808-422-0015
by Jennifer Sinor
Avocado and mustard, also cream.
Your family often waited days for AT&T to set up the new phone service, having moved, once again, from one military station to the next. Sometimes, you could choose the color. Most often your mom insisted on white to match the military-issue walls, the military-issue range, the military-issue linoleum that squared every room into formation. The arrival of the phone rooted you to what would never feel like home, for you could now be reached. Even toward tiny islands that had been flung like beads across the Pacific, phone lines burrowed beneath the sea, tethering you to what had been left behind.
The grime that ringed the earpiece and mouthpiece and stained the rotary dial documented the length of each tour of duty. Sometimes not even long enough for dirt to find you.
When the phone rang, the whole body vibrated, yours and the phone’s, electrified, the first by the knowledge that someone was reaching for you, the second by a bell, bronze (you once opened the shell to touch what seemed like a heart nestled amid a tangle of red and blue vessels), a bell that shivered inside the cover, shook like a dog fresh from water.
Because it was rare, that bell. Almost anyone who wanted to reach you would have to pay by the minute for their words (not unlike early letter writers who wrote in two directions on every page in careful consideration of the message’s cost), so when the phone rang it heralded intimacy. The Lover spiraling toward the Beloved, the circle growing tighter up the line, until voice whispered into ear.
To pick up, you lifted the handset from its cradle, where moments before it had been sleeping, a deep sleep, for hours, if not days, and then, all of a sudden, bright clarion of bell that broke the tropical air. Handset to ear, to mouth, phone held close to your body, sometimes wrapping the long cord around you as you spun ever nearer to that which you could not touch but recognized upon answer. On the soap operas that bored you but were the only options on weekdays when school was out, the women removed their earrings before speaking. Nothing could get in the way of sealing ear to cup.
The bell rarely called for you. You were, after all, only seven or eight or twelve, but that didn’t stop you from racing to the sound that chimed for not-you-but-close-enough.
“Sinor residence, Jennifer speaking.”
And then, phone to belly as you called for your mother, handset pressed tight to body, sending the caller into the muffled sounds of digestion, the burbles and the creaks, or maybe handset to counter as you walked through the house and then out to the lanai, looking for your mother who was never simply sitting but instead watering, folding, sweeping, putting away groceries, polishing the brass that grew green in the cabinets, ironing your father’s dress whites, pressing the same seam into the same polyester every other day for years. The phone remained on the counter, untended, and narrated for the Lover the shush of a day far away from where the Lover stood, cupping phone to ear, hand wrapped around handset, in a midwestern kitchen abandoned by the sun, maybe your grandmother calling for her daughter. When will you come back?
The handset was heavy, the release to cradle, certain and satisfying. The phone now dormant once again, marking, in its refusal to ring, the distance you were from any sense of home, marking just how far you were from it all.
Except for the time in Virginia, when your father was stationed at the Pentagon, and your family had the choice of avocado or burnt orange or toast and selected white once again because the color felt familiar in a way the oaks surrounding the house did not. That night, at dinner, a storm rolled in. You and your brothers sat with your parents at a table that, by then, had traveled further than most Americans would in their entire lives. Outside, the winds blew savage; acorns and leaves riddled the air. Rain slashed against the picture window and thunder shook the glass. All at once, lightning struck the house and traveled through the phone lines—veins, hands reaching out—and exploded the phone that hung on the wall, sending the body to the floor, singeing the hole left behind. No one left the table to answer that call. Instead, the wind outside wailed a reply.
Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books of literary nonfiction, most recently Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World (University of Nebraska Press). Her other books include Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe (University of New Mexico Press) and the memoir Ordinary Trauma (University of Utah Press). The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism as well as a nomination for the National Magazine Award, Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.
About “808-422-0015” Sinor writes, “Deep in the pandemic, surrounded by suffering and loss, I found myself on a run one morning wanting to write about something simple and ordinary. I thought of the phone and the materiality of the phones from my childhood. They had a physicality and a weight that cell phones just don't have. The phone for a military family becomes one of the only constants, one of the only means for connection. I wanted to see what happened if I began with the heft of the phones from my past.”