The Sharp Time (5 page)

And then it’s me trying to ignore her delusional salutations, trying to casually leave the classroom as if for a dental appointment, and then running down the hall and out the front doors of Woodrow Wilson High School.

* * *

Before I head back to work, I cruise the student section, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand flattened to the sore spot on my rib, not wanting to be seen, wanting to be seen, not wanting to be seen, wanting to be seen: the Invisible Man snapping his rainbow suspenders and pinning an oversized
KISS ME I’M IRISH
pin on his collar. I’m hoping to see Marshall Hoopes or Kellie Brock in the parking lot. The digital clock on my dashboard says 12:25, so I know fourth period is breaking for lunch, and I wonder if Leah Carr and Caitlin Jantzen and Parker Jackson and Megan Loneker are congregating around my locker, wondering where I am, how I’m doing:
Where is she? Where is Sandinista?

I imagine the teachers are tense and nervous, the administration confused and wimpy. I stare at the school and note how it resembles a penal colony: the grim redbrick nothingness, the extensive and regularly broken rules. I dig my cell phone from my purse and call my home number. When I enter the code and check for messages, there is in fact one new message and my heart does a scream-roller ascent—here it is, it’s coming, the facts from the school, the deal struck by the school board and principal and would I like to come in and talk to the counselors and would I, perchance, be willing to sign a confidentiality agreement about the whole Catherine Bennett scenario? However, it is not anyone from school, it’s a bored voice saying: “Stanley Steemer is having a sale on carpet cleaning this month, four rooms for the price of three.” Godfuckingdamnit. “Imagine how terrific your home will look and smell with freshly cleaned—like new!—carpets.”

I hit the End button on my phone. I comfort myself with this thought: I have to get back to work. Backtowork. Backtowork. Backtowork. The staccato comfort of it.

* * *

The afternoon passes too quickly, the Pale Circus precisely the heaven I had imagined. Well, a heaven framed by un-ringing phones and the ghost of Catherine Bennett, but then there is also the strikingly angelic Bradley leading me to the three-way mirror at the back of the store. Bradley holds up an A-line dress printed with interlocking aqua and olive circles and says, “You
have
to try this on,” and, “How fun to work with a girl; it’s like having my very own Barbie doll.” When I look at our reflection in the mirror it is very nearly a bridal tableau, and Catherine Bennett recedes into a haze of arid beige nothingness, which is perhaps the natural habitat of high school algebra teachers.

At Bradley’s insistence I go into one of the two dressing rooms at the back of the store to try on the dress. I take off my sweater and stand in my skirt and black bra, staring at the bruise on my rib cage: plum-colored, sepia at the edges and shaped like Italy. I press my finger to the tender city, Assisi, where St. Francis communed with the birds, and then I touch the radiant center of the bruise: Milan, where clothes are spun from gold, from the expansive minds of geniuses. I remember my mother tracing her finger over a magenta Italy on the globe and saying: “Assisi … Milan”: the two Italian cities she most wanted to visit when we went on our European odyssey.

My mind stretches, litigious: Should I take a photograph of my Italian bruise? I should. But then I hear Bradley sing out my name—“Sandinista”—so I quickly pull on the dress, and bossa nova—ironic yet not, for I am pleased with the print, the waistline—out of the dressing room.

“It’s perfect on you, as I knew it would be,” Bradley says. He crosses his arms over his chest and smiles like a TV dad on prom night. Bradley! He’ll work here for only three more weeks; he’s on his winter break from college, home with his family, home to the Pale Circus. As soon as he told me, it occurred to me that I had not seen him in the shop since summer, since all was right with the world.…

I’m admiring myself in the three-way mirror, absently raising my hand as if I’m hailing a taxi, when the string of silver bells shivers against the glass door and a homeless man enters. He’s every inch the stereotype, with Grizzly Adams wild hair, multiple stained Windbreakers, aggressive BO and windburned face, and of course he wants to know if he can use the bathroom.

“Please?”

Bradley points to the words
No Bathroom
that are spelled out in shellacked mini-marshmallows on a small oak plaque hanging on the wall, Henry Charbonneau taking the candied Circus dream a bit too far. I never noticed this sign before; maybe my eyes were blind to this, wanting so much to see only the pastel magic.

When the man leaves, Bradley asks me, “Do you think people really believe that we hold it all day? That we take in no solids, no liquids, I mean, surely this whole ‘no bathroom’ thing is the antithesis of entertaining the angels unawares—”

And here I go on space patrol for a moment and consider
antithesis of entertaining the angels unawares—
and loving my new friend—whee! But even though I am
not paying attention not paying attention not paying attention
and my mind falls into Catherine Bennett country, I don’t miss much because Bradley is still ruminating on the bathroom/homelessness dilemma when I resurface.

“Surely this turning people away from the bathroom business will come back to fuck me at the gates of heaven.” He brushes his hair out of his eyes with his hand, the crucifix tattoo on his thumb flashing. “But when you have to scrub projectile diarrhea off the walls, it turns you into a real Judas.”

I change back into my skirt and sweater, and when I come out of the dressing room I look at all the pretty clothes, a variance of color and style and era. I talk about many random things with my new friend and I feel what must be the alleged peace of Christ, a deeply groovy respite spent with a disciple who seems better than the real deal—kinder, less prissy, without the creepy beard and über-goth crown of thorns, and who, in his millennial human form, has a serious marijuana habit: Bradley takes a break every few hours and comes back haloed with that unmistakable smell, the briefest rock show. Oh, but the hours take flight and soon it’s six o’clock and it’s all
See you tomorrow
and
I loved working with you
and
Good night, good night, sweet prince
as he walks me to my car, then takes off down the cold sidewalk, a boy alone, digging in his coat pocket for his bag of weed.

* * *

What’s there at home for me?

I sit in my car until Bradley is safely off in the distance, and then I stroll down Thirty-Eighth Street. I look up at the monastery, at the liquor store, the erotic bakery, the pawnshop. I think of the world never stopping, just rolling, rolling, rolling, and I have that bad sensation of my hands starting to feel strange, detached from my body, that all my moronic thoughts and blood and bones are about to ooze out of the loose shells of my wrists.

But I am paying attention to this sensation, yes, I am paying attention. I am a person and I am paying attention as I walk through the sidewalk slush. I look in the window of Second Chance? The store is illuminated by a single bare bulb in the front window. There’s a jaunty
YES, WE’RE OPEN!
sign hung on the door. Because I have nothing better to do, because I have nothing at
all
to do, I open the door and go inside. The back of the store seems to float in semidarkness, and there is a heavy smell of standing water and bacon grease, as if the pawnshop is in the midst of a breakfast buffet/flood sale.

There is a smeared glass case of wedding rings to my left, mostly cornucopias of yellowish diamonds on thin gold bands. The price tags are strung on the rings by black thread, like tagged toes at a morgue. I think of my mother’s tan, veiny feet—she favored vamp polish and sterling toe rings—and my chest tightens. And when the
Are you paying attention
song starts up in my brain, I have to admit to myself that I am not. I am lost as I gaze into the next case. Handguns. I think:
Now, there’s something that has never been on my shopping list
.

I look around the shop and see that people pawn some fairly useless items: a five-foot ceramic camel, startled, caught in mid-bray, his jeweled halter studded with dusty amethyst and rhinestones, his teeth glazed a bright corn yellow. There is a child-sized motorized Jeep—Easter egg purple and covered in Barbie stickers—a snowmobile, a mink coat chain-linked to the ceiling, a scramble of power tools trailing frayed cords, an oversized painting of
The Last
Supper
with jolly disciples pigging out and a foxy brunette Jesus looking up from a platter of purple grapes, his smile tight, his forehead laced with anxiety. Mostly, though, people give up their rings and their guns.

The handguns in the glass case are displayed on grease-stained tea towels. And there is another glass-fronted cabinet, this one stately and cherrywood, tall as a grandfather clock and filled with shotguns and hunting rifles that look clanking and cumbersome.

But I’m no Davy Crockett, no Daniel Boone, I would not want a big gun, I would not want to kill an animal, I definitely prefer handguns. And in the next second my brain does a mocking double take:
You prefer
what?

I see what must be a girl’s gun next to the black revolvers and pistols. It has a shiny, snub-nosed barrel and a sweet pink handle with ivory mosaic inlay every bit as luscious as peppermint marzipan swirled with cream. There is a closed-circuit black-and-white TV over my head and I look up at myself: a grainy, blurred girl coveting a gun. When I press my palms flat to the cool glass of the gun case, a disembodied voice asks, “Need any help, young lady?”

Which of course is an exercise in understatement, and then he appears from the darkness, a man in his sixties with a full sleeve of tattoos and a faded red T-shirt that says
CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT
.

“I’m just looking,” I say.

He holds a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand. A book is tucked under his arm.

“At the firearms?” He smiles, skeptical and amused and grandfatherly there amid all the junk.

And my mind floods with the image of Catherine Bennett standing at the blackboard with her chalk and her perpetual smirk; Catherine Bennett, the flashing red exclamation point to my nothingness. I travel back to algebra class like Huck Finn without the funeral, and I imagine that nothing has changed, that the school has decided not to fire her, that the class sits, placid and resigned, in their straight rows of desks. Catherine Bennett wears a teal blue Hillary pantsuit and the humble expression of one making amends until she looks at Alecia. In my mind’s eye, Alecia Hardaway sits alone.

Mrs. Bennett’s wolverine smile fixes on the dreamy face of Alecia Hardaway, and I know that no counselor or principal or teacher or paraprofessional is on their way to help. I have studied the ways of Woodrow Wilson High School and know that I am the chosen one; I must keep Alecia Hardaway safe.

Still, when the words come out of my mouth, calm and sane, I am surprised. I am in no way prepared and there it is anyway. I feel my victim’s mind-set fading away, replaced by a new idea, the attendant breathlessness of a new idea.

The guns glimmer in the dim light;
CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT
.

“I’m in the market for a handgun. I live alone and I need some protection.”

The word
protection
is suddenly so reminiscent of condoms or birth control pills that I feel myself blush, a hotness in my neck that rises to my hairline and fries my scalp.

He looks at me. “What are you, sixteen, seventeen? Why do you live alone?”

“I’m eighteen, actually.” And then I whore out my grief; I sing it out, slicing up the syllables: “Well, my mother died.”

He chews tobacco. He says, “No dad around?”

“I don’t have a dad,” I say.

He gives a sidelong glance as if I am a child of a random hooker in a latex miniskirt, a glance that makes me want to smash the glass and grab a gun.

“You’ll need to go to school,” he says, looking troubled. He must be some kind of mystic, someone who, in this dank shop with its smell of basement water, can divine the lives of his customers.

I look down at the case of handguns. A wandering crack in the glass is sealed off with a strip of yellow wax.

“I’m not going back to school.” I shrug. “School is not my thing. I had a big, big problem with algebra.” I let loose with a psychotic little chuckle.

He looks at me for a long moment, an O.K. Corral moment, and then he spits tobacco into the Styrofoam cup.

“
Gun
school, dolly.”

Dolly
, I think.
Well, hello
.

“Gun school,” he repeats. “You need to learn to fire a gun, or in an emergency you’ll end up shooting your fool foot off.” He gives a masterful suck to his front teeth:
tsk, tsk
. “Very common occurrence among rookies.”

“Gun school? You mean, like, a shooting range?”

“Something like that, dolly.” He gazes out the front window and then gives a little forward jab with his shoulder. “You like working yonder at the used-clothes store?”

The used-clothes store
. Henry Charbonneau would fall down dead at the sweatpanted sound of it. He prefers the term
spun-sugar vintage couture
.

“Oh, I like it a lot,” I say. “I love it so far.”

“Today was your first day, right? Thought I saw you pop in first thing Monday morning. I knew you were looking for a job. You didn’t have the lollygagging shopping look. Dolly, you looked
all
business.”

Perhaps he registers some alarm on my face because he says, “Now, don’t worry, dolly. I’m no stalker. We keep pretty good tabs on each other on Thirty-Eighth Street, that’s all.”

Through the grimy windows I see a monk strolling past. Not the sleek handsome one. This monk is doughy and bearded and troubled-looking, a frown pinched between his eyebrows. The monk squints into the store. I know it looks dark from the outside; I know that he probably can’t make out our forms, but he waves anyway. This hopeful waving seems to be the social contract of the Trappist monks of Thirty-Eighth Street.