Baby Hit Me One More Time [Update]

Hit Me Baby One More Time

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

            She looks strictly at you as she speaks to the class, her poisonous eyes weighing on you.  You start to scratch at the top of your head, still smarting from the metal blades of the Sears home haircut razor that father used to cut down your hair in the basement the night before.  You want out of her classroom.  You search the plain, circle-faced, black-and-white wall clock above the blackboard for an answer to how much longer this will last.

            6 past 9.  Too much time until noon recess.

A narrow wooden and metal desk chair tightens into your body to hold you fast under her eyes.  You feel bound and tied to your uniform of a starch-stiff dress blue shirt with a clip-on tie and dark blue pants of coarse cloth.  I’m a slave for her, you think, so I’d better start doing what she says.  You pull open the thin drawer that presses against your stomach as far as you can and you tug out a pad of paper and pencil with a blunt tip of lead.

            You close your eyes, trying to picture the shape and contour of the statue that Sister Brittany has tasked you to draw.  All you see is a blob of a Baby Jesus swollen on a granite lump of a misshapen Virgin Mary.  You open your eyes and look down at the sheet of paper.  You start drawing out that picture in your head into the pencil, but you only mark blurry splotches onto the paper.  You cannot figure it out, none of it is correct.  So, you pull out the drawer again and poke all your right fingers inside, feeling blindly for a rubber eraser.  Nothing comes to the touch.

            You slip your fingers out of the drawer and wipe them over your eyes.  Then you wet your right thumb with the tip of your tongue and take to wiping it over the splotchy paper, hoping to bring form out of the mess.

But as you are smearing the markings, you suddenly smell the odor of cheap soap and linen boiled clean above you.

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

You look up into the dead-black heavy cowl and shrouded headpiece with its stiff-white board across the forehead.  Silver chain of the great crucifix that hangs 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 says.

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

            Her eyes fix on the sheet of paper. You smile weakly into them and say, “I guess it isn’t very good, Sister.”

            She snatches up the paper, glares at it, turns it around to shove it at your face.  “This?” she says. “I told you to give me this?”

            On the paper, a girl sits on a 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.  Her face of pure clean skin delivers a coy smile that carries the soft hint of a first kiss and welcomes the palm of a hand to rest on the smooth of her thigh, warm to the touch.

            “I didn’t mean that,” you say. “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,” you say. “And she’s so nineties. She isn’t even born yet.”  Frantically, you look away from the nun, only to realize that you do not know the faces of the other students in this classroom staring at you.

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

            “1960s, 1990s,” you say. “ ’90s, ’60s.”

            “I’m warning you.”

            “69696969” you scream at the girl on the page as she disappears into smaller and smaller shreds under the hands of Sister Brittany tearing the paper apart.

“I don’t belong in here,” you cry. “It’s time to leave.”

You wince through your tears to look at the clock again.  It is still 6 past 9.  Then, you catch sight of a tightly wound, dead-black umbrella leaning against the wall next to the blackboard beneath the clock.  It seems so much a part of her, something Sister Brittany carries with her at all times, night and day, rain or shine.  Now, where did you hear that Sister Brittany once swung that umbrella like a black bat at a boy who she said committed mortal sin?  Hitting him at the side of his head, sending him down face first onto the floor of the school basement.  Did anybody ever see him again?

            Was he you?

            You twist and turn quickly to pry yourself out of the desk to throw it off you to lunge past Sister Brittany toward the umbrella before she can go for it.  Heaving with tears and gasps for air, you grab it up and wave it at her as she closes in on you, grimly.  And then, standing face to face with her, you yell:

            “You’re not Britney, bitch.”

            “That’s my umbrella, I want it back,” she says. As she gropes for it, you aim the umbrella toward the two eyes that had accused you of yourself and thrust the metal tip toward her to spear them out.  She cocks her head away to avoid it, the metal tip scrapes her right cheek, and then lodges beneath the stiff-white board across her forehead for you to rip off the headpiece.

            A crazed horror creases her face.  She paw-slaps her bloodless hands over the top of her exposed head, anxious to cover it from the eyes of her charges in the classroom.  She howls at you:

            “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 you to a glow at the foot of your bed.  Your Britney appears with 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.  On the TV screen, she plays at an open-mouth tongue kiss with an older woman in the severe black costume of a whip-sharp dominatrix.  You know her as the Madonna of your time.