She shrugged. “It’s a nickname, I guess, but that’s what everyone calls me. ‘Cause I’m so cool, you know?”
James found the right size springs and he placed them carefully next to the clock. Springs had a habit of jumping away and getting lost so he kept his eyes trained on them. “Everyone meaning your parents? Or everyone meaning that group of kids?”
He was amazed to see her blush, just a little. It was like she controlled it. It started at her neck, turning the skin a tomato color, and then it got to her chin. But before it spread to her cheeks, it was like she fought it down. “My friends.”
“What do your parents call you?” James pried the two broken springs out, then worked to set in the new ones. Cooley leaned forward and took the broken springs. She glanced at James quickly and he pretended to not see as she tucked them slyly in her jeans pocket, the motion pulling the too-baggy denim dangerously low over her hips.
“Nothing really. My mother calls me all sorts of names. My dad doesn’t say much at all.” She laughed, but there was no happiness in her voice. It was that tone, the one James heard when the kids laughed on the street. It made him flinch and his fingers stumbled. This girl put him on edge.
Her laughter guttered suddenly to a stop. “Is my clock almost done?”
James snapped the back on and twisted the alarm-set knob until the clock sang out in a rich cow bell, its vibrations tingling his fingers. Cooley sat straight up and gasped, a smile on her face brighter than a flashlight piercing the dark. She held out both hands for her clock and James gave it to her, feeling like a saint handing out a miracle. Cooley suddenly looked like a little girl, the delight on her face plain and clear under the black make-up. She shut off the alarm and then hugged the little clock to her chest. “Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.” James tidied up a bit, making sure the workbench would be ready for whatever clock showed up next.
“So how much do I owe you?” Cooley reached into her pocket again. James thought about the two broken springs in there, original parts from her clock. He wondered what she would do with them. Bury them in her back yard?
“It was just a couple springs,” he said. “No charge.”
“Really?” She smiled again. “Cool.”
But then James thought about it. He thought about how he had her here, away from her friends, her clock held tightly in her hands. A clock repaired by the clock-keeper. “Except for two things,” he said quickly.
She froze, her knuckles whitening. “What?”
He held up one finger. “First. The next time I walk by you and your friends downtown, you’ll tell them to shut up and never use that clock-keeper rhyme again.”
She looked at the floor. “I said I was sorry,” she muttered.
He held up another finger and pointed the V at her. “Second, if you ever decide to get rid of that little clock, you won’t throw it through a window. You’ll bring it here.”
Her eyes came flying back up to meet his. “Why would I throw it through a window?”
He shook his head. “You’d be amazed. I bet you never thought you’d skip school and answer to Cooley either.”
She looked away again, tucked the clock into her coat. “Okay. Thanks.”
James turned toward the outside door, preparing to show her out, but then he changed his mind and headed up the stairs. If she went out the front, he could watch her walk away. There wouldn’t be any time for foolishness in his back yard, near the clock cemetery.
“Where are you going?” she called.
“I’m showing you out a different way. Come on.”
She followed him up the stairs, but once they were in the hallway, she walked beside him. He saw her looking from side to side, taking in all the clocks, her upper teeth busily working her lower lip. “Bet it gets noisy in here,” she said.
“My visitors say it does. I don’t think of it as noise.”
Cooley smiled and James suddenly felt like they were sharing secrets again. “My alarm clock doesn’t sound noisy to me either,” she said. “My friends have radio and CD alarm clocks and they wake up to music, but this clock sounds like music to me. Sometimes I hear it in my dream and it just fits right in. Then I’ll say, oh, wait, that’s my alarm, and wake myself up.” She shook her head. “I even heard it the last two mornings when it didn’t go off.”
“The Ben clocks work really hard to wake people up. It’s their job.”
She looked at him.
“That’s the kind of clock you have. A Baby Ben. I have a Big Ben. Same kind, only larger.” He wondered how she never noticed the words Baby Ben written in scroll under the twelve.
“I thought Big Ben was that huge clock in London.”
“It is. The alarm clock line was named after it.” James really wanted to see Big Ben, the original. A long time ago, he bought an old LP record of sound effects at a rummage sale, just because one of the sounds was Big Ben. He played it over and over again, picturing himself standing at the giant clock’s base as it chimed the middle of the day or the dead of night. James wanted to be there, to see it, touch it, feel the reverberation deep in his stomach. But he could never leave the Home, his clocks, his family, for that long.
Cooley stopped in front of a dwarf tall clock, squatting by an archway. The clock was only four feet tall and Cooley, at least a foot taller, bent down to look into its face. “This is a really short grandfather clock.” She reached out to touch the mahogany, but James blocked her hand.
“It’s not a grandfather clock.” He touched the wood himself, reassuring the clock that it wasn’t about to be hurt. “A grandfather clock is actually called a tall clock or a longcase clock. This is a dwarf tall clock, more commonly called the grandmother clock. And it’s actually quite tall for the type; they range in size from two to five feet. This one was made by a man in Massachusetts, James Wilder, in 1823.”
Cooley’s smile prettied her face. James wondered what color her hair really was, beneath the purple-red dye job. “Grandmother clock. I like that. It does look sort of grandmotherly, like it could give a hug.”
This time, when she reached out to touch, James didn’t stop her. Her fingers graced the case, following the whorls of pattern in the wood. He noticed her fingernails were all painted black, except for her middle finger on the right hand. That nail was still a tender baby pink, a pre-adolescent pink, a pink that came before the polished color.
That little nail softened him, until he realized what that bare nail would be used for. What it in fact had been used for, on one of his last walks downtown. He could see the other fingers furled over, fisted, except for that one naked nail, pointing straight up.
Clock-keeper, clock-keeper, too bad you’re not a cock-keeper!
James turned abruptly. “It’s time for you to go. I need to have my breakfast before visiting hours.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said behind him. “That coffee smells really good.”
There may have been a request for an invitation in her voice. James wasn’t sure. But he didn’t care. He didn’t trust her, didn’t know when the smile would turn into a sneer, when her whisper would turn harsh and mocking. Women could change so quickly, like his mother, like Diana, and Cooley, though young, was almost a woman. It was time to get her out of there. Her clock was fixed.
Although she walked quickly, James made sure to stay in front of her. He didn’t want her next to him, walking the way he imagined a friend would. When he reached the door, he opened it and waited.
She stood there uncertainly, patting her jacket where the Baby Ben hid. “Well…thank you,” she said.
James looked away.
“Your name is James, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s James.”
“My name is really Amy Sue. Not Cooley, though that’s what I’m called. Amy Sue Dander.”
James struggled to connect the two, the sweet name with the purple-haired taunter. He couldn’t. “I think you look more like a Cooley.” Her face fell and he wished for a moment that he hadn’t spoken aloud. But no matter, she would never be back anyway. He wondered if she really could be an Amy Sue. But then he shut the door firmly behind her. It wasn’t worth thinking about. Amy Sue or Cooley, she was dangerous.
Remembering his newspaper, James tracked it down, finally finding it on the kitchen table. He must have set it there on the way down to the workshop. After pouring his coffee, he sat down and turned to the comics. The page was creased, probably by that single pink nail. He sighed and tried to ignore it.
T
he day Audrey’s special scratch’n’sniff cherry-scented hot pink thong panty snapped as she tucked it into place was the day she realized she was heading over that proverbial hill. Her friends talked about it all the time; you hit forty and it’s all downhill from there, they said. Audrey felt like she spent all her life struggling uphill and she wasn’t about to head down yet; if anything, she was going to level out. But the sting of the snap caused her to rub her rear and curse.
She stood in front of her opened dresser drawer and lifted out pair after pair of thong undies. She was suddenly afraid to put any of them on. This hurts, she thought, one hand still patting her backside. This really hurts.
Finally, she just pulled on her slacks over her bare skin. She reasoned that it wasn’t that different from a thong; her buns were basically always bare anyway. But she didn’t count on all the chafing in her unprotected crotch. By mid-morning, she was wiggling in her seat.
“I have to go shopping during lunch,” she said to her office friend, DeAnne. “I need some new unmentionables.”
DeAnne laughed. “Have fun at Frederick’s then,” she said.
Audrey never hid her underwear preferences. She was proud of the electric colors, the animal prints, the leather and the silk. Up above, she was even prouder of the underwire and pump, the featherboaed number with straps of bright yellow feathers (to wear with strapless gowns…the yellow feathers fluttering over black velvet was to die for) and especially the nipple cut-outs which lifted her high, but gave her that natural naked look. Freddy’s was indeed high on her shopping list.
But now, she looked at DeAnne and considered. DeAnne always looked nice. Her clothes were simple, but sharp, smooth with no pantyline. DeAnne still went out on Friday and Saturday nights and came in Monday, looking like she lived it up over the weekend. And Audrey knew from the last office birthday party that DeAnne was forty-six years old.
Audrey wondered if DeAnne wore thongs. Maybe there was a trick to keeping sagged behinds from snapping the material. “Hey,” Audrey said. “Hey, DeAnne? Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Guess not,” she said.
“What kind of unmentionables do you wear?”
Both women looked down the hallway outside their cubicle. No one was in sight. It was just before lunch and most everyone was out. DeAnne leaned way over and whispered in Audrey’s ear anyway. “Lace bikinis mostly. Sometimes a silk thong.”
“Lace?” Audrey always rejected lace as being too demure. “Doesn’t that itch?”
“Only if I think about it,” DeAnne said and instantly scratched. “But mostly, it makes me feel pretty.”
“And the thong has never…snapped? Broken?”
DeAnne shook her head. “I’m not that far gone, Aud.”
Audrey looked back at her screen. Apparently, she was.
That far gone.
She waited a few minutes, letting DeAnne bustle out to lunch first. Audrey wanted to leave last, in case DeAnne asked to come with. Not this time. Audrey wasn’t going to Freddy’s. She was sneaking to the Foundation Emporium, a store that specialized in unmentionables for all ages, but especially, as they liked to say in their ads, The Mature Woman. Audrey never thought of herself as mature, equating maturity with bland. Now she wondered if she should think of herself as old.
Moving slowly, Audrey left the office. She knew what she was going to have to buy. She wore them the first seventeen years of her life, when her mother did all the shopping.
Plain white cotton briefs.
The same as her mother wore her entire life. Audrey could still hear the satisfied snap of the waistband as her mother dressed every day. She used to snap the band on Audrey’s too, when Audrey was still little enough to need help dressing. Back then, when she was four and five, six and seven, even up to ten, Audrey kind of liked the white briefs. They matched the plain white undershirts she wore that had a little silk bow right in the center of her chest. After her bath on hot summer nights, her mother let her run around in just her underwear and it seemed to Audrey the most elatedly free feeling in the world.
Until she got older and comfort was no longer an important consideration. With the arrival of breasts when she was twelve, Audrey wanted something wild, naughty, outlandish…as a teen, she wanted Wow. At sixteen, she dreamed about wearing sweet blouses with ribbons at the throat, matching skirts down to her ankles, all the rage then. But underneath, peekaboo unmentionables in chocolate brown, cinnamon red, cool mint green. The underneath unmentionable life was who she really was and Audrey wanted so much to be unwrapped and have someone discover edible undies and a push-up bra, discover Audrey, beneath the softspoken, shyly-dressed exterior.
While shopping with her mother, the teenaged Audrey pointed out all the gorgeous unmentionables, soft things in silk, rough things in leather, but her mother shook her head and dragged her to the plain white cotton brief section. Instead of white undershirts, she wore plain white bras with a pink rose nestled in her new cleavage.
Until she was seventeen. At seventeen, she graduated from high school, got a job, moved out, and carefully budgeted her paychecks to cover rent, food, electric, phone and unmentionables. Lots and lots of unmentionables for lots and lots of boys, and unwrapping and unwrapping and unwrapping. Audrey felt discovered.
Until now, at forty, when she felt found out. Her body betrayed her, insisting on no more exotic unmentionables, just plain white cotton briefs.
Outside of the Foundation Emporium, Audrey hesitated and stopped in the vestibule to put on a pair of dark glasses. She heard a deep ticking and when she looked up, an odd sort of clock looked back. It was only about four feet tall, too short to be a grandfather clock, but too tall to sit on a table. It was long and straight and its face was crackled with age, but someone took it upon himself to decorate it for the store. Painted on its body was a stiff white one-piece foundation garment, what looked like a combination bra, girdle, and garter belt. The poor clock looked restrained and ridiculous and Audrey knew she was going to look ridiculous too. Ridiculous and plain and old, old, old. If plain white cotton briefs were back in her life, girdles and longline bras couldn’t be too far away.