Whenever You Call

by Anna King

  This time, Mom yelled. “Everyone go upstairs and put on dry socks!”

  So we up we went, scrambling through drawers in search of socks, which was one of those items in the winter that disappeared easily. When I got back downstairs, the tree was lit and the lamps were all on as well. I could smell bacon and coffee cake, plus fresh coffee, but none of that mattered to me because I couldn’t see a single package that was big enough for the doll. My heart seemed to tighten and screw together like a rose that is dying, not blooming. I received more presents than I’d asked for, including socks, a sweater, and a puzzle of the human body. Obviously, my parents had had quite enough of my doll fixation. The truly odd part was that I didn’t receive a single book, though my brother and sister did. Finally, no poem.

  When all the presents had been opened, I burst into tears. I couldn’t sit on my father’s lap because he wasn’t strong enough to hold me, but he pulled me between his legs and asked what was the matter.

  “I didn’t get anything I asked for,” I wailed.

  He spoke softly. “It’s the thought that counts.”

  “A poem is a thought!”

  My mother, across the room, couldn’t help but laugh. “I had every intention of writing you a poem, but I just never seemed to find the right thing to say. You can’t turn the writing of poetry on-and-off like it’s a water faucet.” Her voice, by the time she’d said the word faucet, had become as tight as my heart.

  I said, “What about the doll?”

  “A doll as tall as you are seemed like we’d be adopting a kid,” Dad said, amused.

  Everyone started to laugh and Dad patted my arm, as if all was well. “Let’s have breakfast,” he said.

  Why was I remembering that doll forty-two years after the fact of not getting her? I scissored my legs beneath the covers and glared at the gap in the curtains hanging over the window. I could see the long, silky drops of rain as they dribbled down the panes. It was a terrible day. Not, as Mr. Poet would say, auspicious. Nor was remembering such an asinine thing.

  My eyes closed and I tried, once again, to pretend that I might be able to fall back to sleep, even though I knew I wouldn’t. I had the ignoble thought that I was still waiting for that stupid doll. I threw off the blankets and jumped out of bed. Standing on the icy wooden floor with bare feet, I shouted.

  “Ralph!”

  I looked around and when nothing happened, I skipped quickly to the closet for slippers and my robe. Warmer then, I looked around the room carefully. I relaxed my eyes, something I’d learned to do without being aware of it, but I couldn’t see any lights, blue or otherwise.

  In the kitchen, the coffee was sputtering into my mug when I glanced at the clock on the stove. Assuming it was morning, I hadn’t bothered to look at the alarm clock on my bedside table. I squinted, disbelieving. Three o’clock in the afternoon? Could that be possible?

  If I’d finally fallen asleep at five o’clock in the morning, then it was feasible, though unlikely, that I’d slept ten hours. I ran downstairs and checked the clock in my bedroom. Wow. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was due to meet Joseph Finder at six. I wasn’t sure that I had time for a run, plus the weather wasn’t exactly cooperating, though I’d had some good runs in the rain. In fact, I even kept a special pair of running shoes for rainy days.

  But, yes, I would run. I needed to get outside and move. Nothing else, no amount of thinking or writing or talking would work. Nothing except a run and a hot shower afterwards. Then I would dash to the Miracle of Science Bar & Grill, without getting myself all worked up.

  Uh-huh.

  I didn’t even finish my coffee and, instead, gulped a small glass of orange juice, then hopped down the stairs, and got ready for the run. When I burst through the front door, I almost changed my mind. The rain, far from settling into a steady kind of affair, doubled and tripled in volume the further I moved out into the open until, on the sidewalk, water gushed on top of my head and pelted my face. Last thing in the world I really wanted to do was to go running in this downpour, yet I knew it was what I needed. One of the most annoying things about growing older was this terrible wisdom we possess. We friggin’ know stuff, whether we want to admit it or not. I ducked my head and began to run, fast and awkward.

  I ran for thirty minutes and never hit that effortless feeling. Still, as I burst through my front door, I felt great. Righteous, of course (“aren’t I great to go for a run in the rain?”), but also enjoying the ache of my muscles and the scream in my lungs. In the basement, I peeled off my running clothes and draped them over the washing machine, dashed into the bathroom and turned on the faucet to fill the bathtub, then went to check my e-mail.

  Rabbitfish.

  I glared at the screen. Was this really Rabbitfish, or Joseph Finder? It appeared to be from Rabbitfish. I clicked to open the e-mail even while another part of my brain listened to the thundering noise of the water filling my gigantic bathtub.

  Scientists reported that ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes–such as mullet, goatfish, tangs, damsels, and rabbitfish–could produce LSD-like hallucinations in those who ate them.

  I think, but I can’t be sure about this, but I think, time stopped. Well, the physicists say there is no time, or that’s my understanding of what they say. The non-existence of time, when you try to wrap your mind around it, is singularly difficult to grasp. But, yeah, time stopped. Then, when time kicked back in, I allowed the threat to hit me. Because it was a threat, an intimidation, a warning: go in the direction of meeting Joseph Finder, and you will find true craziness, if you haven’t done so already, which was an open question. Confusion jabbered through my body and head with such speed that nausea overwhelmed me. I pushed away from my desk and tore into the bathroom where I crouched over the toilet bowl, retching. I had nothing much in me, except that small glass of orange juice, so it was short-lived, but definitely nasty. I wiped my mouth with toilet paper and turned to check how full the bathtub was. Full enough. I crawled over and twisted the faucets to OFF. Standing up, I held carefully to the side of the tub.

  The water, despite all the rain that had thoroughly soaked me, soothed me for a moment. Then, as I thought about LSD-type hallucinations being produced in someone who ate a rabbitfish, I kicked my legs wildly. Water splashed over the sides of the tub. Decision made, I slid under the water, wetting my hair completely.

  I would not meet Joseph Finder at six o’clock. So it was okay to let my hair get wet. I kept my eyes closed under the water and lifted my hands to rub at my scalp and free-floating hair. Whenever I went under the water in this gargantuan bathtub, I felt like a mermaid. Sitting up with a rush, I tried to decide whether to e-mail Joseph Finder. Politeness would dictate that I should, but then, I’m not sure that even the wise Miss Manners would have advice for how to handle this sort of social interaction. I washed my hair, ducked under the water again for a good rinse, then quickly scrubbed myself all over. Out of the tub, I wrapped my terrycloth robe around me and walked to the computer.

  No new and surprising e-mails had arrived. I wrote Joseph Finder a note.

  Dear Mr. Finder:

  After due consideration, I’ve decided that it would be unwise to meet you.

  Sincerely, Rose Marley

  Then I reread Mr. Rabbitfish’s most recent e-mail. I had to wonder, was I hallucinating everything? Was I, in fact, mad as the proverbial hatter? Was I Alice, tumbled down the rabbit hole, and this a dream? I pushed back in my desk chair and thought about the way my still damp bare feet felt on the thick carpet. I wiggled my toes. I tapped the desk with my knuckles. I sniffed and smelled the damp from the rain and a basement buried under the earth. Finally, I reached for the telephone and pushed the number one preset number.

  “Jen, it’s me, Rose.” I took a deep breath. “I need you.”

  Her voice, distinctive with its high girlish cadence, was so familiar that I almost gasped.

  She said, “I’ll come right now.”

  “You’ll come
here?”

  Because of Jen’s disability, she had only rarely visited me in this house.

  “I forget if you have handrails along the steps leading to the front door. “

  “On one side—,”

  She interrupted. “I can do that.”

  After we hung up, I pulled on sweats with no underwear. I laid a fire in the living room, which began to burn with a satisfying roar. Back down to the basement, I checked through my meagre wine collection and discovered a very good red, a 2001 Angelo gaja barbaresco, which I opened and put out on the coffee table with two wine glasses. It looked inviting. I glanced out the window and saw that it was still pouring, so I grabbed an umbrella, stuck my feet into boots, and went out to the road where I waited for her.

  Jen had improved her walking technique in the time since I’d stormed out of her apartment. She seemed, most of all, comfortable in moving about, as if it wasn’t a big deal, one way or the other. We said hi only briefly because the rain forced us to hustle into the house. She peeled off her long yellow raincoat and I ran upstairs to hang it in the shower stall.

  When I got back down to the living room, she was settled into a corner of the couch, a glass of wine in one hand. She smiled with one corner of her mouth tipped up like flower aiming for the sun.

  I poured myself a glass of wine and went to stand in front of the fire. I began.

  “What I am going to tell you will make you think I’m crazy.”

  Her expression didn’t change much. She looked, well, ready.

  I continued. “I’m not crazy, but I will admit that crazy things are happening, things that aren’t rationale or easily understood. I don’t expect you to explain what’s been going on, but I do need your respect and pragmatic, lawyerly point of view.”

  Sipping my wine, the room seemed horribly quiet.

  Jen took a sip, too, then made a pleased face. “Wow, this is wonderful.”

  “Just for you.” I paused. “I would ask, for the sake of argument, that you assume I am sane and still the woman you’ve known for thirty years, who was your very best friend in all the world.”

  “I promise, Rose.” She sipped more wine. “I admit that you don’t seem in the least bit nuts, nor have you ever seemed nuts. But … an angel named Ralph?”

  “It’s a whole lot weirder than that, I can assure you.”

  I sat down in the opposite corner of the couch, legs tucked under me, and I began to talk. It took a solid forty-five minutes to hit every single thing, from the very beginning. I got a little lost at times, and was forced to backtrack, but Jen had the kind of mind that could create order out of any amount of chaos and she kept to the trail admirably. Finally, exhausted, I simply stopped. I stared into the fire.

  “That’s quite a story,” she said.

  I glanced at her. It seemed to me that if she said I was crazy, or anything even remotely critical, I would go crazy.

  When neither of us spoke again, I got up and went to throw another log on the fire. Then, seeing the fire needed even more encouragement, I added another. From behind me, Jen spoke again.

  “I completely believe you.”

  I reached for the fireplace mantel with both hands, and ducked my head forward, my back still turned to Jen. I began to sob.

  “You know, I was brought up Catholic,” she said. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that there is a god and angels and all that other stuff. ”

  I turned around, tears streaming.

  She said, “What, in the end, do we know about any of it?”

  I shrugged and sniffed.

  “Go blow your nose and then let’s try to figure out what to do.”

  I ran up to the second floor bathroom and blew my nose resoundingly. She called out from downstairs, “Do you have some potato chips or something to eat?”

  I took some cheese out of the refrigerator, crackers, and a jar of peanuts, and trotted back downstairs.

  We crammed food into our mouths, refilled the wine glasses and drank sloppily. Jen raised a finger. “First of all, why don’t you go see whether you heard back from Joseph Finder?”

  “Okay!”

  I rushed downstairs. “Yes!”

  “Oh my god,” she yelled. “Read it to me in a loud voice!”

  I clicked on the e-mail and began to speak out loud, without first reading it silently to myself. “I think we should meet. Please. Trust me.”

  “Sounds like he means it,” Jen screamed.

  I ran back up the stairs.

  “Should I meet him?”

  With her little pointed chin raised defiantly, Jen said, “Yes.”

  “What if he’s a crazy guy, a stalker, or something?”

  “I’ll get my firm to check out his background, just to be sure, but my gut—,”

  I interrupted, “You have a gut?”

  “Getting legs has changed me.” She danced them up and down on the floor.

  I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know why all of this has happened. Why did I suddenly see Ralph … why?”

  “I have a feeling that Joseph Finder will have the answer to that.”

  “Jen?”

  “Umm?”

  “How are things with you and Tom, anyway?”

  She held out her left hand, which I now realized she’d kept tucked out of sight. A diamond ring.

  I whispered, “You’re engaged?”

  She nodded.

  I slid across the couch and hugged her. “I can’t believe you didn’t call me.”

  “I was an asshole,” she said. “Tom told me I was, and I knew it, but I felt stuck. I didn’t know how to get back to where we were.”

  “I guess the answer was not to try. We had to take this leap.”

  Quietly, Jen said. “It’s all a leap.”

  “Or, as Brother Ralph said at Isaac’s monastery, Ask the question as if the answer doesn’t matter.”

  “What’s that got to do with leaping?”

  “No fear.”

  She sighed. “Yeah.”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  14

  AFTER JEN LEFT, I sat in the dark living room and stared into the fire’s flames. I felt myself drifting, neither here nor there, as if I’d been given a dose of valium intravenously. Lovely, warm, liquid, sweet. The top of my head began to burn and seemed to shine, though of course I couldn’t see it and, therefore, had no way to know it was shining. Mostly, a mild searing sensation and then it opened. The top of my head opened like a trap door, wide and effortless. My eyes closed and I was happier than I’d ever been. That was how and why I remembered.

  I lost my virginity to my first love, Mike, my fellow cello player, who was African-American, brilliant, and so handsome that women were known to stop in their tracks in order to better stare at him. Indeed, women seemed to devour him with their eyes, and I never had any doubt that they would literally devour him if he gave them the opportunity. After our first date at that coffee shop, when I’d reached over to tap his white teeth and he’d sucked my finger into his mouth, we moved quickly into complete accord. Both his parents were on the faculty of Smith College, so we had a great deal in common despite the different colors of our skin. When you’ve reached middle-age, it’s impossible to ever fall in love quite like that again. We were so unencumbered, ready, passionate with desire, and, most of all, easy together. It was all so easy.

  We’d been together for a month, inseparable and happy to be so. We spent more time at his house than mine because he was an only child and his parents were delighted to have another person around, particularly a girl person. He lived in a row house almost identical to mine, except that his mother, Ellie, was an immaculate housekeeper, as well as being a well-known scholar in early Christian gnosticism (this was long before it had become popular). Their living room’s floor was covered by a faded oriental rug, the walls floor-to-ceiling books, the couch and chairs deep and cozy. In the beginning, Ellie didn’t allow me to go up to Mike’s room, and these small houses had
only dismal basements where the washing machines and dryers were awkwardly placed on cold cement floors. So, the living room was our hang-out. His Dad, Jeff, was a Math professor and much shyer than either Ellie or Mike. He stayed on campus until right before dinner time, and Ellie, for the most part, was in the kitchen making dinner, or sometimes in the dining room where a corner of the old mahogany table was her place to work.

  Mike and I cuddled on the couch, which was permitted, and we talked. We talked and we talked and we talked. Nothing could keep our mouths shut. I think now that it was because we desperately wanted to be kissing with those mouths, but we didn’t have the necessary privacy. Instead, we moved our mouths in the only other way available. I watched his lips shift shapes, as if they were formed of some new formula that allowed such extraordinary flexibility. He watched mine, too. Our eyes would meet briefly, then return to the mouths. I think, truthfully, he talked more than I. He was, after all, a senior, while I was a mere junior. And shortly after we became an item, he was admitted early to Harvard. So, I was impressed. He’d also had sexual experience, which he whispered about in long, elaborate stories. His whispering lips, when they whispered about sex, made me pound with desire.

  It felt as though my heart had shifted to my genitals, where it beat with such a resounding rhythm and force that at times I had to excuse myself, go to the bathroom, and press my hand against myself, not as a further arousal, or to come to orgasm, but more as a warning, a stop sign, a pressure meant to arrest the beat of my heart in such an unlikely place.

  Ellie would bring us cokes and cookies in the late afternoon, but as the smells of dinner cooking permeated the house, she’d feed us crackers and peanuts, and sometimes grapes, though grapes were expensive and Mike had a way of popping them into his mouth in rapid succession, so that they’d be gone in minutes. I loved watching those grapes disappearing into his mouth, right where I wanted to go.