The Princess Phone - 1. Chapter 1

“Hello?”

Nothing. Silence. A click. Then, like the edge of the sharpest knife, the infinite plane of dial tone sliced right through her.

She placed the receiver back in its cradle and sat in silence, her chin resting on her hand.

She lifted the receiver again. Her fingers walked gingerly and slowly across the pushbuttons, step by step, like children testing the firmness of a fresh ice sheet on a frozen pond.

Five pushbuttons, then the sixth, and she paused. She hung up. Stop it! I shouldn’t be doing this, she told herself.

She sat in silence, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes looking straight ahead, but seeing nothing.

Holding the receiver hard against her ear, her fingers stepped gingerly across the buttons again, but this time only pressing five of them before she hung up. And then she sighed, as if she were in agony. Stop doing this, she told herself.

She pushed her chair back and rested her elbows on her knees with her hands holding her face, and then the tears started flowing. The sound of her sobbing filled the room, just as it had the day before.

“Millicent, remember--you must call me at six o’clock every day. That’s six o’clock sharp, and every day, no exceptions--do you understand?” Mother told her when she left home for the first time to live and work in a town not too far away, only ten miles down the road. Then she added, “But don’t call me before six, either—I am usually very busy.”

At least once a week, Millicent went through the house and fixed the time on all her clocks; first she called the number that gave out the correct time and went around the house to make sure that every clock displayed that precise time so that she would not be late, or too early. If the time was five fifty-nine and forty-five seconds, she was too early and would wait out the next fifteen seconds before dialing Mother’s number. If the time was one minute past six o’clock, she knew she was late, and would hurriedly dial, hoping Mother would not say anything about her being late.

Every evening Millicent would go into the bedroom a little early and wait for the precise time next to her pink princess phone, the phone she loved to use because it was so pretty, and because it made her feel so feminine. The old princess phone was light blue and had a dial, and so she had that one moved to the kitchen. The new pink one in her bedroom had pushbuttons, and she thought it was so much more ladylike. She liked the way each button sounded a different note, and she had quickly memorized the seven-note tune that Mother’s number played for her every time she called.

For many years the only days she didn’t call Mother at six was when she was visiting Mother. Even so, every time Mother’s old grandfather clock gonged six times, her mother would tap her wristwatch, look Millicent sharply in the eye, and say, “It’s six o’clock. Millicent, remember you are supposed to call me right now. But since you are sitting here with me right now, I’ll let you skip the call today. But--just today.” She smiled at Millicent with a smile that was always half smile, half warning.

A handsome young man found himself attracted to Millie, and after taking her out several times, he fell in love with her. He couldn’t believe his luck: to be so close to proposing marriage to a woman as beautiful as Millie; and he was proud of her beauty when people looked at her when he took her out. He had even bought a little red roadster just to drive her around, instead of in his pickup truck, when he took her out on a date. Every weekend he would pick her up for a dinner date at a nice restaurant, and sometimes they went dancing after dinner.

The young man daydreamed about Millie all day long, every time he wasn’t required to think about work or anything else. He vividly pictured her in his mind and thought how beautiful she was. At night when he thought of her he had trouble calming down and wanted her so much he couldn’t sleep until he let himself follow his usual way of easing his excitement, and he looked forward to the day when he could do those things together with her.

One day, he couldn’t wait to see Millie because he was excited and wanted to ask her something important, and he showed up a half hour early for their dinner date, at five forty- five instead of six-fifteen. They sat together on Millie’s sofa, and he put his arms around her and leaned over to kiss her. All day, he had thought about nothing but her and he desired her very intensely that evening and wanted her to know that, to him, she was his beautiful darling, and he loved her very much. He leaned close to her, and, just as his lips touched hers, and their lips locked onto each other’s, Millicent’s clock struck six o’clock. Sharp.

“Oh! I have to call my mother now,” Millicent said, startled and abruptly pulling her lips away from his. She quickly extracted herself from his arms and ran into the bedroom and, still distracted, she mindlessly pressed the pushbuttons. “It’s time for you to settle down and get married, my Dear,” Mother said, as she had been saying every night for some time by then. Then, Millicent felt an urgency to end the call soon and said, just before hanging up, “I have to go now, Mother,” as she said every night at about that time.

Millicent hurried back into the other room, and, to her distress, the handsome young man she had just been kissing was no longer there. She heard a car door slamming loudly outside and she ran to the front window, where she saw the little red sports car—the car she had enjoyed riding with him so much–driving away, rapidly accelerating as if in anger, racing down the road and quickly swerving around the bend where the trees swallowed it.

Millicent threw herself onto the couch and sat alone for a few minutes, feeling sad for herself and angry at the young man. She felt sad because she had enjoyed being with him so much, she had been so proud of being with such a handsome man, and thought of the good times that would never happen again, the times they’d ridden together all over the place in his little red sportscar, and the many wonderful kisses he had given her in that car. And on her lips she still felt those kisses he’d given her just before she called her mother.

It was just my mother, she thought, feeling angry at him. Just my mother, so how could he leave her just like that? In her anger, she stood up and carelessly tore off her fancy pink dress, ruining the zipper, and threw it into the trash can in the kitchen. I won’t ever wear this again, she thought. Suddenly she changed her mind and took it out of the trash can, brushed some specks of dirt off, and hung it in her closet.

The young man was angry too: angry at himself for falling in love with Millie, and angry at himself for what he had just done to her. But he was not angry at Millie.

He remembered that odd little thing about Millie that he was mildly curious about but never thought about very much: for some reason she always insisted that he not pick her up until after six-fifteen, or, if they did something together during the day like a picnic in the park, she had insisted he take her home before six. Now he knew exactly why, and he was angry at Millie’s mother--and at his mother too--for having made each of them unsuitable for the other. He realized that, if they married, they would never have enough time to themselves, and having those two mothers meddling in their lives would make for an unhappy marriage. Now he knew something that had never occurred to him before. Mother only wanted me to marry so that she would have a daughter in law to boss around. It’ll be better if I stay single for the rest of my life, he thought.

Day in, day out, year in, year out, for so many years she could no longer remember, perhaps thirty or so, Millicent faithfully called her mother at six o’clock sharp. One way or another, word got out among people who knew her: that every day Millicent had to call her mother at six. Feeling sorry for her, a spinster who lived alone, they would invite her for dinner, but always after six-thirty so she could talk with her mother first.

At two thirty in the afternoon one day, Millicent suddenly felt a searing pain, so sharp that she couldn’t even stand upright, and she called 911. All the way to the hospital in the ambulance, Millicent tried to forget her pain by worrying that she might not be able to call her mother at six o’clock. Lying flat on the gurney, they wheeled her into the operating room just before six, and suddenly, at the very moment they started the flow of anesthetic through the tube, she remembered: “I need to call my...”

When the anesthesia wore off and Millicent woke up hours later, the very first thing she thought about was that she had to call Mother at six o’clock. But it was already eleven o’clock, too late to call, as Mother was already in bed and would be very angry if she were disturbed at this hour. Instead, she called Mrs. Morton and asked her to call her mother first thing in the morning and tell Mother what had happened to her.

That day and the next day, from her hospital bed, Millicent faithfully called her mother at six o’clock.

“Millicent,” her mother said, “I told you to call me every day at six o’clock. You disobeyed me yesterday. Don’t let it happen again. No excuses.”

“But Mother,” Millicent explained, “I was in surgery at six o’clock. I was asleep, knocked out, under anesthesia—that’s why I couldn’t call you.”

“Millicent, that’s no excuse,” her mother replied. “You disobeyed me. How could you do this to me? Don’t you love me? You know I cannot bear being disobeyed.”

The comforting early onset of darkness had relieved the gray gloom of the day by the time the family gathered for a dinner at the hotel after the funeral. The closer six o’clock approached, the more anxious Millicent felt, and she excused herself so she could find a payphone in the lobby before six. For the last few days, she had started feeling very anxious around six o’clock, and she didn’t know what would happen when she called.

She put a dime in the phone and called her Mother, but there was no answer, just as it happened for the last few days.

She tried again, and then again, but no answer. The phone kept spitting her dime out again and again, so she thought, Well, at least I tried.

A few weeks later, Millicent was in a hurry to get home by six, but when she ran into Mrs. Morton in the supermarket around five-thirty, she felt she had to stop and chat. An old, close friend of Mother’s, Mrs. Morton smiled at her and asked her how she was doing, then Millicent asked Mrs. Morton how she was doing. Millicent had always liked Mrs. Morton but she always thought it a little odd that Mrs. Morton’s voice sounded exactly the same as Mother’s; when she was little, and Mrs. Morton visited her mother and Millicent was playing with her dolls in her bedroom, she could never tell which of the two was speaking in the other room.

Trying to look casual about it, Millicent looked at her watch and said, “Oh, it’s getting late--I have to make a call at six.”

Mrs. Morton smiled at her, with a kind and knowing smile. “Yes, I know, dear,” she said. “It’s so nice seeing you, Millie.”

Day in, day out, month in, month out, Millicent tried calling her mother; at first there was no answer. Then, each time she called Mother’s number, she would be told, in an ice-cold woman’s voice, “The number you have dialed has been disconnected.” Sometimes she pressed the zero button on her princess phone, and the operator would always tell her, “I’m sorry, Ma’am, but that number has been disconnected.” Each time, she felt a curious sense of satisfaction, but she didn’t know why.

For some reason, people who knew Millicent stopped inviting her for dinner, and if they saw her on the street or in the supermarket, they would say hello, but then, “Oh, I should keep you—you probably have to be home by six,” and rush away from her. And the day came when she felt that folks she didn’t even know began looking at her with a strange look in their eyes.

Then, one day, a man’s voice answered when she called precisely at six o’clock.

“Hello? Could I speak with Mother, please?” Millicent meekly asked, surprised to hear another voice on the line.

“I am sorry,” he said. “You must have the wrong number.”

The next day, at six o’clock, a kind-sounding woman’s voice answered, “I’m so sorry, your mother doesn’t live here. Are you sure you have the right number?”

On some days, when Millicent called, she would hear a busy signal; on other days the phone would ring and ring and ring with no answer. But usually, the man or the woman answered.

Soon the torture began on days when one of them would pick up the phone and not say a word to Millicent. “It’s that poor woman again, Mitchell, calling for her mother,” the woman’s voice would sometimes faintly say, her voice muffled and directed away from the receiver. Then the man’s voice would grumble even more faintly in the background.

Eventually, as Millicent continued to call every day at six o’clock, the voices of the man and the woman began to sound gruff and irritated. One day when she called, and endlessly, every day after that, she heard a recording: “Hello. Please leave a message,” in a man’s voice that sounded like it wasn’t real. She didn’t like the idea of speaking to a machine when she only wanted to speak with her mother, so she always hung up.

But still Millicent obeyed her mother and called her mother’s number every day at six o’clock, hoping that, sooner or later, her mother would answer.

One day when she called, to Millicent’s great surprise and joy, Mother did indeed answer.

“Hello, Millicent,” she said. “It’s wonderful to hear your voice.”

“Hello Mother, I’ve been so worried about you. I want you to know that I called you every day at six o’clock sharp, and you didn’t answer.”

“Yes, my dear Millicent, I am so happy that you have been so obedient. But there is a very good reason I haven’t answered. You see, Millicent, I am dead.”

Millicent paid no attention to the meaning of what Mother had just said, and suddenly blurted out, “But Mother, that’s no excuse. That’s what you told me when I was put under and couldn’t call you. Mother--don’t you love me?”

For the first time ever in her whole life, Millicent felt that her mother had no idea how to respond to her. All Mother said was, in a voice that sounded almost meek, “Yes, my dear, I do love you.”

After a long awkward pause, Mother said, in her usual firm voice again, “And Millicent—please don’t call me at six o’clock anymore. Never more, do you understand? This is the last time we’ll speak to each other. Now don’t disobey me this time, or ever again, do you understand?”

With that, Mother hung up, and Millie listened to the dial tone. Suddenly she felt terrible; she felt rejected, she felt that her life was now useless and meaningless, she felt that now that Mother didn’t love her anymore, she had no one who loved her and no one she could love.

Suddenly, the tears flowed and flowed, and then the pain began, so severe that Millie could no longer sit in her chair, and she rolled onto the floor. The sound of her sobbing filled the room.

Millie pulled herself up off the floor and, barely seeing through her tears, stumbled to her closet and pulled out the pink dress. She covered her face with the folds of the dress and sopped up her tears.

Two days later, at precisely one minute past six o’clock, as they had agreed, the phone rang.

“Mitchell, the phone!” his mother yelled, in the usual commanding voice she used with him. He ran to pick up the landline his mother had insisted they keep.

“Hello Mitch, Marian Morton here. Did she call today?"

“No.”

“That’s good news for you. I think we solved your problem.”

But before Mitch could thank her, Mrs. Morton said, “By the way, Mitch, do you still have your little red jalopy? My nephew is interested in buying it from you, if you still have it.”

“Yeah, let me think about whether I’m ready to let go of it yet. But I’m not sure it runs anymore. I probably haven’t driven it for almost thirty years, not since the day I parked it in the garage behind my dad’s shop.” Saying that made Mitch remember Millie, and he wondered what had happened to her. In a split-second, he came to a decision. “By the way, I also have a diamond ring that I’d like to sell, just in case your nephew’s got a pretty girl in mind—or whenever he’s thinking of getting married. I’ll give him a good price. It’s never been worn.”

When Mitch hung up the phone, a thought occurred to him. He went to his desk and pulled out the bottom drawer. Deep inside, all the way back and under piles of papers, he found his old phone book. He flipped the pages back to the M’s and found Millie’s number--her number from thirty years ago--and entered it into the contacts in his flip-phone. One of these days, I’ll try calling her, he thought. I’m not sure she still has the same number. Or maybe she’s married and moved away.