241-4331
The black rotary-dial phone of my girlhood lived on a built-in wooden stand in the kitchen. It had shelves underneath for the big telephone book with Yellow Pages and the small local one and other random junk that got shoved in there over the years. Anyone using it was smack in the path to the stove in a kitchen so tiny it could barely fit a table. The landline was a fixed, immutable presence when I was growing up, and unlike later cell phones or cordless phones, it couldn’t be carried into my room to talk in privacy.
If I had secrets, they had to be whispered so that my mother and brothers couldn’t hear in the next room, but anyone on the other end of the call could hear my mother yelling at me to get off the phone. I would desperately try to cover the receiver and hiss at her to give me another minute while I tried to move farther away, stretching the cord that twisted up constantly and had to be unplugged and unwound almost daily.
So many calls went back and forth down that line over the years. Calls for help: to my grandmother the day my father left home with no warning and my mother was broken open and my brothers and I were like orphans. Collect calls: when I was divorced and living far from home and scared and broke. Rescue calls: the day a drunken neighbor tried to break in while I was home alone, and my grandfather came right away to get me in his old pickup truck with the spittoon on the floorboard. Mating calls: to break up and make up with my first boyfriend over and over, or just to spend hours leaning over the kitchen sink, both of us inhaling and exhaling in unison when we ran out of words, the two of us connected by breath and longing and an emotional cord that is still tangled when I hear from him decades later. Most of all, I remember the calls to and from my mother after I left home. Calls for advice, for recipes, to assuage homesickness, to share news, to ask for help, to hear hometown gossip, to exchange lists of books were reading. I remember perching on the highchair by the phone, and instead of my mother yelling at me to hang up, it was my kids. And toward the end of her life, there were tearful calls when loneliness and disorientation were taking her into darkness. Long after my mother and the phone have vanished, I sometimes want to dial 241-4331, and I imagine that phone ringing somewhere in an empty house. I want to think she’s just in another room, and maybe that’s true.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.