Hanging Up

HANGING UP

DELIA EPHRON

Dedication

To MY FATHER, HENRY EPHRON

1911–1992

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

I always knew my mother had no friends because she never talked on the telephone. During the day, when the phone rang, the cleaning lady would answer, saying, “Mozell residence.” Or my father would pick up, yelling, “I’ve got it.” Or else my sisters and I would fight for the receiver, grabbing it out of each other’s hands. If Georgia answered and then just dropped the receiver, leaving it dangling about an inch above the floor, the call was for me. It was never for my mother.

My father planned their social life. “The Irvings on Friday,” or whoever, he would say, bounding into the room after hanging up. Social life turned him on. He was like a dog pulling at its leash, waiting for the moment when he could bolt out to dinner, see friends. My mother lay on the couch doing the crossword. “The Irvings on Friday”—sometimes he had to say it three times to get her attention.

Every day, when she returned from teaching, my mother did the New York Times crossword puzzle. We were the only family I knew in Los Angeles who took The New York Times, and we took it because my mother said, “It’s the only crossword puzzle worth doing.” She lay there, her head propped up on throw pillows, her stocking feet neatly crossed, and worked her way straight through from one across to sixty-two down.

The crossword seemed to be the thing she lived for, and it was the main constant in our daily lives, until the fights.

That’s what my sisters and I called them: the fights. As if the frequent arguments between my parents were bouts in a ring.

They started in the fall of 1966, when I was a sophomore at Uni High School in West Los Angeles, the same high school where my mother taught literature—A Tale of Two Cities, My Ántonia, The Stranger. She finished teaching at two, I didn’t get out until three-thirty, and I would go into the living room to let her know I was home. She always said the same thing, “If you’re hungry, have an apple,” working her pen on the crossword without pause. But one day when I came home she was staring at her feet, the puzzle lay undone on her stomach. Her shoes were on, and they were not the usual brown pumps that she wore each day with her shirtwaist dresses. They were red high heels with open toes. As I watched, she raised one leg and turned her slender foot to and fro, wiggling her toes and then admiring the open back with the strap across.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

She sat up and slipped the shoes off. “Slingbacks,” she said. “Do you like them?”

“No.”

“No?” She smiled at me. “Well, I do.” She got up and walked over to a mirror and did something else I had never seen: She turned up the collar on her shirtwaist dress.

“That looks dumb,” I said.

She ignored my comment, smoothing her hair over her ears.

My mother wore her dark wavy hair cut almost as short as a boy’s, and slicked back off her face, a style she referred to as “no nonsense.” Her only concession to vanity, until the slingback heels appeared, was the bright pink lipstick she freshened every hour or so.

I kept an eye on those shoes. They disappeared into the closet for the rest of the week, although her collars stayed up, and she even added a scarf, a jaunty silk thing that she tied around her neck western style in a little knot, letting the short ends lap over her collar.

Then, on Saturday morning, she tipped her hand.

Maddy, my younger sister, who was ten, was lying on the floor in the family room watching The Flintstones. I was perched on the pantry counter clocking the first of many daily hours of conversation on the telephone with my boyfriend. His name was Stuart, but I called him Sonny and he called me Cher because, like Sonny and Cher, we fancied ourselves sparring partners. “What are you doing?” he would say. “Who wants to know?” was my quick comeback. We thought this was hot stuff. Anyway, Georgia, four years older than I, was in Massachusetts, a sophomore in college, and it was just another peaceful weekend morning—my parents drinking coffee, the lazy Susan stacked with bagels, lox, and cream cheese—when my mother, reading the newspaper, said, “Those damn loggers.”

The swinging door was open and I could see my parents in the breakfast room. Even though I was deep in Stuartland, I heard the comment and noticed that my father, who was spinning the lazy Susan in search of a second helping of lox, halted a second.

A few nights later, instead of going to his weekly poker game, he followed her to a motel and nearly broke down the door.

They fought regularly after this. Night after night, they relived the moment—my father’s eureka at the breakfast table, my mother’s fury and humiliation at being caught in bed with Tom Winston, the biology teacher, who, we learned from the fights, was a very active member of the Sierra Club.

He had red hair and he was huge. “His body is as big as a double bed,” Georgia said ominously when Maddy and I took the telephone into the hall closet and, hunkering under the coats, called to let her know what had happened.

“Was he your teacher?” I asked.

“Yes. He taught me to dissect frogs. How can Mom have sex with someone who knows that much about your in-sides?”

Maddy yanked the phone away from me. “Come home, Georgia.”

I pulled it back. “She can’t, Maddy. Do you want her to flunk out?”

I tried to imagine what I would look like if Tom Winston were my father. Would I be as big as an ostrich, forced to buy my clothes at the tall women’s shop instead of wearing my neat size seven? Maybe I wouldn’t have black hair with curls springing in all directions but thick, well-behaved tangerine-colored locks that kept a clear part in one-o’clock position. Would I have blue eyes instead of brown—blue eyes with, oh God, pinkish lashes like his?

Every day I invented reasons—told to no one but myself—why I had to walk by the science lab. I sneaked a look, barely taking in a blur of microscopes and Tom Winston’s white lab coat. I never saw my mother with him (something I craved and dreaded), and Tom Winston never looked at me. He traveled through the halls as if on cross-country skis, making gigantic strides, and if by accident we passed, he didn’t jerk or slow down. There wasn’t even a flicker in his eyes that we had a connection.

I checked out the lab every day right through June, and then, on the first day of my junior year, I took another surreptitious stroll past. Where was Tom Winston?

I waited until after French class, pretending to take a long time collecting my books. When I was the only one left in the room with Monsieur Lecard, I said very casually, “Oh”—the “oh” was important, it showed that this thought had just popped into my head—“Oh, I was walking by the science lab and I noticed there’s a new teacher. What happened to Mr. Winston?”

“En français,” said Monsieur Lecard.

“Où est Monsieur Winston?” I said, starting to sweat, thinking that my mother was going to appear, just waltz in from her English class at that very moment.

“Il est à Big Bear.”

Big Bear? I called Georgia at college. “He moved to Big Bear. Do you think they’re through? Where’s that?”

“It’s this grungy little town in the mountains. I went there by accident once when I was going to Lake Arrowhead. It has a bowling alley.”

“Los Angeles has bowling alleys.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I could hear her disgust. “I mean that’s all there is. At night people come out of their log cabins and go bowling. Guess what, I’m engaged.”

“Hey, congratulations.”

“Georgia’s engaged,” I said to my mom when she came in from the garden, where she was inspecting the rosebushes. My mother frequently inspected the roses after she did the puzzle. Then she gave the gardener instructions. When I was older, I wondered why she had so much to say. Joe and I have rosebushes, and the only thing we do is cut them back and spray them. Cut and spray. Cut and spray. Maybe she was having an affair with the gardener too. “She’s going to call tonight and tell us all about him.”

“It won’t last,” said my mom. She opened the cabinet, took out a bottle of scotch, and poured herself a glass. It was four in the afternoon and she did it as if she were having orange juice. I watched, eating Oreos, as she dropped in two ice cubes.

“Are you looking at something?” she asked.

“Uh, no. Want an Oreo?” I offered the bag.

“Don’t be smart, Eve.”

“I’m not.”

My mother considered, poking the ice cubes down with her finger. I thought she was thinking about me, but then she turned, looked out the window, and began slowly sipping her drink as if I weren’t there at all.

She had never been much of a cook. Her idea of dinner was broiled meat (chicken, lamb chops, or steak), baked potatoes, and a Birds Eye frozen vegetable. But at least she used to arrange the food on platters and let my dad serve. These days she loaded up our plates in the kitchen, and while we ate, she disappeared into the den and poured another scotch.

I tried to keep my father occupied. “How’s the writing going?” It was something I’d heard one of his poker friends ask him.

“Fine.” My father stared at the door, in my mother’s direction.

I kicked Maddy.

“Mrs. Weber plays favorites, she really does,” Maddy yakked. “She won’t put me in the front row of the Pilgrim tableau. I’m going to complain to the principal.”

“She can’t complain about that, can she, Dad?”

My father flung his fork across the room and we were struck dumb. He went into the den. And they started screaming at each other.

Our house, like all the houses on the street, sat on an ivy-covered hill, which sloped down to the sidewalk. Once, really late at night during the fights, my mom threw herself off the front steps. It was as if she were doing a gigantic belly flop off a diving board. She landed with a smack in the ivy and lay there facedown. Maddy and I watched, amazed, our faces pressed against an upstairs window, making little breath circles on the pane, with our mouths hung open. After a few minutes, our mother stood up and came back inside. Had she expected us to rush out? Or had she been waiting for something to happen, something like death, and when it didn’t, had she just returned to the house to scream some more?

When Georgia came home for Christmas, she, Maddy, and I went out for ice cream. We sat in a row—Georgia eating pistachio, Maddy peppermint stick, and me chocolate chip—and I told Georgia all about Mom’s feeble attempt at suicide.

“Death from ivy asphyxiation.” Georgia laughed, then snorted by accident, sending us into hysterics. Normally she was utterly composed. She kept still, her arms very close to her body, and although she wasn’t tall, she seemed to be looking down at everyone, even when she was sitting. She licked her ice cream in an exquisitely well-mannered way. It remained a perfect round mound that got smaller and smaller. It never dripped.

I couldn’t keep up with my ice cream. It melted onto the back of my hand, which I licked, getting some on my chin. Once, when I flipped my hand out to the side to emphasize some comment or other, the scoop flew out of the cone and across the store. I always talked with my hands. Georgia could pull the eye just sitting. I must have known I had to work harder for attention, because whatever I said was accompanied by a streak of hand patter.

“Really,” I said, my hands doing their usual dance, “we watched from the window. Mom was in her fancy pink robe, facedown in ivy.”

“Maybe next time she’ll impale herself on the rosebushes,” said Georgia.

“Or take an overdose of daisies.”

“I know, I know.” Maddy threw her hand up high.

“Yes, Miss Madeline Mozell,” said Georgia, imitating Mom’s teacher voice. “Do you have a suggestion to make to the class on how our mother, Patricia Mozell, might commit suicide?”

“She’ll run around the science lab until she drops. Around and around and around and around.”

“Like The Red Shoes,” said Georgia.

“Her red shoes?” I asked.

“No. It’s this movie where a girl puts on ballet shoes and can’t stop dancing until she dies.”

“Kerplop,” said Maddy. She threw her arms up and flopped down on the floor, dead. “Kerplop, kerplop, kerplop”—she died over and over, all around the ice cream store.

One night, while Mom and Dad fought, Maddy and I sneaked out. I had just passed my driver’s test, and braving the freeway for the first time, I drove us to the airport. “People always hang out waiting for planes,” I told Maddy. “No one will notice us. They’ll think we’re meeting our parents.” After an hour or so of traipsing from one arrival gate to another, we called Georgia collect.

“We’re at the airport because of the fights. We don’t want to go home. What should we do?”

Georgia instructed us. “Go to a motel. There’s a gray one with white iron railings at the corner of Sepulveda and Washington. Not the one across from it with the sign that says ‘Our rooms are tops.’ You’ll think it’s better, but it’s not.”

Georgia always knew how to advise us so we wouldn’t make a mistake. She even anticipated our anxieties. “You can register in your own name, they won’t ask you any questions, but do you have fifteen dollars? That’s what the room will cost.”

“Maybe this is where Mom went with him,” Maddy said after we checked in.

We stood in the center of the room, not knowing what to do, although there were only two choices, bed or television. “We should sleep in our clothes,” I said.

“Is it safe here?” Maddy wondered. She sat on the tiniest inch of bed, looking down at it warily, then over at me.

“I’ll tell you what, if you get scared, just say ‘Aroo.’”

“What’s that mean?” Maddy scooted back against the wooden headboard.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Aroo.” I marched over to the TV and turned it on.

“Aroo.” Maddy pulled the blankets out from under herself and tucked her feet in. “Aroo, aroo, aroo.” She snuggled down and put her head on the pillow.

I got into her bed, although we had never slept in the same bed before. “Move over.” I kicked her.

“Aroo.” She kicked me back.

We left the TV on all night.

In the morning we tried to put the bed back exactly as we’d found it. The sheets were barely rumpled. We had each slept in one position, or else it seemed that way, but we folded and smoothed the pillows so they were again shaped like Tootsie Rolls, and tucked the spread over them, working together, feeling very competent, a team.

“When they find out where we were, they’ll feel awful,” I told Maddy on the way home. “If they’re mad, I’m leaving forever.” I slammed my hand against the front door, pushing it in, and moved aggressively ahead of her. She trailed a car’s length behind as we hunted around, finally locating our parents in the kitchen. My father said, “Hi, you hungry?” My mother glanced over from where she was squeezing oranges for juice, and kept squeezing.

A year and a half later, when I left for college, my parents came to the airport and we all pretended to be a family. Mom bought me magazines and Dad stood at the departure gate with his arm around her. The plane was announced and Maddy jumped on me, piggy-back.

She was thirteen now, taller than I was, and long and gangly. Her legs went on forever, and disappeared into her baggy shorts like firehouse poles that go right through the ceiling. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. “Maddy, let go.” It was like being locked in a vise.

“Aroo,” she squeaked.

Not fair. I shook her loose. “Bye, Dad. Bye, Mom. I’ll miss you.” Big lie. I got in line and didn’t look back.

During my first two years of college, my mother never phoned. But my father did. There was a pay phone in my dorm that served the entire floor. It was in a wooden booth with glass doors and a seat inside, and I spent more time in that booth talking to my father than the girl next door to me spent gabbing with her fiancé. I began to anticipate my father’s calls. “For Eve,” whoever answered would shout. I approached the phone with trepidation, picking up the receiver and listening to see whether the call was long-distance. You could hear long-distance then. It was an empty sound, like air in a tunnel. If that sound was there, I knew who it probably was.

“Hello. Just checking in,” he’d say.

“What’s new?” I’d say.

“We had a fight last night. Your mother’s driving me crazy.”

I called Georgia to complain. “Do you believe they’re still at it?”

“Refresh my memory,” said Georgia, who was now in New York City, working as a girl Friday at Mademoiselle magazine.

“What?”

“Mom had one affair, right?”

“As far as we know.”

“Well, I don’t mean to state the obvious, but it’s hardly a big deal.”

“Maybe she can’t get over him, Georgia.”

“Over that lab rat? Over a man who smells of formaldehyde? I don’t think so. Anyway, doesn’t our father start the fights?”

“Not exactly. She drinks, which provokes him. Besides, it’s all her fault for having an affair in the first place.”

“Eve, there are hundreds of people in the country right now having open marriages, swinging, the works, and he is carrying on about one petite affair. You know, when Richard and I get married—”

“Who’s Richard?”

“You’ll love him. If he talks. But he doesn’t talk that much in public.”

“Where does he talk?”

“At work—he’s a lawyer. Or with me.”

“Is this serious, or is it like that engagement you had in college? Mom predicted it wouldn’t last.”

“This is serious. We’re eloping next summer. I can’t have our parents at the wedding. Who knows what they’ll do.”

I spent the summer when Georgia eloped as a camp counselor in Maine. No sooner had I dumped my luggage back in my dorm room than the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“She won’t go to school,” my father said. This was new: He didn’t say hello. He left the front off the conversation.

“What? She’s dropping out? Put her on, Dad.”

“Not Maddy, your mother. She says she doesn’t give a shit about Sydney Carton. She’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of scotch.” He hung up.

This was also new: No good-bye. He left the end off the conversation.

The next day, I answered again. And again I heard long-distance. Then crying. Well, not crying, sniffling. Very large sniffles.

“Dad, what is it, what happened?” I closed the phone booth door.

Still nothing but major intakes of breath.

“Are you all right?” I started breathing heavily too, inadvertently, in unison. I could see Joanne, the girl with the fiancé, coming down the hall to use the phone. Minutes went by. She stared at me so I couldn’t help but notice that she was waiting.

“Dad?”

No answer.

Joanne used her diamond ring to knock on the door. I twisted in my seat so I wouldn’t have to see her.

“She’s gone,” my dad said finally.

“Mom’s gone?”

“Yeah.”

Fine, I thought. Great, she’s gone. Thank God. No more drinking, no more fights. “Dad, don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll be back.”

“She ran off with that redwood.”

“What?”

He hung up.

She ran off with that redwood. She ran off with that redwood. His words played over and over in my brain. Joanne rapped her rock against the glass again and glared at me. She ran off with that redwood. I stuck my tongue out at Joanne and yanked open the door.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I couldn’t focus on anything. I had invented a system, five minutes of study, five minutes of daydreaming, which allowed me to relive necking each weekend with my boyfriend, Mark. But as I sat at my desk trying to study, then trying to think about Mark, my mind kept veering off to Mom and Tom Winston. Had she pined for him for five years, or had she been seeing him secretly the whole time? Did they meet at exits off the freeway all along the route from Westwood to Big Bear, or did they have a favorite rendezvous, a favorite room? Did he pin her on the bed the way he pinned those little frogs when he cut them open?

“It’s for you,” Joanne yelled. “Telephone.”

Maybe it’s Mom. Maybe she’s calling so I’ll know where she is.

I took the receiver and, holding it away from my head, stood outside the booth and listened. There it was again, but dimly, the long-distance sound, plus noise, horns, traffic. “Hello?”

“Evie?”

I slammed the phone against my ear. “Maddy, where are you?”

“In Malibu. In a parking lot. Guess what? I’m moving in with Isaac.”

“What do you mean? You can’t move in with Isaac. You’re only fifteen. What about school?”

“I don’t have to live at home to go to school. God, I knew you’d say that.” Her words turned into a wail. “Just leave me alone, all right? You don’t have to live with a drunk.”

“But I thought Mom moved out. Dad called last night. He said she left.”

Now she was crying. Gulping sobs. Big fat teenage tears. “Not Mom, dummy. Dad. Look, I’ll be at Isaac’s. He doesn’t have a phone. Bye.”

Dad? What was she talking about?

Two

The door is unlocked from the inside, an orderly opens it, and Angie wheels my father in. This place is not old, really, just battered. The painted plaster walls have scrape marks on them, probably from wheelchairs. The wooden trim around the doorways and windows, that homey touch signifying extra care and concern, is gouged, and the walnut stain is scratched and thin. “UCLA Geriatric/Psychiatric”—the words are discreetly printed on a rectangular plastic plaque next to the door, which the orderly relocks after us.

The wheelchair squeaks on the linoleum as we go down the hall. We pass first an old-fashioned telephone booth built into the wall—it is nearly identical to the one in my college dorm years ago—then a room filled with rows of chairs. Assorted chairs in assorted colors, but mostly they have metal legs and metal arms, with cushioned vinyl seats and vinyl pads on the armrests. Old people are sitting in some of them. They are facing a television set, which is on. Straight ahead is something I will begin to call the cage. It’s an office that has a small opening fitted with a protective grate, like the kind in front of bank teller windows in dangerous neighborhoods. The nurses hang out here. There is glass on the sides so they can see out into the patient rooms that surround them.

My father twists around to look at Angie. It’s a strain for him to turn because he’s so fat. He takes up all the space in the chair, and when he turns, his shirt strains, almost to popping open. “What’s Claire doing here?” he growls.

“I’m not Claire, I’m Angie.”

“You know Angie,” I say. “She works at the Home, where you live. She’s helping me bring you here.”

Angie wheels him into a dining room. An older man in glasses and a woman, both in medical whites, come into the room, closing the door behind us.

The woman introduces herself. “I’m Dr. Kelly,” she says. She looks like a high school cheerleader. That young and wholesome. “This is Rob Bateson.”