Lost Calls by Garnett Kilberg Cohen

Photo by Wesley Hilaro

Lost Calls

Creative Nonfiction

I’ve been thinking about the telephone, not the mobile or the landline with its detached stand; I mean the real telephone, the rotary with its long curly pig-tail cord tethering the receiver to its base.

In my parents’ first home on Strawberry Lane in Ohio, we had one phone with a party-line. In rural areas, that was all that was available. In our Levittown-like neighborhood of little single-family homes, it simply cost less when more families shared a single line. When alone, I liked to pick up the receiver and eavesdrop. I felt invisible. To think the people talking—across the street or maybe blocks away—didn’t even know I was listening! A lover of noir films from an early age, I was disappointed to never overhear a murder plot or cover-up. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing anything of interest; it was the potential that mattered.

Most kids I knew were captivated by distance talking devices: cans pulled taut by strings or static-ridden walkie-talkies (where one usually had to be close enough to see the other speakers in order to hear them).

We were seldom allowed our own conversations on the family phone unless it was to talk to our grandparents in Illinois, and then a parent loomed above exhorting, hurry, it’s long distance.

When I was able to dial a phone on my own, only four digits were required for local calls. Later seven numbers (to be more precise, two letters and five numbers—our letters were OL) and now, all seven plus the area code. For years, I had multiple people’s numbers stored in my head. Now, I might have five, two of them my own. Why bother with the rest when they are readily available in my cell phone?

During my childhood, two phones per family was a luxury. Usually the two consisted of a communal one (hanging on the kitchen wall or sitting squat on a hall table) and a personal one (the parents’ bedside). When I was a teenager, very lucky girls had their own princess phones: pink, long and sleek like oversized ballet slippers. My sister and I were not among them. Had we asked, my mother would have laughed at the idea of allowing such an indulgence. But by that time, we had moved into a two-story house and had become a two-phone family with a private line. After homework, my sister and I were allowed to use their bedroom phone for private conversations.

I remember the languid feeling of stretching out on my parents’ bed, the chenille bedspread like a vast field of miniature cabbage rows beneath me, talking about boys, school or an outfit someone had worn that day. As my allotted time ran thin—my right ear warm and waxy—I worried about what was being said about me on other phone lines across town, and would become panicky about how I would fit in calls to all my best friends before my sister or parents pounded on the door or picked up the extension.

The worst, of course, was expecting a call, waiting while another family member used the phone. There was no voicemail back then; even answering machines were yet to be invented. I remember the pain of awaiting a call, actually watching the phone. I have tried to explain this to students or people under thirty, the concept of not being in contact with whomever you wanted whenever you wanted. I suppose they grasp the concept intellectually (most have experience traveling to places with faulty cell towers) but don’t connect emotionally to the concept, don’t understand the intimacy of not even considering carrying on conversations in public or having limited access to, well, anyone. They smile and tilt their heads, perhaps puzzled that I don’t look old enough to have been alive when horse-drawn carriages were the norm. Then, I tell them about carbon paper and ditto machines.

Near the end of high school, my parents moved us to Philadelphia, away from friends and the boyfriend who would later become my first husband. On weekends, my father would take me into his office to use the Watts line where I could call anywhere for free. It always felt rushed and unnatural. I was no longer a part of the lives of the people at the other ends of the line. My conversations with my boyfriend were particularly stilted, given my parents disapproved of him. But my boyfriend and I devised a plan. We would meet in separate phone booths at appointed times where one of us would call the other collect. I think the caller had to put in coins to make the initial contact, but my memory is fuzzy regarding anything besides making the connection, the steamy interior of the booth, and the fear of getting caught. We could talk as long as we wanted, and when we hung up, there was no one for the company to charge. I remember the sound of the distant ringing of the phone as I walked away from the booth.

Later, back in my small Ohio town, married, then divorced, there existed briefly a restaurant/bar called the Brass Frog with a phone on every table, each flagged with two-digit numbers to call other phones within the restaurant. It was the late seventies and I suppose the concept was in league with disco and the dating scene; the place became a singles hang-out at night. A guy didn’t need to go through the torture of approaching a person physically to learn of her interest. Usually I went for lunch with an old friend visiting from out of town (intent on showing them how sophisticated the village had become) or my son, a toddler, who liked to call the other tables, allowing me some peace to eat. Once a man called our table, and said he was a photographer and would like to make my son into a model. As he left, he passed by our table and gave me his card; I was suspicious and didn’t keep the card.

In my late twenties, I lived in Michigan for a few years where I worked for six weeks as a switch board operator. I sat in front of a board of holes that reached slightly above my head and close to arm’s length on either side. The device looked steam punk before the term was coined. In response to blinking lights, I yanked resistant cables from their bases and plugged them into ports. The feeling was similar to pulling a miniature gas line from the pump, but required a firmer tug because the cables could snap back. Aiming the plugs and corking the round jacks felt satisfying—a combination of physical exercise, efficiency and precision. At the height of my shift, I was caught in a web of tentacles, circuits buzzing all around me. Despite my short tenure, I can still call up the muscle memory. Much of my job involved providing a human answering service for businesses, but I also served as an authorized ship-to-shore operator for vessels out on Lake Michigan. In this capacity, I was required to memorize a spiel which I learned to say in a sing-song officious voice. Reciting it became a bit of a party trick I liked to do then. I wish I had saved the script, but I thought I would always remember it.

I remember the grimy clear plastic rotary of the wall phone from which I heard the news of my grandfather’s death.

Perhaps the sweetest memory I have of my second husband is when he was away on business and I was reading Dracula and became terrified of vampires creeping in the outside hedges. He stayed on the phone with me most of the night, the receiver continuing to rest on his pillow when we stopped talking. That was early in the marriage.

The first time I witnessed widespread use of mobile phones was on a trip to Paris with my current and forever husband in 1994. We laughed at the way fashionable people strolled with phones pressed to their ears, and at a girl, one arm looped around her boyfriend’s waist, as she rode on the back of his motorbike chatting away. My husband thought the prevalence was due to the poor phone system in France. We never guessed the scene was coming our way.

Years ago, before cell phones were ubiquitous, my friend Jeanne I went to the Pump Room in Chicago, a legendary restaurant in the Ambassador Hotel where a long list of luminaries—such as John Barrymore, Bogart and Bacall, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland—liked to hang out when performing nearby. Frank Sinatra even included a mention of it in a version of “Chicago, My Kind of Town.” The restaurant was famous for bringing phones to the tables for all the wheelers and dealers. It must have been a thrill back in the day to overhear part of a celebrity’s conversation. Jeanne and I ordered a phone but neither of us can remember whom we called. The glamour was already fading to gimmick. The Pump Room closed in 2017.

The loss of the old fashioned telephone seems to contribute to a loss of mystery. Now, you can see who is calling before you speak. A clear setback for script writers. Dial M for Murder. When a stranger Calls. Sorry, Wrong Number. Adolescents can no longer make phony phone calls. Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Also an obstacle for obscene callers, but they have come into such a bonanza with the internet that it hardly matters.

Like just about everyone these days, I am in and out of ZOOM meetings. In some ways they feel like miracles: talking heads teleported into my home. People I normally only see in hallways, offices and classrooms appear in my home study. This platform is what I might have wanted as a girl who watched the Jetsons as a mildly amusing fantasy cartoon, and enjoyed any episode of Twilight Zone where people could traverse space without physical movement. Now that a version of the technology is here, I have to resist turning off my video unless it is a huge group and I know my absent image won’t be considered unfriendly. The experience is not what I envisioned.

Did you know that if there are multiple callers, you can stare directly at people and they won’t even know you are looking at them? I have tested it in groups of four and six. No one guesses correctly.

What I miss most about the midcentury phone is the sense of intimacy—having a friend’s disembodied presence in my head. I liked the inability to multi-task when tied to the phone by the length of the cord. There was no choice but to focus. I have had some memorable phone conversations in the cordless era (prior to my own acquisition of a mobile), like on 9-11 when my childhood friend, Elizabeth, in California, and I in Chicago, stayed on the phone most of the day, not knowing whether we would be forever disconnected if we hung up. But that, of course, was a rare event.

I simply liked the old-fashioned telephone. I liked inserting my finger in the proper hole, drawing the rotary dial around to the fishhook-like stopper, watching it circle back, again and again—a mounting build-up. I liked the gentle sweep of the handset, like a cradled baby doll, the hard head at one end, curled feet at the other. I liked how my voice went into the speckled holes of the convex knob attached to the cord and your voice came out the cupped end, right into my ear, almost as if your essence entered my brain; I liked the way our voices seemed to circle from inside my head to inside yours, and for just that period of time on the phone we heard no one but each other.

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The Author

Garnett Kilberg Cohen has published three collections of short stories, most recently Swarm to Glory. Her fourth collection is forthcoming from The University of Wisconsin Press. Her writing has appeared in Brevity, American Fiction, Brevity, The New Yorker online, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and others. Her awards include two Notable Essay citations from Best American Essays, the Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize; the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review; and four awards from the Illinois Council of the Arts. She is a professor at Columbia College Chicago.