Authors: Pamela Sargent
His hand was cold. A madman, she thought; I’m going to die. His grip was crushing her fingers; she thought of his mind crushing her soul. “You may be lying,” she said. “How can I know?”
He shook his head and smiled as he led her toward the ocean.
Ringer
Cheryl saw the telephone ring. The chirping sounds exploded behind her eyes as a series of flashes. She pulled a pillow over her face, yearning for the dark silence to return. After months of nagging, she had finally persuaded Nick to get rid of their old black telephone with the rotary dial and the bell that hit her with the force of a lightning bolt, but this chirper wasn’t much better.
The phone kept chirping. Cheryl prayed for it to stop, unable to bring herself to pick up the receiver. Nick was probably calling from his office, checking up on her, seeing if she was out of bed yet. She could tell him that she had gone out to a job interview. Pressing the pillow more tightly around her ears, she composed a possible story for her husband. Adele from Ronald Associates had called to tell her that the personnel manager at Trahel Engineering was looking for a new file clerk, had seen Cheryl’s résumé, and wanted to interview her at eleven. That would be detailed enough to satisfy Nick, who would be delighted that she had miraculously managed to answer the phone and too busy to check on her story.
The phone stopped chirping. Cheryl peered out from under the pillow. The glowing numerals of the clock-radio told her that it was almost eleven now. She had to get up. If she could pull herself together and go out on a few errands, she would not be here to answer the phone.
Years ago, when Cheryl was a small child, the sound of a telephone ringing had filled her with dread. She did not know why; it had always been that way. She had once thought that she must have picked up the receiver and heard something so frightening or upsetting that she had blocked it from her mind, recalling only that the telephone had carried the horror to her. But what could she have heard? Why had her parents known nothing about such a call? Surely she would have run to them, however emotionally distant they were, for comfort.
So, she had concluded years later, something else had to be at the root of her fear. Maybe it was the intrusiveness of the instrument, the fact that she was forced to pick it up without knowing who was calling or what she would hear. The chaotic outside world, the world her parents had tried to escape inside their neat orderly house in a dull small town, was always threatening to intrude through the phone. Cheryl could not know whether the call was from her best friend Marcy or from that creep Julie Colton, who always rushed to tell her what everybody was allegedly saying about Cheryl behind her back. She might be dreaming that Joe Wentworth, the best-looking boy at school, was finally going to ask her out, then pick up the phone only to discover that Mrs. Nance, her math teacher, wanted to see one of her parents for a conference on why Cheryl was doing so badly in that subject. She could answer to find that her life was on the verge of some precipice. The torment of wondering whether the voice at the other end was going to launch her into ecstasy or plunge her into depression was usually so great that she could not bring herself to answer the phone at all. The ringing would stop, and her life would remain as it was, placid and undisturbed, at least for a while.
She had supposed that the other kids, even Marcy, sometimes thought she was weird for being so abrupt with them whenever one of their calls did get through to her. Unlike them, she didn’t mind when her mother or father picked up the phone first, and she usually hung up as quickly as possible instead of staying on for hours and hours to gossip. She could even feel relieved when her mother told a friend that Cheryl was doing her homework and could not come to the phone. She could not explain to anyone, even Marcy, how the ringing made her tense with terror.
By the time Cheryl graduated from high school, she could barely bring herself to say anything over the phone even when she was able to answer it. Sometimes words lodged in her throat, forcing her to hang up as she gasped for breath. Sometimes the disembodied voice at the other end of the line seemed alien and unfathomable, and she would find herself hanging up to escape the sound. “We must have been disconnected,” she would tell the caller later. “Lots of trouble on this line lately.”
When she went away to college, at a university only one hundred miles from her home town, she did not follow the example of other students and plague her parents with collect calls. She never called them at all. Her mother sent her a short letter twice a month; Cheryl mailed a postcard back every six weeks or so. The lives of her mother and father remained uneventful according to her mother’s letters, and she sometimes wondered if they were secretly relieved not to have her living at home for most of the year. Even one shy and docile daughter had occasionally seemed more than the quiet withdrawn couple could handle. Her mother often looked vaguely distressed whenever any of Cheryl’s friends dropped by on their infrequent visits, and her father seemed happiest when he was alone in his den with his books and records.
Getting through college without having to deal with telephones proved to be simpler than expected. Her roommates usually rushed to answer any calls first, and soon Cheryl had talked them into covering for her. The other girls took messages, called out for pizza, accepted dates, or turned down guys Cheryl wanted to avoid with excuses agreed upon earlier. As time went on, word got around the dormitories that any compulsive phone freak wanting to have a telephone entirely to herself ought to room with Cheryl Manfred. By the middle of her sophomore year, Cheryl was much in demand as a roommate.
During her senior year, she moved off-campus to an apartment with her friend Beth Terrence. Beth, as had her previous roommates, gloried in the opportunity to monopolize the phone. Because of that, Cheryl was surprised when, only two weeks before they were to graduate, Beth answered the loudly ringing phone, but insisted that Cheryl speak to this particular caller herself.
“Can’t you tell them I’m not here?” she whispered, terrified as always.
“It’s important,” Beth replied, and then Cheryl noticed how pale her friend looked and how Beth’s eyes refused to meet hers. “You’d better take this call.”
Somehow she managed to hold the receiver to her ear and listen as Mrs. Redfern, her mother’s closest friend, told her that both of her parents had died in a car accident. Mrs. Redfern’s choked voice kept breaking as she spoke of rain-slicked roads and of the car going through a guard rail and into a river swollen by late spring flooding. Cheryl knew then that all her terror of telephones, her fear of what might happen to her world if she responded to the ringing, had anticipated this incident, as if the future had been calling to the past through the telephone lines. Even through her grief, she felt a bitter satisfaction. Her fear, as it turned out, had been completely justified. She had been right to fear the phone.
Nick was pacing in the living room, talking to his mother over the cordless phone. Cheryl knew that her husband was talking to his mother because he was speaking in Greek and also sounded more tense than usual. He spoke to only two people in Greek, his mother and Mr. Vassilikos, the butcher who rented one of the commercial buildings Nick owned. In the three years she and Nick had been married, Cheryl had been unable to learn a single word of Greek, but she could tell to which of the two he was speaking by the tone of his voice. With Mr. Vassilikos, Nick sounded patient and resigned; with his mother, his voice was strained. Both Mr. Vassilikos and Nick’s mother usually called only when they had complaints, one reason to dread their calls.
Nick’s voice was rising; soon he would be shouting at his mother. They could not discuss even the most innocuous subjects without engaging in histrionics and high drama. Cheryl, out in the kitchen, tried not to listen. She hated it when he was talking on the phone to his mother, and speaking in a language she could not understand only made things worse.
Mrs. Christopoulos could be complaining about almost anything. She still thought of her mother-in-law as “Mrs. Christopoulos,” since the woman was much too formidable to be addressed by her first name and Cheryl could not bring herself to call her “Mother.” She could endure Mrs. Christopoulos’s annual visits, even if the two or three weeks sometimes seemed like an eternity. Usually her mother-in-law would keep herself occupied by watching soap operas while commenting on the moral degeneracy of the characters, and she liked cooking Greek dishes for her son that Cheryl had failed to master. When Mrs. Christopoulos was here, Cheryl did not mind hearing her conversing in Greek with her son; it saved Cheryl the trouble of having to talk to her. Whatever complaints the older woman might have, she usually kept them to herself in Cheryl’s presence.
But the telephone, combined with a language foreign to Cheryl, gave Mrs. Christopoulos freedom to vent her feelings and say anything she liked to her son, and Cheryl could never know if her husband was sticking up for her or siding with his mother. She could sense her mother-in-law reaching through the phone lines from a thousand miles away, still clinging to the son who could never give her enough attention.
Cheryl, tearing at lettuce leaves, wondered what Mrs. Christopoulos was bitching about now. Nick should call more often, even though he called her at least once a week. He should talk some sense into his sister, who was almost thirty and still hadn’t settled down. He could visit her once in a while, or even move back home instead of leaving her to rattle around alone in their old house, and it was about time he visited his father’s grave, which he had not been to since the funeral. He could give up being Nicholas Christopher, as if Christopoulos wasn’t a good enough name for him, and change his name back to what it had been. He could tell Cheryl that it would be nice to have her get on the phone once in a while and say a few kind words to her old and neglected mother-in-law.
Mrs. Christopoulos could be complaining about any and all of those things, but Cheryl suspected that the lack of telephone conversations with her daughter-in-law was one of the complaints being batted around now. Nick had explained to his mother that Cheryl was shy, which had not done much good. Shyness was a concept that apparently did not exist in Mrs. Christopoulos’s mental universe, where people were classified as either warm-hearted or cold-blooded and neurosis was considered self-indulgence. Cheryl tore up the last of the lettuce and began to peel a carrot, hating the sound of the Greek words she did not know, the words being drawn from her husband out along the telephone lines by his mother’s voice.
Nick fell silent. She had put the salad into the spinner when he wandered into the kitchen. “Mom tried to call today, twice,” he said.
“Must have been when I was out getting groceries.”
“She tried at ten o’clock her time, and again at around two.”
“Oh. Well, I had to go over to the mall to see if that screwdriver you ordered came in.” She had decided to save her excuse about having an appointment with the personnel manager at Trahel Engineering for another time.
“You could have phoned the store about that.”
“I was going there anyway. Benetton was having a sale. I don’t know why she was calling anyway, when she knew you’d be at the office.”
“Maybe she wanted to talk to you. Ever think of that? You are her daughter-in-law. It wouldn’t hurt if you’d try to be a little friendlier to her.”
“I do try. All she ever talks about is the soaps, cooking tips, what a fine little boy you were, and all those crazy people who lived in her village in Greece.”
“They weren’t crazy. It was just a different way of life. Look, I know she’s a little difficult. She can drive me nuts sometimes, but she’s not a bad person.” Nick leaned against the counter and folded his arms. “You’re not answering the phone again. I’ll bet that’s what it is. I never get an answer when I call home, either.”
She stared at the salad, unable to reply.
“I got rid of the old phone. I thought that’d help. I know that old ringer brought back some bad memories.”
He knew about the call that had told her of the death of her parents. That call, she had let him believe during the years he had known her, was the source of her inability to handle telephones; he did not know that she had suffered from her fear of phones since childhood. He had been patient, making excuses to his mother and their friends and taking care of all their phone calls himself. Her anxiety still persisted, making her queasy whenever the telephone rang, even when he was there to answer it. Sometimes, unable to control herself, she would find herself begging him to let it go on ringing and not to answer it at all.
“An answering machine,” she said. “We can get an answering machine. It’s about time we had one. Everybody else in the world does.”
“You know I can’t stand those damned things. It’s bad enough having to have one at the office—I don’t want one in my home.”
Cheryl had never been enthusiastic about getting an answering machine herself, not wanting to dwell on anything having to do with telephones. Now she was wondering why she had not seriously considered such a device before. The machine could answer the phone for her. She could surely calm herself enough to listen to messages left hours before. The machine could screen calls, meaning that she might actually be able to overcome her phobia enough to pick up the receiver once in a while. An answering machine might even cure her.