A Blue Phone

My grandmother picked a terrible time to lose her mind. Alzheimer’s began to cause all of the switches to malfunction right after the birth of my fourth child, Penelope. Once diagnosed, the family realized we had been experiencing her fading in and out for some time. There was bread with the pots and a lost piece of jewelry that turned up with socks. There were moments where she seemed to lose track of who was in her living room or at a restaurant’s table. Sentences that broke and derailed themselves from her thoughts. Things progressed more quickly than any of us could have imagined.

We couldn’t even sing any more. Not just because the words to her favorite hymns were fading. Taking a family of six all the way there, listening to them scream and cry and complain about the sway of the car on the highway stole the fun from the meeting. My head would start to throb before we even got halfway there. Then chasing them around the house and trying to solace the chaos with pictures and waxing nostalgic was no fun any longer. So, we simply stopped going. I’d try and call every week. Then the phone calls grew softer until they were just quiet. Letters with pictures and good intentions were all I had left to give.

Penelope, who we called Pen now, and I were playing with this and that in her room, sitting on the wooden floor. Enjoying one another’s noises and sharing smiles. She was only a year old and had not acquired language beyond touch and expression. There was a wooden rainbow to stack and cars to push and suck on.

There was a blue phone on the shelf just next to a set of cups that would sit within themselves. It was rotary driven with the numbers fading slightly from use. The cable on the back had been cut where it would connect to a wall and then to those beyond it. But the extended pig tail chord was alive and well.

Pen grew tired of her trinket and made her way to the shelves. Her wobbled, crab walk made me smile. She reached for the blue phone which was deceptively heavy. I thought about the fifties when it was made after my wife brought it home for her students to draw, how much we’ve evolved and devolved since then.

“Peeeeeeeeeen,” I drew out her name, “be careful, honey. That’s heavy.”

I remember reading somewhere, maybe Smithsonian or Science Magazine, that speaking to a baby as if they were an adult accelerated their language acquisition and vocabulary. So, I spoke to each of our children, except Daisy who was our first, like this. The article was consumed when my wife was pregnant with our second child.

She dropped the baby blue phone on the floor beside the blocks and the old bell inside of it gave a muffled attempt at a ring. She began fingering the dial, moving it slightly and letting it tick back to its resting place.

“Can I show you how we used to talk to people?” I asked her.

I moved my fingers over the dial, letting them fall into familiar divots. I dialed my home phone number from when I was a child, just the seven numbers before the wires had expanded our reach: 587 – 2402.

“Hello!” I mock talked. “Yes. I would like to buy some snuggles.” I hung up the old phone and kissed Pen’s hands and head and shoulders. I thought of how our children’s head often smelled like spit and how delightful it was to be able to adorn that scent as a father. She giggled and squirmed, throwing her head back into my waiting hand.

I picked up the phone again, weighing it in my hand and wondering why everything was so light these days.

“Let’s call someone else! Want to?” I asked her. “Grammy B? We know her number.”

I pulled the 7 and let it click down. Then the 2 and the next 7. Pen was mesmerized by the spin of the rotary dial. The 5, 6, 4, 3 went quickly.

“Hello?” said a voice I once knew. The inflection was the same as I always had been. The dip in the middle that had become habit after so many conversations.

I was holding the receiver a bit away from my ear which made me second guess what was happening. But I had heard something. Elaine coming in the door? A neighbor through an open window. No and no. Sleep deprivation was clearly in control of my mind for a bit was my final, split second consensus. Full time job, four children, and multiple endeavors outside of my normal realm of responsibility were clearly taking a toll on me. I laughed and hung up the toy phone. The ding it made when I did so made Penny smile again.

“Do you want some snacks?” I said to her, looking at the phone as I did. “Let’s go get something to eat, my love.”

…

I often think about my childhood with my grandmother. We would spend days talking and learning from one another. What it was like to run a home. How to handle family that wouldn’t listen. The right way to scramble eggs.

When I got older, I would read with her and we would share poetry. e.e. cummings was her favorite writer. The chaos of his work now makes me think of her mind towards the end. I remember glimpses of them, mutter lost lines under my breath to my little ones:

(far from a grown -up i&youful world of know) who and who

Who would have I become without her? There was a time where I thought myself a poet. When she started losing herself, I tried imagery and metaphor as a solution to my sadness, my anger.

Her mind is like a tree stump melting beneath the ground, making the grass sink. She is ready to trip the feet of those walking over her who have forgotten that she was once the giver of shade and song.

It worked for a while. I read them to her. She seemed to enjoy them even though they poked at her current state. In those moments where only three children occupied our time, I found myself wishing for more, wanting to slow the curve. By the fourth, time broke altogether and the visits just stopped.

When I went back into the playroom the following evening, I didn’t really know what I wanted to experience. I could taste my heart and couldn’t figure out why I was so nervous. Hearing voices wasn’t healthy, but there was something so familiar about the one I thought I had heard yesterday with Pen.

I sat on the floor and pulled the blue phone from the shelf where it lived. I laid the receiver on the floor and began examining it. The underside was a piece of bronze metal which probably accounted for some of the weight. Flathead screws held it to the polymer exterior. The cable that used to plug into a wall and allow the caller to reach out was frayed. The other end hid inside the phone and I didn’t want to take it a part. There was something that told me the phone needed to stay as whole as it could for the time being. The entirety of the phone, the letters crowding around the dial and the plate that showed the numbers was a light blue that was unique to plastic in the 50’s and 60’s. A mix between the sky when high clouds are muting the blue and the paint on some costal homes.

I put the phone up to my ear and listened. The din of the house was all I could hear. No dial tone. No voice.

I dialed my best friend’s number from when I was a kid: 961 – 2142.

I muttered feeling foolish a meek, “Hello?” The question suggested by my own forced inflection went unanswered.

I hung the phone up again. And left the room.

The last time we saw one another ended with me crying in my truck outside her home. When I arrived, my mother greeted me at the door, and said that she was having trouble. She hadn’t let the home health nurse come in and give her the necessary medicines that morning which resulted in the delay or skipping of 6 other medications. Her routine simply couldn’t afford errors. Her life had become a series of them.

A lack of anxiety medication had amplified her paranoia. When I came in, she was sitting in her deep blue chair that rose and fell at her command. She was looking to the left, at a lamp on a table surrounded by pictures of my children, my sister’s kids and family, my mother and late father, and her husband who died after they had only been married for eight years. Long enough for three children, but not long enough for a lifetime of promises and disappointments. I thought that it was nice that she had a table of memories right beside her.

As I sat down beside her on the couch, the most uncomfortable, decorative couch in the world with a cream base and light green trails of filigree running the length, she whipped her head at me. Her pupils were too big for her eyes. They took over and left only a slight ring of glacier colored iris to be seen.

“Hey you,” I halfheartedly said, worried that even my presence might tip the scales. It’s how we greeted one another for years before everything got fuzzy for her. But she said nothing in return. She jerked her hand from the arm rest as if she knew I was going to go for it, try to comfort her confusion even if just for a second or two.

“So, have you caused any trouble today?” I asked, trying to sound jovial and kind. “My name’s Aaron, and I’m going to sit with you a while if that’s okay.”

She was looking down at her bare feet and yellowed nails that had again grown too long. There was a faint smell of urine that was being masked by the stale potpourri that sat on a table in the corner held in the giant, bronze swan that Pap, her husband, had brought her as a gift from Sweden. I remembered thinking about how it could make a fine weapon if anyone every broke into the home when I stayed the night as a child.

There was another shudder and quick movement and then she screamed. It caught me so off guard that I let out a short scream that rivaled hers in volume but not timbre. The scream that escaped her was long and fell away to nothing as the air left her lungs. It was nothing but a whisper by the time it ended, like an old siren as it moves towards motionlessness.

My mother came running out of the back room with a bottle of cleaner and rag in her hand.

“What the hell was that?” she asked.

“She just screamed,” I said.

“She’s never done that. What did you do? Did you say something to upset her?”

“No!” I said, my voice raising a little bit again. My grandmother had cocked her head back towards the photos again and was muttering something to herself. I could only pick up the words “get out” and “alone.”

“I swear, Mom. I said what we’ve always said and then introduced myself. No jokes or anything. I stopped that crap forever ago,” I told her.

“It’s probably her meds being off or something. Just make sure she doesn’t try to get up. I’m going to finish cleaning the back bathroom. It flooded again yesterday and the plumber left a ridiculous mess.”

“Alright. I won’t say anything. I’ll just sit here and hum,” I said back, sounding more like my teenage self than I meant to.

“Smart mouth, that boy…” she said as she walked back down the hallway.

My grandmother had closed her eyes and was snoring softly. I just sat there. I closed my eyes and tried to remember trips to Blockbuster and the way she’d fix my popcorn. Flowers planted in spring and how she played Monopoly with me even though it was just us and she not-sosecretly hated the game.

My mother came back into the room after a while and I opened my eyes. I shushed her with a finger and got up to leave. As I did, the couch creaked and the wide eyes were back on me.

“I’m going to go now. I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. We have the kids at home. They’re in the pictures I sent you a few weeks back. Have Mom show you,” I said to her but really to the room. “I love you.”

I went in for a hug and she cringed, became so small in her chair. It looked like she was sinking in deep water. I kissed her forehead anyways. The room with the phone was only used for playing for a while. I would walk past it with clothes or dishes from the big girls’ room and think about just leaving everything right at the door for little feet to spill over. Close the door and walk into the room to dial her number again. I had figured out who it was the moment she said “hello” but I didn’t admit it then. The voice was loud in my mind for days while we played and cleaned and played and cleaned.

My job felt stale, and everyone in the family felt me tilting.

“Honey?” my wife said to the back of my head in bed four days after my failed attempt at Tyler’s old home phone number.

“Yeah,” I said trying to fake exhaustion to get out of the talk that was bound to happen.

“What is wrong with you?”

“That feels a bit accusatory,” I said as I rolled over to her. She saw that there was not a bit of tired to be seen on my face. “What makes you ask that?”

“Your kids talked to you all through dinner tonight, and you gave them grunts or a crappy Dad ‘uh-huh’ about everything,” she said.

I was looking right through her head, most likely the way I was at the dinner table tonight, thinking about going into the room and dialing the phone. Seven numbers. Seven. I thought about that number for a moment. There was something hiding in it that I remembered then but couldn’t quite pull on just yet.

“…and if you’re going to be an ass, then just don’t say anything at all. Or eat somewhere else,” she finished.

“I’m sorry,” I said with a sense of hope that she’d let it alone if I just apologized. “You’re right. I’ve been so exhausted from work and stressed about everything. I will reengage. I swear. I’ll be back to normal tomorrow. I just need to sleep tonight.”

I waited for her reply, but she just looked at me. I could see the specs of brown in her hazel eyes. They always reminded me of islands that stick out of that green water you see on TV in places I’ll never go. Then she rolled over without another word, clicking her lamp off as she did. I continued to look at her form in the sheets that she had pulled up and thought about how easy it must be for her with all of her grandparents gone.

I rolled over and stared at the wall. …

Only the sound of the air conditioner cycling on and off could be heard. It just shushed the house for about three minutes or so and then shut off with a gentle click. I was counting in my head and found that there was an average time of about eight minutes after it shut off to when it came back on.

My wife had twitched about an hour ago and I remembered reading an article from Science Magazine or Smithsonian or somewhere that convinced me that meant she was in REM sleep. I shed the covers slowly during one of my counts to 180 and sat up on the edge of the bed. The air conditioner shut off and I stopped. I could hear her breathing deep and thought for a split second about how insane this was. Getting back in bed and spooning was the logical thing to do right now. But the minutes passed quickly and the silence was taken away again by the fan moving cooled air throughout the house. I tiptoed in all of the right spots I could find. The wood floors would voice their complaints and possibly wake a child if a wrong step was made. Brushing off my out of bed adventure on a waking child would be easy. But the wait for another chance to call would not. There was a voice in my head, my memory that I wanted to find a match for.

I pulled the door closed just a bit to release the incessant crack that happens when it’s opened and went inside the room. The blinds had been left open, so the shades casted orange bars of light across the room. It was enough to see. I pressed the door shut and set on the floor in front of the shelf that housed the phone.

When it was raised, it felt heavier, like a stone had been set inside of it to keep it shelved. I put my left hand underneath it as I sat it on the floor, eliciting a faint ring. That wrinkled my skin and made me shiver.

I picked up the receiver and started to spin the dial one number at a time. The rotary ticks were louder than I wanted them to be but the air had just started. I had three or more minutes of time that wouldn’t been interrupted because of the light noises from the playroom. 727-5643.

There was a bit of my bedtime snack, pretzels and peanut butter, rising up my esophagus. I swallowed as the last number clicked into place. In that moment, I thought about the fact that I have no clue how phones worked then or work now.

And then I heard her again answer the phone the same way she always had, “Hello?”

I had a slight pain forming behind my left eye, and I just say there with my mouth open and head sort of starting to hurt. I didn’t say anything.

“Hello?” This time it was a bit different. I realized I had never heard her second “hello”, the one that we all reserve for those machines who call us to sell our numbers. Who knew what you needed one for before machines called to sell our numbers?

“Grammy?” I managed.

I must have sounded like myself because what she said next destroyed me.

“Hey, you!”

“Mom. How’s Grammy? How are you?” I asked.

“Why do you ask, baby?” my mother asked back.

“I just haven’t talked to her or seen her in a while. I wanted to check in.”

“She’s her. Nothing new to report. You okay?”

“Yeah. Why do people keep asking me that?” I said.

“Only people who love you will ask you that question in that tone I just used. Remember that,” she replied. I could hear dishes hitting a metal sink in the background.

“Does anybody still call, Mom?” I asked after a short pause.

“Just telemarketers and those robot voices that try and steal credit card numbers that she doesn’t have any more,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason. I was just thinking the other day about our conversations. Missing her. Missing those,” I said sounding sadder than I was. Most of the time if I sounded overly sad, she wouldn’t press further. I wanted to end the call there. The information that was needed had been given.

“Okay,” she said. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I didn’t have to sneak around my own house the next day. Park playdate and a very real headache married perfectly and I simply stayed home. My wife rounded the corner with the kids in tow and I moved to the playroom.

I dialed the numbers quickly this time, and I only felt nauseated from the headache. No nerves this round.

“Hello?”

“Hey, you!”

“Hey, you!”

I let the excitement in her voice sink into me, bury itself into my memory so I would never forget how it felt to hear it just like that again.

“What are you up to today?” the first five words of that question became one in a sort of whadaryaupto slur as I was talking too fast.

“Oh, you know. Causing a little trouble and eating too much.”

Everything she said sounded as it did ten, fifteen years ago. There wasn’t a touch of forgetfulness. No rust at all.

“I’m so sorry it’s been so long…” I spilled a sorry that was confusing and much too long out.