The Clock's CountdownA Story by pswriterMadison shares her daily life in three parts: first as a teenager, next as a young adult, and then as a middle-aged single mother.Part
One A red strip of sunlight snuck in
through the window pane and splashed against the mirror I faced. Cringing away
from light, I continued getting ready for school. I spent what I considered to
be too much time with my makeup: covering up blemishes whose red marks still
showed through the powder, picking black chunks of mascara off of my eyelashes,
and giving up on the unevenness of my eyeliner with a frustrated sigh. After
one last look in the mirror, I rubbed off some of that new bright red lipstick
that I loved but would never have the confidence to wear. I may not be good with a brush, but
at least I was good with timing. My grumbling ignition turned off in the
student parking lot precisely ten minutes before the bell for homeroom rang.
This gave me time to prepare for the day: precisely enough to make me want it
to be over as soon as possible. The morning was the worst. My early grogginess
could not handle the rednecks’ ostentatious trucks or the morning people’s over-enthusiastic
greetings. I slid into my assigned seat in
homeroom with a few minutes to spare before Mr. Carson took attendance. My
faltering eyelids snapped open to catch my name coming up in roll call: “Hayley
Mathews, Jacob Moyer, Maddie Norman.” “Madison.” I corrected him
irritably, but he must not have heard as he continued down the list without a
glance in my direction. Sadly, the nickname I had chosen for myself at the age
of six years old had stuck, despite my effort to reform it back to plain old
“Madison”. The classroom’s TV screen crackled
to life to display the blurred faces of the peppiest seniors who constantly
scrambled over each other to read the next announcement in a more artificial
tone. I choked back a groan at their “Sunny Monday!” weather report and buried
my head into my assignment book as a refuge from the series of updates on all
the trifling activities our great educational institutional had to offer. I
flipped through the curling, leather bound pages for the thousandth time until
I found today’s temporarily empty page. Last night’s work was already crossed
off with a thin ink line. The bell signaled a mass exodus of cattle
who roamed the halls to their first period classes. I mean students, but they
may as well have been cattle. Some of them just looked so dead eyed, like they
were not capable of the simplest human thought. But the ones who I knew were
more than capable were just as bad. Maybe even worse. I thought that you could
escape the stupidity by enrolling in Honors classes. For
once, I’ll admit. I was wrong. I
walked into my AP English class to witness the same dead eyed stupidity, only
it was covered with flowery language and a professional attitude. Seriously,
none of the work was theirs, and if it was, it sounded like some ancient
dinosaur named the thesaurus-rex attacked it. AP should have stood for Advanced
Plagiarism. I
barely made it to my seat before my friend, Catherine, pounced to inform me all
about how the rain had ruined her plans from the night before. I actually found
the rain to be soothing as I fell asleep, but pretended to sympathize with how
dreary the weather had been lately. The awful thing about Catherine was that
she could go on and on about the same topic unless you stopped her. “So,
what do you think about having a get together this weekend before finals?
Because let’s face it, I probably won’t live through them.” I interjected
before the next wave of complaints hit me. “You’ll
do fine, Maddie!” Catherine rolled her eyes and continued before I could
correct her about my name, “But yeah, that sounds like a great idea. We could
totally do something at my house.” I
nodded in appreciation and turned my attention to the front of the classroom
just in time for the first presentation on Hamlet to begin, not that anyone
cared if Hamlet was mad or not. Most of the students just spoke an online
critic’s position in a voice that made it sound like they did. It was so
infuriatingly obvious that the work was not their own. But the teacher didn’t
care about authenticity. She liked hearing just the right words. Everyone likes hearing just the right words. I
couldn’t wait until next year when their professors in college would be able to
see through their fake intelligence. They could not possibly succeed then. * Later
that week, I was greeted with flashing smiles and half-assed hugs from a select
group of my closest friends who eventually all settled down into a circle
around the table of food in Catherine’s basement. As everyone talked about what
was happening in their lives, I realized that we weren’t close at all. I didn’t
know what was happening in their lives, and I didn’t particularly care while we
were supposed to be at a party. Although this get-together could hardly be
called a party considering it only consisted of the same people I saw at school
just without the stifling academic setting and with a whole lot more food than
our “nutritional” cafeteria had. Yet
school was still mainly what everyone talked about: the classes that everyone
learned nothing in for a whole semester because we had to memorize everything
the night before the tests, the SAT scores we received despite the probability
that no one was honest about them, and the colleges that we considered attending
despite the low chance of our admittance and high chance of being indebted for
the next 15 years of our lives. But somehow this whole large and scary process
as a high school senior who was moving on was still exhilarating to me because
at least it was some sort of change. Before the biggest change in the past four
years of my life was cutting off all 12 inches of my hair and dying it a dark
auburn because that brilliant red that I really wanted was just too out there. Soon
I headed home and got stopped at the most unnecessary long stoplight where I
was forced to watch no one drive by as my foot itched towards the gas pedal.
The red stoplight captured my gaze by standing out from the bleak dark sky
ahead of me. The blinking red clock on my dashboard told me that I probably
should have been home about 20 minutes ago. And as soon as the light turned green,
I had to wait for a man to dash across the crosswalk before I finally crossed
through the intersection towards the vivid moon. Part Two Five Years Later My
alarm perched precariously close to the end of my nightstand and waited to fill
my tiny apartment with a shrill wake up call. Before it rattled its way onto
the floor, my arm instinctually threw itself out of the bed sheets to silence
it. The world was still dark, but I could tell that the morning was in its last
few minutes of peaceful silence before the rest of humanity awoke. Temporarily,
I rejoiced in the fact that the birds lightly chirping outside my apartment
building were my only company. With
a hefty sigh, I wrestled with my sheets until they were ruffled lumps at the end
of my bed, which was much too large for one lonely person. Per usual, the
shower pelted the feeling of grogginess away with warm sprinkles. My grumpy
mood, however, would take until 11:00 to wear away. After struggling with the
stubborn closet doors, I searched for a white button down shirt that wasn’t
wrinkled beyond repair. I managed to match it with black pants and scuffed
shoes all while watching the clock with extreme awareness. Then
I was out the door, but not before having to open it back up again since I
almost forgot to lock up my apartment. Instead of waiting for the crummy
elevator to stop at every goddamn floor in the building, I decided to jog down
a few flights of steep stairs. This routine sadly planted a seed of reminder
that I should actually go to the gym for once even though I broke that New
Year’s Resolution long ago. Once
outside, the sky was losing its pink tinge, and I raced across the street to
meet the bus that just arrived at its stop, not hesitating to climb aboard and
sit in the nearest open seat to the driver. Having nothing else to do for the couple
minute trip downtown, I got the blasted “Wheels on the bus go ‘round and
‘round” song stuck in my head for some unforsaken reason considering I was probably
seven the last time I heard it. Once the bus halted, I jumped out of my seat
and flicked a nice tip at the driver who simply nodded his head in
appreciation. I swung my briefcase as I crossed the street to my white collared
graduate job in the painfully plain office building. Arriving
in my seat two minutes early, I sighed at the white stacks of busy work in
front of me. At least they offered some contrast to the varying shades of grey
walls, desks, and carpet. Since the work of entering numbers into my high-end
company’s database was not exactly intellectually stimulating, my mind drifted
as it does most days to wondering why my bachelor’s degree led to this. In no
more than five minutes, I decided that I was going to quit because I was overqualified
and deserved to live. But then it took me another ten minutes to convince myself
that being unemployed would be worse, and that I knew what I was getting into
when I signed up for the business major. The
morning drudged on as always with a few bored greetings from not-so-close
coworkers and interruptions from annoyed customers on the phone whose problems
were passed down to me because God knows no one else wanted to deal with them.
And after asking my boss one too many questions, my stomach finally chimed in
with the series of complaints to demand my lunch break. What a relief. I
got on the bus again, jealous of all my coworkers’ shiny cars, and rode a few
miles downtown to a coffee shop where I was forced to wait in the longest line
just for a cup of overpriced caffeine and a bagel without enough cream cheese
spread. After a bit of internal contemplation, I decided that there was not
enough time to sit down and eat, so I walked back outside. Of course, this
could not be done without swinging the wide glass door open and almost smacking
into a woman with her children and spilling some scolding hot black coffee down
my hand. I scowled as they scuttled away without a word of apology. For
the rest of the afternoon, I waited for the artificial energy to make my day
feel productive and worthwhile. But I had the feeling that such a day would not
come for quite a few more years after I spent my time in limbo struggling with
the “real world”, which I learned was only comprised of overqualified
intellectuals like myself whose ambitions were floating too far away to see
anymore through all the fog of day to day living. At
the end of the day, I scratched out the date on the calendar hanging above my
desk with a thick red sharpie. One day down. Problem was, I didn’t know what I
was counting down to. Part Three Eleven Years Later A
pang of fear tore through my chest as fast as the speeding red SUV on the main
road where my children were much too close to the edge. I tugged on my young
son’s hand to steer him away from the traffic as my three children and I made our
way down the uprooted sidewalk, dodging other pedestrians left and right. James
was constantly pulling away to point “Look, Momma!” and “I want this!” I kept
pulling him back with a grumble about how we all want things we cannot have as
I secretly wished for a futuristic time when he would be sad about leaving my
side. Meanwhile I almost tripped on my younger daughter who insisted that she
must attach herself to my leg as if I would magically disappear otherwise. So I
also wished for a time when she will be independent enough to let go of me. I
made my way through my mental to do list: the bank to the dry cleaners to the
grocery store. By the time I was in the last dairy isle my head was spinning
and irritated by all the other customers, who needed to learn how to steer
their damn carts; and by my children, who were constantly pulling on my shirt
hem. I hurriedly left before I made a scene in the middle of the store. By the
time I reached home, I realized that I forgot crackers and cheese, but at that
point I could not care less. The clock that read 6:00 glared at me from above
the doorway to inform me that I was late and that, of course, there was no time
to relax. As
a single parent of several years, I had mastered the trade of cooking dinner
while keeping another eye on the kids. The water began boiling as Rachel
dribbled her soccer ball around the chairs in the dining room. Knots of
concentration grew across her face, but they were lit up by a passionate
intensity in her eyes. When she realized I watched her from over my shoulder,
she smiled proudly. Meanwhile, my older son Michael was teaching James
something that he learned in science class. I couldn’t see him from the other
room, but I heard his voice as it grew with a crescendo whenever he got really
excited. I almost let out a giggle at the sight of my little man in a suit and
tie teaching in front of a classroom. However, only his age made this scene seem
unrealistic. Michael the professor and Rachel the pro-soccer star. Serving
dinner was when it hit me. The next day, my kids would learn and teach and
improve on their soccer skills. And I would go to work in the same building
that miraculously became plainer since I began working there years ago. The white
paycheck that I received would reflect the emptiness that I felt. As I chewed
my food, I wondered where this feeling was derived. I had three beautiful
children and was making just enough to support them without my intolerable slob
of an ex-husband. My children should have been enough to make me happy. Every
mother’s wish was to have successful children, right? I just had to be noble
and sacrifice my paychecks to their wellbeing. But why did nobility mean
emptiness? I
scrubbed the dirty plates clean and chewed on my bottom lip until it was as raw
as the glistening dishes. Watching my kids now tossed me to the edge of
waterworks. Every time Rachel determinedly kicked that ball and whenever James
shouted “Oh!” in understanding at Michael’s explanation, I rolled further down
the side of an emotional cliff. Each spike took its turn to plunge through me,
so by the time I hit the water, the wild waves of salty tears felt like heaven
as they crashed down my cheeks. * The
next morning I was in a rush to drive the kids to school. This was mostly
because I had to battle them to get out of their pajamas, even though I had to
battle them to get into their pajamas the night before. As I drove through the
early morning traffic to the school, I couldn’t help but wish for the blissful
time in the morning before everyone woke up like when the sky was fluctuating
between shades of pink and purple and when the streets weren’t full of
aggressive and rushing drivers. God, they were loud, but they were all so
small. Thankfully
I soon arrived back in my cluttered home. Before I had to leave for work, I
rejoiced knowing that I had this time to myself. That was all I needed: some
time to myself. I
cleaned. The kids’ toys were placed neatly into their toy box. The rugged
carpet was vacuumed. Family photos hanging on the walls were wiped down.
Bookshelves were dusted. The overflowing sink was emptied. The house felt empty
with its neutral colored walls and clear halls. But this emptiness was not
startling; it was refreshing. After
appreciating my work, I stole a glance at the clock. I would be a bit late to
work. But for once, it did not really bother me. © 2014 pswriterAuthor's Note
Featured Review
Reviews
|
Stats
181 Views
1 Review Added on February 3, 2014 Last Updated on February 3, 2014 Tags: young adult, fiction, short story, general |