Nothing Is Terrible (15 page)

“Skip this room.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t Skip the room.”

“Why?”

“I gave my word.”

“Oh, your
word
.”

“Shut up.”

“You have a
word
, and you give it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“What?”

“What do you do every day?”

“Like what do you mean?”

“You wake up in your tent in Central Park and …?”

“I meditate.”

“What kind of meditation, transcendental?”

“No, it’s my own kind of meditation which I developed. It’s similar to worrying.”

“Then what do you do?”

“Breakfast.”

“Which is?”

“Pint of coffee.”

“How do you make coffee in a tent?”

“I have a small portable camping stove that burns white gas which I have to go up to Scarsdale to get because it’s illegal in the city because somebody like me with a different political philosophy might be tempted to make an explosive device and blow something up with the white gas which I haven’t ever seriously considered doing. I don’t make the coffee in the tent I make it on the lip of the tent.”

“Oh. The
lip
.” Mittler’s neck got blotchy.

“You’re making it hard for me to clean the room.”

“How about after the coffee?”

“I pace.”

“Like back and forth in your tent?”

“Like back and forth between Fifty-ninth Street and One-hundred-tenth.”

“How many times?”

“Once.”

I sprang up from the bed and jumped on Mittler. He jabbed me in the breast again.

“Ow. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to hit a woman there?”

“You’re not a woman.”

“But I have tits and you poked them twice.”

“Teach you to jump on me.”

I jumped on him again and he hit me in the arm, hard. I mean really hard, so tears came to my eyes.

“I’m leaving. I’ll call Miss Hartman so I can come back and finish when you’re not here.” He left.

I opened the bedroom window and leaned out to watch Mittler exit the house. He took the stairs in two long jumps, cut straight across the sidewalk, slid between two parked cars, and made a perpendicular turn to the right. Down in the street itself, he walked in a westerly direction toward the park. He was the most strictly linear walker I have ever seen. The rain began as I watched him. It was the dense kind of rain that comes down in long continuous columns rather than individual droplets. Mittler was soaked in a matter of seconds. He kept walking as if nothing different were happening in the natural world around him. He went steadily away from my house with his linear walk and his light blue valise of cleaning tools. I wondered if stoical people like him were allowed to enjoy the feeling of the rain on their faces. I thought of a song my father used to sing about an umbrella salesman:

It was eleven
A.M
. I was agitated and could think of nothing to do. This was standard for eleven
A.M
. of that period of my life. Some people would make food in this situation. I had seen people make food often enough—women, mostly—and it didn’t appear to be a waste of time. I thought I could manage a grilled cheese sandwich. Because I was fearing the stretch of time between eleven
A.M
. and whatever came after eleven
A.M.
, I took the most circuitous route to the kitchen, making stops in all the other rooms of the house. I also crawled on my hands and knees instead of walking upright. As I crawled along the hard brown floor from room to room, a stinky smell gathered in my nostrils. It was the smell of Mittler’s cleaning fluids, of which he had left a thick, drying coat on every surface in the house, the way a dog might leave urine. As I crawled headfirst down the carpeted stairs, my eyes teared up and my nose ran and the skin on the palms of my hands first tingled and then burned. The knees of my pants became damp and the skin underneath them began to burn also.

I crawled back upstairs and changed clothes again and walked down to the kitchen on my hind legs in a pair of stiff, thick-soled hiking boots that had cost Skip Hartman $300 and that I had not used for hiking. In our household we liked good, supportive shoes, even if the hiking boots turned out to be overkill in terms of footwear to make grilled cheese in. I couldn’t eat the sandwich because every time I opened my mouth it filled up with the taste of bleach and ammonia. I was angry with Mittler. I had expected more from him. As I was about to throw the grilled cheese in the garbage, Skip walked in.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.” It was 11:38
A.M
. Her eyes and nose began to water.

“You’re a child,” she explained. “From now on I mustn’t let you sway me in decisions better left to an adult, such as whom to hire to clean.”

“Ah, but you must.”

“First I hire Stephen Samuels, who cleans not at all, then I hire Mittler, who cleans too much.”

“It’s not Mittler’s fault. I distracted him.”

“Did you now?”

I know that I have tried to document the expressive activities of Skip Hartman’s hair and face, but I think I have not yet spoken in particular of her nose, correct? It was a straight, medium-sized, practical nose that had the slight advantage over her hair of being an organ of both expressive
and
perceptive capacities. She tilted her head back now and vertically scrunched her nose. She seemed to be trying to sniff out events other than cleaning that had taken place in the house while she was gone. “And what exactly did you do to distract him?”

“I threatened him.”

“Threatened him how?”

“Verbally.”

“Mittler’s fired.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I’m doing it.”

“But you didn’t even tell me Tommy and Myra are moving!”

“Oh, dear heavens. I did not tell you. I wonder why I did not tell you. That was an egregious oversight, to be sure. I suppose I don’t much like your aunt and uncle.”

“But they’re the only people I have in the world.”

“They’re the only people you have in the world?”

“Yes.”

“What about—”

“Yeah?”

“What about—us?”

“Us?”

“What about me?”

I could think of nothing to say. Skip’s mouth hung open. Without knowing it, I think, she turned her thumbs out away from her body to show me, below the short sleeves of her lavender silk T-shirt, her taut, creamy inner forearms, and this little argument ended as many of ours did: in the kitchen, in a piteous embrace.

We had made it to the end of another summer when Skip Hartman glided to the curb near our house in her black high-gloss Porsche. I climbed in next to her. Skip Hartman in her brown leather driving gear, in profile in her car by the curb giving me an ominous look like a one-eyed jack, sweet indulgent reader, was at her most manly.

There was a satchel of fine luncheon meats and cheeses and fruits and fruit juices and liquors in the broad sense of the term on the buttery leather shelf behind the two seats of the Porsche. This satchel and its contents were a part of the pleasure of the orderliness of a life with Skip Hartman. The orderliness, in turn, was a fortification against terrible events like the end of summer.

Driving out of the city, Skip said, “Stephen was very angry when
I
told him we had found another housecleaner.”

“So?”

“He refuses to tutor you. He feels betrayed.”

“He needs to learn responsibility,” I said.

“The passenger seat: a center of moral authority. Joseph told me this termination has really sent Stephen into a tailspin.”

“So screw him.”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

It was a cool day in mid-September. Maybe the leaves on the trees were changing color—I didn’t notice. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t making conversation with Skip Hartman or even looking at her as she drove. I was glued to the window. I just happen to have been the kind of person who, when she was looking at a landscape out a window, got distracted by her own reflection. I guess what I’m saying is, I looked at the world and saw myself. Not that I’m proud of it, or of much else that I did or said or thought or felt or was.

Toward the end of our journey we found ourselves in a dark wood. We slowed and approached a dense iron gate that was the only break for miles in a high wooden wall along the right-hand side of the bumpy road we were on. A man stepped out of a low, narrow, gray, one-story A-frame house next to the gate. He was a man of fair complexion with short blondish-orange hair who walked toward us with his mouth ajar. He wore a dark blue uniform and held a clipboard. He was older and taller and wider and lighter in color than Mittler, and didn’t appear to have the odd, gentle decorousness that Mittler had, but he did have something of the Mittlerian American soldier-of-fortune can-do male way of being in the world. He appeared to be about to say something to Skip Hartman like “Name, ma’am,” when Skip Hartman preempted him with “Hartman, September, and White, Mary, here to see Thomas White and Myra White.”

If the man regarded the efficiency of speech and the fancy car as mockeries of himself, he was right. He looked at his clipboard. “I’m sorry but you’re not on the list for today, ma’am.” He was now bending over and peering into the car to see who was in the passenger seat. I stuck my tongue out at him.

“What you should be sorry about, young man,” said Ms. Hartman with an imperious tone, “is the disgraceful condition of the road approaching this entrance over which you are standing guard. One is a second- or third- or fourth-class citizen until one has been granted permission to enter Marmot. This attitude of Marmot’s I already do not like. Get on the telephone, please, young man—you do have a telephone in your little shed?—and call the sometimes forgetful Thomas White and ask if indeed he is expecting two lady visitors in a fancy foreign car whose shock absorbers have truly been put to the test by this approach road—which Marmot may try to disavow but whose responsibility, surely, is Marmot’s.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the man, the crisp American Marine politeness being strained now by the savage American Marine violence beneath it. He walked back to his little house.

I said, “God, you’re a bitch. It’s just a dumb job for him.”

“Then he should get another dumb job, darling.”

“What dumb job do you have right now?”

“Right now? Right now I have the dumb job of protecting you from idiots like him who justify their impertinence to people like you and me with some misguided concept of safeguarding gentility.”

“Whatever,
darling
,” I said, with my own justification for impertinence that I didn’t understand but felt.

The man opened the gate for us automatically from within his narrow house and we entered Marmot. We drove along a
well-paved road for a few hundred yards through a dense forest of deciduous trees. The trees gave way to a small, modern village of evenly spaced and not identical but honest and similar and comforting wooden two-story family houses. The houses were painted in quiet varieties of gray and beige and brown. Each house was surrounded by one or two acres of clean, bright lawn. The shrubs were short and round and trim. Bright flowers. Sidewalks with no people on them. No toys. No cars. Our car in this place was like a long wet black rat sliding down the street looking for whom to eat. The front door of one of the houses on our left flew open and Tommy came out onto his porch in a pair of white ducks. He waved. He was smiling. He wore black canvas sneakers and walked directly on the bright green lawn in them, which was probably against the law. He came down the little hill of his front lawn toward our rat car. Skip stopped the car. Tommy waved gaily. Open-necked red-and-white-striped short-sleeve shirt worn out over the trousers. Skip idled. It had been a year since we’d seen Tommy. His face had developed some fine wrinkles like abstract designs made carefully with a diamond on a sheet of glass. Skip revved the engine. Tommy laughed. “I forgot!” he said. “I love to leave the names at the gate but in this case I forgot. You can’t park here. You have to come up into the driveway. Preferably the nose of the car three feet from the garage door. Fantastic!”

“Where’s Myra?” I said, getting out of the car. Tommy kissed me on the cheek for the first time ever.

“Hold this,” Skip said behind me.

“What?”

“The food basket.”

“What are
you
doing?
You
hold it.”

She rolled her eyes.

Myra had put on fifteen pounds. It is especially gratifying to see someone you haven’t seen in a long time if there has been a dramatic change in appearance: if the person has become fat or thin or shaved a beard or grown prematurely old. I loved touching Myra’s body. It was a body both sturdy and soft that I wanted to ram myself against to knock from their deep hideaway some of the feelings that surely must have dwelt there. But I remembered about breaking her arm and settled for working a goodly amount of saliva onto my lips and distributing it over her face with kisses. “Oh, Myra Myra Myra Myra Myra,” I said, approximately. She squeezed her eyes shut. We were standing now in the new-wood-and-lacquer-smelling kitchen with lots of gray, foggy light coming in through the big windows on the street side of the house. I admired Tommy for being able to pick another house with light.

“Who wants a tour of the house?” Tommy said.

Skip said, “I do.”

I said, “I don’t.”

“Oh, come on, Jesus, you’ve been here about one second and you’re trying to hurt me already. Aren’t you civilizing her, Hartman?”

“Not my job,” Skip said, and took his arm in hers, and led him out of the room that I might commune in private with my girl relative.

“What should we do now?” I asked.

“Make something,” Myra said, head down, moving her full bulk toward the refrigerator.

“What?”