Ma bell

Her face comes up on the screen and everything around me stops. My breath catches and the room goes silent if only in my consciousness, which has muted what had previously been an entertaining noise.

A cold sweat comes over me; not unlike the sudden panic of a doorbell; perhaps welcome sounds back in the olden days of neighborly caretaking. Perhaps not.

Even back then, the doorbell would send me into a panic. Stranger danger isn’t a new development; mothers everywhere warned their children away from answering doors when they were home alone, or at least from telling the door ringer, or even the phone caller that we were, in fact, home alone. 

But when the house was full, we would trip over ourselves to get to a rigging phone. I’d stretched out the coiled cords, worrying them through closet doors, to get some privacy,  

I can’t say as I miss the days when we used to wall ourselves off in our rooms, listening to music and engaging in marathon-length phone conversations where nothing truly memorable was ever discussed despite how important it all seemed. 

My mother would rattle the door an hour before she needed me to hang up, and again, more fervently at the half-hour mark, so she could place her nightly welfare checks on the elderly aunties before they retired to sleep. 

Things haven’t changed as much as we think. Since we all have our own separate phones, I am at liberty to call (or text) the elderly aunties whenever I like, though still trying for reasonable hours. But I rattle to door to my son’s room every so often just to see his face.

This is what I tell my daughter when I look at the phone tracking app to locate her from afar. I’m not so much checking up as checking in, though I can’t pretend either definition isn’t a first cousin of stalking. 

Unlike her friends’ parents, who track down their kids and quiz them as to why they may be in a sketchy neighborhood after dark, or in a questionable establishment geared toward debauchery, inebriation, and the potential for sophomoric pranks, when I see her icon photo somewhere other than her dorm room, I sigh in gratitude that she’s not just holed up in her cubicle being all alone in her aloneness. 

I walk a fine line, I know. It’s easily crossed. So easy that I don't tell what I know from checking the maps. I don’t let on that I know she was at an arena, or in the shopping district, or at a frat house. What she does is her business. 

I don't expect the good news to travel as fast as the bad. 

Which is why every nerve in my body stands at attention when the phone rings with her face looking to spend time with mine. I do everything in my power not to answer the phone the way my mom used to answer: What do you want … or what’s wrong? 

Often I fail.

“Why can’t your daughter just call you to say hi?”

“Oh, she most certainly can! How’s everything going?”

“Well, everything was going fine but Trader Joe's just stopped stocking cornichons… how am I supposed to live without my gherkins?”