Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “I would prefer if you both would address me directly rather than talking about me as if I were not in the room,” I said, wanting to make a good impression.

  “Kid’s smart,” Joe said.

  “Kid wants man to talk directly to her or get out of her house,” I said.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, kid, I don’t have much—what?—grace or aplomb with children.”

  “Get some,” I said.

  “I like you, dear girl,” Ruella said, leaning down almost on her hands and knees as if talking to a baby or a dog. “You are small but with a fully formed personality. Tell me, have you read Nietzsche?”

  “What’s Nietzsche?”

  “September, do you mean to say that you have not offered the child Nietzsche to read?”

  “Short of shoving Nietzsche down the child’s throat, I don’t think any offer of Nietzsche would be accepted by the child, isn’t that right, dear child?”

  “Ah, but Nietzsche himself said, ‘One has regarded life carelessly if one has failed to see the hand that kills with leniency,’ ” Ruella said.

  Skip said, “He also said, ‘The good teacher takes things seriously—even himself—only in relation to his pupils.’ Shall we eat dinner?”

  In the manner of Skip Hartman at her finest, Skip Hartman had seized the adversity of the summer’s little oil fire in the kitchen to make some advantageous modifications to her cooking setup. Cooking—like reading, or memorizing poems, or teaching, or loving—was one of the ways she made a meaningful connection with the world. In the delicious taste of the tajine of lamb that she prepared for us that evening, I was given access to yet another expressive venue for the passion of this remarkable woman, who also expressed her passion in posture, in the syntactically baroque sentences that marked her conversational style—in the way she made a bed or sat in a chair, for that matter. There was so much for me to admire in Skip Hartman that the admiration I had to give could not possibly have been adequate, so I often neglected to admire her at all.

  “So, kid,” Joe Samuels said to me, his head ranging out over the salad bowl, “how you adapting to your situation here?”

  “Okay, I guess. I’m kind of bored.”

  “ ‘Boredom—the desire for desires.’ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina,” Ruella Forecourt said.

  “We are attempting to discover Mary’s interests and cultivate them,” Skip said.

  “We’re not sure I have any interests. We’re hoping I have some,” I said.

  “Certainly her irreverent wit is not in need of cultivation,” Skip said.

  “You would love the studio, my child,” Ruella said. “You would adore the studio. Joseph, wouldn’t the child adore the studio?”

  “She might adore it,” he said.

  “What kind of stuff do you do there?” I said.

  “Oh, we photograph people in gorgeous clothing. It is at once deeply rewarding and repulsive to me, for you see I am a feminist and a socialist with Nietzschean leanings. ‘ “Sympathy for all”—would be harshness and tyranny for thee, my good neighbor.’ ”

  Joe said, “See, what happened was, I was a features photographer for one of the city papers and I was assigned to photograph an international high school spelling bee and who should be one of the finalists but this Teutonic giantess here who happened to be more or less the fantasy of every Flatbush Jewboy I ever grew up with, anyway. So I started popping pictures of her my ass off—September, is it all right to say ‘ass’ in front of the kid?”

  I said, “Well, September and I have done ass, so you might as well say ‘ass.’ ” Everyone smiled merrily at the precocious child, who was not as precocious as she sounded. The me who talked knew more than the me who knew things without saying them. The me who knew things without saying them waited in silence to see what the me who talked was going to say next. The me who is saying this right now is trying to talk and know at the same time. She’s also trying to know and not know at the same time, because frankly some of the things she would find out if she knew what she was saying are kind of creepy.

  “So anyway,” Joe said, “I’m popping black-and-white pictures, and then I decide to pop some color pictures as well just for the hell of it, and then I get home and start developing ’em and I notice the colors aren’t right, so I futz around, futz around, and what do I come up with but an entirely new color process which I then went out and patented, so I turn out to be this big lug from Flatbush who happens to have patented a process for developing color film that’s pretty popular with just about everybody.”

  Ruella said, “I won third prize in the spelling bee and went on to become an internationally recognized fashion model, thanks to Joseph, and except for the eight years when I lived with the guru I have been with Joseph ever since the spelling bee and we have had a fabulous life together. Darling child, you really must come down and see us at the studio because you would love it.”

  So that was my first evening with Skip Hartman’s friends: Joe Samuels, the self-made aesthetic Brooklyn Jewish millionaire, and Ruella Forecourt, the large but perfectly proportioned Swiss fashion model and Nietzsche enthusiast; and let us not forget September Hartman herself, the cultured, literate, independently wealthy New England WASP with posture and cooking skills.

  If you are wondering what descriptive epithets I would assign to myself at that time: Mary White, obnoxious, lonely, self-loathing American orphan.

  At a certain point during the winter of our first year together, Skip Hartman and I agreed that haircutting, if nothing else, was a cultural activity we could jointly participate in. Specifically, she would cut my hair, which had not gone under the scissors since before the death of my parents. It—my hair—was big and messy and black and poured down in great impenetrable chunks over my white, skinny arms and back.

  As a prelude to the haircut, we took a long shower together. Reader, one of the many advantages of wealth is good water pressure. Skip had a shower like a waterfall. She had personally painted the bathroom dark green and had painted the shower walls with realistic eucalyptus trees. She burnt mint-flavored incense when we spent time together in this, our favorite idyll. Here—even just brushing teeth together—I often felt the most intense love for Skip Hartman. Does it surprise you that I could love her at all? Love does not absolve the loved one from loving, you know.

  I felt pacified and quiet that morning, sitting on the small built-in bench in the shower while Skip Hartman stood naked above me and squeezed hair conditioner from the plastic bottle onto my hair. “Your hair at this time reminds me of the wave-particle theory of light,” she said, working the goo from the ends of the hair in toward my scalp. “Your hair has a certain essence of fluidity even as it could stop a bus like a brick wall.”

  I giggled and relaxed. “Tell me more.”

  She held a lock of hair close to my scalp with her left hand, while with the fingers of her right she worked to undo the tangles in outer regions of that same lock. “Once upon a time, there was a lock of Mary’s hair streaming out from her head like a ray of light,” she improvised, “and God saw this ray of light and was satisfied with His creation. God went on in His way being satisfied with this and the other things He had made. Then God, in His infinite capacity for noticing things, noticed how much attention certain of His other human children were paying to this lock of hair, which streamed out from Mary’s head like the rays of the sun itself, only dark instead of light, some had begun to say. And God felt a little icky. Something was bugging God that He couldn’t put His infinitely long finger on, at least not right away. And God meditated upon His creation, which was the same as Himself, which is to say He thought of everything at once, because He could not do otherwise. While not ceasing to think of any of His other feelings, God sort of zeroed in on His own jealousy, which was, like everything else about Him, big. But not infinite. No, not even God may feel jealous without becoming that much smaller than Himself. ‘What to do, what to do about this child with magnificent hair like waves and pa
rticles at once,’ God said to Himself, who was now no longer everything; specifically, He was not this hair, for had He been the hair He could not also have been jealous of the hair, or so He reasoned omnisciently. At first He considered wiping out all of humanity with an enormous flood, but then He thought better of it: ‘A lot of people think highly of this child’s hair. Is that any reason to kill them all? No.’ Instead, God, seemingly at random, fixed on the heart of the woman named after the first month of autumn, and He filled this woman’s heart with a love for the child that was frighteningly immoderate and frowned upon by most of the rest of the human community. And in this way the woman knew some small part of God’s own sorrow and helplessness. The end. Time for your haircut.”

  The water gushing from the shower head was very hot. Skip Hartman took me gently by the temples and brought my head under the water. Steam billowed up from the shower floor. I felt mournful and soothed. I wished that she would go on making up stories about my hair until one of us died—her, probably.

  Soon I was sitting in a swivel chair in the center of the book room wearing my white terry-cloth bathrobe. The book room seemed to have a knack for precipitating great onrushes of feeling. Skip stood in the doorway wearing her larger version of the same bathrobe. I swiveled left, I swiveled right, I swiveled left. Skip held a comb and scissors in one hand and a dark blue folded sheet in the other. She entered the room and did a few understated hip wiggles of the haircutters’ dance. She placed the scissors and comb on the edge of a shelf. While holding one edge of the sheet in her two hands, she cast the sheet up and out across the room. The dark sheet billowed in the sunlit room with the white walls and the books. She wrapped the sheet around my neck like a cape, whereupon I could not resist saying, like the owner of a couple of capes we knew, “I want some of these old books to spread around the house. I’ll sprinkle some in the backyard. I’ll tile the bathroom with books. Have you got any history books for the kitchen?”

  “I love to meet a fellow booklover,” Skip said, a look of mischief on that face of looks. She walked toward me snipping the air with her scissors, closer and closer to my head, snip, snip, snip. “And what sort of haircut would we like today?”

  “Well, we would like something like what we have now.”

  “Do we mean a big mess?”

  “I guess we mean a big neatness.”

  “A trim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or how about this?” Skip said. She plunged the scissors into the nest of my hair and cut off a big hunk right up close to my scalp. A big wad of black hair the size of a cat fell to the floor. Before I could stop her she did this twice more. My hand rushed up to the side of my head, where there was now an extensive patch of hair as short as the grass on the first green of a golf course. I screamed and stood up and clawed at my neck to remove the cape. “Why did you do that?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just ruined my life!”

  Her face—that face of hers—grew red. Her eyes were wide open and big teardrops appeared at the bottoms of them and fell down her face. “But my darling,” she said, “you have also ruined my life. I thought that was understood.”

  I began by hitting her face and then I moved down and started beating her sides with both fists. I pounded away at her sides, using all my strength, until I felt a terrible burning sensation in my right cheek just below my right eye. I fell back onto the floor, holding my face. It felt as if a large, burning coal were embedded in my skin. “Make it stop,” I pleaded with Skip. I looked out at the room with my left eye and saw that she was gone. She came back with a paper towel and took my hands away from my face and placed the cool, wet paper towel on my right cheek. I saw the paper towel fill up with blood in seconds, and I understood that to make me stop punching her she had stabbed me in the face with the scissors. She removed the towel and placed another against my cheek, pressing hard this time to stanch the flow of blood. “We must never hurt one another like this again,” she said.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “I think you broke my ribs. Yes, you hurt me very much.” She almost started sobbing but stopped herself for the sake of the medical emergency. “Can you see out of your right eye?”

  I opened it.

  “Can you see?”

  I nodded.

  “I was aiming for your eye, you know. I would never have been able to forgive myself had I succeeded in blinding you.”

  “How about stabbing me in the face? Can you forgive yourself for that?”

  “As I said, you were hurting me a great deal. I am not prepared to be a martyr.”

  I was relieved to hear her say that. After we returned from the emergency room, she finished the haircut. I looked like a boy. There was not too big of a puncture gash in my face, but for the next several weeks it hurt if I moved around much. For the first day or two, I sat for hours at a time on the big living room couch with my cut face, and Skip Hartman sat beside me with her broken ribs, and we just sat there being stunned.

  Having to remain still for so long, I then accidentally discovered the pleasures of reading. I read Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre (my favorites) and Great Expectations and Mediocre Expectations and James and the Giant Peach and The Red and the Black and The Martin Luther King Story. My heart felt big during that time. I know it wasn’t really all that big. I mean, let’s face it, this Mary character is not very nice. But I can guarantee you this: she wishes she were. If she wounds the woman she loves most in all the world, if she loves her more fiercely than tenderly, it is not because she wants to do it that way, but because she does not know how else to do it. Dear reader, she cannot tell you herself, so I will tell you for her: she is trying to learn how!

  5 I Am Not Embraced by Everyone

  Wearing my new short haircut and a large square Mickey Mouse Band-Aid below my right eye, I went downtown one fine winter Monday to the place called Studio Joe. As I entered the low concrete building along the Hudson River, I could feel myself floating further adrift from the prescripted school-day life of a twelve-year-old.

  Inside the building, thin, delicate people in extravagant outfits rushed about in thick heels on the gray cement floor looking desperately glamorous. They were exerting themselves toward some objective. They dressed in a certain way so as not to be nothing. You have to do everything you can to make yourself distinct from these white walls, their body shapes and outfits and manners seemed to be saying; you have to be ready at all times for that moment when you meet the person who’ll carry you out of your life that is impoverished by the lack of that one intangible thing; ready to be carried into the other life that someone would carry you into if only you could meet him or her and be assured of saying or doing what you’re supposed to say or do and looking how you’re supposed to look, as you’ve always known you could, because secretly you’re sure it has been willed where that can be done which has been willed, maybe.

  “Yes, young man?” someone behind a tall marble embankment said to me.

  “I’m here to see Joe Samuels and Ruella Forecourt.”

  “Of course you are.”

  I looked up, and saw the black boy whose pot I had stolen in the park, and felt sick.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “It was a dumb mistake.”

  “I have no doubt that it was,” he said.

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “I cannot.”

  “I’ll pay you the twenty dollars.”

  “You could pay me the million dollars, boy, and that would not change a thing.”

  I was now standing more or less directly below this person sitting behind the high marble embankment. I looked up into his face. He seemed to be trying to outwit his bulbous nose and pitted skin with lotions and overscrubbing, not yet having settled into the comfort of his ugliness. His hair was long and nappy like a partially unraveled sweater. I recognized the overall frame of the body and the effeminate gestures of the hands, but the face seemed different. What had the face of
the boy in the park looked like?

  “I did meet you before in the park, right?” I asked.

  “No doubt that is true, but right now let me put it to you this way: if you want to see Joe and Ruella, who is the person who needs to have been met, you or me, chicky?”

  “Do you think I’m a boy or a girl?”

  “Oh, I can’t say that I honestly care, but I might get somebody to throw your butt out of here if you don’t stop staring at me with those creepy little eyes.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out if you’re the guy I sort of—you know, the guy who was going to sell me some pot in the park a few months ago.”

  “Oh, I’m the guy.”

  “Like I said, I’m sorry, and I’ll give you the money.”

  “Like I said, up your butt with a broom handle.”

  “Listen, jerk, who the hell are you anyway? Joe and Ruella told me to come here and say hi to them; so I want to see them now.”

  “Yes, well, that’s refreshingly spirited and insouciant and naïve to be sure. Have a seat right over there, child.”

  “Over where?”

  “There.”

  “There’s no place to sit down anywhere around here.”

  “How observant. If you walk back through the front door and sit on the curb, someone will fetch you when the special moment arrives for you to say ‘Hi’ to Joe and Ruella.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  I sat on the curb in the long, shabby black business coat which the boy behind the counter had looked askance at, and which I had insisted on buying in a thrift shop despite Skip’s urgings. The sun was bright and the air was frosty. I looked at the seagulls hovering above the river and uttering their cold-weather survivalist cry on this Monday morning. I wondered if many children my age spent as much time as I did trying to imagine what they were supposed to be doing, how they were supposed to behave from one moment to the next in order to make themselves feel real.

  A taxicab pulled up and several tall blond women got out and went into the building. Another cab pulled up and several short, dark, voluptuous Mediterranean women got out and went into the building. Another cab pulled up and two ugly Eastern European men in messy clothes who looked as if they had just crawled out of a Dumpster got out and went into the building with camera equipment. I stood up and vomited and went into the building.