Telephone Talk
Lee Hunnewell
My father once sent me to my room from Saudi Arabia. I went without any questions and didn’t ask to be let out until my mother, having enjoyed several hours of peace, came to get me. My room was in Paris, far away from the sand in which I imagined my father living. In fact, I didn’t have any particular understanding of either his surroundings or job. I had been told only that he “did deals,” and I knew that when my mother had visited the kingdom herself, she had come home to Paris unconvinced that any of us should ever go there. I also knew from the way that my mother emphasized his name when her brand of discipline inevitably failed her, that my father was powerful and that she, the guardian of three children in a foreign land, was not.
My mother’s powerlessness showed up in many ways. First of all, she could barely speak French. Her accent—made worse by the fact that she came from the southern United States—was so bad that it revived cashiers who otherwise sat listless at their registers. My mother would emerge from grocery shopping shaken by peoples’ rudeness and their complete lack of understanding of such things as customer service. I knew that it all had to do with her accent. People were never rude to me for any length of time. I perfectly understood these ladies and their grievances toward my mother.
She also had difficulty keeping track of us. My mother would be tucking me into bed only to throw up her hands suddenly and yell in her southern twang, “Oh, my God! Where’s Freddy?” I would know exactly where the dog must be. He’d be tied up on a hook inside the grocery store where we’d left him on countless other evenings, doomed to sit out the night with a bowl of water at his side. Through the store window, he would see my mother and me, both of us wearing jackets over our nightgowns, and give us a look and a tail wag, the faintness of which told me that he also knew she couldn’t take care of anything on her own.
My mother’s biggest weakness, however, was her obvious inability to control her three children. She would say things like, “I bet you all get together in a corner and ask yourselves, ‘What can we do to make Mom’s day miserable?’”—which would give us the idea to do just that. She would appeal to us to understand how tired she was, which of course we didn’t much care about. She called us by our full names with a threatening voice that didn’t scare us. She would tell us we couldn’t go to our friends’ houses and then would let us go anyway the moment we raised our voices. And then, one day, when my mother found us throwing our father’s cigars off the fifth floor balcony, she threatened for the first time to call him in Saudi Arabia. I think my cigar-holding hand was in mid-air when she conjured up his name, and I thanked God for weeks that I hadn’t actually let go of the Cuban treasure. Indeed, my mother’s new disciplinary tactic was the first that ever impressed me, and I was deflated at the idea that she had actually thought of it.
The threat worked because my father terrified me. Every few months, he would emerge through the door without my having known he had left Saudi Arabia. It always happened that this unbearably tall man would appear in the parlor at the moment I was doing something bad, and so one of this giant’s first actions upon arriving home always included disciplining me in some way. I could feel an immediate shift in the rules governing my day-to-day life. Power had now passed from the little people to this man, of whom I knew little.
Soon, I’d be reduced from an energetic sofa acrobat to someone who lurked in rooms and crept between furniture. I think I once tried to make myself invisible by hiding in the dryer since I knew, with my father home, that my brother would resist the temptation of turning it on for no reason. Though I resented my mother for allowing my father’s intrusion into our lives, I’d go to her for comfort since her comparative benevolence seemed so obvious. During these times, she would play Monopoly with me in a way that was more animated than usual. She would sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me and remember to leave out the verse that scared me, the one about the child being taken away. Freddy even spent more nights at home with us. This orderly house, however, was not in the least bit pleasant to live in since the calm was built on fear. Even though my mother no longer nagged me and my brother didn’t hit me, I felt miserable because of the presence of a man who had never to my knowledge hurt me physically or emotionally. My father’s power over me grew out of his elusiveness. He scared me simply because I didn’t know enough about him to imagine what he was capable of doing.
So I felt the day my mother went ahead and called him in Saudi Arabia. While my brother, the first culprit to have had the phone passed to him, shrieked “No, Dad, no,” I imagined my punishment as anything from being left at the grocery store myself to being shipped off to an orphanage somewhere cold with cockroaches. Some minutes later, I stood mute on the phone while I was told by a calm but firm voice to go to my room and think about how to respect my mother in the future. She needed help. I was to cooperate with her from now on. “Or else,” I thought to myself, although my father never actually said the words. Soon, I was walking with a lowered head toward my toy-filled sanctuary convinced but accepting of the fact that I might never emerge. Indeed, I was fully prepared to stay there for the rest of my life talking to my stuffed animals and overfeeding Jeff, my goldfish.
I used to tell my politically-correct friends about that phone call to Saudi Arabia years later after we moved to Wellesley, MA, a town where I was embarrassed to find out my father’s family was very prominent. I used this call to show how my mother was one of those women we would never want to be, a woman under the control of a domineering man, unable to do anything without him. How could she allow my father to do exactly as he pleased? At this time, he lived in New York doing his deals, leaving my mother to suffer through us, the three kids. Indeed, she battled every week-morning with my brother, trying to get him out of bed and into a car that she avoided noticing reeked of beer. She was clueless that my sister was off losing her virginity or that I wanted to lose it myself with one of my brother’s tobacco-dipping friends. No, instead, she and I would walk around the TV room ridding the coffee table of brown spit-filled glasses like it was a normal thing to be doing. At those moments, I, like any good emerging feminist, would look upon her powerlessness—over us, our dad, her whole situation—with disdain, but at the same time convinced that she was a victim of having had no expectation as a young woman other than getting married and having the three children who made her life miserable. Look at her, I would think, waiting for the weekend so that she can unleash that man on us for two interminable days before he goes back to New York. I wondered if two married people could be any more different—so opposite one from the other—than were my parents.
When my father finally returned home from recession-hit New York and became a nine-to-five husband, I used to joke with people that now that they lived together, my parents were sure to see their differences and get divorced. They were perhaps closest—which means not close at all—the day my mother went to the customs bureau to pick up a Chinese bed that my father had bought and shipped from China a year before. When she came home, my father insisted on putting the seven-by-four, eight-foot-tall structure in the main hallway, and my mother threatened to divorce him for so grossly interfering with her house. I knew she wasn’t serious about the divorce, even though they did end up putting the Chinese bed in the front hall—after the antique had been sawed in half. Then my mother went out and bought some pillows for it, commenting on how, really, the bed was a beautiful piece of furniture, though thoroughly mauled in everyone else’s estimation.
So I was not completely surprised by the time my mother pointed out to me one day that she considered herself powerful within the relationship. Laughing and rolling her eyes, my mother said, “Your father was telling our friend Sam something, and I realized I had just told him that very same thing. Can you imagine? He was passing my idea off as his own. Honestly, your father can’t do anything without me.” I hung on her words because the idea that she might be right fascinated me. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t do anything for himself. It was that my parents, after thirty-five years of marriage, had become one versatile person, able to do more in life than either my mother or father could have done alone. For them, achieving more together happened by doing many things separately.
My own relationships in high school had run on an entirely different premise. I had thought that successfully being together with someone meant giving up your independence to that person. Indeed, I had been involved with one person after another who found any interests I had that took me away from him annoying. Soon, without really knowing why, I had begun envying the fact that my father spent his weekends in the woods playing lumberjack, and that my mother had somehow found the time and developed the drive to become a published writer. In one of my mother’s most popular pieces, she celebrated the time she and my father spent apart and equated his chainsaw to a benign “other woman.” They used to laugh about that at dinner, and then my father would turn serious and say, “You know, I can’t write like your mother, but she could use some of my discipline.”
Buried within these comments, I detected a model by which I could refashion my failing relationships. This model emphasized independence. Soon, I was dating people who lived, if not in a different country—although that was sometimes the case—then at least in a different state. Unlike my parents, however, my understanding of independence was linked to power, and this independence was for me the goal, not a means of creating a successful partnership. The way I saw it, I didn’t have to stick around or even be around whenever a person showed his faults or weaknesses. With this attitude, I ultimately had the upper hand in all of my relationships because I was always prepared to bail out. Indeed, I embodied elusiveness.
At the University of Michigan, my friends and I took pride in this kind of thinking because we thought it illustrated our sense of ourselves as “strong women.” We looked down on prostitutes and housewives for the same reason: they were controlled by men. And even to say we had feelings for a guy admitted a weakness. So my enlightened friends and I went on to wake up on some Saturday and Sunday mornings next to people we hardly knew, certainly not feeling independent of the emptiness with which these meetings often marked us. My lofty definitions and practiced intellect didn’t seem to do much in the way of teaching me to respect myself in my college years, and it certainly didn’t rid me of the infuriating idea of wanting a boyfriend.
I eventually unleashed this fury on my mother. Standing on the other side of a telephone cord, far away from her in my Michigan dorm room, I imagined my mother leaning over the sink scrubbing away at my dad’s dinner dishes. With this in mind, I considered myself at a perfect vantage point from which to launch my tirade, firmly affixing blame for my own confusion on what I imagined were her stooped, scrubbing shoulders. I accused her of being powerless, of letting my dad get away with murder. “He can do whatever he wants, and you sit there and accept it, blindly doing nothing. He’s never even done the dishes.” And to assure a little pity for me, I added, “He never even had to change a diaper or pick us up.”
After a pause, my mother told me that my father had never asked her to share in the stress of supporting a family financially and that she certainly had not intended to burden him with the day-to-day intricacies of raising kids, much less with our diapers. “That is how we worked it out. That is how we’ve supported each other.” Though my mother did not raise her voice, hers was decidedly the speech of someone who was sure of herself and not one to be crossed in this matter. Neither was she going to entertain a conversation about what her expectations in life may or may not have been. Indeed, she based her response in the reality and pragmatism of her time. I hung up the phone and paced my room until my housemate came in and announced that our Saturday night party hour had arrived.
My parents and I have been reunited in the Boston area for five years, and now I joke with my friends that I spend an unreasonable amount of time with them. But why wouldn’t I? There’s always something happening at their house. Recently, my mother hosted a gala affair for the young musicians who go to the school where my father is a board member. The other day, I arrived at the house with my laundry bag just as my mother, the president of the Wellesley Historical Society, was seeing off the board members for whom she had led a meeting. Sometimes, I come home just as my dad is pulling up the pickup to the house, and the three of us spend my first half hour there unloading the wood onto the porch. I eat countless dinners listening to stories about my parents’ speedy taxi rides through revolutionary crowds in Tehran, or about how my mother once caused my father to miss boarding his aircraft carrier. A few months ago, after my mother’s knee operation, my dad even cleared the table after dinner (I didn’t know he knew how), and on his way to the kitchen, saw me sitting on the couch and asked me if I wanted him to get me a cookie. I nearly fainted.
When my mother’s knee finally healed, my father forgot where the sink was again, but it occurred to me during the weeks of my mother’s convalescence that, as a child, I had thought that I was seeing a relationship with a fixed power balance in my father’s favor when, in fact, I was merely witness to a relationship in progress. I had concluded that my father’s being able to do more in the discipline department, even from a great distance, meant that my mother didn’t have things she could do well, like keeping the nuclear family up and running, from right where she was. My early ideas on feminism turned unproductive when I assigned a lower value to—dismissed really—my mother’s abilities. Just as Amy Tan, upon observing her own mother’s Chinese-influenced English, had assumed that imperfect expression was indicative of imperfect thought, I had used my mother’s imperfect form of discipline not only to define her character, but also that of the women of her generation. To me, their lack of choice meant that it was impossible for them to develop interests or talents.
Thus had my beliefs about women given me an impressive set of blinders, forcing me to view my mother solely in relation to her husband even as she did not. It had never occurred to me that while my father broadened his knowledge all over the world, my mother learned a new language, created a full life for four people in a country of relatively rude and intimidating people, and thoroughly engaged in glamorous outings with her ex-patriot friends who loved to be around her. And she did so without spending endless, useless hours wondering about the rightness of her marriage. Indeed, my mother looks at me like I’m crazy when I tell her that my father’s absences must have made her life difficult. In this look, I read that I’m still scared of independence, whereas my mother achieved it long ago by means of a relationship whose validity neither she nor her husband questioned. Hadn’t instinct told me that even the Chinese bed couldn’t come between them?
I’m grateful that my parents didn’t analyze things the way my generation is prone to do, because their lack of questioning has instilled me from a very young age with the certainty that they would always be together, no matter what. Seen in this light, the dreaded call to Saudi Arabia was merely one of the many ways in which my parents unrepentantly made use of each other’s strengths when the need to do so arose. Having been a witness to the whole bumpy process that is a broadening relationship—that is, togetherness—I had misunderstood bumps like the phone call as egregious faults and signs of innate weakness.
Now, here I am in my adulthood, spending so much time with my parents because I am comforted by theirs, the most seamless joining of two people I have ever known. Being around them gives me hope that my independent nature won’t doom me to a life alone. Watching their relationship grow into its fortieth year, I become more willing to accept the people, weaknesses and all, in my life. Recently, I received a phone call from my mother who was visiting her own mother in Virginia. “You know,” she said in a steady voice, “the dog is dying.” The vets were saying that Clemm, who had been sick for a long time, should be put down, news that devastated my father. My mother wanted me to go to Wellesley so that he wouldn’t be alone. “Your father is so sensitive, you know,” she said. “Go to the house and be with him.”
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