Telephones
Faith Shearin
I passed an empty telephone booth this summer— daydreaming in an open field—and was aware, suddenly, of its resemblance to a coffin. Because I was sent away to boarding school when I was young, a decade of my life passed in telephone booths. Stepping into one was like stepping into a confessional; I shut the door and wept over failed math tests and wayward boyfriends. I told my mother about bad cafeteria food, or a nosebleed, or my part in the school play. At summer camp it was possible to wander into a forest of old growth pines and make phone calls away from the bunks in our claustrophobic cabins; sometimes, I descended to a polished basement and used a credit card number to conjure the distant, disembodied voices of my grandparents. (Each number, when pressed, created a note which—together—formed a familiar, discordant melody.) I settled myself on the shelf-like seat, rested my legs against the adjacent wall, and held the stiff silver cord like something umbilical. Phone booths are liminal spaces—both public and private—a contradiction I love. They are the translucent closets where Clark Kent became Superman.
I grew up in a world where telephones were attached to walls. My grandparents owned the rotary dial model, with a finger hole in a wheel for each digit. Phones loitered in our kitchens, where they witnessed our fried eggs, bowls of cereal, overcooked pot roasts, and wizened peas. They crouched in bedrooms on bedside tables, where it was possible to have a semi-private conversation if no one else in the house picked up a receiver; they perched in offices
where they were attached to answering machines with throbbing lights. (Our machine had a defect and recorded exactly half of each message, usually omitting a call back number, or name, or some other critical detail.) Each member of my family had a different relationship to the phone. My mother stood up with a dinner roll in her mouth, or ran, wet, out of the bathroom to answer any call, while my father and I ignored the ringing and went on sipping our bowls of clam chowder. My sister tugged at the living room cord until she was able to reach the privacy of a porch, while my brother projected from some central location. Our phones were fixed objects and someone had to be home to answer them. They were domesticated and as heavy as cats.
My childhood has become a remote, unreachable place, a place where my father leans over the hum of a typewriter, or records dictation on a hand-held tape recorder, while my mother feeds our garbage to a snarling trash compactor. My sister opens a fat telephone book, and thumbs through the yellow pages, while my brother uses a leather-bound encyclopedia to write a report on lizards. One grandmother lights a cigarette on a porch swing— beside a garden thick with azaleas—while the other presses the inky pedal of a Singer sewing machine. My grandfather rolls up his newspaper with one hand and swats a fly. Or he puts a Louis Armstrong record on the turntable, and reaches out a hand, so we can dance. In the past, we go driving in a Lincoln Continental and eat dinner in a dim steakhouse where each waitress wears cherry red lipstick and all meals are served with a salad and baked potato. My great grandparents are still alive in a balmy living room, drifting in reclining chairs, where they squint into a fat television set; they watch The Price is Right, in which strangers scream and bid on luxury items, and they watch a soap opera called The Guiding
Light in which characters suffer frequent bouts of amnesia. They listen to commercials about Cross Your Heart Bras for big-busted women and Doan’s Pills for backaches. Their shows tremble and wiggle or appear behind a steady snowfall. Each evening, my great grandmother’s teeth are submerged in a jar of blue liquid beside the bathroom sink where they watch me brush my hair. Nearby: a low, yellow cottage beside the Chowan River where I spend summers floating in the silvery rippling waters until dusk, then play Monopoly at a card table with my cousins: our cheeks pink and peeling from sunburn, our silver top hat, dog, wheelbarrow, and thimble sliding past Park Place towards Free Parking. And beyond the Chowan—in this lost town, where time stands still— each Great Aunt’s living room contains a smiling, upright piano, a leggy record player, and a table cluttered with framed, sepia photographs of brides. One great grandmother, Helen—who sits sternly on a wraparound porch, clad in a black dress—is forever mourning the three sons she lost in the Second World War. (Helen did not fear telephones but telegrams delivered up the narrow lane, past the chickens and fig trees.)
I have a fraught relationship with the telephone. It has connected me to love, pizza, Chinese carryouts, prize money, and astrologers, and it has brought devastating news. When I started college in 1987 my mother was suffering from some sort of menopausal anxiety disorder and she called the dorms and houses where I lived with astonishing frequency. She called when I was taking a shower, or brushing my teeth, and she called when I was having sex with my boyfriend; she called when I was drunk on cheap wine, and she called while I was trying to memorize French verbs. She called when the cake was being served at a birthday party. Once—when I disappeared for a Labor Day weekend—
taking a bus to visit a friend several towns away, my mother called my housemate so frequently that, when I returned, I found him sprawled out on the lawn in front of our apartment with a glass of wine, desperate to escape the ringing. My mother called the front desk of the hospital in Pontiac, Michigan—where I was giving birth to my daughter in late May of 2000—every hour until Mavis was born. (That spring, my husband, Tom, was Director of Summer and Special Programs on the campus of a private high school, and the program that commenced the evening I went into labor was called “The Primal Scream.” A pair of hippies were leading a workshop for executives on “screaming to release tension and trauma”—and the school’s headmaster called the front desk of the hospital just after one of my mother’s checkins—to report that the police had received noise complaints and had burst into the school gymnasium, where the primal screaming was—apparently—quite loud. My husband pointed out that the executives and the hippies and I were all screaming together—but, of course, no one is surprised by screams in a birthing ward. I’m sure the front desk of that hospital was relieved when my daughter made a safe arrival and the three of us packed up and went home.)
A telephone brought the news that I’d won a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts and could spend a year writing poems, and it brought the news that my husband had suffered a fatal heart attack at a business conference in Colorado. A phone was the messenger. It was my husband’s mobile phone that I flung across a white, windowless hospital room when he died, pleased by the sound of its shattering glass.
Before my husband proposed to me—when I lived at the tip of Cape Cod, and he was teaching high school English in Michigan— he called each evening for months: while I rinsed out linen dresses,
or chopped vegetables for a salad, or boiled red potatoes and smothered them in butter and parsley; sometimes he called after I opened a can of tuna and settled myself by the window, waiting for my favorite stray cat to climb the stairs. This was back when long distance calls cost a lot of money. Before we were married by a sheriff on a beach—one year later—Tom revealed that he’d spent so much money wooing me by telephone in 1994 that he might, instead, have rented a cheap flat or purchased a new car. I was flattered by this. I remember the soothing lilt of his voice while a black cat with green eyes ascended my stairs, and my potatoes softened, and my damp dresses gestured to me from a clothesline.
I was a late adopter of the mobile phone. I didn’t enjoy a ringing purse in the car, or grocery store, or bathroom, and I didn’t want to be constantly available. I liked the part of my life when I drove away from the house and was not expected to speak to anyone. I spent a few hours of each day writing and was constantly searching for a silent car, or library, or clearing. Eventually, my daughter’s middle school insisted, and I relented. (I bought a used phone with a cracked screen that my daughter named Hal after the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey because it seemed to have a mind of its own.) Still, I dislike nearly everything about modern phone life apart from my new ability to listen to podcasts while doing housework, and a clever exchange of news articles and emojis in a text chat with my siblings and daughter. I hate the way the phone no longer curves like a banana, but sits flat against my face, so that my ear accidentally activates the mute button or dials random numbers. I hate that I am expected to download an app so I can park my car. I hate FaceTime, which is a place where I contemplate my own jowls instead of enjoying the voices of the people I love. I hate the way I touch the icon
for Facebook while standing in line at the grocery store and find myself scrolling through photos of lives that appear so much more cheerful and glamorous than my own. I hate the way I look up recipes when I’m cooking then find myself inundated by pop-up ads. I recently stopped into a restaurant to order carryout food and was told I needed to scan a QR code or visit a website instead. I’m still angry that I wasn’t allowed to speak to the person in front of me and receive a sandwich in a box. Last year, while trying to catch a train, I left my phone behind in my mother’s car and—during the forty-eight hours I waited for her to ship it to me—I discovered I had no identity or agency without it. All attempts to resolve banking or messaging problems resulted in a one time code being sent to my phone, which was bloodless and powerless, traveling in a dark box, swaddled in bubble wrap.
My great grandmother told me the story of how the first telephone poles appeared in her rural North Carolina neighborhood in Snakebite Township. She described the way she watched, transfixed, from her bedroom window as workers strung dark lines. Two long rings and one short one let her know a call was meant for her family. Her line was shared by seven other farmhouses, so it was possible to listen in as mothers called doctors, or men asked women out on dates. This eavesdropping became a favorite pastime for my great grandmother and her sister, Rubelle, who left behind the oppressive heat of the kitchen’s wood stove— their aprons white with flour—and pressed their ears to the details of their neighbors’ private lives.
During the first successful phone call on March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant, Thomas Watson, in
an adjacent room at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, and said “Mr. Watson, come here . . .” Later, in a letter to his father, Bell wrote that “the day is coming when wires will be laid to houses like water and gas and friends will converse with each other without leaving home.” Here, at last, was the invention that made calling cards and parlors extinct, the one that—along with radio and television—eroded the southern accents in my family until they softened and faded. (Doesn’t every dialect require isolation?) My siblings and I sound nothing like our grandparents whose drawls were distinct, their stories full of archaic words left behind by the British, who settled our Carolina islands and coasts.
My daughter, husband, and I once spent two weeks in a primitive dune shack by the sea without a telephone. We had, instead, a gas stove we lit ourselves, an outhouse with the shape of a moon carved in the door, and a weasel that slipped through a hole in our floorboards at twilight to search for crumbs. Each morning we sat on our porch with cups of tea and watched the breaching whales. On that trip—while we swatted mosquitoes with fly swatters and listened to the weather on a glowing radio—I considered the starless darkness and vast silences of the past. I remembered smoke signals, lighthouses, telegrams, and pigeons with messages attached to their legs. I remembered the way it felt to wait for a letter in a snowy envelope: each cold, folded page smelling of distance. On my most recent visit to the dune shack I met an artist documenting her solitary stay—and the paintings she was creating there—with her mobile phone. I watched her arrange her hair and smile for an unseen audience.
There was a game called Telephone when I was a child, and my friends and I liked to line up on the playground, near the slide, or
at a birthday party—beside unlit candles and a stack of wrapped gifts—and whisper messages into each other’s ears. The game was meant to illustrate the dangers of gossip, so a message might begin as apples are ripening on the trees, but by the time the last child in the queue spoke it aloud, it had become stripes are yellow on the bees, or flags are blowing in the breeze. I am old enough to remember live operators and the voices of secretaries who placed me on hold when I called my father’s law office. My college switchboard was run by a guy named Johnny who could connect me with the person on campus who was selling the most affordable marijuana.
I had a work/study job, answering phones in a student center— connecting parents with their children—and a job answering phones in a literary agency and, in each case, I repeated a phrase: Stone Student Center, student speaking, or Wendy Weil Agency. I miss those antiquated greetings each time I find myself addressing a robot, or being redirected to a website where I have to prove I am not a robot. I miss filling out paper forms with an ink pen. I miss the way my grandfather befriended telemarketers and salesmen: sat down with a glass of iced tea and enjoyed a long, meandering talk. I had a job interviewing elk hunters in Utah the year I graduated from college. I called men with one syllable names and placed a red pin on a map for each elk they had killed. That same year my brother—a traveller, who would grow up to be a polyglot and a classics professor—called me from pay phones in Greece and Italy. He called from hillsides, after washing his laundry in the sea, and he called from a monastery where he had been living with dogs. Once, he yelled at someone in another language before reading aloud a grocery list that he had just translated from an ancient papyrus. I remember the crackle of distance and the sound of coins being deposited and, sometimes—suddenly—silence.
I remember my daughter’s first phone calls from college, where she was memorizing Latin declensions, and learning to
use the laundry machines, and had joined the knitting club. She had just come from an orientation session where she was asked to memorize and recite the names of the three exchange students on her hall: Latrina, Selena, Ming. I remember her calling in spring to say that her college was closing, because of COVID, and that she needed to move out within forty-eight hours, and I remember the way the half-lit basement of her dorm looked when I came to fetch her, in a light rain—awash in piles of cast off objects, each one looking stunned—mirrors, posters, aquariums, cashmere sweaters, fans, socks, pajamas, empty Vodka bottles, miniature refrigerators.
I remember calling my daughter from a hospital bathroom in Colorado to tell her that her father was going to die, though I cannot remember what I said. What I do recall is this: the sound of a toilet flushing in a nearby stall, a nurse in scrubs, the black and white tile on the floor, a row of porcelain sinks. Afterwards, while leaning against a full-length mirror, I texted my husband’s closest friends from his phone—one after another—and imagined them standing in the light of their own phones, expecting the warmth of his words, but finding mine instead. Each word I typed was coiled like a snake.
Once, I helped my younger sister. She had been caught in a room full of cigarette smoke (smoking was illegal at her boarding school) and was supposed to be punished over a conference call with her resident advisor and our father. I told her to give her RA the phone number for my apartment in New York City and explain that our father was visiting me. Then, I asked a male friend—an actor—to answer the phone when the RA called. My thespian
friend had a convincing paternal tone and a deep voice and he managed not to laugh; he said he particularly enjoyed pretending to be shocked by cigarettes. His performance spared my sister the dismay of our father, who adored her. (Cigarettes were one of the only things he couldn’t abide—having grown up in the tornado of his mother’s smoke.) I realize this whole charade would be impossible now, when any parent can be reached in seconds. (I still love the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where an answering machine protects Ferris after he calls in sick to his high school— and goes out to enjoy a day of dining and singing in the streets— while his classmates suffer through dull classes and ringing bells. School administrators call and call for him but they reach only his recording, which assures them that he is too sick to answer.) Students carry their old lives with them to college now, inside their phones, while my generation was forced to abandon one life for another. We heard from our old friends infrequently. Phone calls had to be arranged. Letters arrived, smelling of cologne and salt air. Handwriting mattered. We sent cassette tapes, filled with the music we had been listening to. (These sometimes got caught in a tape deck and had to be surgically removed, using a fork.) We rode around unfettered in our cars: unfolded our paper maps full of blue highways, and got lost, and spoke to strangers in roadside diners. I am dyslexic and could never seem to follow the directions people gave me: two rights after the light, for example, became two lefts. My mother was even more challenged and to ride with her was to ride aimlessly. Sometimes, when I was a child, she asked me how I felt.
Did I want to turn right? Or left? Did I feel the tug of our destination? We rarely arrived anywhere on time.
I remember the first time I saw a woman answer a telephone in a swimming pool. She was sitting on the submerged stairs in a hat
and a string bikini, sipping a drink with an umbrella and, when her phone rang, and she answered, I worried that it would slip from her hand into the over-chlorinated water and kill us all.
I remember the first time I heard a woman answer a phone in the public bathroom stall beside mine, while tearing off a sheet of toilet paper, her voice echoing off tile.
Once, I dialed my husband’s phone number after he died and listened to the ringing, which was like listening to an unanswered question.
I grew up beside the sea and my earliest telephone was a conch shell my grandmother taught me to hold to my ear so I could hear the ocean’s roar. For several years I kept one on my bedside table and believed I was in conversation with shipwrecks and whales. I believed the ocean spoke to me from its heavy depths full of sea spiders, colossal squid, and lost cargo. I was in fourth grade when I learned that the sound inside my shell was really the roar of my own blood, that the ocean I’d been conversing with was really deep inside myself.