Nothing Is Terrible (28 page)

“Skippy, you’re drunk.”

“It is so nice.”

“I’ve eaten LSD every day since I last saw you.”

“Is that your special way of telling me you’ve missed me?”

“Yes.”

“And have I missed you?”

“Terribly.”

“What are you doing?” Myra said to me. She was standing on the threshold of the book room of our comfortable brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I sat inside the book room at the rosewood desk. It was a Sunday morning in springtime.

“I’m writing my memoirs. Want to read them?”

“Don’t think I’d understand them.”

“Of course you would, honey. You are a groovy, self-knowing woman.”

“Maybe some other time. I just wanted to tell you I’m going down to clean the kitchen and make blueberry pancakes. They’ll be ready in half an hour.”

“Come here and let me kiss you,” I said.

Myra blushed and backed away from the threshold. I got up
out of my chair and approached her and she kept backing away. I caught her halfway down the hall and gave her a light, dry kiss on the cheek. She pawed at her cheek as if to wipe off the kiss, and went downstairs.

Reader, isn’t it totally cool how Myra bounced back from that stroke? She even used it to sort of grind out a couple of new little personality traits. I wouldn’t dare say that Myra was a new woman—you’re not going to get any of that kind of crap here as we draw toward the end of this account. Still, Myra is modest proof of a girl’s ability to progress. “Modest proof indeed,” you might say, but I say Myra is an inherently incremental chick, and I have been rewarded by waiting a very very very long time for her to accomplish the smallest change. Though I certainly do not deserve it, I hope you have been able to find it in your heart to wait similarly for me.

I went back to my memoirs and became lost in writing until I heard the distinctive rhythm of the Hartman footsteps, back and forth, back and forth, on the floor of the upstairs hallway. “Skip, is that you?” I called.

“Yes. Is that you, Mary?”

“Yes, Skip. I’m in here writing my memoirs.”

“And how is it going so far?”

“I’m starting with recent events and working my way back.”

“I see.” She came to the doorway. She wore a long navy-blue skirt with a red and yellow dragonfly/dung beetle/cockroach print. Beige silk shell. White athletic socks.

“I’m writing in the third person for greater objectivity. You know, like when I refer to myself I say ‘she’ instead of ‘I,’ ” I said.

“Yes, dear, I know what the third person is.”

“Are you just going to be snide from now on?”

“I’m not
just
going to be snide. Would you read me what you’ve written so far?”

“Ahem. ‘Two women sat on the bare oak floor of the empty house in the suburbs, one of them getting drunk on red wine, the other numbed by trauma and fear; one of them tall and slender and graceful and educated, the other short and wiry and wild and fearful and sad; one of them older and doting and heartsick and crazy for love, the other younger and contrary and inconsistent and capricious and mercurial and loving; one of them sad and defeated and tamed and subdued and resilient and resigned and tortured and guilty and doubtful and world-weary and decent and sick and kind, the other sad and abrasive and unrealistic and defiled and subdued and volatile and ephemeral and weak and sick and sad and abused and grateful and shocking; one of them with nice posture, the other not so much.’ What do you think?”

“Grown tired of a career in plagiarism?”

“Does that mean you like it?”

“It’s very touching.”

“Shit. Just say you like it.”

“I like it.”

“You’re lying.”

“Aunt Myra has made pancakes for breakfast. Why don’t you join us all in the kitchen.”

“I can’t. I’m writing.”

“Whatever.” She cocked her head sideways, looked down, and held her two hands out in front of her shoulders, palms facing me in the universal
whatever
body posture. I looked at her long, slender fingers and the creases in her palms. I thought of other things she had done with those hands: held a
glass of wine; patted her father on the head; manipulated the steering wheel of a car; taped the mouth of that rapist guy; turned the pages of a book; gently touched my bare shoulder. She was halfway down the stairs when I caught up with her and stopped her and took her hand in mine. Her face turned splotchy red and she brushed a lock of smooth gray hair from her eyes and it fell back into her eyes. I removed a bobby pin from where it had been nestled in the side of her head and replaced it, pinning back the stray lock she had just tried to brush away. We went down to breakfast together. So much for writing my memoirs.

Everyone was in the kitchen—my whole bouillabaisse of a family. There was Myra, walking toward the kitchen counter to address her blueberry pancakes. She had returned to her same way of walking that involved no shoulder movement. Her body still had the look of being a more concentrated mass than other people’s bodies: one of her arms would weigh more than one of someone else’s arms of equal size.

“Hoving and I are having bagels and lox,” Tommy said defiantly. He was in an excellent mood.

“The boy is keen on bagels and lox,” Hoving said. “He’s been to prison so why not let him have what he wants.” Hoving wore the old cape that belonged to Tommy, the one that was black on the outside and red on the inside. On Hoving’s body it drooped and was filthy with food stains and dried drippings of God knows what origin. Hoving wore his clothes with a senile, old-money stainedness that Tommy would not dare aspire to, a filth-style that no doubt disgusted Tommy even as it thrilled him.

Skip and I sat down at the table in the kitchen. With a metal spatula, Myra placed blueberry pancakes on our plates and on
her own. Tommy and his new best friend, Hoving, shared a conversation on bagel technique. Skip leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Guess who is now the exclusive changer of Hoving’s diapers.”

“No!” I whispered.

Tommy said, “I hate secrecy between women.”

Hoving said, “Young man, now that the bagel has been lightly toasted, you must spread a thin layer of cream cheese, thus. Do you see the way I am grasping the knife?”

“Myra, look at the way he’s grasping the knife,” Tommy said. “This is a professional medical practitioner with many years’ surgical experience, spreading the cream cheese in retirement.”

“Myra, these pancakes are exquisite,” Skip said.

I said, “The elderly white-haired man was saucy and irrelevant and dirty and kind; his young male companion was handsome and freckled and self-regarding. The old man was churlish and nonsensical and sweetly paternal and drooling; the young man was languid and vicious and obtuse and amused; the young man’s taciturn wife’s pancakes had been pronounced exquisite.”

“Hartman, what’s she doing?” Tommy asked.

“Our young woman seems to have become a play-by-play announcer of her own life. She’s dictating her autobiography live, as it were.”

“Who’s she dictating it to?”

“To the general populace of the kitchen. To no one in particular. To the air.”

“She’s dictating her memoir to the air,” I sang in an operatic soprano. “She’s dictating her memoir to the air, she’s dictating
her meh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-mwah tooooooo theeeeee aiyah!”

“Well, we’re going to move out soon anyway, which you can put in your memoir,” Tommy said. “Myra, honey, when you’re done with your pancakes I think we should go apartment hunting. Maybe in Brooklyn. What was that middle-income neighborhood near the park with all the black people where the real estate is still cheap? Do you think black people would tolerate us in the neighborhood or do I look too much like I’m from Darien? Would someone please answer me?”

“Isn’t the boy gloriously straightforward and simple?” Hoving said. “He’s like a fool in a Shakespearean tragedy.”

Reader, I think it happened when I closed my eyes and was wishing Tommy away. A utensil dropped onto a plate. A plate dropped onto the floor and shattered. I opened my eyes. Hoving’s chin was on the table and his eyes were closed. Skip was yelling, “Hoving!” Tommy yelled his name too. Myra picked up the phone and pressed the emergency number and spoke our address softly to the person on the other end. We moved the table to the side of the room and put Hoving’s body on the ground as if we were all about to change his diapers. Skip knelt above him and exhaled into his mouth and pressed down on his chest with the palm of one hand over the palm of the other hand, and exhaled into his mouth again and put her ear to his mouth to listen for breath. She repeated these movements for the next five minutes. Hoving was dead.

She sat cross-legged over him and held his head in her lap. His neck was bent at a sharp angle and I worried she was hurting him. She caressed his forehead, saying, “My sweet boy, my sweetheart, my nice man.” I stood above Skip and touched her
hard, orderly head and told her I loved Hoving. She said, “He was a good little father.”

“He was an exemplary man,” Tommy said, and touched the hem of his cape.

“Hoving,” Myra said.

The ambulance arrived.

In the months following Hoving’s funeral, Tommy and Myra moved out of the house. September Hartman and I became a pair of thin, sullen, lonely spinsters such as you might find sighing and puttering around the attics and hearths of nineteenth-century novels devoted principally to spirited young men. She and I slept in the same bed but rarely touched. We woke up grumpy and tried to give or receive comfort, often without success.

“I never thought I would say this, but without that man in my life I do not know what to do with myself,” Skip said one morning before dawn, lying next to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘yeah’?”

“Don’t snap at me.”

“I was not aware that I was snapping.”

“Well, you were.”

“Then I am sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“What are you sorry about?”

“I’m sorry you don’t know what to do with yourself without Hoving.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a stranger. It gives me the creeps.”

“Come here, darling,” she said. I rolled on my side to face
her. Softly, she kissed a few different spots on my face, and that was nice. “I had thought,” she said, “that my life for the next while would be given over to caring for my little brood: Hoving, you, even those people, your aunt and uncle, Myra and Thomas. And now—”

“And now there’s just me, and I’m not so good at being cared for.”

“Say something nice to me,” she said.

“ ‘Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves / A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me,’ ” I said.

A few tears dribbled out of Skip’s eyes, which she shut, and she rested her head on my shoulder and fell asleep for another hour. I lay awake, looking at her and looking out the window and wondering if adulthood meant letting someone you love lie on your arm in the morning when you want to get up and get out of the house, plus your arm is going numb.

When she woke up she said, “I dreamt we were playing that running game we played when you were a child.”

“What running game?”

“The one you called Going Away and Coming Back.”

“You mean where I sprinted around the block and you timed me?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened in the dream?”

“You sprinted around the block and I timed you.”

“What was my time?”

“Three months.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know.”

“How old was I?”

“My age.”

“How old were you?”

“Same age as you. I mean we were both my current age, but you were also a small child, younger than when I met you.”

“Huh. Weird.”

“Is that something you would be interested in doing?”

“You mean being an adult and being a child at the same time?”

“She is a comedian. I am in bed now with Richard Pryor.”

“Sprinting? Sure, I’d give it a try.”

On the way out to the street, Skip noticed the postcard on the low table in the entrance foyer. She picked it up and read it and winced. “This is for you,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it.” It had been written and sent to me by Mittler and it said, “I’m not dead, you know.”

“Why did you leave it there?”

“I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. I didn’t want to save it and I didn’t want to throw it away.”

“You wanted me to see it.”

“How do you know?”

“All right, forget it, forget it.”

In subsequent years I have, by the way, received a number of postcards from Mittler, with messages on them such as “Not dead” and “Not dead yet” and “Still not dead,” lately postmarked in Montana.

We stood together on the stoop of the building. Summer had come and the air was warm. The sky that morning was filling up with tall, dark clouds.

“Quickly, it’s going to rain,” she said, holding the stopwatch in the air. I went down to the sidewalk and waited. “Ready?” she said. “Go!” I stood still. “And the difficulty is?”

“You’re supposed to start with ‘Runners take your marks.’ ”

“Yes, of course. Runners take your marks.” I squatted and leaned forward and pressed my fingertips to the sidewalk. “Set.” I stuck my butt up in the air. She let me remain in that position for a good ten seconds.

“I feel silly,” I said.

“Go!”

I shot out low along the sidewalk, my best start in years. On about the fifth step I felt something go
pop!
in my right calf, followed by a searing pain and a shower of raindrops from the sky. I fell on the ground and clutched my calf. Skip ran to me and carried me in out of the rain.

Half an hour later, during the dramatic summer rainstorm, we were sitting on the dark-blue linen-upholstered couch in the living room, formerly Hoving’s bedroom. My right leg was draped across her lap, along with an ice pack, which she held to my calf, and an old hardcover copy of Gray’s
Anatomy
, which she scrutinized. Incidentally, this is a position we have duplicated many times since that morning. We often read books like this: I hold my book cradled in my arms and she rests her book on my ankles, which are in turn resting upon her thighs. We are efficient readers in this position. I read the most number of words with the greatest comprehension while my legs are casually, absently, touching her legs. This alignment of our bodies makes reading easy, convenient, and fun.