... And Telegraph

I roll over one early morning after a loud, long night dancing, the only odd lesbian in a crowd of evens, or so it seems, and find myself with my hand on the phone. I'm startled. Does it mean that I dreamt of calling someone? What does this sleep-time attempt at communication say? Knowing Jung, it probably means that I'm feeling disconnected from the collective unconscious. The modern day solution is probably to go out to the woods and beat a drum for three or four days in the rain. There's only one problem with that. There's no room service in the woods.

My fingers wander over the large, dark grey buttons. I press them randomly, first in a vertical line, then in a horizontal one. Suddenly, I feel daring, so I go for the diagonals in both directions. The click they make when I depress them fills a small void I didn't even know was there. As the weight of my fingers causes the buttons to connect with the dollar and 25 cent computer chip board inside the phone I think back to the time I was nine years old and dying of boredom in the suburbs just east of San Francisco.

I used to like to see how fast I could dial the numbers in order. 1234567890 My fingers flew, faster than the speed of light. Sometimes I'd lift the receiver just to hear the numbers mutter their tones. One time, though, the receiver lifted itself, ok, my arm knocked it off the cradle a little. That time I messed up in my order, going so fast I hit the two first by mistake. No matter. Back then I just corrected for these things rather than first spending time wondering if I was a good person even if I wasn't perfect. I hit the one, and then the two, and then all the other numbers in rapid succession. BeepBoopBeep. A classmate of mine was skilled she could play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" using only the touch tone sounds on the phone. Her brother had taught her how. She could also, through a complicated series of addition and subtraction problems, spell out a variety of lewd things on my miniature solar calculator. Her brother had taught her how to do that too. I hit the last button. Ah...satisfaction.

Later in the month my stepfather showed up in my room, irate.

"Did you make this phone call to New York?" he asked.

"Uh, I don't know anybody in New York."

"You must have made it. You are the only one who could have," he said, shoving the bill in my face.

I stared at the itemized long distance calls. There, among the ones to my grandmother, my aunts, and my uncle back East sat a single one minute call 212-345-6789 (this was in the days before baby bells and dial-1 long distance and getting to know your MCI sales rep by name because she calls you every six weeks to find out if you are really happy with that other long distance company). I paid for the phone call out of my allowance that month.

I wonder who is living at that number in Brooklyn now as my fingers caress the phone's receiver. Could it be some very patient dyke who actually talks to the little kids who end up dialing her house by mistake? I imagine her jogging up three flights with fresh bagels and the New York Times in hand to answer her ringing phone. She's got postcards from kids all over the country taped to the back of her front door. Families she's only talked to over the phone send her Christmas cards every year.

"You'll always have a place to stay if you ever get to Des Moines," one family writes yearly.

I imagine her at the small dining table, splitting the warm bagels carefully to spread on a bit of butter, wishing she'd remembered to buy more cream cheese while she was out. She opens the Times, going right to the daily diary in the Metro section. The paper snaps as she spreads the thick sheets out flat on the table so all she has to do is turn the pages. One hand smoothes out the thick crease in the middle of the pages while the other goes unerringly to the bagel top where the butter has melted into the small holes in the dough and formed warm pools inside the body of the bagel itself.

She reads the daily diary, delighting in the little town descriptions of the big bad city. She thinks about writing one herself, about all the phone calls she's gotten because of her numerically sequential phone number. I can see her shaking her head, the sunlight streaming in the window catching the highlights in her hair. Her phone and the calls she gets are something she wants to keep for her own.

What would happen if I let my stroking fingers dial that number? Would she talk to me when she answered the phone? Could I handle a long distance romance? New York isn't so far away. The phone rings, the receiver vibrating a little under my hand. The collective unconscious really works, the moronically silly part of my brain thinks. She's calling you.

"Hello," I say, still a little sleepy.

"This is Bell Atlantic, and we'd like to tell you about our new voice mail boxes. These boxes help eliminate unwanted phone calls from your life."

I refuse politely, thinking that the line between unwanted and unexpected is very thin.

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