The stupid lady

When I was five the neighbor kids, my sister, and I did this kind-of mean thing.

They had this great fort in their backyard and we would take the cordless phone and the phone book from the house and sit around in a circle making prank phone calls and laughing until we peed our pants. Ordering pizzas from furniture stores. That one really got us.

Sometimes we just dialed random numbers until we got, who we called, "the stupid lady."

I still don't know what this lady is called. Not the operator. Just the lady that tells you, "The number you have dialed blah blah blah so please hang up and try your call again."

She was always so polite. So pleasantly direct and informative. Her professionalism never waivered.

This is why it was particularly funny when we would pass the phone around the circle and hurl insults at her, literally shouting:

"YOU STUPID LADY!" we would scream. "YOU'RE SUCH A STUPID IDIOT!! WHY DO YOU KEEP ANSWERING THE PHONE!?!" "SHUT UP YOU STUPID LADY!!!" "I HATE YOU YOU'RE UGLY!!" "GO DIE YOU STUPID LADY!!"

We would laugh so hard as she ignored our violent cursings, remaining collected and sticking with her original script. "The number you have dialed..." she would say, every time.

"I wonder what that stupid lady is thinking when we call her," one of the neighbor kids would pant, out of breath, laughing so hard.

Though I was certain, in my five-year old brain, the stupid lady was a voice recording, I had never entertained the slim possibility she was actually a real person. A person we were spewing the most filth and profanity our 3-7 year-old brains could come up with.

For me, after this, the game was ruined.

When the phone was passed to me I would try to "soften" my insults,

"You are such a stupid lady. You stupid lady. Why don't you shoot yourself in your brain you stupid lady." All the while I thinking, "Why are you being so nice! Stand up for yourself! Don't take this!"

I imagined her going home to her husband, perhaps the man who reads books on tape. The stupid lady pours herself a short glass of chardonnay (her voice hasn't felt the sting of harsh heavy drinking) and settles on the couch.

"How was work?" her husband says, every word smooth and perfectly articulated.

She sighs. "These kids keep calling ... for hours they call and just yell at me and call me stupid... ugly... tell me to kill myself..."

Her husband, his perfect blonde haired blue-eyed husband, massages her perfect shoulders,

"You know darling, you can always stay home ... we can start a family."

The stupid lady stiffens. He's brought this up before. She's an independent woman, she could never be at the whim of her husband's money... his domain-- tidying the house, waiting for him to come home, entertaining herself with gossip magazines. She must be ready at all times to take her life into her own hands. And kids ... never.

"No, darling ... no." and later they make love and her perfect brown hair sprawls across satin sheets, the troubles of the day forgotten.

I hope so anyway.

Sometimes I think about finding a land line and dialing a random number. "The number you have dialed..." the stupid lady would say in a voice strained by almost twenty years of hard liquor and cigarette smoking. "I'm sorry" I say and she pauses immediately recognizing my voice. We'll start to cry.

Soon after we meet up and I'll hold the stupid lady's perfect shaking shoulders as she sobs at having never had children because of us, how her husband left her for the operator lady, how she has lung cancer now because she started smoking cigarettes. But she'll forgive me, because I'm all she has and she begins to call me daughter. Daily visits to the hospital we talk about those days when I would call her line as a kid and the stupid lady would say "I sure wanted to wring you kids up!" and we burst out laughing at the pun. She tells me how the telephone business sure isn't what it used to be and I say, "yeah, life was simple then," she agrees taking an inhale from her cigarette and we become silent.

Everyday until the stupid lady died I would take care of her like my own mother. Care for her until her last breath sounds forms into a smile. At the eulogy I talk about the whole story, putting it into a neat little box for friends and family who became estranged from the stupid lady during her hard times.

The marble tombstone I would have personalized for her would read:

The Stupid Lady

(year of birth and departure)

She wasn't so stupid.

Her only mistake was being too nice,

to the wrong people.