=The Last Phone Call=

I'm on the phone with my mother. Halfway through the conversation I'm horrified to realize that I've run out of things to say. This constitutes a real crisis because by some unwritten rule based on arcane calculations the origin and justification of which she alone knows, she has determined that all our phone calls should last at least forty minutes. Forty minutes is the proper length of a mother-daughter call and outside of natural disasters and sudden health emergencies requiring nothing short of immediate ambulance transport with lights and screaming siren there are to be absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Whether she's actually looking at the clock while we talk or has some kind of internal timer that tells her when we've hit the quota I don't know, but she has the time down to the second and I don't have the nerve to ask how. There's no way I could pose the question that wouldn't sound alternately suspicious, accusatory and condemning; in other words, sounding an awful lot like her. But I am curious. Usually I make it to the end of the allotted time with no more than  two or three uncomfortably unscripted moments to suffer through. Tonight, however, we somehow managed to cover all the usual topics in record time. These topics, always following the same order, are: What I've been doing with myself lately. What's new on the job front. What's going on in my social life,, specifically, who am I dating. The answers to these questions, even embellished, hardly require more than two or three hundred carefully chosen words. After that, it's a desperate attempt to perform CPR on a brain-dead conversation about the weather, television, and current affairs, which drives me into even deeper despair as our opinions on all of these topics are invariably diametrically opposed. Finally, we lob the question "So what's new with you" back and forth at each other with various types of tricky spin until we're too exhausted to continue and we agree to call it a draw until next week.  That's where we are now, except there's twenty minutes left on the clock, not just two or three. Suddenly I feel like I'm six again, sprawled on my belly across my mother's enormous bed, reading a chapter book. I've come to a strange word, a word all twisted up like a tight black knot. "Sound it out, honey," my mother suggests. I try and try but just can't get it out; it's at the back of my throat, practically strangling me. "Bring your book up here, sweetheart," she says. "Show me." My mother is propped up against the pillows where she sleeps alone since Daddy left, except, sometimes, when she lets me join her, wandering lost into her room after a nightmare. Now the bed seems more like a desert, a wasteland of sheets like sand shifting beneath me as I wade and flail hopelessly toward the horizon, like the only survivor of a doomed caravan. My mother has slipped over the edge of the world; in her place only immense distances on every side. I'm so alone on this great empty bed I want to weep but who would hear me? Then I look down at the forgotten phone in my hand; it might as well be a mirage. "Oh mother," I cry. "Oh mother." "Tell me darling," her disembodied voice says calmly, nearly inaudible over the terrible wind that will eventually smooth everything over. "Tell me all about it."