life you have.’
‘View of life?’
‘Yes, yes – this inertia, these lapses of concentration. We need to correct your – your –‘
Stuckness, she thought.
He looked up at last. ‘That’s all, you may go.’
‘Where?’ she blinked.
‘Well, home of course.’ His tone shifted up a notch. ‘You can’t continue your shift now, in this state.’
‘What state?’ This was confusing.
‘This state, this state of’ – searching for a word that might register – ‘nothing!
It exploded out of his mouth, rushed through space and landed in her lap. Which is where she found it – this thing called nothing. Dark down there, and murky. Smoky, foggy, glass stained and suffocating. Nothing clear in the nothing. Where had the white light gone? Where was that beautiful sea of white light that had grown from a tiny lamp on a Ma Bell switchboard?
‘Oh,’ she managed as the nurse came to unstick her from the chair and help her to the cloakroom.
The nurse put on her coat and hat. Gloves as well. Into her handbag went the doctor’s letter. ‘Now you go home and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow you can take the train from Penn Station down to Cottage Green – it’s just outside Philadelphia on the main interstate line. All the instructions are there in your bag. Give the doctor’s letter to the Matron in charge and soon they’ll have you right as rain. You’ll be back with us in no time.’
February. Spring was on its way but the nights still closed in early. It was cold out. Fog was coming up from the East River as Ellie made her way downtown. She looked fine enough in her full green coat with the faux fur trim, matching brown gloves and mustard yellow cloche. She hoped that no one could see the nothing, pulling the coat tight around just to make sure.
The streets were quiet for early evening. Everyone with somewhere to go was there already, it seemed, snug-warm and cosy by a fire in the grate. Home. Home. She was supposed to be going home. The doctor said. The nurse said. But she couldn’t. Not yet. She couldn’t face her parents – didn’t want them to catch a glimpse of the nothing. She could already see her mother’s disappointment, as clear as the switchboard light which had flown inside her.
Her mother’s disappointment. Her mother’s happiness. So happy when Eleanor had been accepted to operator training school. Her mother’s application textbook perfect, her mother wooing the company nurse during home inspection – it was her victory, pure and simple. She always knew what to say, what to do. Mother never got stuck – frozen in a moment wondering how or why she got there, how or why she’d get out, or whether she’d even bother.
Ellie was passing the diner near 46th and Broadway when she saw the light again. It was the same milky white-white, the same round and hopeful moon. Here now, hatched in two long rows across the ceiling of a Horn and Hardart automat. She stood and let them blur – all together into one huge disc of light, a shimmering sea of white filling her eyes and memory. It was singing lessons on Saturday mornings and a treat from Mother before going home – lemon meringue pie and iced chocolate milk that splashed from a lion’s mouth, froth-creamy and cold.
She looked in – to self-service vending machines and clean stone-topped tables. A coffee. A coffee might be a good idea. Pushed open the wide glass door with its polished brass handle and went over to the nickel thrower’s counter.
‘Looks like you need something against the cold, honey, you being as white as a sheet!’
She received her change with a wan smile. The coins jingled in her hand as she moved past signs for cakes, pies, pastries, sandwiches. A man stood at the macaroni and cheese window – three nickels in the slot, a turn of the knob and out popped his meal. She really wasn’t hungry. She waited till he’d filled his coffee cup – ‘no one makes a better cup of coffee, hey Miss’ – placed her own under the ceramic dolphin’s head, and pulled the brass handle. The pungent liquid hissed in. Wet, she thought. Water, she realised. Water never gets stuck.
She moved to a table over by the door. Far from the chatty man and the nickel lady. Close to the door where no one wanted to be, where a blast of cold air smacked hard each time someone entered. This was practical, this was safe, she thought. My coat can hide the nothing. She looked at her cup, removed one glove, the better to hold it, and slowly brought the hot edge up to her lips. Yes, her hand was shaking, but that was normal at the end of a long shift. Tired, that’s all. Soon she’d be ready, able to go home and face a living room of smiling photos, papered walls and chatty mother.
But not yet, not quite yet.
Her eyes focused on the cup in her hand. Focused on thinking about where the nothing had come from. How to send it away? Send it someplace it couldn’t come back from? Someplace far beyond, far down, a place beneath the deepest seas – where white light would surround it, eat it up, stop it from getting inside her. Beautiful white light – that’s what she needed to protect her from the nothing. What did her father say when she was like this? That she was under the sign of Saturn. He also said there was someone called Freud who would call her melancholic. She didn’t know – Dr Flynn had called it the nothing. That was enough.
Things seemed much easier when Mother was around. Mother liked making decisions, telling everyone what to do. Mother decided what classes Eleanor should take at school, what instrument to learn, what books to read, what needlework to practice. Mother had read the recruitment notice for telephonists at Ma Bell, noting the good working conditions, employee benefit plan and a savings fund, even – more than any of the department stores were offering. Where would she be now if it weren’t for Mother?
But Mother couldn’t be on the switchboard with her. She had to watch for that tiny flashing light by herself. Anytime, anywhere it could pop up – someone wanting a connection – NOW! Having to watch more and more closely for that instant when the light was put out, extinguished – needing to disconnect – NOW! And always the supervisor hovered. Timing and monitoring calls – how fast the girls were, how polite, how accurate. The reason for more pay or less at the end of each week.
They were trained to be the voice with a smile. Eleanor had attended the long and difficult training sessions but it was still so hard to learn. She couldn’t believe there were so many places to stick your tongue or your lips to make sure you spoke just right, and always with this smile.
Sometimes you’d see the other girls, stretching, yawning, complaining of backache or headache or sore tired eyes. Telephone shock, they called it. But it never got to Rosie. How did she do it? So sweet and chirpy all the time, chewing gum with a wet smacking sound and smiling down the line at even the rudest caller. Skipping along the switchboard as if through a wildflower meadow. Always singing. Always making you laugh. Like when she made fun of the Al Jolson song they played on wireless radio:
All alone, I’m so all alone
There is no one else but you
All alone by the telephone
Waiting for a ring – a ting-a-ling …
Sure, she poked fun but still the girls would go quiet at the end, feeling how all alone they were with little flashing lights and ting-a-lings instead of men.
Funny, thinking back, how quiet she herself became. If she didn’t have to talk to a caller, easier not to talk at all. Saving energy for the next burst of tiny flashing lights that demanded undivided attention. Rosie would ask: ‘You’re not saying so much these days, Ellie, even on breaks. What’s eating you, sweet pie?’
‘Nothing,’ would be her stock-standard reply. Nothing – the nothing – sitting right there in her lap. Eating her up from the inside-out. She quickly drained the coffee and looked around. No one had seen her thoughts, had they? No one had seen the nothing, there hidden by the table edge? She was alone, wasn’t she? All alone?
A Cuban bussing tables came to clear her cup away. ‘You finished there, Miss?’ he asked in a thick accent. She nodded and moved to put on her free glove as he wiped the table down.
&nb
sp; It was bare now. Bare and clean. White. And round. Big and round as a disc of white light. She sat, gloved hands in lap, hiding the nothing, staring into all that white, stuck. Tears came. Because of the brightness, all the white, that’s all. Oh, how to fall into you forever! she thought. Into an ocean of white light, never having to surface and face the nothing. And tears drip-dripped onto the smooth surface of her phosphorous moon.
She walked home across the Williamsburg Bridge in the light of moon risen. Full and round. Stopped to watch its reflection skate across the surface of the East River. With each breath of wind scudding the fog away, its milky whiteness melting and spreading through the water, becoming lighter, whiter, bigger. As big as the sea itself. Maybe here it was. The light to take the nothing away, light as wide and deep and pure as the sea.
Over on the river bank, there was the nothing, that’s where it lived. Over there where it was dark. Thick with sludgy oily fog, city fog, damp fog. There the glass was stained with nothing. Only within the moon’s watery shimmer was there light. The light of knowing. It had tried earlier in the day, she realised now, tried to take away the nothing, this wonderful fulsome light. There at the switchboard, growing and growing inside her. White light pure. But it must have got stuck somehow.
But now. Now maybe a second chance. Water never