Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  I walked through the pedestrian turnstile beside the large black gate and saw the blondish-orange Marine guard getting into a beat-up small gray American car that didn’t look like much but which he probably lay beneath on his back in his spare time when he was not practicing how to field-strip a muskrat or something.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “Ms. White, is it?” he said. He sat down in the driver’s seat and started the car with the door open.

  “Give me a ride to the nearest train station.”

  “What happened to Ms. Hartman?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Get in.”

  I got in next to his big square body, which was covered by the dark uniform. An animal smell came from under the uniform like the smell of a freshly washed dog. Layered over that was a cologne smell. “What’s that smell?”

  “Ralph Lauren Polo. Thirty dollars a bottle, but you gotta spend money on your odor because it’s connected to pheromones.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “What is she, your aunt or something?”

  “I don’t want to talk, I just want to ride.”

  “Fine.”

  It took ten minutes to get to the station in the neighboring town of Verdant. I looked out the front window while with peripheral vision I took in the man’s face, especially this one small triangle of muscle below and slightly in front of his right ear that kept bulging out and going back in, bulging out and going back in, like a little straining penis under the skin of his face.

  He stopped the car in the Verdant station parking lot and leaned violently in front of me to open the door on my side. I got out as the train was pulling in. The sky was deep gray. It looked as if it might rain. I backed away from his car in case he tried to shoot me. Backing steadily away with the field hockey mallet pressed along my right leg, I watched the little flexing muscle thing under the side of his face until I couldn’t see it anymore. Then I watched his whole head grow dark until it became a silhouette in the shadowed darkness of the car. Then I got on the train. Then the train left the station.

  Without my knowledge, Skip Hartman and Mittler had arranged for Mittler to be cleaning the house while we were away in the country. When I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, Mittler was in our room, lying on the bed, naked. His body was horizontal except for his dick, which was angled up away from the base of his torso toward his chin. His hands were resting at his sides. I stood in the doorway. “Mittler, what the hell are you doing?”

  He was startled. He grabbed the white comforter and threw it over himself. “None of your business,” he said.

  “It is my business because this is my bedroom and your penis was sticking out into the air of it.”

  “That was a private moment.”

  “You were thinking of me, weren’t you?”

  “Go away and let me put my clothes on.”

  I ran and pulled the white comforter off his body and leapt on him. He was still naked and his whole body was there for me to see plus that thing that was standing up away from his body like a small second body.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” he said, holding my hand.

  “What were you doing, really? Was that masturbation?”

  “It was mental masturbation.”

  “Were you thinking of me?”

  “Not telling.”

  I tried to get my clothes off while holding Mittler’s hand. I took my shirt off with both hands and then went back to holding his hand. I unlaced each hiking boot with just my left hand and pulled each boot off. I got my pants off with just my left hand, and my underwear, and then I needed both hands to remove the elastic knee brace for my stress injury, and then I went back to holding his hand. I took my bra off with one hand and with my free hand held his hand, and then I started touching his body with the other hand. His body was harder and thicker than what I was used to, with hard lumps in unexpected places.

  “Oh, Mittler, this is so weird for me. This is nice. I’m very excited.”

  “Ah.”

  “Mittler, I don’t know how to do this. Do you know how to do this? Let’s do it now. Do you know how to do this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you’re supposed to do? Ouch. That hurts. Stop it. I said OUCH! Okay, I have an idea. All right, you go over there like that. No, turn sideways like that. Okay, you put that there and I’ll put this here like this. Oh, that’s much better. Oh, that feels good, Mittler.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “That hurts you? That feels good to me. That hurts you?”

  “Let’s keep doing it.”

  “Do you want to keep doing it? Let’s keep doing it.”

  “I like it but it hurts. Ow, it really hurts. Let’s keep going for a minute.”

  “Oh. Oh nice. Oh. Oh.”

  “OH! Stop! I think I ripped something. It feels like something tore in me.”

  “Oh, Mittler. Oh, I guess we had to stop because something tore, right?”

  “Yeah, but let me try something. You just lie back now. You lie still and I’ll go like this.”

  “Yeah, but is that fun for you? That’s not fun for you.”

  “It’s nice for me.”

  “It’s nice for me too.”

  “It’s really nice for me.”

  “Me too.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “Yeah. Like that.”

  “Like this?”

  “A little more sideways. A little more—ooh.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “Nice.”

  We were quiet for a while and then that electrical pulse-shock thing happened and Mittler sounded as if he were choking and then he started asking me questions: “Was that it? Did you—you know?”

  “Wait. Shut up.” I didn’t really mean “Shut up,” I meant I needed a minute to come back into my body, but I did say “Shut up” and he heard “Shut up” and was already getting his clothes on.

  “We never do this again,” he said.

  “What? I didn’t even get to hold your dick.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. You have no respect for me or my penis. I can’t be with you or see you ever again because you’re thoughtless. What do you think about anyway? Tell me even one thing you thought about today.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “See?”

  “What?”

  He left.

  Now listen carefully, dear reader, because I am going to give you some very important advice: don’t ever have sex with a boy. He sticks you with that thing and it HURTS! And, what’s worse, it feels GOOD! No, but I mean it really feels good like you wouldn’t believe, which is why I’m saying don’t do it. I am not saying that sex with a boy brings more pleasure than sex with a girl and that you should therefore favor the milder pleasure of sex with a girl. I am especially not saying that about Skip Hartman, who works my body in a way that makes me cry out sharply. She knows how to touch me with her whole body and fasten her body to my body. She lays her perimeter down on my perimeter and we fasten ourselves to each other all along the surfaces of our bodies. And this is what is especially lovely about Skip Hartman: she knows how to unfasten, too. You have to unfasten slowly and gently. Sometimes Skip and I have been fastened so deeply that even the gentlest unfastening leaves wounds in the surface of my body, and Skip knows what to do about those, too. She fills the wounds in. She will put a kiss in each wound like a poultice. She will touch my body lightly here and there like a sculptor smoothing the last bits of rough clay into the flesh of his statue of a human figure. Mittler, on the other hand, penises you and walks out.

  9 The Louder a Lady

  Hoving Harrington Hartman arrived at our door dressed as a small Nobel Prize winner. It was a Sunday morning in late October. Skip Hartman was in the kitchen making crêpes. “Skip, it’s your dad!” I yelled.

  “You look fine, young man,” he said. “So tall and elegant, like my daughter.”

  “I’m a girl.�
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  “Yes.”

  “Daddy? What is going on?” Skip said. She stood in the foyer with flour on her fingertips. A thin streak of wet crêpe batter hung in her right eyebrow.

  “I’ve decided to accept your invitation to brunch, my child,” he said, in the middle range of his falsetto. Today his posture was more Hartmanesque in the Skip Hartman sense of the word. He wore a long tailored black coat. He had wire-rim spectacles and kempt hair. Someone had shaved his face.

  “I see,” she said. “Let me take your coat, sir.” She moved to hug him.

  “Don’t touch me, please. Let us have a formal brunch for once.”

  She took his black coat in one hand and my upper arm firmly in the other and walked us swiftly into the kitchen.

  “What’s Daddy doing here?”

  “You have gunk in your eyebrow.”

  “This is serious.”

  “How should I know?”

  “You didn’t orchestrate this?”

  “No!”

  “Sure?”

  “Let go my arm, jerk.”

  She let go and left the kitchen and came back with Daddy. “How did you get here?” she said.

  “My man drove me.”

  “Your man?”

  “The amusing Negro boy who waves his arms about as if he were a girl.”

  “Stephen Samuels,” we said. Skip looked at me.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” I said, “so don’t even say it.”

  H. H. Hartman looked less like a Nobel Prize winner now that I could see the brownish collar of his white shirt, his tapioca-stained black silk tie, and his herringbone jacket two sizes too big for him.

  “Have a seat, Daddy. How do you feel about crêpes?”

  “I feel about crêpes as I feel about diapers.”

  “Which is?”

  “If I must.”

  He sat in a chair and put his elbows on the kitchen table. His hands were lost inside the sleeves of his jacket. “I’ll give you a light back rub,” I said, to get the brunch rolling.

  “Get your hands off me, you creepy little shit!” he shrieked. Then, calm, indignant: “I would like a cup of milk, please.”

  I brought him milk in a tall glass.

  “A cup of milk. Five fingers of milk in a cup.”

  “This is my whole childhood,” Skip said, twisting her smooth Teflon crêpe pan.

  I re-presented the milk in a cup. “Good mothering instincts,” he said to me, “like a female cockroach.” He dipped the four shriveled, oily fingers of his right hand into the milk, lifted them out, and held them above his head. Much of the milk from his fingers drained off onto the top of his head. He then tilted his face back to catch fewer than half the droplets of milk in his mouth.

  “What’s he doing?” I said to Skip.

  “Acting like a baby. This is not a function of old age, by the way. He’s always been like this.”

  She placed a crêpe before Hoving. The marmalade, sour cream, et cetera, et cetera, were already on the table. “Daddy,” she said, “your man, as you call him. Where is he now?”

  “Why, he’s outside in the limo, waiting to take me back to that dreadful prison you have locked me away in.”

  “Mary, would you be a sport and run outside and invite our charming friend in for a word?”

  I went out the door and saw the white stretch limousine with darkened windows in front of our house. The passenger window slid down with a light hum, Stephen leaned over and gave me a good long dark finger, the window slid back up, and the car took off. That was the last I was to see of Stephen Samuels for a long time.

  I went back inside, conveyed Stephen’s message to Skip, and was hit by a wall of ungodly stench. “What the hell is that?”

  “Okay, Daddy, lie down on the floor here and let’s take care of you. Did you bring extra diapers?”

  “Didn’t the boy bring them?”

  “The boy left,” I said.

  “Child,” he said, “do you expect me to carry a diaper wadded up in my breast pocket? Really, the level of humiliation.”

  He was lying face up on the kitchen floor now. Skip knelt above him and between his legs. She had removed his pants and was undoing the Velcro waistband attachments of the soiled diapers. We are talking breathtaking odor here. I couldn’t look. “Honey, go upstairs and find me the biggest pair of underwear we’ve got,” she said to me.

  I dug around in Skip’s underwear drawer and found a big pair of ladies’ white cotton briefs from the 1950s; for what outfit or situation Skip had ever worn them I could not fathom. I of course brought them into the kitchen on top of my head. “Oh, this is just great,” she said, and snatched them off my head.

  Hoving, naked and freshly cleaned from the waist down, gazed at the ladies’ undies in horror. “You will not put those on me.”

  “Well, if you’re going to forget your diaper—”

  “No!”

  “Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “What do you want to wear?”

  “I’ll wear my pants and I’ll just be extra careful.”

  “Your pants are soiled.”

  Hoving began to weep. “This is terrible,” he said. “I am so sorry to put you through this. A daughter should not have to see her father like this.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy. I love you.”

  “Oh, September,” he said, and wept. She crawled over to his head and cradled it and pushed the tears away from his eyes with her fingers.

  She put a bath towel down on a kitchen chair, and he sat on it directly with his little naked buttocks. “Finish your brunch,” she said, “and we’ll go out and buy you some clothes and diapers afterward. Then we’ll return you to the home.”

  “But I hate the home.”

  “You said you didn’t mind it.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Maybe we can find you a better one.”

  “I hate them all.”

  “Well, then, where would you like to live?”

  “Here with you and the little fellow.”

  “But Daddy, you’ve said many times before that you did not want to live here, don’t you remember?”

  “September, it is cruel of you to ask me to remember anything. I remember nothing.”

  “Well, Daddy, so you will live here as of now. It is a done thing.”

  “I don’t have any say in this?” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Then he has to stop thinking I’m a boy.”

  “If you are nice to him, perhaps he will.”

  By the time the first snow fell that year I had been a blonde for several weeks. Don’t worry, reader, I had it done professionally. I didn’t consult the old ball and chain beforehand. I’m sure you can imagine the outbreak of ill will—some people who are pederasts are really just as uptight as you and me. No, but seriously, hair color can make a big difference in a person, especially when that hair color is blond. I mean, don’t you feel that I’m talking to you differently, dahling reader, now that I’m recounting my life as a blonde? I’m adopting like a more voluptuous prose style—not consciously, it’s just happening. For the next little while, expect me to be sassy!

  So one night in the early part of December between the hours of eight P.M. and seven A.M., two feet of snow fell on Manhattan. Skip and I woke up, looked out the window, embraced each other, and leapt out of bed. While Skip began to dress, I ran naked in circles around her—blond up top, brunette down below—yelling, “Snow day! Snow day! Snow day!” and waving my arms. While naturally graceful, Ms. Hartman was not inclined to dance, but I made her. We did a waltz on her checkered flannel pajama shirt, which she had uncharacteristically thrown to the floor in her excitement. We held each other tight and danced over to the window and back to the bed and back to the window. She could do this thing where she hugged me from the front, aligned the heels of her palms on either side of my spine at a place that was even with my shoulder blades, locked her fingers together, an
d, as I was beginning to exhale, jammed her palms into my back with all the power of the leverage of her excellent posture plus the natural inborn strength of a prizefighter. This caused the air to whoosh from my mouth and set off loud crackling noises everywhere inside my body. Sometimes it also made me laugh uncontrollably, as it did that morning. Skip got me on the bed and tickled and tickled and tickled me and wouldn’t let me stop laughing until it got a little violent.

  After this typical morning at home, Skip Hartman and her blond girlfriend trudged into the blinding whiteness of Central Park to make bas-relief angels in the snow. As we lay on our backs laughing, whom should we run into but Mittler. Okay not exactly “run into.” He knelt forty paces away, digging for edible roots beneath the snow, wearing a puffy blue down coat that made him look like an astronaut digging for rocks beneath the lunar surface. He did not see us. Skip Hartman did not see him, for she was lying on her back with her eyes closed in a state of ecstasy. You must understand how it was to see, across a snowy field, after a period of months, the boy who had put himself inside me. I don’t mean just physically, I mean metaphysically, too. Mittler had insinuated himself into my body and remained there even as he had disappeared from the world around it; how else can I explain that during the months of his absence, I had often felt his fingers press into my thighs late at night when his actual hands were miles away? I ran to him, silent and fast.

  I wonder what I knew of jealousy at the time. I am talking about my total obliviousness to what effect my love of Mittler would have on Skip Hartman. Could a sixteen-year-old be a blank slate as regards jealousy? Bear in mind that I was raised unconventionally from the age of ten by a group of oddballs, and that whatever training in the emotions I may have received before that time is almost entirely lost to me, except perhaps in the form of the voice that belonged to my father, singing, for example, “I’d rather be a memory than a dream.”