Fiction Fragment: Phonecalls and Weekends

She is fantastic at coming up with excuses. It’s how she survived. So over the years she let all her friends know that she hated being disturbed over the weekend. That she switched off her phone because it helped her unwind.

Utter rot.

It all started when she turned 14. Before the days of caller-ID and other fancy devices, the phone was rooted to its wire. Anchored in the living room. Conversations were never meant to be private. It wasn’t till years later that she even discovered that the phone instrument had a volume control on the ringer. The phone would ring loud and clear. Crisply through the weekend afternoon.

Since then, she associated phone rings with an increased heart rate. Her mother never liked her talking to boys. It was almost as though her mother though the boy would yank her daughter’s hymen through a telephone line. So when they called, and when she was lucky enough to pick the phone up, they were referred to with various girl’s names.

And then she started living with a man. Who was kind, and wonderful. Who had the perfect sense of humour. But who, like his mother, didn’t like members of the opposite sex calling her without a reason. A reason was anything to do with one’s career or one’s laundry. While he knew that hymens were in no danger over phone lines, and that she definitely didn’t have one anymore, phone calls from friends became hard to handle.

So she began to switch her phone off over the weekends. Or put it on silent. Anything to keep it from ringing and shattering the fragile peace of the relationship. She told her friends that she didn’t like being disturbed over the weekends. Her friends didn’t call her on Saturday and Sunday. And some friends were so busy, that if they didn’t call her on these days, they never called her at all. She lost them. Some of her friends.

One day, she finally moved out. Her friends could call her over the weekends, she thought. Which was nice. However, having established over the years that she was the kinds who hated phonecalls over the weekends, nobody really called her.

Except the laundry shop manager. He was allowed.