Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  How I tried to have sex with Mittler on the last day of school is something I don’t want to leave out of this account, God knows. (In fact, every single event in my life that I can think of seems to have a purpose, each event somehow causes the event that follows it. Isn’t that amazing?)

  Had I been older, I would have known to give the name longing to the feeling I had been harboring for Mittler since the day he had faux-tipped his hat to me in the boys’ bathroom; but, as I was eleven, I didn’t call it longing, I called it Mittler. Mittler also became the name of an enduring confusion in my life.

  A small enclosure had been created at the back of our classroom by a cork partition. I stood just outside the partitioned area playing with clay. Mittler was inside the partitioned area extemporizing thoughtfully to some of the other boys. “It’s spring and the weather is warm,” Mittler said. “Everybody feels wild on the last day of the year,” he said. I was not so much playing with a hunk of clay on the Formica table as I was having a tactile experience of Mittler in the clay. Touching his words with my hands. “Everybody feels desperate on the last day of the year. Everybody feels hopeful. This is a good time for a man to get in touch with his dick.”

  I feel lucky that I’ve met a lot of people in my life, beginning with Paul, who knew how to expound. Some have used the Socratic method and some have pontificated and some have quietly generalized or instructed, and some have let an aphorism fall so quickly from their lips that I have had to be waiting to catch it.

  “You take all that energy of the last day,” Mittler went on, invisible to me. “You take it all inside you and you bring it quietly to somewhere private. It has to be quiet, because when you unzip your zipper it’s like the roar of a lion. And: you take out your dick. And: you focus all the energy to your dick. And listen,” he whispered. “Then, you hold your dick. You’re holding your dick. Then, your dick is, like, everything.”

  Jane Building was eight and twenty-nine-thirtieths months pregnant, as we liked to say. For the last hour of school of the year, she gathered us around her to read the finale of A Wrinkle in Time. I understood Mittler well enough to know that he would choose this moment, when everyone else was in the thrall of the end of the story and of Building’s soft, crackling voice and her full-term pregnancy, to put his philosophy into practice. So I snuck out before the reading began and secured myself behind the door of the stall closest to the urinals in the boys’ room, standing, of course, on the toilet seat so as not to be detected by careful Mittler.

  With its tiles and high ceiling, the bathroom made a resonant sonic environment. I passed a happy half an hour listening to the echo of the silence, and then it happened: with an explosion of sound, Mittler kicked open the door of the boys’ room whistling the mouthwash theme song, which is the song of the heroic bottle of mouthwash swinging through the wild jungles of Africa from vine to vine.

  I considered it a pity that the stalls stood opposite the urinals: as I peered over the top of the stall door I was directly behind and slightly above Mittler, and once he took the basic urinating stance I could not see exactly what he was up to in front of his body where the action was taking place. A long moment of utter stillness followed and, from where I hung, an even longer one of only small movements of his shoulders and elbows. His head had rolled forward. Two peninsulas of dark down grew on the back of his neck, softest hair on his body. I looked at his amorphous brown pants and green short-sleeve shirt that seemed never to have been made but always worn—the standard outfit of the eleven-year-old sage. Then came that sigh. I wish I had had a tape recorder handy every time in my life that I heard a boy sigh at the outset of a urination. What a lovely sound. So much satisfaction. Girls sigh far less often before they pee, and not with the same devotion, I think. If only I had such a recording of boys’ sighs. I would lie on a pillow in the sunlight of the late afternoon, sometimes listening to Chopin, sometimes to Schubert, and sometimes to the sighs, seriatim, of all the boys about to pee.

  By the time spring arrived, I had switched over from dresses to pants on a daily basis. On that fateful afternoon, I waited in my pants until the sound of liquid entering liquid subsided before opening the door of the stall and thrusting Mittler against the wall next to the urinal. I accidentally knocked his chin against the wall and he started crying and getting an erection. “Sorry, Mittler, sorry, Mittler,” I said, without letting him up.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Pull your pants down.”

  “Then what?”

  “Pull my pants down.”

  “Then what?”

  “Have sex with you.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I don’t love you, and if you have sex with me I’ll never love you.”

  Ah, Mittler. Mittler, how could you have said such a thing? Even now it burns in the telling. If you could kill a person by having sex with him, that’s what I would have done to Mittler then. I got his pants down and, with some effort, mine, when the two girls who were the emissaries of Dierdre ran into the bathroom and told us Mrs. Building’s water had broken.

  “So?” I said. “Get out of here.”

  “There’s a big puddle on the floor and she’s having her baby.”

  I released Mittler. He withdrew a sharp knife from his pocket and made a gift of it to me blade-down in the palm of my hand. He left the bathroom with the girls. Jane Building and her baby: big deal; this would not be the first time in history that a great passion was thwarted by uninteresting news.

  2 I Am Commodified

  The summer of that year I will give in summary: though Mittler was wholly absent from the physical dimension of my life, I did not engage in a single activity that was not at least partly a devotion to or distraction from Mittler, including my twice-weekly reopening with the knife of the cut in my palm, or my first ovulation, or my body’s production of a pair of small breasts. So much for that summer.

  In the fall, our new teacher was September “Skip” Hartman, whom I liked because she so obviously was making a lifelong effort to cultivate the raw material of herself through things like posture. She stood up in front of the class with her lovely spine and her blond hair saying, “ ‘Be silent and take defeat’ ” and “ ‘I knew a woman lovely in her bones’ ” and “ ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’ ” and “ ‘In the old age black was not counted fair’ ” and “ ‘Time will say nothing but I told you so.’ ”

  The first time Skip Hartman spoke with me in private she said the word sensation. Ms. Hartman was not an exclusive proponent of the open classroom. With her it was sometimes open, sometimes closed, sometimes halfway open or closed. One week the class resembled an old turn-of-the-century schoolroom with desks in rows; the next it resembled Gertrude Stein’s salon with chairs in loose circles and, on the walls, abstract line drawings imported from the kindergarten, where the five-year-olds were busy producing them (“It’s good not to lose touch with what the younger generation is doing,” Skip Hartman said). All of which is to say that early in the semester, during the first grid era of the classroom, she came down along the column of desks and chairs I was sitting at the end of, with her hair and her posture and her loose silk chemise. Her dark-blond hair when she was walking toward me was a machine like a music box with diverse moving parts that operated smoothly in concert with one another. She stopped by my desk and asked to speak with me about the report I was then preparing to write on Samuel de Champlain. She pulled a tiny children’s chair next to mine and sat in it with her soft beige skin under the dark chemise. I elaborated on my plan to build a canoe or hut from paper and twigs and glue. Then, in the middle of a sentence, she told me sensation and, to illustrate, touched her own bare forearm below the chemise’s rolled-up sleeve.

  Some words (like sensation) she spoke, and some words (like chemise) she gathered around her, in the way that I imagine Saint Francis of Assisi gathered starlings. Her lips were thin and gave the words that passed across th
eir threshold distinct shapes in the air; she imbued them with independent lives of their own. I wanted to use words that she had used, or words that accurately described her, the former because I was touching something that she had touched, the latter because I was touching something that was touching her. New England was another thing she told me, on more than one occasion. I liked her shoes.

  Skip Hartman taught by implied confession. She was always in the process of revealing her own close relation to the knowledge she imparted: “ ‘Whose woods these are I think I know.’ ”

  In the encyclopedia, I looked at the photograph of the mud hut of Samuel de Champlain—or Samuel D. Champlain, as I liked to call him—and built a quick version of it in my bedroom and carried it to school on one of Myra’s food trays. This was the first schoolwork I had ever done, and I think Skip Hartman recognized the birth of an interest. Whereas Jane Building had conducted all her meetings in the shadow of the great mansion of her adult desk at the front of the room, Skip Hartman invited herself into the dwellings of the hoi polloi. At our second private meeting—where were all the other children? at lunch—we were alone at the back of the classroom amid the furniture of children. She said to me, “I’m very excited about your hut.”

  Having now the organized movements of Skip Hartman’s hair as she walked toward me on low heels, I stopped carrying Mittler’s knife, which ceased to have the voodoo power to cut me. I didn’t stop loving Mittler, but this adult had enchanted me more than it was in the power of a child to do. So I would say that the intense bodily feeling I was in the habit of calling Mittler was crowded aside in the fall of my twelfth year by a new sensation named Skip Hartman.

  Many of the same children populated Skip’s class as had populated Building’s. A new disaffection settled upon them. Perhaps this was a result of the previous spring’s humbling spectacle of childbirth. Or perhaps the new teacher—voted Teacher of the Year for the two previous years—had a kind of charisma that did not invigorate her students so much as it made them experience their own inadequacy more keenly. Mittler and Dierdre found some consolation in smoking filtered cigarettes together by the smelly Dumpsters on the dark north side of the brick school building, but even that they did languidly, not in grandiose imitation of a wise and world-weary adult but out of heartfelt torpor and the inability to locate the interest in their own lives.

  One day in October, Dierdre dragged Mittler over to see me on the playground just as school was letting out and said, “We think you should come and smoke a cigarette with us.” The attitudes of cleverness and excitement she had used the previous year to woo me and then to cast me out had vanished. Her freckled eyelids were heavy now. Her thinness, once a sign of energy, had become anemic. Mittler stood by, doubtful, looking away. “She won’t smoke,” he said. “She loves that body of hers too much.”

  “I’ll smoke,” I said, “but not if Mittler comes along.”

  “Mittler, get lost,” Dierdre said. Cruelty without pleasure, reduced to its essence of need.

  Mittler shrugged and left.

  “We can go to my house,” she said.

  The school was on the side of a long hill. Behind it there were a few dozen acres of woods sloping sharply upward. Dierdre slipped her little arm into mine and leaned into me as we walked up the path through the woods.

  “Why are you inviting me to your house?” I said.

  “Feel like it. How did your brother die?”

  “I killed him.”

  “That’s what I figured. Would you kill someone else?”

  “Shut up.”

  We reached a metal fence that bordered someone’s backyard, where there was a small swimming pool resting on top of the ground. I crawled through a little hole at the bottom of the fence and Dierdre came through after me. Her purple flowered dress got caught at the hip on a sharp piece of the fence. “Ow! It stuck in me, and now it’s on my dress. Get it off! Don’t rip my dress!”

  I grabbed her elbows and jerked her through the hole in the fence, which tore a hole about a foot long in the side of her dress.

  “You made me scrape my knees and you tore my dress!”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  She was about to continue berating me but stopped. She nodded thoughtfully. “Too bad,” she agreed softly, learning, it seemed, something she had wanted to learn. I suppose I have had a kind of luck in sharing my misery with others and receiving their gratitude in return.

  She took me directly to her parents’ bedroom and showed me the illustrated sex books. “I figured you’d want to see these. Do you want to smoke a cigarette now?”

  “Could I borrow these books?”

  “No.”

  “How about just one?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll give it back tomorrow.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “My parents will know.”

  “Why, they’re gonna have sex tonight?”

  “I don’t know, they could.”

  “Don’t they know how to do it already?”

  “Duh. They had me, didn’t they?”

  “What are the chances of them doing it tonight?”

  “Forget I even showed you the books. Put that book down.”

  “You can’t take back showing someone something.”

  “I knew you would be into these books. I don’t even get what the big deal is.”

  “All right, listen: you go and smoke a pack of cigarettes and I’ll stay here and just read this one book and I won’t even take it out of the room, I’ll just read it in here.”

  Dierdre left. I became a scholar of that one book, which surprised me here and there and confirmed some of what I had recently been suspecting was the case. Still, it was quite narrow in scope and prepared me only in the most rudimentary way for the astonishing thing that was about to happen to me.

  I came out into Dierdre’s backyard as the sun was setting and she looked sick from smoking a pack of cigarettes. “Do you want to try some of the stuff in that book?” I asked.

  “With you? Eeew. We can touch tongues if you want.”

  We touched tongues for a second and Dierdre vomited in the dark grass of her backyard. I went home.

  There are certain objects meant to be looked upon by certain eyes and vice versa. Such was the case with my Uncle Tommy’s cape and the eyes of Skip Hartman. Things Tommy didn’t quite know about himself were absorbed and understood by Skip Hartman, who was, it should be said now, independently wealthy. As for Tommy, when he entered Skip Hartman’s classroom one Thursday evening in mid-autumn for the first parent-teacher conference and witnessed the erect posture, the short, straight, segmented blond hair, the crisp, pale-blue linen sleeveless dress, the black silk scarf, and the black suede lace-up boots with the Louis Quatorze heels, he gasped. “I hope you don’t mind my saying that’s a delightful dress.”

  “And I hope you don’t mind if I tell you something you are no doubt already aware of: namely, how precious is your niece.”

  There was everything that needed to be said. The rest of the conference was a mere formality, ending with Skip Hartman’s grateful acceptance of Tommy’s invitation to dinner the following night. On the way home in the car Tommy spoke passionately about the importance of a good education. Myra was at the conference too, in her way.

  An hour before the arrival of Skip Hartman at our house for dinner, I entered the kitchen to find Myra’s eyes, which had been dry for several months, leaking again. I have not ever come to a good understanding of the folkways of the kitchen, but I liked to observe Myra doing somber, orderly things to food in vessels with tools and heat. When she moved, I followed her. When she stood at the counter surrounded by the bright light of the kitchen, bashing something soft with a wooden hammer, I stood behind her.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “What are those tears?”

  “What tears?”

  “The ones coming out of your eyes.” />
  “I guess allergies.”

  “You don’t feel sad inside right now?”

  “No.”

  “What do you feel inside?”

  “I’m trying to concentrate on making dinner for you and Uncle Tommy and Miss Hartman.”

  “Are you making a special dinner?”

  “Just trying to make something everyone will like.”

  “What are you making?”

  “Veal.”

  “Do you like Miss Hartman?”

  “Yes. Uncle Tommy likes her very much.”

  “Thanks for making such a great dinner for Miss Hartman.”

  “Trying to make something people like.”

  I was a skinny girl and short for an eleven-year-old. Myra was tall and big. I leaned in over her broad behind and hugged her ribs. Her large breasts rested lightly on my skinny arms. I pressed my belly and my little chest against the great contour of her behind. She continued bashing as if nothing had changed.

  “Aunt Myra?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re so beautiful.”

  She missed with the hammer and broke something delicate that fell on the floor in pieces. I felt a tremor shuttle through her body and heard a noise come from her. I let go of her and tried to get around to the front of her to see what was happening on her face, but she ducked down and away from me to pick up the shards of ceramic off the floor. “I think you ought to get out of here with your bare feet,” she said.