Nothing Is Terrible (7 page)

I returned to my seat. Nobody knew about the quaver except Skip Hartman and me, and possibly Mittler, the disaffected prodigy; I thought I could sense this in the way he stared out the window, whistling to himself very softly.

To dinner the following Friday, Skip Hartman brought pairs of shoes. For Tommy she brought two-tone brown leather wing tips. He squealed with delight. He put them on during the gazpacho and paraded them around the kitchen. He left the kitchen and shouted from the hallway, “Watch when I enter the kitchen. The shoes will be coming in first. I want to know everyone’s reaction.”

He reentered the kitchen with elongated steps. We all applauded, even Myra. Then Skip held out Myra’s shoes to her across the table. They were wisely moderate black flats.

“Please, you mustn’t give these to me.”

“But I must.” She continued to extend the shoes over the table.

“It’s so kind, but I couldn’t wear them.”

“Try them on. If you can’t wear them I’ll get you a size you can wear.”

“It’s not that.”

“Oh, you’re being demure!”

Myra looked down abruptly at her plate of linguine with fennel and sausage. If only Skip had understood Myra one hundredth as well as she understood Tommy (arithmetic being, here, a matter of belief). She didn’t realize she was causing Myra pain, as anyone did who described or noticed her. I whispered in my teacher’s ear, “Take back the shoes and she’ll feel better, but do it quietly.”

“You know perhaps I’ll see if there’s a different color that would be more suitable at some future date as yet to be determined at which point everything may not be so …” She rounded out the sentence by pulling the shoes back over to her side of the table and slipping them into her oversized purse. Even if one did not understand Myra, one wished to do something for her. Just as Skip Hartman was rescuing me from my orphanhood swashbuckler style in her leather pants, so I wished that someone would find a way to rescue Myra from wherever it was that she was stranded—inside her body, was how I chose to locate it. But some people never get found, never get rescued.

To this third dinner at Tommy’s house, Skip Hartman had
also brought a toothbrush and deodorant and fresh underwear and a sweatshirt and jeans. When we were alone in my room after dinner she said, “And would you like me to call you Paul this evening?”

“I would like you to call me ‘teacher.’ ”

“Oh, really.” She took a step back away from me and folded her arms and frowned.

“Yes, really. And you have to go sit in that little chair over there, and if you want to speak you have to raise your hand.”

She looked at me, not sure what to do. “And what will you call me?” she said.

“I shall call you Skippy. Skippy, sit down now, please.”

She sat down. She raised her hand.

“Yes, Skippy?” I said, prancing back and forth in front of her.

“How much is one half plus one half, teacher?” she asked.

“One half plus one half plus religion plus poetry plus arithmetic plus Skippy plus teacher plus you plus me plus you plus Skippy plus Skippy plus Skippy. Skippy?”

“Yes, teacher.”

“Now I have a question for you, Skippy.”

“Okay.”

“Here’s what I want you to do. I’ll stand on the bed and you hop around the room in circles like a giant kangaroo.”

“I don’t think I want to do that.”

“Excuse me, Skippy?”

“I will not do that.”

“I will not do that
what
?”

“Mary, please.”

“Skip-py!” I commanded, leaping onto the bed with both feet.

“What?”

“Do it. Now!”

Skip Hartman stared up at me. I stared back down at her. Slowly, she stood up. She took one cautious hop.

“Good girl, Skippy,” I said very gently. “Try it again.”

She removed her pumps and took a few more hops.

“
Very
good, Skippy. Oh, Skippy, I’m so proud of you.”

She hop-hop-hopped around the room. Her head, which she usually held vertically in place atop her spine, bounced from side to side on her shoulders, which I found perfectly charming.

“Now I will ride you.”

Skip Hartman hopped over to me and turned her back and bent down. I jumped onto her back and grasped her kangaroo flanks tightly between my legs. She hopped around the room while I messed up her hair with my hands. “Now make kangaroo noises!” I said.

“Arf!” she said. “Arf! Arf!” We both were laughing now and we collapsed onto Paul’s bed and laughed for a while. Her face was bright red. “Oh, my darling teacher,” she said.

“Yes, my darling Skippy?”

“Come put your ear close to my lips. I must whisper something.” I did as she said. She whispered, “I am discovering aspects of myself that I had not an inkling existed, thanks to you, my teacher.”

“My little Skippy is soooo cute,” I whispered back, and patted my excellent pupil on that fantastic machine, her head.

On the day before the first day of summer, a big door at school slammed on my fingers and September “Skip” Hartman lost her place in the world. She happened to see my fingers resting lightly on the door frame as the door approached them. She
happened also to be the person who had pushed the door with mild vigor, not knowing my fingers were there at the time she had pushed it, a big oaken door easy on its hinges. “I saw your hand and I looked very quickly up at your innocent face,” she said to me the following evening, when we were reunited in my bedroom and she was helping me to pack my things. “Your face was turned the other way. You did not see the door coming.” She perched on Paul’s bed, controlling the skeletal muscles and tear ducts of her erect body but unable to keep her voice from rising and rising. “Mary, all in a moment I felt myself about to shriek, was seized with fear, and then did a terrible thing: I did not shriek. I did not warn you, my dear child, of the pain I was about to cause you,” she said, as Tommy sauntered into the little bedroom to supervise the packing.

The pain was surprising and intense, and you might say that the shriek Skip Hartman did not utter came out of me. She had been leading our entire class through the hallways of the school to the gym. After the door slammed, she put my hand that was not hurt inside of her hand and commanded the other children to remain still while she took me to the nurse’s office. Once we had rounded the corner she stopped a moment and could not prevent herself from bringing my injured hand to her lips and whispering into it, “Oh, my precious precious.”

“I hate you people,” Mittler said. He had rounded the corner behind us. “I knew you couldn’t wait to kiss her hand, I knew it! I’m telling everybody about you two. I’m telling the principal, I’m telling all the kids, I’m telling
everybody
! Mary, I want my knife back right now!”

“I threw your stupid knife away!” I roared back at him. “Miss Hartman sleeps in my room once a week!” I roared, and turned to my lover and threw my arms around her neck.

“All right, dear, we’ll go to the nurse’s office now,” she said and removed my arms from around her neck. “Mittler, I understand your agitation. Please join the rest of the class and I’ll speak with you later.”

The rest of the class, however, had joined Mittler, and most of them had heard what he’d said, and what I’d said, and seen a few things they didn’t quite know how to see, and now they stood there, some of them staggering like people newly blind, as if they had used up all their eyesight looking at the strange pair of us. Skip Hartman took me by the elbow and led me to succor.

In light of September Hartman’s six years of devoted and intelligent service, and to avoid a scandal, the school administrators canned her quietly and did not make public the wrongdoing of the Teacher of the Year, nor did they press charges. The central outcome of the door slamming was the transfer of guardianship of me from Thomas and Myra White to September Hartman. In exchange for the transfer, the Whites received from Ms. Hartman a lump sum of $100,000, and would also receive weekly payments of $500 for the duration of such time as she remained my legal guardian.

On the day that Skip and I moved to Manhattan, the weather was hot enough for Skip to put the top down on her little black Porsche when she came to pick me up. Just the same, Tommy wore the woolen cape in his driveway to send us off. Myra did not appear to be on the verge of voluntarily kissing me good-bye, so I leapt on her in the driveway and knocked her down, accidentally breaking her elbow. I didn’t care about her elbow. At the time, caring did not strike me as a useful activity. Little did I know that all the caring I didn’t do then was
being stored up inside me and that I would eventually become a young lady full of care.

Tommy did not kiss me good-bye, but he made a definitive flourish with his cape, bowing deeply before me and the Porsche, such that I saw the individual drops of sweat lined up along the border of his pale forehead and his delicate blond hair. He whispered, “I’m sorry if I have failed you.” As Skip and I climbed into her car, Tommy went to where Myra was lying in the driveway to attend to her elbow, which had already swollen up in much the same way that Paul’s face and torso did after the bees stung him and just before he died. New York City, here we come!

Sooner or later everyone finds a way to be mistreated. Some find it more easily than others: Skippy and I, for example. But sometimes mistreatment is better than no treatment at all.

In the early days of living in her house in New York City, Skip and I lay on top of the white duvet on her king-size bed facing the French windows that opened out onto one of the pristine streets near Fifth Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My favorite time to lie on the bed with her there was early in the morning. At that time we heard four or five or six kinds of birdsong, and Skip was someone who could attach a great many bird names to the songs in the world that belonged to them.

At other times of day I did not like to lie on the bed. Late morning, for example, or early afternoon, or late afternoon, or anytime in the evening before ten-thirty. But Skip Hartman
wanted me on the bed with her, and I thought the arrangement was that either I stayed on the bed or I got kicked out of her house. If she kicked me out of her house, I thought, she would also stop paying Tommy the weekly stipend, and then he would not take me back into
his
house. At the age of twelve, I was not ready to live on the street without knowing a soul who would help me, so I stayed next to her on the bed, usually naked, eating or listening to her pronounce the litanies she had taken pains to learn and loved to say, such as the names of all the popes or all the kings of England, or the countries of South America, or the lakes of northern Finland, or the provisions of the Bill of Rights, or, as my father used to sing, “ ‘I’ll quote the facts historical, now please don’t get hysterical.’ ”

One afternoon when I was feeling especially perspicacious and Skip especially vulnerable, she revealed to me in a vocal tremor and tic of the mouth that it was I who allowed her to keep me in her house, not she who allowed me to stay there. I may desperately have needed the enclosure of her house, but she needed the enclosure of the slim radius of air around my body. She could not bear to be away from me. Or so I became convinced that she imagined.

I got out of bed and got dressed and walked out the front door and onto the sidewalk. She followed me. “Where are you going?”

“Need some air.”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me when you are going to do something like go out for air. I cannot abide a system of communication wherein you do not consult me before leaving the house. We need to, I think we ought to, we need to—” Skip stood at the top of the short
flight of stone steps between our house and the street, while I stood at the bottom of it. Her face was flushed and even her hair was beginning to show signs of disorder.

“Okay, okay, okay, so don’t have a fucking fit,” I said. I saw that the word
fucking
startled her, coming from me. “Don’t have a cow,” I added. “Don’t have a pig. Don’t have a goat. Don’t have a canary,” I said, to make her laugh and bring her back to an area of comfort: lists of names of things—animals, in this case, that a woman would not ordinarily give birth to.

“Mary, would you like to go out to a restaurant?”

“I want to
do
something.”

“Such as?”

“Do you have a stopwatch?”

“I have a wristwatch with a stopwatch function.”

“Go get it.”

Startled again.

“Please.”

She stood still for a moment, thinking perhaps that when she returned with the watch I would be gone. She went inside and came back, breathing hard. “Now what?” she said.

“Now I run around the block and you time me.”

“Where are you going to run?”

“I said around the block.”

“Which block?”

“Duh. The block that we’re on.”

“Do you mean that you’ll run to Fifth Avenue, take a right and go north for one block, take another right and go east to Madison, take another right and go south for one block, another right and return here?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Go!”

It was five
P.M
. on a Thursday in early summer. The sidewalk along Fifth Avenue was crowded with wealthy adult pedestrians and tourists. I liked weaving among them, defining my speed by their slowness, my youth by the rigid expressions of fear and annoyance on their faces. As I reached the farthest point in my journey, I began to miss Skip Hartman. My heart beat wildly inside my chest; I missed the pressure of her hand on the skin that surrounded my heart. I tried to picture her face and could not. I sped up. As I rounded the corner onto our block I saw her lips moving. “Forty-nine,” she was saying, “fifty, fifty-one—”

I ran to her and threw my arms around her, being careful not to knock her to the sidewalk, as I had done to Myra. (Fancy that, reader: Mary learned from a mistake. She’s growing up so fast!) “Fifty-one point three two seconds,” she said.

Varying the route, we enacted this little game many times that summer and over the next several years. We called the game Going Away and Coming Back. It was one of the ways we loved each other.