The Sharp Time (18 page)

I push the mouth of my gun into the passenger seat for a second. It leaves a soft oval indentation on the gray fabric. I do it again. The fabric is mottled with stains and spills: lipstick, coffee, blue pen, carrot-ginger soup, strawberry smoothie. My mother longed for leather; she rued the thrift of the car’s original owner.

Even though the gun is unloaded, the bullets safe in their box in the glove compartment, I imagine the gun accidentally going off, how it would give the wrong impression.

The school would be sweetly official:
Sandinista has a record of skipping school, so we weren’t terribly concerned when she missed a week
. And here the school would be correct, because my mother had a loose policy about school attendance, her thought being that if she homeschooled me, I would never have to go to school, so what was so wrong about a girl taking a day off to go to the museum, or to read J. D. Salinger’s
Nine Stories
, or to go for a hike during September’s monarch migration? Plus, the school would have a pretty big out:
Her mother died in the fall. Naturally she was upset. Apparently she never recovered
. All the while relief warming the duplicitous bastards like whiskey straight from the bottle. Ahhh, in front of a bonfire on a winter night:
Now she won’t complain. Not that she mattered. But still, now we are in the clear. That warms the old bones! Such a troubled girl, such bad luck! Well, maybe she’s in a better place
.

Ha! Go fuck yourselves. I’d never do it.

My mother told me each and every night of my life: “There will never be anyone more precious to me than you, Sandinista. I love you more than anyone in the universe.” The saccharine burden of it annoyed me.

I pop my gun back into the glove box.
I love you more than anyone in the universe
. I put on fresh lipstick—a matte brown-pink called Ashes of Roses—and press my lips together. I give myself a crazy smile in the rearview mirror to check for lipstick tracks. I clear my throat as if I’m about to make a speech.
I love you more than anyone in the universe
.

And then I drive home, slowly and carefully, as if I’m a chubby suburban mom in sweatpants driving a van with a Baby on Board sign in the window; over the icy patches I go, slowly and surely, as if I’m worth being saved.

SATURDAY
GOD’S GUIDE TO GETTIN’ IT ON

Saturday used to be the best day. My mom and I would go for pancakes and heavily creamed coffee at the diner, and then we would hit the thrift stores, the library for travel books, the grocery stores, a matinee, maybe popcorn and pie for dinner, sometimes a fancy dinner—my mother tying on her red and orange Ugandan apron and making pad thai and lemongrass soup, and then having friends over for Scrabble or going out into the night for more adventure, a concert, a drive under the stars. It was always the longest day, the most packed day of adventure, of the pure pleasure of no work or school, a day so reliably lovely that it would always inspire the Sunday blues.

But. Good-bye to all that.

Stepping out of my car on Thirty-Eighth Street, I have the jittery, dirt-gray feeling of no sleep and no phone calls and too many cigarettes. But at least I have the solace of work, if work is a candied shop with gleaming oak floors and racks of lovely clothes. And of course there is Bradley, Bradley taking the money, Bradley judiciously mocking those and
only
those who severely deserve it, Bradley who is reliably kind to the polite, to the downtrodden. And he has a lot of work to do, too, what with being the unwitting juxtaposition for the doom of my unringing phone, that seismic quiet, for Catherine Bennett, and for my whorl of pink-gun thoughts. My perpetual
Oh! What’s a girl to do, what’s a girl to do!
Well, to answer my own question, I suppose I could pay attention; I could sit up straight and listen carefully. I could look all the shining and heavily deluded people of this world in the eye and smile!

And now I am the proud owner of this brilliant little epiphany, which really should have been clear from the onset to anyone with a pulse: I know the school will not call. And it burns burns burns, but still I have something. I think of the words highlighted in my mother’s white leatherette Bible from St. Scholastica’s:
I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you
.

Because I have a gun in my glove box, and my eyes are open, people, open, though weighted with heavy mascara, my long lashes fluttering like texturized spider legs. I wear a short skirt with irregularly spaced pear-green squares and arrows on a creamy tweed background, a black mohair sweater with a keyhole neckline (the black camisole beneath rescuing me from hoochie territory), black opaque tights and some big-ass shoes: four-inch platforms that give me the buoyancy of a moonwalker and pinch my baby toes, those poor little piggies that went wee wee wee all the way home.

The shop is busy—Saturday busy—which means no lunch hour, which means just Bradley zipping out the back for weed patrol and me eating a few poisoned circus peanuts before I smoke a cigarette out front. Henry Charbonneau is driving through obscure towns, hitting the estate sales with his new lovah, so this Saturday is just Bradley and me and the Pale Circus makes three. And despite my bleak week there are moments of real happiness: listening to Bradley hum
John Henry was a steel-drivin’ man
as he rings up a studded leather jacket; watching a gray-haired woman bring her hand fluttering to her neck with delight when she steps out of the dressing room in a violet-blue cocktail dress she swore would make her look just ridiculous.

But always there is the metal shell of my dread, my heart a bronzed baby bootie of
fuck me fuck me fuck me
.

By afternoon I lose my resolve to be cool and realistic; I lose my vibe of
the school will not call and that is okay, or, that it really is not okay at all, but like many a morning gin drinker, God has granted me the knowledge to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot change or whatever that alcoholic wisdom is
.

A girl with an auburn bob tries on a dove-gray dress with a fitted bodice that flares into layers and layers of moth-eaten tulle buoyed by a crinoline. When she looks at herself in the three-way mirror it is with pleasure, her eyes widening slowly, as if to modestly say:
Well, now. Wow
. She smiles. Her teeth are the ruined oyster gray of a bulimic, and I am sad to see that she is a cutter, sad to see the thin raised scars striping her calves and inner arms.

Bradley is squatted down, straightening shoes so that they are equally spaced. He looks up at the girl in the gray dress and says, “Oh, that is great on you. Just great.” And it’s the second heartfelt
great
that gets us both—the girl looks stricken and I know for sure that his kindness is doing something to my own heart, trying to tamp down both my sorrow and my girl-with-the-gun-in-the-glove-box bravado. And so I wonder—and I can tell that the girl wonders too, her face private and pensive—can the semi-okay people of the earth not build some kind of army? Could we live in a commune, a cloister, protected from all the world is so quick to offer up?

My mind is hazy and soft, as if lined with toxic velveteen, and the hours, the hours, all the fucked-up or sublime hours, go too fast. Soon it is six o’clock and Bradley locks up and that’s all there is, there isn’t anymore—except for me wishing and wishing I had a cot in the back room.

I Windex and I clean the bathroom; I bag the trash and I straighten the racks, Swiffer the floor and dust the baseboards. Bradley does the cash register totals, his hand one with the calculator buttons as he adds up the checks, little pastel flags zipping between his fingers. He looks up at me and says, “Are you doing anything tonight?”

“ ‘Washing my hair,’ she said coquettishly.” I twirl the feather duster in my hands, a peacock’s swishing tail of silver and black and cobalt blue.

Instead of laughing Bradley merely gives me a rueful little smile.

I shrug. “I never do anything. Why?”

“I need a hit.”

“Really?” I say. “Thinking of … a hit of … 
moi
?” I twirl the feather duster again, but this time it is quite lame, a forced and awkward gesture.

“Yeah, baby,” he says, plunging an imaginary hypodermic needle into the crook of his arm while making Bambi eyes at me.

“You’ll have to try something in a different vein, no pun intended. I’m not interested in a shopgirl romance.”

Bradley smiles but there is something dry and tired about our shopgirl humor, the jokey facade. The backbone of our forced humor is shrinking away, an osteoporosis of good cheer. I move the duster over the cash desk, over the cash register.

“I need my Jesus-hit.”

“Oh.”

Bradley rubber-bands the checks; he puts them in the bank bag with the cash. Henry Charbonneau will go to the bank first thing Monday morning; Henry Charbonneau is the moneyman.

“I know it’s weird to ask someone to go to church with you, it’s all evangelical and shit. Just so you know: I don’t even believe in God. I’m a cultural Catholic to the extreme.”

I steal a look at the crucifix tattoo on his thumb.
That’s a lot of culture
, I think.

“But if you’re not doing anything else tonight—”

“Bradley, I’m not. I never do anything.”

Bradley locks the doors of the Pale Circus and we are out into the world, which has the cold, stinging look of
Hey, Mom, I think it’s going to snow
. That old hurtful dreamscape. I daydream a brighter snow day, a snow day where the children laugh and play and Frosty does not melt away, where the mothers live forever and where there is hot chocolate and warm shortbread and the hard-assed individuality of snowflakes, their ephemeral pronged crystals.

Except I know that Catherine Bennett would ruin the snowy dreamscape of winter wonderland, that she would appear in her beige snow boots and nylon parka and yell out to Alecia Hardaway,
Alecia, yoo-hoo! Alecia! What is the substance that comes from the sky? It rhymes with “toe”!
And there would be Alecia in a striped stocking cap sprouting a festive tassel. She would be squinting as the snowflakes landed on her face. Alecia would knit her holly-green gloved hands together and try to puzzle it out.

I feel more mentally ill than usual and realize that I’ve had nothing but coffee, cigarettes and germy candy for the past twenty-four hours, that I’m not only internally jittery but physically trembling. When Bradley asks if he can drive—well, precisely what he says is “I’m good to drive,” with a solemn nod—I am grateful to get in on the passenger side, to have a different point of view.

Mostly I like to be the person who is not in charge.

And so Bradley drives, and the car heater kicks on, and I am warm and sleepy, traveling with a safe person. I close my eyes and have the fantasy that Bradley is an escaped convict who is kidnapping me, and how completely, completely great that would be: Route 66, diners with strawberry malts and fat, crisp onion rings, motels with flamingos and vinyl lounge chairs arranged in a listless pattern around drained swimming pools, a homicidal front-desk clerk with a lazy eye working crossword puzzles. It would be entirely preferable to summer vacation, to burned noses and the hot, webbed plastic of the lounge chairs biting our bare calves. Bradley and I would sit in our winter coats by the empty pool, reading and daydreaming and smoking, watching the snow fall.

But wait, look who’s ruining our bliss: there stands Catherine Bennett at the outdoor vending machine, wiggling her dollar bill into the silver slot, working hard for a stale Mars Bar.

I must doze off for five full minutes or more, because when I open my eyes, we are off the interstate and driving slowly through Mission Hills, an old-money suburb with Tudor houses sweet as fairy-tale castles. When I watch a black Lab being chased through a snowy yard by happy doll-children in colorful ski gear, I’m disgusted and envious.

“This neighborhood is really lovely, in a completely bourgeois way,” I say. “It shows how capitalism works beautifully for the top tier of society.” The words just pop out, and I realize this is precisely the freelance social commentary my mother indulged in: basically correct, though vexingly self-righteous.

“Thanks.” Bradley chuckles.

“What?”

He drives a half block and then points to a cream and red brick Tudor on the left. “That’s my house.”

“Oh, my God!” We both crack up at my faux pas. I wonder, though, about Bradley: he seems not just a mere college guy home from the dorm, enjoying the aesthetic pleasures—I imagine a library inside, a stone fireplace, many a built-in walnut bookcase—in his family home.

The snow starts again, a breezy powder on the windshield fine as baker’s sugar. When I squint, I see my mother lying on her stomach on the hood of the car. With her chin resting on one hand and her feet crossed, she looks as casual as if she is stretched out on the living room floor watching TV. My mother smiles at me, snow glittering her dark hair, the briefest veil of diamonds.

The Clash song “Train in Vain” comes on the radio, and Bradley says, “Sooo, Sandinista, tell me, do you feel a spiritual connection to Joe Strummer? Since your mom clearly picked the name for a reason and probably not just because she liked the song, but … wait!” He turns and does a dramatic double take.

In Darth Vader’s breathy evil voice he says, “Sandinista, Joe Strummer is your father.”

“Nope,” I say. “I mean, he
could
be, for all I know. But since Joe Strummer is dead, it’s kind of a losing deal either way.”

“Right,” he says. He glances in the rearview mirror, looking troubled by this new information. “I kind of wondered, just being at your house. I didn’t see any pictures of men—”

“Does Johnny Depp not count? Did you not see the vintage
21 Jump Street
poster on the back of my door?”

“Oh, he counts; he counts double.”

As we pull up in front of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception—my mother called it Our Lady of Mercedes—it seems that I might be inherently Catholic, because I am more than a little okay with the whole idea of an immaculate conception, of holy sperm and egg scrambled in that great petri dish in the sky—it is, in fact, my preference to the idea of my mother hooking up with a guy at a Cure concert.