Wilde Lake(28)

As spring and AJ’s fifteenth birthday approached in 1977, he began to campaign for a new telephone line in our house, a private one, to be installed in his third-floor room. And if not a private one, then an extension. Between sports and his other extracurricular activities, he was almost never home. When he was home, he usually had Noel with him. And if Noel wasn’t at our house, AJ needed to talk to him, for hours and hours. We had only two telephones, one in my father’s bedroom and one in the kitchen, a fire-engine red one that hung on the wall. The cord was just long enough that AJ could stretch it into the walk-in pantry. I would go into the kitchen after dinner and see this thin scarlet worm taut across the kitchen, hear AJ’s mutterings. But even when I could make out the words—and I always lingered as long as I could—they never seemed to be about anything important or interesting.

Yet AJ insisted he needed his own phone.

“I can’t see why,” our father said. “All you use it for is idle gossip.”

“No, we check our math homework. Algorithms are killing me in Algebra two. I don’t understand them at all.”

“Then I don’t think more time on the telephone is the remedy. A tutor, perhaps, if you’re really struggling—”

“Also, we could use a Baltimore line, couldn’t we? Don’t you need to be able to make local calls to both Baltimore and D.C.? That way, I could have a private line. Lots of kids do.”

Now in Columbia, at that time, your telephone prefix conveyed an important part of your family’s story, its roots. You were given a choice, upon moving in, whether you wanted to be “997,” which allowed you to make local calls to D.C., or if you were “730,” oriented toward Baltimore. Yet my family, who had moved to Columbia from Baltimore, always had a D.C. prefix. “For my work,” our father said, and I guess that made sense. He was in government, government was in D.C. And Annapolis, the state capital. There was nothing left for us in Baltimore. AJ sometimes spoke longingly of the house where he had lived his first eight years—the stained-glass windows, the turret, the fenced backyard. But on our rare trips into the city—usually to eat at Haussner’s, the art-crammed German restaurant that my father loved—there was always a reason not to drive by. We were running late, the house was in the wrong direction.

“We don’t need a Baltimore line,” our father said. “But we can compromise. If your grades are good on your third-quarter report card, I’ll install an extension, only in the living room.”

The phone that arrived in April was as ordinary as a phone could be: black, squat, unmoving. If you wanted to use it, you had to sit in one of the two wing chairs flanking the round mahogany table where the phone lived. Still, it was a novelty and like all children, I loved novelty. Home alone (except for Teensy) until 4 or 5 P.M., I would sit in a wing chair, the TV muted, and pretend to place calls. The White House, Buckingham Palace, China. I yearned to make prank phone calls, but knew the circumstances would be dire if I were caught. Besides, the only two jokes I knew were about Prince Albert in the can, which I didn’t really understand, and “Is your refrigerator running?” (Then go out and catch it!) I wasn’t even sure to whom someone was meant to place prank calls. Friends? Strangers? I would pick up the black handset, my index finger on the button so the phone was not actu ally off the hook, and imagine someone calling me. Lu? Lu? Would you like to come over? Sure, let’s make ice cream sundaes and watch The Big Valley.

I was playing this sad little game when the phone rang one afternoon, vibrating beneath my finger. Startled, I almost dropped the handset. Instead, I lifted my finger and rattled off as I had been instructed, “Brant household-who-may-I-say-is-calling?,” even as Teensy was saying the same thing into the kitchen phone, although not quite as swiftly.

“Luisa?” a strange woman’s voice asked. “Luisa?”

At that, I did drop the phone with a shriek, let it clatter to the floor, believing a ghost was calling me. From the kitchen, Teensy yelled: “You hang that phone up NOW, Lu. You hear me? You hang up that phone and go outside.” I did, but not before I heard Teensy in the kitchen, breathing hard into the receiver. “Please do not call here again. I’m sorry, ma’am, but you know that’s how it has to be.”

The phone began to ring every day after that, between the hours of three and five. At some point, Teensy decided to stop answering. “Nuisance calls,” she said. “Like pranks?” “Yes. Do not pick up the phone. That only encourages them. Just let it ring.”

Every afternoon, the phone continued to ring. Five times, eight times, a dozen. We got used to it. As for telling my father—I guess I assumed Teensy had filled him in. Surely this had something to do with his work.

Now, even though Miss Maude was no longer available to look after me, Teensy had come to expect her early leave-taking on Fridays. My father had decided I could stay home alone as long as AJ promised to get there as soon as possible. “As soon as possible,” to AJ’s way of thinking, was any time that put him through the door ahead of our father, who seldom left the office before 6:30. I kept his secret, enjoying my autonomy and the power it gave me. Then, one Friday, as I was watching a rerun of The Big Valley, the phone rang and I was so caught up by the strange things that were happening on the show—the Barkley brothers were threatening a Chinese man, making him swear on a chicken that he didn’t know where Victoria Barkley was, when she was downstairs in his master’s basement—that I picked up the receiver almost without thinking.