The Enormous Phone Call

The Enormous Phone Call Jane Bernstein One morning in June 1991, I was scurrying around in my bedroom, late—as usual!—trying to dry my hair, throw on clothes, grab my papers, catch the commuter train that would take me to New York. Everything was wrinkled—of course!—so I hauled out the ironing board, yanked cords from sockets, plugged in the iron, and commenced bashing away at a shirt. And suddenly—the iron was stiU cold—a disembodied voice fiUed my room, the voice of a woman complaining in bitter and graphic terms about the wretched human being she caUed her husband. For an instant I thought my own interior voice had broken free. I reaUy did think this, crazy as it sounds. But it's important to recaU that 1991 was stiU the dark age of mostly wired telephones. You didn't hear much about cordless phones in 1991, didn't see drivers taking corners one handed, gesticulating wildly talking, talking into tiny phones.You didn't see tiny phones at aU. I had no explanation for the voice in my room. Though now I have a rough idea how it happened, I'm stiU struggling with what I heard, still trying to make sense of the beautiful town where I was living when the voice came into my room. "W," the beautiful town, is a suburb of NewYork City that one could just as easily imagine in New England as in New Jersey. In the center of town is a lively shopping area, a majestic white Presbyterian church, and a park with a meandering stream spanned by a little stone bridge. There are ducks and geese, and cherry trees lining the paths. In the spring, when the trees are in bloom, wedding parties are herded into the park by photographers . First they are arranged en masse in front ofthe gazebo; then the bride and groom are posed, gazing at each other from beneath boughs heavy with clusters ofpink blossoms. There are lots ofwhite clapboard center-hall colonials in town, and huge trees with roots that crack and push up slabs ofsidewalk . It is nearly impossible to walk with a stroUer on these sidewalks, but 66 Jane Bernstein67 for much of my first year in town, it was exactly what I did. I hiked my daughter's stroUer onto its back wheels, worked it over the peaks and depressions , dazed, determined, always wondering how on earth I had ended up in this particular town. The answer—or part of the answer, at least—was perfectly clear. My husband and I had been living in a fifth-floor walkup apartment in NewYork City. It had been cozy when I lived there alone, and tight for two, even though my husband had left most of his possessions in a rented garage in northern New Jersey, and in peoples' basements statewide. We began to expand upwards to fit the baby in: crib beneath our loft bed, bookshelves to the ceding. StiU, we knew that we were going to have to move, and that whatever we bought had to be affordable and close to the research laboratories where my husband worked. This meant New Jersey. We did not research towns, house hunt, talk to others who'd moved. We did not think about taxes or school systems. We simply lived with the inevitability of the move, until a chirpy realtor, married to a coUeague ofmy husband's, decided we should live in W, and one summer day produced a house for us. I was in Maine when my husband caUed and said the realtor had found a house we could afford. It was a seUer's market; if I didn't hurry back, it would probably be snapped up. I thought about this for an instant and said I didn't think I'd make the drive. "Ifyou like it, buy it," I told him. This was not extreme flexibüity as I Uked to believe, but resignation. I hadn't considered where in New Jersey we should live, because I had not wanted to be there at aU. But I knew that ifmy husband was to be the kind offather we...