Telephone

In the beginning was the gray, and it was called Elisha. In the beginning was the bell, and it was called Alexander. In the beginning was an office in Highland Park, a classroom in Boston, competing laboratories. One future hinged on the “harmonic telegraph”—better than a letter, better than a message in a bottle. Think of it: your own words in real time, your own voice coming through the line like music, and there on the end, your beloved rapt and eager, listening, waiting to hear! In this beginning, as with all: a diagram, a caveat, a rival creation story.

Imagine the bell chiming in the gray. Imagine the loud moon of sound rising through the clouds. Now Alexander whispers to Elisha on the courthouse stairs, “We can’t all be famous, man.” In this version, he has a pipe and pretty hair, soft like taffeta on a woman’s dressing gown. “Give it a century or so. History might turn this all around.”

“Since when?” Elisha spits. He tugs his beard to a narrow point, then tucks his hands inside his trouser pockets. “Since when has history ever been kind to the underdog?”

When the red curtains sweep closed, the gold tassels swish this way and that, almost an echo. Over the clatter of applause, everyone hears it—that loud moon of sound, so unmistakable now: a bright silver telephone ringing.

Can you hear it? The song of a loon—voice echoing across a bright sliver of lake, disembodied. Like the voice on the other end of the telephone. In the beginning, that voice mingled with static, especially long distance, and long distance was expensive. My mother hissed the words to us as she spoke with her mother in Brooklyn—long distance—when we made a racket in the kitchen. She stood at the tall counter as she talked, the long coil of the telephone looped around her fingers. Her fingers twirled the loops tighter until her knuckles bulged, and then she let the strand uncoil, bouncing ringlets, like the hair on the girls I admired in novels.

I tried to imagine it: long distance, and how a voice could traverse that territory to reach us there in the suburbs of Los Angeles. My mother’s voice, as she talked, became increasingly inflected with New York-ese, an actual dialect recorded by linguists; she seemed to take on the persona of a different person, the girl I never knew.

When my cousins came to visit they spoke a foreign language, tough and hardy, a rollick through the streets. They said I had an accent too—a California twang—but I couldn’t catch it. Can we ever hear ourselves clearly? How others hear us? Say hello to your grandmother, my mother said, and handed the earpiece to me. Hello? I said into the static, my greeting always a question, each word that followed echoing across the distance between us. The telephone warm with my mother’s ear, her fervent listening.

My father’s palm warms the receiver with sweat. His dime slides down the phone’s cool throat. As he waits for a dial tone, he peers through the grate on the hospital window. It’s late evening, September in Seattle, plump pigeons mingling on the ledge. It’s his wife’s mother he’s calling, a woman they haven’t seen or spoken to in years. His voice wavers when she answers, but then he says it, clear as a bell, “You’re a grandmother!” Silence: looping back on itself like a snake’s tail. “Did you hear what I said, Teena?” She sighs, begins to uncoil. When she speaks at last, her tone is merely curious: “Boy or girl?” This is the first time my father has ever mentioned me aloud, and she can hear the hope and love and fear passing through his teeth like water over rocks. This is an actual dialect recorded by linguists, as is disappointment, as is grief. “We have a daughter,” he tells her proudly. Now the pigeons have moved on to other perches. A...