* * *
And then there’s coming home but not walking into the house right away, just sitting on the freezing porch swing and smoking before walking around to the backyard—the kidney-shaped flower beds crunchy with ice-glazed leaves, the chain-link fence a geometry of snowy iron diamonds—before I go in the back door and move from the January cold to subtropical heat. I forgot to turn the heat down after I took my shower this morning. Guess who’s not paying attention? Yet again.
And there is the big surprise of the cool gray button on the answering machine. I was expecting the wild siren flash of multiple missed messages: maybe not the police, but at least the principal, the counselor, my Honors English teacher, Ms. Lisa Kaplansky. A friend or two. But no.
And so I eat a fun-sized Almond Joy and pace around for an hour; I watch TV and wait for the official phone calls. On the Discovery Channel, a cheetah outruns a gazelle and plunges his openmouthed face into the gazelle’s skinny neck. But after the chase, after all that pouncing and guttural roaring, the cheetah doesn’t seem especially hungry for the body and the blood. The cheetah rests his claw on the gazelle’s open chest and licks its shoulder, nonchalant: I just did that because I could, people. I switch to the mind-numbing show where celebrities dance, and paint my fingernails black raspberry. When my nails dry, I lie on my back on the couch and put my hand under my shirt, cradling the hurt part of my ribs. I consider the water stains on the ceiling; if I don’t blink, if I squint until my eyes water, I see the angel Gabriel with his arched wings and kind out-stretched hands, his head cocked to the left, as if imploring me to get off my sorry ass and do something. And so I haul myself off the couch, switch on the computer and Google the shit out of Mrs. Catherine Bennett.
There are ever so many—a Playboy Bunny, a marine biologist, a birdhouse builder—but I finally find my own private Catherine Bennett. She teaches at Woodrow Wilson High School. She is a consultant on a textbook called Math Without Fear! She donated fifty dollars to the Humane Society in honor of the late Mr. Fluffers Bennett. She lives at 1207 Ponderosa Lane. I put her address into MapQuest, and while I study the grid of intersections and arrows that leads from my house to hers, my mind wanders to the image of me at school, gathering my books off my desk and walking out the classroom door, my classmates seated, unsure whether to stay or to go, and then the asthmatic gloom of the hallway, of searching for my car keys in my pockets and my purse and backpack, waiting for the small relief of metallic shivering and deciding that I will change my stupid fucking destiny, that I will drive away from Woodrow Wilson High School and apply for a job at the Pale Circus.
I call my friend Caitlin Jantzen and leave a message on her cell phone: “Bennett lost it today. On me. Freak show extraordinaire. Did you hear? Jesus. Call me.” But my hopes aren’t that high. I haven’t returned her calls in months, and Caitlin has a new boyfriend in a band, a strapping lad, handsome and prehistoric, with high cheekbones and a large, commanding skull that houses a brain the size of a shelled walnut. I try to decide who to call next, but then the story itself is so humiliating … so I zone out and put on cherry lip balm, coats and coats of it, a soothing and useful repetition, thinking that my waxed lips will never chap, thinking: Hurrah! I am embalmed.
I walk into the kitchen for variety and stare at the mosaic of crumbs on the floor. I briefly consider sweeping and mopping, thinking it will be brisk and medicinal. Instead, I light a cigarette. I flick the spent match into the sink and exhale into the silence. Because I’m paying attention to potential fire hazards. I turn on the tap and let water stream over the match, over the stray cereal bits plastered to the sink. I’m not hungry for any specific thing, but I open the refrigerator to look at my mother’s bottle of carrot juice, gone crimson and scalded at the top, a froth of pressed blood that makes me think of the body and the blood, of heaven.
I sometimes wonder if my mother has all-new celestial powers, if she can slice the roof of our house with one breath and float though the kitchen. I hope this is not true. I hope that the atheists are correct, that everlasting life is a mere snow-globe hoax. I hope my mother could not see that I spent Christmas Eve alone, curled up with a bag of fun-sized candy bars, worried that burglars would break into the house and gasp at the sight of me on the couch, silver wrappers littering the living room floor. I would be brave and breezy, saying to the burglars, to the world: Oh, great! I knew I should have gone to my aunt and uncle’s house in Florida! In truth that invitation did not come, or maybe it did, maybe my uncle’s elliptical “Whatcha doin’ for the holidays, kiddo?” was the opening, but I could hear relief in his voice when I told him I was spending Christmas with a friend’s family: “Sounds good, Sandinista! There’s no young people around here. You’d be bored stiff!”
I hope my mother is not looking down at me from heaven like an angel doll-baby sealed up in a plastic bubble, the most despondent Polly Pocket. My first day of kindergarten, my mother cried and held on to me, frightened as she was by the specter of crayons and glue, by my teacher, Ms. Kelly, who was moderate and kind. My mother would die all over again to see me mooning over her spoiled carrot juice, and I know I am lucky to have been loved like that, but I am also the biggest loser in the world to have had it ripped away, and so I smoke and pace and wait for the phone to ring. The moon is full and my rib is sore.
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!’ ”
The Sharp Time Page 2