Prologue
The snooze button grants a limited number of reprieves before finally saying screw you, I’ve done my job and I’m going back to sleep. It was a screw me morning.
Now that I’ve readily contributed verification of my peculiar relationship with an inanimate object, I guess there’s no harm in admitting that the majority of my mornings begin exactly this way. What’s one more quirk between friends?
I turned my back to the clock and we came to an impasse, peacefully coexisting until someone in 2C slammed a door and woke me again. Then, in one of my more creative but least graceful moves, I flipped over, caught my foot in the ragged hem of the comforter, and we both landed in a pile of laundry on the floor between the bed and dresser. I couldn’t see the clock from my new position but did see the sun peaking through a broken slat in the blinds to assure me that I was significantly late.
As I pulled myself into a sitting position and freed my leg from its captor, I realized that my fall had left my mother vulnerable to criticism and smiled for the first time that day. Although Mother had failed to mention it in her thousands of warnings, I was sure that unmatched linens must rank right up there with dirty underwear and stringy hair on the list of ways in which daughters humiliate mothers. The yellow-striped fitted sheet, pink-flowered top sheet, navy pillowcases, and red comforter would surely beat anything else I had done to disgrace the family.
Mother would disapprove, but I felt comfortable with the odds against Candid Camera or Better Homes and Gardens dropping in that morning and left the comforter on the floor as I headed for the shower. One of the benefits of having my own place was that I didn’t have to care what she thought or hear her say, “It’s still a reflection on how I raised you.”
Rather than allow thoughts of the unkempt bed or betraying clock to depress me, or investigate the cause of my refusal to be punctual, or try to guess exactly how many days worth of soap scum it would take to completely fill the grout between the shower tiles, I contemplated a more important question. Is it better to be screwed by an inanimate object than never be screwed at all?
While the water hammered my face, I gave up on that question and pondered another. Are clocks truly inanimate? After all, they function independently and they communicate information that we don’t readily have without them. They have hands, faces, and rhythm, almost like a human. Apparently, mine also had a vindictive personality.
By the time the third and most shocking question came to mind, it startled me so badly that I carved a sizeable chunk of skin from my knee with the dull razor I used to rasp the forest off my legs. Was my alarm clock more dependable than the men I had dated? It had managed to hang around for years, faithfully disappointing me three out of five days a week. None of the guys had lasted as long or been so consistent.
Without contest, the clock won, hands down. Or hands up as the case happened to be at nine fifty-five, one hour and fifty-five minutes after I should have opened my customer service window at the water company’s main office.
I had overslept on the day that delinquent customers were scheduled for shut-off. That wasn’t good, from the company’s perspective or that of the general public. Because I didn’t wake up and report to my position in time to collect last minute overdue payments, some poor soul might lose water service and go to work without a shower. I would be indebted to all of society for the inconvenient stench I had forced upon them.
Selfishly, I hoped it wouldn’t be anyone that I would meet. After recalling my experience at Russell Jenky’s Deli the week before, I especially hoped it wouldn’t be anyone who worked in a food establishment. My stomach turned just remembering the moment when I had caught the first whiff in the deli and instinctively grabbed Clarice’s arm to whisper my best guess. “The new kid must have kicked a slice of meat under the counter to rot again.” I held my breath and decided that he must have been another member of the Jenky clan; otherwise, they’d surely have fired the lazy boy after his first misplaced meat incident.
True to character, Clarice had tactfully disagreed with my guess, saying the exotic cheeses that she couldn't pronounce were the only things she could imagine smelling that bad. “Not that I’d ever want to pronounce or eat them,” she clarified. “Anything that rancid should be kept away from people who are fixing to eat.”
It turned out that we were both wrong. When we approached the cashier with our selections--but little appetite left with which to eat them--Russell’s wife, Gladys extended an arm to collect the ten I had been holding over my nose and we discovered that her multi-colored synthetic sweater was the culprit. As my stomach clawed its way through my throat, I held my breath and squeaked out a thank you for my change and left Clarice alone so I could claim the booth farthest away from the cashier before someone else beat me to it.
“It makes sense if you think about it,” I rationalized once Clarice had joined me and our gagging subsided. “Shouldn’t a sweater make you sweat?”
After a good laugh, and with less discussion than we had normally devoted to our world-changing hypotheses, we decided that warmer was a more appropriate designation for that article of clothing, at least for those of us who didn’t wear them for the purpose of sweating.
As my water turned cold, I admitted that I needed that same logical assistance from Clarice before I could decide if clocks were inanimate. I finished my shower, band-aided a square of toilet paper over the gash in my knee to catch the blood, towel dried my hair, and dressed in gray slacks, a lavender warmer, and my navy slip-on shoes. At least that’s what I thought until Clarice informed me later that I was wearing one navy shoe and one black.
“Rena,” she had whined, “you need to get to bed earlier so you can wake up in time to hunt down matching clothes and clock in before lunch time. Maybe you could even put on some of that make-up you cleaned your bank account out to buy. No offense, but you won’t ever get moved up to manager at this rate.”
By that time I had learned to appreciate Clarice’s whiney chiding, often coupled with reluctantly voiced advice. The groundwork for the lasting impression she would make on my life had been set the day I met her, which was also the day I became I Greensville Water Company employee.
Ann Lyons, anxious to pass me off on an employee whose time she considered less valuable than her own, had caught Clarice off guard and instructed her to complete my orientation. The off guard part was a mistaken assumption on my part, quickly cleared up by a mutual embarrassment.
“Show Rena around and introduce her to the other first floor employees,” Anne had ordered. “Then, bring her back here to observe your procedures for the rest of the day. I’ll check back with you later.”
I envied Clarice’s composure. Instead of complaining that life had cursed her with the worst possible luck, she pretended that her head wasn’t full of mucus, mumbled a suitable response, and cleared her work area to accommodate me. The still oblivious Ann darted out before the poor girl had had a chance to reach for a tissue.
After our manager had walked away, leaving me to believe that she was the most insensitive person I had met in a long time, I discretely whispered to Clarice that it wouldn’t offend me if she wanted to blow her nose. I’d wait.
“Girlfriend, I don’t need a tissue. I’m afraid this is my regular speaking voice,” she explained. I hoped my expression hadn't prompted her next statement, because I honestly tried to hide the shock. “I reckon it was nature’s way of protecting me. Stud magnets need some offensive trait to stave off the rowdy ones.”
She tried to laugh but the sound she produced more closely resembled a snort, which I decided was probably another symptom of the condition that caused her to talk like her head was full.
I laughed and said I was sorry, immediately afraid that I had made my second faux pas. She has spoken with confidence, although she was far from stud magnet material. Surely, she was kidding. She reminded me of Belinda Peakins, a girl I had known in college.
Often, the less attractive girls in my dorm had dragged Belinda along when they went out. In comparison to her, they received more attention from the boys. Later when they compared notes, Belinda reminded them that she would never give those jerky guys a second thought anyway. The other girls laughed, but Belinda stuck to her story.
After knowing Clarice for less than five minutes, I hoped no one had treated her the way Belinda had been treated. I posted quick reminders on my subconscious bulletin board to look the word ‘stave’ up in the dictionary, and to ask my father if there was a surgical procedure that could return Clarice’s voice to normal. Then I concentrated the rest of my mental energy on Clarice’s face, hoping her expression would tell me whether she understood that I was laughing with her and not at her.
Clarice drew the corners of her mouth a tad further back, exposing one more oversized, protruding tooth on each side of her face. I wanted to count, positive that she must have the Guinness record number of teeth in her mouth; that, or she had the world’s smallest face, making her teeth appear larger than they were. It was hard to tell, since everything about her except her teeth was unusually small.
I was already bordering on rude, so I shifted my focus from her teeth to her eyes. I thought I saw a glint in them, but couldn’t be sure it represented warmth. It might have been a reflection off the rhinestone studs in her glasses.
“Let’s just throw this out on the table straight away,” she suggested, trying another smile that was so wide that she had to slurp to keep saliva from slipping out the corners of her mouth. “Girlfriend, I own mirrors and I’ve heard my voice on tape.”
I smiled, thinking anything I said would surely be wrong.
“And if that’s not enough, I’ve had people tease me about these things my whole life, so you don’t need to pretend you’re blind or that I’m anything other than what I am. I don’t. I like me just fine the way I am.”
She paused to slurp and stretch her lips over her teeth while she swallowed. I said thanks because I still couldn’t think of anything better to say.
“One more thing,” she added. “I try to avoid the paparazzi, so if you’re somebody famous we’ll have to restrict our meetings to private places.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted her to call me girlfriend, but I knew I liked Clarice no matter what she decided to call me. I wanted to know her better.
My life changed the day I met Clarice McDaniel. She exorcised the boring, twenty-four-year-old, semi-depressed, slightly neurotic, demons right out of Rena Boyles. Right when I was in the middle of trying to convince the world that I was smarter, more beautiful, saner, and more successful than I truly was, Clarice McDaniel shamed the all-American-know-it-all-snob right out of me. She liberated me from the box that had controlled my life until then.
Before Clarice, I hadn’t considered the important things in life, like the hidden meaning in my alarm clock, or the inappropriate labeling of articles of clothing. And nobody had called me girlfriend.
Clarice turned the lights on and introduced me to a colorful side of the world that I hadn’t noticed before. And seeing the world through Clarice’s glow is about as good as it gets.
