Nothing Is Terrible (17 page)

“I see,” she said. “Let me take your coat, sir.” She moved to hug him.

“Don’t touch me, please. Let us have a formal brunch for once.”

She took his black coat in one hand and my upper arm firmly in the other and walked us swiftly into the kitchen.

“What’s Daddy doing here?”

“You have gunk in your eyebrow.”

“This is serious.”

“How should I know?”

“You didn’t orchestrate this?”

“No!”

“Sure?”

“Let go my arm, jerk.”

She let go and left the kitchen and came back with Daddy. “How did you get here?” she said.

“My man drove me.”

“Your man?”

“The amusing Negro boy who waves his arms about as if he were a girl.”

“Stephen Samuels,” we said. Skip looked at me.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I said, “so don’t even say it.”

H. H. Hartman looked less like a Nobel Prize winner now that I could see the brownish collar of his white shirt, his tapioca-stained black silk tie, and his herringbone jacket two sizes too big for him.

“Have a seat, Daddy. How do you feel about crêpes?”

“I feel about crêpes as I feel about diapers.”

“Which is?”

“If I must.”

He sat in a chair and put his elbows on the kitchen table. His hands were lost inside the sleeves of his jacket. “I’ll give you a light back rub,” I said, to get the brunch rolling.

“Get your hands off me, you creepy little shit!” he shrieked. Then, calm, indignant: “I would like a cup of milk, please.”

I brought him milk in a tall glass.

“A
cup
of milk. Five fingers of milk in a
cup
.”

“This is my whole childhood,” Skip said, twisting her smooth Teflon crêpe pan.

I re-presented the milk in a cup. “Good mothering instincts,” he said to me, “like a female cockroach.” He dipped the four shriveled, oily fingers of his right hand into the milk, lifted them out, and held them above his head. Much of the milk from his fingers drained off onto the top of his head. He then tilted his face back to catch fewer than half the droplets of milk in his mouth.

“What’s he doing?” I said to Skip.

“Acting like a baby. This is not a function of old age, by the way. He’s always been like this.”

She placed a crêpe before Hoving. The marmalade, sour cream, et cetera, et cetera, were already on the table. “Daddy,” she said, “your man, as you call him. Where is he now?”

“Why, he’s outside in the limo, waiting to take me back to that dreadful prison you have locked me away in.”

“Mary, would you be a sport and run outside and invite our charming friend in for a word?”

I went out the door and saw the white stretch limousine with darkened windows in front of our house. The passenger window slid down with a light hum, Stephen leaned over and
gave me a good long dark finger, the window slid back up, and the car took off. That was the last I was to see of Stephen Samuels for a long time.

I went back inside, conveyed Stephen’s message to Skip, and was hit by a wall of ungodly stench. “What the hell is that?”

“Okay, Daddy, lie down on the floor here and let’s take care of you. Did you bring extra diapers?”

“Didn’t the boy bring them?”

“The boy left,” I said.

“Child,” he said, “do you expect me to carry a diaper wadded up in my breast pocket? Really, the level of humiliation.”

He was lying face up on the kitchen floor now. Skip knelt above him and between his legs. She had removed his pants and was undoing the Velcro waistband attachments of the soiled diapers. We are talking breathtaking odor here. I couldn’t look. “Honey, go upstairs and find me the biggest pair of underwear we’ve got,” she said to me.

I dug around in Skip’s underwear drawer and found a big pair of ladies’ white cotton briefs from the 1950s; for what outfit or situation Skip had ever worn them I could not fathom. I of course brought them into the kitchen on top of my head. “Oh, this is just great,” she said, and snatched them off my head.

Hoving, naked and freshly cleaned from the waist down, gazed at the ladies’ undies in horror. “You will not put those on me.”

“Well, if you’re going to forget your diaper—”

“No!”

“Daddy.”

“What?”

“What do you want to wear?”

“I’ll wear my pants and I’ll just be extra careful.”

“Your pants are soiled.”

Hoving began to weep. “This is terrible,” he said. “I am so sorry to put you through this. A daughter should not have to see her father like this.”

“It’s all right, Daddy. I love you.”

“Oh, September,” he said, and wept. She crawled over to his head and cradled it and pushed the tears away from his eyes with her fingers.

She put a bath towel down on a kitchen chair, and he sat on it directly with his little naked buttocks. “Finish your brunch,” she said, “and we’ll go out and buy you some clothes and diapers afterward. Then we’ll return you to the home.”

“But I hate the home.”

“You said you didn’t mind it.”

“I hate it.”

“Maybe we can find you a better one.”

“I hate them all.”

“Well, then, where would you like to live?”

“Here with you and the little fellow.”

“But Daddy, you’ve said many times before that you did not want to live here, don’t you remember?”

“September, it is cruel of you to ask me to remember anything. I remember nothing.”

“Well, Daddy, so you will live here as of now. It is a done thing.”

“I don’t have any say in this?” I said.

“No, you don’t.”

By the time the first snow fell that year I had been a blonde for several weeks. Don’t worry, reader, I had it done professionally. I didn’t consult the old ball and chain beforehand. I’m sure you can imagine the outbreak of ill will—some people who are pederasts are really just as uptight as you and me. No, but seriously, hair color can make a big difference in a person, especially when that hair color is blond. I mean, don’t you feel that I’m talking to you differently,
dahling
reader, now that I’m recounting my life as a blonde? I’m adopting like a more voluptuous prose style—not consciously, it’s just happening. For the next little while, expect me to be
sassy
!

So one night in the early part of December between the hours of eight
P.M
. and seven
A.M
., two feet of snow fell on Manhattan. Skip and I woke up, looked out the window, embraced each other, and leapt out of bed. While Skip began to dress, I ran naked in circles around her—blond up top, brunette down below—yelling, “Snow day! Snow day! Snow day!” and waving my arms. While naturally graceful, Ms. Hartman was not inclined to dance, but I made her. We did a waltz on her checkered flannel pajama shirt, which she had uncharacteristically thrown to the floor in her excitement. We held each other tight and danced over to the window and back to the bed and back to the window. She could do this thing where she hugged me from the front, aligned the heels of her palms on either side of my spine at a place that was even with my shoulder blades, locked her fingers together, and, as I was beginning to exhale, jammed her palms into my back with all the power of the leverage of her excellent posture plus the natural
inborn strength of a prizefighter. This caused the air to
whoosh
from my mouth and set off loud crackling noises everywhere inside my body. Sometimes it also made me laugh uncontrollably, as it did that morning. Skip got me on the bed and tickled and tickled and tickled me and wouldn’t let me stop laughing until it got a little violent.

After this typical morning at home, Skip Hartman and her blond girlfriend trudged into the blinding whiteness of Central Park to make bas-relief angels in the snow. As we lay on our backs laughing, whom should we run into but Mittler. Okay not exactly “run into.” He knelt forty paces away, digging for edible roots beneath the snow, wearing a puffy blue down coat that made him look like an astronaut digging for rocks beneath the lunar surface. He did not see us. Skip Hartman did not see him, for she was lying on her back with her eyes closed in a state of ecstasy. You must understand how it was to see, across a snowy field, after a period of months, the boy who had put himself inside me. I don’t mean just physically, I mean metaphysically, too. Mittler had insinuated himself into my body and remained there even as he had disappeared from the world around it; how else can I explain that during the months of his absence, I had often felt his fingers press into my thighs late at night when his actual hands were miles away? I ran to him, silent and fast.

I wonder what I knew of jealousy at the time. I am talking about my total obliviousness to what effect my love of Mittler would have on Skip Hartman. Could a sixteen-year-old be a blank slate as regards jealousy? Bear in mind that I was raised unconventionally from the age of ten by a group of oddballs, and that whatever training in the emotions I may have received before that time is almost entirely lost to me, except perhaps in
the form of the voice that belonged to my father, singing, for example, “I’d rather be a memory than a dream.”

I tackled Mittler from behind. I grasped my favorite spot on Mittler’s body—the back of his neck—and shoved his head down into the snow.

“Children,” Skip said, standing above us, “what is happening here?”

Because I had forgotten she was alive, the sound of her voice startled me. Mittler wedged his hip under my legs and leveraged me off of him and spat the snow out of his mouth. He and I sat there looking at Skip. Her face was stiff, with eyes open like the eyes of a fresh, erect corpse beginning to harden in the cold. We all remained still. Skip Hartman turned her neck and looked to the north. She seemed to be remembering some vital errand. She turned her neck again and looked at us. Her beige woolen snow hat had ridden up and was perched like the cap of the court fool on the crown of her head. She pointed a gloved forefinger at the sky as if to say, “First,” or “Just a moment please,” or “Look at that cloud.” She gazed northward once more and began to walk in the direction she was gazing, in the way that people begin to walk when they will be walking a long time. Mittler and I stood up. We watched her. While walking down a short, steep incline, Skip Hartman lost her footing and tumbled several yards to the bottom. She stood up. Clumps of snow clung unevenly to the back of her pale brown cashmere coat. She tottered stiffly and continued to walk. Reader, this is one of those moments when I wish my memory were better. What could I have thought, watching her walk away like that? Was I so ruthless in love as I am about to appear to be? Yes, I believe I was.

At the first moment that morning when nothing that I could see was Skip Hartman, I turned to Mittler. “Show me your tent,” I said.

Mittler was silent for so long that I wondered if I had said “Show me your tent” or only thought it. I said it again to be sure.

“This is all wrong,” he said.

“What?”

“Me thinking I should make you a pair of snowshoes.”

“What?”

“I want to make you a pair of standard bearpaw snowshoes, but right away there are problems. First I’d have to find four young saplings of equal length, let’s say three feet. Then I’d have to pair them off and bind the thick butt ends together with whatever material I have available, let’s say raw, damp strips of deer or moose hide.”

“ ‘Bind the thick butt ends’?”

“Then I would have to lash in a couple of wooden crosspieces, spacing them fifteen centimeters apart, and bend and tie the remaining free ends together. Then cross-weave in more raw, damp strips of deer hide above and below the crosspieces. This is a difficult process. The deer hide alone takes days to render into that state of rawness and dampness, plus you have to keep it warm in these arctic conditions.”

“ ‘Render into that state’?”

“That’s the thing right there. I want very much in my heart to make you the snowshoes, but you say things like ‘“Render into that state”?’ and it hurts me. So I talk funny. So I’m just a big joke to you.”

“No, Mittler.”

“Snowshoes,” he said, looking down at the place in the snow where my snowshoes would be if I were wearing them. “But I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Why?”

“First of all, you’re married to Miss Hartman.”

“You’re such a goofball every time you say ‘Miss Hartman.’ ”

“Second of all, you’re mean and you always were and you always will be because people don’t change and I’m in love with you.”

“Okay, first of all—What?! Okay, first of all I’m not ‘married’ to Skip Hartman. I don’t owe her anything. She robbed my innocence from me.”

“I doubt it.”

“It’s true.”

“So what about the other part, how you’ll always be mean to me?”

“Maybe I won’t, and you know something? Even mean people’s fingers get cold. Mine hurt.”

“Come here close to me,” he said. I did. He took the two soggy gloves off my hands and stuffed them in the pockets of his puffy coat.

“You’re taking my gloves
off
?”

“Trust,” he said, as if he had already explained his thoughts on the subject a hundred times. He took my two red hands in one of his and shoved them gently up under his coat, under his sweater, under his other sweater, under his thermal shirt, under his T-shirt, and against his flat, hard ribs. He arranged my hands so the palms were in maximum surface contact with his warm skin. “This is what you have to do in a cold-weather survival situation is engage the bodily contact of the other person
for warmth.” I felt his heart thrusting madly against my palms. I was kneeling before him now.

“When are you going to show me your tent?”

“It’s in a tree.”

“A tree?”

“It’s folded up inside a small waterproofed nylon sack that is suspended from the branch of a sycamore at approximately One-hundred-eighth Street.”

“So let’s get it down from the tree and open it up and go inside it and engage bodily contact of the other person for warmth.”

“Due to the personnel of the Parks and Recreation Commission patrolling the area in daylight hours, I cannot open the tent at this time.”