Phone Calls - A Short Story by Me
Mary Lou stayed up most nights talking on the phone until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. She talked about what had happened to her during the day, about sermons her pastor gave, and she reminisced about her dead mother. She had a loud, shrill voice that carried through her apartment walls as if they were then cotton sheets. The neighbors that shared walls with Mary Lou were used to being woken up late at night when she was arguing with someone or cackling at something she found funny. I once overheard a conversation she had with one of the other neighbors in the building.
Janice was a young single hipster girl who worked in the accounts payable department at an independent record label. She always had someone in her apartment laughing or playing Nintendo Wii. The smell of marijuana seeped daily out of her front door and into the common hallway. Mary Lou knocked on Janice’s door wearing a white knitted sweater splattered with food stains, faded pink sweatpants, and black sneakers with Velcro straps instead of laces. Janice opened the door with skeptical eyes.
“Hello.” Mary Lou screeched. “I’m Mary Lou, your neighbor.” Mary Lou had the habit of elongating the first syllable of a word and shortening the last. Neighbor became naaaaaaaybr. Her vowels were thin and they rattled around in her nasal passages before finally finding their way out of her mouth.
“Yeah I know. What’s up?” Janice responded.
Mary Lou shifted her weight back and forth between her feet and fiddled with a yellow post it as she made her request.
“Well, my garbage disposal is broooooken, and the phone at my house isn’t working. Would you let me use your phone to call the landlord?”
Janice had two guys over. They snickered in the background.
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“No.” Mary Lou answered. “My mother said cell phones give you caaaaaancer.”
Janice sighed deeply.
“Here.” She thrust her Blackberry at Mary Lou. “Don’t use all my minutes.”
Mary Lou stood in the hall as she dialed the number that was scrawled in pen on the note she was holding. She left a message for the landlord describing in painful detail how the garbage disposal broke down. That night at 2:00 AM Mary Lou was on the phone in her apartment repeating the entire incident to a friend. Somehow an event that took place over three minutes was enough material for a thirty minute story.
When Mary Lou died she was fifty nine years old. In the weeks after her death, her neighbors gossiped about her in the hallways of the apartment building, the parking garage, and the laundry room. She had been in the same one bedroom apartment since she born. She had lived there with her mother, who had passed away only three years before her. The two women had shared a full size bed since Mary Lou was big enough to not sleep in a crib. She never got married, never had kids.
A week after she died there was a technician for the phone company outside Mary Lou’s apartment. Our eyes met, and I tried to make a joke.
“You guys lost one of your best customers.”
“Sorry?” He was confused.
“The woman who lived here. She talked on the phone every night for hours. Her bills must have been huge.”
“Not in this apartment, buddy.” He shot back. “There hasn’t been phone service in this unit for almost three years. They sent me out to check all the wiring, make sure it still works.”
He hefted a large spool of cable onto his shoulder and walked away. The door to the now vacant apartment was open. On the floor among stacks of boxes and piles of old clothes was a small rag doll. It lay on its back surrounded by once treasured possessions. The doll’s red yarn hair fell haphazardly on the worn blue carpet. Its button eyes, long ago picked off by young hands, stared without emotion at the ceiling.
