Nothing Is Terrible (6 page)

I came out into Dierdre’s backyard as the sun was setting and she looked sick from smoking a pack of cigarettes. “Do you want to try some of the stuff in that book?” I asked.

“With you?
Eeew
. We can touch tongues if you want.”

We touched tongues for a second and Dierdre vomited in the dark grass of her backyard. I went home.

There are certain objects meant to be looked upon by certain eyes and vice versa. Such was the case with my Uncle Tommy’s cape and the eyes of Skip Hartman. Things Tommy didn’t quite know about himself were absorbed and understood by Skip Hartman, who was, it should be said now, independently wealthy. As for Tommy, when he entered Skip Hartman’s classroom one Thursday evening in mid-autumn for
the first parent-teacher conference and witnessed the erect posture, the short, straight, segmented blond hair, the crisp, pale-blue linen sleeveless dress, the black silk scarf, and the black suede lace-up boots with the Louis Quatorze heels, he gasped. “I hope you don’t mind my saying that’s a delightful dress.”

“And I hope you don’t mind if I tell you something you are no doubt already aware of: namely, how precious is your niece.”

There was everything that needed to be said. The rest of the conference was a mere formality, ending with Skip Hartman’s grateful acceptance of Tommy’s invitation to dinner the following night. On the way home in the car Tommy spoke passionately about the importance of a good education. Myra was at the conference too, in her way.

An hour before the arrival of Skip Hartman at our house for dinner, I entered the kitchen to find Myra’s eyes, which had been dry for several months, leaking again. I have not ever come to a good understanding of the folkways of the kitchen, but I liked to observe Myra doing somber, orderly things to food in vessels with tools and heat. When she moved, I followed her. When she stood at the counter surrounded by the bright light of the kitchen, bashing something soft with a wooden hammer, I stood behind her.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.”

“What are those tears?”

“What tears?”

“The ones coming out of your eyes.”

“I guess allergies.”

“You don’t feel sad inside right now?”

“No.”

“What do you feel inside?”

“I’m trying to concentrate on making dinner for you and Uncle Tommy and Miss Hartman.”

“Are you making a special dinner?”

“Just trying to make something everyone will like.”

“What are you making?”

“Veal.”

“Do you like Miss Hartman?”

“Yes. Uncle Tommy likes her very much.”

“Thanks for making such a great dinner for Miss Hartman.”

“Trying to make something people like.”

I was a skinny girl and short for an eleven-year-old. Myra was tall and big. I leaned in over her broad behind and hugged her ribs. Her large breasts rested lightly on my skinny arms. I pressed my belly and my little chest against the great contour of her behind. She continued bashing as if nothing had changed.

“Aunt Myra?”

“Yes.”

“You’re so beautiful.”

She missed with the hammer and broke something delicate that fell on the floor in pieces. I felt a tremor shuttle through her body and heard a noise come from her. I let go of her and tried to get around to the front of her to see what was happening on her face, but she ducked down and away from me to pick up the shards of ceramic off the floor. “I think you ought to get out of here with your bare feet,” she said.

“I want to see what everyone is going to wear for Miss Hartman tonight,” Tommy said twenty minutes before she arrived.
“I will stand by the back door in the kitchen, since that’s where she’ll come into the house and see you first. I’ll stand right here and you two come in wearing your outfits and I’ll tell you if they’re working or not.”

Everyone became excited for this fun family activity. Our first outfits were all wrong. “Elegance, elegance, supreme elegance for the meal.”

We returned in a pair of frilly pastel outfits that made us look like people who owned one good costume and saved it for Easter, though I didn’t believe in God and if Myra believed in anything in particular, it’s doubtful that she knew it. Tommy stared at the outfits for a long time with his close-set eyes and the hurt look that was really a quality of the skin. “This will be fine. I think we could do better but we’re out of time. Why are these important decisions always rushed? Myra, why are these important decisions always rushed?”

“I’m sorry,” Myra said.

In a stage whisper, I said to Myra, “Call him ‘dear.’ He wants you to say ‘I’m sorry, dear.’ ”

Tommy said, “Ah, Christ, are you just gonna make weird remarks when the teacher gets here? Is that what I have to look forward to—you throwing off the whole dinner conversation?”

“If I just said normal stuff, I don’t think Miss Hartman would be coming to dinner.”

“Hell, Christ, what do I know, right, Myra?” Tommy said, looking at me. “I’m just the guy who bought the house where the whole dinner is going to be. What does that make me? Just some idiot with a tiny house in the suburbs.”

Skip Hartman’s long legs were sheathed in black leather when she stalked into the kitchen. She carried a lily of the valley
and wore hand-stitched cowboy boots and an oversized white cotton chemise that hung loose over the pants.

After swallowing a first small mouthful of prosciutto at the family dinner table in the kitchen, Skip Hartman said to Tommy, “I am making the supposition that you are some sort of public-interest lawyer.”

“Nope.” Tommy beamed. She had instinctively picked the best lie. “I would have been a lawyer but I did poorly on the LSAT. I would have done well if it weren’t for the time limit. I think there are plenty of jobs in the field of the law where you don’t have to think fast. Oh, I can think all right, but I need time. I wouldn’t make a good trial lawyer—I know that about myself and I accept that limitation about myself—but there are plenty of jobs within the field of the law I could have done, if it weren’t for the damn time limit on the LSAT.”

“It is perfectly all right—I daresay advantageous—to think slowly, if one thinks thoroughly. Many people who think quickly think sloppily,” Skip Hartman said, indicting by implication anyone whom Tommy might have envied.

For the sake of the rapport that had to develop between Uncle Tommy and Skip Hartman, I refrained from making what Tommy would have called weird remarks at the table. I tried to interject funny, niecely things into the mutually respectful dialogue, just as Myra provided the kind of wifely silence that deepens the harmony between the husband and, shall we say, the husband’s prospective business partner.

After two glasses of brandy in the living room (did he get these moves out of a book?) Tommy, talking more and more like Skip as the evening wore on, said, “Miss Hartman, I’m glad my niece is in such capable hands as yours. Mary, would
you like to show Miss Hartman your bedroom, where you do all your schoolwork?”

Skip Hartman and I strolled to the threshold of my room. “Well, my child,” she said, looking dizzy and frightened.

There was only one thing I wanted to show her in that dark little room with the false wood paneling and the cheap orange carpet. I took her hand and led her to the empty army cot by the window and stood with her before it, saying nothing.

“This is where your twin brother slept,” she said.

I nodded.

“ ‘Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?’ ” she said to herself and me. And to me: “You miss him terribly.”

I nodded, and the tears started leaking, and then in the presence of Skip Hartman I let my body go. I felt jolts of electricity pulsing through me and when Skip Hartman took me in her arms I could not imagine a more intense pleasure than sobbing and being held by Skip Hartman. She was a head taller than I, and presumably knew what she was doing while I did not, and yet what we were doing did not feel like an adult hugging a child. No doubt the treachery of retrospect comes into play here, but those two people in that room seem to me now like two women hugging, each with something to give the other for comfort.

I stopped crying, and some space opened up between the fronts of our bodies, which had been pressed together. Skip Hartman lightly touched the sides of my body underneath my arms. She put one hand on my face, in my hair. “You are such a beautiful child,” she said, and kissed me on the mouth.

“Did you two have a nice time in there?” Tommy said, back in the kitchen, showing Skip to the door.

“Splendid,” she replied.

“It got cold outside, and you in your cotton blouse. Take this.” Tommy removed the cape from his shoulders and held it out, gorgeous black wool with the crimson inside.

“Mr. White, I must admit that I have been admiring your cape all evening, and I must also say that I find your generosity breathtaking,” she said, leaning against the wall in the tiny foyer for support, dizzy again, overwhelmed by the luck, if you could call it that, of having discovered such a family, if you could call it that, “but I have also observed how very important your cape is to you and I do not wish to be the cause of a separation between you and your cape.”

“You can give it back when you come to dinner a week from tonight,” Tommy said.

“That I do wish for, and that I can accept,” Skip said, and grinned. “That I wholeheartedly accept.”

On the night that followed, Tommy asked me to play catch with him. I said no. “Please please please please please please?” he said. We gave it a shot, but I kept forgetting to catch the ball or throw it, and that was because I was thinking of a song. It was called “You Do Something Something Something” and was one of the show tunes my father used to sing, incorrectly I suspect, when he was alive:

“How do you feel about mutual funds?” Skip Hartman said to Uncle Tommy at dinner number two.

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s your gut instinct, yes or no?”

“No?” The blood roiled up beneath his pale freckles.

“Me too!” Skip exclaimed, the pleasure of
this
mutuality shooting up through her straight spine into her neck and head. “I feel I can talk to you about my financial instruments,” she said.

“I’m not sure I could add much to the conversation, embarrassed to say,” Tommy said.

“No, no, that’s quite all right. I feel I can talk to you nonetheless and you will listen. I’ll show you my portfolio of investments and you either say nothing or you say anything that occurs to you.”

I have never in my life seen someone understand someone else as uncannily as Skip understood Tommy. It was now Tommy who looked dizzy. Myra’s face was blank and indecipherable as usual, and Skip had the good sense not to try to draw her into the conversation more than perfunctorily. I can’t even tell you how hard it is to remember Myra. For all I know she spoke all the time, and I have simply forgotten everything she said.

In my room, Skip Hartman sat on Paul’s bed and held me in her smooth arms as if I were a baby. I liked when she walked toward me and I liked when she held me in her arms. Then I held her in my arms and played with her hair. I rubbed it and tried to mess it up. She thought that was funny. We went over to the little mirror above the dresser and watched ourselves put Skip’s hair in different positions. She made faces at me. She asked to feel the muscles of my upper arms. “Oh, my, but you are a strong little girl,” she said. She felt the muscles of my calves and said, “Oh, my, but you
are
a strong little girl.” She felt the muscles of my thighs and said, “You are
such
a strong little girl.” This seems like a good time to say, if I have not said it already, that I both did and did not know what I was doing at
age eleven, just as now I do and do not remember what really happened, because I think that after Skip Hartman said, “You are
such
a strong little girl,” I climbed on top of her on the rug and affectionately gave her my virginity.

“Should I still call you Miss Hartman?” I asked.

“Call me whatever you would like to call me.”

“I like Miss Hartman.”

“Miss Hartman likes you. And what shall she call you?”

“She shall call me Paul.”

“All right, Paul.”

“She shall call me Paul only sometimes.”

“All right, Paul Only Sometimes.”

You may wonder what it was like to continue to be a student in the sixth-grade class taught by the first person I had ever made love to. The answer is that I wanted to see her as often as possible, and that seeing her and speaking with her at school, yet knowing that we could not speak as we spoke in private, caused in me an excitement that slipped easily into discomfort and confusion. The confusion came about when I tried to understand what the words we said to each other in that public space really meant, because they did not seem to mean the most obvious thing that was conveyed in them. “Mary,” she happened to call out one day in the classroom, causing a small commotion just below my chest, “would you please demonstrate for the class the proper way to add fractions, using the case of one half plus one half as a straightforward-enough illustration?”

“Yes Miss Hartman.”

I went to the blackboard. The air near my head was buzzing. I looked around and tried to see my classmates, which I did, but I had a hard time composing them in my mind; I saw individual
elements of them, and of objects in the class—someone’s neck, a plastic hairpin, the bottom of a chair leg. I drew the two figures on the board and made some manipulations of them using a logic that was perfectly clear to me in the state of mind I was in. I then turned to my teacher and said, “Miss Hartman, I believe that one half plus one half equals two.”

“All right,” she said, and approached me. She took the chalk from my hand and, in doing so, touched two of my fingers with one of hers. She redrew the equation on the board and arrived at the correct answer, which was apparently one, and explained how she had done it.

“I still believe it’s two,” I said, standing next to her.

She looked frightened, as she had in the foyer of our house. “Mary,” she said, controlling a quaver in her voice that was audible to those who knew to listen for one, “perhaps you are confusing arithmetic with religion or poetry. Religion and poetry are matters of belief. Arithmetic is, unfortunately, not. In poetry in particular, one half plus one half may sometimes equal two. In arithmetic it cannot and will not.”