The Sharp Time (15 page)

Mr. Hale, the gym teacher, is back from escorting Mrs. Bennett to the office. He has told everyone, “Why don’t we just have some quiet time before the bell rings.” And so he sits at Mrs. Bennett’s desk, reading
Penthouse,
which he has stashed between the covers of an ancient
Newsweek.
And all is quiet; all is still. But, people, all is not calm, nor is it bright
.

Sandinista Jones is walking back into the school. Sandinista must have done some kind of Superman outfit switcheroo in her car, because she’s returning to Woodrow Wilson High School in a wrap dress with repeating black and turquoise triangles and patent-leather high heels. In her matching patent-leather handbag there is a gun. Sandinista Jones walks through the dim anteroom of the principal’s office unobserved, the secretary listening to her iPod and reading T. S. Eliot. Sandinista Jones looks through the rectangular windowpane of the principal’s office and sees Catherine Bennett holding up a platter covered with Saran Wrap. Sandinista Jones puts her head next to the cracked door, and Sandinista Jones pays attention
.

“Caramel apples?” Catherine Bennett smiles and flutters her pale lashes. She is one grotesque coquette
.

“What?” asks Principal Jack Johnson. He looks frightened
.

“You know I bring them to the Christmas party every year!”

Catherine Bennett plunks the platter down on his desk and frantically takes off the Saran Wrap. “It’s kind of my signature treat! I bring them to class sometimes and let the kids graze a bit while they do their math problems. Did you know if they get an A on their test I also give them a coupon for a free burrito?”

Through the cold patent leather of her handbag, Sandinista Jones feels the bulk of her gun
.

The principal clears his throat. “I was wondering if we might talk a little bit about Sandinista Jones? The … incident.”

“Nice, girl, nice girl! What a super senior class we have!” Catherine Bennett pushes the platter of apples closer to Jack Johnson. “You have to use Red Delicious. They have to be very, very firm! Or else the warm caramel will turn the apples to pure goosh.” She gives a Halloween grimace and repeats “pure goosh” in a Frankenstein monotone. She flutters her hands to her neck and leaves them there. She laughs and says lightly, “Pure goosh,” and looks out the window at the lemon-gray sky of a dreary afternoon, the banked snow. She whispers, “Pure goosh.”

The gun in Sandinsta’s purse is an itch, an ache
.

But, now, in Jack Johnson, Sandinista Jones sees something beyond the random expedient pervy principal; she sees a certain wariness, the briefest sign of cognition. Jack Johnson looks down at the caramel apples, all that red and tan sweetness on his desk, fructose and sucrose and corn syrup goosing his brains by osmosis:
Oh, fuck.
Catherine Bennett really is crazy
.

And this is all Sandinista Jones wants, this gift of someone who gets it, who is not going to fake-smile and give her zombie eyes:
Have you perhaps misinterpreted the situation?
And Jack Johnson is getting it slowly, surely.… He rubs his temple and thinks of Catherine Bennett’s erratic behavior in the teachers’ lounge; he thinks of a random Monday morning before school started when he heard a pounding in the hall and looked out to see Catherine Bennett banging her fist against every locker, remembers how the sound reverberated down the hall like a metallic woodpecker.…

Sandinista Jones opens the door to the principal’s office
.
Catherine Bennett says, “Well, look who’s here! Speak of the devil! Hi, Sandinista!”

Sandinista Jones looks at Jack Johnson and says, “Through your faith, you have earned your salvation. Go in peace.”

And he does, the principal grabs his coffee cup from his desk and skitters out of his office. Next, Sandinista turns to Mrs. Bennett, who sits with her hands clasped together, smiling
.

The interlocking silver circle on Sandinista Jones’s leather handbag makes an intriguing
swarishhh
when she clicks it open
.

But then the string of bells on the door shivers and Bradley walks into the Pale Circus and smiles at me, big and sweet; he gives a repentant nod to Henry Charbonneau, who offers up a tart. “So nice of you to join us, Bradley.”

The sight of Bradley gives me a jolt of optimism that makes me start to think a little differently. Because maybe Catherine Bennett’s car parked in the lot could mean many things: she could have already been dismissed from her teaching job, and in a flurry of whacked-out desperation, maybe she really has brought a tray of candied fruit to the principal and staff; perhaps she has already morphed into the crazy aunt at the Christmas party. Surely they are trying to find a way to let her go quietly. Lisa Kaplansky could be waiting to call and tell me about the terms of Catherine Bennett’s dismissal. The words
terms of dismissal
are bright and promising as poppies, and when Ms. Kaplansky tells me about Catherine Bennett’s terms of dismissal, orange-red blossoms will flower through my mind. I will nod and look pensively to the ceiling, an intelligent girl considering a fact.

Oh, I will not disappoint Lisa Kaplansky. I will not scream or shout about the injustice shown to me, I will simply say,
I see
, and I will be appreciative of the school’s efforts as I gnaw my thumbnail, taking it all in, and who among you would not admire my stoicism, who among you would not note the jaunty poppy-colored cashmere-sweater-and-beret combo I am wearing in this five-second daydream?

At the very least, I imagine that everyone has told their parents and that the parents have probably called the school and it is all a bit of a breathless mess. I also understand that people clear up business on Friday afternoons; there is an implicit decency to clearing up any old business so that people might be free to enjoy their weekends—viva Miller time!—the same week as
the incident
 … because there is a certain decency to taking care of things within the week. It’s professional. And so the chance of me getting the call today is high … at least, moderately high.…

Bradley looks at the pile of dresses still to be ironed and then back at Henry Charbonneau, who is reading in the pale morning sun. To anyone passing on the street this must make a fetching picture, the headless mannequin in her polar parka and Henry Charbonneau with his book and fashionably pensive gaze: a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man.

Bradley swallows his laughter, but his shoulders shake a little bit as he takes off his leather jacket. Bradley whispers: “It is
such
a shame that Henry Charbonneau was born after the Civil War. Because just look at the dear man. He would have looked fetching drinking mint juleps and reading on some crumbling, leafy veranda while his slaves hammered horseshoes and hung out laundry under the blazing sun.”

Henry doesn’t look up from his book when he says, “Bradley, if you’re both half an hour late to work and mocking me … hmm … that doesn’t necessarily seem like a wise combination.”

Bradley smiles. “Observation is not mockery.”

“Listen up, worker bees.” Henry Charbonneau clears his throat. “I’m going to read a poem.”

I look down and take a ferocious interest in a satin mandarin collar, tracing the mouth of the iron around the sweet curves. Because the only thing more mortifying than someone reading a poem out loud is having someone read their
own
poetry out loud, but as Henry is reading from a book and not a frayed spiral notebook, at least I won’t be party to that cringe-fest. And so the sun sparkles and Bradley gives me a comradely smile and Henry Charbonneau begins his recitation:

“The monastery is quiet. Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon
.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from
,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star. In the conflagration of memory

my people sit on green benches in the park
,

terrified, evil, broken by love—

to sit with them inside that invisible fire

of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk

billboard crawled across the street

seemed impossible, but how

was it different from here
,

where they have one day they play over

and over as if they think

it is our favorite, and we stay

for our natural lives
,

a phrase that conjures up the sun’s

dark ash adrift after ten billion years

of unconsolable burning?”

“Look,” Bradley says.

Right on cue, two of our monks, the monks of St. Joseph’s, walk past. Caught in the bright spell, the three of us look out at them with longing. When they pass out of view, Henry Charbonneau says: “It’s a Denis Johnson poem. My book club is reading his poetry this week. But, truthfully, I think I might be the only one to ‘get it,’ ” he says, making air quotes around the last two words.

My heart races a bit. “So is Arne in your book club?”

Henry Charbonneau looks truly surprised. “Have you been hanging out at the pawnshop, Sandinista? And yes, Arne is most certainly in my book club. And, well, how have you become a girl from around the way so quickly?”

Bradley smiles at me and I can
feel
it, the bright promise of the New Testament, my phone ringing at home, as if Jesus himself is calling, using his human’s voice, which is the commingling of Joe Strummer’s and Al Green’s and Bono’s, saying,
I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you
.

We get into the groove of the day: Henry Charbonneau leaves to do the important things that Henry Charbonneau must do and Bradley and I iron dresses and fill candy dishes; we offer up kindness to strangers who walk into the Pale Circus—though, no, this does not include letting them use the bathroom—we arrange and rearrange clothes; we mourn the implicit broken contract and personal disappointment of gorgeous clothes balled up on the dressing room floor, left there by some jackass customers. We rehang these spurned items, cursing.

I hope that my mother can see the good moments of this day, my camaraderie with Bradley; I hope my mother can see me working alongside a boy who keeps Catherine Bennett at bay with fun and fabrics.

I hope my mother can see me laughing at a boy’s joke: Bradley, apropos of nothing, sniffs the air with great distaste. He says, “Uggh. It smells like up-dog in here.”

I look up from the last unironed dress in my stack and say: “
What
is up-dog?”

“Not much, dog. Wazzup with you?”

And then we laugh the high, keening laughter that reminds me of our old neighbor’s hunting dog, the inter-galactic noises he would make as the elderly Mr. Schmitz packed up his truck for a day of hunting. A skinny, liver-spotted dog who lived for the crack of the gun.

* * *

Bradley seems unwilling to risk taking a lunch hour thirty minutes after he shows up for work, so I cruise down Thirty-Eighth Street by myself.

My car knows where to go. It’s as if the Taurus is some futuristic Ford that can read my mind and poof, purple haze, the rabbit out of the hat, three dollars in gas, I’m turning in to the parking lot. With my gun in my glove box I’m as amped as a prizefighter. I’m at Woodrow Wilson High School at 12:30 smack on the nose, on the cauliflower ears.

I park way in the back row, where the newspaper recycling vat intersects the mouth of the track, and watch my fellow seniors with off-campus lunch privileges come out of school: even from this distance I can spot a few stoner pals, and there is the surly cheerleader, Olivia Leland, who I was friends with until seventh grade, until her mother learned that my house was slightly too crappy and also in the wrong part of town. But fair enough, there is also Johanna Zehr, whom I promptly dumped when I started high school, as she had committed the double sin of not smoking Camel Lights and enjoying Christian rock. Until freshman year I loved Johanna both for her Mennonite beauty—blond cornsilk hair pulled into a bridal bun at the crown of her head—and for the luscious cinnamon buns her mother baked. Even in my current gloom I think of her mother’s being so pleased that I could eat three, how she wrote out the directions for me on an index card—
Use water from boiled potatoes
.

Why did the potato water make the cinnamon buns so delicious?

My car fills with the smell of cinnamon and warm frosting as the senior cliques trickle out of school, as the security guard roams the parking lot with his hand clapped to the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, wishing it were a billy club or better yet, a gun, probably wishing he were an actual police officer, which would make it ever so easy for him to get laid. Instead he’s stuck being a minimum-wager for the school security corporation that blossomed after the shootings at Columbine.

I light a cigarette and watch the teachers who smoke heading out to their cars for a quickie, and then there she is, her herky-jerky walk, her crazy-ass smile: Catherine Bennett. She wheels a backpack behind her, as if harboring a long-lost dream of being a flight attendant. She is going to lunch, I suppose. She either has a cell phone clipped to her ear or is frantically talking to herself. Her hair is short. I don’t see a phone. See how she walks with purpose—
Look alive, people! Pay attention! Alecia, Sandinista, are you paying attention? Have you done the review problems? Why are you wearing a sweater? Did someone not check the weather forecast?
Oh, she is the Comet in my cake and will be forfuckingever if I don’t do something.