Disconnected
“Are you going to get that?” the husband asked, lifting his head above a very soggy bowl of corn flakes.
The wife remembered a time when the husband ate like the bear he was meant to be. The doorbell rang again and the husband seemed to shift in his seat.
“Mom, can you get that? I think it’s Tara. She’s driving me to town and I think…”The daughter’s voice was muffled into the drone of a blow dryer. The wife liked that sound. It meant things were getting done.
The doorbell rang again.
“Oh, no. Not that look,” the husband grunted, seeming somewhat irritated. The wife remembered a time when irritated could have been manipulated. She remembered when irritated could have worked, maybe even for the better.
The doorbell rang. There was a knocking at the door.
The wife thought of the power of the knock. She calculated the power of the thrust against the glass. She figured the quickness at which it was delivered. She questioned the interval of time between each blow. All this and the husband merely shifted again.
“What look?” the woman questioned, trying to sound as though this were just another day, just another year, and not the day that could knock all into another decade. She thought of her dead father. She calculated her why nows and divided her prayers by what she dreaded could be their fate.
“Can you get the door?” The husband acted as though it were paramount that he resume in the delivery of soaked cornflakes to his down-trodden mouth.
“Why can’t you get it?” The wife tried to protect the monotone voice she had been practicing for such occasions.
The door bell rang one more time.
The woman waited, lifting her head just enough to raise her right ear to heaven. In the lifting, she willed the visitor away.
“Mom, is it Tara?” The blow dryer stopped. The daughter’s bedroom door slammed. There was a rush of steps on the stairs. “Mom?”
The wife feared what she already knew was happening.
“Why couldn’t you disconnect that damn thing like I asked you to do?” the wife grunted from a hard-set jaw.
“And what would disconnecting the doorbell do?” the husband asked in his calm and knowing-all drone.
“I just don’t want to know that it can ring. I just want to sit here and know that even if it wanted to ring, it could not ring.” The wife knew what she sounded like.
Suddenly, the door bell rang again and the wife jumped. The chime was just one dong past her realization that the intruder had not disappeared and had not presumed that the house was empty.
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong with this family?” the daughter chanted, her voice reaching the front door. The wife calculated that her daughter’s voice must be exactly in front of the sidelight, next to the solid, solid door. She presumed that the daughter could now see, could now meet the eyes that were set in the head, ready to deliver some message to whoever was willing to answer.
“Oh, they’re so in uniform,” the daughter announced in what the mother thought was an alarmingly charming voice for one who was peering into death itself.
“Mom, it’s some girl scouts. They’re selling cookies.”
The father swallowed. He smirked as though he knew all along, as he always did.
The wife swallowed air as though air could be devoured just this one time.
“Put us down for four boxes of Thin Mints,” the husband called.
The door opened. The door shut. The mother calculated the possibility of her husband eating four boxes of Thin Mints.
She clenched her eyes and thought of the girl scouts who were by now walking down the front steps. Behind them was the mother’s front door where next to it swayed a blue star flag—large, proud, and somewhat innocent against a solid black door.
Gail Serino lives in Camarillo, California with three of her five children. Her son-in-law is now serving a second tour in Iraq.