"Dialing" by Theresa M. Senft

note: This essay appears in Strategic Sex , Travers Scott, ed. Cleis Press, 1998. Please do not distribute this without written permission from me. Thanks.)

DIALING

by

Theresa M. Senft

There are three things to do in Buffalo: watch snow, watch the Bills lose another Super Bowl, and watch people you love die of cancer. Once those options are exhausted, there is nothing much left to keep you going, other than drinking or going into recovery. Nothing says fellowship, Buffalo-style, like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. If you go to one, say hello to my father for me. He likes to go to a different meeting each morning before work, so as to get the "full flavor" of the Program. For many years, my mother and I have been in Al-Anon, the codependent girl equivalent of AA. We are all used to introducing our friends, sans last names, as "Bob from Wednesday night", or "Louise from Double Winners". Strangely, what with all the snow, drinking, 12-Stepping and cancer that happens in Buffalo, what you cannot do in this town is get someone to speak to you. I know this first-hand.

I have an argument with my father. He explains to me that my mother's brain cancer is a "challenge to his sobriety", and that he can no longer drive me to the hospital to visit her. I ask him who was going to take care of him, when he becomes ill. His answer is, "the state will do that." I tell him Commnism is no longer the rage. I tell him I think Mario Cuomo is too busy to take time off work to care for my father. My father tells me I am being cruel, and that he will pray for me.

I hate him. I hate myself. I hate this situation, so I take what I consider to be an understandable course of action: I tell my father, in measured tones over the telephone, that the moment my mother dies, I am going to kill myself. Soon, I begin to panic. The thing is, sucide really does seem as good a plan as any.

Frightened and very much alone, I start dialing. First, I call my I friends in New York. All I get are answering machines. It's the week before Christmas, and they are all at parties. I am not embarrassed to threaten to kill myself during my mother's terminal illness, but I am, for reasons I might never understand, too ashamed to call my brothers past midnight, so I don't do that. Finally, swallowing my pride, I look up the Suicide Hotline People in the phone book, and dial the number. I tried to think of how I will even begin talking about my dying mother and my sobriety challenged father to a complete stranger. I wonder if this isn't a story these folks hear all the time. But there is no need to wonder anything, it turns out. The phone goes unanswered. It rings. And rings. Nothing.

I can't believe it. Someone forgot to man the Suicide Hotline during the holidays. Only in Buffalo. Squatting in the middle of my mother's bed (in her apartment, for which we continued to pay; it seemed creepy to give up her place, as she was only 51 years old) wrapped in my mother's expensive down comforter, I sob. I look like shit. I stink. I have a permanent headache from living off hospital coffee and Christmas cookies. My brothers and I have fouled my mother's home: there are candy bar wrappers in the bed, old magazines, 12 Step literature, laundry I dirty piles on the floor. And newspapers. Everywhere newspapers, one of which is the Buffalo weekly arts rag called, Gusto!

It is impossible to convey to you just how many of these Gusto! things I have had shoved into my bookbag, given to me by well-meaning Monday-night friends of my mothers who insist that I "get out of the hospital room more often" and "see some theatre." "Theresa, Buffalo is really expanding in the arts! " they say. As though I want to see a fucking play.

In the back of the Gusto! are some ads for phone sex services. They say things like, "One on One with Horny Sluts", and "Live Talk with Dirty Housewives." I've never called a phone sex service,before. On the other hand, I haven't seriously plotted my suicide before either. If I am going to die tonight, I think, I might as well go out with a bang, so to speak. It's certainly going to be far more traumatic to my brothers that I want to kill myself, than that my I used my dying mother's credit card to try something new. This is, at least, my reasoning at the time.

I pick what I think is the sleaziest ad. It is the one with a busty blonde woman bent over with her ass in the air, her hands on her nipples, her teeth perfectly straight. "God, she looks in a good mood" I think, and then I dial.

The moment I hear the connection, I clear my throat and announce: "Hello, I have never done this..."

But it doesn't matter. What I am hearing is a recording instructing me to, "Stay on the Line for the Hottest Talk--" The recording breaks off, and I hear coughing in the background. Coughing?

"Um, hi" I begin, again. "I've never done this before--"

"Wait," a woman's live voice answers. "You are a girl."

"Right," I answer, " I am."

"I don't talk to girls." she says.

Such a night I am having. First, denied my God given right to call the suicide hotline, and now, rejected by my first phone sex woman. I am ashamed, and then incensed. I mean, I'm not dialing Alabama. Surely these women have heard every request; mine is *so* different? Besides, no one has asked me what I want! Suddenly, I am feeling very Queer Nation. Right then, I decide to do something unique among Alanon members. I stand my ground.

"Can you transfer me?" I ask.

She does. I get transferred to a nicer woman, who sounds more mature. Well, old. But I don't care. I ask her to talk to me about breast feeding. She decides instead to talk to me about bondage. Whatever. I don't come on the phone, the first time. I do come later, by myself in my mother's bed. For the first time in a long time, I feel alive and beautiful.

It becomes a habit. Phone sex, I mean. I find that I can be stinky, funky, ugly, despairing, with dirty toenails and poor Home Health Care coverage, yet still feel glamorous, sensual and exciting on the telephone. I start using every break to go downstairs at the hospital and use the phone booths to make nasty calls. Some to women, on my mother's charge card. Some for free to men, on "chat lines." I call after spending the day with my mother, from her apartment, stirring a pot of soup in a ratty bathrobe and bunny slippers, answering the breathy question "What are you wearing?" with the reply, "Nothing, baby. I am wearing Nothing."

Sometimes I am "myself". Sometimes I make up a woman I want like to fuck, someone tall with long dark hair and green eyes, a ballet dancer maybe, and be her on the phone. Whenever anyone ever asks my name, I would tell them, oh, its Jane. Jane, to me, stands for Jane Doe. I like the anonymity. Only months later does it occur to me that Jane Doe is a dead person's name.

My father has a way of spinning banality to chrystalline perfection. I admit, I am on the dramatic side, but even I was surprised that he could so conveniently forget my threat to commit suicide, and call Christmas morning, suggesting that we go Christmas shopping together. I, characteristically, agreed. We go to the Eastern Hills Mall, where he buys many products for his second wife at Ye Olde Body and Bath Shoppe. Of course, it is snowing. It always snows at this time of year in Buffalo. In the two hours we are at the mall, the snow drifts accumulate up to the door handles on his car.

Now he is nervous. He doesn't want to drive me back to the hospital. He wants me to stay over at his new house, with his new wife , and his new make-believe family that includes a yippy dog. I tell him no. He has to drive me back to the hospital. He then reverses the drama queen business on me, and starts to sob confessing that AA has taught him he has a crippling fear of driving in the snow. It is his new wife who comes to the rescue, driving me to the hospital, so as no to threaten my father's sobriety.

Momma is sleeping when I get there. She is quiet, snoring a little. The room is blue. The light matches the color of the bruises running up and down my mothers arms from her IV's. I hear the pumps and the drains in time with her breath. She has had her third brain surgery. Her shunt keeps getting infected. Her head is wrapped up in a little turban of white gauze. Her cerebellum is where the tumor was located, so her balance and walking has been taken from her. She ain't going nowhere, she tells me again and again. Even so, she makes the trip to the physical therapy room every day, and tries.

Her eyes open, and they are wet. "Hi. It's me", she says. She often talks like this now, like a child. She asks me to come around to the side of the bed, and I do. I kiss her face, and feel the little whiskers the hormones are causing her to grow. She tells me she wants to show me something. She asks me to hold her arms, and pull. She manages to sit up, and I start to cry. "I been doing this for a week, but I told them keep it a secret, it is a Christmas present for Theresa, " she says. I cry some more.

She wants me to wheel her down the hall, to look at the Christmas tree. I do, and almost lose control of the wheelchair a few times, which makes us laugh like loons, alone in a deserted secretaries wing of the Cancer Clinic. She was right, the tree is worth the trip. It is tall and high and alone in the snowy field and it has lights on it, and it is perfect. My mom asks me to sing her a song. She always asks me that, and I always say no, which is strange, because I have sung professionally. I say no again, and she says, okay, fine. Can she have some Chinese food?

I call every place in the phone book for Chinese food on Christmas eve, because my mother is a lunatic, and finally get some people in this dumpy town to feel sorry for me and my crazed dying mother and deliver. Then I dial a number (I have them written in my date book now) and manage some quick phone sex in the downstairs booth. I come, the food comes, and I get on the elevator. When I get upstairs, juggling huge shopping bags full of Chinese food, the first thing I see is my mother sitting in her chair, mouthing my name over and over, silent tears running down her face. I look down at her hand. It has swollen to the size of a softball and is filling up. "I am going go explode," she whispers, her eyes wide.

Yelling, I finally get a nurse, who waddles down to my mothers room, takes a look at her hand, now swollen to the size of a small tether ball, and announces that my mother's line has been "infiltrated". She takes the IV line out of my mothers hand, covers her up with a towel, and begins preparing a fresh needle, muttering to my mother and I about how this line my hurt, the ones in right after the infiltrations always do-- Right then, my mother does a remarkable thing. She looks at the nurse and says,

"Write this down in my chart. No more lines. This my last Christmas. No more lines."

Clucking in disgust, the nurse does write my mother's demand into her chart and then looks again at the two of us: my mother, IV-less for the first time in a month; me, polluting the room with hundreds of little boxes of greasy Chinese takeout. We eat like dogs. She says she is happy to have the IV out. She is glad to have taken charge of her care, she says. She loves me the best, she says, and she knows she is going to get better soon. She falls asleep before eleven, and I doze in the chair. When I wake up at midnight, and kiss her, I feel something wet and warm running down behind her ear, and I know what it is, because we have gone through this before. I t is cerebral spinal fluid. My mother's wrong. There will be more operations, more IVs. She is going to die in this horrible snowy place.

My momma wanted to have one more orgasm before she died. I don't know if she ever thought of masturbating in the hospital room. She was a Catholic school girl at heart. Besides, she was left handed, and that is where the IVs ran, up her left arm. I hope she took the opportunity on Christmas eve, when her hand was free, and her hopes were high. I know I did. I took the white down comforter, and went to sleep in the visiting room. There was a tree with blinking lights. Clink, they went. No one else was there; no one else was going to be there. There was a blizzard outside. I used the courtesy telephone to call a phone sex line. I used my mothers charge card to pay for it. I spoke to a woman named Monique (they are all named Monique) and asked her to tell me about her breasts. She started to tell me about bondage; for some reason they all want to give me a bondage story. Generally, I let the bondage story run its course, but that night I stopped Monique. I asked her to listen instead. I sang softly into the phone:

I don't want my arms around you--
no, not much.
I don't bless the day I found you--
no, not much.
I don't need you like the sun
don't need the sky.
I won't love you longer than
the day I die.
You don't please me, when you tease me--
no, not much.
My head is swimming, from your cool and
crazy touch.
Darling, if you ever go--
could I take it?
Maybe so.
But would I like it?
No, not much.

Merry Christmas, Momma.