Redial

Clarissa arrived home from work to find her husband, Jawon, spinning a cell phone on each hand, like two little helicopter blades, on the front stoop of their flat. A small crowd of about ten stood around watching, but it was enough people so that Jawon didn’t notice Clarissa, at least at first, and he was concentrating on what he was doing anyway, which was really quite amazing. Clarissa recognized one of the phones as her own iPhone, which she’d left at home by accident, having gotten up late for work. The other one was pink and she didn’t recognize it, but there was a woman in the crowd who was glaring at Jawon as if this were her phone, and this woman made Clarissa instantly jealous as she seemed to have more than a passing interest in what was going on.

It was a spring day not far from downtown and soon a few more people came to watch. Jawon went from spinning two phones, horizontally like helicopter blades, in his hands at the same time, to juggling them, and now a third one appeared, which Clarissa recognized as Jawon’s own phone, from his pocket. So now he was juggling three phones although they were no longer spinning, at least not as much, and he made their arc slightly higher so that now he had a second or two between when he’d throw one and catch the other. And he used that second, quick, to grab his phone, after he’d caught it, and dial the pink phone, which now made a cute little squeaky ring-tone and this made everyone laugh a little.

The woman, who was on the other side of the crowd from Clarissa, now changed her attitude as if Jawon had just given her some flowers. It was clearly her phone and he was calling her as part of his juggling act; the three phones continued in the air; he was juggling them all even as one rang its cute ringtone. Clarissa boiled: who was this woman who had a ringtone on Jawon’s phone? Jawon had a really good juggling skill, apparently, which she had never observed, and hadn’t broken his stride at all. But Clarissa could take no more, and found a young boy of about eighteen who had been walking down the street, and who was on his own phone, for whatever reason. Clarissa demanded that this young boy lend her his phone, and he handed it to her obediently. Instantly she dialed her own number, and watched as her own phone, one of the three being juggled, started ringing also. Its ringing did not match with the pink phone’s ringing and there was a kind of cacophony. The audience was spellbound.

Jawon hesitated for a moment, not quite knowing to do about the two ringing phones. It was as if it hadn’t occurred to him that Clarissa’s phone might ring, as if he were the only one who had ever called her, and he hadn’t, up to now, seen her, as far as she knew; she was hiding somewhat behind a larger man and a tree. She clutched the young boy’s phone as it continued to dial her phone across the sidewalk, but she could see that for some reason they young boy, wild curly hair unkempt, had gone white as a sheet, terrorized in fear. She sensed police cars coming from both directions on the street; she was right about that, as they were approaching quickly.

Jawon dropped the phones in a mess on the street, but it wasn’t his fault; the woman had jumped in in some way to ensure that her own phone wouldn’t be damaged and in the ensuing struggle the other phones came down; one hit his arm and bounced, and the other, Clarissa’s, would have smashed on the sidewalk, but for his foot which reached out and kicked it at the last moment; a kind of cap fell off anyway but it didn’t seem to stop ringing.

Within moments the police had arrived, from both directions, and stopped more or less immediately in front of Clarissa; they came out of their cars, two balding white men fully loaded, and grabbed the young boy by each arm. He, white as a sheet, was unable to move, apparently. He made no move for his cell phone which was still clutched in Clarissa’s hand. They were removing him to the cars where they would search him and push him in and take him uptown for whatever his offense. He looked like a scared kid who had forgotten, at least for the moment, about his phone. But on his way to the police car, being somewhat dragged as he was, he inadvertently kicked one of the phones on the ground, and it skittered along the pavement and rested under one of the tires of the police car, such that if that car were to go forward, it would crunch the phone in minutes.

Now all this had happened in seconds; the police knew who they wanted and they’d got him, and got him over against the car where they could search him and do what police do. Several people in the crowd had disappeared immediately when the police cars had arrived. Several others had been involved in the little scuffle between Jawon and the woman, where the woman actually tried to answer the phone as if the ringing had been driving her crazy even though she’d known it was him calling. It clearly wasn’t her phone that was under the car, since hers was pink, but Clarissa at first couldn’t clearly tell whether it was hers or Jawon’s, since the two phones simultaneously hitting the pavement had shut up the one that had been ringing. It also wasn’t clear who exactly had seen the phone get kicked and skitter over under the tire. Clarissa had seen it, but the boy probably hadn’t; the police hadn’t; Jawon hadn’t, even though it could have been his own phone.

Jawon at this point was picking up one phone and putting its little battery cap back on it, and inching away from the woman who he saw more as a liability now that the police were on the scene. He was like about half the neighbors who would just as soon be anywhere else when the police started their arrest, even though as far as Clarissa knew he was clean, not wanted for anything, a writing teacher by trade home alone grading half the afternoon, and this is what bothered Clarissa the most: when she’d confront him about this woman with the pink phone, it very well could turn out to be some student, come over to discuss her paper, on legitimate business, blah blah blah. But explain the ringtone, two-timer, she thought to herself. It was now clear to her that it was her own phone under the police car’s tire, and nobody going after it; she surely wasn’t going after it herself, since she didn’t care for those policemen; she knew over half of them from a time three or four years ago when she’d dated one and every one of them seemed to know a little too much about her. Since she’d met Jawon, that would be two years ago, she was grateful to have nothing to do with them. And she wanted it to stay that way.

She expected Jawon to go looking for the phone, but he didn’t. So she pressed “redial” on the phone in her hand and it started ringing, down under the tire as it was, and one of the policemen, believe it or not, stooped down to answer it. That’s the older generation for you, ring a phone near them, and they go after it dutifully, as if it would be here one minute, gone the next, or as if somebody wanted to talk to them. OK, she thought, I’ll talk to this guy, if he’s going to answer. The policeman was all bent over with his hand down by the tire, trying to grab the phone.

Over by Jawon the woman was now beating him with her purse, which was also pink, because apparently she’d just found out that he was married. How she found this out, Clarissa had no idea, perhaps he’d just told her. But the phone in Jawon’s hand now appeared to be Clarissa’s phone; it was ringing again along with the one beneath the car. Now Clarissa was confused. She knew she’d just called her own phone, she thought, but somebody was calling the other phone, and she wasn’t sure who, and wasn’t sure which of these two phones she’d actually called. She’d know her own ringtone on her husband’s phone, but she wasn’t calling from her own phone.

Jawon saw the policeman with the other phone now and walked over to the policeman. He had also seen Clarissa by now, she was pretty sure. He appeared to be grateful the police were around now, or this wild woman might have kept beating him. Somehow Clarissa felt everything was going to be OK. Jawon was retrieving the phone from the one policeman; the other was putting the poor teenager in the car as part of the arrest procedure. One way or another, Clarissa would get her own phone back.

Clarissa remembered that she was still holding the young kid’s phone, and that she could give it to him, or to the policeman, quickly, before it was too late, before they drove off. So she turned it off and walked toward the police to do that. But that phone, the phone in her hand, rang, and, mindlessly, she answered it. An older female voice on the other end asked if everything was ok, and, though it wasn’t, Clarissa made a sound that could be interpreted as yes. Though there was a police window in the way, she held the phone out to the boy, and he let the policeman take it, rather than reach out for it himself. Somehow she sensed that he, also, was not in serious trouble; his eyes met hers, and she sensed that. She had an intuition about these things, and sometimes it worked better than all the phones put together.

Five-second rule

Ed was at his kitchen counter one day explaining to his wife how lucky he was. He’d been lucky in love, he said, and his wife blushed, but, he was lucky in lots of other ways too. Suddenly a grape fell from the counter, and he picked it up quickly, said “five-second rule,” and popped it into his mouth.

This in fact was to him a tradition that went back to his childhood; saying “five-second rule” was little more than saying “gezundheit” after someone coughed; it was a kind of superstitious cleansing of whatever had dropped. His wife laughed quickly and looked the other way. When they were courting she had asked him what that “five-second rule” was all about and he’d said, if it’s on the floor less than five seconds, it’s not too dirty and you can still eat it. The essence of it is, you have to move fast; you can’t stop to think about it, and you have to let a little dirt go, it’s not going to kill you.

The afternoon sun shone in the kitchen window and left a calm, peaceful, clear kind of day that appeared to be about to end with a gentle western Missouri sunset. For some reason, perhaps because he’d been explaining about luck, Ed thought about the hedge-apple incident, which happened when he was maybe about fifteen. Hedge-apples, also known as Osage oranges, were these big softball-sized nuts that were hard as a rock but wild and easy to find in those parts. People said that if you put a hedge-apple under your sink it would keep the roaches away because they kind of stunk in a really subtle way, only the roaches could smell them. Ed didn’t really know whether this was true, because he hadn’t had much problem with roaches anyway and didn’t have to experiment. But when he was about fifteen, he came over a hill near his house and happened to see a local bully roughing up his sister. The guy was mean and he was being rough with her in a way that made Ed’s adrenaline flow and made him pick up a hedge=apple and hide behind a large tree. When he’d had the opportunity, he fired the hedge-apple at the bully and, just out of pure luck, hit him in the head and knocked him out cold.

His sister Edie, who was actually his twin, didn’t miss a beat, thanked him for his generosity, and stole the guy’s pants, right there on the road not far from their house, and talked Ed into hiding them in the barn, a kind of shed connected to their house, after they’d run home. Ed was sure this guy would wake up, enraged, and come after them both, and do them in, but in fact the guy didn’t know what had hit him, woke up somewhat confused and ended up dropping the matter, never bothering Edie again. Ed was in fact lucky; he never had anything more to do with the guy.

Edie wasn’t so lucky. She’d married a guy who had turned out to be bad; spent all their money, got in trouble with the law, ran off with somebody else, she had to go out to California to untangle some legal issue he’d gotten himself into before he’d been thrown in jail. On her way back she’d stopped in Vegas, and that was the last Ed had heard from her, except that, more or less as he was telling this story to his wife, she’d called and said she was arriving at his home that very evening, if it was ok with him. Of course it was; he was her twin, they were still close after all these years. He and his wife spent a few hours getting the house ready and preparing a guest bedroom.

She arrived breathless, though she’d been driving, as if she were running away from something, but Ed and his wife got her a glass of cool lemonade, put her bags in the room and sat her down in the living room in front of a fireplace. She took a look around and noticed that in general, the house was cleaner than the one they’d grown up in. He was lucky, he explained, that his wife had such high standards. His wife said suddenly that she was lucky, in that Ed, her husband was more relaxed than what she was used to. Her own sister had married a guy who insisted on everything being spotless, and they’d had a kid who was born with every allergy under the sun, including an intense allergy to peanuts and strawberries. They’d asked their doctor once why so many people had so many intense allergies these days and all he could think of was that there were so many antibiotics these days, that people’s bodies had gotten more sensitive just for that reason alone. What else could it be? Otherwise we’d lived in the same world, the dirt sure wasn’t any cleaner than it used to be.
Ed’s sister finally got to tell her story. She explained that, in Vegas, she’d been talked into marrying some guy who she’d met at a show. The man was wealthy, successful, and charming, and had swept her off her feet for a couple of days, until the moment they’d married, soon after which, something ugly happened that had revealed his true character. She didn’t want to go into details, so they didn’t force her to, but she knew at that moment that marrying again had been a mistake. She dumped him like a hot potato and fled, and now she was looking for a place to hide for a while, and she thought there was no better place than right out in the open, at her brother’s place. She only wanted to stay a couple of days, though, she said, and she’d be on her way.

His wife asked her if, by association, she didn’t feel bad about marrying this weasel, this guy who was hanging around Vegas preying on the innocent.

No, she said. It was the five-second rule, she figured. If she got out of there fast enough, she’d probably be ok, there wouldn’t be too much lasting damage. It was the one thing she’d said that night that stuck with Ed. Even after she left he couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was, after all, his twin, and their fates seemed connected, even when he didn’t know where she was, or where she was going.