Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “I threw your stupid knife away!” I roared back at him. “Miss Hartman sleeps in my room once a week!” I roared, and turned to my lover and threw my arms around her neck.

  “All right, dear, we’ll go to the nurse’s office now,” she said and removed my arms from around her neck. “Mittler, I understand your agitation. Please join the rest of the class and I’ll speak with you later.”

  The rest of the class, however, had joined Mittler, and most of them had heard what he’d said, and what I’d said, and seen a few things they didn’t quite know how to see, and now they stood there, some of them staggering like people newly blind, as if they had used up all their eyesight looking at the strange pair of us. Skip Hartman took me by the elbow and led me to succor.

  In light of September Hartman’s six years of devoted and intelligent service, and to avoid a scandal, the school administrators canned her quietly and did not make public the wrongdoing of the Teacher of the Year, nor did they press charges. The central outcome of the door slamming was the transfer of guardianship of me from Thomas and Myra White to September Hartman. In exchange for the transfer, the Whites received from Ms. Hartman a lump sum of $100,000, and would also receive weekly payments of $500 for the duration of such time as she remained my legal guardian.

  On the day that Skip and I moved to Manhattan, the weather was hot enough for Skip to put the top down on her little black Porsche when she came to pick me up. Just the same, Tommy wore the woolen cape in his driveway to send us off. Myra did not appear to be on the verge of voluntarily kissing me good-bye, so I leapt on her in the driveway and knocked her down, accidentally breaking her elbow. I didn’t care about her elbow. At the time, caring did not strike me as a useful activity. Little did I know that all the caring I didn’t do then was being stored up inside me and that I would eventually become a young lady full of care.

  Tommy did not kiss me good-bye, but he made a definitive flourish with his cape, bowing deeply before me and the Porsche, such that I saw the individual drops of sweat lined up along the border of his pale forehead and his delicate blond hair. He whispered, “I’m sorry if I have failed you.” As Skip and I climbed into her car, Tommy went to where Myra was lying in the driveway to attend to her elbow, which had already swollen up in much the same way that Paul’s face and torso did after the bees stung him and just before he died. New York City, here we come!

  3 More Wrong Songs

  Sooner or later everyone finds a way to be mistreated. Some find it more easily than others: Skippy and I, for example. But sometimes mistreatment is better than no treatment at all.

  In the early days of living in her house in New York City, Skip and I lay on top of the white duvet on her king-size bed facing the French windows that opened out onto one of the pristine streets near Fifth Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My favorite time to lie on the bed with her there was early in the morning. At that time we heard four or five or six kinds of birdsong, and Skip was someone who could attach a great many bird names to the songs in the world that belonged to them.

  At other times of day I did not like to lie on the bed. Late morning, for example, or early afternoon, or late afternoon, or anytime in the evening before ten-thirty. But Skip Hartman wanted me on the bed with her, and I thought the arrangement was that either I stayed on the bed or I got kicked out of her house. If she kicked me out of her house, I thought, she would also stop paying Tommy the weekly stipend, and then he would not take me back into his house. At the age of twelve, I was not ready to live on the street without knowing a soul who would help me, so I stayed next to her on the bed, usually naked, eating or listening to her pronounce the litanies she had taken pains to learn and loved to say, such as the names of all the popes or all the kings of England, or the countries of South America, or the lakes of northern Finland, or the provisions of the Bill of Rights, or, as my father used to sing, “ ‘I’ll quote the facts historical, now please don’t get hysterical.’ ”

  One afternoon when I was feeling especially perspicacious and Skip especially vulnerable, she revealed to me in a vocal tremor and tic of the mouth that it was I who allowed her to keep me in her house, not she who allowed me to stay there. I may desperately have needed the enclosure of her house, but she needed the enclosure of the slim radius of air around my body. She could not bear to be away from me. Or so I became convinced that she imagined.

  I got out of bed and got dressed and walked out the front door and onto the sidewalk. She followed me. “Where are you going?”

  “Need some air.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me when you are going to do something like go out for air. I cannot abide a system of communication wherein you do not consult me before leaving the house. We need to, I think we ought to, we need to—” Skip stood at the top of the short flight of stone steps between our house and the street, while I stood at the bottom of it. Her face was flushed and even her hair was beginning to show signs of disorder.

  “Okay, okay, okay, so don’t have a fucking fit,” I said. I saw that the word fucking startled her, coming from me. “Don’t have a cow,” I added. “Don’t have a pig. Don’t have a goat. Don’t have a canary,” I said, to make her laugh and bring her back to an area of comfort: lists of names of things—animals, in this case, that a woman would not ordinarily give birth to.

  “Mary, would you like to go out to a restaurant?”

  “I want to do something.”

  “Such as?”

  “Do you have a stopwatch?”

  “I have a wristwatch with a stopwatch function.”

  “Go get it.”

  Startled again.

  “Please.”

  She stood still for a moment, thinking perhaps that when she returned with the watch I would be gone. She went inside and came back, breathing hard. “Now what?” she said.

  “Now I run around the block and you time me.”

  “Where are you going to run?”

  “I said around the block.”

  “Which block?”

  “Duh. The block that we’re on.”

  “Do you mean that you’ll run to Fifth Avenue, take a right and go north for one block, take another right and go east to Madison, take another right and go south for one block, another right and return here?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Go!”

  It was five P.M. on a Thursday in early summer. The sidewalk along Fifth Avenue was crowded with wealthy adult pedestrians and tourists. I liked weaving among them, defining my speed by their slowness, my youth by the rigid expressions of fear and annoyance on their faces. As I reached the farthest point in my journey, I began to miss Skip Hartman. My heart beat wildly inside my chest; I missed the pressure of her hand on the skin that surrounded my heart. I tried to picture her face and could not. I sped up. As I rounded the corner onto our block I saw her lips moving. “Forty-nine,” she was saying, “fifty, fifty-one—”

  I ran to her and threw my arms around her, being careful not to knock her to the sidewalk, as I had done to Myra. (Fancy that, reader: Mary learned from a mistake. She’s growing up so fast!) “Fifty-one point three two seconds,” she said.

  Varying the route, we enacted this little game many times that summer and over the next several years. We called the game Going Away and Coming Back. It was one of the ways we loved each other.

  “You must learn to lie still,” Skip Hartman tried to explain to me, on her bed one morning after the end of my brief period of compliance.

  “Why must I?”

  “Just as it is important to cultivate useful activity, so it is important to treasure idleness. One might even consider idleness a skill.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  Startled yet again. (To startle and be startled: this was another of the ways we loved each other.)

  “Why’s everything have to be useful and cultivated and treasured?”

  “Because life is short.”
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  “I don’t care.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why, because not caring isn’t useful?”

  “No, because it hurts me.”

  Across the hall from the bedroom where we slept on the second floor of the Hartman apartment was another, slightly smaller bedroom. Most of the available wall space in this room had been covered with bookshelves. The books, which nearly filled the shelves, were arranged both alphabetically and by category. I had not seen such a room as this before in a private home. By the window there was a small antique rosewood desk and matching chair. Next to the desk there was a four-story wooden filing cabinet, and on the wall beside the cabinet hung a large glass-framed print depicting a small unhappy child flying a red kite in a scarred purple sky.

  Just after the beginning of the unending period of my noncompliance, there followed the period of Skip Hartman’s weeping. She sat at the desk in this room and looked at one particular page of a certain book and wept for most of the day. I didn’t want to go into the room where she was weeping, so I sat on the wooden floor in the hallway just outside the open door. There I tried to re-create my dead brother, Paul, inside myself in the form of a Philosophical Conundrum. The conundrum was not supposed to replicate exactly the situation of the weeping; it was meant as an idealized conundrum about weeping. Let us say, the conundrum began—for all conundrums must begin with this supplication—let us say that you are in a room. And let us say that there is a room adjacent to the room you are in and that someone is weeping in this second room. There is no door to the room in which the person is weeping, and there is no door to the room you are in. Nor are there windows to these rooms. Each of you, then, is sealed in a room with no way in or out. The walls of this conundrum, then, are the walls of the two rooms, which are the walls of the world, for the purposes of the conundrum. It is your task to stop the person in the adjacent room from weeping. Why is it your task? It is your task because it is your task. And it is your task because you cannot sleep with the ceaseless weeping. The weeping distracts you from everything in your life that is not the weeping. You have already tried calling to the person. First you called softly and tenderly. You said, “Oh, my child, I am right here beside you, and though you cannot see me or touch me, I will always be here beside you.” But that only made the weeping more abject, more disconsolate. You have also tried calling loudly and angrily: “Will you shut up already! I am your neighbor, and your sorrow is not my sorrow!” That, too, intensified the weeping. At this point in the conundrum, reader, I noticed a difference between this conundrum and the ones Paul used to instruct me in. In Paul’s, there was generally a choice to be made among two or more distinct courses of action, and it was implied that only one of these courses of action was correct. Whereas the conundrum I had invented to instruct myself presented a situation unresponsive to anything I might do to attempt to change it. Either it was a conundrum without a solution or the solution consisted of a mental adjustment to a situation I was powerless to affect. I believe this was the point in my life at which I abandoned conundrums altogether.

  In this way, the memory of Paul’s life loosened its grip on my mind.

  For a few days, I sat outside the door to the room of the weeping woman playing the game of jacks that I had brought with me from the suburbs in a red cloth bag.

  Then I went into the room.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  Skip Hartman sat in her chair. She was not actively crying now. She was in that red-eyed resting place between crying and more crying. She was looking down at a picture in a book about northern Renaissance painting. I pulled a book down from one of the shelves and opened it and touched the pages and tried without success to figure out what the book was about. I put it back and pulled down another book and touched its insides and put it back. I did this to maybe two thirds of the books in that room. Then I left the room and went out of the house. Skip Hartman did not follow me this time. I imagined she was still in that chair looking down at that page of that book. I went into Central Park and wandered down to Bethesda Fountain and watched two squirrels alternately frolicking and standing still. I came back to the house and made a sandwich and ate it and went to sleep. When I woke up I went to the book room again. She was looking down at the book, crying.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  I wanted to do something nice for her but I didn’t know how, so instead I pulled down the books again, all of them, and I did not replace each book before pulling down the next. In the middle of the floor, I made a huge unruly pile of every single book in that room except the one that Skip was staring down into. Then I put the books back on the shelves in no particular order, as if I had not already left my smudge of randomness on Skip Hartman’s life.

  “Ooh, this is fantastic,” Tommy cooed in the entrance foyer. He was looking at a tall, ancient, rectangular mirror with a mahogany frame, to which a pair of coat hooks was attached on either side of the reflecting glass. His pale red silk shirt, his lavender cravat, and his delicate, smoothed-out-baklava skin looked patrician in the tarnished surface of the old mirror. Myra was still wearing the hard rough white-plaster shell that the doctor had put on her forearm the day I felled her on her driveway. She was dressed in a brown cloth in which fragile produce might have been wrapped to be shipped overseas.

  Tommy gazed at that mild narcotic, the image of his own face in the mirror. “Oh,” he said. Myra looked at an area of the white wall in the foyer that had no mirror or window or painting.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Skip asked.

  It was the end of August and the ostensible purpose of this, the first visit from my aunt and uncle, was to discuss plans for my education, but nobody seemed to want to do that, except possibly Myra, but then one has to invent virtually all intentions and attributes of Myra.

  Tommy checked his collar and cuffs in the mirror. He was not quite ready to leave the mirror. He stepped away from the mirror and rushed back to it. “I forgot the cape!”

  “As lovely as your cape is, Thomas,” Skip said, “it seems to me more of a winter cape. Perhaps an autumn cape is in order.”

  Now Tommy could safely turn away from the mirror, having found another place that reflected him—Skip Hartman—and the tour of the house could begin.

  “I want books,” he said, when we reached the book room. Skip had not returned the books to their previous arrangement but, by using a mnemonic technique she had learned from the Roman orator Cicero, she had asserted the ordering principle of her own mind on the chaos of book placement.

  “Perhaps I could lend you some,” she said. “What sort of books would you like to read?”

  “I don’t necessarily want to read them, at least not right away. I just want to have them around. I don’t want you to lend them to me. I’ll go out and get some. I’ll build a nice bookshelf in maybe Paul and Mary’s room so it can be the room where the books are, the way you have this room. Do you know where I could get some books like this?”

  “In a bookstore, I imagine.”

  “I don’t want the kind of books they have in bookstores. I want this kind. Old books that are about things most people don’t know about. I want to read but I’m easily distracted. I want to know things. I think I could work up to reading books by first owning them.”

  Skip Hartman stood tall in the center of the book room while the rest of us stood around her. She cocked her head to the side to consider Tommy, which gave me the opportunity to consider her long, curved, graceful neck. “I own many more books,” she said. “Some of them I keep in the basement. Some are quite rare.”

  “Rare—the word alone gives me a feeling,” he said.

  “Rare and juicy,” I said.

  “Succulent,” Skip added.

  “Succulent doesn’t give me the feeling,” Tommy said.

  “Why don’t I box up a couple gross of books and have them carted up to you,” Skip said, with the faintest Br
ooklyn inflection waxing and waning in the course of that sentence.

  Tommy was too intoxicated with the aura of the rare books in the room to notice the irreverence. In the chair on which Skip had wept for a month, Myra sat looking at the floor, while the fingertips of her left hand grazed the cast on her right arm.

  “Further, let me simply hand over some cash to you,” Skip said. “Here.” She removed several hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them to Tommy.

  “Thanks.”

  “Look under ‘Books, rare’ in the Yellow Pages and you’ll find many more books that I’m sure you’ll read with relish.”

  “And mustard,” I said.

  “And not only that,” she said. “We must now hurry you off to my tailor, who will make you an exquisite autumn-weight cape.”

  “Maybe after we eat,” Tommy said.

  “Oh, no! You must visit the delightful hot-dog cart on the way to my tailor on Fifth Avenue. That is where you will have your lunch. Visiting the island of Manhattan without eating a hot dog from a cart would be the equivalent of visiting Paris without climbing the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Or teaching sixth grade without having sex with one of your students,” I said.

  “Just so,” Skip said.

  “Hey, come on!” Tommy said.

  Skip hustled Tommy down the stairs and out the door. She stood in the foyer and said, “How often do you suppose we must have this uncle of yours to the house? I don’t enjoy his company.”

  We noticed then that we had not sent Myra out of the house with Tommy. She stood on the stairs above the foyer and had heard what Skip said to me. For an instant, she looked at Skip with what appeared to be hatred, and then the hatred—if that was its name—was swallowed back into the affective abyss of her body.

  At noon on Labor Day of that year—the day before what would have been the first day of school in some normative version of my life—I answered the doorbell and saw before me slightly older, wickeder versions of Dierdre and Harry, my elementary school classmates, who had somehow obtained my address. Had my twelve-year-old body not felt so woozy and sated after a morning of love with my thirty-seven-year-old guardian, I would have been shocked to see those two. They were no longer the disgraced elder statesmen of the schoolroom. They did not look wounded and chastened so much as dirty and arrogant and theatrical. Dierdre had dyed her hair black against her pale skin and freckles. She wore black mascara and lip liner. Harry had grown taller than Skip Hartman, and massive. Random light hairs grew from his jaw. He wore a scuffed black leather jacket. He looked down at me with an expression of amusement that suggested he had come as far from wanting to tussle with me as a rhinoceros would be from wanting to tussle with a penguin.