Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  Tommy released Myra. Skip said, “I shall bring you the batteries you need. Double A?”

  “I don’t want you to bring them. I want her to bring them. The invalid. She brings them or it’s no good. You bring them,” he said, pointing at Myra, “or nothing will ever be good.”

  “F,” Myra said. Oh, I thought I knew what two words were coming and I hoped she’d be able to produce them.

  “Foo,” Myra said.

  “What, honey?”

  “Food.” (Oh well.)

  “Oh, you want to know how the prison food is!” Tommy said. “Everybody, this is my wife. The gal I married is in her coma or whatever, but she can still ask after my well-being. God, I love you, honey.” He embraced her again.

  “That’s not what she was doing,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You think everything everyone says in the world is about you. She’s hungry. She wants food.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “Because, you selfish idiot. Who even cares if you’re in jail? I’m glad you’re in jail.”

  Tommy lunged anemically at me and the guard caught him. He said, “Okay, fine, Myra, maybe you are hungry. I don’t give a damn about any of you people anyway. You can let me go now, I won’t go near them,” he said to the guard, who was hugging him from behind. The guard let go. Tommy placed the earphones in his ears and pressed the PLAY button on the Walkman that was clipped to his waistband. He went and stood facing one corner of the yellow cement room and waved his right arm from side to side across his torso with flowing undulations of his wrist, as if moving the bow of a cello.

  Skip drove Tommy’s big sedan back to the house. I sat in back with Myra. Midway on the ride home, Myra spoke my name. I turned to her. Her hand came slowly up toward my face and poked me in the eye. Maybe she was trying to remove a stray eyelash.

  11 I Fail

  On the Tuesday after Labor Day I woke up at dawn and entered Myra’s room. She lay with open eyes in her dark, half-empty bed. I kissed her cheek. Then I went into the room where Hoving groggily reclined, scooped him up, put him in my car before he knew what was happening, and left Marmot without a word to Skip Hartman.

  It was a rainy day. If nothing else, I came away from this visit with a new mental picture of Skip Hartman’s hair. The new hair was without its previous machinelike segmentation, reader. The new hair not only touched her shoulders but cascaded over her shoulders. It had a curl and a wave. Many strands of the new hair fell about her shoulders on their own, away from the central body of the hair. Many of the strands of the new hair were gray against the sort of manila field of the rest of her hair. She was forty-two years old. She was a mature woman with gray hair who did not need someone like me who was a child and a fool who caused her grief. If I could not witness such a monumental change in the hair of someone I loved while it was happening, I might as well be dead. In the car on the Taconic State Parkway, my face imitated the sky.

  Hoving said, “I am not accustomed to traveling in my bedclothes. Now that Labor Day has passed I like a pair of dark worsted wool slacks and a button-down poplin open at the collar.”

  “Did you notice her hair?”

  “My daughter’s hair has been graying for some time. It’s inhumane to force a man to travel in his pajamas.”

  “So change.”

  “Change me,” he said with a beatific smile.

  I slammed on the brakes and lost control of the car on the wet, oily road and skidded and turned into the skid and came to a stop on the grassy shoulder. I got out, opened the back door on the passenger side, opened the front door on the same side, lifted little Hoving Harrington out, and placed him in the backseat. I removed his overnight bag from the trunk, took off his red flannel pajamas, changed his diaper, and put the fresh clothes on him. I stood outside the car in the grass and leaned in, manipulating his body. Drops of water hit my back through my frayed T-shirt. I noticed Hoving’s large speckled head and the thin, isolated clumps of white hair that made his head resemble the head of an old dandelion. Look at the old, pale dandelion and the bright young dandelion side by side, a voice came back to me. It is lovely to try to hold the two in your mind as one, for they are the same flower. See how the wind comes to kill the old dandelion. It is the very death of the old dandelion that spreads the seeds that make the new dandelion. See how the old dandelion willingly allows itself to be destroyed by the wind to honor and uphold the next generation of dandelions.

  We beat the morning rush-hour traffic into the city and I called Skip Hartman on the phone.

  “Skippy,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your hair changed.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair is different.”

  “Different from what?”

  “I just wanted you to know I noticed.”

  “I see.”

  “Skippy?”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  She did not respond.

  I said, “You don’t have to feed Myra baby food.”

  “What?”

  “Myra can chew really hard.”

  “Yes. Good-bye, Mary.”

  “Wait!”

  “What do you want?”

  “The sun came out in the city. Is it still raining there?”

  “Good-bye.” She hung up.

  I was in a state of agitation. I changed into my pink Lycraspandex exercise unitard with the white stripe down the side and left the house. I jogged over to Second Avenue and took a right, heading downtown. The unitard made me feel snug inside my own body and I knew that Mittler, whom I was going to visit, would not approve of its color. Mittler favored clothing that was loose and natural and free and brown; he did not want to startle the animals of Central Park. Mittler was the animal I wanted to startle, or so I imagine I thought, but who knows if, at the age of seventeen, I thought anything at all?

  When I reached Second Street I took a left and sprinted until I came to the condemned building. Chet stood out front, looking robust in a clean shirt. The sun shone on his back from the east.

  “Hey, Chetty, looking good.”

  “September is a good month for me.”

  “How’s the dysentery?”

  “I’m getting a solid turd.”

  “Nice.”

  “It holds together.”

  “Have you seen Mittler?”

  “That I cannot say.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, say.”

  “Why?”

  “Fuck.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Can I wait here with you?”

  “It’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “People want to stick together. It’s bad luck.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “Well, think of shit. Shit is lucky, compared to people. Sticking together is not a whole lifelong project for shit. I want my shit to stick together in nice firm little groups, but that’s me imposing my needs on the shit. The shit itself doesn’t care. The shit doesn’t give a shit.” This he found very funny and leaned against the wall laughing between two graffiti messages, one saying, NO POLICE and the other, BEWARE OF MUGGERS—DON’T GET CAUGHT ALONE. After a while he sat down and fell asleep on a mound of sand on the sidewalk.

  Chet’s friend who looked like Chet came out of the building. I said hello.

  “How they hanging?” she said.

  “Seen Mittler?”

  “He’s been in the park the last few nights.”

  “Central Park?”

  “What’d you think I meant, Tompkins?”

  “Is Chet all right?” We looked down at Chet.

  “Chet’s going to die.”

  I ran up to Tenth Street on Avenue B. On Tenth I ran over to Fifth Avenue. I ran up Fifth, and when I got to Central Park I borrowed a kid’s skateboard that kind of was just there in the grass where the kid wasn’t paying attention to it. This skateboard I used to get me up to 108th Street near the tr
ee from which Mittler hung a minimum necessary amount of outdoor supplies with a strong fishing line. Coming over a hill on foot, I saw him in profile at the base of a tulip tree. The shape of Mittler’s head in the northern woods of Central Park in the late morning with the sun coming almost straight down onto his hair reminded me of the noble head shapes of our early hunting-and-gathering biped forefathers.

  “Hi, cutie,” I said.

  “I’ve been anxiously awaiting your return from Marmot. Don’t call me cutie. I don’t want to know what happened in Marmot.”

  “Okay.”

  “So don’t tell me what happened there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think it’s best if I don’t hear about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “I’m scouting out this tree.”

  “For what?”

  “So that I can scout it out.”

  “But what do you scout it out for?”

  “You just look at it and touch it and think about it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing.”

  “I think I have ankle cancer. Can you get that? Look at this thing. What is this thing?”

  “I have a poem,” he blurted.

  “What kind of poem?”

  “Well, it’s a non-rhyming poem about trees. Just a regular poem. And in a way it’s also about you. Oh, and also it’s written by, um, me.”

  “You wrote a poem about me?”

  “In a way.”

  “Mittler, I can’t stand you. Can I see it?”

  He looked away and handed me a piece of paper with a handwritten poem on it. This is the poem:

  Poem Praising the Trees of Manhattan

  I see all the trees of Manhattan lined up in a row.

  The paper birch, whose white bark is good to start a fire,

  The tulip tree, who is tall and fashioned by geometry,

  The Japanese maple, who is a delicate tree with red hair,

  The pear tree of West Eleventh Street, who blossoms white and sweet for five days in March to make me want to die,

  The sugar maple, whose leaf is the logo of Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, an eccentric,

  The oak tree, who has an indecent relationship to squirrels,

  The tamarack, who oozes semen all year like me only not ashamed,

  The juniper, medium-sized and proud like me only not ashamed,

  The poplar, who appears in great Western works of art I haven’t seen or read,

  The sycamore, who is in that Grace Paley story you read me in the hammock that time,

  The magnolia, home to unhappy starlings,

  The rhododendron—don’t understand him, can’t relate to him,

  The ailanthus, thrives in disturbed sites, enjoys violence,

  The butternut, light and soft and weak and neglected,

  The mimosa, snubbed me once when I needed her, just like something you would do,

  The giant sequoia, who isn’t even here as you are often not here even when you are here.

  You are water and sun for the trees of Manhattan,

  I am afraid of you,

  Afraid of you,

  Raid of you,

  Aid of you,

  Of you,

  View,

  You,

  ooh.

  Sincerely, Mittler

  We strolled a long time through the woods of northern Manhattan holding hands. I spoke to Mittler of how I loved his poem. I asked him not to be afraid of me. He denied my request.

  He told me my exercise suit was hideous. I asked him to look at my ankle and tell me if he thought there was any cancer on it. He said I should lean against a tree which he identified as a lollygag pine or something. Bending slightly, he lifted my foot up to his face and inspected the ankle in question. “I don’t know what the hell it is but it’s definitely not cancer. I think we should make our bed by this tree, which will protect us.”

  “You want to sleep in Central Park?”

  “I do it all the time.”

  “I don’t. How do you know the tree will protect us?”

  “It’s a feeling.”

  “What’s the feeling?”

  “Like a dark voice.”

  We had walked and talked a long time. The sun that had been shining on the top of Mittler’s hunting-and-gathering head now shone on the side of his head and his left ear as he faced north and gazed adoringly at the tree. I waited by the tree while he retrieved his tent and other things from the other benevolent tree. Two big black boys my age walked by along a path. One of them was bald and the other had long braids. They stared at me. I was scared. Mittler came back and I told him I didn’t want to sleep in Central Park. He said the tree would protect me and he would too. He constructed his small, low, unobtrusive tent that you could not sit up in. He gathered fallen white birch bark and wood and made a fire. He cooked lentils, which he had soaked the previous night under a rock at Sixty-seventh Street. To the lentils he added garlic and carrots and diced celery and zucchini and basil and salt and pepper and, toward the end, a tomato. His resourcefulness was a comfort to me, even as I realized how helpless I would be with no one to feed me. We ate and I burned my tongue, which ruined the meal. The sun had set and the sky was deep violet. We slid into his little tube tent. It was so close in there that I breathed in the air he breathed out, and vice versa. Our bodies were pressed together. I felt bloated and gassy, while he was getting excited. There wasn’t room for us to get our clothes off so he made two quick openings in our clothes and fucked me. I had to pee, which hurt. Also, because we were so tight in there, he scraped my neck with his face hairs. I started to feel scared, as if he were stabbing me over and over with that penis. But I was also excited and wanted him to keep doing it. Mittler was pretty good at control, but you know how boys are at that age, reader. His body quaked and his penis got extra stiff and large just to tantalize me before he burst and yelled and went slack. He lay on top of me. I know how dreamy and delicate anyone—even a boy—feels after that explosion. I wanted to be sweet with him the way he usually tried to be with me after sex—except when he was all freaked out and had to leave—but I was also mad at him for having sex with me when I had to pee and for getting me all excited, so I made him keep thrusting even though he said doing that made the skin all over his body feel funny in a bad way. I made him keep doing it and doing it and nothing happened and then we were both mad at each other. Then I made him escort me out of the tent to pee. We went back into the tent and fell asleep pressed up against each other, mad.

  I woke up in the middle of the night having to pee again. I asked him to come out with me again. He said no. I said pretty please and he said no. I asked him if he had a flashlight. He told me I wouldn’t need a flashlight because it was New York City, that I should look up at the sky when I got outside the tent and I’d see that it was not black as it would be in nature but pale red like the skin surrounding a wound that could not properly heal. I walked outside and gazed up at the soft pink glow and found it soothing. Gazing at the sky, I peed standing up in my special way. I walked back to the tent and felt a sharp discomfort in the bottom of my left foot. Every time I tried to place my foot on the ground the discomfort grew worse. I hopped the last few yards to the tent and felt the bottom of my foot with my hand. It was wet. I looked at my fingers and the wetness was dark or black. I touched the bottom of my foot again and now I felt the sharp discomfort on two of my fingers as well. I told Mittler and he said, “Wait here.” He raced off skillfully along the dark, uneven ground. He came back several minutes later with a kerosene lamp. He lit the lamp and together we looked at the bottom of my left foot. A long sliver of green glass stuck up out of it, surrounded by thick red blood. He pulled gently at the glass. It sort of kept coming out of my foot. It wasn’t so much a sliver as a wide piece of jagged glass, much of which had been inside the flesh of my foot. When it was all the way out, a lot more blood pumped up out of the cut and onto Mittler and the lip of Mittl
er’s tent and the ground. He inspected the opening in my foot and removed some little shards. He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the foot and raced off along the ground again, not tumbling or falling or stepping on glass himself. He came back with a first-aid kit. “Where do you get all this stuff?”

  “Trees.”

  He cleaned the wound and injected my foot with a local anesthetic. He sewed the bottom of my foot like the best girl in home ec class.

  “How do you know how to do all this stuff?”

  “I read books.”

  “So do I.”

  “Then you must know how to do stuff too.”

  “I know how to recite a poem by heart.”

  “My poem?” he said, and stopped sewing me, and looked up at me hopefully with his mouth open.

  “No, silly, I just read your poem once a few hours ago. How could I have memorized it?”

  “Oh.” He sewed more flesh and was sad. When finished he said, “We should try to get some sleep now.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am not sleeping in a broken glass jungle with a hurt foot. I want soft pillows or I’m breaking off the relationship.”

  “Well, isn’t that just typical. The same day I give you my best poem you’re breaking off the relationship just because something sharp went in your foot.”

  “Take me home.”

  He did. On piggyback. At first he ran but I told him that the bouncing hurt my foot, so then he walked swiftly, quietly, and smoothly. At three A.M. on this hot summer morning, Mittler carried me up the stone steps to the door of my house. He was strong and quiet and handsome and wet.

  “I’ll just check on Hoving and we can go to sleep,” I said, unlocking the top lock.

  “I am honor bound not to sleep in this house.”

  “You are an asshole chickenshit.”

  “I am already acting against a principle I hold dear.”

  “What principle?”

  “No adultery.”

  “How about the principle of not leaving someone alone with a hurt foot?”