartman or even looking at her as she drove. I was glued to the window. I just happen to have been the kind of person who, when she was looking at a landscape out a window, got distracted by her own reflection. I guess what I’m saying is, I looked at the world and saw myself. Not that I’m proud of it, or of much else that I did or said or thought or felt or was.

  Toward the end of our journey we found ourselves in a dark wood. We slowed and approached a dense iron gate that was the only break for miles in a high wooden wall along the right-hand side of the bumpy road we were on. A man stepped out of a low, narrow, gray, one-story A-frame house next to the gate. He was a man of fair complexion with short blondish-orange hair who walked toward us with his mouth ajar. He wore a dark blue uniform and held a clipboard. He was older and taller and wider and lighter in color than Mittler, and didn’t appear to have the odd, gentle decorousness that Mittler had, but he did have something of the Mittlerian American soldier-of-fortune can-do male way of being in the world. He appeared to be about to say something to Skip Hartman like “Name, ma’am,” when Skip Hartman preempted him with “Hartman, September, and White, Mary, here to see Thomas White and Myra White.”

  If the man regarded the efficiency of speech and the fancy car as mockeries of himself, he was right. He looked at his clipboard. “I’m sorry but you’r
e not on the list for today, ma’am.” He was now bending over and peering into the car to see who was in the passenger seat. I stuck my tongue out at him.

  “What you should be sorry about, young man,” said Ms. Hartman with an imperious tone, “is the disgraceful condition of the road approaching this entrance over which you are standing guard. One is a second- or third- or fourth-class citizen until one has been granted permission to enter Marmot. This attitude of Marmot’s I already do not like. Get on the telephone, please, young man—you do have a telephone in your little shed?—and call the sometimes forgetful Thomas White and ask if indeed he is expecting two lady visitors in a fancy foreign car whose shock absorbers have truly been put to the test by this approach road—which Marmot may try to disavow but whose responsibility, surely, is Marmot’s.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the man, the crisp American Marine politeness being strained now by the savage American Marine violence beneath it. He walked back to his little house.

  I said, “God, you’re a bitch. It’s just a dumb job for him.”

  “Then he should get another dumb job, darling.”

  “What dumb job do you have right now?”

  “Right now? Right now I have the dumb job of protecting you from idiots like him who justify their impertinence to people like you and me with some misguided concept of safeguarding gentility.”

  “Whatever, darling,” I said, with my own justification for impertinence that I didn’t understand but felt.

  The man opened the gate for us automatically from within his narrow house and we entered Marmot. We drove along a well-paved road for a few hundred yards through a dense forest of deciduous trees. The trees gave way to a small, modern village of evenly spaced and not identical but honest and similar and comforting wooden two-story family houses. The houses were painted in quiet varieties of gray and beige and brown. Each house was surrounded by one or two acres of clean, bright lawn. The shrubs were short and round and trim. Bright flowers. Sidewalks with no people on them. No toys. No cars. Our car in this place was like a long wet black rat sliding down the street looking for whom to eat. The front door of one of the houses on our left flew open and Tommy came out onto his porch in a pair of white ducks. He waved. He was smiling. He wore black canvas sneakers and walked directly on the bright green lawn in them, which was probably against the law. He came down the little hill of his front lawn toward our rat car. Skip stopped the car. Tommy waved gaily. Open-necked red-and-white-striped short-sleeve shirt worn out over the trousers. Skip idled. It had been a year since we’d seen Tommy. His face had developed some fine wrinkles like abstract designs made carefully with a diamond on a sheet of glass. Skip revved the engine. Tommy laughed. “I forgot!” he said. “I love to leave the names at the gate but in this case I forgot. You can’t park here. You have to come up into the driveway. Preferably the nose of the car three feet from the garage door. Fantastic!”

  “Where’s Myra?” I said, getting out of the car. Tommy kissed me on the cheek for the first time ever.

  “Hold this,” Skip said behind me.

  “What?”

  “The food basket.”

  “What are you doing? You hold it.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Myra had put on fifteen pounds. It is especially gratifying to see someone you haven’t seen in a long time if there has been a dramatic change in appearance: if the person has become fat or thin or shaved a beard or grown prematurely old. I loved touching Myra’s body. It was a body both sturdy and soft that I wanted to ram myself against to knock from their deep hideaway some of the feelings that surely must have dwelt there. But I remembered about breaking her arm and settled for working a goodly amount of saliva onto my lips and distributing it over her face with kisses. “Oh, Myra Myra Myra Myra Myra,” I said, approximately. She squeezed her eyes shut. We were standing now in the new-wood-and-lacquer-smelling kitchen with lots of gray, foggy light coming in through the big windows on the street side of the house. I admired Tommy for being able to pick another house with light.

  “Who wants a tour of the house?” Tommy said.

  Skip said, “I do.”

  I said, “I don’t.”

  “Oh, come on, Jesus, you’ve been here about one second and you’re trying to hurt me already. Aren’t you civilizing her, Hartman?”

  “Not my job,” Skip said, and took his arm in hers, and led him out of the room that I might commune in private with my girl relative.

  “What should we do now?” I asked.

  “Make something,” Myra said, head down, moving her full bulk toward the refrigerator.

  “What?”

  “Snacks.” She removed a roll of mozzarella and a jar of Spanish olives. She had on a knee-length denim jumper and a sturdy white faded T-shirt. I wanted her to drop the glass jar on the high-gloss oaken floor or give some other sign that she loved me.

  “So how do you like the new neighborhood?” I said, dancing around her while she stood and did whatever it is women do to mozzarella.

  “Good.”

  “Do you miss the old place?”

  She shrugged. Either that or she tensed up more. I strolled around the kitchen. The one accoutrement I didn’t recognize from the old place was an antique field hockey mallet, if that’s what you call it, that hung on the wall below the clock. The mallet was decorated with bright stripes of color. “Nice mallet,” I said. I was wearing the hiking boots and tried unsuccessfully to make a scuff mark on the floor. I took off the boots and tested the slidability of the floor in my socks. It was good. I slid here and there about the kitchen while Myra shuttled from fridge to counter and back.

  Skip’s voice entered the kitchen through the acoustic funnel of the hallway off the kitchen. “… difficult,” I heard her say. “This is a lovely home.”

  “Isn’t it?” Tommy said.

  They walked into the kitchen.

  “Where’s the food, darling?” Skip said to me.

  “Myra made a spread,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t mean Myra’s little spread. I mean what I made for us to eat for the substantial meal of the day.”

  I glanced at Myra, who looked like her usual lump self. I began to develop the idea of returning to New York without Skip Hartman.

  Tommy and Myra and I sat down at the kitchen table of old, which had a sad personality, for like a dog or a child, a table is susceptible to the vibrations of a home.

  Skip stood with her back to us at the built-in counter unloading a three-bean salad. I thought of things around the house that a person could use to hit and sever her spinal cord, such as the ornamental field hockey mallet. The room was quiet. You could hear the mozzarella sliding down people’s throats.

  “Come on already, why is it so quiet in here? Somebody say something,” Tommy said.

  “Where does your water come from?” Skip said, turning to face us with the bean salad.

  “Is that some kind of dirty question?” Tommy asked.

  “When you turn on the tap in the kitchen sink, the water that comes out comes from where?”

  “A well.”

  “Where?”

  “In the backyard.”

  “And must each homeowner have his own well in the backyard?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. Yeah.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

  Skip had put the salad on the table and returned to the counter to arrange the cool, damp pieces of tarragon chicken. “I mean that you do not really need a wall and a gate with a Special Forces commando in order to keep the poor people out.”

  “So? Who cares? What are you talking about?”

  “I am talking about the necessity, for living in Marmot, of having a well. And one must suppose that when there is a well per man, each man must buy enough land surrounding his well such that his well is, shall we say, one hundred fifty yards from his neighbor’s well, because a preponderance of wells any greater than one per one hundred fifty yards
would radically destabilize the water table.”

  “I hate when you say ‘per,’ ” I said.

  “In this way you keep the poor and lower-middle-income people out sans gate.”

  “I hate when you say ‘sans.’ ”

  “Myra, would you like a piece of tarragon chicken?”

  “Yes please.”

  “Leg or breast?”

  “Either one is fine.”

  “How do you keep the poor and lower-middle-income people out of your brownstone in Manhattan?” Tommy said.

  “That’s not the same.”

  “It seems similar.”

  “The equivalent would be if I had devised a way to keep them off the island of Manhattan altogether.”

  “Besides, you talk like a liberal but you live like a conservative,” Tommy said.

  “How would you know such a thing?”

  “I’ve been reading up on people like you.”

  “Were I a liberal only insofar as I have redistributed my own wealth to you and Myra, that would surely be liberal enough.”

  “Let’s play catch,” I said.

  “We don’t have a ball,” Tommy said.

  “I have a ball in the car,” I said.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Tommy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Skip said, “He means let’s not make a display of ourselves in the yard because the new neighbors might not understand the friendship of the two visitors. The friendship of a mature woman with an adolescent girl can only be a form of deviancy, from the imaginary point of view of the new neighbors.”

  Tommy said, “Ah, come on, stop it. I go a whole three hundred and sixty-five days feeling pretty good, and then you come up here with your remarks that are designed to hurt me and make me unhappy and depressed. I’m saying lay off me because I have a toothache.”

  We went into the living room with the exposed beam roofing or whatever you call it and we sipped pastis, or pretended to. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Passing the kitchen, I glanced at the clock. It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon. I removed the field hockey mallet from the wall. I crept into the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, the same hallway where Skip Hartman had been walking when she spoke the word difficult. I peered at them, the adults. They were sitting there: Skip Hartman on a roughly striped couch of coarse brown material, her arms spread wide over the back, one hand holding a tall, clear tumbler; Tommy with his legs crossed woman-style, thigh on thigh, a foot wagging nervously in the air; Myra balled up in another chair. I thought they were grotesque—the two people who had sold me and the one who had bought me. I went out the front door with the field hockey mallet and jogged not on the sidewalk but down in the road like Mittler toward the gate of Marmot.