Nothing Is Terrible (2 page)

We were discovered at six
A.M
. by the aforementioned grounds manager, Hawthorne, the other grown-up whose anger we were looking forward to. He was a big, robust, crimson man in his early sixties who loved his morning constitutional on the golf course in crisp khaki shorts and saddle-style golf spikes. He came upon this huge hole in the first green. He peered down into it and saw the two skinny weirdo new foster children of the TV repairman sleeping. The wrongdoing, I imagine, was so categorically pure that the outrage it inspired in him must have felt something like delight. He had thin white hair, and his whole head turned dark purple with what seemed to be happiness when he woke us up. He grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the hole. As I came up, I put my lips
next to his ear and said, “You can’t pull my brother’s arm like that. It’ll come off in your hand.” He thought that was very funny, and Paul came up on his own.

“I feel like I’m dreaming here,” Hawthorne said. “Tell me this isn’t happening.”

“This isn’t happening,” Paul said.

Hawthorne thought that was even funnier. Without taking his eyes off the shovel he said, “Your uncle’s gonna go nuts over this. Your uncle is going to go nuts. I just hope I can get you kids up to the house before he wakes up this morning so I’ll have the pleasure of getting him out of bed for this one. I mean, this is inspirational.”

Paul said, “I’m sure the golfers will think so.” Hawthorne’s mirth subsided then. As he walked us down to his station wagon in the clubhouse parking lot and drove us up to Tommy’s house he tried to laugh a few more times, but it was a big effort for him. In fact, we were not prepared for just how upset it would make Hawthorne to contemplate the indignation of his bosses, the golfers.

Hawthorne and Tommy had shared an incident. The very first time a TV set had broken at the country club, Tommy showed up to repair it in a black-and-white houndstooth check blazer and white pinpoint oxford dress shirt and pale blue tie with small bright-yellow polka dots. Hawthorne had a fit. He told Tommy to hurry up and fix the TV and get out of there and next time come dressed for the job he was doing. Tommy was bewildered. Not only did Tommy have better golf skills than Hawthorne without being allowed to play golf where Hawthorne was allowed, but Tommy had a better wardrobe and better taste in clothes than Hawthorne, and Hawthorne
could wear his nice clothes in places where Tommy couldn’t wear his even nicer ones.

We arrived at Tommy’s doorstep with the great discomfort of Hawthorne looming above us.

Our Aunt Myra answered the door, a non-churchgoer up and dressed on a Sunday morning at 6:45
A.M
. Hawthorne stood between and slightly behind Paul and me, one hand on a shoulder of each child. At ten years old I wanted to think of myself as a person who knew who she was, but now, many years later, when I think of the way I focused my attention on the faces of adults, I know that I needed those faces to find myself in. Myra’s was the hardest possible face for this purpose. Before Hawthorne spoke, I saw a look of confusion on her face. Then Hawthorne said, “The children have vandalized the first green.” Then the look on Myra’s face was gone, replaced by a frozen expression that I had been seeing for a month. It was an expression that said here was another of life’s generalized difficulties. To give more of herself to an event like this would have been something too wild for Myra. Where inside a person do all the events go when they go almost unnoticed? To the event graveyard.

“I’ll get my husband,” she said.

Hawthorne stood silently with Paul and me on the flagstone stoop, none of us yet invited into the house.

After ten minutes, Tommy came to the door. He had not been awake. About him was the smell of stick deodorant fermented for hours in dark armpits. He wore a neatly pressed dark blue paisley satin robe that showed some of his narrow, hairless chest. His pale, gently freckled skin looked even softer at this, a wee hour for him. His fingers were long and delicate
and tapered, the finest fingers of any TV repairman in town. His blue eyes were shiny and his facial features looked small and fine and hurt. Tommy always looked hurt. If, in the morning, he poured milk into his cereal and the milk splashed on his clothes, that was a small example of injustice. Hawthorne at his door in the morning with the two brats was a big, vulgar, bodily injustice standing at his door with the two brats. Hawthorne overseeing the TVs down at the club presented a professional and personal challenge for Tommy that was unpleasant but workable. Hawthorne on the border of Tommy’s sleep, however, Hawthorne authoritatively touching the children whom Tommy had brought into his own home for the sake of guilt and duty and love of his dead sister and how it would look to the people who would care how it looked—and even for the sake of the children themselves, whom he worried about perpetually on top of his own worries—Hawthorne, in short, in the tender private places sent Tommy into a quiet tizzy. Did he have to bow to Hawthorne on the threshold of his own house? He needed Hawthorne.

Partly because of the manly discomfort Tommy’s prettiness caused in him, Hawthorne wanted to get out of there and order someone to fill in that hole, so he gave Tommy the basic information and was ready to leave when Tommy said, “I’ll pay you whatever it costs to repair the hole.”

“No need.”

“I want to.”

“Don’t.”

“I will.”

“You will what?”

“Send you money for the damage.”

“I’m not gonna tell you how much it is.”

“I’ll guess.”

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

“It won’t get you anywhere.”

“I don’t care.”

“Gotta run.”

“You’ll be receiving a check.”

“I’ll send it back.”

“I’ll send it back at you.”

“Do whatever you want,” Hawthorne said, and walked away.

I understood why adults were inclined to hate or at least fear Paul. Paul had an aberrant philosophical cast. He knew things other people didn’t know—secrets from the womb, perhaps—and he had a genius for expressing them in unhappy prophecy. “They’re not ever going to let you into the club no matter what you do,” Paul said to Tommy, and Tommy, who had had no practice at child rearing, grabbed a hunk of Paul’s curly hair close to the scalp and used it as a handle with which to rattle Paul’s head vigorously for fifteen or eighteen seconds.

When I’m feeling sad, which is quite often even now that I’m all grown up, I look for ways to console myself for Paul’s crippling illness of that summer. Illness, I think, taking my lead from Paul, was the form Paul was meant to inhabit. Appropriately to his condition, he was a boy without hope, and it is the memory of his lack of hope that leads me unfailingly back to the beauty of Paul. He was not happy or charming or pleasing to the eye, and he understood these things about himself, and he was not indifferent to them, but he also did not rail against what he was, the way Tommy did and the way everyone else does whom I’ve ever met, either right out in the open for all to see
or else secretly in some place that may be hidden even from themselves.

Until September of that year I divided my time between the boy who was already little more than a mind in a dark room and the two strangers who were now my parents. More time with Paul than with the others. I felt I had no choice but to stay with him in that dank little space. I did not do enough big, muscular activity to subdue the rude and contemptuous feelings an unhappy girl like me harbored in her breast, but Paul appreciated my sacrifice, and in return he tried to teach me to think with rigor and passion, if not exactly with the joy of intellectual activity.

“I have another conundrum for you,” he said, lying supine on his army cot, looking grim on the night after the head rattling.

“Okay.”

“Let’s say Mom and Dad are still alive.”

“Let’s say they are.”

“No, I mean let’s believe they are.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I’m trying to help you think.”

“Don’t.”

“Fine. Just say they are, then.”

“Fine.”

“And then they’re kidnapped by these evil guys and the evil guys call you on the phone and tell you to go to where they’re holding Mom and Dad, which is this big abandoned armory out on the edge of town with a quarter-mile running track. You walk into the armory and it’s all lit up by these bare bulbs that are hanging down from the ceiling, and from where you stand by the entrance there’re four tiny specks in the huge area of
concrete inside the running track. Two of the specks are Mom and Dad, tied up and sitting in chairs. The other two specks are the evil guys, standing over Mom and Dad, and one of ’em’s pointing a gun at Mom’s head and the other one’s pointing a gun at Dad’s head.”

I was sitting on Paul’s bed next to his body and I cried a little.

“We have to do this,” he said. “It’s important.”

“Okay.”

“Then one of the guys says, ‘Listen, girlie, here are some very lightweight running shoes that are just your size,’ and he hands you the shoes and he goes, ‘You have to put them on and get on that track and run a mile in four minutes or less or we shoot your parents.’ So, Paul, the conundrum is, what do you do?”

“I run the mile, what else?”

“You can’t.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Shut up. Why are you even saying this?”

“Because you have to start thinking of these things. You don’t have any parents to help you when life gets confusing.”

“I have you.”

“I wouldn’t count on me.”

“I said I’d run the damn mile.”

“Even professionals can only do it in like 3:59.99999. How are you gonna do it?”

“Because I have to.”

“You couldn’t even stop Tommy from breaking my neck, practically.”

“Paul, you make me feel so helpless.”

“You
are
helpless, Paul.”

On the first morning of his convalescence, Paul asked me to travel from my army cot across the rust-colored deep pile carpet to his army cot, sit down beside him, and tickle him. He couldn’t have borne the invasive tickling that causes convulsions of laughter. He wanted the kind that is light fingertips rushing along the surface of the person, leaving a wake of little outstanding nubs. I tickled him in this way and we observed the effects of the tickling on Paul’s body. We discovered that it was interesting for me to tickle his chest in particular because of the changes in his nipples: they shrank slightly in circumference, and grew darker, and stood out in pointy relief from the rest of his chest. For that summer at least, my own body remained a private space that I could do whatever I wanted with, except for my hands, which, beginning on that morning, I submitted to the behest of Paul and his body. Paul’s body became the joint property of me and Paul—a fascinating little domain full of mystery and foreboding.

Myra came into the room that morning at eight o’clock, as she would do every morning that summer, with a bowl of sugared cereal for Paul. She did all the external things that a good mother would do for her own child. She was gentle and meek and almost sweet. Whatever feelings of unmitigated sweetness she had were trapped inside her body. All of the feelings were in there, and they rarely could come out. She entered the room and opened the curtains and, because the room was dark, turned on the bare ceiling light. She put the raised breakfast tray over Paul’s abdomen and put her hand on his forehead and asked him how he was feeling. She asked me how I was feeling, too. “Come downstairs and I’ll fix you breakfast,” she said to me.

I don’t remember how I began helping Myra—if that’s what you would call what I did—in her garden. I can’t imagine that she asked me. She didn’t ask people to do things that would benefit her. She didn’t ask me to set the table or clean up after meals or wash the dishes or take out the garbage. Tommy told me to do some of those things some of the time, when he remembered. I must have volunteered to help Myra in the garden on that first morning of Paul’s illness, seeing an opportunity to be away from Paul, out under the sun, moving around and smelling the earth.

It was also an opportunity to be near Myra. The emotional comfort she had to give voluntarily was, as I said, locked inside her body, but I found, with Myra, that I could get it by taking it. For an hour that first morning I watched her in the garden. Her body was the opposite of Tommy’s body. It was big and coarse and earthy. She was an inch taller than he was, and wider, and deeper. She had big round hips and heavy breasts and thick, muscular arms and legs, black dense hair, and a wide nose. She worked in the garden for hours under the sun and her skin didn’t burn and her body didn’t wear out. It was so clearly Tommy who had not wanted children of his own because even a ten-year-old could see that Myra was made for intense, purposeful sex and birthing. (I say this now, though who but a ten-year-old knows what a ten-year-old can see, except perhaps someone who has just turned eleven?)

After an hour in the garden, it was no longer enough to look at Myra, crouched with her spade. I ran at her and pounced on her back, trying to knock her over. She let out what I thought was a laugh, but might just have been an expulsion of air from the blow. I clung to her with my arms and legs. Was she smiling? Could she?

“Can I help you with your work?” I asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Please?”

“All right.”

“What should I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, just tell me something to do.”

“All right. Dig a long trough from here to where those sticks are.”

“What’s a trough?” (I knew what a trough was.)

“It’s a long, shallow hole.”

“How shallow should the trough be?”

“Six inches.”

“How long should the trough be?”

“To where those sticks are.”

I dug the trough for a minute and put the spade down and ran around the house as fast as I could. When I got back I told Myra I would run around the house again and she had to time me.

“How?”

“Does your watch have a second hand?”

“No.”

“Then go one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.”