Phone Home

Phone Home Eileen Vorbach Collins (bio) In a garden in the town of Otsuchi, in the northern region of Japan, Itaru Sasaki set up a telephone connected to nothing. This is not a cellular phone without a talk, text, and data plan. It is not simply a phone without a signal, the portentous No Service icon where the Wi-Fi logo should be. There are no dreaded bars with a slanted line crossing through. It is an old black rotary phone, which, if you are of a certain age, might cause you to absently extend your right index finger, slightly bent at the first and second joints, ready to dial a seven-digit number ingrained on your memory like a tattoo. My daughter, Lydia, had curated a room full of eclectic retro trimmings. In 1999, the year she ended her life, when pagers were passé and cell phones were becoming popular, she had a beloved pink Princess phone. The Princess was not the original dial model but had push buttons that made satisfying little beeps, not the unpleasant drrrrt of the dial. With practice, you could play a song on those keys. Lydia decorated the phone with Hello Kitty stickers and glitter that wound up in her hair. This was especially charming when she’d shaved much of it off and the glitter stuck to the stubble that was already blue from the Manic Panic hair coloring. If the angle and light were just right it looked like a nimbus, at least in my memory. Itaru’s phone is in a white phone booth with glass windows. He put it there to help process his grief over his cousin’s death. A one-way conversation on a phone that never rings, Itaru called it his kaze no denwa, which roughly translated means “wind phone.” For months after Lydia died, I would call our home phone from my cell to hear her voice on the answering machine. I wouldn’t talk much, just close my eyes and listen. I always said I love you before hanging up. Her father was angry that I left her voice on the recorder. He didn’t like [End Page 113] to hear it when he called to speak to our son. Pain is like that—sometimes manifesting as rage. Finally, I changed the recording. My sister-in-law made a copy of Lydia’s voice. I hope she still has it. How long do those things last? I wish I could call that number now and hear her voice again. Somewhere I have a cassette tape of Lydia reading a story she’d written in French. It may not be grammatically perfect, but I wouldn’t know the difference. There’s a recording of a flute piece that she was practicing, but I can never be sure whether it’s her playing or something else she’d recorded. The tapes are all in a box in the closet of my spare room. Third Eye Blind, Dvořák, The Cure, Mozart, They Might Be Giants, Beethoven, Marilyn Manson, Sarah McLachlan, Patsy Cline, Gregorian chants. There are also about twenty mixtapes made by Lydia or that were gifts from friends. Some are painted and labeled, others offer a surprise. Years ago, I would take a few on car trips and listen. Now cassette tapes are as obsolete as that dial-up phone. There is no tape player in the car. Some of the tapes are unraveled. I bought a little device that is supposed to record the sound of a tape onto an mp3 player, but by the time I figure out how to use it that too may be an outdated technology. For as long as we lived in the house where she died, when our home phone rang, I was always disappointed that it wasn’t her. For months I answered the phone with high expectations. I developed tinnitus, a ringing in my ears so loud I thought it was the telephone. I heard it when I lay awake at night. I heard it in my dreams. Or was there more to it than damaged little hair cells in the cochlea, that little snail...