After a Phone Call
by Mike Blake
Her limitations disturbed him; he could see they would always keep her where she was. If she were younger and had a few more tools, or skills, she may have been able to extricate herself, yet as it was now, she would remain in her limited rut, holding on with pills, pot, booze, and plenty of sleep. Sleep played a big part in her days, for she was depressed more often than not. She had to have a glow on just to call him, just to summon up the necessary laughs to make the talk bearable. As they talked, he could picture her sitting on her old sagging bed, with her dog beside her, the TV volume turned down, the projects noise outside always in the background. Her little, two-room space. Her world, for the most part, these days, for he knew she never went anywhere unless it was necessary - food shopping or medical appointments. The only reason she stepped outside every day was to walk the dog. Her days hadn't changed since he had lived with her and he doubted they ever would.
She lived from check to check every month - enough welfare to get her by, to put a smile on her face for a couple of party days. She might, if feeling particularly high, make a couple of social calls to the few neighbors she stayed friendly with, or they might stop in at her place to see if she needed anything in the way of "medicine". He knew the routine, for he had lived there with her for a couple of years. Yet he pretended to sound interested in what she told him on the phone, the latest incidents in the ongoing projects story. It only reminded him of his time there, nothing different, and in the end (he could hear it in her voice), as sad as it ever was. It could be no different in those conditions, and that is why he left. It wasn't that he necessarily wanted to leave her - though he didn't want to live with her anymore - but that, for his sanity's sake, he had to get away from the projects. He had to get off on his own again, without the constant daily distractions, or the temporarily soothing yet ultimately limiting inebriation.
So he did. Yet he knew, even now after three years away from the place, it wouldn't take him long to fall back into that old rut if he visited her again. A visit with her would last months, as they had in the past (he always found it difficult to say goodbye), and he doubted if he had the strength in him to last that long. The last winter-long stay had left him very sick with the DTs and depression, and it had taken him weeks to recover from the alcohol poisoning. The mood swings and depression he would always have.
She would always have them, and he wouldn't be surprised if the booze and drugs killed her (she'd had a couple of close calls with overdoses already). It was all she had, at times, to make things bearable for her. He knew what she saw when she looked in the mirror in the mornings; she had told him often enough how ugly, old and fat she was, and how she hadn't always been that way. When she was younger, she had gotten plenty of male attention, yet now she couldn't expect any of that. It didn't matter that much now anyway, she said. She wasn't getting old - she was old. Sex wasn't that important anymore.
Her health was her major concern these days. For the time being, she had gotten past cancer, but there were plenty of other less serious yet nagging problems. With painful arthritis, there were many days when she found it difficult to get out of bed.
Yet she kept on. She hung in there, as she often said, and he had to admire her for that - her strength, from somewhere, in keeping her going in a trying, lonely existence, where to be temporarily content seemed to be the best she could hope for. He wasn't sure he could have survived in that way. He had the uneasy feeling that he would have given up, thinking he didn't have enough to live for.
He was saddened every time he got off the phone with her, for he never knew what to tell her to help lift her spirits. He tried to think of jokes or amusing stories - anything to get her laughing - but sometimes they just didn't come. Sometimes, he just listened - an ear for whatever troubled her that day. Every once in a while, she'd ask him if he was still there, and he'd laugh and say that he was. At times, he wished he could have been with her, physically, so as to give her a hug. Phones were good, to a point. Yet they were better than nothing when people were fifteen hundred miles apart.
During this last call, he had assured her that he would visit again some time, but purposely hadn't been specific about a time. He would have preferred it if she could have come and visited him, but she didn't drive, and couldn't take her dog with her on a bus. She didn't trust any of her neighbors enough to leave the dog in their care for a week. So there it was. She was stuck. She couldn't visit him or her son, who lived closer to her than he did. The son wasn't a city boy, however, and he was afraid to visit the projects. He had only visited a handful of times in the ten years she had lived there.
And this is what frustrated and disturbed him, thinking about how limiting her circumstances were (some of it her own doing, of course). She seemed to have lost just about all control over her destiny. She had very few choices left to her, and this wasn't all due to her financial situation or poor physical health. He had no doubt that, like him, she suffered mental problems, too, and this was probably the greatest handicap of all, in the end. It was her mental disturbances that would always hold her down, and she seemed to know that, accept it, even. She claimed she had gotten her craziness from her mother, who had spent years in mental institutions. Whatever the cause, he had certainly seen her when she was unstable. If something positive happened in her life, then something negative followed shortly thereafter. Her good feelings were always brief, and usually had something to do with drink or drugs. And then they were followed by the inevitable fall into depression and dark moods. He recognized this pattern with her because he had dealt with it himself, though perhaps not suffering from it as severely as she had. Yet that may have been because he was fifteen years younger than her. Maybe his condition would worsen in the coming years. Perhaps he would end up in a small room somewhere, sucking on bottles and not inclined to go anywhere, talking to himself, alternately crying and laughing, and thinking about people no longer in his life.
Wondering if this was how it was all meant to end.