Free Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe Page B

them to Tommy.
    “Thanks.”
    “Look under ‘Books, rare’ in the Yellow Pages and you’ll find many more books that I’m sure you’ll read with relish.”
    “And mustard,” I said.
    “And not only that,” she said. “We must now hurry you off to my tailor, who will make you an exquisite autumn-weight cape.”
    “Maybe after we eat,” Tommy said.
    “Oh, no! You must visit the delightful hot-dog cart on the way to my tailor on Fifth Avenue. That is where you will have your lunch. Visiting the island of Manhattan without eating a hot dog from a cart would be the equivalent of visiting Paris without climbing the Eiffel Tower.”
    “Or teaching sixth grade without having sex with one of your students,” I said.
    “Just so,” Skip said.
    “Hey, come on!” Tommy said.
    Skip hustled Tommy down the stairs and out the door. She stood in the foyer and said, “How often do you suppose we must have this uncle of yours to the house? I don’t enjoy his company.”
    We noticed then that we had not sent Myra out of the house with Tommy. She stood on the stairs above the foyer and had heard what Skip said to me. For an instant, she looked at Skip with what appeared to be hatred, and then the hatred—if that was its name—was swallowed back into the affective abyss of her body.
    At noon on Labor Day of that year—the day before what would have been the first day of school in some normative version of my life—I answered the doorbell and saw before me slightly older, wickeder versions of Dierdre and Harry, my elementary school classmates, who had somehow obtained my address. Had my twelve-year-old body not felt so woozy and sated after a morning of love with my thirty-seven-year-old guardian, I would have been shocked to see those two. They were no longer the disgraced elder statesmen of the schoolroom. They did not look wounded and chastened so much as dirty and arrogant and theatrical. Dierdre had dyed her hair black against her pale skin and freckles. She wore black mascara and lip liner. Harry had grown taller than Skip Hartman, and massive. Random light hairs grew from his jaw. He wore a scuffed black leather jacket. He looked down at me with an expression of amusement that suggested he had come as far from wanting to tussle with me as a rhinoceros would be from wanting to tussle with a penguin.
    “How’s the sex going?” Dierdre said.
    “It’s about the only thing that’s going good,” I said.
    “Why? What’s wrong?”
    I heard Skip on the stairs behind me. I turned to look at her. She was wearing a white terry bathrobe and her hair was darkened by water and smoothed down on her skull in combed stripes. The skin on her face glowed as if lit from within. This was the classic postcoital Hartman look. Dierdre and Harry stared at her. “Here comes the pervert,” Dierdre said, meaning to be funny, but no one laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Can Mary come to the park with us?”
    “Mary may do what she likes. I am not the keeper of Mary.” Skip did not descend the few final steps to greet the two children, one of whom had been her student.
    “I thought you were her guardian,” Dierdre said.
    “Legally, yes, but it is perhaps best to behave as if we are equals in all things, even while we are not equals in all things: in age or in experience or knowledge, for example.”
    “Or money,” I said.
    “I thought it was understood that you own everything I own.”
    “But you own me.”
    “Perhaps,” Skip said, “this particular can contains worms enough for only two people, in which case it would be impolite of us to open it in front of your little friends. Why don’t you all run along to the park, and we’ll discuss this in the evening after they’ve returned to the suburbs.”
    “But I want them to stay for dinner. Can they?”
    “Here again, a decision is being thrust upon me that is not mine alone to make.”
    We entered Central Park at Seventy-second Street and walked over a small grassy hill