Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “Why do I have to sleep with you in the hammock?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  He answered me not with a word but a look; no, not even a look, unless looking away counts as a look.

  I lay in the hammock at night but rarely slept in it, so when I came home in the morning, I turned on the AC, collapsed into the soft white duvet, slept for four hours, woke up, slowly washed the dried boy–girl fluid and grime from my body, and made huevos rancheros, a hearty meal for a young woman. I wished there were a way to make huevos rancheros elsewhere than the kitchen, which was a fright, for Hoving Hartman loved to cook but not to clean. He also loved to eat food in all the rooms of the house, but not to clean.

  Hoving’s body itself was a disaster. Neither of us liked when I changed his diapers, so I tended to save it up for a few days at a time. Once, in the middle of summer, I smelled him in the upstairs hallway and charged at him with a fresh pair.

  He said, “Get away from me, you little bratty boy. You poked me last time.”

  “I’m not a boy.”

  “Yes you are and stop trying to deny it.”

  I did what I should have done long ago. I lifted up my T-shirt and showed him my breasts.

  “Holy criminy!” We stood in the dark hallway on the long, thin Persian rug. He stared dutifully. I kept my shirt aloft a long while so those breasts would imprint on his old man’s brain.

  “May I touch them?”

  “Yeah, but only for like a second.”

  In his brief tactile encounter with my breasts he was grave and clinical, as a man would be who had touched women for a living. “Thank you,” he said when he was done.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You may now change me if you like.” I did change him there in the hallway and showed his bottom and his privates the same respect he had shown my breasts. His face looked contemplative, mildly pleased, as he lay back on the floor with his knees up and his legs spread. In this way I did not mind changing him so much and we developed a way of relating to one another that was suited to the task.

  I felt less certain of myself in the problem area of his mouth. It, too, emitted an odor. It was one of those places in the world—like El Salvador—in which I knew atrocities were being committed but I was hesitant to find out what they were. Some bleeding went on in there that I caught glimpses of from time to time. He had, as I believe I have previously documented, several fuzzy gray-brown teeth of his own. These were attached to his bloody gums and could not have been detached without the use of force. But I would now like to introduce into the record some other teeth of his that were more architectural in nature. These could be attached and detached by him at will and by me, eventually, with some cajoling. It was not just the bleeding and the odor that convinced me to make my first oral intervention in Hoving. One day after my nap and my shower, I tiptoed into the war zone of the kitchen to fetch my huevos and I saw him at the kitchen table lipping a thing that I at first mistook for the rib cage of a chicken, but which I then realized was his set of false teeth. He held them up to his mouth on the tips of his oily little fingers, not lipping only but sucking, too, the cheesy-soft matter from the crevices of them. I am not willing to state categorically that I saw one thick segmented strand of this pink-faint goo struggle up from its lodging and wiggle for dear life as Hoving brought his wet, open mouth down over it, but I’m saying that’s what I thought I saw. I ran to the cabinet under the sink, took out a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, slipped them on, grabbed the teeth from his hands, and okay I think it’s fair to say that I raced around the house screaming, “Eeeeew! Eeeeew!” until I could locate the minty acid wash and drop his awful teeth into it.

  I came back downstairs and I was very mad at him. “Grandpa,” I said, “could you please not ever do that? It’s really disgusting and you could probably poison yourself or something.”

  “Child, am I your grandfather?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t know why I called you that. It just came out of my mouth.”

  “Do you have a grandfather?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come here, sweet girl,” he said, and opened his arms to me. I went into them, and put my cheek on his shoulder, and felt indescribably unhappy.

  I passed the road test for my driver’s license by the width of the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin. Skip bought me a car for my seventeenth-and-a-half birthday. Two days later I smashed it and she bought me a new one and I smashed that and she bought me another and I used it to drive Hoving up to Marmot on Labor Day.

  I don’t know why I hate the end of August so much. If each year at that time I could smash the car just enough to get into a monthlong coma without any major bone breaks or contusions, I think I’d appreciate the vacation from consciousness. I navigated the car up the driveway. I did not see the weed trimmer until after I had heard the front wheel crush it, and by then it wasn’t a weed trimmer anymore.

  Hoving raced ahead of me up the flagstones with his side-to-side bowlegged wobble-walk and knocked on the door. Skip Hartman shouted, “It’s open!” from deep within. We found her on the threshold of the living room and the deck. “Daddy,” she said, in a tone as if chastising him for not allowing himself to have been driven up for a visit sooner. She placed her hands on his shoulders, bent forward, and gave him a kiss on his forehead. Me, she stared at.

  “Hi, Skip.”

  She nodded.

  “It was a long car ride.”

  She looked at me.

  “My back is kind of hurty-ow-y.”

  “Upper back or lower?”

  “Middle.”

  “Hm.”

  “What have you to nibble on?” Hoving said.

  “Your teeth,” I said.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, the lad is funny.”

  “I thought we were past that ‘lad’ crap.”

  “I’ll prepare snacks when I’ve finished feeding Myra,” Skip said.

  I said to Skip, “So I was wondering if you could align my back by that hugging thing you do.”

  “I could not.”

  I went out to the deck to watch Skip feed Myra.

  “Did you bring fresh diapers for him?” she asked.

  “Who do you think’s been changing him for the last few months?”

  “The suffering must be fantastic.”

  “You know, all you have to do is forbid me to be in love with him. Did you ever think of that?”

  “It had not occurred to me.”

  “So, forbid me.”

  “No, I mean it had not occurred to me that you were in love with him. Please excuse me.” She dropped a spoonful of stewed carrots onto the wooden surface of the deck, stood up, and walked into the house.

  Myra reclined in the chair in the same position she had been in when we came up to bail out Tommy. She was wrapped in a brown woolen army blanket. The sun shone directly down upon her. She stared out at the birch and maple and pine trees beyond the yard. I sat in the small folding bridge chair Skip had been sitting in to feed her. She turned her head slowly to look at me. Taking full advantage of her psychomotor retardation, I gazed into her eyes for longer than she would ever have let me before the stroke. For the first time, I saw how quick she was inside that slow body. I saw urgency in those eyes. I thought I almost saw the words she might bring into existence on behalf of her own feelings, if she were a woman who knew what she felt, and for the moment, because of her eyes’ eloquence, I suspected she was such a woman after all.

  I picked up the spoon from the floor of the deck and wiped it off on my ancient T-shirt. I dipped the spoon into the shallow porcelain bowl and brought it toward her mouth with stew on it, chanting the age-old pun, “Choo-choo-choo-choo.” She bit on the spoon with the crushing jaw strength of a snapping turtle. She would not release the spoon. I looked out at the trees and wondered what part of the house Skip Hartman had gone to and what she was thinking now.

  “I’m hungry,” Myra
said.

  “What?”

  “You are d. You are d. You are day. You are daydreaming.”

  I removed the spoon from her mouth and filled it and said again, “Choo-choo-choo-choo.”

  Myra said, “D.”

  “What?”

  “Doe.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t feed you? You said you were hungry.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t ch.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t choo-choo.”

  “Oh. Oops.”

  I finished feeding this new invalid and self-assertive Myra and went inside. The doorbell was ringing. I answered it. Hoving stood there in a shirt and tie and suitcoat and no other clothing. A big, sturdy fellow in his fifties was holding Hoving by the back of his collar—more or less where the scruff of his neck would be if he had one. The big man looked like a fatter, older, more upstanding version of the man at the gate of Marmot.

  Hoving’s face looked vacant and sad. The other man’s face looked disciplined in its principles.

  “Who are you?” the man said to me.

  I said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m John Hand. This man came out of this house and wandered into my yard, where he shouldn’t be. I also don’t know how he got in because there’s a fence.”

  “Oh, naughty!” I slapped Hoving’s hand. “By the way, are you related to the guy at the gate?”

  “Johnny? He’s my son. Now, who are you?”

  “That’s my grandpa. I’ll take him now, thank you.”

  “Are you related to Tommy White?”

  “My mommy’s not home. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “Do you have any idea what this—this man did?”

  “Grandpa, what did you do?”

  “Well, my child, I was out for a lovely barefoot stroll in the backyard. I do so enjoy the sensation of stiff grasses in the soft skin between my toes. Too, the varieties of olfactory sensation in this part of the country at this time of the year allow me to dream fondly of days finer than the present one. In the vicinity of this gentleman’s home, I smelt a septic tank running high, which caused a sympathetic stirring in my own bowels. And child, you know how I loathe the sensation of fecal matter clinging to my skin, and the subsequent dermal irritation. I was able to discard my trousers and nappies in the nick of time for a pleasant open-air defecation. I so enjoy a lovely stroll in the country.”

  “Oh, Grandpa, you sure are aware of those sensations. Grandpa likes to play that edge between emeritus professor and disgusting senile fart. It’s funny, right?”

  “No.” John Hand stood blocking the sky, hands on hips.

  Skip Hartman emerged from a room somewhere and took up a position next to me. Her eyes were red, and the splotchy red and beige skin on her face hung more loosely on the bone than I had remembered. Still, the erect posture and broad shoulders and the expansive breadth of clavicle that Skip introduced to our side of the doorway would be, I sensed, a more than adequate balance to the bulk and indignation this man was weighing in with on his side. “What goes on here?” she asked.

  “Who are you?” John Hand said.

  Skip said, “Who are you?”

  “I am John Hand, a village elder.”

  “Elder than what?”

  “Is this your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “He shat in my yard so please keep him inside this damn house. Nothing personal.”

  “You say ‘elder,’ but the word ‘vigilante’ springs to mind.”

  “You’re out of line, lady. Is this your daughter?”

  “Why?”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “Then I’ll tell you something. This is not the kind of household we want in Marmot. Tommy White is a troublemaker, and I don’t think this is your daughter, and we prefer if the children of the community are not exposed to any lesbian or other homosexual type of activity.”

  “Did you say ‘lesbian’?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  “That is quite interesting, for you see, this young chap here is not a lesbian, nor could he and I in any way be construed as engaging in lesbian or other homosexual type of activity. In that regard, sir, I commend to your attention the perfectly formed penis that hangs—and sometimes does not hang, if you follow my meaning, sir—between the boy’s legs. Paul, undo your trousers for the gentleman.”

  John Hand stared open-mouthed at the crotch of my pants, which I unzipped. “Oh no,” he said, and turned around and started to walk away down the flagstones. “Oh no, no, no, this will not do.”

  Skip and Hoving walked inside the house together, and I finished the gesture of taking the talked-about penis out of my pants. There it was, reader, hanging out for all the world to see, only no one was looking; not John Hand, not Skip Hartman, not even me. So like the fellow said, was it really there?

  After we locked Hoving in the guest room of Tommy’s house, Skip and I put Myra in the car and drove down to the Marmot courthouse, where they were holding the prisoner. The courthouse and the police station took up an entire block of downtown Marmot across the street from the Town Square. The Town Square was a prim hunk of wilderness with a pond, a gazebo, tall shade trees, and hillocks and meadows. The courthouse and the police station shared a wide, elongated rectangle of flat green crew-cut lawn. They were fraternal twin brick buildings of three stories, each with a wide marblesque staircase that led up to a row of white Ionic columns.

  I pushed Myra’s wheelchair up the ramp along the side of the courthouse steps. The ramp marred the grandeur of the steps and seemed out of keeping with Marmot’s civic intentions. A gaudy chandelier hung from the ceiling of the main hall of the courthouse. A uniformed officer greeted us and led us to the back of the main hall. We took an elevator down a floor and walked (or rolled) along a low-ceilinged corridor lit with fluorescent bulbs.

  “Where are we?” Skip asked.

  “We’re on our way to the holding facility.”

  Wheeling Myra, I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “Facility.”

  She gradually craned her neck around to look at me. “Fa-ci-li-ty,” I said, and nodded at her authoritatively. She rolled her eyes.

  We entered a yellow concrete room with no windows. Another man in uniform who had big red hands waved in front of each of our bodies an electronic object that looked like half the handlebars of a girl’s bicycle. He left and came back with Tommy, and my heart filled with admiration. If there was someone who could make despair into a visual style, it was he. He stood several feet into the room and glanced at the three of us. He looked down at his feet and waved: that was his greeting. His body listed to one side but his head remained vertical, as if his ear were pressed to an invisible door behind which a secret conversation was taking place. He had applied gobs of pomade to his light hair to darken it and bring forward the shape of his skull. His face was shaved. Dark, livid rings marked the perimeters of the skeletal holes that accommodated his eyes. Already a thin man, he had lost ten or fifteen pounds. His personal jail uniform of khaki pants and a pale blue work shirt was neatly pressed and loose on his body. A small yellow Walkman was clipped to the waistband of the pants. The sleeves of the shirt were rolled halfway up his arms with a sharply creased fold in the cuff. He wore brown plastic sandals and gray cotton socks.

  “As you know, Myra, I have a lot of problems finding shoes that fit me well,” he said, looking at his feet still. The man with the red hands stood behind him and in front of the closed door of the yellow room. Skip and I sat in molded plastic chairs. I held one of the handles of Myra’s wheelchair and casually moved her back and forth as if rocking a baby to sleep in its carriage. Tommy said, “My right foot is bigger than my left and my heels are very narrow whereas the toes at the front end of my foot are very wide. My feet were swelling up for some reason and they
were blistering up along the knuckle of the toe in my usual shoes, so the town government issued me these sandals, which is why I’m wearing them. Plus I listen to a lot of Bach now so I don’t move around much anyway.

  “Sometimes I’m listening to the Suites for Unaccompanied Cello on my headphones in my cell in the middle of the day, and I feel like I can hear Pablo Casals talking to me. Sometimes he’s just saying ‘Unhhh’ and sometimes he speaks in complete sentences like ‘All is not well’ or ‘Everything won’t turn out fine.’ I have a toothache but I’m not telling anyone about it. It doesn’t hurt that much, it’s just that sometimes it makes one whole side of my head hurt. They have a bargain toothpaste here at the jail that I don’t think is effective. Plus I forget to brush because of the Bach. The Bach doesn’t make me feel better but it helps to pass the time because there’s one hour of TV a day and it’s always during a bad show. I can play the Bach whenever I want but I’m trying to be careful so the batteries don’t run down. Could you bring me fresh batteries?” he asked, looking at his sandals.

  “I’m so glad you’ve discovered Bach,” Skip said.

  Tommy rushed forward, reached under and behind the armpits of Myra, pulled her toward him, and hugged her hard and long. “My sweetheart is in a coma or something,” he whispered. “Can you hear me?” Myra’s mouth hung open and she seemed to be staring at a blank area of the yellow wall. I did not understand what governed her ability to speak and move at some times and not others, but I sensed in Myra at this moment a conscious decision; I sensed whim, whimsy even. Yes, her mouth hung open and a trickle of drool spilled over the bottom lip, but were not the corners of her mouth upturning in the slightest? Perhaps I was not the only person in the world who registered the correctness of the pairing of this woman with this ailment. Could it be that a certain muted and immobilized girl was playing it up a little, was discovering, for the first time in her life, the pleasures of theater?