The Sharp Time

by Mary O'Connell

  And like that, I can feel that the jumbled zoom and sway of ugliness is gone; for the moment, the creep-show allure of being Li’l Miss Tragedy is gone, and I laugh and cough some more.

  Together we watch the monk walk the other side of the street. Squinting against the diamond flare of sun and snow, Bradley puts on his sunglasses for a better look. The monk is twirling the braided white cord that cinches his brown robe, whistling as he slip-slides along the ice. He looks as carefree as the young Hugh Hefner twirling the belt of his satin bathrobe as he grooves around the Playboy Mansion.

  “These guys from St. Joseph’s,” Bradley says, nodding at the monk. “My theory is that they’re either on crack or lobotomized.” He affects a stoner accent: “Like, dude, maybe they’re simply stoned on the Resurrection.”

  “Creepy,” I say, watching the monk.

  He shrugs. “They’re okay, actually. They’re Trappist monks. They make the famous jams, the jellies. They’re not big talkers. They are a contemplative order. They mostly just wave. I always engage them in conversation, though. You’ll see.”

  I am stabbed: my mom loved the raspberry Trappist jam. There was always a jar in our pantry. And yet Bradley’s magical You’ll see pulls me into the candy-colored vortex of the future, a shared future in which I have a comrade with whom to smoke and study the midwinter habits of monks on crack and I have that sugar-swirled transporting feeling of happiness.

  When the monk walks in front of the liquor store, he picks up the folds of his robe and picks through the snow on tiptoe, looking for islands of dry ice. He is wearing black socks and cinnamon-brown sandals.

  “The footwear is a definitive lifestyle choice,” Bradley says.

  “Barbaric-chic,” I say.

  Maybe the monk senses that we’re talking about him, because he immediately looks over at us and waves.

  And so here is another surprise: not only does Bradley prove that he’s not too sardonic and sophisticated to give a hearty, happy wave to a sandaled monk, but he also yells out “Good morning!” When the broken muffler of a passing van drowns him out, Bradley yells it again: “Good morning! How’s it going!”

  The monk breaks his vow of contemplative reflection or whatever to shout out: “We should all be wearing ice skates this morning!”

  It’s clear that we should all be wearing anything but sandals, that ice skates really would be a better choice, and in the next minute Bradley will quietly say, “He’d probably enjoy trading in the robe for some peacock-blue sequined stretch pants,” and I will say, “I do so love the Ice Capades,” and the two of us will smoke and chuckle in the crystalline cold.

  But for this moment, which is all we fucking have, Bradley smiles at the monk. “Absolutely!” he shouts out, his cold breath spangling the air. “Ice skates! Yes!”

  * * *

  Bradley is the sweetest teacher. He is every inch the anti–Catherine Bennett as he starts the workday by explaining the geometric aesthetic of the store: He actually uses the phrase “geometric aesthetic of the store” instead of the trendy and more concise feng shui, which makes me like him even more. The clothing racks are circular—no straight lines here—so that the store looks softer and more centered, which, okay, sounds not only highly mockable and pretentious but also not really possible. But now I see that the concentric vibe accounts for the dreamy feeling one has when walking into the Pale Circus. Plus, the sherbet-colored walls are not junked up with merchandise. They provide a sweet and unfettered backdrop for the gorgeous clothes, which, in my peripheral vision, appear to be in motion. The soft woolens twirl; they waltz. The bright cardigans and kicky skirts flamenco. And all the shades and fabrics give me a giddy high, my hollow head filling with the beauty of jewel necklines and zippy prints, with vintage polyester and pale green sateen.

  And beneath all the dreamy minty magic lies the quotidian: a back closet full of toilet paper and paper towels, Windex, latex cleaning gloves, a mop and bucket, Murphy Oil Soap, economy-sized cans of Raid to blast the cockroaches, Terro for the ants and, horrifyingly, glue traps for the rats, horrible, maxi-pad-looking contraptions that must cling like deathly sleeping bags to the rats’ backs. Of the rats, Bradley only shudders and says, “They are some candy-loving motherfuckers; if we close the store for even a day, we come back to a wicked rainbow of rat shit on the floor.”

  For whatever reason, Bradley trusts me.

  He fills the cash register with money from the zippered First National Bank bag, and after he shows me how the cash register works and tells me to copy driver’s license numbers on personal checks, he says, “You can do the register today, pal,” the word pal sweetly reminiscent of black-and-white film strips, of a boy throwing a ball to his golden retriever. And so I do. The first item I ring up is a 1950s cherry-red dress with whimsical pink topstitching—an excellent combo of fitted and flared—and to the lucky college student buying this dress I am just any old girl, but she will always be my first: the sweep of pale gold hair against her shoulder as she pulls crumpled bills from the dark cavity of her black backpack, her violet sweater, her dark-rinse jeans, her nose ring, her bitten-down nails, her bleached white teeth, her acne scars, her courtly Thank you so much as I put change in her cold, cupped hand.

  Bradley Windexes the windows with his back to us—the tidy squeak of paper towels against glass—and Mrs. Bennett is falling away, gone gone gone for all these fat and happy moments.

  * * *

  I drive past my school on my lunch hour, wishing I had pimped-out tinted windows so that no one could spot me. Because as I switch into the left lane that turns into the Woodrow Wilson High School campus I see it: the one empty space in the teachers’ parking lot, the missing tooth in the crowded grin. Catherine Bennett’s champagne-colored Toyota Corolla is missing.

  I shiver. The school must have put her on leave while they get this situation figured out. Or have they fired her? In any case, her sorry ass is not here, and I wonder if she’s on some heartsick vacation, listlessly tramping around a random Comfort Inn off the interstate, buying a Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew from the vending machine before heading back to her room to watch Days of Our Lives or a PBS knitting program, maybe some Larry King rerun if the guest isn’t too trashy. Maybe she flips through the channels as she eats her candy bar on the bed, before she is seized with the bad feeling of Oh, why did I ever. Maybe she walks to the window and looks down on the parking lot, at her lonely Corolla with the sun-bleached bumper sticker that proclaims: WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY!

  I rest my face against my car window, the chill of safety glass, and I let myself go there. I let myself feel it: the expansive insanity of yesterday, of Mrs. Bennett standing at the front of the room, of Mrs. Bennett asking if I am paying attention, her voice quivering, lowered to a manly baritone, which further enhances her crazy-bitch effect.

  “Sandinista, I asked you: Are you paying attention?”

  Mrs. Bennett wears an itchy-looking tan wool skirt teamed with a brown boatneck shirt: a slice of beige bra strap shows at the shoulder, but she is clearly immune to the lure and promise of the underwire. She completes the earth-toned look with support hose in the suntan shade and Clarks shoes. Oh, her vibe is pure sack o’ potatoes, pure math teacher.

  I do not look at her face. I will not meet her eyes. I have an anorexic’s discipline, the cold steel will of a cutter.

  “Sandinista, do you even know how to pay attention?”

  Her rage unspools so quickly, her dramatic dinner-theater soliloquy on paying attention delivered against a backdrop of green chalkboard. Her lips tremble.

  Not mine. My face is a scrim of indifference: Whatever, people. But inside I’m all outraged Pollyanna adrenaline, all persecuted synapses firing.

  Mrs. Bennett comes closer to me, closer still. The space between the two rows of desks is her comfort zone, the teacher’s terrain. Her shoes squeak—squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, left-right, left-right—as if dying mice trapped in the spongy soles of her Cl
arks are letting loose with their final battle cries: Fuck the cheese, fuck the cat, fuck the mouse, fuck the perpetual scurry and worry, fuck nestling in a forgotten cherry-red mohair sweater at the bottom of the closet.

  And then she poses a query better left for freshman poetry journals: “Are you sleepwalking through your life?”

  Catherine Bennett marches toward me with her fluttering colorless lips, her eyes wild behind her bifocals. An expression that holds both delight and a despairing rage that surely does not stem from a student who doesn’t understand a problem, a girl who has not completed her homework.

  Shouldn’t she be a little mellower on the first Monday morning after Christmas vacation? Shouldn’t she be offering up some postholiday goodwill after two weeks of freedom? Also, hello? The girl with the dead mother? I’m your target?

  “Sandinista, you never listen. Do you need a”—and here she cupped her hands over her mouth, her fingers curling into a megaphone when she screamed her last two words—“hearing aid?

  “All I ask is that you listen, Sandinista! Is that so difficult? Hmmm?

  “All I ask is that you pay attention!

  “I realize you’re not even going to need algebra if you’re just going to get married and have babies.”

  I don’t tell her: Bitch, the plan was Europe with my mom, not marriage. Though the “non-math = excellent bridal potential” equation I find quaint in its antiquity—though it brings an outraged gasp from many a young lady and then it’s all:

  “Sandinista, are you listening to me? Are you even here?”

  Her voice rising and shot with a shrill, aluminum whistle.

  Confession time: yes, I did not review any algebra over winter break, as Mrs. Bennett so strongly advised. And I’m certainly aware of the freakishly ironfisted manner in which Mrs. Bennett conducts her algebra class. (The class is composed of sophomores and juniors, a few irresponsible, arts-loving seniors like me, a few meth heads, and Alecia Hardaway.) It’s my second semester of Catherine Bennett—I squeaked by my autumn of Algebra I with a D—so I really should have known better than to come to class unprepared.

  So, yes, I should have skipped algebra class. I would have skipped algebra had it not been for that old devil inertia. I walked mindlessly from Honors English—the sublime world of Lisa Kaplansky, of poetry and prose—to the roaring fire pit of Algebra II compliments of Catherine Bennett.

  “Sandinista, are you paying attention?”

  And then the world splits into two clean halves: Mrs. Bennett kicks the leg of my desk. I feel a vibration rise through my body. I am tucked up to my desk, freakishly so—the fat man at the buffet—so that the edge of it gives my ribs a ringing jolt. And the class vibrates with me; everyone sucks in their breath and lets it out slowly, oxygenated waves and shimmers.

  Even before her foot hits the floor again, Mrs. Bennett waves good-bye to her known life. Because surely a teacher cannot really live deep down in the heart of Crazyville, though they sure do like to visit that town, especially when they are the only full-fledged adult in the room.

  As soon as Mrs. Bennett kicks my desk, Alecia Hardaway starts crying. Alecia, the slow girl.

  That nice Sara Ellison who sits next to Alecia croons, “It’s okay, Alecia, it’s okay.” Even as I listen to Alecia crying, a shred of genetically coded empathy tells me that it’s not easy to be Catherine Bennett, either. It’s not as if I don’t see Mrs. Bennett trying a little too hard with her rhinestone American-flag lapel pins, her swipes of bronzy-pink lipstick; certainly being a dowdy fifty-something widowed schoolteacher in a suburban Kansas City high school is not the sweetest deal in the world. She missed two days of school last semester when her husband died, her only absence during my tenure in algebra class.

  “Sandinista!”

  Her breathing is ragged, vicious.

  It would seem that our grief-ridden fall semesters—my mother’s death in September, her husband’s death in October—would make us mourning comrades, heirs to the tender world of sadness. But in the weeks after my mother’s death, Mrs. Bennett’s disgust with me came into sharp focus. Sandinista, I hope you know you just can’t slide by in my class. Sandinista, that dress! Sandinista, I won’t baby you with a B you haven’t earned. And look at her now.

  “Sandinista!”

  When I finally look at her, my body goes numb with what will prove to be a homespun religious revelation, some angel whispering, “Here it comes!” I drop into the black hole of nothingness as Catherine Bennett leans down and screams in my ear, “Are you paying attention?”

  My shoulder pops up to protect my ear and remains there, a tableau of severe scoliosis, and then come some unpleasant little epiphanies:

  I will never effortlessly lift a car to rescue some screaming soul trapped under a tire.

  I will never fall out of a fifth-story window and land, unscathed and sheepish—I’m okay! People, I’m totally fine!—in a bed of pastel tulips.

  Any guy that has sex with me before giving me ye olde “You’re beautiful and smart but this is just not a good time for me” is safe; he will not spontaneously combust as he walks down the street with some shiny new girl. Because I will have my Jesus-y creep-show miracle, the old stone rolling back from the tomb, yes I will.

  I sense someone standing in the door well before I look up and see that the cavalry has arrived in the form of Mr. Hale, the Drivers’ Ed teacher/football coach. He blinks like a hamster in the sun; his nervous smile is partly shrouded by a humongous porn-star mustache. Mrs. Bennett looks over at Mr. Hale. She has been looming over me, her mouth at my ear, her man-hands on my desk, and she stands up too quickly and provides me with a solace I will play over and over in my mind. What she does is jerk upright, and her skirt catches the edge of my desk.

  Her hips are substantial. It is easy to imagine her in the morning working her skirt up to her waist, so you would think that getting the skirt off would involve some work, some breathless tugging, but in this miracle moment, God’s grace grants me a dramatic fuck you.

  Her hem catches on a metal hinge on the corner of my desk and her zipper rips and a button flies off, hitting the floor with a ping! as her skirt slips from her waist to mid-hip.

  But I don’t see any lumpy panty lines beneath her panty hose, because Mrs. Bennett is wearing a paisley slip of valentine pinks and purples and wild navy blues. As soon as I see it, I know my brain will remember the pattern forever: The oblong shapes, sperm shapes, the kidney shapes bordered by minuscule dots …

  The class inhales in unison, a fat, sucking sound.

  Mr. Hale walks over to Mrs. Bennett and stammers, “Can I be of any …? Do you need some …?” He gesticulates madly with his hands, his upper lip a secret beneath his mustache.

  Mrs. Bennett pulls up her skirt and tells Mr. Hale—she whimpers, actually—that she’s not feeling very well. “I had a fever last night, and my head still hurts. I thought it was my sinuses … but I’m afraid it’s the full-fledged flu.” She pinches her skirt closed with her hands and giggles like a deranged coquette. But then, as Mr. Hale leads Mrs. Bennett out of the classroom, she starts to cry: gasping, phlegm-choked. Everyone studiously looks away from me, except for Alecia Hardaway, the slow girl breaking the silence, trying to make it all better by shouting across the classroom: “Hi, Sandinista! You’re a real cool person, Sandinista! You’re a real cool person every day!”

  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.