John Janelle Backman
Someone Else's Phone Call
You couldn’t help but eavesdrop at the pay phones inside North Station in 1981: each phone stood inches from its neighbor, amplifying the voice of the caller next to you. The whole bank of phones was smeared in a thin layer of grime, like the trains that steamed and rumbled and picked up commuters just outside the open doors. Commuter included me that day, trudging home from my low-wage back office job in Boston’s financial district, calling my new wife, hoping she’d let me write the next weekend.
Back then I wrote poetry mostly, with a little fiction thrown in. One of my writing dreams—at twenty-four, I had a lot of them—involved a scribbled personal note on a rejection slip from Poetry or The Atlantic. Not money: even I knew that was unrealistic. My new wife had a master’s degree and a career-track position in her profession. For reasons beyond me, she tolerated my dreams, but I always feared the day she’d say, like the critic in my head, “Enough. Get a real job.”
I dialed the number and she picked up on the third ring. The hiss of the engine twenty yards away rendered her barely audible. It didn’t help that the woman on the next phone was chirping, loudly, into the receiver.
I looked at her with the intent to glare but never got that far. She was new to the world too, about my age, but dressed in a better suit. The smile never left her face. Whoever listened on the other end meant as much to her as my wife did to me. I couldn’t ask her to pipe down; she was struggling to hear too, her manicured fingernail in her non-phone ear.
I turned my attention back to my wife when the woman next to me chirped, “OK, I’ll see you in an hour. Love you. How’d the writing go today?”
How’d the writing go today.
My wife asked me the same question every time I returned from the café or library or wherever I’d schlepped my notebooks and pens. She was eager to hear whether I’d started a new story, or finished a poem—works that wouldn’t move us forward, wouldn’t get us a house or finance a child or do any of those things our friends did.
It never occurred to me that anyone else would pursue so futile a dream. Suddenly this woman—who’d hung up and hurried off barefoot, carrying her stilettos, to catch her train—had given me an ally. Now the writing had to go well. It meant something. I had an obligation to this writing friend I’d never meet, and through that writer to every writing friend I’d never meet, and then back to the one ally I’d never appreciate as much as she deserved, the woman who loved me enough to cheer me on.
John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, and occasionally cats. Janelle’s work has appeared in Catapult, the tiny journal, Tiferet Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made the shortlist of the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and Wild Atlantic Writing Awards.
Back then I wrote poetry mostly, with a little fiction thrown in. One of my writing dreams—at twenty-four, I had a lot of them—involved a scribbled personal note on a rejection slip from Poetry or The Atlantic. Not money: even I knew that was unrealistic. My new wife had a master’s degree and a career-track position in her profession. For reasons beyond me, she tolerated my dreams, but I always feared the day she’d say, like the critic in my head, “Enough. Get a real job.”
I dialed the number and she picked up on the third ring. The hiss of the engine twenty yards away rendered her barely audible. It didn’t help that the woman on the next phone was chirping, loudly, into the receiver.
I looked at her with the intent to glare but never got that far. She was new to the world too, about my age, but dressed in a better suit. The smile never left her face. Whoever listened on the other end meant as much to her as my wife did to me. I couldn’t ask her to pipe down; she was struggling to hear too, her manicured fingernail in her non-phone ear.
I turned my attention back to my wife when the woman next to me chirped, “OK, I’ll see you in an hour. Love you. How’d the writing go today?”
How’d the writing go today.
My wife asked me the same question every time I returned from the café or library or wherever I’d schlepped my notebooks and pens. She was eager to hear whether I’d started a new story, or finished a poem—works that wouldn’t move us forward, wouldn’t get us a house or finance a child or do any of those things our friends did.
It never occurred to me that anyone else would pursue so futile a dream. Suddenly this woman—who’d hung up and hurried off barefoot, carrying her stilettos, to catch her train—had given me an ally. Now the writing had to go well. It meant something. I had an obligation to this writing friend I’d never meet, and through that writer to every writing friend I’d never meet, and then back to the one ally I’d never appreciate as much as she deserved, the woman who loved me enough to cheer me on.
John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, and occasionally cats. Janelle’s work has appeared in Catapult, the tiny journal, Tiferet Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made the shortlist of the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and Wild Atlantic Writing Awards.