The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell

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