Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “I want to see what everyone is going to wear for Miss Hartman tonight,” Tommy said twenty minutes before she arrived. “I will stand by the back door in the kitchen, since that’s where she’ll come into the house and see you first. I’ll stand right here and you two come in wearing your outfits and I’ll tell you if they’re working or not.”

  Everyone became excited for this fun family activity. Our first outfits were all wrong. “Elegance, elegance, supreme elegance for the meal.”

  We returned in a pair of frilly pastel outfits that made us look like people who owned one good costume and saved it for Easter, though I didn’t believe in God and if Myra believed in anything in particular, it’s doubtful that she knew it. Tommy stared at the outfits for a long time with his close-set eyes and the hurt look that was really a quality of the skin. “This will be fine. I think we could do better but we’re out of time. Why are these important decisions always rushed? Myra, why are these important decisions always rushed?”

  “I’m sorry,” Myra said.

  In a stage whisper, I said to Myra, “Call him ‘dear.’ He wants you to say ‘I’m sorry, dear.’ ”

  Tommy said, “Ah, Christ, are you just gonna make weird remarks when the teacher gets here? Is that what I have to look forward to—you throwing off the whole dinner conversation?”

  “If I just said normal stuff, I don’t think Miss Hartman would be coming to dinner.”

  “Hell, Christ, what do I know, right, Myra?” Tommy said, looking at me. “I’m just the guy who bought the house where the whole dinner is going to be. What does that make me? Just some idiot with a tiny house in the suburbs.”

  Skip Hartman’s long legs were sheathed in black leather when she stalked into the kitchen. She carried a lily of the valley and wore hand-stitched cowboy boots and an oversized white cotton chemise that hung loose over the pants.

  After swallowing a first small mouthful of prosciutto at the family dinner table in the kitchen, Skip Hartman said to Tommy, “I am making the supposition that you are some sort of public-interest lawyer.”

  “Nope.” Tommy beamed. She had instinctively picked the best lie. “I would have been a lawyer but I did poorly on the LSAT. I would have done well if it weren’t for the time limit. I think there are plenty of jobs in the field of the law where you don’t have to think fast. Oh, I can think all right, but I need time. I wouldn’t make a good trial lawyer—I know that about myself and I accept that limitation about myself—but there are plenty of jobs within the field of the law I could have done, if it weren’t for the damn time limit on the LSAT.”

  “It is perfectly all right—I daresay advantageous—to think slowly, if one thinks thoroughly. Many people who think quickly think sloppily,” Skip Hartman said, indicting by implication anyone whom Tommy might have envied.

  For the sake of the rapport that had to develop between Uncle Tommy and Skip Hartman, I refrained from making what Tommy would have called weird remarks at the table. I tried to interject funny, niecely things into the mutually respectful dialogue, just as Myra provided the kind of wifely silence that deepens the harmony between the husband and, shall we say, the husband’s prospective business partner.

  After two glasses of brandy in the living room (did he get these moves out of a book?) Tommy, talking more and more like Skip as the evening wore on, said, “Miss Hartman, I’m glad my niece is in such capable hands as yours. Mary, would you like to show Miss Hartman your bedroom, where you do all your schoolwork?”

  Skip Hartman and I strolled to the threshold of my room. “Well, my child,” she said, looking dizzy and frightened.

  There was only one thing I wanted to show her in that dark little room with the false wood paneling and the cheap orange carpet. I took her hand and led her to the empty army cot by the window and stood with her before it, saying nothing.

  “This is where your twin brother slept,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “ ‘Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?’ ” she said to herself and me. And to me: “You miss him terribly.”

  I nodded, and the tears started leaking, and then in the presence of Skip Hartman I let my body go. I felt jolts of electricity pulsing through me and when Skip Hartman took me in her arms I could not imagine a more intense pleasure than sobbing and being held by Skip Hartman. She was a head taller than I, and presumably knew what she was doing while I did not, and yet what we were doing did not feel like an adult hugging a child. No doubt the treachery of retrospect comes into play here, but those two people in that room seem to me now like two women hugging, each with something to give the other for comfort.

  I stopped crying, and some space opened up between the fronts of our bodies, which had been pressed together. Skip Hartman lightly touched the sides of my body underneath my arms. She put one hand on my face, in my hair. “You are such a beautiful child,” she said, and kissed me on the mouth.

  “Did you two have a nice time in there?” Tommy said, back in the kitchen, showing Skip to the door.

  “Splendid,” she replied.

  “It got cold outside, and you in your cotton blouse. Take this.” Tommy removed the cape from his shoulders and held it out, gorgeous black wool with the crimson inside.

  “Mr. White, I must admit that I have been admiring your cape all evening, and I must also say that I find your generosity breathtaking,” she said, leaning against the wall in the tiny foyer for support, dizzy again, overwhelmed by the luck, if you could call it that, of having discovered such a family, if you could call it that, “but I have also observed how very important your cape is to you and I do not wish to be the cause of a separation between you and your cape.”

  “You can give it back when you come to dinner a week from tonight,” Tommy said.

  “That I do wish for, and that I can accept,” Skip said, and grinned. “That I wholeheartedly accept.”

  On the night that followed, Tommy asked me to play catch with him. I said no. “Please please please please please please?” he said. We gave it a shot, but I kept forgetting to catch the ball or throw it, and that was because I was thinking of a song. It was called “You Do Something Something Something” and was one of the show tunes my father used to sing, incorrectly I suspect, when he was alive:

  Let me live ’neath your skin,

  I will not leave you if you lock me in.

  “How do you feel about mutual funds?” Skip Hartman said to Uncle Tommy at dinner number two.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s your gut instinct, yes or no?”

  “No?” The blood roiled up beneath his pale freckles.

  “Me too!” Skip exclaimed, the pleasure of this mutuality shooting up through her straight spine into her neck and head. “I feel I can talk to you about my financial instruments,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I could add much to the conversation, embarrassed to say,” Tommy said.

  “No, no, that’s quite all right. I feel I can talk to you nonetheless and you will listen. I’ll show you my portfolio of investments and you either say nothing or you say anything that occurs to you.”

  I have never in my life seen someone understand someone else as uncannily as Skip understood Tommy. It was now Tommy who looked dizzy. Myra’s face was blank and indecipherable as usual, and Skip had the good sense not to try to draw her into the conversation more than perfunctorily. I can’t even tell you how hard it is to remember Myra. For all I know she spoke all the time, and I have simply forgotten everything she said.

  In my room, Skip Hartman sat on Paul’s bed and held me in her smooth arms as if I were a baby. I liked when she walked toward me and I liked when she held me in her arms. Then I held her in my arms and played with her hair. I rubbed it and tried to mess it up. She thought that was funny. We went over to the little mirror above the dresser and watched ourselves put Skip’s hair in different positions. She made faces at me. She asked to feel the muscles of my upper arms. “Oh, my, but you are a strong l
ittle girl,” she said. She felt the muscles of my calves and said, “Oh, my, but you are a strong little girl.” She felt the muscles of my thighs and said, “You are such a strong little girl.” This seems like a good time to say, if I have not said it already, that I both did and did not know what I was doing at age eleven, just as now I do and do not remember what really happened, because I think that after Skip Hartman said, “You are such a strong little girl,” I climbed on top of her on the rug and affectionately gave her my virginity.

  “Should I still call you Miss Hartman?” I asked.

  “Call me whatever you would like to call me.”

  “I like Miss Hartman.”

  “Miss Hartman likes you. And what shall she call you?”

  “She shall call me Paul.”

  “All right, Paul.”

  “She shall call me Paul only sometimes.”

  “All right, Paul Only Sometimes.”

  You may wonder what it was like to continue to be a student in the sixth-grade class taught by the first person I had ever made love to. The answer is that I wanted to see her as often as possible, and that seeing her and speaking with her at school, yet knowing that we could not speak as we spoke in private, caused in me an excitement that slipped easily into discomfort and confusion. The confusion came about when I tried to understand what the words we said to each other in that public space really meant, because they did not seem to mean the most obvious thing that was conveyed in them. “Mary,” she happened to call out one day in the classroom, causing a small commotion just below my chest, “would you please demonstrate for the class the proper way to add fractions, using the case of one half plus one half as a straightforward-enough illustration?”

  “Yes Miss Hartman.”

  I went to the blackboard. The air near my head was buzzing. I looked around and tried to see my classmates, which I did, but I had a hard time composing them in my mind; I saw individual elements of them, and of objects in the class—someone’s neck, a plastic hairpin, the bottom of a chair leg. I drew the two figures on the board and made some manipulations of them using a logic that was perfectly clear to me in the state of mind I was in. I then turned to my teacher and said, “Miss Hartman, I believe that one half plus one half equals two.”

  “All right,” she said, and approached me. She took the chalk from my hand and, in doing so, touched two of my fingers with one of hers. She redrew the equation on the board and arrived at the correct answer, which was apparently one, and explained how she had done it.

  “I still believe it’s two,” I said, standing next to her.

  She looked frightened, as she had in the foyer of our house. “Mary,” she said, controlling a quaver in her voice that was audible to those who knew to listen for one, “perhaps you are confusing arithmetic with religion or poetry. Religion and poetry are matters of belief. Arithmetic is, unfortunately, not. In poetry in particular, one half plus one half may sometimes equal two. In arithmetic it cannot and will not.”

  I returned to my seat. Nobody knew about the quaver except Skip Hartman and me, and possibly Mittler, the disaffected prodigy; I thought I could sense this in the way he stared out the window, whistling to himself very softly.

  To dinner the following Friday, Skip Hartman brought pairs of shoes. For Tommy she brought two-tone brown leather wing tips. He squealed with delight. He put them on during the gazpacho and paraded them around the kitchen. He left the kitchen and shouted from the hallway, “Watch when I enter the kitchen. The shoes will be coming in first. I want to know everyone’s reaction.”

  He reentered the kitchen with elongated steps. We all applauded, even Myra. Then Skip held out Myra’s shoes to her across the table. They were wisely moderate black flats.

  “Please, you mustn’t give these to me.”

  “But I must.” She continued to extend the shoes over the table.

  “It’s so kind, but I couldn’t wear them.”

  “Try them on. If you can’t wear them I’ll get you a size you can wear.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Oh, you’re being demure!”

  Myra looked down abruptly at her plate of linguine with fennel and sausage. If only Skip had understood Myra one hundredth as well as she understood Tommy (arithmetic being, here, a matter of belief). She didn’t realize she was causing Myra pain, as anyone did who described or noticed her. I whispered in my teacher’s ear, “Take back the shoes and she’ll feel better, but do it quietly.”

  “You know perhaps I’ll see if there’s a different color that would be more suitable at some future date as yet to be determined at which point everything may not be so …” She rounded out the sentence by pulling the shoes back over to her side of the table and slipping them into her oversized purse. Even if one did not understand Myra, one wished to do something for her. Just as Skip Hartman was rescuing me from my orphanhood swashbuckler style in her leather pants, so I wished that someone would find a way to rescue Myra from wherever it was that she was stranded—inside her body, was how I chose to locate it. But some people never get found, never get rescued.

  To this third dinner at Tommy’s house, Skip Hartman had also brought a toothbrush and deodorant and fresh underwear and a sweatshirt and jeans. When we were alone in my room after dinner she said, “And would you like me to call you Paul this evening?”

  “I would like you to call me ‘teacher.’ ”

  “Oh, really.” She took a step back away from me and folded her arms and frowned.

  “Yes, really. And you have to go sit in that little chair over there, and if you want to speak you have to raise your hand.”

  She looked at me, not sure what to do. “And what will you call me?” she said.

  “I shall call you Skippy. Skippy, sit down now, please.”

  She sat down. She raised her hand.

  “Yes, Skippy?” I said, prancing back and forth in front of her.

  “How much is one half plus one half, teacher?” she asked.

  “One half plus one half plus religion plus poetry plus arithmetic plus Skippy plus teacher plus you plus me plus you plus Skippy plus Skippy plus Skippy. Skippy?”

  “Yes, teacher.”

  “Now I have a question for you, Skippy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do. I’ll stand on the bed and you hop around the room in circles like a giant kangaroo.”

  “I don’t think I want to do that.”

  “Excuse me, Skippy?”

  “I will not do that.”

  “I will not do that what?”

  “Mary, please.”

  “Skip-py!” I commanded, leaping onto the bed with both feet.

  “What?”

  “Do it. Now!”

  Skip Hartman stared up at me. I stared back down at her. Slowly, she stood up. She took one cautious hop.

  “Good girl, Skippy,” I said very gently. “Try it again.”

  She removed her pumps and took a few more hops.

  “Very good, Skippy. Oh, Skippy, I’m so proud of you.”

  She hop-hop-hopped around the room. Her head, which she usually held vertically in place atop her spine, bounced from side to side on her shoulders, which I found perfectly charming.

  “Now I will ride you.”

  Skip Hartman hopped over to me and turned her back and bent down. I jumped onto her back and grasped her kangaroo flanks tightly between my legs. She hopped around the room while I messed up her hair with my hands. “Now make kangaroo noises!” I said.

  “Arf!” she said. “Arf! Arf!” We both were laughing now and we collapsed onto Paul’s bed and laughed for a while. Her face was bright red. “Oh, my darling teacher,” she said.

  “Yes, my darling Skippy?”

  “Come put your ear close to my lips. I must whisper something.” I did as she said. She whispered, “I am discovering aspects of myself that I had not an inkling existed, thanks to you, my teacher.”

  “My little Skippy is soooo cut
e,” I whispered back, and patted my excellent pupil on that fantastic machine, her head.

  On the day before the first day of summer, a big door at school slammed on my fingers and September “Skip” Hartman lost her place in the world. She happened to see my fingers resting lightly on the door frame as the door approached them. She happened also to be the person who had pushed the door with mild vigor, not knowing my fingers were there at the time she had pushed it, a big oaken door easy on its hinges. “I saw your hand and I looked very quickly up at your innocent face,” she said to me the following evening, when we were reunited in my bedroom and she was helping me to pack my things. “Your face was turned the other way. You did not see the door coming.” She perched on Paul’s bed, controlling the skeletal muscles and tear ducts of her erect body but unable to keep her voice from rising and rising. “Mary, all in a moment I felt myself about to shriek, was seized with fear, and then did a terrible thing: I did not shriek. I did not warn you, my dear child, of the pain I was about to cause you,” she said, as Tommy sauntered into the little bedroom to supervise the packing.

  The pain was surprising and intense, and you might say that the shriek Skip Hartman did not utter came out of me. She had been leading our entire class through the hallways of the school to the gym. After the door slammed, she put my hand that was not hurt inside of her hand and commanded the other children to remain still while she took me to the nurse’s office. Once we had rounded the corner she stopped a moment and could not prevent herself from bringing my injured hand to her lips and whispering into it, “Oh, my precious precious.”

  “I hate you people,” Mittler said. He had rounded the corner behind us. “I knew you couldn’t wait to kiss her hand, I knew it! I’m telling everybody about you two. I’m telling the principal, I’m telling all the kids, I’m telling everybody! Mary, I want my knife back right now!”