The Sharp Time (6 page)

“I’m Arne, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Sandinista.”

He squints his eyes, as if thinking,
Well, goddamn if that ain’t a doozy of name
, right before he surprises me again.

“Listen to this, Sandinista. I think you’ll like this quite a lot. It’s from this poem called ‘The Monk’s Insomnia.’ ” He takes the book from under his arm and half-glasses from the pocket of his T-shirt, and reads:

“The monastery is quiet. Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon
.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from
,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star.”

He whistles under his breath; he takes off his glasses and puts them back in his shirt pocket. “Goddamn. Excuse my French. But, ‘the furnace of a star’? I can’t get over it.” And now a pair of monks walk by with their heads down. Just when it seems they might be oblivious save for their God-thoughts, they look up and wave into the store.

Arne waves back, then shakes his head. “They were like you once, young, trying to find their place in this wild old world … now they’ve found their place, I suppose, but they still have the memory of being thrown from the furnace of the star. I’m not a Catholic myself, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ll tell you what, dolly, those boys up on the hill making the jelly appear to have some goddamn hidden depths.”

It doesn’t seem polite to point out that the monks didn’t
write
that poem themselves, that the pretty and pointless phrases are a poet’s trick. But then I realize he’s fallen into the magic of words as I am apt to do, which makes me like him but also makes me wonder why my Honors English teacher, Lisa Kaplansky, hasn’t called to check in on me. She called me over winter break to tell me how much she liked my paper on
The Awakening
. She took time away from her family, from wrapping presents and eating iced cookies, to read my essay and pick up the phone. Well, where are you now, Lisa Kaplansky? Why doesn’t the
poet
call? And then of course I’m not paying attention I’m not paying attention. Catherine Bennett looms in my peripheral vision, standing in the half-light of the ceramic candle, her words hitting the Replay button in my brain: Do you not even
know
how to pay attention, Sandinista? Have I identified the problem?

Arne lays the book on the gun case. It is a library book, encased in dirty vinyl, a bar code on the spine. “I’m going to make you a deal.” As if in some ominous after-school special: a “deal.” He scratches the stubbly gray hair on his chin, a professorial gesture, and says, “I don’t want you to be scared at night. That’s not right. You should be out with your friends, chasing the boys.” He raises his hand, a magnanimous gesture. “Or … whatever.”

Well. Arne cares. It’s weird, to be sure, but he just met me and he cares. I see this; I see he is not from the school of smiling bleached-teeth bullshit.

“I’m not too big on the gun laws. All right? Look here”—he takes a ring of keys from his belt loop and unlocks the glass case of handguns—“if you were a drug dealer you could get one just as easy, and so …” He takes the handgun with the pink and ivory on the handle out of the case and gives it to me. “I know I can trust you.”

I hold the gun tentatively with both hands, as if it is a hamster about to ribbon my fingers with sharp little teeth. It’s heavier than it looks. “It’s pretty.”

“So it is.” Arne smiles, pleased. He relocks the glass case. “It’s yours.”

This is a confusing transaction for so many reasons. I stare down at the gun for a moment while I try to process this last moment: Who hands out guns to teenagers? Am I part of some sting operation of underage criminals trying to procure firearms? Will Geraldo Rivera burst through the door with his microphone and handlebar mustache? It seems best to keep my eyes down and my big mouth shut and study the handle of the gun, the sweet swirled cream and pink.

When I look up, Arne has crossed his arms over his chest. He gives me the quickest glare. “Here’s the thing: A person should feel safe. Okay? Sometimes your safety is here,” He strikes his hand to his chest. “Sometimes you need a little something external to get you over the hump.”

Inadvertently, I look over at the ceramic camel.

“Or the plural form, the
humps
, as the case may be,” he says sternly, before breaking into a gray-toothed grin.

Arne digs around under the counter for a minute before he reappears holding a square box of bullets and a wrinkled plastic grocery bag.

“I can tell you’re full of sorrows,” he says as mere statement, not overstuffed with empathy or sympathy, no maudlin
Moonlight
Sonata for Charlton Heston’s disciple. “But the sharp time passes.”

He holds out his hand; I give him the gun. And then he puts it in a plastic bag, along with the box of bullets. He takes his wallet from his back pocket and flips through a half-inch stack of business cards. “Here we go,” he says. “The pistol range. Out past Harper Boulevard. You’ll need some practice before you become one of Charlie’s Angels.”

“Thanks,” I say. The card has the words
Protect Yourself
in shadow letters beneath the address and phone number.

“This is a gift. No payment necessary, dolly. Can you assure me you’re not a felon?”

“Not that I know of.” I give him a sort of bizarre, flirty smile before I realize that this is someone I don’t have to attempt to charm. He appears to be giving me a gift, no strings attached, as he says, “Hold the bag from the bottom so it doesn’t bust out all over the street. And don’t do anything crazy with this. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“For you, I’m taking a chance. For you I’m bypassing the ninety-day waiting period. Because I like you. Because I want you to feel safe.” He comes around the counter and hands me the bag. He puts his arm around me. Usually the old “arm out from an old guy” means he is interested in brushing your breast, oh so casually:
Pay dirt! It’s a tit!
But this feels different, this feels … creepy, sure, but also, this feels like friendship. Normally I do not kick it with older gents who smell of hard liquor and peppermint and BO—Arne is a bit of a big, stinky mint julep—but I see that he is trying to improve the quality of my day, with his kind words, with his dreamy cream and pink pistol.

“Well, thanks,” I say. I feel like I might cry, so I affect some kind of cowgirl–spaghetti Western accent and say, “Mighty kind of you, sir.”

“No problemo,” he says.

When I turn to leave he says, “Remember, I don’t want any problems. If there
is
a problem I’ll say you stole the gun while my back was turned. I’ll say girls are crafty like that. I’ll say, ‘Why, I know exactly where to find that little lady: at the Pale Circus.’ ”

* * *

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.