The Sharp Time (14 page)

I lower my gun to my lap. I review some basic facts, hoping for clarity. Right now Catherine Bennett is inside her house and I am outside her house, parked beneath the shaggy evergreen that borders her front lawn. We are both alone in the world—her husband is dead, and … I force myself to form the sentence in my head; I spell it out in the choppy font of cartoon ransom notes: my mother is dead. I turn my car on for the heater; I overheat and turn it off, sitting in the cold. I cross my arms over my chest. My rib still hurts, but
I am paying attention
.

I do not listen to the radio or to a CD. I sit in silence—trying to hear what, if anything, God tells me in the heart of this cold Midwestern night, in this reflective blackness that shades the snow in the distance with lilac and navy. I’m thinking,
Out of the depths I cry unto you, O Lord
, and also
I could do it I could do it I could do it
.

FRIDAY
PLAYING WITH THE CHEETAHS

I’m wearing starlet shoes and drinking coffee as I hobble from my parked car to the Pale Circus, a short icy journey that, to an indoors-loving girl like me, is as treacherous as a Himalayan trek on stilts. And so I nearly wipe out in my vintage stilettos when I hit a slick patch. I’m correcting myself, arms arched like I’m surfing, when I notice that the headless mannequin is wearing a long white parka with a full and fluffy hood. Our Lady of the Snows. When I pull open the door of the Pale Circus, I find Henry Charbonneau seated at the cash desk. Despite his general quality of bedazzlement—the sweet celery eyes, the ironic look of heartbreak on a face far, far too pretty for anyone to refuse, his startling hands, the knuckles wide as soup spoons—Henry Charbonneau certainly disappoints me. Wherefore art thou, Bradley?

“Good morning, pretty girl, good morning,” Henry Charbonneau calls out, as if he were a pet-store parrot with green and blue plumage. “We’ve got to get you some keys. Your own set, dearie-doo.”

“Okay,” I say. I will certainly kick off my stilettos later, but for now I hammer across the wooden floor in my lovely and perilous beaded shoes. With each wooden
whackuh whackuh
Henry Charbonneau winces, his central nervous system unglued by my shoes. Oh, he does so love the varnished hardwood of the Pale Circus.…

“Bradley called me this morning at home, and, apparently, he wasn’t ‘feeling well,’ ” Henry says, hooking his fingers around those two words and giving an exasperated smile, as if we were comrades in the know and Bradley existed merely as a drunken oaf we tolerated out of sheer goodwill.

But I offer up only a concerned and quizzical Florence Nightingale expression, as if Bradley has a new and surprising diagnosis and I am pondering potential sympathies: A balloon bouquet? Banana cream pie?

“I hope he feels better soon.”

“Oh, I’m fairly sure it’s nothing serious and that he’ll be ‘feeling better soon,’ ” Henry Charbonneau says, finger-quoting yet again. “Just as soon as he’s had a few hours to sleep off his hangover.”

And thinking,
Wow, overkill, dude, what with all the bitchy
finger quoting
, I take off my coat and set my coffee cup on the counter.

Though it has a lid, Henry looks at my coffee cup with alarm, as if I’m about to dump it all over the party dresses slung next to the cash register, or maybe slam dance over and splash my coffee on the white fur parka in the display window, an homage to PETA, as the fur is really just acrylic fluff.

I take another sip of my coffee and he rubs his hands together, itching to give me instruction. Like all bosses, Henry Charbonneau believes the wheels of industry should be in motion at all times, that workers should be
working, people, working!
I realize that he’s just a hipper and certainly more handsome version of bald Herb Winters, the manager at Baskin-Robbins, who gave many tutorials in the wrist-flip that provided maximum speed and efficiency when I was scooping up the Mint Chip and Pralines ’n Cream last summer.

Henry Charbonneau smiles at me, rests his palm on the party dresses before he taps them and says, “Will you iron these up, love?”

Ironing is not in my skill set. My mother was a leather-jacket-and-jeans kind of gal; in summer, a lover of Indian cotton gauze glinting with metallic thread. I take my vintage clothes to the dry cleaner’s. There is no iron in my home. And when I’m at the Pale Circus I prefer to use the steam cleaner with its fat-frog mouth sagging away from the hose that connects it to the steam.

But what can I do when he’s already plugging in the iron and pushing the candy and cash register aside, covering the cash desk with a stained tea towel. Oh,
that’s
what they’re for. I used the towel to mop up spilled tea yesterday. Henry Charbonneau notices the sepia-colored stains. Tut-tutting a bit, he digs around under the counter, finds a clean tea towel and drapes it over the cash desk.

I take another sip of coffee, and Henry Charbonneau says, “This time, before there are many customers, is really a
great
time to do all the housekeeping.”

“Right,” I say brightly, thinking
Jackass
, and I take a long draw of coffee before I flip my cup into the painted lavender trash can.

I lay a magenta dress with a jewel collar on the counter and start nosing the warm iron down the pleat of the skirt. I make a smooth canal; I am paying attention. I follow the line of the pleats and am rewarded by a dramatic smoothness, one crisp, bright line shooting to the hem.

I am lost in the reverie of this magic when Catherine Bennett’s gray face pops into my mind, entirely un-fucking-bidden: there she is, there she is, as if she doesn’t know I have a pink and cream gun in my glove box. This morning I left it on the coffee table, and then reconsidered. And so I’m thinking of the gun and bullets in my glove box when the iron grazes my pinkie. I pop my finger into my mouth, and Henry Charbonneau looks over, alarmed, as if this action is totally unhygienic/porn star–ish. Which, I suppose, it is.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine,” I say in a singsong voice.

Henry straightens a few racks, gives a brisk
tsk tsk!
to a cashmere cardigan with a rip at the elbow before he checks the price tag, and seems to consider it for a moment. Henry Charbonneau sighs and then brightens, perhaps assigning a certain vagabond charm to the sweater, and rehangs it.

I finish ironing the first dress, hang it on a satin-covered hanger, and start on a spring-green shantung shift. The fabric sizzles and I turn down the temperature wheel. I find a soothing rhythm to my ironing; I lose myself in the steam and heated fabrics, and I think of my gun in my glove box, and it does make me feel better; it seems to cancel out the power of the unringing cell phone in my pocket, the cheap little Sprint freebie that has made me hope’s bitch. I try to discipline myself—I will check my home messages on my lunch hour and not a minute before.

The bells on the door shiver and then ring out and it’s Erika in a scarlet-red coat, ripped fishnets and combat boots, her dark, manicured nails popping out of her fingerless gloves like chocolates. She’s holding a bakery box. “Henry, you old slag. Sandinista’s ironing and you’re just mincing about?”

“What is it
this
time?” Henry asks, as if morose.

Erika opens the bakery box like a game-show hostess and caresses the air over the candy. “Today we have chocolate caramels infused with fresh pineapple juice.”

Erika holds out the box, and Henry says, “Oh, that sounds like it will be good for a gentleman’s waistline.”

But he takes one anyway. He chews, rolling his eyes and holding up one finger, imploring us to
wait, wait!
And then, the verdict: “That is, in all seriousness, the best thing I’ve ever had in my mouth.”

Erika smiles at me and stage-whispers: “We will be ladies, and let the obvious punch line to that joke just fade, fade, fade away.” She twinkles her fingers back and forth, Glinda the Good Witch, bidding sweet farewell to the bawdy, the improper, and hands me the box of chocolates.

“Later, babies,” she says. “I’m off to the sugar mines.”

We watch Erika cross the street, the tails of her red coat whipping behind her.

“She’s a genius with the chocolates, Sandinista. She used to be the pastry chef at Boulangerie Marcel.”

Henry Charbonneau has the look of someone wanting very badly to tell you something that you do not particularly want to hear. I place Erika’s chocolates in the mahogany display box.

“She was raped at gunpoint going into the bakery one morning before dawn. Someone knew the pastry chef went in at four-thirty. Someone was waiting for Erika.”

Henry Charbonneau’s gaze turns from the anticipatory to the rueful, as if saying it out loud has cost him something. He looks down at the floors of the Pale Circus for a moment. But soon he’s distracted by a scuff, a nick, something. He leans down and works his fingers over the wood with a stern
tsk
.

“She opened her own bakery after it happened. Everyone was pretty surprised that she went the way of pornography. But”—he waves his hand in the air,
c’est la vie
—“it’s quite common for victims to take on the ways of their oppressors.”

I think of the frosting in the bowl. This professor of gently used couture might not be quite as clever as he thinks.

“Stockholm syndrome,” he muses dreamily, stretching the words into a musical affliction that sounds like it would strike down blond supermodels. “I do believe she has Stockholm syndrome.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s back to work for us!” He claps his hands, and I get the message—how could I not—and finish ironing a black polished cotton shirt with a severe bell shape. When I look up, I find Henry Charbonneau slacking, gazing out the window, watching the monks troop past in their brown robes—which, I guess, preclude their need for winter coats.

Henry Charbonneau turns from the window and looks at me; he’s clutching a bottle of Windex to his chest like a bouquet of bluebells, like he’s a tidy bridesmaid. “Do you like working here?”

“I love it,” I say, truthfully.

Henry Charbonneau nods. “I
knew
you would,” he says. When he looks down at the floor with a shy smile I see what it is about him that causes Bradley’s face to be wreathed in kittenish pain—oh, the sexy, intermittent kindness of Henry Charbonneau. Except soon he completely dispenses with his facade of cleaning and sits down, yoga-style, near the front window, with a book.

I am nearly undone by his feudal tendencies, as I still have a mound of satin dresses to iron. But the ironing is a small, good thing, even if my pleats totally suck. I have seen Bradley do twenty pleats in the time it takes me to iron three, and his pleats are severe and fresh.

When Henry looks at all these dresses I have ironed, he will sigh and his face will crumple. But for now I work and my mind wanders to my first short film of the day, which showcases my own Great Expectations:

We first meet Lisa Kaplansky when she is in the classroom, a hip teacher sitting cross-legged on her desk, comfy in her Dansko clogs, black yoga pants and batik tunic. Ms. Kaplansky is being apprised of the school situation by the several caring students crowded around her desk, Bethany Adams chief among them. Bethany Adams, Sandinista Jones’s best friend from elementary school. In junior high Sandinista dumped Bethany for a skag named Josie Jennings, a bad call, the outlaw cadence of Josie’s name a glimpse into her very soul. But Bethany Adams is as tall as a catalog model and a star volleyball player, to boot; she has fared well, even with those junior high injustices. And now Bethany Adams spills it with feeling. “And remember, Ms. Kaplansky, Sandinista’s mother died in the fall.”
Here I rework the sentence, I slide the words back into Bethany’s mouth so that it doesn’t sound like my mother stepped off a skyscraper:
“And remember, Ms. Kaplansky, Sandinista’s mother died last autumn. She’s all alone in the world this year.”

Lisa Kaplansky’s face falls and goes gray and red all at once, a crumbling ash rose. She says: “Class, I’ll be back.” Her tunic billows out behind her as she scrambles off the desk and flies out of the room. Lisa Kaplansky charges into the principal’s office without knocking, only to find a man who is neither prince nor pal, an antihero, perhaps the Antichrist: Principal Jack Johnson. He is cruising the Net for “artistic photos” and he hammers the escape button with his index finger when he sees Lisa Kaplansky
.

“Catherine Bennett …,” Ms. Kaplansky says, breathless
.

“I know,” he says. He lets loose with a desolate little sigh. “I’ve heard all about it by now.”

Because his demeanor veers too close to the ol’ “hey, babe, these things happen” nonchalance of the professional educator, Lisa Kaplansky plants a hand on Jack Johnson’s desk. Because she hits the tanning beds—I fear you not, melanoma!—her hand is a plasticine shade of butterscotch, and she wears a silver skull ring on her middle finger with ominous violet stones in the carved eye sockets, Georgia O’Keeffe for the aging hipster. Still, despite a few fashion missteps, Lisa Kaplansky is valiant, pure-hearted
.

“Catherine Bennett?” Lisa Kaplansky rolls the words off her tongue—the last name clipped and ominous, like a dare. “She kicked Sandinista’s desk!”

They lock eyes
.

“I dunno,” he says. “She’s been here forever. It’s complicated.”

“You have two choices,” Lisa Kaplansky says. “Fire her today or I go to the newspaper tomorrow.”

Eager to get back to his photographs, Jack Johnson nods
. Fantasy sequence number two:

Wherein we find the class sitting quietly after Mrs. Bennett and Sandinista exit, ye olde calm after the storm: there sits Evan Harper in his
CORPORATE COFFEE SUCKS
T-shirt, inscrutable as you please. Alecia Hardaway reads her Powerpuff Girls comic book, her face seized by some secret delight, or maybe it’s merely the madcap antics of crime-fighting cupcakes. A few girls are sniffling. A few boys are thinking poetic and unsavory thoughts of Sandinsta Jones, wondering
, Why are the beautiful ones always so tormented?