The Sharp Time (10 page)

“You
expect
a little better treatment from a public school,” Bradley says. “What with Big Brother watching and all. Maybe high school just sucks in general. College is a million times better: if you’re gay, whatever, you can just sort of go ahead and be gay. At St. Matthew’s? Not so much.”

“I am highly honored to have a St. Matthew’s alum in my car. Mr. Blazer and School Crest, I salute you. And I thought you might be Catholic”—I point to the crucified-Jesus tattoo on his thumb—“but I had no idea that you were some Catholic
fancy pants
.”

Bradley laughs. “Oh, well, absolutely I am a tattooed Catholic fancy pants. And that would not be a bad name for a blog: the Catholic Fancy Pants.”

But Bradley’s words zigzag into buzzy nothingness, because as soon as I turn into the school parking lot, I see it. Catherine Bennett is back. Her car is in its usual spot in the teachers’ row, her
WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY!
bumper sticker taunting me.

Bradley looks at me. “What is it?”

“She’s back.”

Did the school do nothing? Is that even possible? Legal?

“Are you kidding? Her ass should totally be fired. Man, I thought only the Catholics were this lame,” Bradley says mournfully. He leans over the bucket seats and awkwardly puts his arm around my shoulder. I put the car in park and sit there, staring at Catherine Bennett’s car.

Bradley sighs. “I mean, a normal person? Their skirt catches on the desk and comes down? A normal person would take the whole week off. For that alone.” Bradley clears his throat. He is working very hard. “This is massively, massively fucked up.
Massively
.”

I stare out the window. I had thought waiting for the school to call made me stoic and mannered, a rawboned Midwesterner staring out at the frosty fields.
I shall bide my time
. Perhaps it was my rampant Midwesternitis that made me prim and polite, my Kansas City calling card:
I don’t want to bother anybody! I’ll go ahead and wait for you to call!
But probably geography has nothing to do with any of this; probably the school of We Will Mistreat You With Pleasure If You Let Us has an international open-admissions policy. And look at me: My mother gave me a punk-rock name, but my spirit is composed of elevator music:
Tra-la-la-la./Don’t mind me./I’m a nice girl./I have good manners./I’ll not bother you./Tra-la-LA!

Because look how easy I have made it for the school; I have a bruise on my ribs from where my desk slammed into me when that crazy bitch freaked and kicked the desk leg and I have said nothing.

Still, isn’t the school worried that I will contact an attorney? Do they not think I will report this to the state? Do they not think that I just might have a pretty pink and cream gun in my glove box?

But as I look at Woodrow Wilson High School, my rib starts to ache and pulse. Epiphany comes as soft sickness, acid pangs in the gut: the school knows of my personal situation, they know I am an eighteen-year-old with no parents. They know, a quick look at my transcripts, that I am not some shiny-haired Caitlin off to Yale, not someone whose name they would call out at graduation to a mad blast of applause. They have nothing in the world to fear from a girl like me: motherless, mediocre, my only As in art and English.

“Let’s blow this Popsicle stand,” Bradley says, his voice heavy with kindness, and so I drive off—there’s not a reason in the world to stay.

Bradley seems to know that my brain has gone muzzy, possibly because when I merge onto the highway, a semi blows its horn. I always pass too close.

“For lunch we’re getting burgers and fries and milk shakes, chica. We are having a comfort-food extravaganza and we are going to eat everything on our plates, even the wrappers, and you know what?” Bradley claps his hand on my knee and gives it a nice little shake. “We are going to love every last bite.”

And so we do, we drive through and get burgers with bacon and cheese, and chicken strips, as if animal death is the antidote for all this—
Viva the slaughterhouse!

But of course it does make us feel a little better, doesn’t it, and we eat in a deserted park, brushing the snow off an ancient wooden picnic table carved with inane graffiti:
DO YOU GET HI? FOR A GOOD TIME CALL JULIE’S SEXY GRANDMA. I HEART TITS
.

When we finish the winter picnic, we smoke our comfort—tobacco for me, weed for Bradley—and it’s back to work we go, where all afternoon my mind flashes images of Catherine Bennett teaching algebra as if nothing ever happened, and I wonder, exactly, what the social expectation is: Is everyone expected to act like nothing happened? Like Monday was just another day in paradise?

And I am paying attention, I am paying attention, I know how to pay attention and I make change and I sell powder blue cashmere sweaters with iridescent pearl buttons, and men’s black tuxedo pants with a charcoal stripe. I Swiffer the floor, I Windex the mirrors in the dressing room, I fill and refill the candy dishes, and I have the satisfaction of this, though occasionally I check my home messages—surprise, surprise, nobody has called. No one is curious about me. No one would like to see how I am doing; both nobody and no one would like to go for coffee.

Okay: I understand how unnuanced the whole situation is and I understand that people enjoy being helpful and prescriptive if your problem is singular and manageable. Boyfriend dump you? It’s all: Been there, sister. Smoke and write your stricken poetry and you will feel better in approximately seven months. But the school thing on top of the dead-mom thing is too much, one melodrama too many, and a girl becomes Typhoid Mary of the Plains. This is my fault too. After my mom died, I routinely blew off my friends for such minor offenses: I remember a sympathy card with a peach rose photographed in soft focus like an aging starlet that infuriated me.

But now there is Bradley.

I see him crouch behind the rack of coats, pull his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, punch in numbers, and wait, his eyes cast down, his dark lashes fringing the planes of his cheekbones. He’s waiting, too.

When he stands up, he gives me a bright smile that seems full of effort and says, “What’s your plan for tonight, Sandinista?”

“Advil and vino?”

“Nice,” he says. “I’m there.”

And so he is. When we lock up for the night, when the minutiae of commerce are done—counting out the cash drawer, the soft shuffle of bills, the crisp flick and flutter of checks, the rusty
zi-i-ip
of the bank deposit bag—we drive to my house, cranking the radio and smoking, the feeling of a fun night on deck undercut with the specter of Catherine Bennett behind my eyelids. She might be popping a Lean Cuisine in the microwave right now, or watching
Law & Order
or ironing clothes for tomorrow, which is a school day, after all … heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work she goes!

But then there is the joy of scraping my key against the doorknob in the darkness. Can you guess who forgot to turn on the porch light this morning? Can you guess who isn’t
paying attention
? There is the joy of having someone standing behind me, so that I can open the door without the fear of a stalker jumping out of the snowy hedges and pushing me into my house. I get the door open, and first thing I do is look at the answering machine, at the red zero flashing in the darkness: molten, taunting. But then Bradley follows me inside. When I flip on the light, he doesn’t do the jackassy thing where a first-time visitor looks around your home like they’re at a museum, eyes flitting and voice buoyant:
I love the red paint! Did you make that vase? What a super print, I didn’t know you liked Marc Chagall. And the framed album cover of
Sandinista!
Très apropos! Oh, we bought that bookshelf at Ikea too. We painted ours a glossy apple green
.

There’s just Bradley being himself, smiling, his shoulders slightly hunched, his hands in his pockets. He stands like that for a moment before he takes his coat off, slings it on the arm of the couch, and says, “I love it here, Sandinista. I’m never leaving.”

But he is, of course. He’ll leave us all in two weeks when he goes back to college, the semester break a shocking six weeks, but I try to push this reality from my thoughts and enjoy having Bradley at my house.

I haven’t had a boy spend the night since the whole debacle with Jonathan H. last summer. Jonathan spent the night on the Fourth of July when my mother went to visit her friend Arla in Omaha. Oh, the embittered drama of last summer now seems swathed in cotton candy, lit by pink and lavender incandescent bulbs. Had I known what the future held, I would have cherished the innocence of smashed romance and written bland odes celebrating my generic teenage heartache. I would have blessed Jonathan for dumping me for Tatiana Turner, she of the porn-star alliteration name and the extensive body piercings. Through her whorishly tight T-shirt, you could see the flat silver hoops that ringed her pierced nipples, two perky Saturns that Jonathan could not, apparently, resist.

But Bradley is no Jonathan. Bradley sits on the couch and pulls out his cell phone to check his messages. My soul mate. It seems as if he as always been here, not in a ceramic-elf-on-a-shelf way, but in the way of naturalness, of inevitability. And so our angsty slumber party commences: I order pizza without the fear that the Pizza Hut delivery man will peer inside, see me alone, and show up after his shift with complimentary breadsticks and an ice pick.

We eat a shitload of pizza. We watch TV and we smoke and we drink diet soda. We get in my bed together, some Ricky and Lucy high jinks concerning this: many, many jokes about keeping one foot on the floor and pledges about not taking advantage of one another. I’m still a little buzzed from the caffeine when I hear Bradley’s breath begin to rise and fall evenly. Just when I think he’s dead asleep, Bradley gets out of bed. I listen to the squeak of his footsteps on the pine-plank hallway. The thick 1970s carpet muffles sound in the rest of the house—we had thought of pulling it up, but in the end we just went ahead and stayed with the toxic shag. So I don’t hear anything at all before there is the aggressive jiggling of the sliding glass door.

Next, Bradley checks the steel locks on the front door—
click click click click—
and then I hear his footsteps coming down the hallway again, and he gets back into bed. I have the far-off thought that he will make a good father someday.

Soon, Bradley really is asleep. But my mind is full of parking lots and Alecia Hardaway and the pleasure of having someone in bed next to me. Bradley must use a fruited shampoo, because curled up under the blankets he smells warm, citrusy. I have a sudden sensory memory of an orange Christmas cake my mother used to make. Orange peels next to a blue bowl, ribbons of batter falling from the electric hand beater. And Catherine Bennett. Of course she’s there too. Catherine Bennett, Catherine Bennett. I look at the clock on the nightstand: 2:30.

Quietly, I creep out of bed and tiptoe out of my room. In the hall mirror, I wipe the sad-clown mascara smears from beneath my eyes, put my coat on and head into the night: the cold car, the choking ignition, the icy air on my face. It’s only because I have someone waiting for me at home that I have the courage to leave the house at this hour. Hear me now, O rapists and muggers and frantic meth heads who will tap my car window at any given intersection: Bradley awaits.

I take the MapQuest directions out of my purse and let the car warm in the driveway while I study my path. And then I light a cigarette, switch on my headlights and drive slowly and carefully through the side streets of my neighborhood.

I speed up as I drive on and on into the heart of the cold and starless night, thinking,
Oh, Catherine Bennett, I am coming for you
, a nervous pioneer exploring the far-flung suburbs with their replicating tanning salons and Burger Kings and Kwik Shops. When the street names start to sound like cowboy movies, I know I’m getting warm. Here is Trailblazer Avenue, here is Cattleman Court, here is Maverick Lane. And here is my right turn, Ponderosa Lane, where shaggy pine trees in the front yards dwarf all the ranch houses. With my heart racing and all my stalkerina impulses on fire, I squint at the passing house numbers illuminated by porch lights. I’m expecting revelation, something along the lines of the humiliation and the exaltation and Christ only knows what. When I reach the 1100 block of Ponderosa Lane, I slow down, my foot taking a soft turn on the brake, and there it is, 1207 Ponderosa Lane.

Catherine Bennett lives in a cranberry-colored ranch house with a maple door and shutters. Though it’s the first week of January, there’s still a life-sized wooden toy soldier—or is it a fucking nutcracker?—with painted rose-pink cheeks, a modest smile and a tall black hat garlanded with green and red Christmas tinsel.

I think:
Why would a woman so efficient and mathematical not have taken down her Christmas decorations?

The front is dark, though there is a lit window at the side of the house, a golden rectangle cheering the side yard. Still, as I drive on, inch by inch past her house, there is a pallor here that I recognize. Catherine Bennett’s house has the same doomed
whose woods these are/I think I know
vibe of my own house. I imagine that Catherine Bennett is in her bedroom. Catherine Bennett is watching a crime show. Maybe Catherine Bennett is dead. Perhaps she slipped on the shower floor and her body is decomposing, because of course there’s nobody to call the ambulance, the morgue, whatever. Of course there’s no one to help her, because she’s all alone, isn’t she?

I crack my window and throw out my cigarette butt. I immediately light up another, the match sparking blue in the darkness. I must consider that Catherine Bennett might not be home at all. Catherine Bennett might be on some grief-limned vacation. With her affinity for paying attention, her expertise at forethought, she’s surely bought that special device that I keep meaning to buy, the one that I really, really need, the device that allows lights to click on every night at the same time, a device that makes each and every burglar put finger pensively to chin and think,
What light in yonder window breaks? Ah, it must be that the homeowner is inside. Alas, I shall try another house
.