Nothing Is Terrible (20 page)

“Right back,” she said, meaning, I’ll be right back. She walked toward the kitchen. I leapt up and blocked her way. I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned into her. Her shoulders felt bulky and firm. She had a naturally low center of gravity and kept moving forward. I slid backward in my socks on the polished oaken floor of the living room.

“Say something say something say something say something.”

Myra paused and scowled at me. I mean that her eyebrows went up and the ends of her mouth went down so that her lips formed two pale pink crescents that sandwiched a black crescent. Her face lost suppleness and looked like a hard plastic child’s Halloween mask. Myra fell on the floor and twitched. Her eyes closed and she was still. Tommy screamed and rushed to her. Skip Hartman called an ambulance. The ambulance took Myra to the Marmot Medical Center, where she was treated for a stroke.

Reader, now don’t be cruel and think, How can you tell the difference between Myra before a stroke and Myra after a
stroke? The difference was that she needed someone to take care of her in the most basic way, which Tommy could not do. He could not do it because during his assault trial he lost control and slapped the prosecuting attorney. The judge indicted him on the spot for assault and declared a mistrial. For the next four months Tommy lived in the Marmot town jail. Skip Hartman moved up to Marmot to care for Myra White.

Skip Hartman’s move was a boon to me in terms of not having to sneak rendezvous with Mittler. Still, if her move seemed to say to me, “You don’t have to sneak rendezvous with Mittler,” it also seemed to say, “However, you will pay a price.” But her move, being a move and not, say, a tearstained five-page letter written to me in anguish on her first night alone with my thrombotic aunt in Marmot, did not specify what that price would be. After all, there were prices everywhere, and I was an adolescent without fiscal savvy. Even now I am in capitalism but not of it.

Mittler offered me love that was tender and hard and angry and fair. With the advent of the warm weather, he folded up his indoor tent and suspended a hammock from hooks he had secured in the crumbling walls of the room in the condemned building. He made me sleep with him in the hammock. It was not at all comfortable.

“Why do I have to sleep with you in the hammock?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

He answered me not with a word but a look; no, not even a look, unless looking away counts as a look.

I lay in the hammock at night but rarely slept in it, so when I came home in the morning, I turned on the AC, collapsed
into the soft white duvet, slept for four hours, woke up, slowly washed the dried boy–girl fluid and grime from my body, and made huevos rancheros, a hearty meal for a young woman. I wished there were a way to make huevos rancheros elsewhere than the kitchen, which was a fright, for Hoving Hartman loved to cook but not to clean. He also loved to eat food in all the rooms of the house, but not to clean.

Hoving’s body itself was a disaster. Neither of us liked when I changed his diapers, so I tended to save it up for a few days at a time. Once, in the middle of summer, I smelled him in the upstairs hallway and charged at him with a fresh pair.

He said, “Get away from me, you little bratty boy. You poked me last time.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“Yes you are and stop trying to deny it.”

I did what I should have done long ago. I lifted up my T-shirt and showed him my breasts.

“Holy criminy!” We stood in the dark hallway on the long, thin Persian rug. He stared dutifully. I kept my shirt aloft a long while so those breasts would imprint on his old man’s brain.

“May I touch them?”

“Yeah, but only for like a second.”

In his brief tactile encounter with my breasts he was grave and clinical, as a man would be who had touched women for a living. “Thank you,” he said when he was done.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You may now change me if you like.” I did change him there in the hallway and showed his bottom and his privates the same respect he had shown my breasts. His face looked contemplative, mildly pleased, as he lay back on the floor with his
knees up and his legs spread. In this way I did not mind changing him so much and we developed a way of relating to one another that was suited to the task.

I felt less certain of myself in the problem area of his mouth. It, too, emitted an odor. It was one of those places in the world—like El Salvador—in which I knew atrocities were being committed but I was hesitant to find out what they were. Some bleeding went on in there that I caught glimpses of from time to time. He had, as I believe I have previously documented, several fuzzy gray-brown teeth of his own. These were attached to his bloody gums and could not have been detached without the use of force. But I would now like to introduce into the record some other teeth of his that were more architectural in nature. These could be attached and detached by him at will and by me, eventually, with some cajoling. It was not just the bleeding and the odor that convinced me to make my first oral intervention in Hoving. One day after my nap and my shower, I tiptoed into the war zone of the kitchen to fetch my huevos and I saw him at the kitchen table lipping a thing that I at first mistook for the rib cage of a chicken, but which I then realized was his set of false teeth. He held them up to his mouth on the tips of his oily little fingers, not lipping only but sucking, too, the cheesy-soft matter from the crevices of them. I am not willing to state categorically that I saw one thick segmented strand of this pink-faint goo struggle up from its lodging and wiggle for dear life as Hoving brought his wet, open mouth down over it, but I’m saying that’s what I thought I saw. I ran to the cabinet under the sink, took out a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves, slipped them on, grabbed the teeth from his hands, and okay I think it’s fair to say that I raced around the house
screaming,
“Eeeeew! Eeeeew!”
until I could locate the minty acid wash and drop his awful teeth into it.

I came back downstairs and I was very mad at him. “Grandpa,” I said, “could you please not ever do that? It’s really disgusting and you could probably poison yourself or something.”

“Child, am I your grandfather?” he asked.

“No. I don’t know why I called you that. It just came out of my mouth.”

“Do you have a grandfather?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come here, sweet girl,” he said, and opened his arms to me. I went into them, and put my cheek on his shoulder, and felt indescribably unhappy.

I passed the road test for my driver’s license by the width of the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin. Skip bought me a car for my seventeenth-and-a-half birthday. Two days later I smashed it and she bought me a new one and I smashed that and she bought me another and I used it to drive Hoving up to Marmot on Labor Day.

I don’t know why I hate the end of August so much. If each year at that time I could smash the car just enough to get into a monthlong coma without any major bone breaks or contusions, I think I’d appreciate the vacation from consciousness. I navigated the car up the driveway. I did not see the weed trimmer until after I had heard the front wheel crush it, and by then it wasn’t a weed trimmer anymore.

Hoving raced ahead of me up the flagstones with his side-to-side bowlegged wobble-walk and knocked on the door. Skip Hartman shouted, “It’s open!” from deep within. We found her
on the threshold of the living room and the deck. “Daddy,” she said, in a tone as if chastising him for not allowing himself to have been driven up for a visit sooner. She placed her hands on his shoulders, bent forward, and gave him a kiss on his forehead. Me, she stared at.

“Hi, Skip.”

She nodded.

“It was a long car ride.”

She looked at me.

“My back is kind of hurty-ow-y.”

“Upper back or lower?”

“Middle.”

“Hm.”

“What have you to nibble on?” Hoving said.

“Your teeth,” I said.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, the lad is funny.”

“I thought we were past that ‘lad’ crap.”

“I’ll prepare snacks when I’ve finished feeding Myra,” Skip said.

I said to Skip, “So I was wondering if you could align my back by that hugging thing you do.”

“I could not.”

I went out to the deck to watch Skip feed Myra.

“Did you bring fresh diapers for him?” she asked.

“Who do you think’s been changing him for the last few months?”

“The suffering must be fantastic.”

“You know, all you have to do is forbid me to be in love with him. Did you ever think of that?”

“It had not occurred to me.”

“So, forbid me.”

“No, I mean it had not occurred to me that you were in love with him. Please excuse me.” She dropped a spoonful of stewed carrots onto the wooden surface of the deck, stood up, and walked into the house.

Myra reclined in the chair in the same position she had been in when we came up to bail out Tommy. She was wrapped in a brown woolen army blanket. The sun shone directly down upon her. She stared out at the birch and maple and pine trees beyond the yard. I sat in the small folding bridge chair Skip had been sitting in to feed her. She turned her head slowly to look at me. Taking full advantage of her psychomotor retardation, I gazed into her eyes for longer than she would ever have let me before the stroke. For the first time, I saw how quick she was inside that slow body. I saw urgency in those eyes. I thought I almost saw the words she might bring into existence on behalf of her own feelings, if she were a woman who knew what she felt, and for the moment, because of her eyes’ eloquence, I suspected she was such a woman after all.

I picked up the spoon from the floor of the deck and wiped it off on my ancient T-shirt. I dipped the spoon into the shallow porcelain bowl and brought it toward her mouth with stew on it, chanting the age-old pun,
“Choo-choo-choo-choo.”
She bit on the spoon with the crushing jaw strength of a snapping turtle. She would not release the spoon. I looked out at the trees and wondered what part of the house Skip Hartman had gone to and what she was thinking now.

“I’m hungry,” Myra said.

“What?”

“You are d. You are d. You are day. You are daydreaming.”

I removed the spoon from her mouth and filled it and said again,
“Choo-choo-choo-choo.”

Myra said, “D.”

“What?”

“Doe.”

“What?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t feed you? You said you were hungry.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t ch.”

“What?”

“Don’t
choo-choo
.”

“Oh. Oops.”

I finished feeding this new invalid and self-assertive Myra and went inside. The doorbell was ringing. I answered it. Hoving stood there in a shirt and tie and suitcoat and no other clothing. A big, sturdy fellow in his fifties was holding Hoving by the back of his collar—more or less where the scruff of his neck would be if he had one. The big man looked like a fatter, older, more upstanding version of the man at the gate of Marmot.

Hoving’s face looked vacant and sad. The other man’s face looked disciplined in its principles.

“Who are you?” the man said to me.

I said, “Who are you?”

“I’m John Hand. This man came out of this house and wandered into my yard, where he shouldn’t be. I also don’t know how he got in because there’s a fence.”

“Oh, naughty!” I slapped Hoving’s hand. “By the way, are you related to the guy at the gate?”

“Johnny? He’s my son. Now, who are you?”

“That’s my grandpa. I’ll take him now, thank you.”

“Are you related to Tommy White?”

“My mommy’s not home. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“Do you have any idea what this—this man did?”

“Grandpa, what did you do?”

“Well, my child, I was out for a lovely barefoot stroll in the backyard. I do so enjoy the sensation of stiff grasses in the soft skin between my toes. Too, the varieties of olfactory sensation in this part of the country at this time of the year allow me to dream fondly of days finer than the present one. In the vicinity of this gentleman’s home, I smelt a septic tank running high, which caused a sympathetic stirring in my own bowels. And child, you know how I loathe the sensation of fecal matter clinging to my skin, and the subsequent dermal irritation. I was able to discard my trousers and nappies in the nick of time for a pleasant open-air defecation. I so enjoy a lovely stroll in the country.”

“Oh, Grandpa, you sure are aware of those sensations. Grandpa likes to play that edge between emeritus professor and disgusting senile fart. It’s funny, right?”

“No.” John Hand stood blocking the sky, hands on hips.

Skip Hartman emerged from a room somewhere and took up a position next to me. Her eyes were red, and the splotchy red and beige skin on her face hung more loosely on the bone than I had remembered. Still, the erect posture and broad shoulders and the expansive breadth of clavicle that Skip introduced to our side of the doorway would be, I sensed, a more than adequate balance to the bulk and indignation this man was weighing in with on his side. “What goes on here?” she asked.

“Who are you?” John Hand said.

Skip said, “Who are you?”

“I am John Hand, a village elder.”

“Elder than what?”

“Is this your father?”

“Yes.”

“He shat in my yard so please keep him inside this damn house. Nothing personal.”

“You say ‘elder,’ but the word ‘vigilante’ springs to mind.”

“You’re out of line, lady. Is this your daughter?”

“Why?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Then I’ll tell you something. This is not the kind of household we want in Marmot. Tommy White is a troublemaker, and I don’t think this is your daughter, and we prefer if the children of the community are not exposed to any lesbian or other homosexual type of activity.”

“Did you say ‘lesbian’?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“That is quite interesting, for you see, this young chap here is not a lesbian, nor could he and I in any way be construed as engaging in lesbian or other homosexual type of activity. In that regard, sir, I commend to your attention the perfectly formed penis that hangs—and sometimes does not hang, if you follow my meaning, sir—between the boy’s legs. Paul, undo your trousers for the gentleman.”