Delia Ephron - Hanging Up

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.