The Sharp Time Part 7

"Nice, girl, nice girl! What a super senior cla.s.s we have!" Catherine Bennett pushes the platter of apples closer to Jack Johnson. "You have to use Red Delicious. They have to be very, very firm! Or else the warm caramel will turn the apples to pure goosh." She gives a Halloween grimace and repeats "pure goosh" in a Frankenstein monotone. She flutters her hands to her neck and leaves them there. She laughs and says lightly, "Pure goosh," and looks out the window at the lemon-gray sky of a dreary afternoon, the banked snow. She whispers, "Pure goosh."

The gun in Sandinsta's purse is an itch, an ache.

But, now, in Jack Johnson, Sandinista Jones sees something beyond the random expedient pervy princ.i.p.al; she sees a certain wariness, the briefest sign of cognition. Jack Johnson looks down at the caramel apples, all that red and tan sweetness on his desk, fructose and sucrose and corn syrup goosing his brains by osmosis: Oh, f.u.c.k. Catherine Bennett really is crazy.

And this is all Sandinista Jones wants, this gift of someone who gets it, who is not going to fake-smile and give her zombie eyes: Have you perhaps misinterpreted the situation? And Jack Johnson is getting it slowly, surely.... He rubs his temple and thinks of Catherine Bennett's erratic behavior in the teachers' lounge; he thinks of a random Monday morning before school started when he heard a pounding in the hall and looked out to see Catherine Bennett banging her fist against every locker, remembers how the sound reverberated down the hall like a metallic woodp.e.c.k.e.r....

Sandinista Jones opens the door to the princ.i.p.al's office. Catherine Bennett says, "Well, look who's here! Speak of the devil! Hi, Sandinista!"

Sandinista Jones looks at Jack Johnson and says, "Through your faith, you have earned your salvation. Go in peace."

And he does, the princ.i.p.al grabs his coffee cup from his desk and skitters out of his office. Next, Sandinista turns to Mrs. Bennett, who sits with her hands clasped together, smiling.

The interlocking silver circle on Sandinista Jones's leather handbag makes an intriguing swarishhh when she clicks it open.

But then the string of bells on the door shivers and Bradley walks into the Pale Circus and smiles at me, big and sweet; he gives a repentant nod to Henry Charbonneau, who offers up a tart. "So nice of you to join us, Bradley."

The sight of Bradley gives me a jolt of optimism that makes me start to think a little differently. Because maybe Catherine Bennett's car parked in the lot could mean many things: she could have already been dismissed from her teaching job, and in a flurry of whacked-out desperation, maybe she really has brought a tray of candied fruit to the princ.i.p.al and staff; perhaps she has already morphed into the crazy aunt at the Christmas party. Surely they are trying to find a way to let her go quietly. Lisa Kaplansky could be waiting to call and tell me about the terms of Catherine Bennett's dismissal. The words terms of dismissal are bright and promising as poppies, and when Ms. Kaplansky tells me about Catherine Bennett's terms of dismissal, orange-red blossoms will flower through my mind. I will nod and look pensively to the ceiling, an intelligent girl considering a fact.

Oh, I will not disappoint Lisa Kaplansky. I will not scream or shout about the injustice shown to me, I will simply say, I see, and I will be appreciative of the school's efforts as I gnaw my thumbnail, taking it all in, and who among you would not admire my stoicism, who among you would not note the jaunty poppy-colored cashmere-sweater-and-beret combo I am wearing in this five-second daydream?

At the very least, I imagine that everyone has told their parents and that the parents have probably called the school and it is all a bit of a breathless mess. I also understand that people clear up business on Friday afternoons; there is an implicit decency to clearing up any old business so that people might be free to enjoy their weekends-viva Miller time!-the same week as the incident ... because there is a certain decency to taking care of things within the week. It's professional. And so the chance of me getting the call today is high ... at least, moderately high....

Bradley looks at the pile of dresses still to be ironed and then back at Henry Charbonneau, who is reading in the pale morning sun. To anyone pa.s.sing on the street this must make a fetching picture, the headless mannequin in her polar parka and Henry Charbonneau with his book and fashionably pensive gaze: a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man.

Bradley swallows his laughter, but his shoulders shake a little bit as he takes off his leather jacket. Bradley whispers: "It is such a shame that Henry Charbonneau was born after the Civil War. Because just look at the dear man. He would have looked fetching drinking mint juleps and reading on some crumbling, leafy veranda while his slaves hammered horseshoes and hung out laundry under the blazing sun."

Henry doesn't look up from his book when he says, "Bradley, if you're both half an hour late to work and mocking me ... hmm ... that doesn't necessarily seem like a wise combination."

Bradley smiles. "Observation is not mockery."

"Listen up, worker bees." Henry Charbonneau clears his throat. "I'm going to read a poem."

I look down and take a ferocious interest in a satin mandarin collar, tracing the mouth of the iron around the sweet curves. Because the only thing more mortifying than someone reading a poem out loud is having someone read their own poetry out loud, but as Henry is reading from a book and not a frayed spiral notebook, at least I won't be party to that cringe-fest. And so the sun sparkles and Bradley gives me a comradely smile and Henry Charbonneau begins his recitation: "The monastery is quiet. Seconal drifts down upon it from the moon.

I can see the lights of the city I came from, can remember how a boy sets out like something thrown from the furnace of a star. In the conflagration of memory my people sit on green benches in the park, terrified, evil, broken by love- to sit with them inside that invisible fire of hours day after day while the shadow of the milk billboard crawled across the street seemed impossible, but how was it different from here, where they have one day they play over and over as if they think it is our favorite, and we stay for our natural lives, a phrase that conjures up the sun's dark ash adrift after ten billion years of unconsolable burning?"

"Look," Bradley says.

Right on cue, two of our monks, the monks of St. Joseph's, walk past. Caught in the bright spell, the three of us look out at them with longing. When they pa.s.s out of view, Henry Charbonneau says: "It's a Denis Johnson poem. My book club is reading his poetry this week. But, truthfully, I think I might be the only one to 'get it,' " he says, making air quotes around the last two words.

My heart races a bit. "So is Arne in your book club?"

Henry Charbonneau looks truly surprised. "Have you been hanging out at the p.a.w.nshop, Sandinista? And yes, Arne is most certainly in my book club. And, well, how have you become a girl from around the way so quickly?"

Bradley smiles at me and I can feel it, the bright promise of the New Testament, my phone ringing at home, as if Jesus himself is calling, using his human's voice, which is the commingling of Joe Strummer's and Al Green's and Bono's, saying, I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.

We get into the groove of the day: Henry Charbonneau leaves to do the important things that Henry Charbonneau must do and Bradley and I iron dresses and fill candy dishes; we offer up kindness to strangers who walk into the Pale Circus-though, no, this does not include letting them use the bathroom-we arrange and rearrange clothes; we mourn the implicit broken contract and personal disappointment of gorgeous clothes balled up on the dressing room floor, left there by some jacka.s.s customers. We rehang these spurned items, cursing.

I hope that my mother can see the good moments of this day, my camaraderie with Bradley; I hope my mother can see me working alongside a boy who keeps Catherine Bennett at bay with fun and fabrics.

I hope my mother can see me laughing at a boy's joke: Bradley, apropos of nothing, sniffs the air with great distaste. He says, "Uggh. It smells like up-dog in here."

I look up from the last unironed dress in my stack and say: "What is up-dog?"

"Not much, dog. Wazzup with you?"

And then we laugh the high, keening laughter that reminds me of our old neighbor's hunting dog, the inter-galactic noises he would make as the elderly Mr. Schmitz packed up his truck for a day of hunting. A skinny, liver-spotted dog who lived for the crack of the gun.

Bradley seems unwilling to risk taking a lunch hour thirty minutes after he shows up for work, so I cruise down Thirty-Eighth Street by myself.

My car knows where to go. It's as if the Taurus is some futuristic Ford that can read my mind and poof, purple haze, the rabbit out of the hat, three dollars in gas, I'm turning in to the parking lot. With my gun in my glove box I'm as amped as a prizefighter. I'm at Woodrow Wilson High School at 12:30 smack on the nose, on the cauliflower ears.

I park way in the back row, where the newspaper recycling vat intersects the mouth of the track, and watch my fellow seniors with off-campus lunch privileges come out of school: even from this distance I can spot a few stoner pals, and there is the surly cheerleader, Olivia Leland, who I was friends with until seventh grade, until her mother learned that my house was slightly too c.r.a.ppy and also in the wrong part of town. But fair enough, there is also Johanna Zehr, whom I promptly dumped when I started high school, as she had committed the double sin of not smoking Camel Lights and enjoying Christian rock. Until freshman year I loved Johanna both for her Mennonite beauty-blond cornsilk hair pulled into a bridal bun at the crown of her head-and for the luscious cinnamon buns her mother baked. Even in my current gloom I think of her mother's being so pleased that I could eat three, how she wrote out the directions for me on an index card-Use water from boiled potatoes.

Why did the potato water make the cinnamon buns so delicious?

My car fills with the smell of cinnamon and warm frosting as the senior cliques trickle out of school, as the security guard roams the parking lot with his hand clapped to the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, wishing it were a billy club or better yet, a gun, probably wishing he were an actual police officer, which would make it ever so easy for him to get laid. Instead he's stuck being a minimum-wager for the school security corporation that blossomed after the shootings at Columbine.

I light a cigarette and watch the teachers who smoke heading out to their cars for a quickie, and then there she is, her herky-jerky walk, her crazy-a.s.s smile: Catherine Bennett. She wheels a backpack behind her, as if harboring a long-lost dream of being a flight attendant. She is going to lunch, I suppose. She either has a cell phone clipped to her ear or is frantically talking to herself. Her hair is short. I don't see a phone. See how she walks with purpose-Look alive, people! Pay attention! Alecia, Sandinista, are you paying attention? Have you done the review problems? Why are you wearing a sweater? Did someone not check the weather forecast? Oh, she is the Comet in my cake and will be forf.u.c.kingever if I don't do something.

But I think of the boys at Columbine, how stupid and wild-hearted they were with their boy-dreams of shooting everybody up. And not just the teachers and the kids who had bullied them, but random people, nice people: the Johanna Zehrs of the world, some of them dead, some of them forever tethered to wheelchairs and catheters, thanks to the faulty, self-aggrandizing logic of tortured dorks. Henry Charbonneau's poetry recital floats back to me as I replay the old news footage from Columbine in my head: a boy sets out like something thrown from the furnace of a star. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And Erika's poisoned p.o.r.no cake is not the best idea either. Has she not thought it out? Because it's so easy to imagine the stripper leaving the drunken guys in the living room-See ya, boys!-and heading out to the kitchen, to the safety of her coat and boots stashed by the fridge. She steals a beer for herself, for later when she is relaxing in the tub, and cuts a piece of cake up for her daughter. She takes the green frosted section, the bikini underpants, thinking how it is the exact shade of Mr. Ribbits, her daughter's stuffed frog.

Precision. Accuracy. It's best to work with a clear plan.

Mrs. Bennett stows her little suitcase in her trunk and gets into her car. It seems that the clouds have parted just for her, that a single brush of sunlight illuminates her Toyota Corolla, her b.u.mper sticker a warning to all: WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY!

But then the thoughts I have actively been pushing from my brain rush back to me. Mrs. O'Dell, the biology teacher, coming in the day when she heard Catherine Bennett using her "funny" tone with Alecia and yelling at her for forgetting her backpack. "And you have no idea where you put it? Is that it? I'm just supposed to let you wander the halls alone?" How Mrs. O'Dell looked down over her half-gla.s.ses as she entered the cla.s.sroom, as if delivering an important paper, walking purposefully to Catherine Bennett's desk. How Mrs. Bennett looked up and said "Oh! Good morning, Jean!" when she saw Mrs. O'Dell. How she then smiled, rolled her eyes at Alecia as if they were actresses in a 1940s student-teacher screwball comedy. When I walked past Mrs. Bennett's desk on the way out of cla.s.s, I looked at the piece of paper: blank.

And worse, the day Ms. Kaplansky saw Mrs. Bennett walking down the hall, Mrs. Bennett pounding her fist to the palm of her hand, the odd, skin-slap sound of it as she muttered under her breath. We had studied "The Dead" in Lisa Kaplansky's cla.s.s that morning, a chilly golden-green September morning. When Mrs. Bennett pa.s.sed Lisa Kaplansky-slap! slap!-Lisa Kaplansky allowed a frown to grip the s.p.a.ce between her eyebrows, the briefest parenthesis, before Lisa Kaplansky looked away and smiled brightly as if she had just seen something very pleasing indeed: all that snow covering the living and the dead.

After lunch, the day goes gray and teary: a b.i.t.c.hy customer inquiring about the discount for a tear in the lining of wool tuxedo pants sends me catapulting into a fit of OCD message-checking, my overused cell phone hot as a soup pan against my ear. Because this is it. Friday afternoon. The school's last chance to make this right before the weekend, before Monday's events go all into the muzzy whirl of Okay. Now, when did this happen? This is it, my last best chance for Lisa Kaplansky or the princ.i.p.al or anyone to call.

I am one with Bradley because he does this too; he's Mr. Ringy to my Ms. Dingy with his constant cell-phone checking. He is straightening a rack of shoes, all the pointy toes as tense as good girls lined up in pairs at a dance. His phone is cradled between his shoulder and his ear.

But Bradley has received good news.

I see it in his smile, in his exhilarated Swiffering, in the way he tosses me a velvet cape and says, "Buy this! You'll be more beautiful than Batgirl, Sandinista!" And G.o.dd.a.m.n, still no messages for me-not even one reminder call for a dentist appointment. It's as if the whole world is colluding with the school to accentuate the truth: n.o.body's paying attention.

When we lock up the Pale Circus, Bradley leaves in a flurry; he gives me one last "You okay? Your car's right across the street, right? I'll see you tomorrow, okay?" And off he goes down the sidewalk with his jacket slung over his shoulder, with his palpable delight. With, really, no thought of me.

I walk across the snowy street and lean on my car.

I try one last time: I dial my cell phone, hoping that there is magic in the lavender twilight, and I try to believe that the world is full of promise and stricken beauty but ... beep! You have no new messages.

So, to be sure, one thing the world is not full of is concerned people picking up the phone to check on your welfare. The cell phone is cold against my ear, but I hold it there anyway, and I think of the child who licked the street pole and got his tongue stuck. Perhaps I will freeze the phone to my ear in homage to Catherine Bennett and getting away with it, in homage to me and to Alecia Hardaway, to all the other screwed daughters of Eve who have walked through her cla.s.sroom. I am contemplating how deeply symbolic the phone earring would make me look-I am waiting for the world to call-but then there's also the possibility of looking like any random sweatpanted jacka.s.s who wears a Bluetooth clamped to his or her ear, as if expecting communication from Mars, when I see the monk.

He's walking down the street, hands clasped behind his back. Why are the wandering Jesus people so lame? Why do they do nothing but smile and stroll around in their soft sandals in the snow and cold? Okay, I suppose that inside the monastery they are praying in their cells, maybe stretching their arms out and tilting their heads to the left, making Bambi eyes and lolling their mouths open in extracurricular imitation of the cruciform Jesus in his hour of betrayal. And I suppose some monks are working at the monastery, creating jams and jellies, an image that brings to mind 1940s farmwives in gingham ap.r.o.ns and strawberries on the vine, a summer day on the banks of the Kaw, though probably the real work is strictly industrial: boiling and dangerous.

I put my cell phone in my pocket and walk toward the monk. I have a bounce in my step, a purposefulness born of absolutely nothing. The monk smiles at me. He's wearing a wool beret, which gives him the look of a French film director. The beret makes me think of the Madeline stories my mother read to me when I was a child: " 'In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines' ... I can't wait to take you to Paris someday, Sandinista!" Of course the City of Light was on the itinerary for our postgraduation trip. But now it's just me; it's just me and a random monk whose eyebrows shoot up as he realizes that I am walking away from my car, not haphazardly window-shopping at the liquor store, but coming straight to him. But Jesus boy should not be so worried, for I am giving him a polite smile, striding along happily like the wholesome Midwestern girl that I am not. I am Midwestern to the extreme, which my mother guarded against: "You don't have to be nice to everyone all the time, at all times." But as the smiling monk comes closer he infuriates me. His big, nervous smile makes me want to chew off my arm, and the whole sandals-in-the-snow thing is a bit ostentatious, a bit too And Jesus Loves Thy Frozen Toesish.

"Well, good evening," the monk says, hearty and polite as Santa-he even has a huge bushy beard.

"Well, h.e.l.lo!" I double his exuberance. I triple it, giving him a brightly psychotic smile and clapping my hands. I have on my mother's s.h.a.ggy yarn mittens, so my hands make a soft thud instead of a skin slap.

The monk draws his eyebrows together; he puts his hands on his waist and tilts his head back: a rehea.r.s.ed gesture, I imagine. A pregnant pause. They must teach these conceits in the monastery. But I wait him out. I keep still and smile, a foot soldier of quiet good cheer. I lock eyes with him and struggle not to blink. Finally the monk realizes that if he wants to escape me, he will have to make further social effort.

"I'm Brother Bill," he says.

"I'm Sandinista." I put my hand to my heart, a wintry coquette, and give a little bow. His smile fades as he tries to a.s.sess my wacko factor.

Brother Bill asks, "How are you doing today?"

"I'm fine, thanks."

Thank you for asking! I am so great! Great! Oh, my G.o.d, I'm just so fabulous. I'm watching my mother and Catherine Bennett and Alecia Hardaway skip around the periphery of the sidewalk, Brother Bill. And, FYI: I believe that all my anger and all my sadness are about to funnel together into a substance that, if measured and bottled, could be sold as a potion that would allow you to body-slam your opponent with one sip. And how are you today, Brother Bill?

Oh, but I don't know why I'm letting this bother me so much; I don't know why I thought the school would call, I don't know why I'm such a sucker, I don't know why I thought my mother would live forever, I don't know why I never said anything when Mrs. Bennett would torment Alecia Hardaway, why I shamefully sat with the rest of the cla.s.s waiting for the harshly fluorescent-lit moment of Alecia's humiliation to pa.s.s.

Brother Bill laces his hands together as if he's about to do that hand game: Here is the church, here is the steeple, open it up and see all the people. Instead he nervously pops his knuckles, one by one, each joint offering up a satisfying crack crack crack. He is very tall and the clouds are shifting around his head and he looks puzzled and pained, every inch the Christ figure-oh, brother.

"How are you?" I ask.

"Oh, fair to midland," he says.

"Well then," I say. "A weather metaphor. Clever."

He puts his hand down at the sides of his robes, palms flat, and seems surprised that he has no pockets, that he is wearing a long robe, and I wonder if he is new to monkdom. He looks about fifty, but maybe he's a slow learner. Like me. And Alecia. He crosses his arms over his chest. He hunches over a little bit, rubbing his elbows and looking down at the dirty snow. Jesus, he's just out for a walk.

My problems are not his fault and I feel some spark of shame, which may be my mother tapping me with her far-off lightning rod, because, as she liked to say, "Our family value is kindness."

My mother's wisdom, which was often dispensed from fortune-cookie fortunes taped to the refrigerator-It is no small feat to improve the quality of the day! Lucky numbers 17, 3, 58-counts for nothing in the real world of screamers and liars. And I see that my moment of b.i.t.c.hiness, my weather-metaphor comment, has made me feel calmer, pensive. If this is a general phenomenon-the b.i.t.c.hier you are, the better you feel!-then after Catherine Bennett's freak-out she must have been the embodiment of post-yoga calm; possibly she was comatose.

"Well, have a great night," I say, mixing it up, trying not to seem too crazy, and failing.

"Thank you," he says. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, which is lacy with dried skin. Stop, I want to say, that is only going to make it worse.

When I turn to go he smiles and says, "Hey!"

I smile. I wait. His eyes go blank. Then he focuses and asks, "What animal should you never play cards with?"

"What?" I say, thinking it's a real question, before I see his frantic smile-and then, oh, okay, it's a joke. Sure.

"Well, I don't know," I say, smiling. "What animal should you never play cards with? No idea."

"A cheetah," he says.

I nod. A cheetah.

Is he f.u.c.king kidding me? This is his G.o.d-given wisdom? Some lame joke from a Dixie Cup?

"Okay," I say, trying to infuse my voice with as much sarcasm as possible. "I will certainly take that under advis.e.m.e.nt."

"Good," Brother Bill says. He frowns and mumbles under his breath, lots of consonants, lots of shhh and rhhh. And so now I see-I think I see-that he has something wrong with him. A little something? Like all of us, I guess, but maybe a little more, maybe he was once Alecia Hardaway in the junior high special ed cla.s.ses, maybe he was once Alecia Hardaway, mainstreamed in algebra cla.s.s. And so if he wants to spend his adult life making fancy jam and loving Christ and telling kindergarten jokes, well, okay, bring it, Brother Bill. There's no reason I should be such an a.s.s to him.

I try to smile in a normal manner, with no irony or anger, without my gums bared. "Well! Nice talking to you."

"Enjoy your day," he says. I look back at him standing there, pale and nervous in the royal purple twilight. As an afterthought, he offers up a shrill, shouted "Peace be with you!"

I turn away to walk to my cold car, then shout over my shoulder: "You too, Brother Bill."

The weekend! No plans! It's Miller time, friends, Oh, yes, yes yes yes yes, it is. There's the long, lonesome whistle, where's my local bar? I know there's n.o.body and nothing for me at home, so I go for a little drive. I feel the need for instruction. And so I find the business card with the gun info and I light out for the territory of Price's Pistol Range.

Price's Pistol Range is just off the interstate and adjacent to a low-rent strip mall-apparently you can learn to blow someone's head off and then walk across the parking lot to World of Nails and get a pedicure for $19.99. When I walk in and see the sign posted at the reception desk-NO MINORS PERMITTED WITHOUT PARENT OR GUARDIAN-I feel a shot to the heart, a metallic pang of Mom! But it's not like she would have ever taken me to an indoor shooting range for recreational purposes. The thought If only my mother were here seems to belong to the old world now.

The receptionist, a smiling blond woman in her fifties, says: "Can I help you, hon?"

I look up and see myself in the security-TV screen over her head. I shake my hair: the Veronica Lake I created this morning with a Chi iron has frizzed into a Stevie Nicks. Behind the reception desk is a metal door that looks like it might lead to a bank vault.

"Um ... yes ... actually ..." I take the business card that Arne gave me out of my purse and hand it to her, as if this is my entry into a posh private club. Which it might be. "A friend recommended this place to me." I clear my throat. "And, well, I was just looking into taking some cla.s.ses, or signing up for a lesson, or something."

I'm speaking too fast. I have the adrenaline of a furious, starving jackal.

"Sure, hon. You have your driver's license on you?"

I open my purse and give her my license. She writes the number down on a piece of paper on her clipboard and then looks back up at me and smiles, tapping her baby-pink fingernail on my driver's license. "This is certainly you. But do you have a second form of ID, hon? Anything else with your picture on it?"

I take my school ID from my wallet and hand it to her with a heavy heart.

She looks at my lame school picture for a long, uncomfortable moment. Her creepy smile is so serene it appears as if she's gazing at a photo of an infant in a pastel sweater coat, as if she's about to bust out with a long awww! Finally, she looks up and hands me my IDs.

"What an unusual name you have, Sandinista: Sandinista. It's very pretty."

I shrug. "Yeah, it's okay, I guess.... Thanks."

She hands me my own clipboard and instructs me to fill out the back and front sides of all the forms. And it becomes increasingly clear that it's hard to go incognito at a shooting range. They want to know who I am and where I live, my social security number, my place of employment and have I ever been convicted of a felony? Have I been convicted of a felony in the past seven years? Of course, I would be a fifth-grade felon had I been convicted of any crime beyond then, but: Whatever, gun people!

I sit down in a white wicker chair and notice the cigarette burns in the mauve carpet. At first I'm both confused about the aggressively girly decor and distracted by the magazines on the white coffee table: Along with the usual crumpled copies of People and US Weekly is a pristine, mailbox-fresh issue of The New Yorker. But then I puzzle out that the shooting range has the same vibe as the free dental clinic, which always has the latest issue of The Economist in their magazine rack. The management is trying to offer you so much respect regardless of your low income or your questionable desire for a handgun that it comes off a tad patronizing: We know it's not your fault you don't have dental insurance and thought you might like some pithy social commentary about the free market. We don't think your desire to fire guns for sport makes you a redneck and sincerely hope you enjoy the latest Alice Munro short story.