Volume 9
An Online Literary Magazine
November 30, 2014

 

Phone Home

Nonfiction

Barbara Ridley

 


 

I
didn’t mention my plan until after I’d returned from the store, purchase in hand. Better to present it as a fait accompli.

 

“I’ve bought you a new phone,” I said, plunging a pair of scissors into the hermetically sealed hard plastic wrapping.

 

My mother stood at the doorway of the kitchen. “We already have a phone,” she said. She twisted her mouth as if she had sucked on a lemon. “We don’t need a phone.”

 

“It’s not for you, it’s for me.”

 

“You’re going to take it with you back to California?”

 

“No, of course not.” An English phone wouldn’t work in the U.S. I abandoned the scissors and took to ripping the plastic apart with my bare hands. “I mean, it’s for you to have here, for my benefit.”

 

A cordless phone. A revolutionary idea in my parent’s household. The year before, when my father had broken his ribs in a car accident, I’d been unable to talk to him. He couldn’t make it downstairs to the phone in the study. I couldn’t hear his voice, couldn’t gauge his condition. I had to rely on my mother’s vague reports. Oh, he’s holding up.

 

She stood over me now at the dining room table, shoulders hunched forward, in that new posture of hers – not new really, but it still shocked me each time I noticed; she was now three inches shorter than me. She stared at the metallic silver imposter and its square base, now liberated from its packaging.

 

“I don’t like it,” she said.

 

“You can still keep the old one. I’m going to set this up in the small sitting room upstairs.” I’d discovered an unused phone jack, and confirmed that it was active the previous morning, testing it with the phone from the study. “I have to charge it first. Then I’ll show you how it works. I think you might like it.”

 

What’s not to like? I thought. I’d been careful to select the simplest model available: large buttons, clear black numbers on the keys, no fancy memory functions.

 

Three hours later, the red button indicated that the phone was fully charged and ready to drag my parents into the twenty-first century. My father still did all his writing on a typewriter. They had no computer, no cell phone, not even an answering machine.

 

“This is the on-off button,” I said.

 

“Wait a minute.” My father squinted at the buttons. He pulled out his black-rimmed spectacles. “This one? But it says Talk.”

 

“Yes, this is how you turn it on to talk. To get a dial tone.”

 

“Where’s the rest of it?” my mother said. “There was another part that came with it.”

 

“That’s the charging station. You leave that upstairs,” I said. “You just bring this with you. You can use the telephone anywhere in the house.”

 

My mother shook her head. “Oh, I don’t like this at all.”

 

I ploughed on, undaunted. “You can still use the one in the study if you prefer, but if you want to sit in here or in the kitchen, you can. In the summer, you could even use it out in the garden.”

 

“In the garden?” My father’s eyes brightened. He still had a full head of hair – all white now but thick and curly, and his complexion retained a youthful glow. “Well, I must say, that might be rather convenient. You mean if one is expecting a telephone call, one could take this thing out into the garden, and answer it there?” He turned to my mother. “Remember, that glorious sunny day last July? It was the only warm day we had. And I couldn’t sit outside because I was waiting for Geoffrey Wilkins to call.”

 

“Yes. You can take it out to the garden. If the phone rings, you push this button.”

 

“But when I answer the telephone in the study, I don’t have to push any button; I just lift up the receiver.” They had an old bakelite model, not quite a rotary phone, but just one step up, with the number buttons lined up in four rows on the base.

 

I took a deep breath. “Well with this one, you have to press the button to answer.”

 

He held it in his hand, handling it as if it were an extraterrestrial object. “But I thought you said you push this button to get a dial tone.”

 

“It’s both. It’s the on-off switch. You push it to get a dial tone and you push it to answer.”

 

“Like this?” His index finger hovered over the key at an awkward angle. “I push it like this?”

 

“Yes. Try it. Oh, and another thing,” I said. “You have to remember to return the phone to the docking station upstairs to re-charge it. Every now and then.”

 

That was the final straw for my mother. She rose from the sofa. “I don’t like it,” she muttered again as she left the room.

 

But by dinner time, she had softened.

 

“I just want to be able to talk to you if either of you aren’t well enough to come to the phone downstairs,” I said.

 

“I can understand that,” she said.

 

My father was still ruminating on the instructions. “So, if one is in the garden, and the telephone rings…”

 

 

M
y mother’s health deteriorated over the next year. Nothing specific, no terrible diagnosis, just bouts of extreme weakness, when she would retire to bed and my father would call in a panic.

 

“I don’t think she’s going to last until morning,” he told me.

 

“Let me talk to her.”

 

“Oh, she can’t get out of bed.”

 

“Go and get the cordless phone from the sitting room and take it to her room.”

 

“The what? Oh that thing. Wait a minute.” I heard him shuffle to the door of his study, mumbling to himself as he faded into the distance. That other telephone. Now there was something about pushing a button...

 

I waited on the other end of the line, six thousand miles away, repeating instructions into the void. By the time he returned to the phone, I was told my mother had declared she wasn’t going to talk to anyone.

 

I made another quick visit home. My mother seemed all right to me. A bit pale, and slower than she used to be, but she could still walk over a mile into the center of town without any shortness of breath. I suspected she was depressed. She acknowledged she might be, but refused to discuss this possibility with her doctor.

 

I reviewed the directions for the cordless phone. I had them practice carrying it into the bedroom.

 

“Does one press the Talk button in the sitting room or in the bedroom?”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” I said through clenched teeth.

 

 


The author's parents, Vera and Jasper.

 

E
ight months later, just after Christmas, my father called again. My mother was having another bad turn. She hadn’t been out of bed all weekend, had hardly eaten. No, she wouldn’t talk on the phone.

 

“Call the doctor,” I insisted.

 

I called back the following day. It was just after noon in California, eight p.m. in England. My father sounded perky.

 

“Your mother is an amazing woman,” he said. “She’s made a wonderful recovery. She’s still in bed, but so much better. The doctor gave her some pills. Antibiotics.”

 

“Let me talk to her. Take the cordless phone to her.” He managed to do it. My mother and I had a long conversation. She sounded good. The doctor said she had bronchitis and she should stay in bed two more days. She liked the Christmas present I’d sent: a recently-published memoir of a friendship between two Bay Area residents, one a Holocaust survivor, the other the son of a Nazi, both young boys during World War II.

 

“I received other books,” she said. “But that was the one I wanted to read first.”

 

“I thought you’d find it interesting.” She’d been a refugee from the Holocaust herself. “It’s only because they were so young at the time,” she said. “Otherwise, they could not have done this. They could not have been friends.”

 

I told her we were all planning to come and visit during the summer, make a family vacation of it. “You’re not afraid to fly?” she said. This was a few months after the September 11 attacks.

 

“No, we’re going to come.”

 

“That’ll be nice.”

 

 

T
hirty-six hours later, the phone rang. One a.m. The middle of the night. You know it has to be bad news. Either that or the wrong number. I leapt out of bed, heart thumping.

 

It was my father. “She’s dead.”

 

“What?”

 

“At least I think so. I’m no expert on these matters, but she won’t wake up. And she’s completely cold. I’ve called the doctor.”

 

“But I thought she was getting better,” I said, as if this were a bargaining matter.

 

“Yes, well, there you are.”

 

“Call me back when the doctor arrives.”

 

I returned to bed. “She died,” I said, stunned, numb. Grief would come later, in random uncontrollable waves. “I’ll have to go back.”

 

“We’ll all go,” my partner said.

 

I launched into action-mode, the to-do list already swirling in my brain: arrange bereavement leave, clear calendar at work, find dog sitter, book flights at short notice. I jumped up again, reached for the phone.

 

“Tell the doctor I’ll need some kind of note from him, saying she’s died. I’ll need them to fax it to me.”

 

I braced myself for a lengthy explanation of the facsimile machine. “What’s your fax number?” my father said, without missing a beat.

 

 

Barbara Ridley grew up in England but has lived in Northern California for over 30 years. She has had a successful career as a nurse practitioner and has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. More recently she has turned to creative writing and has completed a novel set in Europe during WWII. A story adapted from one chapter of the novel was a finalist in the Nov. 2012 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Clockhouse Review, The Berkeley Monthly and Still Crazy. When she’s not working or writing, she likes to walk her dog, hike, bike, cross-country ski or go backpacking in the Sierras.

 

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