Hanging Up

by Delia Ephron

  “At least you have Joe,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She picked up the birthday napkins, which still hadn’t made it to the table. “I’ll set it for you, okay? I’m sorry, I forgot before.” But she didn’t move.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”

  “What’s wrong with our family?”

  “Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. We’re fine.” I put my arm around her. She handed me a birthday napkin to wipe my eyes.

  “Claire! Answer the fucking phone, Claire!” Maddy and I peered through the kitchen doorway. Jesse was sitting on the living room floor in the middle of his party, playing with his executive telephone. He hung up, pressed the Ring button, and when it rang, answered. “Claire!” he shouted. “Answer the fucking phone, Claire!”

  The next morning I woke up yelling at my father. Not out loud, just in my head. All day I was in instant replay. My father sprawled backward, me at the kitchen door, but this time I screamed hundreds of wounding lies: that I saw my mother every day, that I loved Tom Winston, that we had Thanksgiving there and Christmas, that Mom loved Jesse and he loved her. One fantasy even had me yelling that her dogs, probably long dead, had sleepovers with Jesse whenever my mom and Tom went camping. I told him Claire was too good for him. I told him I never wanted to see him again. I told him that especially, over and over and over.

  I called Adrienne six times before I reached her. She had begun jogging, a strange development for someone who preferred the coziness of four walls, her drafting table, the TV, and a cup of tea. Adrienne in running shoes. It was hard to envision. But she’d met a man. She had jogged past him every morning at six. He’d been running too, but had stopped for a cigarette break at the West Village park right near her apartment. After the first day they started waving at each other. Finally she stopped to say hi. “The last of the big-time smokers,” she reported with dismay, although she immediately sold a cartoon with that title, showing a man trailing butts across a map of the United States. Paul was a sportswriter. So far he hadn’t done anything off-putting like wear his running shorts on his head, but they’d spent only one night together, and she apologized for not being home when I needed her. Which was the sweetest thing. She said it was sad I lived three thousand miles away—she couldn’t come over and cook for me. She said she was going to do a cartoon called “Rendezvous,” which would be scenes of men and women meeting all over New York City—at the Central Park reservoir, under the arch in Washington Square Park, on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. Meeting Paul had made her prolific, and if she worked fast enough, maybe her drawing could be a New Yorker Valentine’s Day cover. She also said maybe it had already been a cover, some other artist’s, it sounded familiar. And speaking of magazines, she said, there was an interview with Richard Nixon, a huge interview, the month before in Esquire. “Mark today’s date,” she said. “January 19, 1984: Your father’s in exile and Nixon’s back.”

  I didn’t tell Georgia until a few days later, and I didn’t call her, she called me.

  “I heard it all from our sister, Madeline Lee,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me to speak to him again, because I won’t.”

  “Eve, darling, you don’t have to speak to him if you don’t want to.”

  “Joe hates him even more than I do. Joe said that his behavior was unforgivable.”

  “You don’t have to speak to our father.”

  “Thanks.”

  “He made it back to New York, in case you were worried. And they are getting divorced. Claire’s moved out.”

  “I told you, I don’t care. Remember when I was in that car accident, soon after I moved here to live with Joe? For the first few days afterward the world felt so dangerous that I took only teeny-tiny steps wherever I went. That’s what I feel like now. Like Dad came to my house and ran me over.”

  There was a long pause.

  “How dramatic,” said Georgia. “Well, forget about him, I mean it. Do you want to hear my news?”

  “What?”

  “I was fired.”

  “Fired?”

  “Yes.”

  “God, I’m sorry. I thought Harper’s Bazaar was doing so well, I mean, I know your ad revenue was down, but—”

  Georgia jumped on me. “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know. I read it or Joe knew or something.”

  “Everyone’s ad revenue is down, that’s no big deal.”

  “Oh.”

  “Harper’s Bazaar is irrelevant, anyway. I’d been sneaking relevance into it, but I had to sneak all the time.”

  “That must have been hard on you.”

  “Believe me, you have no idea.”

  “Well, why don’t you come out here and visit?”

  Dead silence.

  “Or why don’t you go to Jamaica or wherever?”

  “Martinique?”

  “Right, Martinique, somewhere like that. You’ve never had any time to yourself, you work so hard. I mean, it’s like a sudden death, the death of your job, you have to grieve.”

  “I’m starting my own magazine.”

  “What? How can you do that?”

  “I have backers. It will probably take me a year to get it going, but I’m calling it Georgia.”

  “You’re calling it Georgia? As in Georgia Mozell?”

  “Yes.”

  I got off immediately to call Maddy, so I could be the first to tell her that Georgia was naming a magazine after herself. But I didn’t call my father. I didn’t speak to him again for seven years.

  Once he called me. “Don’t hang up,” he said, and I hung up. He asked Georgia to intervene and she refused.

  Every so often I told someone that I didn’t speak to my father. I announced it in a blasé manner. I didn’t add that I had no contact with my mother either. Being on the outs with both of them seemed extreme, as if the problem were mine, as if I were neurotic. It was too complicated to explain that my mother wasn’t a mother, which meant I couldn’t reject her. There was simply an absence of something between us, that’s what I told myself. My father was a father: a horrid, distorted version in a funhouse mirror. “I don’t speak to my father,” I declared, often to provoke someone who had confessed to a minor resentment of his own: that, for instance, his father had sent his brother an airplane ticket to visit but had expected him to pay for his own. “I don’t speak to him,” I would needle, hoping to cause the other person to do likewise.

  “Suppose he dies?” I’d invariably be asked. “Aren’t you worried he’s going to die?”

  “If I knew he was going to die, I would speak to him.” I liked saying that. I liked the cold-bloodedness of it. For seven years I was as relaxed as I was capable of being. For seven years the phone never rang at an inconvenient moment.

  Seven years later. Spring 1991.

  “Hi, Eve, it’s me. You won’t believe this. Dad just called and told me Georgia won the Pulitzer.”

  “The Pulitzer? Maddy, that’s incredible.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My God.”

  “I guess she’s going to be more successful than ever.”

  “I guess so. Well, that’s great. That’s just fantastic. Did you talk to her?”

  “I put in a call, but she was in a meeting.”

  “We should send flowers,” I said.

  “Hold on, that’s my call waiting.… It was Dad again, telling me the same thing. That’s the third call. You’re so lucky you don’t speak to him. What were you saying?”

  “That we should send flowers. When did you get call waiting?”

  “I’ve had it for months.”

  “Months?”

  “Everyone has it. Haven’t you noticed, you never get a busy signal anymore? The busy signal is practically obsolete. God, Eve, what planet are you on? Look, would you order the flowers? I’ll pay you back.”

  “Georgia Mozell’s office.”

  “Is Georgia there? This is her sister Eve.”

&nbs
p; “She’s in a meeting.”

  “Tell her congratulations. Tell her to please call me the minute the meeting is over.”

  “Will do.”

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Jesse, where are you? I thought you were coming home after school.”

  “Matt, Jennifer, and I are hanging out at his house. We’re watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

  “Again? How many times is that?”

  “‘Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.’ ‘Here’s one.’ ‘I’m not dead.’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s from Monty Python, where he’s got this cart with all these dead guys.”

  “Your aunt won the Pulitzer.”

  “‘I blow my nose on you. I fart in your general direction.’ That’s from Monty Python too. What did she win?”

  “Never mind. Be home by five.”

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Joe, where are you?”

  “In the Denver airport. I’ve just finished up. I’ll be home in three hours.”

  “Georgia won the Pulitzer.”

  “What? For what? Something in that magazine?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, she got it. Dad called Madeline.”

  “My God.”

  “It seems ridiculous that she got one and you didn’t. I mean, what you do is so much more original.”

  “They don’t give radio people Pulitzers.”

  “Well, they should.”

  “I didn’t think they gave them to magazines either.”

  “Still, it’s great for her.”

  “Absolutely. It’s great. They’re announcing my plane. I have to go.”

  “I love you.”

  “Hello, I’m calling from California. I’d like to order flowers. How much do I have to spend to get a lot?”

  “At least one hundred dollars.”

  “One hundred dollars? Uh, okay. Beautiful spring flowers. It’s lilac season. Do you have them?”

  “For lilacs you need to spend one hundred twenty-five.”

  “Forget the lilacs. Send the flowers to Georgia Mozell at—”

  “We know. We’ve sent her flowers before.”

  “Oh. Thank you. Can they be delivered tomorrow morning?”

  “No problem.”

  “The card should read, ‘Congratulations and love, Eve—E-V-E—Joe—J-O-E—and Madeline—M-A-D-E-L-I-N-E.’ Here’s my credit card …”

  “Hello, Eve.”

  “Georgia, hi, this is so exciting. Fantastic. Congratulations.”

  “For what?”

  “I heard you won the Pulitzer.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Dad. He called Madeline.”

  “That’s what he told her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I told him I was thinking of hiring Roxanne Pulitzer to write a sex column. But then I decided not to. It’s tacky, it’s really not Georgia. It was one of those four-o’clock-in-the-morning ideas. What are we going to do about him? He can’t live alone anymore.”

  “He can’t live alone because he got Roxanne Pulitzer confused with the Pulitzer Prize? He probably just has bad hearing complicated by not listening.”

  “The police picked him up twice in the last month. Once he was wandering down the middle of Fifth Avenue in his boxer shorts. Another time he wandered into an art gallery on Madison Avenue where they had some sculptures made of beer cans. He took one, popped the top, and drank it. They wanted to charge him twelve thousand dollars for ruining this great piece of art. Thank God I am famous, or we never would have gotten out of it, and I still keep expecting the event to turn up in some column.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You’re not speaking to him, remember? So I thought you didn’t need to know.”

  “That’s very nice. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. I think we have to put him in a home. He’s seventy-seven now. He needs a controlled environment. I think I can get him into the Jewish Home in L.A.”

  “Here? Where I am? You’re sending him back to where I am?” My voice scaled high enough to break glass.

  “Not exactly. It’s in the valley. It’s in a different area code from you. Eve, it’s really hard to get old people into good homes.” Her voice turned sincere, even heartfelt. She was no longer the director of transportation, preparing to ship cargo to a preferred storage location. Now she was the champion of old people. Now she was virtually running for office on the plank “Save Our Elderly.” “Do you know what most homes are like?” she asked achingly.

  “No.”

  “Well, I do, believe me, and Stephen’s father—”

  “Who’s Stephen?”

  “That psychotherapist I hired to write a column, ‘New Solutions to Old Problems.’ His father lived there.”

  “New Solutions to Old Problems?”

  “I know it sounds boring. I may have to change the title, but Stephen is brilliant.”

  “Are you involved with him?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “I wondered why you didn’t tell me about him. Are you in love?”

  “I like him very much.”

  “You’re in love, I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Really.” The word did not have its usual edge. There may even have been a blush in it. “Stephen gives the Home a lot of money, it’s one of the nicest things about him.”

  “Do we have to put Dad there?”

  “He can’t take care of himself. He’s calling me twelve times a day. Of course, I rarely talk to him. My assistant should be awarded the Purple Heart. I’m sure I can convince him to go. You know, in the end he’s a pushover.”

  “I think just with you. Most people are.”

  “Yes.” Georgia sighed deeply at the burden of being impossible to refuse. “It will be the best thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I really am. He’ll have a life, which is more than he has now. Nobody sees him, he has no friends. You remember how happy he was at Bloomingdale’s?”

  “How do you know? You never visited.”

  “You told me, darling. I figure it will take a month or two to arrange it, and I’ll ship him out. Someone has to take him there.”

  “Madeline can.”

  “Hasn’t she started that soap where she plays a secretary—or is it an assistant? Secretaries are never called secretaries anymore—that soap that she has to be at every single day?”

  “Oh God, I’m going to have to speak to him again.”

  “Well, it’s not as if you haven’t had seven good years.”

  “I feel sick. I’m getting off.”

  “Eve?”

  “What? Honestly, I feel completely nauseous. I have to go lie down.”

  “Did you purchase that Armani jacket I told you about?”

  “No, but Chantell has called three times. Joe keeps saying, ‘Chantell’s a person?’ He wants to know if people get those names before they become Armani saleswomen or after. He’s thinking of doing a funny interview with several of them. Do you know any other ones with silly names?”

  “You can joke about this if you want, Eve, but you have your own business now. When you want to impress people, you must always wear Armani and you must compliment men on their ties. That’s something not every women’s magazine will tell you, but Georgia will. We’re not afraid to sound stupid if it’s smart.”

  “Thanks, Georgia.”

  “So you’ll pick Dad up?”

  “I really have to get off. I feel terrible.”

  “Hello. I ordered some flowers for my sister, Georgia Mozell. To be delivered today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it too late to cancel them?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, okay. Thank you.”

  Joe refused to go to the airport. “Furthermore,” he said, “L
ou Mozell is never setting foot in my house again.” The statement had an antiquated quality and reminded me of something an old-time movie father might have said. One of the dads from Meet Me in St. Louis or Life with Father.

  “You can forgive him but I never will,” Joe also said, which was more extreme than anything that crossed the lips of those movie dads. “I’ll talk to him on the phone if I answer,” said Joe. “That’s as far as I’ll go.”

  “Joe refuses to see him,” I announced proudly to Georgia when she gave me the arrival time. “I’m taking Jesse to the airport instead.”

  “Why?” she asked. “I hope you’re not foolish enough to think our father will pay attention to him.”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  “No. Never mind.” Georgia didn’t say she was sorry, but she softened her tone. “He’s older. I’m warning you, he’s older.”

  “He’s older,” I told Jesse as we stood at the arrival gate.

  “Than what, Mom? I don’t even remember him.”

  I had a cramp in my stomach and a stabbing pain between my eyes. My legs were weak; even my arms felt peculiar. “A case of the dreads” was what Adrienne used to call my state of body and mind before I saw my father. How familiar these feelings were, maybe even comfortable, like a long-lost friend of whom you might say, in amazement, “We picked up just where we left off.”

  “What did you say, Jesse?”

  “I said, ‘I don’t even remember him.’ When we get home, I’m sleeping at Matt’s.”

  “Fine. Look, Jesse, I can’t concentrate. The thought of seeing your grandfather makes me crazy.”

  Jesse, who was attempting to check his reflection in a four-inch strip of chrome that separated the airport window and wall, shifted his attention over to me. “So why are you seeing him?”

  “Your aunts have watched over him for seven years. It’s my turn again.”

  “Well, if you’re dreading this, you should do what I do at school.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Count down. Just think like, ‘Okay, fifty-five minutes to go, fifty-four minutes to go.’ How long is this going to take, anyway?”

  “Between getting his luggage and getting him settled, I’d say two hours.”

  “God, I’m never going to get to Matt’s.”