It’s wet, anemic, and sort of pathetic, but it’s snow. The view from the apartment is nothing special, normally: the void of the sky, there just beyond the staggered buildings, the blankness of the river, a suggestion of New Jersey. The snow, such as it is, gives Sarah something to look at, makes her grateful for the view. Anyway, staring out the window is preferable to reviewing résumés for Carol, who has requested Sarah’s input. She’s been moving the stack of papers around on the coffee table for an hour, not reading or understanding any of it. The day feels over, somehow. She picks up her telephone.
As a teen, getting a telephone installed in her bedroom was a hard-won privilege. They were probably the last generation of American girls to have to lobby their parents for that specific perk. Only two decades later, it seems as antiquated and impossible as traveling by blimp. But the negotiations: They had been brutal. Sarah had begged and promised, and the good behavior and good grades with which she bargained were finally accepted, this though she reliably delivered both without any added incentive. In retrospect, it’s less that her parents were duped than that they didn’t actually care. The telephone line was installed. She was charged with monitoring her usage—the bills, in those smaller-than-standard-size envelopes, which she studied looking for what, exactly? They recorded every call she had placed, the eight cents that she would be required to pay for the time she called Hannah at her apartment and had had to leave a message with the grandmother Cho. Sarah didn’t have a checking account, of course, and her parents paid the bills, and never made any particular fuss about the number of minutes she spent on the telephone.
How did they find the time, she wonders? Two-hour phone calls with Lauren: When were they even apart for two hours, and what did they talk about? One of her stronger memories of childhood: the hot plastic of the telephone receiver pressed up against her ear.
She’s still a telephone person, though she can’t now concentrate on both a telephone call and some other task, as she had as a girl. She used to do her homework that way. The ubiquity of telephones hasn’t done anything to change the fundamental intimacy of a telephone call. A little miracle, is what it is. She pushes the résumés away, calls Lauren.
“Hi.” Lauren, familiar.
Another lost aspect of the old telephone culture: never knowing who was calling. “Hi.” Sarah’s surprised Lauren picked up. She’s usually harder to get.
“I was just thinking about you. That’s so weird. But so perfect.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“The greatest, actually. Do you remember our Goth phase? Please tell me you remember our Goth phase.”
“That hardly qualifies as a phase,” Sarah says. “We bought some Urban Decay and went to a Nick Cave show.”
“We were so dark and mysterious.” Lauren laughs.
Sarah shrugs, forgetting Lauren can’t see it. “Adolescence is a dark time. We were experimenting.”
“It’s funny to think about. It was unlike us. It was unlike you. You were . . .” Lauren trails off.
“I was . . . ?” Sarah asks.
“You were, you know, you were the alpha. The leader. The role model, the head of the class, the girl most likely.”
“Bullshit.” Sarah’s laughing. “I was not. I was just some girl. Just a teenage girl trying things on, like you were.”
“So what’s up?”
“Nothing up.” Sarah stands. Pacing has supplanted homework as what she does when she’s on the telephone. “I felt like calling. Do you remember how much we talked on the telephone when we were kids?”
“My parents hated that.”
“I remember you insisting that they get call waiting.”
“They refused. Eight dollars a month! An outrage.”
“But what did we talk about, Lauren? What was it that we had to say to each other, so urgently?” Sarah stares out at the snowy night. Snow makes you feel more cozy, always, and she doesn’t even care about having to go out into the stuff tomorrow. The tickets are bought, the rooms reserved: four nights, a pool, a hot tub, a spa, room service, a bar, golf, if for some reason she decides to take up golf. Having this to look forward to makes everything else seem possible.