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?
The thick tangled cord must have been ten feet, stretched long, but dangling above my head it took the shape of a noose hanging from a knotted mess. Attached to the cord was a telephone receiver and attached to the receiver was my mother's toothless mouth.
ReplyDeleteFrom where I was lying, I stared at her upside down and imagined she was an alien. In this way I could make sense of my seven year old life. Yes, because she was from another planet she didn't know all the things about being a mother.
Yeah, because if she was from here she wouldn't need to see my sister in the corner, eating peanut butter with her hands before she knew it was way past time for lunch.
She wouldn't have sent me to school in that wrinkled uniform, dug up from the hamper, missing my tie with the mother-of-pearl in the middle. Then the nun wouldn't have made me wear boys courdoray pants as punishment while yelling, "What is wrong with your mother?" I remember silently shouting at the pounding in my head, "She is an alien, and just doesn't know how it is supposed to go."
If the people on the party-line try to interrupt her stories she screams at them; like she screams at us if we try to interrupt her. I think it makes her mad when we interrupt her because it reminds her that she is here, in this place where she does not want to be.
And if she is here, then she has to remember that she is 28 years old and has no teeth, because my Dad spent the money for her dentures down at the bar.
—anonymous