Writing about the clocks makes me angry. I don’t know, maybe half a dozen of them. Black and white faces on perfectly square white paper drawn with a knife-sharpened pencil. She was trying to teach me how to tell time. But don’t think she is the good mother; she isn’t. I am in the third grade and I don’t know how to tell time and the teacher sent a note home and now she has to help me and she has made these round clocks and she asks, “What time is it?” I don’t understand any of it. Quarter hour, twenty minutes to, of, ‘til. Nothing. Blank. Maybe I am stupid. She says I am not listening. She says I am not paying attention. I am; I am paying attention to her voice as it moves towards striking.
I am there in the third grade with stringy hair and a gray sock that is creeping under the heel of a dirty sneaker. My face is scorched with fear, hot and damp. I am here at my desk, closing my eyes, the clocks and the girl and the mother all inside me crowding out reason. I hate her. I look at her hands, trying to imagine them holding me; she must have loved me once. Her hands tick with anger and loss and misgivings and fear. She slaps my head and gathering up the silent round faces, throws them up in the florescent air of our kitchen where they fall around me like feathers, one landing on my shoe, accusing me at an odd hour.
In the faces of the clocks are our pasts and futures. In the timepieces she has drawn, now as I reach into my past to see them, I know that we were both caught in a closed plane curve described by an unreasonable concept; that we will go round and round this curve ending and beginning in the same places again and again. But I only know this from my desk, not from my seat at the glass kitchen table where my foot is a pendulum.
She is holding the clocks and pushing them across the table for me to read, to make sense of, to calculate according to ways of sun and stars. But I can only look at the black arms frozen on the white squares, can only stare and hope that soon I will unlock the secrets of the face that stares up silent and judging.
