Nothing Is Terrible (4 page)

School began again that fall. I stopped working in the garden with Myra, and I stopped playing catch with Tommy, and I did not ever do those things with them again. I became preoccupied with people my own age, and I developed my ongoing involvement with myself. I had some difficulties with the other children in school, and without parents or a brother I sometimes felt desperate, so I took refuge in the sensations of my deluxe body. After school, I ran around and around and around the house, with no interest anymore in being timed but only in exhaustion. At night in bed, I softly tickled my own arms and legs and chest. I lay on my back and hummed with my mouth open and lightly punched my breastbone in varying rhythmic patterns. During the day, when other children were watching, I merely thought of doing these things. As I reveled in the pleasures of my own robust health, so Tommy and Myra became more fragile, it seemed. This may be what happens to people whose secret wish comes true, or halfway true.

I went to a small rectangular brick school that housed grades K through six on a wooded hillside. If Tommy was an
overly elegant dresser, then Myra was a simple, tidy dresser with a decent sense of the rightness of clothes—at least of the clothes she dressed her adoptive daughter in—and therefore it was probably not the pale flower-print dress that I wore on the first day of school that caused the other kids to stare at me. I like to think it was the grief, which must have migrated from my mind to the surface of my skin. That would explain why I got punched a lot and seemingly at random: people testing the properties of the grieving skin.

In particular there was a group of boys who liked to hit me. There was a big, dirty-blond, smart-mouthed kid named Harry who was the leader of the boys. Hourly, he sent his emissaries to punch my arms. Once a day, he himself wandered over and performed some variation on the arm punch to demonstrate the kind of innovative thinking that made him worthy of leadership. Smiling, he approached the table where I sat with my head down as usual—like the rest of the boys he mistook my unwillingness to engage as a sign of submission rather than disinterest. He punched me in the chest or brought the side of his fist down on top of my thigh, walked back to his friends, and exchanged nods of affirmation with them, whereupon they proceeded to microevaluate the transaction, in preparation for the kinds of work that boys do when they grow up. As a form of social intercourse, this was tedious and stung for about a minute. As a bodily sensation to savor in private later on, it had its uses and pleasures.

We had what was called at that time an open classroom, which meant that no one had to do any work. Bulletin boards hung from the wall at the front of the room; stapled to each bulletin board was a piece of paper with a list of the names of all the children in the class. One bulletin board was labeled
MATH
and one was labeled
LANGUAGE
and one was labeled
SOCIAL STUDIES
, et cetera. At the end of each day we had to write on each bulletin board a several-word description of the work we had accomplished in the area of discipline of the given bulletin board. So it is actually a slight exaggeration to say that nobody had to do work. Four people had to do work and write about what they had done so that the rest of the class would know what to write when they wrote about the work they
hadn’t
done. Sadly, the very children who did do the work lacked the imagination to write down any more or less than what they had done; that too carries over into adult working life.

At first I myself did not document the work I had not done, and so the space next to my name was blank day after day, not because I felt myself to be outside the system of small rewards and punishments for which the bulletin boards served as a clearinghouse, nor because I was immune to the keen feelings that attended success and failure at school. I just didn’t wanna. I didn’t wanna do any work, I didn’t wanna say I’d done any work, I didn’t wanna talk to anyone at school. I wanted to go home and run around and around and around the house and eat dinner and sit in my room tickling my arms and tickling them until all the arm skin nerves were worn out and delirious and subdued.

Because I was doing no work, Mrs. Building, my teacher, began actively to pity me. She was small and thin and sweet and naïve, with medium-successful authority over her students. Twice a day she took me by the hand, led me to her desk, and sat me down in a low hard wooden chair next to her high cushioned metal chair and devoted twenty solid minutes to trying to soothe me and bring me out. The first tactic I tried,
to avoid the horror of the pity of my teacher, was viciousness. Harry, the leader of the boys, came over one day with all his big cream-colored flesh. His avant-garde statement of the day was to punch me lightly in the throat. I punched him hard in the nose. He looked at me stunned. I punched him hard in the nose again and it bled. Then I punched him hard in the nose again. Then I did it again. Then I stepped on his foot and he fell down. I got on top of him and punched him and scratched him and spit on him. Mrs. Building pulled me off and hugged me and said, “You poor thing.” That was not at all the result I was looking for. However, there was another result that was quite pleasing: with one easy and reasonably enjoyable act of violence I had ruined Harry’s social standing among the boys.

Building continued to pity me each day from 11:00 to 11:20
A.M
. and again from 2:00 to 2:20
P.M
. I was at a loss. Dierdre noticed. She was to the girls what Harry had been to the boys until I beat him up: mean and influential. Now, there may be some grounding in reality for the kinds of statements people make about girls at that age—that they are subtler social beings than boys are—because instead of hitting me, Dierdre befriended me. She came over to my table after one of my conferences with Building and sat down sweetly in the chair next to mine, our first social contact. She had nice flaxen conspiratorial pigtails and a concerned frown as she hunched toward me in the chair: her elbows were resting on the innermost part of her lap, her left hand held her right hand on her knee, her toes were half facing each other, half facing me. “I know what you can do about Jane Building,” she said.

“What?”

“You hate the conferences, right?”

“How did you know?”

“Listen, here’s what you do: be average. Do work. Get along with others. That’s it. Then she won’t bother you.”

I thought maybe she was giving good advice. After all, she herself had the bases covered: she was the smartest girl and the most popular girl and the meanest girl
and
she was not the teacher’s pet.

“Do I really
do
the work?” I said.

“No. What are you, stupid?”

So, as camouflage, I began doing what everyone else did. At the end of the day I approached the bulletin boards and wrote
fractions
and
spelling list number 7
and
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by the way, was a very popular one to write, especially among the boys. They were fascinated by the ramifications of this treaty. At any hour of the school day you could hear a couple of boys discussing Brest-Litovsk, finding nuances of significance that had eluded all other historians for most of the century.

Mrs. Building called Myra to talk about me, which was like calling a child about another child. They arranged a parent-teacher conference. When Myra told Tommy about the conference he got very excited and bought a cape. He loved to meet officials like teachers. Anything could happen in the presence of an official. He would be recognized for his good qualities or be able to change jobs. Thus the cape for the conference with Jane Building, who was skinny and sweet and twenty-six years old and three months pregnant. The cape was made of black wool on the outside and red satin on the inside. He wore it with a black turtleneck and black trousers with suspenders and black low-cut suede zip-up boots. He held his chin up when he wore the cape. His eyes were close together and blue, and his skin was soft like the freckled skin of a
French film actress. Myra wore a brown corduroy jumper with a belt at the waist and a white button-down shirt with a small faded bluebell pattern. The conference took place one Friday afternoon in the classroom after school. I waited in the hallway and peered through the glass panel in the door. Tommy had the hopeful, hurt look on his face that always anticipated the failure of an event. Myra’s eyes began dripping tears shortly after she sat down by Building’s desk, and continued to drip for the whole conference, as if the entire contents of her body were going to leak out onto the floor.

Building’s twenty-minute sessions with me did not cease. The main outcome of the parent-teacher conference was the cape.

I joined Dierdre’s group of friends in the specific way that the person who will be sacrificed joins the group. I became especially close with Dierdre and two other nasty little girls, Melissa and Toni. They liked me a lot. People relish the person they are going to inflict pain on more than they relish each other. One afternoon I found myself in the bathroom with these three: the girls’ bathroom, to be exact. Dierdre and I went into stalls to pee and the other two went to stand in front of the mirror above the row of three sinks. They didn’t yet know what to do in front of the mirror except stand there and talk. Dierdre, in the stall next to mine, saw that my feet were facing the back of the stall and she peered over the top of the partition separating our stalls. I had pulled my dress up and almost off. My arms were still in the armholes but I had taken my head out of the head hole, and the bulk of the dress was bunched up behind my neck. My underwear was around my knees. I stood over the toilet and peed into it.

“How the hell do you do that?” Dierdre said.

I said, “What, you don’t pee?”

“Not like that!”

“Why, how do
you
do it?”

“Sitting down. Hey, you two!” she called to the ones by the mirror. They came over and stood in front of the stalls. “Open the door,” Dierdre said to me. I opened it. The urine was still flowing out of me. I had eaten a beet salad from Myra’s garden for lunch and it was making the water in the toilet bowl red, which added another layer of meaning and/or incomprehension for the girls. “Look at her,” Dierdre said. “Is that amazing?”

“How are you doing that?” Melissa said.

“Give us a demonstration of how you do that,” Dierdre said from above me, her arms dangling into my stall.

“Why should I?”

“Because.”

The urine subsided and I used a piece of toilet paper to clean myself.

“Okay, so that’s something. You wipe yourself,” Dierdre said. “What else do you do? How do you aim it, basically?”

“You take it between your hands like this,” I said, exasperated, turning around so she and the other girls could really see.

“Take
what
between your hands?”

“The genitals.”

“The genitals!”

“You know, the little area you pee out of.”

“Little area, that’s what you call it?”

“Why, what do you call it?”

“I call
that
a penis.”

“This isn’t a penis. Haven’t you ever seen a penis before?”

“I’m looking at one right now.”

“I can’t believe Mary has a penis!” Toni, giddy with horror, said.

“Mary has a penis,” the others said.

“What’s going on in here?” That was Mrs. Building. She had come in and was staring at my crotch. “Oh, my word,” she said. “Girls, all of you get back to class. You too, Mary. What are you doing in here showing these girls
that
for?”

Building stood by the bathroom door and shooed us back to class. I knew this to be the end of her reign of pity. “Thank you,” I whispered to Dierdre in the hallway on the way back to the classroom, and she looked dismayed.

After school Dierdre and the two others cornered me alone between the Dumpsters behind the school. The two girls sneered and Dierdre said, “You’re not allowed in the girls’ room anymore.”

“Why?”

“We don’t want you in there.”

“What if I go in anyway?”

“You know how Harry and the other boys used to punch you? Well, Melissa and Toni will come up to you in the girls’ room and hold your arms and I’ll smash your face into the sink over and over till it’s a bloody mess.”

I considered that. “So where do I go if I have to pee or something?”

“The boys’ room.”

Next morning I went to the boys’ room and was peeing in a urinal when a kid named Mittler came over to me. He often had a thin coat of dried saliva on his chin and was the soul of politeness, having punched me only half a dozen times in all. He had been second-in-command of the boys until I beat up
Harry. Now he was their leader. Mittler possessed many qualities of the philosopher-king. He ruled with an extraordinarily soft touch and had brought the boys into an era of enlightenment and peace. He waited until I finished peeing before he addressed me.

“So you’re using the boys’ room now,” he said.

“You got a problem with that?”

“Nope. How come the girls won’t let you use theirs anymore?”

“How do you know they won’t?”

“Dierdre told me. She asked me if I’d let you use the boys’ room.”

“Gosh, I guess she was doing me a really big favor.”

“I told her you could use it.”

“Gosh.”

“Dierdre also said you showed her your Litovsk.” Mittler made a gesture with his hand as if he were tipping his hat, turned, and walked out of the boys’ room. No one had ever been so polite to me before. That really got me.

The night after the parent-teacher conference, Tommy wore the cape to dinner in our kitchen. Beneath the cape he wore a dark blue blazer and slacks and a white dress shirt and red tie. He strode into the kitchen clutching the edges of the cape. He held his chin high. He looked down at Myra and me, waiting for us to sit that he might sit. In the autumn, the kitchen was spacious and neat and bright and cool. In his dark outfit Tommy stood out in relief from the room. While waiting for us to sit down, he manipulated the cape meaningfully about his body. He could be quite articulate by means of the cape and the dark outfit and red tie. The red tie in particular was a solid,
stable, vertical red line in the visual center of his body around which gathered small fragments of the red underside of the cape in quick, elliptical flashing movements. I thought the redness of the tie and of the inside of the cape stood for the red insides of Tommy’s body. Myra created a quietly tragic setting for the cape by continuing to leak tears. In relation to Tommy’s financial and social standing, the cape in the kitchen functioned in much the same way that the paintings of animals in caves are said to have done in relation to the animals themselves, once upon a time. The cape, I mean, would magically draw the aristocratic life to itself. The cape was Tommy’s primitive get-aristocratic scheme, surprisingly effective as you will soon discover.