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.
Bradley is making a sharp right into the church parking lot and I am sad to be done sailing along the snowy streets, but here we are: the steeple shooting up into the gray sky, the tasteful red brick, the arched windows covered with a milky gray substance. All around us families are getting out of their SUVs and sparkling charcoal-gray wagons, a tableau of shiny swinging hair and dark wool coats and gleaming teeth. Everyone is white. If not for the upscale vibe, it could be a Ku Klux Klan rally. The Catholic church in my neighborhood is Our Lady of Guadalupe, so I am not used to this sea of white Catholics slip-sliding across the parking lot. They grab hands like strings of cut-paper dolls before they take hold of the handrail and parade up the stone steps.
I think of my mother abandoning her principle of Give No Money to the World’s Most Corrupt Corporation by buying tamales and fanciful dolls at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Fiesta each summer, how she would dance in the church parking lot with the believers, beautiful in her embroidered Guatemalan dress and espadrilles, hands flashing over her head.
The lump in my throat is more like a goiter.
And Catherine Bennett asks if I am paying attention and my mind goes sour and swirling and why, oh why, were the only calls I received this week from telemarketers and an alcoholic looking for her beloved guinea pig? Why is my mother dead? And every grief is mine, but then there is the pleasure of another person, the pleasure of Bradley sitting next to me in the front seat, a rueful little grin on his face as he finally finds a parking spot.
Bradley takes the key out of the ignition and says, “My parents got married at this church.”
“Yeah?” What I decide not to say—infected as I suddenly am by my mother’s lefty sarcasm—is Your parents got married at Our Lady of Mercedes? Kick-ass!
“My dad loves to tell the story: they did their premarital counseling with this sort of deluded middle-aged priest who tried to give them sexy advice about the wedding night.”
“Yuck! Ack!”
“Because who is the priest to say, right?”
“Uh, yeah, like, did he read God’s Guide to Getting’ It On and share the knowledge?”
Bradley rewards me with a crescendo of sudden, snorting laughter. The snow starts falling in earnest, covering the windshield in a fast, flecked pattern, and I think of a white cotton dress my mother made me when I was in kindergarten. The dress had demure raised polka dots. Dotted Swiss, my mother told me, and in memory those words come out of her mouth slowly, the last S soft and lingering. The car fills with the hot electrical smell of her old Singer sewing machine.
Bradley laughs a final time. “The priest told my parents not to be nervous, not to worry, that it is a shocking thing for everyone to encounter for the first time.”
“And … again, he would know … because?”
“Exactly. And so my parents were stuck in his hot little office that smelled like beer and feet, trying hard not to laugh about his assumptions of their virginity, because as my mom says, ‘This was the early eighties and everyone liked to “party.” ’ ” Bradley does one of Henry Charbonneau’s finger-hooks around the word party and shudders.
I cringe, empathetic. “One time my mom was describing this old boyfriend and she said, ‘He was a very giving lover.’ ”
“How very enriching for you to know such an intimate thing about your mother’s lovah,” Bradley says. “Truly, there are things we are not meant to know. Anyhow, the priest finally tells my parents, these two eighties kids who have ‘partied’ a lot, that if they become anxious about consummating their love, they should remember one very important thing: the King of Kings will be there with you, all night long.”
“Oh God!” I make many a retching sound. “Jesus in the boudoir? Is he lighting incense?” I do my best To Sir, With Love cockney accent: “Tell me, love, is the savior wearing silky knickers?’ ”
“Right? And so my mom is about to implode with laughter, when my dad looks at the priest and says, ‘Well, Padre, in the words of the great Oscar Wilde: In bed, two’s company, three’s a crowd.’ ”
“Did he die? Did the priest fall down and die?”
“I don’t know. Dad’s always pissing himself by the time he gets to the punch line.” Bradley nods up at the church. “Shall we?”
“Well,” I say, feeling nervous now that we are actually at church, my performance anxiety kicking in. “I’m not actually Catholic.”
“That’s okay! I mean it’s actually preferable, I would think.”
“My grandparents were Catholic. They died when I was in junior high. When I was little they lived in Florida, and when I visited them during the summers and at Christmas they always took me to their church: St. Mary, Star of the Sea.”
Bradley smiles sadly, gives a knowing nod, because of course he shares my aesthetic sense and is envisioning the Mother of Christ breaking the waves, her slick black hair braided with seaweed and shells. And of course I think of my own mother, of all the beautiful ladies lost at sea.
“And my mom was Catholic … earlier in her life … when she was in school, when she was a child. She went to St. Scholastica’s, the whole deal. But she was sort of way not into it by the time I came along. Excessively not into it.”
“Yeah,” Bradley says. “That can happen.”
“She didn’t want me to go to a Catholic school—I guess some weird things happened at St. Scholastica’s in the eighties. She was all like, ‘You need to go to a public school where there’s some goddamn accountability, where they don’t sweep all the crazy shit under the rug.’
“Bradley winces.
“I know, right? See also: overblown irony. See also: Catherine Bennett. See also: Sandinista Jones. Thanks, Mom.”
“It’s like the assholes are everywhere. The assholes have the power. The assholes with their lame advice, their pompous lectures. The assholes who never apologize. No matter what you do, no matter where you go.” When Bradley starts to blink, it’s more like a tic. “You cannot outrun them.”
I feel a little panicked that he’s going to start crying. My mother taking me to the Unitarian church with the poster that said FEELINGS ARE NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD, THEY JUST ARE! was a big waste of time. Apparently I am some kind of android who fears all human emotion. I don’t know why I hate to see a boy cry, why it’s such a knife.
“But I’m happy to be going with you,” I say quickly. “I mean, I haven’t been to any kind of church in ages and ages. Probably the sight of me will surprise and disgust Jesus Christ in equal measure. Jesus will float down and vomit on my dress because I’m such a whorish hoodlum and all. Plus I smoke crack and worship the devil on alternate Thursdays.”
And it works, my lame humor works, just a little: Bradley smiles.
“And I think it’ll be really interesting to go to Mass with you.”
Bradley sighs. “Yeah … yep. I guess it’ll be that if nothing else.”
And then we get out of my car like any other couple and walk through the snowy parking lot. As I button my coat—trying to look proper and all despite my platform shoes—I slip on the slick curb and Bradley reaches for my hand. Then we go up the marble steps, rock salt scritching beneath our shoes. When we pull open the front doors to the vestibule we are greeted by a stone Virgin Mary holding a font of holy water. Bradley dips his fingers in her bowl and makes the sign of the cross—forehead, heart, shoulder, shoulder—and we enter the next set of doors.
/> Inside the church it is a continent of stained glass, an aisle of deep blue carpet splitting the rows of polished mahogany pews in two clean halves: BC and AD, the bride’s side, the groom’s side. On the altar is an old-school crucified Jesus—no contemporary look of neutral sadness at having to die for our sins for this particular Son of God. He is not having it. His mouth has gone slack with agony, his carved eyebrows draw together in dramatic perplexity: WTF?
Flanking the altar are carved saints staring me down with their moon marble eyes, and to the left is a separate little altar for Mary, resplendent in her standard-issue baby-blue robe, bouquets of red roses at her feet.
The church is quiet, save for some pleasant infant babbling, and warm with the smells of candle wax and spent roses. A tiny, ancient nun in a street-length black dress, short habit and Birkenstocks welcomes me, a hand on my back, a plain, pale mouth saying “Good evening, thank you for joining us.” And I certainly understand why people would sign on to marry Jesus, to rest in this perfumed Eucharistic high without the normal worries of STDs or the Guy Who Doesn’t Call You Back.
And so it is my pleasure to shake the nun’s hand; it’s my pleasure to follow Bradley into Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, to have the feeling of belonging to something and someone. Bradley bends deeply on one knee at the end of a pew toward the back, and I do a slight dip too, a sort of church curtsy, and then I sit beside him. He pulls down the cushioned kneeler and kneels. I stay seated and take a long look around—the beautiful elderly couple in front of me, a frail old doll in a red wool coat with a fox collar, her skeletal husband looking starched and nautical in pinstripes and a blue blazer. A beefy-looking Irishman with weedy eyebrows sits down next to me, the flash of smile before he kneels, like Bradley, to pray. On the other side of Bradley is a family with three little girls decked out in zebra-print jumpers and black patent-leather Mary Janes with matching purses. The mother absently strokes the middle girl’s hair; the littlest girl eats Cheerios out of a plastic purple tub patterned with princesses.
The Sharp Time Page 14