The Sharp Time (3 page)

TUESDAY
THE FURNACE OF A STAR

Opening the door of the Pale Circus is like falling into a morning dream of a surprise Technicolor paradise: you walk up any old flight of stairs, open a random closet door and find a dance hall in full swing, a secret garden, a surplus of Starlight Mints. I have tried to honor the aesthetic with my first-day-of-work attire: I wear a soft pink mohair sweater (purchased at the Pale Circus back in October, a world away), a plaid pencil skirt, cream tights, chocolate suede T-straps and a waist-length raspberry fake fur. My hair is glossed and curled into a Veronica Lake peekaboo. I wear false eyelashes I had applied with tweezers and eyelash adhesive, and my fingernails are glittering black raspberries. I look like a glammed-up, wolfish Rosie the Riveter off her shift and searching for love:
Hello, you big, bad world
.

Today there is another Monsieur Cool manning the cash register and the candy dishes. This one is younger, lots younger, around my age, but going retro with his angst: he has on a vintage Sex Pistols T-shirt, Levi’s with a two-inch rolled cuff and black motorcycle boots. I’ve seen him many times when I was shopping here—when I was a mere consumer—and I have sensed that he is one of my tribe: ADD, lovelorn. He has dyed licorice-black hair, and a fat Elvis-y pout. He gives me a solemn, unblinking stare. And so I follow the golden rule. Don’t smile at someone until they smile at you first. Don’t ever wave like a jackass, How-
dee!
Be forever cool. Aloofness is your friend, your BFF.

I stare back at him; we lock into a battle of neutrality as I walk across the hardwood floor of the Pale Circus. It’s all
Whatever, fool
, until I am distracted by a display of vintage accessories. I see a golden compact—I’m guessing from the 1940s—scrolled with hearts and crosses, the sweetest iconography, and I imagine the circle of desiccated powder in the compact, a perfumed ghost of melancholy. I imagine the GI brides, all the Sadies and Goldies powdering their noses before heading out to the dance floor to jitterbug in stacked heels, and my own shoes on the gleaming floor of the Pale Circus make the soft, golden click of the compact snapping shut, over and over and over.

So maybe my own life is not so drastic and dreadful … maybe I am just like all those other girls who have come before me with their oily T-zones and random terrible days and bittersweet triumphs, the world billowing out behind them.

I glance again at the boy—I am but a foot from the cash desk—but then, on the circular rack to my left, I notice a white leather jacket with a fat silver buckle at the waistline and then—whoooosh—I’m riding down Carnaby Street on the back of a skinny boy’s Vespa, my eyes teary and squinting from the cold wind, curtained with waterproof Cleopatra eyeliner. My mother appears and waves madly at the lovebirds on the Vespa; she’s mod as you please in a
Quadrophenia
-style army jacket and black leggings. I’m not in the Pale Circus, I have left Kansas City and now live in the London of my dreams for ten sweet seconds and of course
I’m not paying attention;
I’m daydreaming the lost future my mother and I had planned. When I finished school in May, we were going to sell the house and spend a year traveling in Europe. College could wait, she said. Her own freshman year had consisted of arguing with her bitchy roommates and mooning over her biology TA. She believed my own dorm-room dramas could be put on hold for a year or two while we grooved on life in Europe. But of course, nothing could wait, and now the world sparkles on without my mother.

When I look back up at the real boy, we have five more seconds of Coolfest USA, but then it’s as if we’ve both been tapped by the same lightning rod of goofiness. We suddenly smile at one another, not proper social smiles, but wide, stupid ones: gums prominently displayed, throats wreathed with impending laughter.

“Hello,” I say. Closer, I see that he might be older than me. Not by much. A few years? He has charming crinkles around his brown eyes that hint at copious nicotine consumption and … could it be? … tanning beds.

“Hello,” he says, imitating my soprano tone, my congeniality. And so I have my social cue to let the games begin.

“I think I am a new employee,” I say, employing a musical accent of no discernable origin.

“Indeed,” he says, “you are the new girl.” On the desk in front of him are vintage valentines, hundreds of them, scalloped and sepia along the edges. Sweet Jesus, Valentine’s Day! Next month’s doomsday holiday. But compared to Christmas, Valentine’s Day seems good-hearted, communal: there will be many, many blue people eating chocolates by themselves and watching bad TV.

He gently stacks the valentines and puts them in a shoe box. He very officiously claps his hands, then takes a circus peanut out of the bowl next to the cash register, holds it up to me, Communion-style, and smiles. “Greetings, new girl.”

And so I am the new girl, pierced with—well, I’ll be goddamned—happiness as I think of my fellow students, my “friends” at Woodrow Wilson High School, who are already in class and wearing their jeans and T-shirts, their bright sweatpants ensembles and their flat boots with soles like pork cutlets that are currently the rage among the blond and dullardly masses. Oh, if they could see me now, that old gang of mine! My nails are perfectly arched blood-black roses, and as I reach out to take the coral candy, what I think is this: the aesthetic of my life has improved about one hundred and five percent.

But then the boy yanks the candy back and whisper-shrieks: “Never, ever touch one of these. Seriously, you’ll get hepatitis B. Or C. You’ll get the goddamn
alphabet
of hepatitis.” He returns it to the bowl with a shudder, then gives me a brilliant smile. “People think: Hotmotherfuckin’ damn, free candy, circus peanuts, well, holy smokes. My parents loved circus peanuts when they were kids. Ooh, how very charmingly retro, how admirably thematic. Yum!” He shudders. “They stick their hand in the bowl: filthy fingers, scabby cuticles. Sure, they’ve just pumped gas or used the facilities; sometimes they grab for a circus peanut
whilst
,” he says, making his voice schoolmarmish for that one beat, “they are picking their nose.”

“Yum,” I say. “Delish.”

He takes a chocolate from the mahogany box next to the circus peanuts. “These, however, are too good to resist. The woman across the street makes them.” I want to say that I am well aware of Erika’s Erotic Confections, that I know a thing or two about Thirty-Eighth Street, but then who likes a know-it-all? He holds the box out to me, and though I don’t really want any communal candy after the germ lecture, I pop a chocolate in my mouth anyway: rum, vanilla, cinnamon, the center a surprise of crumbling meringue … it’s like a piece of pie jammed into a chocolate. I offer up an orgasmic eye roll.

“Right? Mmm … Moroccan Meringue.” We chew our chocolates, and the slight bob of his Adam’s apple tells me that we are swallowing in unison.

“So. I’ve only seen you in here about a million times.”

I have the joy of remembrance, of recognition; my heart a muscled little purple cow jumping over the moon, my throat coated with sugar.

“So what’s your name, new girl?”

I hesitate before I rock the nickname: “I’m Sandi.”

“As in Beach? As in Duncan?” He chortles. He must assume I’m devastated by his minor witticisms, because he follows up with a quick “Hey, I’m not winning any prizes in the name department either. My name is Bradley.” He motions holding a baby, rocking it back and forth. “What shall I call my little prince: Ian? Jonathan? Holden? Uh … no, those all sound kind of tacky. I’m going for Bradley. I’ll call him Brad! How sonorous, how very magical: Braaad.”

I laugh, loud and horsey. “Brad!”

He rewards me with a smile; he holds his hand out to me. “Nice to meet you, Sandi.”

“As in Nista!” I say. “Nice to meet you, too.” His grip is perfect, neither too tight nor too loose.

“Sandi?” He opens his eyes wide. He says my name again, this time with a short
I
. “Sandi? Nista? Sandinista!”

Back in the day, my mother wore a safety pin in her nostril, Siouxsie Sioux eyeliner and leather pants. She jammed out to the hard-core bands and the political bands, and her favorite was the Clash. She named me after their seminal album
Sandinista!
She was deeply drawn to their lead singer, Joe Strummer, not in any random whorebag groupie sort of way, but in the way of loneliness, of poetry.

I shrug. “My mother loved the Clash.”

“Is there an exclamation point at the end?”

“I don’t sign my name with it, generally. But it’s on my birth certificate and my driver’s license.”

And here he loses any vestige of ironic composure. He says, “God, that is awesome! You must be so grateful to your mom that you’re not some random Katie or Megan.”

Despite the laughter at roll call, the
tsk, tsks
from teachers, the jokes my mother and I endured about the possibility of her giving birth to a second child and naming it Contra—ha, ha—in this moment I
am
actually grateful for her originality.

“Say, Sandinista, do you smoke?”

I hedge, in case he’s a nicotine Nazi.

“Occasionally,” I say. “I smoke every now and then.”

“Well, then, God made you perfect. And so before you take off your coat and get comfortable”—he puts on his leather jacket, makes an exaggerated hand flourish—“Follow me, m’lady!” and leads me out of the Pale Circus.

I am stoned on the minutiae of new friendship: a one-inch crucifix tattooed on his thumb, a slight stagger to his gait that suggests a knee injury, the back of his neck, which he shaves—though not this morning—peppered with ingrown hairs. He immediately starts in on the owner: “God, is Henry Charbonneau from hell or what? I bet he made you write an essay instead of filling out a job application, am I right? God, Henry Charbonneau! Sometimes he’ll read poetry while he makes you sweep and Swiffer. It is inhuman. Jesus! Henry Charbonneau! What a jackass. You’re not, like, his … niece, are you?”

And I laugh and know that I will now always refer to the owner as Henry Charbonneau, as Bradley does; I will never call him Henry. And as I walk through the Pale Circus I have a sudden burst of optimism that feels like love, love, love. Except that on the pastel periphery of loveliness, Catherine Bennett’s gray pallor floats past. But an aggressively turquoise swing coat catches my eyes—a whimsical tigereye button at the throat—and I return to feeling fine and Bradley steps back to open the door for me and then we’re out into the brightness of morning, the street in its snow-sparkle glory.

The sidewalks in front of the boarded-up stores gleam like silver skating rinks, but rock salt has turned the sidewalk in front of the Pale Circus to chemical slush. I mince around in my suede T-straps, trying to find the driest spot. I reach in my coat pocket for my cigarettes—the crinkle and luminous swish of cellophane against satin—and take out a fresh pack of Marlboros.

Bradley pulls a Zippo lighter from his pocket, the crucifix tattooed on his thumb taking a little bow as he sparks a flame. He cuts the awkwardness with a spontaneous French accent, saying, “Madame,” as the fire hits my cigarette. A robed monk is walking down the street, swooping toward us like a dark bird, and as I inhale I have a moment of glitter-doll happiness
—wheee
!—that is the old snow and the monk and a new friend and nicotine and my dark fingernails against the inch of flecked tan cigarette filter. But again, Catherine Bennett is with me: she is the ice-cold blood pumping though my capillaries; her sociopathic smirk nestles in the blue vein at my temple and the wild paisley pattern of her slip imprints on my eyelids.

I exhale a cold plume of smoke and watch it evanesce into the winter air—doing my part for global warming, thanks!—and inhale quickly again, as if my body is only a conduit for nicotine. My rib hurts and Mrs. Bennett’s ugly words come back to me, unbidden, verbatim. My mind floats back to yesterday morning, to all the slamming phrases I should have said back to Mrs. Bennett, those clever comebacks that would have made the class laugh and perhaps cheer for me—everybody loves the ADD underdog. I cough, I cough and cough, and my lungs hurt. My lungs are jammed full of tiny metal hammers and miniature barbecue grills that hiss and sputter and I wonder why I didn’t simply walk out of class when Mrs. Bennett started up with her crazy-bitch routine. I am not some child trapped at a subpar day care, I am an eighteen-year-old adult with my own goddamn getaway car. And so there is the shame of that, of sitting at my desk and just
taking it
, letting a lame insane teacher treat me that way. And as always there is my embarrassing loneliness, my general momlessness.

But there’s this, too: Bradley pats me on the back, prim and sweet, and says, “Goodness, that little cough could be telling you something. Such as: ‘Congratulations, little lady! You’ve got lung cancer!’ ”

And like that, I can feel that the jumbled zoom and sway of ugliness is gone; for the moment, the creep-show allure of being Li’l Miss Tragedy is gone, and I laugh and cough some more.

Together we watch the monk walk the other side of the street. Squinting against the diamond flare of sun and snow, Bradley puts on his sunglasses for a better look. The monk is twirling the braided white cord that cinches his brown robe, whistling as he slip-slides along the ice. He looks as carefree as the young Hugh Hefner twirling the belt of his satin bathrobe as he grooves around the Playboy Mansion.

“These guys from St. Joseph’s,” Bradley says, nodding at the monk. “My theory is that they’re either on crack or lobotomized.” He affects a stoner accent: “Like, dude, maybe they’re simply stoned on the Resurrection.”

“Creepy,” I say, watching the monk.

He shrugs. “They’re okay, actually. They’re Trappist monks. They make the famous jams, the jellies. They’re not big talkers. They are a
contemplative
order. They mostly just wave. I always engage them in conversation, though. You’ll see.”

I am stabbed: my mom loved the raspberry Trappist jam. There was always a jar in our pantry. And yet Bradley’s magical
You’ll see
pulls me into the candy-colored vortex of the future, a shared future in which I have a comrade with whom to smoke and study the midwinter habits of monks on crack and I have that sugar-swirled transporting feeling of happiness.