The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  Book Report: On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss

  As the book On Beyond Zebra commences, young Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell has just triumphantly mastered the alphabet. Poised ecstatically at the blackboard over his chalked Z, he exults over his mastery of all knowledge, A to Z.

  His joy is immediately squashed by a high-handed pal, who sneers at the poor things spelled with the letters A–Z, crowing: “My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!” This boastful squirt, the first-person narrator of On Beyond Zebra, then gives the wide-eyed Conrad a tour of the post-Z alphabet, each letter of which represents an uncanny beast, inhabiting its own uncanny, post-Z world.

  Dr. Seuss cheats: the letters do not denote single, new phonemes, but syllables composed of existing English letters. For instance, the Umbus, a cow with 98 “faucets,” starts with the “letter” Um. The character for Um is transparently an amalgam of U and M.

  Although this would seem to have killed any mystery stone dead, nonetheless, as an eleven year old, Ralph used this book to intuit alternate worlds, in which fantastic “other” things were possible. So, from the Itchapods, mop-headed creatures that

  Race around back and forth, forth and back, through the air

  On a very high sidewalk between HERE and THERE

  Ralph derived intermediate universes, limbos in which only intermediate things happened. What those things might be was impossible to know, while one remained in the mundane, pre-Z world. By any means necessary, Ralph was resolved to pass beyond Z and into those other realms where he belonged.

  I read it in the Starbuck’s café at Borders. The above quotes were copied longhand as I sipped my Frappucino. The quality of the drawings disappointed me: I hadn’t remembered Seuss being such a terrible artist.

  Ralph kept his copy until he was 21, when he abandoned his BA in Fine Art at London’s Slade School to study Tibetan Buddhism in Colorado. Then it was among the possessions he discarded; the photos, the letters, the books, clothes, records, he carried to the bin unbagged, in valedictory mood, in token of his dedication to the ascetic life.

  Epilogue

  1Lola lived with Peter Cadwallader for nine months.

  1.1When they split for good, he gave her 10,000 dollars.

  1.2In their nine months, she’d stolen as much again.

  1.3She took it to Kathmandu. It was a fresh start.

  2In Nepal she met Pemba, the “stepfather” who taught Ralph Tibetan.

  2.1He ran a small pottery, catering for the tourist trade.

  2.2He never married Lola, nor were they romantically linked.

  2.3Pemba sold her heroin.

  3And Ralph is the prodigal mother’s son who came off the plane at Kathmandu wearing a blue school uniform for want of other “good” clothes and didn’t recognize his own mother, in her sari, with her face painted red and gold to celebrate because she did that, and she jumped up and down spotting him and waved her arms, but he just weakly smirked as if his face itself were bleary with London rain and said, “Hi, Mum,” and then she grabbed him by both lapels.

  MONTARA SECTIONS

  Argument

  •Different times are different.

  •Ralph lied until he meant it.

  •Talking about the Dharma, his face grew predatory, bright.

  •He had experiences we did not understand.

  •He showered three times a day:

  he could only fuck me in the pitch dark.

  •In his absence, I loved him as much as ever.

  January

  Sheila Matthews moved in first – a nice lady who wore blouses and was middle-aged at my same age. She slept alone in the main house for a week. During that brief span, we were girlfriends: I tried her favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor, and learned all about her married lover and his shilly-shallying.

  Then Kate Higgins’s rent was unfairly raised. She came “while she was looking” and wouldn’t leave. “Of course I insist on paying what I would be paying,” she proclaimed stridently, but paid nil.

  Jo Minty moved in without asking. Eddie and I were in the kitchen when her lavender Bug pulled up in the dead of night. Eddie stood up from his chair and froze like a baleful specter – knowing. Bumbling, hasty, Jo unpacked her car pretending not to see us yards away in the big lit bay window. She was a very fat woman who wore a ribbon in her hair – her mishaps with her cumbersome suitcase moved me – but Eddie said dead-voiced:

  “Charging motherfucking gazillions by the fucking week from now on, or I am killing spree time.”

  Jasper stayed on and off. Jasper played “friend of the family,” giving insider information to the new hands. He came to me once with an idea about doing up the unused belfry as an apartment: “Needless to say I’d pay materials, and we could talk about how long I kept it, I’m very open.” When I said NO, he said, “I’m not being funny, doll, but is it because I’m queer?” I said yes, it was exclusively because he was queer, and he told me many a true word was spoken in jest.

  More people came and more. They brought their own beds, they brought their teenaged children. They brought camcorders. At least one brought lice.

  “I tried to leave, but I was stopped – like this wall,” announced Harry, the retired cop, with dazed self-congratulation. Others chipped in with like tales, competing. Arthur Clough quoted his inner child and turned raspberry red as he wept.

  Then there were just untold strangers in the house.

  You Can’t Go Home Again/You Can’t Leave

  1We come home to them and fall asleep to them and wake up to them.

  1.1We can always hear them: in the walls, outside the window, seething overhead.

  1.2They seem to lie in wait. They are behind every door.

  1.3When they finally speak to us, it’s like a bad dream coming true.

  2No one cleans their area.

  2.1We are compelled to have a lock fitted on the refrigerator.

  2.2An anonymous turd is found on the shower floor.

  2.3Some free spirit refuses to yield his sheets, every laundry day.

  2.4• “He said –” / “She said –”

  •“Either she leaves, or I leave.”

  •“But it all started when they –”

  •“Ralph, tell him.”

  2.5We have to go over the ground rules, every fucking day.

  3The graffiti in the bathroom:

  •“I WANT TO SUCK RALPH’S DICK”;

  •“You guys are a lot of asshole who think your holier than thou”;

  •a quarrel in several hands about the Buddhist stance on graffiti

  4The lawn yellows where the smokers gather.

  4.1Frito bags glitter in the shrubs.

  4.2José sighs on his rounds.

  Embarrassing cocoon

  (4.3 Our “guests” cannot even say hello to José. They breeze past him, look through him; pain him a thousand times a day with their incivility. In their presence, his face becomes expressionless. He looks like a servant.

  One day Eddie and I are in Mom’s office, having our ritual bicker about what constitutes “embezzlement,” when Anna Rossi bursts in. She’s come to inform me that José is cutting flowers.

  “I saw him, and I was going to ask, but he just walked away from me. I mean flowers, not pruning, it’s definitely a bouquet.”

  I counter stiffly: “They’re to bring home to his wife. He’s always . . . it’s fine.”

  “Yeah, I just wanted to check, because I know it’s not exactly stealing, but. I don’t know what you want to do, but I wouldn’t let my gardener do that. It’s just the principle. I know my – Chrysalis?”

  – she peeps, surprised, because I’m brushing past her like an insulted woman.

  On my way down the corridor I hear Eddie, in his element:

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong, cause under California law, the flowers are actually the property of the gardener. Menendez versus Disneyland, 1978 –”

  Following the sound of the rider mower, I find Jos
é in the lawn’s upper corner, cruising the cherry orchard. He gazes up wistfully at one tree’s crown, where a beard-like something flaps, something like Spanish moss, only squarish and too meager.

  The something is a bag I threw off the balcony, along with the spoons, brassieres, what-have-you, in my frenzy after Mom’s death. Every time I see it my mind runs a film of the gesture it made, coasting off on the wind with its stiff handles opening, jaw-like, as if to breathe in. I had really breathed in, sharply, and was unduly relieved when it caught in a tree without spilling. It was a boutique shopping bag made of special ventilated paper, like vacuum-cleaner bag paper. It said DISSOLUTE in scrawled letters on one side. It contained my dirty panties, from when I had my period after Mom’s death and was too scared to drive to the drugstore for tampons. I threw it in rabid self-loathing, to get rid.

  It lasted forever. It hung there, lasting and putting me to shame. The bag became gauzy, but stubbornly hung, outlasting autumn’s leaves. Passing it in company, I suffered torments, keeping myself from looking up.

  One day Ralph called me out, upset, to see the cocoon. I followed, dismally knowing. On the way, he enlarged on the hygiene issue: José should cut it down, fast, before it hatched.

  “Otherwise we’ll have caterpillars,” he predicted, with a phobic grimace. “They sting.”

  We arrived beneath the cherry tree. The bag no longer said DISSOLUTE, the DISSOLUTE had dissolved (I thought hysterically). It waggled up there like a big ass.

  I argued:

  •Caterpillars go in, moths come out.

  •Caterpillars don’t sting, and are meek vegetarians.

  •Doesn’t he know what Chrysalis means?

  Ralph said, too angrily, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  That afternoon I wrote José a note requesting that he NOT remove such and such cocoon. Sealing it, I felt powerful: my gardener. I wrote V. URGENT on the back and smiled at the idea that I was too busy now to write VERY out in full.

  The next day José came to the office smiling broadly. “Not a cocoon,” he announced.

  I said, “Oh, but could you still please leave it?”

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, pondering. Then he left, wishing me a good day. I went out later to check the bag and found José there, mooning up at it: I had to pass briskly, pretending to call the dog.

  Ever since, José has been uneasy about the dishonored cherry tree. Now, as I run after his rider mower, he is transfixed – I have to bellow and wave my arms. Then he cuts the motor deliberately and climbs down.

  He has a single Twinkie in his shirt pocket, still in the cellophane, and he offers it to me, commenting that I’m hungry. I accept it and hold it with solicitude, like a helpless mouse entrusted to my care.

  He says, “You wanted to ask something?”

  “Oh, only, cause if these new people are bothering you? It’s just, I know they’re pretty irresponsible and rude, and we –”

  “No, no.” He smiles, hearing my distress. “They don’t bother me.”

  I insist, carried away, “No: they must.”

  Stymied, José turns to scan the wintry, bald trees, looking for a way out of my intrusion. I turn, too, to the orchard, shaken.

  It strikes me that I won’t close the school down for José’s sake. I’m here not to help but to extort forgiveness – from my gardener, whose job is, for all he knows, on the line.

  Fleetingly I feel, like a flavor in my head, how it would be to be a Chrysalis who drove away the clients because they darkened an honest man’s life.

  And I recall how for years I avoided José, and met him with teenagery mumbles and hanging head. Feeling how he must scorn me, I resented him. To me, his flowerbeds epitomized dumb complacency.

  These are my true, puerile colors. I look up at the shaming bag.

  Then, turning to me formally, his dignity somehow making it a statement on behalf of all gardeners, José offers:

  “It takes all kinds to make the world.”

  Startled, I press the Twinkie to my heart. He smiles at me, including me in his kind.

  “Thank you very much,” I say eventually, “for the cake.”)

  A Representative Day/“You Can’t Go Home Again if That’s All You Care About”

  6:00 A.M.Exercise #1 in the series “Cheating Logic” Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast

  No one may eat until Ralph begins to eat. The porridge waits, a vapid unsweetened gruel. It no longer steams. There is nothing to drink and the room is unheated. They have been given the small spoons.

  Yet the eight chosen guests sit in frantic anticipation. They are squirming, too, because Ralph never ceases to examine them. His eyes pause on each in turn, inspecting. No one may speak until he speaks.

  After ten minutes of this ordeal, in rapid-fire:

  RALPH: What lies behind the mind?

  1ST GUEST: Nothing?

  RALPH: Liar!

  2ND GUEST: The liar lies behind the mind.

  RALPH: Who’s the liar?

  3RD GUEST: I am.

  RALPH: No, you are. Knock knock.

  SEVERAL: Who’s there?

  (Ralph picks up his spoon. Now they must eat in perfect silence.)

  10:00 A.M.Exercise #4 in the series “Cheating Logic” Life’s Work

  The sand must be moved one grain at a time. Ralph points at “the origin,” then at “the destination.” We have ten hours to complete “the task,” he informs us, and climbs up on a rock to supervise. Silhouetted against the rising sun, he looks massive with patience.

  We bend and tweezer one grain of sand between our fingertips. We walk along the beach and stop about where we think the destination is. And back and forth. Soon the footprints ringing the destination point make it look mounded. Soon our backs hurt and our fingertips grow numb.

  As the day warms up, the beach seems changed. We speed up, sensing progress. How many grains can there be? How many grains per hour?

  The temptation to cheat by taking more than one grain at a time becomes overwhelming. In conversation afterward, all of us confess to having, at some time, taken more than one grain. “And the guilt. You know, you let everyone down.”

  An hour and a half in, Ralph stands up and calls the job off. We stop reluctantly, feeling we could have made it. We wonder one last time what the point is. As we follow him back to the house, we’re coming up with all the possible meanings of the grain of sand exercise.

  12:00Squeaky wheels get oil.

  12:10Delinquent 5% ruin it for everyone.

  12:20Bad apples spoil bunch.

  1:00 P.M.Lunch

  During lunch, Jo Minty reads aloud from a description of the typical putrefaction of a cadaver. Since I wrote the description, it makes me self-conscious. I eat more than usual, cringing at the infelicitous phrases.

  1:30 P.M.

  Where the cherry blossom powders the fine green lawn, three beefy women from Illinois are very loud:

  “This is my real family, my other family just got their claws out for me.”

  “No, yeah, I couldn’t live without this, literally.”

  “This is, I’ve been looking for this my whole life.”

  “Do you guys wants to go in, by now? Because the meditation started already ten minutes.”

  “Oh, my poor butt.”

  “Janine!”

  3:00 P.M.

  First a faint hickory smell, then a white curl in the air. I decide I don’t really have to meditate, given that we’re fakes, and twist to stare at Eddie smoking in the back.

  He’s got a pink highlighter pen and a stack of Playboys. When he sees me looking, he audibly farts, and the people all around me stiffen with rage.

  4:00 P.M.

  For some time the guests have favored white clothes, à la Ralph. More wear white until the others appear as rebels. They adopt, too, an encephalitic languor in their movements, feeling their way to physical grace. Arthur Clough stands on the balcony for hours, almost absolutely still.

  Bu
t today Matthias arrives in the same suit Ralph’s wearing.

  No one will speak to him. Jasper comes over especially to ask if I’ve noticed, with a catty squint. Finally Mat can’t take it anymore, and leaves before supper, even though it means driving all the way back to Sacramento that night.

  5:00 P.M.

  I find Eddie sleeping on his outdoor leather sofa. Roused, he proves chatty and won’t let my knee go until I swear not to leave. I sit fatalistically and say, “What’s up?”

  – when Jasper hurries toward us.

  He’s clutching a white kitten.

  He found her in the bushes by Walgreen’s drugstore, in a sack with two dead siblings, probably thrown from a moving car. She’s jumpy, with an air of damage.

  The idea that those were bad people colors the scene. We imagine the bad people. The meowing sack recurs in our talk.

  Every time we look at the kitten, we see that she is dying. Finally I say so. Then we all pretend that we can’t tell because we are not veterinarians.

  “I’m going to give her to Ralph,” says Jasper, elated. “He just asked me – inside – but I said I’d get her shots first.”

  “He asked you?” I say, mystified.

  “He’s going to name her Ralph,” adds Jasper, proud.

  Eddie says, “That’s the worst thing I fucking ever heard.”

  6:00 P.M.

  Over supper, I ask Ralph about the kitten. When I mention the resemblance to his Nepali cat, who led him to God, he says in all seriousness,

  “This isn’t the same one.”