Spare The Phone

While talking to my friend one morning on the telephone, I hear the distinctive sound of a child’s heavy breathing from the upstairs extension. “Is someone there?” Silence. “Can you please hang up? I am using the phone.” I hear an abrupt click followed by fleeing footsteps and the slam of a bedroom door. The culprit was no stranger but rather my ten-year old son. I sat him down and explained that conversations are private and it is impolite to eavesdrop.

Oh the hypocrisy…

Flashback thirty years, to my teenage self, lying in the coolness of my suburban Long Island bedroom. It is midweek during the summer and raining. I am bored having not yet begun my summer job. I hear my mother downstairs in the kitchen talking to Lily, who is both her cousin and best friend. They grew up in Ireland together on nearby farms. I knew the drill well.  The two would chat for a while and then Lily would suggest she might “come over for lunch” the next day. My mother always agreed. And so it goes.

Their lunches generally lasted all afternoon into evening and were filled with stories of family, mutual friends and news from Ireland. The whirr of the blender competed with their laughter as they created a favorite après lunch cocktail, their signature frozen daiquiri. I often wondered on some days, how Lily made it home.

On that fateful day, I strain to hear their conversation, but cannot.  Knowing it is wrong, I pick up the phone extension gently and await the next pause between them. Putting on my best Irish accent in imitation of my mother, I ask “Lily, why don’t you come over tomorrow? “ Lily does not miss a beat, “Why I was just going to suggest that dear.”

The next few moments remain to this day, both vivid and jumbled in my memory. I recall a momentary silence as my mother dropped the receiver and then, her thundering footsteps ascending the stairs toward my room. In my haste to lock my bedroom door, I leave the receiver dangling on the bed. Lily is still on the line. I try to hold the door shut but am no match for my adrenaline pumped mother who with the strength of Goliath pushes the door forward and lunges toward me. Generally a nonviolent woman, the incident has unraveled her to the core. Grabbing the only available weapon in sight, the phone, she begins to pummel me with it. In the ensuing chaos, I do recall one thing oh, so clearly… Lily’s voice calling out from the other end “Hello! Hello?” HELLO? Is everything alright? Dear?” in between the strains of my screams of “Mom, NO PLEASE, I’m sorry!” MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Strangely enough, though I saw her numerous times after, Lily never mentioned the phone incident.  There is no doubt in my mind that having lain witness to the payback, if not in physical presence but in audio, was all she ever needed.  And, I learned my lesson in spades.  Though sometime, at family reunions, my sister with a gleam in her eye will beg me to recount the story of mom “and the phone” which remains to this day, an all-time favorite.

Screwdriver Parties

Pulling into my driveway late one afternoon, my eyes fell upon a dark sedan sitting idly.  Unable to recognize a face through the tinted windows and noting a New Jersey plate, a state from which I knew no one, a slight feeling of unease ensued. And then as if in slow motion, a window went down and a familiar voice I had not heard in over ten years bellowed, “Kathy, it’s me, Jim Cappello!” I drove all the way from NJ to visit you.  Look in the trunk!”

My old boss Jim Cappello whom I had worked with for over ten years at a publishing company in midtown Manhattan. Now eighty three years old and long retired, he had driven over two hours, on a whim to visit me at my home in Connecticut.  It was the pretzels, he said. The pretzels made him do it.

He explained he was at his supermarket in New Jersey saw a bag of pretzels which reminded him of me and, the screwdriver parties.  Every Friday at 5:30PM, in our small office on the 12th floor of the Chanin Building, we had a screwdriver party. Jim and I who sold the display advertising and Barbara and Irene the Classified Department.

I can still hear his voice now,  “Irene, get the ice, Barbara open the pretzels, Kathy go down and buy the O.J!” and Jim, well Jim always was in charge of the vodka. He was the perennial salesman. Outgoing, tenacious, social and charming.  He loved a party. Our own little madmen ritual in that tiny office on the twelfth floor.

“Look in the trunk!” He said again. I gazed down at two brown paper bags, one filled with a giant bag of pretzels and a container of orange juice, the other, a bottle of vodka.  “Let’s have a screwdriver!  For old times.”

We sat in my kitchen, Jim and I, and talked of our lives since the magazine closed. He shared how his beloved wife of fifty years had died three months before and how lost he felt in the weeks that followed.  I told him of the difficulty I experience in leaving my life in New York City behind for a small CT town in the suburbs.

We telephoned the classified girls, Barbara and Irene, who as luck with have it were both home.  As each picked up the phone I would announce “Do you recognize this voice?” And then hand the phone to Jim who would bellow “Irene! Barbara! It’s Jim Cappello!  I am at Kathy’s house. We’re having a screwdriver party! For old times.”

But it was not those Friday parties that bound the four of us together but rather the cadence of life, the highs and the lows as we worked side by side in that tiny office as the years ticked past.

The last thing we did together before he left was to walk down to the bus stop where my two sons, whom he had never met, were due home from school. As we walked back up to the house I wondered…was it the pretzels he had seen in the supermarket that prompted his visit or rather the need for comfort often found in days past?  The reason was unimportant.  It was a great day.