{"id":281,"date":"2017-01-15T23:11:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T23:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=281"},"modified":"2017-01-15T23:11:50","modified_gmt":"2017-01-15T23:11:50","slug":"story-of-the-month-hung-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=281","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: Hung Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Hung up.\u00a0 Hard words, whichever way you mean them.\u00a0 Like, he hung up on me before I could say all I wanted to.<\/i>\u00a0 Or, I\u2019m still hung up on him.<\/i>\u00a0 There\u2019s emptiness in both of them\u2014not a still emptiness like on a beach at dawn or in an office after everyone\u2019s gone, but a busy kind of emptiness.\u00a0 Like when you\u2019re a kid and you\u2019re sure something\u2019s there in the dark in the corner of the bedroom.\u00a0 You can feel it breathing and leaning in for you and wanting you, like you were its last hope for a good meal, and you wonder if you scream will anyone come, and you do, and they do, but they never see it, it hides from the light, and they say, it was just the curtains moving in the breeze and the shadows from the stuffed animals on the shelf.<\/i>\u00a0 They can\u2019t see it, the razory realness of it, because it\u2019s not theirs, it doesn\u2019t belong to them, it\u2019s only sharp and alive for you.<\/p>\n

With Billy, I knew hung up<\/i> inside and out.\u00a0 My friends got sick of hearing it after a while.\u00a0 I don\u2019t blame them.\u00a0 Even I was getting tired.\u00a0 It was like watching someone pick at a scab, Maureen said.\u00a0 She has a way of putting things into perspective.\u00a0 I sometimes take her advice, but about Billy all I could do was stop talking; I couldn\u2019t manage to stop picking.\u00a0 Still, the last time was so weird, and important, too, because, finally, it was the last time, I have to tell it.\u00a0 The police weren\u2019t that interested.\u00a0 They hear all kinds of stuff, I guess, and get to be immune.\u00a0 Like my Uncle Reno who had a local for his surgery: he said the doctors were talking about the World Series while they sewed him up, looking like a couple of butchers in their bloody white coats, and sounding like it, too.<\/p>\n

I decided to write it all out about Billy and the phone and the dead body, while it\u2019s still hot on my mind, like my old English teacher used to say, catch the moment, pin life down with words.\u00a0 <\/i>Maybe I\u2019ll give it to Maureen to read on our lunch hour.\u00a0 It won\u2019t take her much time, even though it\u2019s really 45 minutes and not an hour, since she had that Evelyn Wood speed reading course last year that she\u2019s always telling me I should take to improve myself and maybe get a leg up at work.\u00a0 I remember the first time she said it, Pat said that\u2019s what Mr. Blanchard was always after her for, to get a leg up, and she could see how it might earn you a raise or even a promotion, but who needs a course for it?\u00a0 We all laughed, even Maureen, though Pat was teasing her.\u00a0 It was too good not to laugh.\u00a0 And after that Pat said, Evelyn would, would you<\/i>, and we had to make her stop before we wet our pants.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I was on the phone Saturday with Billy.\u00a0 Nothing unusual there.\u00a0 We talk a couple of times a week, even though we broke up almost a year ago and he\u2019s had a new steady girlfriend for three months now.\u00a0 Angelica.\u00a0 I can\u2019t believe that\u2019s her real name.\u00a0 She probably got it from a romance novel.\u00a0 I bet she didn\u2019t even read it.\u00a0 Probably just stood in the supermarket skimming through books until she found a name she liked.\u00a0 Billy doesn\u2019t go for intellectual types.\u00a0 He likes to educate girls.\u00a0 Take them to plays and museums and fancy restaurants.\u00a0 Though he will see any movie made.\u00a0 Sit through it even when he hates it, even if his friends walk out.\u00a0 Of course, no girl ever walked out on Billy.\u00a0 Not in the movies or anywhere.\u00a0 Not that I know of, anyway.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t look like an Angelica.\u00a0 She dresses too conservative, and her hair is smooth and straight, like Jackie Kennedy\u2019s was, even though the style now is tangled waves with a batch dripping over your eye that you have to keep sweeping back with your hand or with a shake of your head, very dramatic and supposed to be sexy, I guess.\u00a0 My hair\u2019s naturally curly.\u00a0 I tried for years to calm it down, even ironed it in high school when it was really long.\u00a0 Now I keep it short and let it go, but not down over my forehead.\u00a0 Hair in front of my eyes gives me headaches.\u00a0 Once Alonzo cut it too short, though, and Maureen said I looked like Little Orphan Annie, so now I watch him every time instead of reading a magazine or sneaking looks at the other customers in the big mirror and listening to their gossip about people I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I bet Jackie Kennedy didn\u2019t have to worry about what her hairdresser would do if she didn\u2019t pay attention.\u00a0 I bet no one dared to think he could know better than she did what would make her look attractive, or to give her little lectures on the shape of her face and getting good lift and movement in her hairdo, like it was a trapeze act.<\/p>\n

The phone was a cellular.\u00a0 Just a flip one.\u00a0 Billy gave it to me for Christmas last year.\u00a0 He personally has an iPhone.\u00a0 When we were together, we talked two or three times a day.\u00a0 Nothing special.\u00a0 Just chitchat.\u00a0 After we split up, we still talked once or twice a week.\u00a0 And still just chitchat.\u00a0 It twisted at my heart every time, though, to hear him so casual, so regular.\u00a0 It was worse than if he\u2019d been cold to me or cut me out completely.\u00a0 It made me keep hoping we\u2019d get back together.\u00a0 That I just had to be patient, stay pleasant.\u00a0 I\u2019d make my voice lively, think of little stories from the office or my family, ask his opinion about the latest movies.<\/p>\n

We got together twice in the past year, and one time was after Angelica was on the scene, which I thought might mean something.\u00a0 But if I\u2019m honest with myself, it only meant I was easy and comfortable for him, not that he missed me or didn\u2019t like Angelica.\u00a0 After all, what guy is going to turn down his old girlfriend when she shows up unexpectedly at his house early one morning before work and opens her coat and has nothing on underneath but a slinky slip from Victoria\u2019s Secret?<\/p>\n

So I was holding on, hung up, like I said.\u00a0 I had got to the point where I didn\u2019t call him any more, but he was still calling me, and I was still turning on the charm as best I could and then cursing at myself and sometimes even crying a little as soon as the conversation was over.\u00a0 I made myself feel better by pretending it was a stage on the way to a good friendship, the kind movie stars usually insist they have with their ex-husbands.\u00a0 Billy was always the one to say first that he had to hang up.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Billy called while I was in the car.\u00a0 I was trying to find a new dress shop Pat said had real bargains.\u00a0 It was in an out-of-the-way place, and I wasn\u2019t paying attention, and I got lost.\u00a0 I thought I was in the right neighborhood, though, so I parked and got out, still on the phone with Billy.\u00a0 I had to put the car in a muddy lot at the top of a hill because the street was all torn up with construction.\u00a0 I thought I\u2019d have a better chance of finding the dress shop on foot, what with all the detours and big machinery blocking my view when I was driving.<\/p>\n

I went down a residential side street.\u00a0 Pat said the shop was in the front two rooms of someone\u2019s apartment.\u00a0 Maybe the stuff\u2019s stolen<\/i>, she\u2019d joked.\u00a0 I was checking windows for signs, but all I saw were drapes and potted plants and, in one window, a big yellow cat.\u00a0 I was telling Billy what I was doing.\u00a0 He said I should call the place for exact directions.\u00a0 He\u2019s practical that way.\u00a0 He used to think it was cute that I was a little scatterbrained about directions and got my left and right backwards all the time and never knew what people meant when they said, it\u2019s on the south side of the street.<\/i>\u00a0 Now it seems like all that irritates him a little or bores him.\u00a0 Angelica works in a map store, I heard.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s it.\u00a0 But she\u2019s just the cashier.\u00a0 She could have as bad a time finding places as anyone.\u00a0 I bet she can get maps at a discount, though.<\/p>\n

So, I was going down the street slowly, looking around, listening to Billy tell about the plot of \u201cDracula,\u201d which he\u2019d just seen last night, as if everybody and his cousin didn\u2019t already know that story backwards and forwards.\u00a0 My brother was Dracula for four Halloweens running.\u00a0 I saved the cape.\u00a0 Once I wore it, to Mr. Fillmore\u2019s retirement party at the Royale Hotel.\u00a0 Maureen said it was embarrassing, anyone could see it was a costume, and everyone so dressed up and all, but Mr. Fillmore complimented me on it and said it was the kind of thing fine ladies wore to the opera when he was a boy in Savannah.\u00a0 I thought of\u00a0 \u201cGone With The Wind\u201d then, my all-time favorite book, even though I couldn\u2019t stand it that Rhett left at the end when really they loved each other underneath and only were too proud, each of them, and too much had happened for them to really show it so the other could see.<\/p>\n

I was just thinking I should get off the phone and pay more attention to finding the shop, or forget about it and leave, when I heard a commotion behind me and turned and saw a group of people coming down the street talking and laughing, and in the middle was Billy, with his phone to his ear, not knowing I was right there on the same block.\u00a0 I stepped back next to a tall stoop to watch.\u00a0 They went up some steps nearby where I was hiding.\u00a0 It must have been Angelica\u2019s place because she unlocked the door.\u00a0 They all marched in, about six or eight of them.\u00a0 I thought it was pretty funny that Billy hadn\u2019t even noticed me since I could have touched him almost, we were that close, and I told him, you just walked right past me, Billy\u2014I\u2019m out here on the sidewalk.<\/i><\/p>\n

That\u2019s when he tried to hang up, like he was afraid Angelica would find out who he was talking to, or that next I\u2019d be knocking on the door.\u00a0 As if I ever would.\u00a0 Anyway, whatever the reason, he sounded nervous and said he had to go, I should go home.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t hang up.\u00a0 I always wait for the disconnect.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t come, but he wasn\u2019t talking either.\u00a0 Just silence.\u00a0 A kind of warm silence, I thought, like two people can have that have been together a long time.\u00a0 Now, of course, I know it was only that he was too distracted to hang up.\u00a0 Like my mother when our neighbor, Mrs. Carratura, came to our house shouting that a car hit my brother on his bike down at the corner, and my mother ran out of the house with an eggbeater in her hand and was still holding it an hour later in the Emergency waiting room and would have held it even longer maybe except my father came in and took it away from her.\u00a0 When the doctor came and said my brother was going to be okay, she looked down at the eggbeater in my father\u2019s hand and said, what are you doing with that here?<\/i><\/p>\n

I was just crossing the street when suddenly all the people who had gone into Angelica\u2019s house came rushing out.\u00a0 They all looked upset and scared, even Billy.\u00a0 I saw him put his phone up to his face.\u00a0 There\u2019s a dead body on the couch<\/i>, he said to me.\u00a0 Then he told me again to go home, stricter now, like an angry nun.\u00a0 The police are coming,<\/i> he said, and I don\u2019t want you to see the body when they bring it out. \u00a0 It\u2019ll be too upsetting.\u00a0 Besides, if you stick around, they might question you.<\/i>\u00a0 Then, finally, he hung up.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t leave.\u00a0 I sat at the top of a stoop across the street and down a little from Angelica\u2019s place and watched.\u00a0 A pretty brunette from the bunch who\u2019d been inside came up and sat beside me.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t say her name, but she knew who I was, and she looked familiar to me.\u00a0 I probably met her at one of Billy\u2019s parties.\u00a0 He\u2019s always giving parties for one reason or another, though he never relaxes at them, never seems to have fun.\u00a0 He runs around like a cockroach, changing the music and refilling the refreshment plates and taking coats and answering the phone and introducing people to each other.\u00a0 What he likes best, I think, is the next day.\u00a0 Sleeping in and then going out to breakfast and talking about who was there, who talked with who, who danced and who didn\u2019t, who drank too much, who left early and why; then going home and cleaning up, stretching it out to fill the whole afternoon; then an early movie, a dinner of party leftovers, and sometimes another movie.<\/p>\n

The brunette told me it was a woman on the couch in Angelica\u2019s.\u00a0 Looked like a junkie<\/i>, <\/i>she said and flipped her hair back\u2014she had one of those do\u2019s, but at least her hair was shiny, not matted like some of them can get.\u00a0 She was all skinny<\/i>, she said, and she was wrapped up in a sheet, like a mummy or a little kid who was cold<\/i>.\u00a0 I told her I had been on the phone with Billy all along.\u00a0 I felt daring, and a little afraid, like I was telling a secret.\u00a0 I knew Billy would see it that way.\u00a0 He has extreme ideas about privacy.\u00a0 But the brunette wasn\u2019t impressed by the amazing coincidence of my being on the self-same street where Billy appeared.\u00a0 I think Angelica knew that woman<\/i>, she said in a low voice, like now she was telling a secret.\u00a0 I think Angelica gave a junkie her key and let her stay in her house<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I wondered how Angelica could feel safe about doing something like that.\u00a0 I wondered if she was one of those people who never think anything bad or ugly or even inconvenient is ever going to happen to them because they are just too beautiful or too rich or too smart.\u00a0 Like their car will never stall in the rain.\u00a0 Like their boss will never stare at their chest and say he likes their new blouse that\u2019s really a ratty hand-me-down from their sister-in-law in Pittsburgh.\u00a0 Like their boyfriend can talk all he wants on the phone to his old girlfriend and it will never mean a thing because they\u2019ve got him wrapped around their little finger like a droopy tomato plant tied to a stake.<\/p>\n

The police came and were taking people\u2019s names and statements, like they call them.\u00a0 A fat detective stopped me as I was leaving, but I told him I wasn\u2019t inside, only out on the street.\u00a0 He looked a little suspicious, but he let me go.\u00a0 Call us if you think of anything<\/i>, he said and gave me a card.\u00a0 But he looked like he hoped I wouldn\u2019t call.\u00a0 The other witnesses were all talking over themselves, probably giving more information than he needed anyway.<\/p>\n

I did a lot of thinking on the way to the car.\u00a0 I had to pick my way through mud and broken bits of concrete where the construction was, so the going was slow, but I would have gone slowly anyway, because I was working a lot out in my mind, like why I had been there on that strange street just then and what it all might mean.<\/p>\n

Maybe I\u2019ve seen too many movies, where everything links up and what people do or see explains what they feel or what someone else feels, and then they say, okay, that\u2019s it, from now on I\u2019m with you<\/i>, or I\u2019m through with that<\/i>, <\/i>or now I understand all of it<\/i>.\u00a0 That\u2019s how it goes in American movies, anyway.\u00a0 Those ones from other countries aren\u2019t always so clear.\u00a0 Except walking to my car, I felt like there were sub-titles floating by me about waist-high and that if I had been watching myself in a movie, I could have read my inner thoughts spread right out there.<\/p>\n

I saw how I had never let Billy go, not in my heart.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I kept on the phone with him all these months.\u00a0 And how he had just put up with it or maybe liked the attention, as long as I didn\u2019t get too close.\u00a0 He never really wanted to think about us, not about what used to be and not about whatever we were doing now, and he didn\u2019t want me to think about it, either, just like he didn\u2019t want me to look at the dead body.<\/p>\n

I let him have his way.\u00a0 Dead bodies have their fascination, as long as they\u2019re not someone you know, someone you used to love and who used to love you.\u00a0 But those are the dead you should look at, the ones that meant something to you once.\u00a0 Look and say good-bye and move along.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t want to be haunted later on.\u00a0 By voices without bodies.\u00a0 By hopes without hope.\u00a0 By stories you tell yourself that sound true but aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

There was a round metal trashcan in the parking lot.\u00a0 I held the phone over it.\u00a0 I let go.\u00a0 It clanged on the bottom.\u00a0 I heard it ringing while I was unlocking the car door, but I didn\u2019t go back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Hung Up” was adapted as a dramatic monologue for “Solos In Harmony” produced by Blue Sphere Alliance at the Lex Theatre, Los Angeles, 2002.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hung up.\u00a0 Hard words, whichever way you mean them.\u00a0 Like, he hung up on me before I could say all […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-noellesickelswp","post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-allposts","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}