A few weeks back in Friday Writers one of the gals wrote about the dark red rotary phone of her childhood. Her mother, like most of ours back in the day, clutched the horn between neck and shoulder, the thick spiraling chord stretching to follow her from kitchen to backyard threshold, allowing her to double-task phone talk and mom duty. It was a sweet image, this homemaking mom stirring a pot of steamy soup or toothpicking a baking apple pie while laughing on the afternoon phone, kids playing in the yard...
And then there was Ma. Of course I instantly remembered her tugging along her mauve rotary by the receiver, the clanking of the bell inside ringing in short tortured burps as it bounced against walls and abrupt corners she hadn't foreseen in hurried escapes to hidden rooms. I at once heard the familiar slamming down and the resonant hissing bell of a conversation that did not end well. I remembered the thick chord twisted into and through itself and the tangled knot it became on certain days and how for some reason I needed to chew on that knot with an inexplicable hunger. And I remember how her Marlboro smoke rings and curls of smoke followed and married into that thick mauve chord, curl on curl. And I remember the sound of that phone when I tried to call it... the endlessly base toned busy signal—ah-ah-ah-ah-ah— mean and loud and unforgiving.... and then, hours later, the freefalling relief I felt in my body, blue skies smiling at me, when at last the phone would ring, ring, ring...breathe, breathe, breathe....
Back home, sick with fever, I heard the thick labor of dialing the number nine.
Your Rotary Phone stories if you please?
