The Sharp Time (2 page)

I open the brochure and learn that this feast day is a kind of post-Christmas blowout:
Now, after contemplating the staggering fact that God has become a human child, we turn to look at this mystery from the opposite angle and realize that this seemingly helpless child is, in fact, the omnipotent God, the king and ruler of the universe
.

I jam the brochure into my pocket, thinking,
Omnipotent? Bang-up job, pal
. I take a seat on a bench in front of Second Chance? and choose a melon-colored pencil. I stick the other pencils under my thigh, the sharpened ends poking at my ass like a little bundle of arrows. Why do I want to work at the Pale Circus?

I love the clothes at the Pale Circus! I have no interest in new clothes. New is ever so dull; new can suck it hard. New clothes symbolize the exploitation of third-world
children locked in the factory, the modern-day slavery of the Mariana Islands, the workaday misery of Walmart employees. So let’s try something else, please: meet me in St. Louis with a cardinal-red Judy Garland–ish cape and fur-trimmed muff! Help me to express my inner smiley-face decal of happiness in a Marcia Brady poly-blend minidress and stacked sandals. Make me a channel of your peace, if you will, in a rainbow maxidress, a strip of fabric saved for a red-yellow-blue-green headband, and, people, show me the woven hemp espadrilles. Hire me, please!

Thanks a trillion
,
Sandinista Jones

PS I am available anytime Monday through Friday, as well as any weekend hours
.

I put the tablet and the pencil on the bench next to me and light a cigarette. A low-riding green Buick rolls down the street, the circular slop-slop-slop of tires cutting through slush, a snippet of buzzy AM radio filtering out:
Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day
.

Understatement.

The air has that iced mineral smell that comes right before new snow falls. I look across the street at the Pale Circus. The awning is striped, a wash of coral and cream, the letters pastel and swollen. In the window, a headless mannequin wears a purple-red taffeta ball gown—I believe the color could be called mulberry, perhaps raspberry—cut to a low V in the front and bolstered by so many crinolines it looks like she might levitate: one hand is already raised and fanning out.
Good-bye! So long!
The carmine-red flats on her highly arched feet give me the rainbow-confetti feeling of a happy ending. But when I look at the liquor store on the corner, that sweetness vanishes.

The liquor store was once a health-food store, the Sunshine Co-op, where my mother bought the natural peanut butter that all children despise for its grotesque texture of ground bones. But she also bought plenty of nice things: dusty raspberries and green beans, dark chocolate pastilles, pear-peach smoothies. The earnest hippie dude who ran the store had painted a mural on the side of the building, so that all who turned left on Thirty-Eighth Street would be greeted by a somber Cesar Chavez holding out a fistful of purple grapes. Painted over his head were the words
WE’RE SOWING THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
, which I suppose is true of both a health-food store and a liquor store. But then the organic superstores opened up in the suburbs, and people stopped driving downtown for organic milk and hemp lip balm, and that was that for the Sunshine Co-op. Except nothing ever snaps shut so neatly, there is no spick-and-span denouement, there is forever the image of my mother weighing root vegetables, standing on tiptoe in her espadrilles, peering at the scale’s needle, then turning and giving me a brightly exaggerated smile, as if to say,
Rutabagas and parsnips and daikon! Oh my!

I think of my mother and I can’t believe this morning, this year, this life. I close my eyes and a wild paisley pattern flits along the back of my eyelids: purple, valentine-pink and navy blue figures; oblong, sperm-shaped, kidney-shaped. When I take a sharp breath in, the sore spot on my rib vibrates up to the back of my throat.

I heave myself off the bench and make my way down Thirty-Eighth Street, practicing for my upcoming conversation with Mr. Pale Circus. I make carefree hand gestures and mouth witty asides to the arctic Kansas City air, trying to perfect my confident girl-Friday vibe. Perhaps my aggressive cheerfulness is alarming, because when I walk back into the shop with my insane grin and my head held high, swinging my hair like a prancing Connemara pony on crack, Mr. Pale Circus looks at me and blanches: his shoulders shoot up; his mouth forms a fat, appalled oval. But when I hand him his colored pencils and the Big Chief tablet, he smiles.

“You came back.”

His voice is authentic and unflourished: nice.

He looks at what I’ve written and smiles. “Miss Sandinista Jones. I would have hired you for your name alone,” he says tenderly, “even if you were a serial killer or a chronic shoplifter.”

But then he gathers himself. “Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth,” he says, doffing an imaginary top hat.

He hands me a Pale Circus business card:

H
ENRY
C
HARBONNEAU
R
INGMASTER AT
L
ARGE

He tells me to come to the Pale Circus tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. He shakes my hand. When I walk out the door, the string of silver bells trembles along the safety glass.

And then I’m back in the world, squinting up at the monastery and touching the middle of my hand again, the soft, meaty bull’s-eye of Christ’s agony.

Across the street, a monk walks by in his brown robe, his hood up, so that in profile he looks like the grim reaper. I wonder if he is happy, if his life is all peaches and rainbows and pretty pretty God love; I wonder if he sleeps with frankincense, gold and myrrh dancing in his head. Or does he celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany by praying all night, only ceasing when the sky finally gives up the violets of dawn?

When he looks over at me he doesn’t smile, but he does wave. He lifts his hand and his sleeve falls to his elbow, revealing his bony wrist, his pale forearm. And it seems that this is the very moment when the snow starts, fat, soft flakes that fall slowly and silver: fairy-tale stardust.

* * *

But then there is getting though the rest of day, the aimless, creeping hours: smoking and drinking a latte at Buzz Café, thinking
Right now I would be in American History
and then taking the longest way home, not along the gray sweep of the interstate, but through the bisected heart of the city, where I slowly drive past St. Scholastica’s—a doll of a school, all pearl-colored brick and sweet girl-saint statuary—the school where my mother wore Doc Martens and ripped fishnet stockings with her black watch skirt, where she reapplied liquid eyeliner and smoked weed in the bathroom before religion class so that the saints would tiptoe out of the oil paintings and whisper epiphanies, their candied breath at her ear, their muslin robes brushing her bare knees, her white cotton socks. I say right out loud in the cold car:
“Help me Help me Help me.”

Of course, it’s a made-up prayer, nonfancy and pathetic, because I am not a Catholic, because my mother was no longer Catholic by the time I came along, and chose not to have me baptized. My grandparents were devout, but they lived in Florida, and I saw them only twice a year when I was a child. My cultural Catholicism is specific and spotty, highlighted by delicious ghost stories whispered by my grandmother while we roasted marshmallows over a beach bonfire: “St. Lucy gouged out her eyeballs for Christ!” My mother and I attended the Zen Center and many Christian churches, her favorite being the Unitarian church with the optimistic banners hanging in the sanctuary:
FEELINGS ARE NEITHER GOOD OR BAD—THEY JUST
ARE!
I’M REAL SPECIAL CUZ GOD DOESN’T MAKE
JUNK. My mother was mildly troubled by the poor grammar and corn-dog aesthetic, but mostly she was happy that I had “the opportunity to see Jesus as a brother, not as Big Daddy.”

As St. Scholastica’s disappears in my rearview mirror, I’m thinking of my teenage mother—plaid-uniformed, Marlboro in hand, all her requisite madcap antics—and I’m not paying attention and there’s the blare of horns and squealing brakes behind me but in the next second I’m still completely alive.

* * *

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.