Hanging Up

by Delia Ephron

  “What are you doing back? Did you finish with the moose? Did my father die?”

  “No. My God, I was worried.” He wraps me in his arms. “You’re home,” he whispers. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I lay my head on his shoulder by way of an answer, finding the nook between his neck and shoulder that has always been my resting place.

  “I couldn’t reach you, so I got on a plane,” says Joe. “Why did you unplug the phone?”

  “I didn’t want to be surprised. My father’s spent my whole life surprising me, and I’m going to find out he’s dead only when I want to.”

  “That makes perfect sense.” Joe lets go just long enough to admire me and my wisdom, then folds me in again. The phone rings.

  “You plugged it in?”

  “I’m sorry,” says Joe.

  “Well, he must be dead. What else could it be at one in the morning?”

  “The phone’s ringing,” Jesse yells from somewhere upstairs.

  “We hear it,” shouts Joe.

  “I’ll get it,” I say.

  “No, I will,” says Joe. “You’ll hear the news from me. That will make it easier.”

  Meanwhile the phone continues to ring. “It’s the ringing I’ve always hated. The suddenness of it,” I tell him.

  “The surprise,” says Joe. “But sometimes it’s good news.”

  “True.” We are in the living room now, heading toward the telephone on the little round side table. The sound is especially dreadful and insistent. To accompany it, the phone ought to vibrate, the way it does in a cartoon, the receiver shaking right out of the holder, demanding, “Answer me.”

  “I’ll get it,” I insist. “I can handle it. It’s not a problem.” I take the receiver out of Joe’s hand, and realize, as I do so, that what I have said is nearly true. “Hello?”

  “This is Jennifer’s mother.”

  Wrong number, I mouth to Joe. “What number are you calling?” I ask.

  “Isn’t this the Marks home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to speak to Jennifer.”

  “Oh my God, you mean Ifer.”

  “I mean Jennifer. I told her to move back home tonight and she hasn’t appeared. Would you send my daughter home now?”

  “Gladly.” I hang up. “Ifer’s mother wants her home.”

  The news sinks in. Just the thought of Ifer’s imminent departure, and the house feels like ours again. We should run from room to room leaping for joy. “She’s really a sweetheart,” I say to Joe. “I’ll miss her.”

  “Me too,” says Joe, who is already out of the living room and halfway up the stairs. “Ifer,” he calls.

  Ifer and Jesse stick their heads over the banister.

  “Sad news,” I say.

  “Your mother wants you home,” says Joe. “And she wants Buddha too. Don’t forget Buddha.”

  Ifer groans.

  “You’d better get going. Right now. Jesse, you can take my car.” Joe tosses the keys to him.

  Ifer comes limply down the stairs, barefoot, with Buddha in her arms and her dirty canvas backpack slung over her shoulder. With each step, her foot lands more heavily. Her sentence is finally being executed: she is no less than on her way to the gas chamber. “Spiritually she’s not my mother,” she wails. “If you kick me out, I’ll be an orphan.”

  “No, you won’t.” I give her a brisk kiss on the cheek. “An orphan is someone in England whose parents died in World War Two. Or a poor child in a Dickens book who turns out to be rich in the end. That’s what an orphan is.”

  “Not technically, Mom.” And undoubtedly Jesse has more to say about this, but Joe closes the door.

  “Come on, sweetheart.” He starts upstairs.

  “Joe.”

  “What?”

  “I have to see my father.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow.”

  “No. Tomorrow may be too late.”

  The hospital is deserted. Our footsteps in the corridors, the ding of the elevator doors when they open sound jarring and frightful. “It feels like we’re waking the dead,” Joe says as we get off the elevator. On the wall are groups of room numbers with arrows pointing in all directions. Trying to deduce the location of my father’s room feels monumentally difficult.

  “I know this is stupid, coming at this hour,” I tell Joe, “but I want to talk to him.”

  “It’s not stupid. Well, maybe it is,” Joe amends. “He’s unconscious, isn’t he?”

  “With failing kidneys.”

  I hook my arm through Joe’s, latching on to the only available security as we approach my father’s room. His door is shut. “What’s that quiz show where you choose door number one, door number two, or door number three?”

  “The Price Is Right,” says Joe. “I think.”

  “So what’s behind the door? My father in a coma, or a washer-dryer?”

  “A television,” says Joe. “I can hear it. And if he’s in a coma, who’s watching it?”

  Ogmed. Who else?

  Joe goes over to the nurses’ station, where one nurse sits, her head down on the desk on folded arms. “Excuse me?” he says.

  She lifts her head and rubs her bloodshot eyes.

  “We’re here to see Lou Mozell.”

  “I’m just covering,” she says. “The floor nurse is on break.”

  “Fine, but I believe my wife’s father is unconscious, and we’re wondering who’s in there with him.”

  She shrugs. “Some woman.”

  OhmyGod, it is Ogmed. Who else would be here? She must have called the Home to check on him, heard the news, and driven over. The Salvation Army, that’s what she called herself.

  “Joe?” I take his arm.

  “What?”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  I look around wildly for someplace private, but in fact the whole hall is private. “You know that doctor whose car Jesse hit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, remember I told you his mother called?”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t? Well, she did. I guess she handles stuff for him like a secretary, so I happened to mention that I was going to the hospital, and she got upset about Dad and came to see him. She sat in his room and knitted and then she said we didn’t have to pay for the repair because she felt sorry for me.”

  I search Joe’s face for a reaction while he thinks about this.

  “How strange,” he says finally.

  “I’ll say.”

  “We don’t have to pay? This is the only thing your father’s ever done for us.” He starts laughing. “Who is she? Where’d she come from?”

  “Persia.”

  “You mean Iran. Iranians always say they’re from Persia because they think everyone hates Iran.” His brow knots with thought. He runs his hand again and again through the shag of hair that insists on falling over his forehead. Then he shakes his head as if to jog his thinking loose. I recognize the process. It’s unmistakable. “An old woman—is she old?”

  “I guess.”

  “An old woman sits at the deathbed of a man she doesn’t know?” Now the hairs on the back of his neck are tingling. “What was she knitting?”

  “Something purple.”

  “I’d like to do a story on her.”

  “I don’t think so, Joe, and please don’t ask her, because she’s in there.”

  “You think that woman—”

  “Ogmed.”

  “You think Ogmed is in your father’s hospital room now? At two in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re nuts, Eve.” He walks over to the door and pushes it open.

  “Shush,” says Maddy, not moving her eyes off the television.

  She is sitting in the chair next to my father’s bed, so they are both facing a small television, the kind with a tape deck built in, that she has placed on the windowsill. Her back is arched, so her pregnant belly, which is still nearly flat, protrudes as m
uch as possible. “Shush,” she says again.

  I realize she’s watching her soap.

  It’s her final exit scene. “Dad, look,” she whispers.

  My father lies on his back with his eyes wide open. His dentures are sitting on his adjustable bed tray. He has one tooth of his own remaining, a holdout, the last soldier in the Alamo. It’s on the bottom, smack in the center. I can see it because his lower lip hangs down loosely.

  “I’ve just gotten back from vacation and I’m feeling great,” Maddy explains, as on TV she strides into her boss’s office with a present, a cactus from her trip to Santa Fe.

  “I don’t think I can accept it,” the boss says.

  The Maddy in the room tenses with excitement as on TV she swerves around, back and forth from boss to temp, a sexy young woman, then takes some time to put two and two together. “Oh, I get it. You couldn’t make it with me, so you’re making it with her.”

  On the TV, Madeline seizes the telephone, rips out the cord, and heaves the phone at her boss, who ducks. It shatters the glass on his framed law school diploma. She stomps out of the office.

  Madeline flicks off the tape by remote control and looks to our father for validation. He breathes. “I wanted you to see what I can do,” she says softly.

  “Do you really think he was watching?”

  Maddy tosses her head. “It’s possible.”

  “He wasn’t even looking at the television. He’s facing that way, but he’s on his back, his eyes are aimed at the ceiling.”

  “Would you be quiet, he can hear you.” Maddy goes to the doorway and stands there, waiting.

  I join her, and together, as if we are about to slug it out, we step into the hall.

  Madeline throws the first punch. “Just because he’s unconscious and all his vital signs have crashed, you think—”

  “His vital signs have crashed? You mean he could die at any minute? When did this happen?”

  “Tonight.” She pushes her hair around. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You didn’t come to see my tape, that’s for sure.” She walks back in.

  “I like your acting,” says Joe as Maddy disconnects the TV and starts to fold the cord.

  She ignores him. “Didn’t they call you?”

  “They probably couldn’t reach us. Our phones were unplugged.”

  Maddy parks herself in the chair again, holding the arms as she sits to let herself down gently, I assume so she doesn’t jar the baby.

  “Can I talk to Dad alone?”

  “How can you talk to him,” she says sarcastically, “if he’s unconscious?” She pats his hand. “Sorry, Dad.”

  “All I said, Maddy, was that he wasn’t looking at the television, but maybe he can hear. Maybe he’ll wake up when I talk to him. You never know.”

  “Fine, Eve, whatever.” She hoists herself up, using the chair arms again for assistance, and flounces out.

  Joe squeezes my shoulder. “I’m going to try to reach Georgia. It’s nine hours later in Paris. There’s a phone down the hall.”

  So now it’s just me, Dad, and death hanging out together. I try to feel its presence. I imagine it floating above the bed, a shadow of my father, all negative image, until, boom, it drops. But I feel nothing. I have heard and read of inspiring death-room scenes, family clasping hands around a bed, providing a hammock of comfort that allows the dying person to let go, if the person wants to, which is also something I can’t grasp. Death and peace. How can you feel peaceful if you don’t feel anything? The idea that peace comes with death is one more false comfort for the living. No, there is no spiritual feeling in this room. I look at my father closely, aware that for most of my adult life I have tried not to. He has a mustache suddenly. I suppose the nurse couldn’t manage to shave the hairs beneath his nose and left them. Or maybe she amuses herself by putting mustaches on dying men the way kids draw mustaches and beards on people in magazine photographs.

  “Dad?” I throw the word out into the air. It feels ridiculous, like throwing a pass with no receiver.

  I walk around the bed, working up energy, trying to imagine I’m Ifer the Kasmian, who believes in spirits and magic, so what I’m doing doesn’t seem foolish. “Dad, if we had such a special relationship, you owe me.”

  I lean in close, my voice in his ear. I am minimizing the chance that my words will have no impact, that they will disappear on their way to his brain the way almost everything else I’ve said over the years has. “I’m not mad at you.” My God, that’s so stingy. “I’ve loved you, even though …” No, no qualifications. “Are you afraid?” Blink. Do something. “Give me some solace, please.”

  I want to jump on his bed and pound him. Help me, you self-centered loony. You doled out insights before. You provided moments of guidance even if they vanished like Brigadoon almost the second they occurred. I constructed a father from them, used them to justify a lifetime of devotion.

  I stare at him fiercely, trying to will something out of him, trying to force a final act of generosity. It can’t be too late.

  We have been here now for several days off and on. My father’s blood pressure teases, playing a game with us. It drops down—“Any minute now,” the nurse announces—then rebounds inexplicably. When it’s low, my father takes rasping labored breaths, and his chest strains with every intake, as if there were weights holding it down. Madeline and I have designated chairs, much as we had them at the family dinner table. She always sits on the left side of the bed, one hand resting on her tummy. I sit on the right. We are the only two people stupid enough to try to get from an unconscious man the wisdom and comfort that we could never get from him when he was conscious. You’d think that would be a bond. Or in the face of death, that our irritation with each other would appear insignificant. But we speak only when necessary, each appalled by the insensitivity of the other. Joe is the only bridge, getting us coffee and sandwiches when he is not working or looking after Jesse. We have been here enough to have opinions about the cafeteria food, to recommend the tuna, which I am eating now, and avoid the chicken salad. We have this knowledge but no one to pass it on to.

  I hear unfamiliar noise in the hall. Unfamiliar because, while not loud, it isn’t restrained. When I go home at night, Joe points out that I have taken to speaking in hushed tones. “Your hospital voice,” he calls it. But this chatty and gay conversation I overhear could be from a cocktail party. I exchange a rare look with Maddy, then walk out.

  A crowd of nurses—in fact, I didn’t know there were so many working here—yak loudly as they move in a huddle, each carrying a magazine. They wave them, read them, clutch them to their chests. Georgia emerges from the crowd. She has flown nonstop from Paris and, even so, surrounded by white uniforms and clumpy white shoes, appears the perfect rose in the center of the bouquet. Her linen suit is only slightly creased. A double strand of pearls, long of course. Her black hair shiny and sharp. A slash of red lipstick.

  “Here.” She whips into a leather bag and presents me with the tenth-anniversary edition of Georgia. “Hot off the press.”

  On the cover, against a shiny metallic background, Georgia is seated in a high-tech desk chair. She is positioned exactly like Rodin’s The Thinker, except that she is not naked but sports a snazzy black suit. “What I wear to work but better.” Georgia, reading my mind, examines herself over my shoulder. In the photo, just like The Thinker, she rests her elbow on her knee and her chin against the back of her hand. Only instead of looking pensive, she is winking at us. “I wanted it to say, ‘I’m serious, but you know what, I’m fun too.’”

  “You look great,” I say.

  “Thanks.” She kisses me on both cheeks, a habit picked up after less than a week in France. “How’s he doing?”

  “He could go at any minute.” I cup my hand over my mouth so only she can hear. “I’m not speaking to Maddy. Do you believe she showed Dad a tape of her—”

  “Shush.” Georgia is looking over my shoulder. “Hi, Madeline, darling.” She
kisses her on both cheeks too. “How’s the baby?”

  “Fine. Thank you for asking.” Maddy looks pointedly at me.

  “Stephen couldn’t come,” says Georgia.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We don’t know him.”

  “I’m crazy to have you meet him, but he had to get back to his patients.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve only been together four years.”

  Georgia lets out a big laugh, then clamps her mouth closed, turning wistful. She links one arm through mine, the other through Maddy’s, and shifts her sad face back and forth between us.

  “May I have your autograph?” Madeline breaks away to sign as the nurse hands her magazine and pen past Maddy to Georgia.

  “What’s that?” asks Maddy.

  “The tenth-anniversary edition,” I tell her.

  Georgia signs a splashy signature above her winking head. “I love Georgia,” the nurse is confiding. “I always read your message first: ‘From the Editor.’”

  “Me too,” says another.

  “You know,” says Georgia, “we did a readers’ survey because we wanted Georgia to contain what you were really interested in, and we discovered that my greeting was the most popular thing in the magazine, isn’t that amazing?”

  A sniffling nurse offers around a box of tissues. “If you read her message this month, you’re going to need one,” she warns.

  “Thank you, I need one,” says Georgia, pulling out a tissue. “I’m going to see my father now.”

  With Madeline leading the way, Georgia leaves the group of nurses comparing her autographs and admiring her photo, and walks into our father’s room. I trail after, flipping open my copy of the magazine. It seems to fall naturally to the “From the Editor” page. Georgia probably has it precreased so this happens.

  She walks slowly around his bed, taking in his every angle. “Oh my goodness,” she whispers, “where is he? I can’t even find him in that body.”

  “I know what you mean.” Maddy grimaces.

  I start reading aloud: “‘This was the hardest challenge of my life: to put out our tenth-anniversary edition while my father’s life was slipping away. Anyone who’s lost a parent knows how wrenching it is to see her mother’s or father’s life ebb. Every day there was less and less of the daddy I loved, but upset as I was, I forged on—’