Odes: Phone Calls

I started answering the house telephone when I was seven, pulling it out of its cradle on the wall in the kitchen and saying “hello?” in the same bored and bothered voice I heard the adults in my house use. The telephone was introduced to me as an inconvenience and a burden; a thing that must be borne.

I know I was seven, because that was the year my sister’s husband went to jail for breaking into the Arby’s where he worked and robbing the safe. My salutation of ennui was pre-empted by a recorded voice informing me that I was receiving a collect call from an inmate of the county jail. Would I accept the charges?

“Say yes. Meghan. Say yes.” The voice on the other end of the line was my brother-in-law, harried and afraid, talking over the machine. I didn’t understand what was happening. When the beep came, I said yes.

That was my introduction to the telephone as bearer of bad news.

As I grew older, I came to know the machine better. It was often that harbinger of chaos and disaster: news of a dead relative, cancellation from someone who wasn’t coming to my birthday party. But it also summoned pizza to our house, called in sick to work, and rang when the auto-dialer carried the glad news of a snow day.

On television, Bart and Beavis were prank-calling everybody. The white pages landed on our doorstep once a year, filled with the names of teachers who weren’t smart enough to go unlisted, and my classmates followed their animated examples. My friends started to call me: did I have the assignment? Could they walk over and borrow my copy of the book, since they’d left theirs in their desk? The important business of middle schoolers was conducted over the wires, and how very formal it seemed to me to ask an adult politely to please put my friend on the phone.

I was a teenager in the 1990s, arguably the height of the phone’s central role in adolescence in America. It wasn’t boring anymore, in fact I lived and died by when it rang and who was on the other end. Caller ID somehow lowered the stakes of the whole thing, depriving me of the mystery of the ringing harbinger and telling me I could let it go to voicemail when it wasn’t my rival or my crush.

We devised elaborate schemes to talk all night without getting caught. A girl taught me in 1997 that I could dial the number that read the time and date and hold on until I heard the beep for call waiting.

“That way I can call you after midnight, and your parents won’t hear the phone ring!” She was practically squealing about her perfect crime. She was right, and it worked. We’d stay up all night talking about pressing topics: Star Trek, vampires, witchcraft, sex, Buffy, high school dating drama, the nature of the soul, the lunch calendar stuck to the fridge with a big magnet. There was no rush and no written record. Thank the gods for that. I have done the late night dive into the threads of conversation that the various platform overlords have preserved for me back to 2001. Though I believe in the power of an archive, when I look upon my own I am in danger of cringing myself inside out.

Between the height of my phone madness and the days of video call on demand, I had a pager. I taught my friends the touch-tone codes to get my attention. 143 means I love you. 411 means I need you to answer a question. 20 means I need your location. It was still the phone, but stripped of the crucial element of the human voice. No matter how many times I got 143637 I love you always and forever, it never hit like it did over the phone, accompanied by the sigh of longing and the sound of teenage devotion.

The world became less personal and more digital, recording every chat and IM and text conversation for posterity, for the screenshots we submit like evidence in the court of the group chat. The phone call faded into the background; an unforgivable inconvenience, not to be assayed without advance permission.

During the worst of the pandemic years, we all got on video calls. I’m ambivalent about the benefits of this technology. It is nice to see faces, but it doesn’t satisfy the social ape’s requirements for community in the flesh. I read Shakespeare plays and movie scripts in small groups of friends; I rediscovered role playing games and attended virtual happy hours, weddings, and funerals. There’s an emptiness to those Brady Bunch screens of tiny faces that the warmth of the phone used to fill. Maybe it’s the one-on-one nature of most phone calls. Maybe it’s the comfort of the confessional: is it easier to tell the truth with no one looking?

When I started dating the man who would become my husband, I told him he could call me without preamble. As it was coming out of my mouth, I knew what it meant. It meant I wanted to be close without warning, the bass of his voice and the bark of his laugh landing in my ear without anything to hold it back. We had had video calls early on, the slant of his drafting desk showing me his outline against the ceiling of his bedroom, my phone carefully cradled in a ringlight that I knew would make my skin look clear and my hair look shiny. That was something; I began to know his facial expressions, his long pauses between thoughts. But it was nothing to compare with the intimacy of the phone, all imagination and intense focus, all the intimacy of one sense in isolation. Without sight, the sound of his voice grew sharper, richer, and altogether more important.

Now, as my friends begin to untangle themselves from an internet that’s filled with slop, overrun with ads, monitored by unknown forces, and provided by supervillains, I find myself taking phone calls again. While we drive a long distances or have a lot of laundry to fold, we do what our mothers did in their own drudgery. Not pinned to the kitchen wall or bounded by the leash of a long curly cord, but free with our headsets and smartphones to roam, to take calls out in the park or even (as I often do, don’t act shocked) in the bath.

There’s no guessing the tone of voice in which good morning is rendered if I don’t have to examine whether there was a period or an exclamation point, no divining the importance of a conversation based on whether it’s a DM or a proper Signal message with end-to-end encryption. There’s the actual tone of the actual voice, giving me just another one of the manic Mondays or the Friday I’m in loves. There’s the person who can’t tell a joke without laughing so hard I can barely understand her. There’s the bad punner, light on his feet and ready to stun in a way that’s much funnier because I didn’t read it too fast but got his actual delivery of the line. There’s the trill and thrill of the immediate and unrehearsed, the raw unedited sound of someone I love, thinking out loud, including me in their first draft.

Phone calls aren’t a thing most people make time for anymore. Even my most beloved friends often resort to asynchronous voice messages, recorded and dropped in succession like tennis volleys. This, too, is intimacy, albeit one safe from interruption (one of my cardinal sins) and unafraid of reproduction. Even when the news is bad, even when you are calling collect from prison, I love to hear from my friends this way. When they ask me to accept the charges, I will always, with my mystified but intrigued human voice, say yes.