MaineCourse

More Than a Phone Call

The sequel to Just a Phone Call.

My mother speaking:

I don’t know if I should bring this up, but did you know Alice Bates? I think maybe Joan does. She’s an old friend. Last year, she and her husband George decided to retire. They’re maybe sixty, married over twenty years. Second marriage for both. George was in the appraisal business and Alice sold Avon products on the side. She also did some waitressing on the weekends at that restaurant in St. Joe across from the Catholic church. She told me that was her social life, and so it might have been, when those children were all so young. I met her when she came to my Yoga class at USI; George told her yoga might help with her lupus.

He’s a good man. Didn't read much but absorbed some NRA propaganda; hence the guns. His oldest daughter is not his but they brought her up as if she were. His youngest girl, Lisa, is married with two children and is probably the most attached to him. She even imitates his mannerisms. His middle daughter was killed in an auto accident last summer. He was inconsolable .

Alice had told me some time ago that she wanted them to take a vacation to Vegas to cheer him up. Gambling was something they both enjoyed--don't know if they knew the odds...but they surely did. About two months ago they were returning from their cabin on Kentucky Lake when he got sick. He said his back hurt but his doctor at Deaconess here said it was lung cancer - Stage 4. They told him if chemo didn't work, he had six months. The chemo made him pretty sick even with phenergan.

I called Alice two weeks ago to tell her about a Wall Street Journal article on cancer treatment. There was silence and then she said, “Too late, he took his life last night. I just thought kids were shooting off fireworks. There were about 15 cops in the house including detectives. They were very considerate--got to see all my dirt.”

I told her I had a robbery once and had left a mess--gone all day from early in the morning. The detective said, "They messed things up pretty good, didn't they?" I had to laugh and admit that I was responsible for some of it.

I asked Alice how the youngest girl, Lisa, was doing.

“They had to medicate her”, Alice replied.

I called back two days later and Alice wanted to discuss the funeral. To see if it was okay to put it off until the 15th of July. The oldest girl who was not his, thought it should be sooner. I told her, “Do what feels right to you. It is not up to the children.”

Then Alice said, “I need to ask you something else. I'm scrubbing the rug. How do I get the blood out?”

I told her cold water first.

“I'm doing that but it isn't getting it all out.”

“Hold on while I get an old cookbook with household hints. It says use a paste of starch.”

‘I don't have any.’

“Do you have cornstarch? That will probably work.”

“Yes, “ now with voice breaking, “I'm going to miss him so.”

“Go ahead and cry, You must or you can't heal at all.’”

“The floodgates open and we both hang up.”

Wonderful journalism, Mike. If all your mother's calls are this gripping, you should have her write her memoirs.

But how do you get it all down? Do you have a photographic memory? Use tape? Write/type really, really fast while she talks? Have her pause every couple of sentences?

(Aspiring reporters just want to know the tricks.)

Posted by rakkity.

She told me the story over the phone and then I emailed and asked for dialogue (hence, More Than a Phone Call). The tale about Alice came at the end of a twenty minute conversation and the funny thing is, my mother wasn’t really telling me about his suicide but about a vision she had afterwards during a shamanic drumming ceremony. I had to throw the train in reverse to get back to this story that says so much about those two women. My mother, the frontierwoman growing up before electricity in Missouri, I sort of understand, but Alice who is only a few years older than I, home scrubbing the blood out of the carpet ?

Posted by michael.

A friend's sister committed suicide with a deer rifle in her new home's garage, where she was found by her new husband when he came home for lunch and the door rolled up, everything as usual until then, nothing ever again afterwards. That anyone should have to have any role in such an end of such a relationship is unfathomable to me. I wouldn't even know where to go to find the empathy to support or console. It's such an isolating burden, so godbless Helen's simple phone skills.

In that context, there's a line where Mike constructs a sentence to entrap perhaps the hardest moment for me of that dialogue -- it's when Helen goes for the cookbook, but her reply comes but a period and a space away in the same paragraph. Unlike what I imagine the reality to have been. A challenging touch of literary grace.

Posted by the sounds of silence.

Glen was about 5’8” with near albino blond hair that he Brylcreamed straight back into that not uncommon James Dean-look of the day. His smile turned his cheeks into rosy golf balls, and though he smiled a lot, his fuse was short. He backed Jimmy Patton off one afternoon in wood shop class with, “You can start the fight, but I’ll finish it.”

Glen and I worked hard together on a mutually concocted, way-over-our-heads scheme to mount and display a dog’s skeleton. My best friend, another Glenn, but with two n’s, produced a more sensible project about tooth decay. A poster board with typed text on white paper pasted along side two rotted molars got him an “A.” Blond Glen and I never finished.

Not much more than a year later, Glen, after a bitter fight with his girlfriend, called a buddy and pleaded with him to come over and talk. Help him deal in the way a teenager might. Late at night and awakened by the phone call, the friend told Glen to go to bed. Instead, Glen walked to the family car, routed a hose from the exhaust into the passenger window and ended it all.

Though no blood, that one haunted me. Casualties all around.

Posted by mike.

Posted by Michael at July 7, 2004 08:22 PM