The Sharp Time

by Mary O'Connell

  * * *

  One quickly learns that, even when depressed, it’s difficult not to feel like a bit of a badass when in possession of a gun. And surprisingly the gun makes me hungry, the gun makes me ravenous! Which is good, I suppose, because the way things have been going with all the espresso and cigarettes even the skinniest of my skinniest jeans have turned into voluminous fat-man pants.

  I own a gun. Perhaps I will join the NRA.

  I drive through Taco Tico and order the enchilada special just like any other customer, as casual as any old high school gal with a gun and a fresh box of bullets in her glove box. I arrive home to no new messages on my answering machine—how can this be?—but I do have beef and cheese enchiladas and a pink handgun.

  The house is boiling.

  I forgot to turn the heat down again and when I see Catherine Bennett appear in my peripheral vision, looking at the thermostat with glee and preparing to start up with her standard nutbar “You’re not paying attention, Sandinista” routine, something different happens. I don’t exactly point my gun at Catherine Bennett; I hold it casually in her direction like a pointer or a pie graph—Here’s something that could happen; let’s take a moment and look at the percentages—and poof, she disappears.

  The house is still hot, though, so I strip down to my bra and underpants and eat dinner at the kitchen table. I put the gun across from me, where my mother used to sit. The barrel points at the empty chair at the end of the table, the phantom winner in a game of spin the bottle.

  The gun is nothing, really. It’s merely a centerpiece, not unlike a cornucopia of plastic fruit. It’s not a petite dinner companion whom I’m expecting to cough up metallic bons mots. But things have changed. It’s not as if I expect that now the school will call me, it’s not like my mother will ascend from her cold grave out past the interstate, it’s not like some father/boyfriend/Christ figure will appear, rugged and flannel-shirted, offering up manly hugs and solutions. But now I have something beyond gloom and pure bewilderment.

  I have a gun. And my mind swirls with unthinkable plans, dumb ones, to be sure. But I can see now that a person doesn’t have to remain staggering and surprised, ready to absorb all the hurts of the day.

  A person can have a gun, and a person can make plans with a gun. A person can, if willing to shed cowardice and complicity, execute their plans.

  Catherine Bennett’s smirk bleeds in my mind, but now it doesn’t feel so unnerving. It seems like she’s more the pathetic character, an active participant in her own doomed foreshadowing. When I hold my gun in my hand, I feel an odd, calm strength, maybe for the first time in my life. Maybe this is how God felt in the prologue to the book of Genesis: haloed with anticipation, and capable.

  * * *

  After my enchilada feast I fall dead asleep on the couch under a patchwork quilt my mother made out of my old baby sleepers, my little-girl clothes. The raspberry wool of my favorite kindergarten sweater is pulled up around my face, and I think I will dream dreams of glue and safety scissors and recess and graham crackers and a book bag embroidered with a green worm popping out of an apple, but in fact my dreams are dreary and asthmatic: walking through endless narrow corridors, eating a hamburger only to discover, my mouth jammed full, that the meat is a charcoal briquette that crumbles to ash. When I wake at eight o’clock, my childhood bedtime, my gun-happy girl-self, has evanesced and I am back in the hole, I am back to staring at the dark answering machine, thinking: Oh.

  Still, I try to hold on to the good feeling of the pink gun. I crank up the stereo, put on my mother’s old orange velour bathrobe and then play Charlie’s Angels in the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door. I apply lip gloss and Cleopatra eyeliner; I brush my hair and swing it back and forth so that it looks shiny and lionine. I purse my lips and raise my eyebrows, surprised as any girl detective: Nancy Drew discovering the hidden cave, the cache of gold bars in the treasure chest. Oh, my hand looks so, so beautiful holding the gun! Perhaps I will be a gun-holding hand model!

  I decide that I will paint my nails the same sweet pink of the mosaic of the gun handle. And the pistol is a freedom, a new freedom, that goes hand in hand with that other new freedom of not being the thing that someone loves most in the universe, being free to come and go as I please. I ramble around the house with the stereo turned up loud, my back splayed next to the bathroom door before I turn around and point the gun at nothing; I hold the gun over my head as I catwalk down the hall; I swing it around low as I walk into the living room.

  There is the soft strain of the telephone ringing, trying to break through the Clash’s Sandinista! (Oh, yes, they’re playing my song; oh yes, I’m singing along …), so I race to the stereo and turn down the volume. With my gun at my side, I stand by the phone trying to will myself to let the answering machine pick it up. Unbidden, my free hand reaches down. Here is the dreamscape moment; here is the reckoning. I offer up a breathless, heart-banging “Hello?”

  “Is this Sandinista Jones?”

  Fast doom: the caller mispronouncing my name, rhyming up the last two syllables with vista. I know it’s no one from school.

  “Yes,” I sigh. “I am Sandinista Jones.” I pronounce it the same way she did.

  “Hi! My name’s Amanda Peterson and I’m calling tonight on behalf of Discover credit card. Sandinista, since you’re one of our most valued customers I want to let you know that—”

  I quietly hang up the phone. I tap the barrel of the gun along the black plastic answering machine. My mother bought it at JCPenney last spring after our old chrome machine broke. The line at the cash register was long; we were bitchy. Later we walked around the mall laughing at the stupid clothes in the windows, at all the lemmings shopping at Abercrombie and Delia’s. And then, in a dullardly display of irony, we went to the Gap and bought jeans on sale.

  Mom, I think, Mom, falling into the word, allowing myself to feel it everywhere, in my wrists and in my knees, a connective-tissue disease I’ve been trying to outrun with my very public mourning. My funeral clothes—a vintage black veiled-hat-and-dress combo, short black gloves—became a wardrobe staple, an ensemble I wore to school at least once a week last fall. Some days I would add a whimsical touch with red Chuck Taylors, but usually I played it straight with black slingbacks. At home I’ve anesthetized myself with TV, with the Internet, with the resulting fatigue of long nights spent with both. And after these past four months of not answering the phone I expect my friends to call? Even after I had, in a fit of holiday grief, sent my friends an email over the winter break explaining that I needed time alone to “process my grief,” as the books say, and that I would call them when I was ready to join the living? I suppose I should thank Catherine Bennett for making it clear to me: I did not need to make such a spectacle of my grief. Because I really am alone. I’m not like any other senior at Woodrow Wilson High School.

  And wouldn’t it have amped up the action in algebra class had I pulled the gun from my backpack, creamy pink and cold as iron ore in my hand, and said: Hey, thanks for asking if I am paying attention! As a matter of fact, I am paying attention. And I am paying attention: I see, I’ve always seen, exactly how Catherine Bennett is, how she preys upon students she perceives as weak or different, and now I have gone and joined Alecia Hardaway’s club.

  Except for one difference: I have a gun.

  And I hate to geek out and be Grammar Girl here, but a gun is the perfect noun for a singular pronoun: I have a gun. This house is where I live. I live alone, and I own a gun.

  It used to be we: we live here, in this house, together.

  But I try not to say we too much anymore, we being the word for my mother and me.

  Because even though I am a cool girl with a gun, it is hard to believe that I am no longer part of a family. Thinking of my mother being really and truly gone, gone, baby, gone is still so hard. I close my eyes; I cradle my gun to my heart. The difficult part is learning to think differently: This is my house. This is our house. Our
house is the one with the ancient Amnesty International sticker on the refrigerator, the house stuffed with crafts from different stages of my mother’s artistic journey. My mother carried a green woven bag to the grocery store so as not to fill the landfill with plastic, and I see it now, pinned to the corkboard next to the refrigerator, looking strung out and worn at the handle. I am not my mother: I use the regular plastic grocery bags and then stuff them in the trash, not the recycling bin. I am not such a peace lover, either. Possibly no one has ever liked the feeling of a gun in her hand more than I do. I turn the music back up and I dance; I sway to the music, holding my gun to my heart. It’s a portal into all the things they do not expect from a Nice Girl Like Me. Maybe everyone has a secret life, maybe even Alecia Hardaway dissects and reassembles her world each night, trying and trying to get it right.

  I take a deep breath and I look over at the answering machine, hoping that somehow I have missed another call. But the machine is dark. I grab the remote and try to lose myself in a reality show, but I find myself merely fascinated by the spray-on tans of the women, the telltale spots they have missed, pale paisleys on their inner calves—Yes, Mrs. Bennett, I am paying attention—and I keep the sound turned low so I don’t miss a phone call.

  I had expected the head counselor, known for her halitosis and shockingly high high-rise jeans, to call last night, certainly by today. I hadn’t expected the big gun, the principal, Jack Johnson, aka Michael Jackson—nicknamed, I’m sorry to say, not for his dancing prowess—to call. So fine, he’s a prince, he’s a pal, he’s running the goddamn school, whatever, but surely the counselor, creepy Ms. Reiber, she of the optimistic posters on her office walls—WE’RE HERE TO HELP YOU, and the classic shot of the terrified kitten on the tree limb: HANG IN THERE, BABY!

  So, where is she? Ms. Reiber? Why doesn’t she call? Didn’t Mr. Hale tell anyone what he walked in on? Did Mrs. Bennett go home for the rest of the day? Did the other classes she teaches get to have study hall instead of geometry and calculus? Didn’t anyone tell anybody? Is Ms. Reiber so lame that she just doesn’t want to deal with it? O school counselor, O valiant dispenser of chocolate kisses, of sugarless gum, where art thou? I have seen her specific kindness before. After my mother died, Ms. Reiber called me into her office and counseled me to “pop in from time to time if you ever feel like ‘rapping.’ ” This made me wonder if she also wanted to, perchance, smoke some “dope” or “stick it to the man.”

  I wanted to tell Ms. Reiber that if I felt like rapping, I would audition for the talent show and kick it old school with some Vanilla Ice. Because it’s difficult to place one’s trust in a counselor who does not realize that word choice is a critical component in interpersonal relations. Note to my fat-assed forty-year-old self wearing an earth-toned pantsuit spruced up with a candy-green silk scarf: Do not use the slang of your youth. Do not ever try to be relevant.

  Additionally, Ms. Reiber asked about my father. And so, to top off my fresh grief, I was forced into an awkward exchange that was basically me explaining that no, I would not be going to live with my father, because, well, I did not have much of a relationship with my father, but things could always change in the future, etc. Ms. Reiber alternated between her made-for-Lifetime-TV caring look (extensive nodding, a soft-eyed gaze, a pressed smile) and her concerned look (slightly raised brows, wide eyes, mouth a grim line).

  I felt proud of my concocted story about my father, pleased with the polite understatement. Because I was conceived at a Holiday Inn in St. Louis, after a Cure concert. My mother explained that there was drinking involved, a broken condom: ye olde story. I have a memory of sitting with her in Perkins in July, the day after my eighteenth birthday. After so many years of hedging, here at last was the story. She smoked and drank her endless cup of coffee, saying, “This was the eighties, Sandinista, when sex with a near stranger seemed feminist and daring, not self-harming and slutty. Actually, you know, in truth it’s probably all those things.”

  Square dancers were sitting in the booth directly behind ours—old gals wearing frilly skirts and matching red vests. Their spiraling bouffants angled toward us as they silently ate their Egg Beaters and eavesdropped. I studied the pancake photograph on the laminated menu—the brilliant royal purple of the blueberry topping, the ivory clouds of whipped cream. My mom told me that my father would not be reappearing, as fathers so often do in wholesome family films, walking in the house with their faded jean jackets and stubbled jawlines, their tanned crow’s-feet and manly apologies. I knew this was true, but it made me a little sad—I secretly wanted Dennis Quaid to tell me he would foot the bill for college and walk me down the aisle—but I mostly wanted my mother to stop talking so freaking loud. Those square dancers were very interested in her story. And then it happened. My mother put down her lipstick-stained cup and said: “Sandinista, you will be the hero of your own story.”

  Oh. My. God. The corniness factor. The clichéd optimism. It was beneath her.

  Mortified, I kept staring at my menu and did not look up when I said: “Okay, Mom. Got it.”

  And so here I am—the hero of my own story!—slung out on the couch, heroic in my quest to relax into the numbness of reality TV. When I imagine that I hear the phone ring, I press the Mute button on the remote and hear only the sounds of the house: the heat kicking on, the hum of the refrigerator and the death-knell clong clonk of the ice maker. I look again at the dark button of the answering machine and feel a burst of rage, Lisa Kaplansky Lisa Kaplansky Lisa Kaplansky Lisa Kaplansky. She’s the one I really want to call: Lisa Kaplansky. She believes in bold prose and will not be afraid to call me up and say: What the hell is going on?

  I imagine her in the teachers’ lounge with her colleagues, lingering over a day-old starburst veggie tray of yellowing broccoli and soft canned olives, pale, woody celery and carrots; the teachers staring at the last of the onion dip dried to crust at the bottom of the tub as if it were tea leaves in which they could decipher the meaning of their washed-up dreams.

  Lisa Kaplansky! How I do wonder about Lisa Kaplansky: Lisa Kaplansky of the foxy husband and new baby; Lisa Kaplansky of the sardonic smile and excellent shoes who writes either YES or! on every page of my creative writing journal; Lisa Kaplansky, who, when my mother died, gave me a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea and also, though I first found it to be a rather conventional choice, the collected poems of Robert Frost. But of course I found medicinal comfort in his wintry poetry, which is grief itself—brittle and chilly and white gray, as far as the eye can see.

  Lisa Kaplansky, Lisa Kaplansky, Lisa Kaplansky. Lisa Kaplansky, who, one week after my mother died, tried to point me toward the future: “You’ve missed a lot of deadlines for college applications, but I’ll help you with the school options that still exist. Your writing is excellent, so in your application essays you should—how do I say this without sounding cynical?—emphasize your situation. I bet you’ll get a full scholarship, even though you haven’t fulfilled your math requirement yet. College admissions people talk the talk about students being well rounded, but they know it’s bullshit; hardly anyone uses algebra as an adult.”

  My Lisa Kaplansky. I have Googled her excessively. She contributes to a blog about MFA programs in creative writing. Her profile picture on her Facebook page is of her random-looking baby. She has had several pieces published in online magazines. I thought her work would be a mirror of Lisa Kaplansky: witty and big-hearted, with flashes of compressed genius, but in truth her short stories and poems were just okay. And now it’s day two of no call from Lisa Kaplansky and this is quite a hurtful surprise, and I wish I could spread awareness of this problem with a postage stamp featuring a bold question mark next to an un-ringing telephone.

  But why won’t she just call? Why won’t the phone ring and why won’t I pick it up to hear Lisa Kaplansky say, “Sandinista? What happened with Mrs. Bennett? I mean, everyone knows that she’s glimmering with craziness and that she’s not good with the special-needs students—I’m not
talking about you—and no one does a good goddamn thing about it; it’s as if everyone is in collective surrender, but that nutjob Bennett has been acting like that for years and everyone knows and everyone just says, ‘She’s tough but fair,’ or ‘Her bark is worse than her bite,’ which is bullshit.”

  I pick up the phone; I put it back down. Possibly in the half second the phone was off the hook the principal called, Ms. Reiber called, Lisa Kaplansky called—synchronicity, people!—and everyone was outraged, so soft and caring. Soon a Candygram will arrive, and then unsigned bouquets of yellow roses will appear in the kitchen, a secret garden of sympathy, because everyone knows. I take the phone book off the bookshelf—it is the most-read book in the average person’s home—and I look up her number.

  As soon as I see Catherine Bennett’s number, I know it will imprint itself on my brain. I will have to be careful not to absently dial it when ordering a pizza or checking my account balance, because the number will glimmer neon green, always. I put the phone gently down on the receiver and go to my mother’s room. I leave the hall light on; I don’t flip the switch in her bedroom. I open the drawer of her nightstand and feel around for her cell phone. It’s shockingly cold, and when I lie down on my mother’s bed and hold it to my ear it’s like a cake of ice to stop the swelling of a brutal punch. I have done the creepy wax-museum thing with my mother’s room. No clothes donated to charity, no dusting. I’m not crazy; I’m not praying my mother will rise from the dead and be delighted to find that her room has not been ransacked. I’m merely sentimental and lazy. In the half-light from the hall, her dresser is a shaded jumble of jewelry and scarves and a photograph of me at five: a neighbor’s kitten in my lap, a corduroy jumper and Mary Janes. My grin is scrappy, confident: Greetings, world. I’ve got no idea what’s coming my way. On the nightstand, the last book she ever read is facedown, splayed open; my mother was a spine-cracker. The book is on Spanish coastal towns. I close my eyes and envision my mother and me at a noon-bright beach, a checkerboard of beach towels on the Andalusian sand, the foam and cold shock of turquoise waves.