The Sharp Time (7 page)

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.

“So much for that,” I say out loud, to nobody.

I dial Catherine Bennett’s number.

I hope she has caller ID; I hope the name
Heather Jones
flashes from the phone on the nightstand next to her bed. I hope Catherine Bennett tries to place my mother’s name
—Heather Jones, Heather Jones, Heather Jones
—now, doesn’t that sound familiar, who in their right mind would call at this hour, pray tell? Her sleep-scrunched face, her glasses on the nightstand, next to a glass of water. She’s prepared if she wakes up thirsty. She always pays attention. I wonder if she looks longingly at the empty space on the bed next to her, but, no, I imagine she and her husband slept in twin beds.

The pauses between the rings go on for so long that I think I’ve been disconnected and then, the surprise of a hello.

Well, of course the bitch surprises me, lulled as I was by the ringing of her phone, of course I’m not paying attention.

“Hello?” No fear of a late-night call, just annoyance. The world giving her yet another headache. Who is this Heather Jones?

The phone feels freezing against my ear.
What is the word you say when you answer the phone? Alecia?

“Hello?” An intonation on the second syllable, the long, aggrieved
O
tinged with sarcasm.

I will her to say it one more time before she hangs up.

I hope she looks at the name blinking on her caller ID display: Who is this miscreant, this late-night prank caller, this Ms. Heather Jones? I hope she Googles my mother’s name and reads her online obituary:
Survivors include a daughter, Sandinista Jones
.…

“Hell
o
?” And then the click.

* * *

Then, at three a.m, the phone. It seems I am hearing it inside my body, a ringing in my ribs that jolts me from sleep and offers a respite, a few seconds of insane hope. Because who would be calling me at that time? Only a crazy neighbor, Mrs. Cavanaugh. She is calling to inquire whether I have seen her guinea pig, Duchess, out and about. In her rum-addled and rambling way, Mrs. Cavanaugh explains that Duchess escaped, perhaps through the clothes dryer duct, maybe via the fireplace. I long to say:
Nancy Jean Cavanaugh, you are hope’s bitch, for a five-inch domesticated animal will not
devise a laundry room getaway, nor will it shoot up through the fireplace like a furry mini-Santa on steroids
. Instead, I say, “No, Mrs. Cavanaugh, I’m sorry, I haven’t seen Duchess.”