Hit Me Baby One More Time

Hit Me Baby One More Time

“You are to draw Our Lady today,” said Sister Brittany, “as you see her on front of our church every morning when you come to school.”

            She looked strictly at me as she spoke to the class, her poisonous eyes weighing on me. What more did this nun want of me? I started to scratch at the top of my head, still smarting from the metal blades of the Sears home haircut razor that father used to cut down my hair in the basement.  I wanted out of her classroom, and I searched the plain, circle-faced, black-and-white wall clock above the blackboard to see how much longer this would last.

            6 minutes after 9 am.  Too much time.

A narrow wooden and metal desk chair tightened into my body to hold me fast under her eyes.  My uniform of a starch-stiff dress blue shirt with a clip-on tie and dark blue pants of coarse cloth trapped me.  I’m a slave for her, I thought, so I’d better start doing what she says: I pulled open the thin drawer that pressed against my stomach as far as I could and I tugged out a pad of paper and pencil with a blunt tip of lead.

            I closed my eyes.  I tried to picture the shape and contour of the statue that Sister Brittany had tasked us to draw.  All I saw was a blob of a Baby Jesus swollen on a granite lump of a misshapen Virgin Mary.  I opened my eyes and looked down at the page, then tried to draw out that picture in my head into the pencil, but only blurry splotches were marking up the page.  I couldn’t figure it, none of it was correct.  Still, I had to make something of it, so I pulled out the drawer again and poked all my right fingers inside to feel blindly for a rubber eraser.  Nothing came to the touch.

            I slipped my fingers out of the drawer and wiped them over my eyes.  Then I wet my right thumb with the tip of my tongue and took to wiping it over the page, hoping I could somehow bring form out of the mess.

But as I smeared the markings, I suddenly smelled the odor of cheap soap and linen boiled clean above me.

            “And what are you doing here now?” Sister Brittany said.

I looked up.  Dead-black heavy cowl and shrouded headpiece with its stiff-white board across the forehead.  Silver chain of the great crucifix that hung around her neck.  Bony face as white as the dust from off the chunks of chalk on the blackboard behind her desk and stiff, chapped lips.

            “I asked you what you are up to,” she said.

            “I’m drawing,” I said. “I heard you tell us to draw …”

            Her eyes fixed on the paper. I smiled weakly into them and said, “I guess it isn’t very good, Sister.”

            She snatched up the paper, glared at it, turned it around to shove it at my face.  “This?” she said. “I told you to give me this?”

            The girl kneels on the floor with her bare legs splayed out on either side of her short navy-blue skirt with a white double stripe running over her tanned thighs, with her lithe feet in cork wedges.  Her hands are bent back at her ankles to hold her in position for tilting her head with tousled, light-brown-reddish hair slightly over her right shoulder.  On a face of pure clean skin, she delivers a coy smile that carries the soft hint of a first kiss, the welcome to a palm of a hand to rest on the smooth of her thigh and warm to the touch.

 

            “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”

            “You deny your mortal sin.”

“No, Sister, that isn’t the Virgin Mary I know you wanted.”
            “I’m tired of hearing about this girl you and everybody else keep talking about.  You are just using my name in vain and you know it.”

            “But this is the sixties, Sister Brittany,” I said. “And she’s so nineties. She isn’t even born yet.” I looked away from the nun, frantically, to realize that the other students in this classroom staring at us were all strangers to me.

            “I don’t belong in here,” I said. “What time is it?”

            I tried to look at the clock again, through my tears.  Still 6 minutes past 9 am.

            “Don’t you try to get out of it,” she said.

            “1960s, 1990s, 1990s, 1960s,” I said

            “I’m warning you.”

            “69696969,” I screamed at the girl on the page as she disappeared into smaller and smaller shreds under the hands of Sister Brittany tearing the paper apart.

Suddenly, I caught sight of a tightly wound, dead-black umbrella leaning against the wall next to the blackboard beneath the clock.  It seemed so much a part of her, something Sister Brittany might carry with her at all times, night and day, rain or shine.  Then, I remembered hearing somewhere that Sister Brittany had once swung that umbrella like a black bat at a boy who she said committed mortal sin to hit him at the side of his head, to send him down face first onto the floor of the school basement.  And that nobody had ever seen him again.

            Or was he really me?

            I twisted and turned as quickly as I could to pry myself out of the desk to throw it off me to lunge past Sister Brittany toward the umbrella before she could go for it.  Heaving with tears and gasps for air, I snatched it up and waved it at her as she closed in on me, grimly.  And then, standing face to face with her, I yelled:

            “You’re not Britney, bitch.”

            “That’s my umbrella, I want it back,” she said. As she groped out for it, I aimed its metal tip toward the two eyes that had accused me of myself and thrust the umbrella toward her to spear them out.  She cocked her head away to avoid it, the metal tip scraped her right cheek, then lodged beneath the stiff-white board across her forehead for me to rip off the headpiece. 

            Anguished horror creased her face.  Crazed, she paw-slapped her bloodless hands over the top of her exposed head, anxious to cover it from the eyes of her charges in the classroom.  She howled at me:

            “Oh – you sinful brat.  Look what you’ve done.  I’m bald.  Bald.  Oh – what a world – what a world.  Who would have thought a bad little boy like you could destroy my beautiful holiness.  Ohhhh, look out.  I’m going.  Going …”

            … to wake me to the nocturnal vision of the glowing TV screen at the foot of my bed where Britney, with her wild blonde hair tangled in ivory necklace beads draped over her chest of pure tanned skin laid bare by a low-cut white-lace bustier, plays at an open-mouth Sapphic tongue kiss with an older woman in the severe black costume of a whip-sharp dominatrix, known as the Madonna of our time.