The Last Landline
Susan Alpert
Did you just try to call? If so, you got the recording saying that the phone is disconnected. But even before today, it hadn’t been working since the last Nor’easter.
I found this out from Ashley at my optometrist’s office. For weeks, she had been trying to call to tell me that my new contact lenses had come in. Meanwhile, I wondered why I didn’t have my new contacts. I thought it had to do with the supply chain issues I was hearing about on the news.
Also, I felt abandoned by my optometrist’s office since I didn’t know they were trying to call me. Instead of wearing contact lenses, which I had run out of, I wore a forgotten pair of purple hexagon glasses that I found in the bottom of a drawer. I must have gotten those glasses when I was about fifteen. Their prescription was too weak to really help me see any better. Worse, they make me look like Velma Dinkley on Scooby-Doo.
Glasses were very weighty back when this pair was made. They felt like I was wearing welding goggles every time I put them on. Also, they made those big red marks on my nose that still haven’t gone away.
I finally decided to drop by my optometrist’s office, and I picked up the new contacts. Ashley told me that my phone seemed to be out of service.
Then I had a depressing thought. I realized that, except for Ashley, no one else called me on the landline. Otherwise, I would have known about the problem sooner.
In all these years, you never tried to call me, but that’s not the point.
The point is that until now, I’ve had the same phone number all my life. I’ve lived in the same house all that time. This was my parent's home. The phone number was so old that, as a kid, I memorized it by its exchange, Yukon 7… It made it so much easier to remember phone numbers when they had those word exchanges. I still remember the phone number of my best friend from childhood. Her name was Mary McGuire, and her phone number was Clover 4… And you know, yours was Gramercy 5… Of course, you had to have a Manhattan exchange. While I had a Staten Island one. Since you were a NYU film school graduate, you probably thought you could get a Butterfield 8 phone number, just like in the Elizabeth Taylor movie. I don’t think that was ever a real phone exchange. You settled for the Gramercy exchange, even though by the time you moved here from Indiana, everybody stopped using exchanges.
We never needed to dial area codes, unless we were calling long distance, which my family never did. It was too expensive, and we didn’t know anyone anywhere else outside of New York City.
The yellow landline phone is still mounted on the wall. Isn’t that silly? I don’t know how to take it down. If I did, I imagine I would find rotten drywall from the 1940s, when the house was built. There may not even be a wall behind the phone. There may just be a hole to another universe like in an episode of The Twilight Zone. That’s why, even if I could take the phone down, I would be scared to do so.
Next to the phone are a few emergency numbers my father wrote down with a red ink fountain pen. For whatever reason, he never got used to writing with disposable pens. He wrote the phone number for Dr. Shonoff, who died in the late eighties, and the phone number for Con Edison, as well as the oil company.
The cardboard that the phone numbers are written on is badly corroded, but I hate to get rid of anything with my dead parents' handwriting. It’s not like there’s going to be more where that came from, if I throw it away.
There’s a lot of guilt associated with that phone. In fourth grade, I came home really late one evening. I saw my father frantically crying into that phone.
“Police, it’s Denise, my daughter. She didn’t come home from school,” he was saying when he saw me and hung up the phone.
At the time there was a missing six-year-old girl, Alice, from the nearby Hylan Apartments. They never found her. My friend Stacey, who lived in Alice’s building, was one of many children interviewed by police.
This was soon after my father had been laid off from Dutch Boy Paint, where he worked for years.
I learned that my mother had been looking for me at the school, talking to some friends of mine who were in an after-school program.
But I had been at the house of the aforementioned Mary McGuire. She surprisingly invited me over after school. We hadn’t seen each other for a while because she had been promoted to Class 4-1, which was the smart class, and I remained with the average students in 4-3.
I thought about calling my parents from Mary’s house. I really did. It was just that I was too embarrassed about needing to call them in front of her.
Never did I think it would cause my parents to be so stressed. My father was in worse shape about it than my mother.
A month after I briefly went “missing,” my father died. It was a bad heart. He had been hospitalized throughout my childhood. I was the one who found him, too late, blue on the sofa, listening to one of his beloved Mozart albums, which was skipping at the end. That was what told me that something was wrong.
Of course, I couldn’t help but feel I killed him by not calling him from Mary McGuire’s house.
I watched you wearing a tux on TV, accepting that award for your short film about an abandoned hospital that, in its day, only took out tonsils. You were handsome, as always, but the most nervous man who ever appeared on TV. You told that joke that a lot of newcomers say when accepting that award, saying, “This award belongs to a lot of people, but I’m going to keep it at my house.”
The last time I heard your soft, midwestern, non-accented voice, which reminded me of the morning hosts on public radio, was on that phone. You called to thank me for the birthday card. You never got the hint that I also have birthdays. I never got a card from you.
You said, “I have some news. I’m afraid of how you’ll take this. I’m getting married to Carrie. We’re looking for an apartment together.”
I had to pause to try to remember Carrie. She was the mousey woman who lived down the hall from you in your apartment in the East Village.
But then I recalled some things that you casually mentioned about her. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, which sounded like a fancy college. Yet the job you mentioned that she had as a paralegal didn’t sound that great. You did mention that her family had money, so I figured that was the reason you married her. I wondered if Carrie was your date at that awards show.
I blasted you in that call. Words came out of me as if I was drunk, but I don’t drink since it just always puts me to sleep.
“I remember Carrie. You made sure we would run into each other in your hallway like you made sure I would run into that last girlfriend you had with the bangs. You play us all against each other.
“But the last time, at that screening for Paul’s horror movie, you didn’t play me against anyone else. You just pretended you didn’t know who I was. You were ashamed of me. And you’re the only boyfriend I ever had. Or ever will have. You think you're God’s gift to the world. But you’re nothing. The only person you’re truly in love with is yourself. Well, you won’t have to worry about being ashamed of me anymore. I hope your movie career goes up in smoke.”
“You’re absolutely right, Doreen,” you said. This surprised me. Then you said, “I’m a bastard. Why do you waste your time thinking about me? I’m not worth it.”
I don’t know how you did it. You almost sounded more upset than I was.
I thought that directors make short films with the goal of making feature length movies, but you never did. In fact, you never made another movie.
You weren’t married to Carrie that long, either, from what I can see from your Facebook. Nor were you married to your next two wives for very long. Although one of them was an assistant to the Deputy Ambassador of Montenegro, so you do have some nice pictures on your social media.
The reason I kept my landline all these years, at some expense, is that I held up hope in the spaces between your wives that you might call.
Then I came across that news story from the small town where you grew up. That the dead priest from the parish, where you were an altar boy, has been discovered to have molested dozens of boys for decades. If that was the case for you, I’m sorry. Now, I think I have a better understanding of why things were the way they were.
I never had any other boyfriend. At one time, I was going to get my own place with a roommate. That might have made things better, in that respect, but I didn’t quite have the deposit.
Then my mother had MS, and I didn’t feel it was right for me to move away.
I worked for many years at the Procter & Gamble plant in Port Ivory. When it shut down, I had a lot of odd jobs but never anything permanent.
In fact, I found out that I have some disability that prevents me from getting good jobs.
I realized that the average person doesn’t draw graphs of which way her car tires move any time she goes on an errand that requires parallel parking. I wish I could afford those new cars that are programmed to park on their own.
And I could never be a witness in a murder trial like the ones I watch on Court TV. You know how you’re just supposed to answer the questions either yes or no?
When the defense lawyer asks questions like, “But you didn’t see it, did you?” I don’t know if I’m supposed to say yes, for I didn’t see it, or no for the “did you” part, and I would most likely have a nervous breakdown on the stand and be accused of the murder myself. Most people don’t have problems like that.
We walked down your neighborhood in the East Village, holding hands, so long ago now. In retrospect, I know now that the graffiti artists we passed, whose colorful, animated work on buildings and handball courts, were Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. They were unlike regular graffiti artists that only spray painted their names in cloud shapes. I know that because Basquiat and Haring’s art is still there, near your old apartment building. But at the time, we never noticed them. I was blinded by my love for you, almost to destruction. You were blinded too, although I never knew by what.
My friend Mary McGuire was killed in a car crash on Victory Boulevard when she was twenty-two. Her drunk boyfriend was driving, and, of course, he barely suffered a scratch.
I called Mary’s mom to give my condolences. By heart, I started dialing Clover-4…
Susan Alpert
Susan Alpert's short stories have appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review and the Jewish Fiction Journal. She is a past winner of Bethesda Magazine's short fiction award. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.