Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  When I’m feeling sad, which is quite often even now that I’m all grown up, I look for ways to console myself for Paul’s crippling illness of that summer. Illness, I think, taking my lead from Paul, was the form Paul was meant to inhabit. Appropriately to his condition, he was a boy without hope, and it is the memory of his lack of hope that leads me unfailingly back to the beauty of Paul. He was not happy or charming or pleasing to the eye, and he understood these things about himself, and he was not indifferent to them, but he also did not rail against what he was, the way Tommy did and the way everyone else does whom I’ve ever met, either right out in the open for all to see or else secretly in some place that may be hidden even from themselves.

  Until September of that year I divided my time between the boy who was already little more than a mind in a dark room and the two strangers who were now my parents. More time with Paul than with the others. I felt I had no choice but to stay with him in that dank little space. I did not do enough big, muscular activity to subdue the rude and contemptuous feelings an unhappy girl like me harbored in her breast, but Paul appreciated my sacrifice, and in return he tried to teach me to think with rigor and passion, if not exactly with the joy of intellectual activity.

  “I have another conundrum for you,” he said, lying supine on his army cot, looking grim on the night after the head rattling.

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say Mom and Dad are still alive.”

  “Let’s say they are.”

  “No, I mean let’s believe they are.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I’m trying to help you think.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Fine. Just say they are, then.”

  “Fine.”

  “And then they’re kidnapped by these evil guys and the evil guys call you on the phone and tell you to go to where they’re holding Mom and Dad, which is this big abandoned armory out on the edge of town with a quarter-mile running track. You walk into the armory and it’s all lit up by these bare bulbs that are hanging down from the ceiling, and from where you stand by the entrance there’re four tiny specks in the huge area of concrete inside the running track. Two of the specks are Mom and Dad, tied up and sitting in chairs. The other two specks are the evil guys, standing over Mom and Dad, and one of ’em’s pointing a gun at Mom’s head and the other one’s pointing a gun at Dad’s head.”

  I was sitting on Paul’s bed next to his body and I cried a little.

  “We have to do this,” he said. “It’s important.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then one of the guys says, ‘Listen, girlie, here are some very lightweight running shoes that are just your size,’ and he hands you the shoes and he goes, ‘You have to put them on and get on that track and run a mile in four minutes or less or we shoot your parents.’ So, Paul, the conundrum is, what do you do?”

  “I run the mile, what else?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Shut up. Why are you even saying this?”

  “Because you have to start thinking of these things. You don’t have any parents to help you when life gets confusing.”

  “I have you.”

  “I wouldn’t count on me.”

  “I said I’d run the damn mile.”

  “Even professionals can only do it in like 3:59.99999. How are you gonna do it?”

  “Because I have to.”

  “You couldn’t even stop Tommy from breaking my neck, practically.”

  “Paul, you make me feel so helpless.”

  “You are helpless, Paul.”

  On the first morning of his convalescence, Paul asked me to travel from my army cot across the rust-colored deep pile carpet to his army cot, sit down beside him, and tickle him. He couldn’t have borne the invasive tickling that causes convulsions of laughter. He wanted the kind that is light fingertips rushing along the surface of the person, leaving a wake of little outstanding nubs. I tickled him in this way and we observed the effects of the tickling on Paul’s body. We discovered that it was interesting for me to tickle his chest in particular because of the changes in his nipples: they shrank slightly in circumference, and grew darker, and stood out in pointy relief from the rest of his chest. For that summer at least, my own body remained a private space that I could do whatever I wanted with, except for my hands, which, beginning on that morning, I submitted to the behest of Paul and his body. Paul’s body became the joint property of me and Paul—a fascinating little domain full of mystery and foreboding.

  Myra came into the room that morning at eight o’clock, as she would do every morning that summer, with a bowl of sugared cereal for Paul. She did all the external things that a good mother would do for her own child. She was gentle and meek and almost sweet. Whatever feelings of unmitigated sweetness she had were trapped inside her body. All of the feelings were in there, and they rarely could come out. She entered the room and opened the curtains and, because the room was dark, turned on the bare ceiling light. She put the raised breakfast tray over Paul’s abdomen and put her hand on his forehead and asked him how he was feeling. She asked me how I was feeling, too. “Come downstairs and I’ll fix you breakfast,” she said to me.

  I don’t remember how I began helping Myra—if that’s what you would call what I did—in her garden. I can’t imagine that she asked me. She didn’t ask people to do things that would benefit her. She didn’t ask me to set the table or clean up after meals or wash the dishes or take out the garbage. Tommy told me to do some of those things some of the time, when he remembered. I must have volunteered to help Myra in the garden on that first morning of Paul’s illness, seeing an opportunity to be away from Paul, out under the sun, moving around and smelling the earth.

  It was also an opportunity to be near Myra. The emotional comfort she had to give voluntarily was, as I said, locked inside her body, but I found, with Myra, that I could get it by taking it. For an hour that first morning I watched her in the garden. Her body was the opposite of Tommy’s body. It was big and coarse and earthy. She was an inch taller than he was, and wider, and deeper. She had big round hips and heavy breasts and thick, muscular arms and legs, black dense hair, and a wide nose. She worked in the garden for hours under the sun and her skin didn’t burn and her body didn’t wear out. It was so clearly Tommy who had not wanted children of his own because even a ten-year-old could see that Myra was made for intense, purposeful sex and birthing. (I say this now, though who but a ten-year-old knows what a ten-year-old can see, except perhaps someone who has just turned eleven?)

  After an hour in the garden, it was no longer enough to look at Myra, crouched with her spade. I ran at her and pounced on her back, trying to knock her over. She let out what I thought was a laugh, but might just have been an expulsion of air from the blow. I clung to her with my arms and legs. Was she smiling? Could she?

  “Can I help you with your work?” I asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Please?”

  “All right.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, just tell me something to do.”

  “All right. Dig a long trough from here to where those sticks are.”

  “What’s a trough?” (I knew what a trough was.)

  “It’s a long, shallow hole.”

  “How shallow should the trough be?”

  “Six inches.”

  “How long should the trough be?”

  “To where those sticks are.”

  I dug the trough for a minute and put the spade down and ran around the house as fast as I could. When I got back I told Myra I would run around the house again and she had to time me.

  “How?”

  “Does your watch have a second hand?”

  “No.”

  “Then go one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.”

  “But I’m gardening.”

  “Pl
ease? Please, Aunt Myra?” I bent down next to her and kissed her cheek. She continued to garden. I knelt down next to her on top of a marigold and felt the cool, uneven surface of the marigold petals crumple against the skin of my knee. She didn’t tell me to get off the marigold. Maybe she didn’t care how her garden turned out. I knelt there crushing her marigold and tasting the sweat from her cheek that clung to my lips when I kissed her. I watched the places where the sweat came from, which I thought were the shallow pockmarks on her skin. I thought of her own big lips touching my check once a night before bed; one regimented kiss per twenty-four hours was Myra’s shy charm. “Please?”

  “Please what?”

  “Time me.”

  “How could I time you? I don’t know how to do it.” She seemed almost desperate.

  “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.”

  “One one thousand, two one thousand.” She paused for a moment. “Three one thousand.” She looked at me questioningly, as if I were teaching her calculus.

  “Four one thousand,” I said.

  “Four one thousand,” she said.

  “Okay, now you say go and I’m gonna run around the house three times. The whole time I’m running you’re going ‘something one thousand, something one thousand, something one thousand,’ and when I come around the first time you have to be saying the numbers loud so I can hear you, so I can pace myself. When I come around the second time, same thing. When I come around the third time, same, except we both stop.”

  She had paused in her work, and I could see she was torn between timing me and going back to work.

  “I’m gonna start at these sticks here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Okay.”

  I stood facing away from Myra, ready to go. Nothing happened. I turned around and Myra was staring at the ground, not doing anything.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Waiting for you to start.”

  “You have to say go.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  “I’m ready. Say it now.”

  “All right.” I stood there looking at her and she looked at me.

  “Right now,” I said.

  “Go.”

  I ran as fast as I could and it felt good in my legs. There was the little gray wooden house on my left blurring toward me, toward me. When I came around Myra was gardening again and who knew if somewhere inside of her body she was saying one one thousand? I tore around the house a few more times until I was breathing hard and my chest hurt and I couldn’t make my legs go fast anymore. Then I piled into Myra and collapsed on top of her, saying, “What was my time?”

  “I don’t know. About two minutes?”

  “Thanks, Aunt Myra.”

  She gardened with me on her.

  “Do you want to do this again tomorrow?”

  “If you like.” This is the way I helped her garden each day until noon, when the sun became too hot and there was no more gardening to do.

  At 5:00 P.M. on the day I began helping Myra in the garden, Tommy arrived home and removed his blue service uniform and bathed and put on a white cotton dress shirt and pink Bermuda shorts and suede athletic shoes with no socks. He could have been living in Darien, Connecticut, in that outfit, with the rolled-up sleeves that fell away gracefully from his thin forearms, and with his narrow, elegantly muscled legs sparsely covered with golden hair. He walked into the kitchen, a room still bright at 5:20 P.M. Myra had mixed up a batch of powdered lemonade, which he preferred to the kind she knew how to make with real lemons and sugar and water. There was such a lovely feeling of coolness about a room Myra had cleaned and arranged, in which Tommy stood wearing his Bermudas and drinking lemonade.

  “You want to throw around a baseball?” he said. “Hey! You deaf? Mary. Baseball?”

  “Me?”

  “No, all the other people named Mary.”

  “Okay.”

  I ran and got my glove and joined Tommy in the backyard, which Myra had mown short the way he liked it.

  “I’m gonna pitch first for a while. You squat down over there, and when you catch ’em, just toss ’em back lightly. If there’s time before it gets dark, you can pitch a few also.”

  I squatted and Tommy, holding the ball, got himself up into the sequence of preparatory attitudes of the major league pitcher—scuffing at the ground with the toe of one shoe, hands behind him, left side toward me; staring down the opponent, which, since there was no batter, was me; left foot back, arms up over and behind his head, arms coming down as the left foot came forward and up; right arm back, left foot toward me, left foot planting in the grass, left arm pointing at me, body pivoting, right arm releasing the ball in my direction. He went through some staggering, spinning motions, which I paid attention to instead of watching the ball coming at me. The ball hit me in the forehead.

  “You’re supposed to catch that. You all right? Yeah, you’re okay. Let’s try another. Toss it back.”

  I threw a wild one way over his head that he had to run for. He came back and pitched another viciously hard one at me, which I caught, stinging my hand. I chucked another wild one—even farther away this time—and he ran and got it and really tried to wound me with his next pitch. We went on in that vein for an hour. I didn’t care if I got hit by his pitches. The pain distracted me from other concerns.

  After an hour, Myra tiptoed into the backyard with her hands behind her back and her head slightly bowed and stood between Tommy and me, just out of the ball’s path—she was another one who probably would not have minded if she’d been hit; would not have noticed was more like it, in her case. Though she had come to indicate in some way that we should go inside for dinner, she did not speak.

  Tommy said, “Is there something we can help you with, dear?”

  “Dinner’s ready,” she said, as if dinner had come into being without agency.

  The game of catch became another of that summer’s routines.

  When dinner was over I rejoined Paul in the dank little cave that was our private space. In the hour after dinner he liked to keep the electric lights off so he could watch the natural daylight drain from the air and from each object in the room. Paul didn’t like to speak during the darkening of the room, so I sat by him in silence, idly tickling the bottoms of his feet. Then, in the darkness, his rigorous mental conditioning of me would begin again:

  “Let’s say you’re on a desert island with one other person …

  “Let’s say you’re in a burning house. …

  “Let’s say you’re driving a train headed for a busload of schoolchildren. …

  “Let’s say you reach the age of ten and stop being able to think.…”

  Evening came to its ritual end when Myra entered and said, “Time for bath.” I would then turn on the light in the room, and Myra would carry Paul to the bathroom as if he were a damsel in distress and she the brave hero, only in this case the damsel, while being bathed, always got an erection.

  So now you know about Paul and Tommy and Myra and me, and the little life we all had together.

  And then, reader, there was the morning at the end of August when Paul stood up out of his army cot, announced, “I can walk!” and took a few small, stiff-legged steps toward me, so much like an idea of a skinny, pathetic, invalid boy and so little like an actual boy that I hardly believe anymore that it happened.

  Tommy was at work and Myra was out shopping. I led Paul out to the tiny hill by the fence that separated our backyard from our neighbors’ backyard, where I had recently made a thrilling discovery.

  “Look, Paul,” I said.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look down.”

  “What?”

  “The bees.”

  “What bees?”

  There was a fearfulness in Paul’s voice that I didn’t recognize.

  “What are you right now?” I asked him.

  “What?”

&n
bsp; “What are you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Just, come on, say what you are.”

  “The sun is hurting my eyes.”

  I was trying to get at something: Paul’s attitude at that moment was so different from the attitude of the Paul I thought I knew that I wondered if he were not offering some more advanced type of Philosophical Conundrum: let’s say I cease to think or behave like the Paul you know; am I still Paul?

  We stood for a moment and watched a half a dozen bees hovering above a three-inch-wide hole in the ground by the fence where the grass was thin enough that you could see the dry, pale brown dirt beneath it. I went inside the house and came back with one of Tommy’s golf clubs. I escorted Paul away from this new hole in the ground in our lives. The network of hair-thin red veins seemed closer than ever to the surface of the skin of his face and his fragile, white little arms and legs. In that way, the inside of my brother was becoming the outside. I returned alone to the hole with the golf club in my hand. I shoved the golf club down inside the hole and pulled it out fast and ran away from the hole to join Paul. I made Paul lie down on his belly in the grass next to me because I thought the bees wouldn’t see us that way. The air above the hole filled up with bees. I could see nothing that was behind the place where the bees were—a small place in the universe made up of the simple hatred of self-preservation. I felt as if all the bees were telling my body something. A shudder and a chill ran through my torso and limbs. I grabbed Paul and shoved myself against him and kissed his cheek. He was limp. “Hug me,” I said, and he did, at first because I had told him to and then, seemingly, because he needed comforting, though it was I who had caused him to need it.

  The air above the hole was thinning out. The decreasing number of bees in the sky above the hole corresponded to the subsiding of the thrill in my torso and limbs. I released Paul but he did not release me. He kissed me softly on the lips and I kissed him back, thinking it might ease the restlessness that replaced the thrill, but my mouth was indifferent to his mouth. I stood up and helped him to his feet.