The Sharp Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Clarks 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