Phone Calls

Hi, all. As I haven't posted anything in a while, I'm taking the liberty of posting a couple different things today. I realize the second is long, and I've put some comments in between the pieces to give you some of my thoughts/questions. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


I was packing to fly home for the holidays. Figuring out which books to take was as weighty a decision as the clothes. And the phone rang. Preoccupied, I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello. Christine?”

His voice, rumbling, uncertain. The same line of immobility traveled from my ear down my neck to my chest that had traveled there a decade before. My lungs freeze, but I say, “yes.”

“I’m calling to see if you and Todd would like to come to our Christmas brunch on Sunday. All the rest of the kids will be there,” he said.

I look to my bookshelves, to the piles of books and articles on my desk, to the half-folded sweaters on my desk chair, my computer, awake still with the screen saver.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I reply.

“Why not?”

I look through the bay window, into the sunshine fractured by leafless tree limbs, the patterns of light on my desk. We had this conversation every ten years or so. The last time was before Thanksgiving in 1992; now it was Christmas Eve 2003. He had a fantasy, a made-for-TV movie of the post-divorce family reunion, where the prodigal children return, everyone starts over, and happiness abounds. Slaughter the fattened calf, there’s no need for forgiveness. …

[Clearly much more needs to be written, as the conversation continues and I do answer the question. I couldn't play along anymore. The movie wasn’t mine—had never been mine—but I’d learned enough by that point that to participate in its making, to gesture however hesitantly toward its realization, would be to sacrifice small pieces of my flesh and enormous portions of my mind and integrity. My life, the one I was building from the fragments, the one I had built in the eighteen years without a father, could not coexist with his fantasy; it came at too great a cost of myself. From some bizarre impulse, the origin of which I doubt I’ll ever understand, I actually put some of these thoughts in words to him. It went terribly, as anything outside the made-for-TV movie tends to be with him, and flashes of the ferocity that I didn’t want in my life anymore confirmed the choices I had made. But the consequences were vast and not just mine.

The story could go on and on, but because I don’t really know what I want to do with this, I’m going to give you the sketch I made (about a year ago for a different Grub class) about the phone conversation that happened in fall of 1992. I was in a decidedly different place in my life, much less sure and much less stable. I don’t know if there is a way to connect these conversations and create a single piece of writing, but I’d love any thoughts any of you might have.]


Funerals end up being raucous, strangely enjoyable gatherings with the extended Personale clan. In October 1992, my cousin Scott died. He had just turned 22, but he had been in a coma since the Christmas before. Born with spina bifida, Scott had survived to graduate from high school—a triumph—and went off to college like any other kid. But he had taken ill on his way home for break; an infection spilled into his bloodstream, blinding his eyes, putting him in the hospital and then into long-term care. Despite our grandmother’s prayers, he had never woken up, and the family converged, as was customary, on McElwee’s Funeral Home to cry and remember and pay our respects.

Because Scott was special—with a quick mind and tongue and personality to spare—everyone knew him: everyone in town, a large portion of the March of Dimes community in the greater Rochester, NY, area, and family members long since lost in the fog of distance, discord, or divorce. My father was one of the latter. When he walked into the overfull room, with its non-descript carpet and non-descript papered walls, bodies working around wooden folding chairs or pressing them farther and farther into the recesses of the room’s narrow ends, my grandmother actually looked up from her Kleenex and asked, “What’s he doing here?” She generally referred to him as ‘the sonofabitch,’ but he had, years before, golfed and played cards with the men of the family. He and my Uncle Sol, Scott’s father, had married into this group. Once, they took a bunch of us kids to see fireworks in my family’s green Volkswagen bug, opening up the front hatch so we could lay in the car with the sleeping bags and watch. Scott had covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut most of the time, in fear of the loud bangs. We sang ‘Hava Nagilia’ on the way home, smitten with the fact that Uncle Sol was Jewish. It had been news to us.

My father made his way to my uncle and even stopped to say he was sorry to Jo, as the grown-ups called my grandmother. I made myself busy, flitting to the farther end of the long rectangular room. I tried hard to make sure that I didn’t have to talk to him, but eventually he came up to Michele, Scott’s older sister, where I stood as well. I thought of Michele as my older sister, too. I got her hand-me-downs, and 10 months ahead of me, she taught me how to talk when I was just a year old. She was my closest friend growing up, and during middle school and junior high, I went to her house nearly every weekend and often on holidays, while my siblings were off at my father’s. At the funeral, we were attached at the hip as we had so often been before. My father hugged her, spoke with her, and I watched it all as if with the sound down—body movements, expressions on faces. He nodded in my direction. “Christine.” And that was it. There were more people who wanted to talk to my cousin, and he wasn’t going to be asked to join us at the house afterwards.

I was surprised that he had come. I didn’t think he was capable of doing the right thing, paying respect, and I thought him incapable of sorrow or kindness toward the family that meant so much to me. Being a part of it had also, in the end, meant something to him.

* * * * *

I was unprepared when the phone rang a month later in Michigan. One of my housemates called me downstairs, where the receiver hung on the back of a kitchen chair, its long white cord floating across to the wall. Trapped there, unable to pace around the house, I usually sat at the table staring out the window, past the plants, to the front walk and a sliver of the driveway, or else I perched on the bottom step and stared at the umbrella stand. Before I had a chance to choose my spot, I said hello and heard a voice—low, gravelly, formal, and just a touch apprehensive. “Christine?” I knew immediately who it was; no one from home called me that except my parents, typically when I was in trouble. I regretted answering and leaned into the counter, refusing to sit.

He had called to invite me to Thanksgiving dinner. He didn’t have my address or he would have sent a card. He wanted to start over, all of us, my brothers, sister, and me, him and my step-mother, Linda. Todd was invited too. I couldn’t remember the last time I had spent a holiday with him. In the revised visitation decree of 1980, my parents alternated holidays, but all too many Thanksgivings fell to him, which I had deplored. Thanksgiving was about my mom’s stuffing (with the spicy sausage) and pies (apple, cherry, pumpkin for me), and it was about visiting her family for turkey-salad sandwiches and dessert in the evening. I had extricated myself from the situation on many occasions, eating dinner out one year in a restaurant with my mom and her boyfriend, wheedling myself to Michele’s house whenever I could. Every year since I’d gone to college, I came home to cook with my mother; the meal was our project, something we did together. And this year, because Scott had just died, she was having Grandma and Uncle Sol to dinner. I didn’t want to negotiate the hours spent here, the hours spent there. I didn’t want to play the game of who mattered more. I didn’t want any of this, anymore, at all.

“Todd spends Thanksgiving with his family,” I said, avoiding the real issue.

“Well, you could come. We want you all there.” His words grated against me, like an open hand.

I didn’t know, and told him as much. And he actually paused to ask why. I had had this conversation so many times in my head, I didn’t know what to do when it started outside me, in another voice, instead of my projection of that voice. I sat down at the table and stared into its flat, burnt-red surface. “It’s not that easy,” I replied.

The volcano started to rumble.

“What’s not easy? All I ask is that you come to my house same as your mother’s. When you come home, you stop by and spend some time with me and Linda.”

He wasn’t asking for hours and hours; he wasn’t asking me to stay with him instead of my mother. He just wanted visits, but as the words rose out of him, he was forgetting I was 24, an adult, living and thinking on my own. I became a pull-toy of 8 or 12 or 16, bound to obey him. I tried to reason, clinging to the years falling away from me. It wasn’t about visiting.

“You don’t know what it takes to walk up to that house, to knock on the door,” I said.

We slipped out of reality. A preternatural calm set in, and he apologized for the divorce. For how difficult it was on us kids. He never should have agreed to it. He never should have let my mother do that to us.

To us? He never should have?

“But the divorce was the best thing that happened,” I said, foolishly. “Do you realize how awful it was to live with the two of you?”

The ground heaved, and the air burned. “What did I ever do to you that was so bad?” The first words were heavy, ponderous, at that just-restrained tension; the rest skipped like a flat stone on water. I found it difficult to breathe.

How acutely I had wanted such a question. Wanted his acknowledgement, grief, and then regret. No longer anywhere near 24, small, frail, weeping and screaming, in truth, inconsolable, I whispered, “Do you remember locking me in that bedroom? At Grandma Bradt’s house? You said I’d never see my mother again. You were taking the other kids to Europe, and she’d never find me.” It had been dark, my Uncle Buddy’s room, bed against the wall with the door, dressers behind me, windows covered. I was 10. His face with fury pulled the white painted door shut. I have no idea what I could have done to receive such a punishment; I have no idea how long I was stuck in there. I know I still can’t sleep with the bedroom door closed, and that I need the curtains and shades open, too. This isn’t always easy to live with, especially when guests are staying with us.

He exploded, molten hot, and denied everything. He says my mother fed me these lies. I’m a bitch just like her. [Do this in dialogue?] And there we are, the same place we always end up.

Yet I did go for Thanksgiving dinner. My brother Billy called Michigan, too, and wept openly for the second time in as many months. He felt responsible not just for our father’s happiness, but also for his pain. So I agreed to go for my brother. …