When my mom’s best friend, Colleen, died from brain cancer at the age of fifty-eight, my mom blamed it on the telephone. “Her tumor was right by her ear, where the phone went,” she explained. “And you know Colleen—she was always on the phone.”
With you, I wanted to say but didn’t.
When I was growing up, my mom and Colleen would talk for hours every Sunday evening, a sacred time during which my brothers and I knew not to disturb her. She would stretch out on the mauve velvet couch where nobody else ever sat, in the weird living room where nobody else ever went, the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, her ankle bobbing to the rhythm of Colleen’s voice.
I hated when Colleen called, because it took my mom away from me.
Colleen died the summer before my senior year of college. Mom and I drove from Kansas to Iowa for the funeral, a mother-daughter road trip I recall as strangely fun, though I imagine it was awful for my mom. At Colleen’s church I was too afraid to look into her open casket, so Mom walked up to it alone. Though I had seen Colleen in person on several occasions throughout my life—including the year prior, when she’d attended her oldest daughter’s wedding in a luscious blond wig and fake eyelashes—it was always odd to think of her as anything more than the voice inside Mom’s phone, an invisible power capable of stapling my mother to the couch for hours at a time, causing her to laugh or gasp or cry or go silent.
After Colleen’s death Mom and I started talking on the phone more often. I’d call her on my way home from class or while walking to meet friends downtown. A couple of years later, when I moved to California for graduate school, we would talk while I walked home from teaching. During these calls I imagined her on the mauve velvet couch, her leg propped on the armrest, ankle bobbing.
I now live in Bellingham, Washington, and call her every morning while walking my dog. She’s still in Wichita, though the couch is long gone, sold along with the house where I grew up. Though we see each other only once or twice a year, I feel closer to her than I did when our bedrooms were off the same hallway. Sometimes during these daily calls my ear will grow hot, and fear will ripple through me: How much radiation is seeping into my head? How much is seeping into hers? Should we cut down on our phone time? Yet I always come to the same conclusion: if this is the price I must pay for staying in touch, let the tumor come. (My mom, who forged my brain in the kiln of her womb, would of course be horrified by this logic.)
She occasionally calls at other times and leaves me voicemails: Hey, Becky, it’s Mom, just calling because I’m thinking about you, or because I’m walking the dogs, or because I heard about a terrible accident in Washington and want to make sure it wasn’t you. I hoard these messages, knowing that if something ever happens to her, they will be precious: forty-two examples of her voice, its lilting cadence, every syllable etched with love.
Before we hang up, we spend a few seconds in an extended goodbye-I-love-you chant that feels weird if someone is there to overhear it. “Bye, I love you,” I’ll say. “Bye, love you more,” she’ll say. I’ll send a kiss. She’ll send a kiss. “Love you,” I’ll say. “Love you more.” Kiss. Kiss. Bye. Bye. Love you. Love you. At least we know that if something were to happen to one of us, our last conversation will have ended with a little parade of affection.
I find talking on the phone to be one of the purest forms of communication. You are receiving the person’s voice, their tone, their laughter, without the distraction of their clothing, their hairdo, their body. I don’t care what someone looks like. I want to hear them sigh with exhaustion or cackle with delight. I want to hear tiny details of the environment from which they speak: birdsong, barking dogs, the beep of a microwave. I want the pleasure of building the physical world around them in my mind, like I do when reading a book.
As someone who has always been self-conscious about my appearance, there’s also comfort in knowing the other person can’t see me. On the phone, all they are getting is my personality, my thoughts and feelings, my words. It’s the same combination of privacy and intimacy I share with readers of my writing.
My passion for talking on the phone makes me something of an oddity among my fellow millennials. I have friends who communicate exclusively through GIFs and memes. Others schedule FaceTime chats with their families once a week or every few months. Some don’t talk to their parents at all.
My best friend, Melissa, is an exception. Her love for talking on the phone rivals mine.
Melissa is five foot ten, so when we hug, my ear lands on her breastbone. When she walks, one of her long toes makes a clicking sound. She is part Armenian, with a mane of curly black hair and thick eyebrows that she conceals behind glasses with translucent frames. Her friendship sits in the bank vault of my life like a mound of glittering treasure I will never spend.
Though we’ve known each other since high school—she played lawyer to my witness in a mock trial—we didn’t become close until we were attending the University of Kansas. Thinking about it now, we didn’t become superclose until after college, when we both moved away from Kansas and began keeping in touch over the phone.
Melissa has always been easy to talk to. She is emotional, intelligent, and curious, and she asks excellent questions. One time we drove together from Lawrence, Kansas, to Denver to meet a friend. I recall arriving at the Rocky Mountains and thinking, Did we just talk for eight hours straight? We had.
When COVID happened, our calls took new shape. We began to talk weekly, sometimes two or three times a week, our conversations evolving into extravagant, marathon exchanges. By the time we said, “I love you,” and hung up, I would feel lightheaded and dazzled. Only now do I realize this must have been how my mom felt hanging up from a call with Colleen.
Whenever we talked, I would lace up my tennis shoes and head out to Bellingham’s Interurban Trail, a corridor of old trolley tracks converted into a densely forested recreational path. Melissa was my companion as I passed the rookery where great blue herons nested in the spring, the village of colorful tiny homes meant for the houseless, the still-active railroad tracks that shuttled unknown quantities of milk and oil across the country. I’d walk all the way to the edge of the city, where the bay lapped lazily at the rocky beach, oblivious to the illness ravaging the humans on its shore and to the beloved, portable voice chiming in my ear.
Melissa was in Billings, Montana, completing a residency at a naturopathic medical clinic, and she’d tell me about B12 shots and the importance of magnesium. She was planning her wedding, an event that chased the COVID vaccine schedule like a greyhound after a rabbit. I was publishing my first novel and told her about the anxiety of putting out a book during a pandemic, which felt like lighting a Fourth of July sparkler during a hurricane, hoping against all odds that someone would look up from the tragedy unfolding around them and notice my little sizzle of art.
Our calls continued. My book came out. Her wedding date miraculously arrived just weeks after most people received their second vaccine. I was her maid of honor, crying hopelessly through my speech. Soon after, she and her new husband began thinking about where to move once she’d finished her residency. They did not want to stay in Montana but had no leads on other places to go.
Bellingham is not a difficult place to sell (lucky for me, since I work for the tourism bureau). It’s a vibrant college town wedged between the moody Salish Sea and the Crayola-green Chuckanut Mountains, in reach of North Cascades National Park, where the lakes turn a startling matte turquoise in summer, a color I call “mermaid juice.” Sitting on the highway in town for more than twenty seconds is considered a major traffic jam. When you go for a walk, people look you in the eye and smile. Most important, anytime there’s a rainbow—and there are rainbows often in the spring and fall—everyone comes outside to look, passing around the multihued joy like a spit-soggy joint at a party.
I shared these details with Melissa: the rainbows, the heron babies, the friendly mail carrier who knows everyone’s name and once taught me how to go “apple bowling” on my street. (If the apple rolls past the neighbor’s Camry, it’s a strike.) When she told me she and her husband were considering moving to Bellingham, I saw my life unfolding like a fairy tale: We could go camping together and take trips to the Canadian coast. She and her husband were planning to have a baby, and I imagined watching their child grow up, being there for his first words, his first school play, his high-school graduation. We would all be together in this beautiful place, a chosen family.
I didn’t think about how she and I would no longer have our marathon phone calls.
When I was very little, my mom used to cook dinner for my brothers and me every night: lasagnas, stir-fries, spaghetti and meatballs. Then my dad left when I was eight, and she eventually stopped cooking and started microwaving Stouffer’s ziti or throwing a bag of chicken tenders in the oven. Some nights she just let us kids loose on the freezer. When I asked her a few years ago if the divorce was the reason she stopped cooking, she shook her head adamantly (or I imagined her shaking her head adamantly, because this conversation most certainly took place over the phone). “That’s not right at all,” she told me. “I didn’t stop cooking because your dad left. I stopped because I always used to talk on the phone with my mom when I made dinner. When she died, I didn’t feel like cooking anymore.”
Melissa has lived in Bellingham for more than a year now. Her son—an unbearably adorable baby with a smile as rich and warm as melting butter—is already walking. She found a job at a naturopathic clinic near the marina and loves the people she works with, a crew of tenderhearted, hippie-adjacent women who perform craniosacral therapy, organize sound baths, and squeeze the arm of whomever they’re speaking to. We see each other once a week, sometimes twice. We have dinners at each other’s houses and sometimes meet downtown for a drink while her parents, who also moved to Bellingham, watch her baby. Usually when we hang out, someone else is there: her partner, my partner, her parents, her son, one of my roommates, one of our friends. The conversation is light, choppy, distracted, a hundred butterflies flitting from place to place, only occasionally settling onto a surface.
Only a few times—while driving to Seattle for a girls’ weekend, our eyes on the highway instead of each other; while sitting on my porch, gazes fixed on the forest surrounding my house—have we been able to slip back into what I think of as our telephone mode: conversation that exists on a deeper level, beneath the sparkly waters where our face-to-face chats typically linger, a dark but beautiful realm where all the peculiar fish with no eyeballs live. Once, even though she was just a few miles away, Melissa called me because she needed to talk. I was startled by how good it felt to slip back into that mysterious, silty space where it’s just our two voices, a pair of glowing lights blinking at one another. What is it about the sight of each other’s bodies that prevents us from descending to those murky depths? Why is it so much easier to connect emotionally when we can let the physical world drop away?
Sometimes, when I think about our phone calls, I picture confessional boxes. Chaise lounges in therapists’ offices. Internet chat rooms late at night. Like a confessional or a therapy session, a phone call is a container. The call draws a circle around the conversation, saying: This time is meant for talking and nothing else, and there are only two people involved, you and me. The boundary pushes away the outside world, aims a spotlight on the exchange.
I no longer regularly walk the Interurban Trail, but when I do, certain markers remind me of those pandemic conversations with Melissa. A bridge, for instance, recalls the time I was having trouble adopting a dog, because everyone else in the Pacific Northwest was also trying to adopt a dog during the pandemic. “I know it feels frustrating now,” she said, “but eventually you’ll get a yes, and none of this hassle will matter.”
I think about how often life does the opposite and throws you a no—a tumor, a virus, a shift in an important relationship—and suddenly all that matters is what came before, those moments that are now just memories: happily lounging on a velvet sofa, taking long walks to the end of a city, cooking elaborate meals.
Perhaps this is what appeals to me about the phone: for however long the conversation lasts, you can pretend there is no body. No tissue capable of growing tumors, no lungs that could harden, no bones that will turn to dust. There is only the voice of the one you love, pure and immediate despite its impermanence, a song unrolling itself in the music box of your head, for you and only you.
