Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “How’s the sex going?” Dierdre said.

  “It’s about the only thing that’s going good,” I said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  I heard Skip on the stairs behind me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing a white terry bathrobe and her hair was darkened by water and smoothed down on her skull in combed stripes. The skin on her face glowed as if lit from within. This was the classic postcoital Hartman look. Dierdre and Harry stared at her. “Here comes the pervert,” Dierdre said, meaning to be funny, but no one laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Can Mary come to the park with us?”

  “Mary may do what she likes. I am not the keeper of Mary.” Skip did not descend the few final steps to greet the two children, one of whom had been her student.

  “I thought you were her guardian,” Dierdre said.

  “Legally, yes, but it is perhaps best to behave as if we are equals in all things, even while we are not equals in all things: in age or in experience or knowledge, for example.”

  “Or money,” I said.

  “I thought it was understood that you own everything I own.”

  “But you own me.”

  “Perhaps,” Skip said, “this particular can contains worms enough for only two people, in which case it would be impolite of us to open it in front of your little friends. Why don’t you all run along to the park, and we’ll discuss this in the evening after they’ve returned to the suburbs.”

  “But I want them to stay for dinner. Can they?”

  “Here again, a decision is being thrust upon me that is not mine alone to make.”

  We entered Central Park at Seventy-second Street and walked over a small grassy hill shaded by large trees and down to a concrete area next to the Sheep Meadow where people were roller-skating to dance music in a tight ellipse. We stood in a crowd, presumably to watch the skaters. But I was distracted by the pronounced sensation that much of the crowd was watching me. I felt the hair sticking to my neck and I felt the crowd looking at my arms and my neck and the black clumps of sweaty hair sticking to my pale, unblemished neck. Have you ever wondered, sexual reader, if people are looking at you funny when you’re out in public just after having had sex?

  “Watch what Harry can do,” Dierdre said.

  We followed Harry to the low chain-link fence that served as the border of the Sheep Meadow. A skinny black boy of Harry’s height nodded at Harry. Harry approached him and nodded back and the boy shook hands with him and described several arcs in the air with his hands and arms while saying something to Harry. He handed Harry a small green object, which Harry brought to his face and smelled. Harry reached into his pocket and gave some money to the boy, who jerked his head around in all directions and walked away quickly.

  “Scored us some dope,” Harry said.

  Dierdre said, “I got high just watching you,” which seemed false. She turned to me and said, “You want to get high, Little Mary Sunshine?”

  “By what? Taking marijuana? Is that what you just bought?”

  “Yeah,” Harry said. “We could go back to Miss Hartman’s house with the air conditioner and ‘take’ some marijuana.”

  Skip was not home when we returned. We sat in the kitchen and Harry rolled some of the marijuana into a little cigarette. We smoked it and my heart raced and my two friends looked like insects to me and I burst into tears. They were very gentle and stopped looking like insects, but I could not stop wheezing and shaking. They fed me bowls of sugared cereal and I shook until I was exhausted. They poured a quart of oil into a pot and turned the electric stove on high and put the pot on the stove with the intention of deep-frying some strips of potato. But they forgot to cut the potatoes and, in fact, forgot that the pot of oil was on the stove. Starting with a small explosion, an oil fire consumed the wiring of the oven and stove and burnt the wooden cabinets above them.

  By the time Skip returned from wherever she was, Harry had found the carbon-dioxide fire extinguisher and put out the fire. When Harry explained how upset I’d become after smoking the pot, and how the fire had started, Skip was gracious. She thanked them for taking care of me. Harry and Dierdre left because they had the first day of school to rest up for.

  The walls of the kitchen were smeared black with smoke residue. The smell of burnt wood and plastic mingled in the air. I cannot remember what my reaction to the fire was. I was stunned, I imagine, and drugged. I sat in a kitchen chair and Skip Hartman stood behind me stroking my cheek. “How come you’re not mad?” I asked.

  “I am grateful to your friends,” she said. “They tried to feed you with warm food. It seems this fellow Harry had the presence of mind to extinguish the fire shortly after it began. I am thankful that you are unharmed, that you are here next to me.”

  Skip Hartman left off stroking my cheek and strolled around the kitchen table slowly and carefully several times. She looked as if she were balancing a stack of books on her head. I liked the way her quiet thighs came down out of her pelvis; the way her hands swung forward wrist first as she walked; the way, at the very front of the pendulum swing of her arms, her fingers flicked forward slightly. She had a monumental style of walking. Watching her walk was like watching the stars fix themselves slowly, over the millennia, into the shape of a woman walking.

  “Well, I suppose it’s time for bed now,” she said, and headed toward the threshold of the kitchen, and stumbled on it, and was jolted, and kept walking away.

  “But it’s only six-thirty.”

  She turned and came back to the doorway. “Oh, well, then, I’ll fix us some dinner. I’ll prepare those flounder fillets I bought at the farmers’ market.”

  “Skippy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t prepare anything because the stove got all burnt to a crisp.”

  “It did?”

  “In the fire.”

  “Yes, the fire.” Skip’s pink face was dazed. “I hope you had fun with your friends. I so want you to be happy.”

  “Skippy-doo?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “Come to me,” she said. I did.

  4 I Am Stuck

  On the morning of what would have been the first day of school, Skip Hartman and I attempted to begin my home schooling. I had a stomachache.

  We sat in her book room, I in my Snoopy pajamas and she in one of her silk and linen teaching outfits, which she called “a bulwark against the boundarylessness of this household.” She tried to give me a lesson in English literature.

  “Let us begin at the beginning of the world,” she said.

  “With swirling hot gases?” I asked.

  “With Shakespeare,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember him from when I was in school.”

  “And I suppose that you wish you were in school now?”

  “I suppose that I wish I were in heaven.”

  “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’ ” Skip Hartman said, “ ‘Is lust in action, and till action, lust / Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.’

  “What do you think of the opening lines of this poem, Mary?”

  “I think I have a stomachache. Could I go to the park?”

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t.”

  “I’d prefer if I did.”

  We were sitting next to each other on chairs in the book room, the oaken floor spreading out all around us. The Riverside Shakespeare, volume 2, opened to pages 1772 and 1773, lay in her lap. She stared at me. She reached out and brushed a lock of black hair away from my eyes. It fell in front of my eyes when she let go of it. She brushed it away again and it fell back again, and she brushed it away and it fell back. “Ach,” she said, which seemed to be a comment on the uselessness of, for example, trying to brush my hair away from my eyes.

  “Go,” she said.

  “I need money.”

  “What for?”

  “Hot dog.”

  “You hav
e a stomachache.”

  “What if it goes away?”

  She gave me a dollar.

  “That’s it?”

  “How much do you want?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “What for?”

  “Harry says you can’t leave the house with less than fifteen, just like you can’t leave the house without ID because if someone runs you over and kills you the police won’t know who you are.”

  “Here’s ten.”

  “So anyway, is this that discussion we were going to have where I own everything that you own?”

  “Here’s another twenty.” She walked out of the room.

  The weather was cloudy and hot and damp. I went to the same place that Dierdre and Harry and I had gone to the day before. I stopped at the long, thin area of concrete where the people had skated. Today there were only three skaters and no music, except the high, thin, rhythmic noise that came from the tiny speakers they all had inserted in their ears. These people were committed athletic skaters and serious loners, skating around and around privately behind their sunglasses on an overcast Tuesday afternoon near the end of summer.

  The tall, skinny black boy who had sold pot to Harry the day before was pressing the top of the low fence around the Sheep Meadow with his elongated forearms. He gazed out at the vast, sparsely populated lawn. “Hey,” I said.

  His body stiffened. He pretended not to have heard me. “Excuse me,” I said, nudging his arm, “do you have pot?”

  “Do I have what?”

  “Pot. Marijuana.”

  He stood and turned to me. “What do I look like to you?”

  “Like the guy who sold my friend marijuana yesterday.”

  “I see. You saw a black man sell marijuana to your friend here yesterday, and because I am black and standing here, you think it must have been I.”

  His white dress shirt was neatly pressed and so were his khaki pants. His brown loafers with gold buckles had just been shined. He didn’t look like a marijuana dealer, but then again I had led a sheltered life in the suburbs, reader, and didn’t know what a marijuana dealer was supposed to look like.

  “I think I know what I saw,” I said.

  “I think I know what I am,” he said, with his hands on his hips.

  “Come on, just sell me some pot.”

  “Listen, would you please get away from me before I call the police?”

  “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?”

  His body relaxed into maybe one tenth of a faint, as if what I had just said were so exasperating it could have knocked a person unconscious. “It is not perfume. It is a men’s cologne. It is Safari for Men.”

  “Well, it stinks.”

  “I cannot sell marijuana to a small child.”

  “I’m not a small child, I’m a small adult. My growth has been stunted by smoking marijuana.”

  “Trust me, you’re a little girl and you don’t know anything.”

  “I know a lot more about life than you’ll ever know.”

  He made a tsk-ing noise with his tongue and teeth and made a little rounded gesture in the air with his long, supple hands that seemed to be a comment on the elaborate wrongness of what I had just said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “Lust.”

  “And what do you know about lust?”

  “Savage extreme rude cruel.”

  “So the little girl has read Shakespeare. Big deal.”

  “So sell me some pot.”

  He rolled his eyes back in his head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. This is really stupid.” He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic bag. “That’ll be twenty dollars, please.”

  “I have to smell it first.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sure that William Shakespeare always smelled it before he bought it.” He handed me the bag.

  “Well, I have to stand away from you to smell it because of your ‘Safari for Men’ cologne.”

  “Fine.”

  I took several steps away from him and, for no reason that I can think of, turned around and sprinted toward the edge of the park at Fifth Avenue. I looked over my shoulder for long enough to see this boy try to organize his two very long, thin legs into a running motion. He was having trouble getting started, like a young colt. I eased off to a quick jog, which was a mistake, because once his legs got the basic concept of running they did quite well with it and he almost caught me. During a whole summer of running, I had developed a burst-of-speed technique, which I deployed just as he was about to catch me. None of the skaters, nor any of the young mothers pushing strollers, nor any of the drunks, nor the old people feeding pigeons seemed to care that a tall black boy was chasing a short white girl through the park. By the time I reached Fifth Avenue I had maybe ten paces on him. I hailed a cab and climbed inside.

  “The toy store,” I said to the cabdriver, who moved out into traffic and also didn’t seem to care that there was a boy chasing his car. I stared at him out the back window of the cab and wished he didn’t look so despondent.

  “Which toy store?” the driver said.

  “That huge one on Fifty-eighth Street with all the nice toys.”

  “F.A.O. Schwarz,” he said.

  “Yeah, F.A.O. Schwarz,” I said. “I have thirty-one dollars and I’m going to buy my teacher a nice present.”

  Back in Skip Hartman’s room, I sort of missed the boy from whom I had stolen the marijuana that I was now smoking. I saw delicacy and hopefulness in his face, and a puzzlement that I understood all too well: why am I this when what I wish to be is that?

  I don’t know how long Skip Hartman had been standing in the doorway watching me meditate and take puffs of pot. She stood in the doorway and I sat on the bed and we observed each other for a while. One of the pleasures of living with Skip Hartman was having the opportunity to watch the quick changes in the color and texture and arrangement of her face. Every gradation of feeling could be seen there. While some people’s emotions originate in their hearts, Skip’s originated on her face.

  “What is it like to smoke pot?” Skip asked me.

  “You’ve never done it?”

  “No.”

  “Kind of interesting. Come here and sit with me and try some.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not need to learn another way to lose control of my life.”

  “How about doing it because you want to keep me company while I do it?”

  “I think there is already enough of that kind of sacrifice in this relationship as it is.”

  “No there isn’t.”

  Skip Hartman held her hand up as if to say stop. I had seen her use this gesture in the classroom to signal please be quiet. I wondered if the gesture now was meant to signal please be quiet about all the topics we never discussed: for example, where she went and what she did without me beyond the confines of the house.

  “What do you do when you leave the house?” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Do you have friends? Who are your friends?”

  “Would you like to meet some of them?”

  “Yes.”

  What I knew about Joe Samuels and Ruella Forecourt in advance of their arrival at Skip Hartman’s house for dinner was that they, like Skip Hartman, were rich. I knew it by what few details Skip told me about them—that Ruella was a retired fashion model-slash-performance artist and that Joe owned a photography studio—but more than that, I knew it because I knew it. As a twelve-year-old, I already sensed that rich people tended not to invite guests over to the house who had personal financial arrangements other than richness. If someone is poor and comes for a social visit to the house of someone who is rich, the question tends to hang in the air: “Could I have some of your money?” This question does not actually get voiced by anyone with more than a casual understanding of reality, but in the case of Tommy White, for example, it gets voiced and, what’s more, it gets gr
anted. You might want to take the Tommy tack and focus single-mindedly on the goal of fabulous wealth for its own sake, but as you probably know, there is very little fabulous wealth to go around, and if you do devote your life to attaining it you might really be screwing yourself out of a lot of other pleasures, thus having, at your life’s end, a fabulous regret beyond anything that I could describe or that you could imagine, cherished middle- or maybe even working-class reader.

  When Joe Samuels and Ruella Forecourt arrived for dinner, Skip climbed the stairs and retrieved me from the bedroom, where I had been engaged all afternoon in drawing women and cars with colored Magic Markers on the surface of the eggshell-white wall between the two French windows. When I came down the stairs in my favorite pink ballerina outfit of that period, I saw the statuesque Ruella Forecourt. She was blond and muscular and wearing a long black dress that embraced her body so tightly it was almost inside her skin. “Oh, look!” she cried in her Swiss-German accent, “the little dancing child is lovely!”

  “Kid’s cute,” Joe said. He was bald and gray and a little shorter and heavier than Skip. He did not have good posture. He held his head forward and down, which I think he did so he would get there a little sooner. He wore a shlumpy gray suit that was probably once very expensive, which he appeared not to care about at all. I thought I recognized him from somewhere.