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HANGING UP
DELIA EPHRON
To MY FATHER, HENRY EPHRON
1911–1992
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
I always knew my mother had no friends because she never talked on the telephone. During the day, when the phone rang, the cleaning lady would answer, saying, “Mozell residence.” Or my father would pick up, yelling, “I’ve got it.” Or else my sisters and I would fight for the receiver, grabbing it out of each other’s hands. If Georgia answered and then just dropped the receiver, leaving it dangling about an inch above the floor, the call was for me. It was never for my mother.
My father planned their social life. “The Irvings on Friday,” or whoever, he would say, bounding into the room after hanging up. Social life turned him on. He was like a dog pulling at its leash, waiting for the moment when he could bolt out to dinner, see friends. My mother lay on the couch doing the crossword. “The Irvings on Friday”—sometimes he had to say it three times to get her attention.
Every day, when she returned from teaching, my mother did the New York Times crossword puzzle. We were the only family I knew in Los Angeles who took The New York Times, and we took it because my mother said, “It’s the only crossword puzzle worth doing.” She lay there, her head propped up on throw pillows, her stocking feet neatly crossed, and worked her way straight through from one across to sixty-two down.
The crossword seemed to be the thing she lived for, and it was the main constant in our daily lives, until the fights.
That’s what my sisters and I called them: the fights. As if the frequent arguments between my parents were bouts in a ring.
They started in the fall of 1966, when I was a sophomore at Uni High School in West Los Angeles, the same high school where my mother taught literature—A Tale of Two Cities, My Ántonia, The Stranger. She finished teaching at two, I didn’t get out until three-thirty, and I would go into the living room to let her know I was home. She always said the same thing, “If you’re hungry, have an apple,” working her pen on the crossword without pause. But one day when I came home she was staring at her feet, the puzzle lay undone on her stomach. Her shoes were on, and they were not the usual brown pumps that she wore each day with her shirtwaist dresses. They were red high heels with open toes. As I watched, she raised one leg and turned her slender foot to and fro, wiggling her toes and then admiring the open back with the strap across.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
She sat up and slipped the shoes off. “Slingbacks,” she said. “Do you like them?”
“No.”
“No?” She smiled at me. “Well, I do.” She got up and walked over to a mirror and did something else I had never seen: She turned up the collar on her shirtwaist dress.
“That looks dumb,” I said.
She ignored my comment, smoothing her hair over her ears.
My mother wore her dark wavy hair cut almost as short as a boy’s, and slicked back off her face, a style she referred to as “no nonsense.” Her only concession to vanity, until the slingback heels appeared, was the bright pink lipstick she freshened every hour or so.
I kept an eye on those shoes. They disappeared into the closet for the rest of the week, although her collars stayed up, and she even added a scarf, a jaunty silk thing that she tied around her neck western style in a little knot, letting the short ends lap over her collar.
Then, on Saturday morning, she tipped her hand.
Maddy, my younger sister, who was ten, was lying on the floor in the family room watching The Flintstones. I was perched on the pantry counter clocking the first of many daily hours of conversation on the telephone with my boyfriend. His name was Stuart, but I called him Sonny and he called me Cher because, like Sonny and Cher, we fancied ourselves sparring partners. “What are you doing?” he would say. “Who wants to know?” was my quick comeback. We thought this was hot stuff. Anyway, Georgia, four years older than I, was in Massachusetts, a sophomore in college, and it was just another peaceful weekend morning—my parents drinking coffee, the lazy Susan stacked with bagels, lox, and cream cheese—when my mother, reading the newspaper, said, “Those damn loggers.”
The swinging door was open and I could see my parents in the breakfast room. Even though I was deep in Stuartland, I heard the comment and noticed that my father, who was spinning the lazy Susan in search of a second helping of lox, halted a second.
A few nights later, instead of going to his weekly poker game, he followed her to a motel and nearly broke down the door.
They fought regularly after this. Night after night, they relived the moment—my father’s eureka at the breakfast table, my mother’s fury and humiliation at being caught in bed with Tom Winston, the biology teacher, who, we learned from the fights, was a very active member of the Sierra Club.
He had red hair and he was huge. “His body is as big as a double bed,” Georgia said ominously when Maddy and I took the telephone into the hall closet and, hunkering under the coats, called to let her know what had happened.
“Was he your teacher?” I asked.
“Yes. He taught me to dissect frogs. How can Mom have sex with someone who knows that much about your in-sides?”
Maddy yanked the phone away from me. “Come home, Georgia.”
I pulled it back. “She can’t, Maddy. Do you want her to flunk out?”
I tried to imagine what I would look like if Tom Winston were my father. Would I be as big as an ostrich, forced to buy my clothes at the tall women’s shop instead of wearing my neat size seven? Maybe I wouldn’t have black hair with curls springing in all directions but thick, well-behaved tangerine-colored locks that kept a clear part in one-o’clock position. Would I have blue eyes instead of brown—blue eyes with, oh God, pinkish lashes like his?
Every