Person on the Page

My thanks to Bear River Review, in which this essay was published.

The sound I heard that morning was from one of those Bell telephones, still in common use in the 1970s, with a rotary dial and an actual bell with a mechanical clapper.  It jangled its urgent ding-a-ling-a-ling, demanding attention.  I sometimes recall one ring only, an unusually long ring, as if announcing its significance.  Other times I remember it as two rings, or as many as four.  The memory of the sound changes from one recollection to the next. 

I was home alone with my father on a mid-summer Saturday morning when I was twelve. I was an only child.  My mother was at the drapery shop where she worked.  The phone rang.  My father answered it and, being a man of few words, said, Yep or Fine, and you?—I’m not sure exactly which, but I remember clearly that he ended with, Okay, see you soon.

After he hung up, he stepped out the back door.  The sky was flat-matte clear, reminiscent of Easter mornings when my mother, father, and I, stiff in our once-a-year clothes, stood in front of the fuchsia rhododendrons that hedged our house while a neighbor snapped our picture with my father’s Polaroid.  The intense warmth and brightness of the sun would have been just right for daylong romping in the backyard pool. But that morning it spread an inappropriate cheer over the scene.  Once outside, my father suffered a heart attack, collapsed, and died in our backyard.

The phone rings.  Someone answers it.  Someone dies.

The significance of my memory lies not in the fact of a father’s death, nor the grief that follows.  After all, sooner or later, everyone’s father dies.  Nor is it significant that the phone rang just moments before he died.  That happened merely by chance.  What matters is the connection my mind established between those two nearly contiguous events—the phone ringing and the death—between what happened one moment and what happened just moments after.  The fact of my father’s death tore through the tenuous weave of assumptions my mind had established by age twelve about what is reliable in our lives.  My mind attached the phone’s ring to that event, making of the sound a seeming alert: Get ready. The impossible is about to happen.      

When it rang that morning, I had just gotten out of bed.  The house was growing uncomfortably warm; it was going to be another in a series of humid June days.  Still in my father’s big white castoff  t-shirt in which I always slept, I headed to the kitchen just as he finished the phone conversation, hung up, and went out the back door.  We never found out who he was talking to in that, his last conversation.  His breakfast dishes lay rinsed and neatly stacked in the sink, as usual.  A bowl that had held his cereal, the glass dish from which he ate sliced fruit every morning, the mug from which he always drank his tea.  I poured a glass of orange juice and went to the back door to look outside.

 He was lying flat on his back beside a tree in the backyard, one of two my parents planted when they bought the house. One on the east side of the house, one on the west.  My parents loved symmetry, predictability. At first I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.  I tried to make the scene fit into the reliable scheme of daily life I had come to know.  At first I didn’t realize that something was wrong.  My father liked to sunbathe.  He was proud of the rich sable tan he achieved every summer.  Lying out in his swim trunks in the midday summer sun was his way of relaxing on a day off from work.  I was accustomed to seeing him out in the backyard, his chest gleaming with sweat, his bare legs stretched slightly apart, feet turned outward.  Lying still, eyes closed, like a dead man.  Mother sometimes followed  him out the back door with a bottle of sunscreen, insisting that he apply it to his exposed skin. The summer sun was dangerous.  It could give him skin cancer.  But he always refused, joking that he wouldn’t let a little thing like skin cancer kill him.

But that morning, something wasn’t right.  I wondered why he had decided to sunbathe on the ground instead of lying as he normally did on the chaise lounge just a few yards away on the deck.  Then I noticed that he was wearing his plaid work shirt and khaki shorts, not his swim trunks.  Why was he sunbathing on the ground fully clothed?  Before I could fully understand what was happening, a burning weight like a ball of mercury sank from my throat down into my stomach.   Now, decades later, I feel the path it blazed still.

The phone rings.  Someone answers it.  Someone dies.

Abrupt changes, endings, deaths are common to us all.  We are all, to some degree, traumatized.  No matter how many times my memories of that morning recur after all these years, they do not matter.  The sound of the phone ringing, and my physiological response to it now: that is the part to consider.  It is the same kind of sound that quickens pulses at the end of the school day and sends students out of the green­-tinged fluorescent lighting of the classroom into the full-spectrum hues of the afternoon sun.  Like a sound that announces that something has arrived—freedom.  Like the whistle or pistol shot that signals the start of a race.  Or a sound that announces something entirely unexpected.  A fire alarm, a blare that says Run!, Escape!, or that punctuates the fact that no escape is possible. 

Now, decades after my father’s death, I dread the sound of a phone ringing. Not just the sound of an old-fashioned ringer with its mechanical bell like the one I heard that morning.  Any kind of ringtone will do, from electronic buzzes and chortles of office telephones to the tinny blare of salsa or the leaden beat of rap songs from people’s cell phones.  The ringing no longer inspires fear that a death is imminent. Today the sound makes my heart race, causes a prickly sweat, a vague yet compelling sensation, the need to flee, to escape what is coming next or, at the very least, to find a reason not to answer. It promises that the unexpected is about to descend and may, like a sledgehammer, obliterate what I depend upon. It announces that a loss is only a few breaths away.

I have a landline phone in my office that hums a business-like monotone and a cell phone that blasts electronica. They tell me who is calling, or whose calls I missed, eliminating at least some of the uncertainties.  My cell provides me with a measure of security when I jog on secluded paths or travel alone in my car. I keep it with me almost always. But more often than not when the phone rings, I don’t answer it.  When the name of the caller appears, I begin to imagine what awful news that person must bear, what tragedy has occurred, what uncomfortable change is about impose itself on my life.  By not answering, I ward off the unbearable.  When a friend says, “I’ll call you,” I immediately want to ask, Why? What kind of trouble is brewing? What bad news do you have?  How will your message wound me?  Why don’t you just text me? Texting is silent. Harmless.  Texting heralds no catastrophic moment.  At least, not in my mind.  One friend, dismayed that I never answer or return her calls, warned me of all the good news I might be missing by avoiding the phone.  News of engagements, births, good fortune.  I love yous and Miss yous and Let’s get togethers.   The pleasure of distant loved ones’ voices, the sound of their breath when they laugh.  Still, my mind has forged its irrational link between one event in my life and another. 

For me, perhaps the phone’s ring is like the tone from the tuning fork struck by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, to which the dogs in his experiments learned to salivate.  During his 1904 experiments, the dogs’ instinctive response of salivation at the presence of food was triggered by a sound that they had come to associate with feeding.  Pavlov called these misplaced responses “psychic secretions,” a term indicative of the mind’s inclination to establish connections between the elements of an experience.

Classical conditioning accounts for phobias, panic attacks, and a host of vague irrational discomforts experienced by many.  A trauma occurs, and the mind grasps for meaning.  For a person to experience a trauma, two factors are necessary.  First, an event that the person perceives as life-threatening or as threatening to his or her assumptions about reality, safety, and security.  Second, a complex of overwhelming physiological responses to that event: the neurological mechanisms of fear, panic, sensations of helplessness, the sense that a cataclysmic end is near.   A third factor may be present, however.  A seemingly innocuous occurrence such as a sound, an odor, a color, a person, or an object that impinges upon the mind of the traumatized person.  That third factor becomes part of the traumatic complex and bears the potential to revive the physiological responses to trauma when experienced at later times and in unrelated settings.

Or perhaps my experience that morning was like the events endured by Albert B., the nine-month-old subject of psychologist John Watson’s experimental efforts in the early 1920s to induce phobias in children.  Watson conditioned fear into his subject by presenting a white rat to the infant while striking a metal bar with a hammer, causing a noxious sound to which, Watson theorized, children would respond with instinctive discomfort. Eventually the infant was conditioned to fear not only the white rat, but also an array of benign white objects.   In my case perhaps, it was the sound that was benign, but followed shortly after by my father’s death, it became the object of fear, rendering me telephonophobic.      

Another explanation, however, is possible.  Perhaps, like the loud clanging sound that Watson theorized was inherently frightening to children, for some people the telephone and its ring naturally elicit fear.  A recognized psychological disorder, the fear of telephones, or telephonophobia, is categorized primarily as a social phobia, related to anxieties about public speaking, trepidations about being rendered a fool during a conversation, or failing to find the words to express one’s thoughts. But the sound of a phone, like the ring of an alarm clock, calls us to attention. It introduces the unknown, punctuates the arrival of change.  We answer, knowing that, even if in only a small way, our lives will be altered by what we hear.  Might something about a phone’s ring raise in some of us a certain dread? 

The first successful telephonic communication was transmitted in 1876, in the midst of its inventor’s profound melancholy.  Alexander Graham Bell’s efforts to develop electric telephony followed the deaths of two of his brothers from tuberculosis and accompanied his father’s and his own struggles with chronic illnesses. Grief and restlessness may have led him to migrate from his home in Scotland to Canada, where his work on the telephone began.  Formerly an elocutionist, he redirected his focus to the challenge of transmitting the human voice so that people separated by long distances could speak to and hear one another.  Was it familial grief that prompted his drive to receive messages from those who are absent?  Was it the desire for word from departed loved ones, the longing to hear his brothers’ voices again, that fueled his determination to allow the living to send their voices to those far away?

When experiments that led to the development of the first functional telephone were publicized, the curious responded with unease.  The notion that human speech could be transmitted as a seemingly disembodied voice appeared to be inextricably bound to the occult. It was considered the stuff of séances and Ouija boards. Of the charlatan medium who sells the grieving widow a message from her dead beloved. The self-proclaimed clairvoyant who takes advantage of a mother’s desperation for some small word from her expired child.  When the first operational telephones were demonstrated to an inquisitive public, some attributed the technology to pure magic, the supernatural, even to the powers of evil. 

Bell’s early attempts at telephony included his creation of a phonoautograph, a device that translated the human voice into visible markings.  To create the device, he and Thomas Watson (not to be confused with John Watson, the psychologist who experimented on Albert B.) employed a tiny membrane from the ear of a cadaver as the receptor of sound, allowing the dead, metaphorically, to hear and process sound.  Bell’s work with telephony was perhaps prodded by death, the dead, and the hopeless desire to communicate with the departed.  His own now legendary outburst, “Watson, I need you,” the tense and ambiguous first telephone transmission sent across the short distance between himself and his assistant, may have been infused with the grief and melancholy that fueled his inventive energies.

Perhaps I am misled.  Is the possibility that I am conditioned to panic in response to a sound really significant?  Are the linkages formed by the mind during trauma really the point worth considering?  Or am I lying to myself? 

Despite my efforts to deny it, is the important part of my experience merely the death of a father?  Surely not, because sooner or later everyone’s father dies.  Or could it be that the memories that recur really do matter?  The penetrating heat of that day, the sun’s unmerciful glare, the unnerving quiet of the moment, my father in the backyard so inappropriately in repose. 

On that morning, I finally realized something was wrong with the fact that my father was lying on the ground.  Our neighbor, Mrs. Llewellyn, came running from across the street shouting that we had to call for an ambulance.  She rushed through our back door, nearly knocking me down as she ran to the kitchen phone, the one my father had hung up just before all this started happening.  Standing there in front of Mrs. Llewellyn in just my father’s t-shirt, I felt exposed.  I was a twelve-year-old girl with long scrawny limbs and developing breasts.  Just a few minutes before, I had been asleep in my bed, and now everything around me seemed unfamiliar, as if I had been transplanted into someone else’s home, thrown into someone else’s crisis.  Mrs. Llewellyn looked at me as she talked to the operator.  If my mother were there, she would tell me to go put some clothes on; we had company.  What was I thinking?  This was not how we dress when our neighbors come to visit. 

Perhaps I have an unconscious fear that when my father ended his last phone conversation with the promise, Okay, see you soon, he was speaking to someone in the next world, the place to which he must have drifted as I saw his body lying lifeless in our backyard.  Like the first witnesses of Bell’s new electric telephone, I may have associated telephonic communication with the supernatural.  Perhaps now I expect the phone’s ring to bring such a call for me.  Hello. This is death. Your time has come.  Or maybe I am acutely aware that answering a phone is like opening one’s door to the unknown.  It carries a certain risk.  For I know that when I do answer a phone, there will be that momentary uncertainty, the silence of space, and then a voice.  I could be letting anything in. 

Possibly I can draw only one conclusion from my experience. One moment in a life, albeit tragic, can define forever the moment that came before it, and the all ones that come after.  If that is so, then my story is mere melodrama. The death of a father, an experience common to all.  For surely death is the ultimate cliché, the over-contemplated hitch in our existence.  Death trips us up, and we are all entrapped by our losses. 

But I cannot accept that possibility.  I distract myself, looking for more.