The Sharp Time by Mary O'Connell Page B

“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