Nothing Is Terrible (3 page)

“But I’m gardening.”

“Please? Please, Aunt Myra?” I bent down next to her and kissed her cheek. She continued to garden. I knelt down next to her on top of a marigold and felt the cool, uneven surface of the marigold petals crumple against the skin of my knee. She didn’t tell me to get off the marigold. Maybe she didn’t care how her garden turned out. I knelt there crushing her marigold
and tasting the sweat from her cheek that clung to my lips when I kissed her. I watched the places where the sweat came from, which I thought were the shallow pockmarks on her skin. I thought of her own big lips touching my check once a night before bed; one regimented kiss per twenty-four hours was Myra’s shy charm. “Please?”

“Please what?”

“Time me.”

“How could I time you? I don’t know how to do it.” She seemed almost desperate.

“One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.”

“One one thousand, two one thousand.” She paused for a moment. “Three one thousand.” She looked at me questioningly, as if I were teaching her calculus.

“Four one thousand,” I said.

“Four one thousand,” she said.

“Okay, now you say
go
and I’m gonna run around the house three times. The whole time I’m running you’re going ‘something one thousand, something one thousand, something one thousand,’ and when I come around the first time you have to be saying the numbers loud so I can hear you, so I can pace myself. When I come around the second time, same thing. When I come around the third time, same, except we both stop.”

She had paused in her work, and I could see she was torn between timing me and going back to work.

“I’m gonna start at these sticks here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, I’m ready.”

“Okay.”

I stood facing away from Myra, ready to go. Nothing happened. I turned around and Myra was staring at the ground, not doing anything.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Waiting for you to start.”

“You have to say go.”

“Oh. All right.”

“I’m ready. Say it now.”

“All right.” I stood there looking at her and she looked at me.

“Right now,” I said.

“Go.”

I ran as fast as I could and it felt good in my legs. There was the little gray wooden house on my left blurring toward me, toward me. When I came around Myra was gardening again and who knew if somewhere inside of her body she was saying one one thousand? I tore around the house a few more times until I was breathing hard and my chest hurt and I couldn’t make my legs go fast anymore. Then I piled into Myra and collapsed on top of her, saying, “What was my time?”

“I don’t know. About two minutes?”

“Thanks, Aunt Myra.”

She gardened with me on her.

“Do you want to do this again tomorrow?”

“If you like.” This is the way I helped her garden each day until noon, when the sun became too hot and there was no more gardening to do.

At 5:00
P.M
. on the day I began helping Myra in the garden, Tommy arrived home and removed his blue service uniform and bathed and put on a white cotton dress shirt and pink
Bermuda shorts and suede athletic shoes with no socks. He could have been living in Darien, Connecticut, in that outfit, with the rolled-up sleeves that fell away gracefully from his thin forearms, and with his narrow, elegantly muscled legs sparsely covered with golden hair. He walked into the kitchen, a room still bright at 5:20
P.M
. Myra had mixed up a batch of powdered lemonade, which he preferred to the kind she knew how to make with real lemons and sugar and water. There was such a lovely feeling of coolness about a room Myra had cleaned and arranged, in which Tommy stood wearing his Bermudas and drinking lemonade.

“You want to throw around a baseball?” he said. “Hey! You deaf? Mary. Baseball?”

“Me?”

“No, all the other people named Mary.”

“Okay.”

I ran and got my glove and joined Tommy in the backyard, which Myra had mown short the way he liked it.

“I’m gonna pitch first for a while. You squat down over there, and when you catch ’em, just toss ’em back lightly. If there’s time before it gets dark, you can pitch a few also.”

I squatted and Tommy, holding the ball, got himself up into the sequence of preparatory attitudes of the major league pitcher—scuffing at the ground with the toe of one shoe, hands behind him, left side toward me; staring down the opponent, which, since there was no batter, was me; left foot back, arms up over and behind his head, arms coming down as the left foot came forward and up; right arm back, left foot toward me, left foot planting in the grass, left arm pointing at me, body pivoting, right arm releasing the ball in my direction.
He went through some staggering, spinning motions, which I paid attention to instead of watching the ball coming at me. The ball hit me in the forehead.

“You’re supposed to catch that. You all right? Yeah, you’re okay. Let’s try another. Toss it back.”

I threw a wild one way over his head that he had to run for. He came back and pitched another viciously hard one at me, which I caught, stinging my hand. I chucked another wild one—even farther away this time—and he ran and got it and really tried to wound me with his next pitch. We went on in that vein for an hour. I didn’t care if I got hit by his pitches. The pain distracted me from other concerns.

After an hour, Myra tiptoed into the backyard with her hands behind her back and her head slightly bowed and stood between Tommy and me, just out of the ball’s path—she was another one who probably would not have minded if she’d been hit; would not have noticed was more like it, in her case. Though she had come to indicate in some way that we should go inside for dinner, she did not speak.

Tommy said, “Is there something we can help you with, dear?”

“Dinner’s ready,” she said, as if dinner had come into being without agency.

The game of catch became another of that summer’s routines.

When dinner was over I rejoined Paul in the dank little cave that was our private space. In the hour after dinner he liked to keep the electric lights off so he could watch the natural daylight drain from the air and from each object in the room. Paul didn’t like to speak during the darkening of the room, so I sat by him in silence, idly tickling the bottoms of his feet. Then, in
the darkness, his rigorous mental conditioning of me would begin again:

“Let’s say you’re on a desert island with one other person …

“Let’s say you’re in a burning house. …

“Let’s say you’re driving a train headed for a busload of schoolchildren. …

“Let’s say you reach the age of ten and stop being able to think.…”

Evening came to its ritual end when Myra entered and said, “Time for bath.” I would then turn on the light in the room, and Myra would carry Paul to the bathroom as if he were a damsel in distress and she the brave hero, only in this case the damsel, while being bathed, always got an erection.

So now you know about Paul and Tommy and Myra and me, and the little life we all had together.

And then, reader, there was the morning at the end of August when Paul stood up out of his army cot, announced, “I can walk!” and took a few small, stiff-legged steps toward me, so much like an idea of a skinny, pathetic, invalid boy and so little like an actual boy that I hardly believe anymore that it happened.

Tommy was at work and Myra was out shopping. I led Paul out to the tiny hill by the fence that separated our backyard from our neighbors’ backyard, where I had recently made a thrilling discovery.

“Look, Paul,” I said.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Look down.”

“What?”

“The bees.”

“What bees?”

There was a fearfulness in Paul’s voice that I didn’t recognize.

“What are you right now?” I asked him.

“What?”

“What are you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just, come on, say what you are.”

“The sun is hurting my eyes.”

I was trying to get at something: Paul’s attitude at that moment was so different from the attitude of the Paul I thought I knew that I wondered if he were not offering some more advanced type of Philosophical Conundrum: let’s say I cease to think or behave like the Paul you know; am I still Paul?

We stood for a moment and watched a half a dozen bees hovering above a three-inch-wide hole in the ground by the fence where the grass was thin enough that you could see the dry, pale brown dirt beneath it. I went inside the house and came back with one of Tommy’s golf clubs. I escorted Paul away from this new hole in the ground in our lives. The network of hair-thin red veins seemed closer than ever to the surface of the skin of his face and his fragile, white little arms and legs. In that way, the inside of my brother was becoming the outside. I returned alone to the hole with the golf club in my hand. I shoved the golf club down inside the hole and pulled it out fast and ran away from the hole to join Paul. I made Paul lie down on his belly in the grass next to me because I thought the bees wouldn’t see us that way. The air above the hole filled up with bees. I could see nothing that was behind the place where the bees were—a small place in the universe made up
of the simple hatred of self-preservation. I felt as if all the bees were telling my body something. A shudder and a chill ran through my torso and limbs. I grabbed Paul and shoved myself against him and kissed his cheek. He was limp. “Hug me,” I said, and he did, at first because I had told him to and then, seemingly, because he needed comforting, though it was I who had caused him to need it.

The air above the hole was thinning out. The decreasing number of bees in the sky above the hole corresponded to the subsiding of the thrill in my torso and limbs. I released Paul but he did not release me. He kissed me softly on the lips and I kissed him back, thinking it might ease the restlessness that replaced the thrill, but my mouth was indifferent to his mouth. I stood up and helped him to his feet.

“You try it now,” I said.

“Try what?”

“Making the bees go crazy.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You have to.”

“Please?” he asked very weakly, the ritualistic resistance of the hopeless.

I handed him Tommy’s golf club and began to escort him by the arm toward the hole. He pulled his arm away from me and walked slowly forward on his own. He looked calm now. He stood above the hole, meditating on the six or seven bees that flew around his ankles. Now there were ten. Now there were fifteen. As if he had many other things on his mind—idly, you might say—he eased the golf club down into the hole and drew it out. He stood there. He turned his head and looked at me. He smiled. I screamed at him to run.

Instead of running, he danced. It was a jazzy dance with whiplike arm moves and crazy, syncopated sidesteps. He danced around the bee hole, in honor of the bee hole. He fell down and seemed to land directly on the golf club. I thought he was shrieking because the end of the golf club had poked him in the belly. I ran to him and took him in my arms and carried him away from the hundred bees in much the same way as Myra, more slowly, had carried him night after night to and from their tender, erotic bath. I laid him down on the ground and felt but did not fully register the sharp jabs on my neck and under my arms.

“They’re in my shirt,” he said, as someone might complain with casual annoyance, I stubbed my toe.

I took off his shirt and brushed away the dirty yellow-and-black bees that were writhing and the ones that were already dead. He had nipples all over his body now. They protruded farther from the surface of his skin than the original two and were growing larger in circumference.

I knelt above Paul, studying him. He looked at me sweetly. “Paul, I can’t breathe so well,” he said.

“What should I do, Paul?”

“Just stay here with me for a while.”

“Okay.”

“This is not so bad.”

“It isn’t?

“I’m glad Tommy and Myra aren’t here. It’s nice to just be alone with you.”

“Yeah, it’s nice.”

“What are you gonna do, later tonight?” he asked, as if asking about the customs of children in a country he would never visit.

“I don’t know. Have dinner.”

“What else?”

“Play catch with Tommy.”

“I think you should mate with Myra,” he said. “It would make her feel good to have a baby to take care of.”

Some of the pink bumps on Paul were connecting up with one another, making long, thick, pink fingers along the surface of his belly. He said, “I’m glad it was you, Paul.”

“You’re glad what was me?”

“You know.”

This was his final puzzle, not a hard one. Then—at least this is the way I remember it—my brother became an idea.

Please indulge me here, reader, as I ease out of the “prologue” and into “chapter one” of “my” “life”; take a moment and try to think of everything that happened to you every day for a week of your life starting in, say, September of the year you were ten years old. Did you try it? It’s really really difficult, right? In my case it’s especially hard since around that time my mind, unbeknownst to me, began its own program of forgetting. My mind’s reason for forgetting was, I assume, to banish grief from its domain, and in this it was only partially successful. Some of the grief remained, while certain other virtues of mental and emotional life fled; kindness was one, memory of daily events was another.

So what your humble memoirist is doing now, for your reading pleasure, is she’s opening the gate of her mind, flinging it open to memory, to kindness, to grief. Well, okay, she’s nudging
the gate open. She’s leaving the gate ajar with the security chain still attached. Let’s not get carried away here—a memoirist needs her amnesia, her cruelty, her euphoria.

Here’s something I wish I could remember that I can’t: my parents, the original ones. After Paul died, I began to forget them. All that lingered were certain songs my father had often sung to me, but I am uncertain even about those. To this day, when I sing the songs, I know that some of the words are wrong, but I don’t know which ones. “Love, oh love, oh careful love,” I sang, the autumn after I killed my brother. (Which word is wrong there?)