Nothing Is Terrible

“That girl is not normal, and neither is the boy,” I overheard my uncle say to my aunt late one summer night a month after my parents had been killed in a car accident on the way home from a wedding. My twin brother Paul and I were ten years old at the time, and we were the children my childless uncle was talking about. “The boy is sickly, that much we know,” he went on. “The girl—hard to say what the trouble is there.”

This remark of my uncle’s seems like as good a place as any to begin. If you’ll stay with me here for a few moments, I think I can show you that what happened that night gave rise to a series of events that turn out to be the fabulous little story I call, for want of a better expression, my life.

My uncle was not kidding, by the way. He calls them as he sees them. Who once said it takes a mean man to tell the truth
about others and a melancholy man to tell the truth about himself? No, I’m asking because I really can’t remember who said it. There’s so much to forget, my dear reader, and a lot of it will be forgotten here by me, your kind, happy interlocutor, the adult woman whom the little girl of our tale is astonished to find she has become. Ah, but enough about the person who is writing this autobiography. Let’s return to the person who is living it.

“Paul!” I called out in a whisper to my brother. We were lying in the dark in our new bedroom. The air was hot and thick, and sound traveled well in that little house.

“Yes, Paul?” Paul replied. The name our parents had given me was Mary, and you may call me that if you wish, but at the time we saw no reason to honor their conventions, now that they had done the most irresponsible thing a pair of parents could do. Besides, we felt “Paul” suited me better, describing the person I was as well as it described my twin brother, just as the word
cleave
means both
to adhere
and
to split in two
.

“Paul,” I said, “I don’t feel like staying in bed tonight. Can you think of something for us to do?”

“Let’s go down the street to the golf course,” he said, and explained what he thought we ought to do when we got there. If a boy who had little hope for life and could do nothing well but think can be said to have a beautiful mind, then that was what Paul had, whereas I was a fine physical specimen of a girl, if a little wifty in the thinking department. The two of us had a division of labor whereby he thought up things for us to do and I did them.

The night we strolled out the front door of the small suburban house of our uncle the unlucky electronics repairman and
his almost mute wife was a warm and clear and starry night. Coming from the city, we had not seen stars, and now that we were seeing them we agreed that we didn’t like them. To us they were so many blemishes in an otherwise smooth sky. We knew that everyone was supposed to like stars. We’d heard nothing but good things said about stars, and we didn’t care. Sorrow makes its own principles, which are not necessarily shared by the unsorrowful; I hope you will bear this in mind as you read on.

We walked on the wet grass of the fairway in short pajamas. I carried the shovel. Thousands of invisible crickets rubbed their legs together. Our naked feet were wet and cool, and cut blades of grass stuck to them in the dark. Far away on the narrow road we came from, a solitary car passed.

We were two pale, thin children with curly black hair. Paul’s paleness was embellished by a spiderweb of red veins spread out just under his skin. These you could see anywhere you chose to look on the surface of his body. I imagined that the function of the veins was to make his skin that much more sensitive than other people’s skin. I imagined the discomfort of being housed in that body, and when I had a physical sensation that I wished to experience more sharply, I tried to feel how Paul would feel it. The soft breeze on his arms and legs that night, I believed, felt like an ongoing swath of fine sandpaper moving across them. Paul walked ahead, navigating in near darkness with his fine abstract sense of space and time. I walked behind with a flashlight, idly investigating the two narrow strings of muscle that connected his torso to the back of his head.

We arrived at the first green and he removed the flag from
the hole and commanded me to expand the tiny golf-ball hole into a hole that the bodies of two small children could fit into. I bent my back and began to dig while he stood tall above me, head tilted back, nostrils aflare, holding the flag erect at arm’s length like the white explorer claiming some wild land that I the dark native beneath him was busy getting in touch with. I dug and dug and dug and dug, or so it seems from the vantage of memory. And while I dug, my poor little twin brother, who shimmers now on the shared border of consciousness and oblivion, began another round of a game he referred to as the Philosophical Conundrum.

“All right, Paul,” said Paul, “let’s say your twin-engine Cessna has crashed in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and your millionaire boyfriend lover died in the crash and it’s just you alive in the middle of the desert. And then a guy comes along giving you a choice.”

“Where’s the guy come from if I’m in the middle of—”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s just a guy, like a guy in a suit. And he comes down out of somewhere to give you a choice. And the choice is you can have a big diamond worth a hundred million dollars or you can have enough glasses of cold milk to last you till you get out of the desert. Which do you choose?”

“But I already have the rich boyfriend.”

“But he’s dead.”

“But he leaves me all his money because he loves me so much.”

“No he doesn’t. He’s just in it for the sex.”

“No, it’s more than sex. He loves me.”

“Okay, he loves you, but he just met you like a month ago and he didn’t have time to change his will yet.”

“Who’d he leave the money to, before me?”

“His ex-wife, and she’s a bitch and she hates you.”

“The diamond.”

“What?”

“I choose the diamond. From the guy.”

“Okay. Fine. The diamond. Now. Poof, the guy’s gone. Now it’s just you and the diamond and a hundred thousand miles to the nearest water.”

“No. There’s water.”

“Where?”

“Right over the hill.”

“But the hill is a hundred thousand miles long.”

“How come it has to be?”

“Because I’m the one making this up.”

“You can’t make stuff up
after
I choose.”

“Your optimism is gonna get you killed one day.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Shut up and dig.”

I was bent over down inside the hole I had created thus far. Paul put his bare foot on my back, which, given the depth of the hole, was nearly level with the ground. I had taken off my pajama shirt for digging, and some of the blades of grass from his bare foot went onto my back and made infinitesimal bloodless cuts in the skin, and the sweat went into the cuts and my back started to itch and hurt. I laughed. I had to stop digging because Paul was making me laugh so much by having his foot on my back. He was laughing too. I took his foot off my back and stood up and fell sideways onto the crew-cut grass of the green. He fell on top of me and I was feeling passionate so I pulled him close to me and kissed him hard on the cheek. He resisted me, so I stood up and finished digging the hole.

We jumped into it and lay down because it was midnight
and we were tired. I curled up into a tight ball and Paul curled around my back in a loose arc. “I like how the dirt feels, Paul,” he said to me. “Thank you for digging the hole.”

“Thanks for the wonderful idea, Paul,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do we have to do anything else on your idea?”

“No. We just fall asleep and wait for some grown-up to come along and get angry at us.”

I closed my eyes and immediately began the descent. I heard Paul say, “Can I hold your hand?”

“Sure.” I was lying on my right side, and I reached across my own chest and gave Paul my right hand.

“I like to hold your hand,” he said. “When I touch you I tingle with how alive you are.” I continued to let myself down into sleep as I felt Paul settling into place behind me. Half asleep, I felt him creeping over the surface of my back, whispery light, a faint tickle on my skin. At this moment, I have a palpable image of him as a long animated skeleton with soft white bones and powers of speech, the shadow of my inner life, clinging to the warmth of my flesh.

The grown-up whose anger we were waiting for was Tommy, our unlucky uncle. He was a mean, delicate, pretty, fine-featured blond man who repaired televisions and other appliances for a living. He was mean because he was pretty. Prettiness was a terrible burden to him because its mute prophecy—wealth—had gone unfulfilled. Prettiness ruined Tommy for a life of subsistence. It was an outrage to have to live modestly, having been born into the aristocracy of looks. If you have a tendency
to be self-regarding, and then you’re also poor and delicate and gorgeous and a man, it’s a hard life. Tommy had little energy for niceness because he had to devote himself to the tragedy of prettiness. The tragedy was that the prettiness kept him enclosed in a stifling little atmosphere of mediocrity not much bigger than his own body that he expected someone taken with his beauty to lift him out of.

If he could only have convinced someone to let him play golf at the country club, for instance. He practiced his driving and putting at the driving and putting range in the next town, and if he could play just one round of eighteen holes, he’d be in. That Tommy thought he was on his way to insinuating himself into a club membership by signing a service contract with the grounds manager of the club to repair its TVs was proof that he carried around with him this bubble of mediocrity that was impenetrable from both sides. This is only my opinion, of course.