Mrs. Muller’s Telephone

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The best part of Jenkins’ day was usually the customers—it tickled him to see grumpy, lonely people almost as much as seeing a looker or two. The lookers didn’t talk to him as much as the lonelies, so he’d gotten pretty decent at listening to people complaining about their dead relatives or their absent children or just about the world moving on into the future without them. Jenkins could sympathize—he wasn’t yet thirty and already he felt behind.

Mrs. Muller was the most dedicated lonely—she rolled up on her mobility scooter nearly every day, regardless of the weather. She cruised up and down the aisles several times each, picking things up and exclaiming over them to herself before putting them back or setting them in her basket. She monologued about her memories of old products compared to the new products, about the people around her and who they reminded her of, about how she felt about them, about how she felt physically. She recognized Jenkins as someone who would listen to her for a good while before finding an excuse to take leave of her, so she always found a reason to halt her scooter near him.

“Hey Mikey,” she said, baring her teeth to squint at him through the smudges on her glasses.

“Morning Mrs. Muller,” he called over his shoulder, placing cans on the shelf, making sure the images of the products faced outward, exposing piles of red lumps or intertwining coils of moistened tubes. “How we doin’ today?”

“Well, I fell down the goddamn stairs last night,” she said. Jenkins looked back at her and sure enough she was wearing a neck brace, cupping her jowls and making her look like a strange volcano swaddled in a purple sweatshirt. The plastic was scuffed and parts of it were yellowing—it wasn’t the first time he’d seen that brace.

“Hurt your neck again, huh?”

She gestured stiffly toward herself. “Good thing I still had this brace, otherwise I might’ve had to go in!” Jenkins regarded her in a way he hoped read as sympathetic.

“So how did you manage that?” She looked him over in a way that she surely thought read as shrewd, her two front teeth poking out of her pursed lips—as closed as her mouth ever got—before answering his question with a question.

“Do you still have those telephones? Are there any of those candy telephones left?”
Jenkins abandoned his cans and turned to face her, leading slightly with his left shoulder, as if he was trying to tilt his name tag toward her—BRIAN was written in orange chalk marker on the black plastic. He knew exactly what she was referring to: the store had gotten a fold-out display a few weeks ago for a new item that had turned out to be exceptionally popular, a soft black licorice candy in the shape of a rotary dial telephone with allsorts in place of the digits. They came in opaque wax paper bags which obscured the arrangement of the digits, although the packaging indicated that some were more rare than others, which began people collecting them and grouping the designs into categories: COMMON, UNCOMMON and RARE. The rarest was rumored to be a telephone with its allsorts arranged into a grid, as on a touch-tone telephone. Nearly everyone in town had at least one, and Jenkins himself had three in his cupboard at home—two COMMONs and one still sealed in its bag.

“Yeah I know those—are you a collector, uh, Mrs. Muller?” She probably couldn’t even afford a COMMON at this point—the display had been completely cleaned out, driving the second-hand prices up. She didn’t seem like the type to have a secret savings account or something either, not with those teeth.

“Collector? Of candy? Jeez don’t be a dummy Mikey—candy’s for eatin! I was just wanting to buy another one is all.”

Jenkins was aghast. She had to be joking. He considered her for a moment, trying to decide if she could really be that oblivious—had he received a card from her when everyone had been mailing those designs to each other? Maintaining the mailing lists posted on the bulletin board and along with obtaining new stationery had been the most recent mania before the telephones. What was before that, the paper statues? He couldn’t recall seeing her with one of those either.

“Have you had one?” she asked, apparently completely sincere. He realized that it hadn’t even occurred to him to try, although now that he thought about it he realized that the telephones might dry out or begin to rot somehow before they had any chance to appreciate in value. She continued when he didn’t find a response.

“I kinda got tired after I ate it, but I had it for dessert I guess. It’s hard for me to go to sleep sometimes,” she said, almost an aside. “I was sitting in my big chair after, watching my news, and when that show about the guy in the stupid hat came on I realized that I didn’t even want to move, I was so cozy. Usually I can’t sit like that for too long, but right then I felt pretty nice, like taking a really good pill kinda nice, and I didn’t feel like moving at all.” She looked up into the flyspecked plastic over the fluorescent light, reliving it. “I wasn’t even watching the show, just kinda looking at the wall where I have some pitchers up, and I was thinking all kindsa nonsense.” She rested her thin hands on her chest, one crossed over the other. The skin sank deeply between her swollen knuckles, and Jenkins noticed a black and purple bruise crawling out of the cuff of her sleeve, up along her wrist. “There was a kind of pattern on the wall that I never noticed before, kinda buttons like those candies on the telephone, moving around in big circles, and after a while watching em I realized I could hear a sound that kind of fit, like the patterns were gears turning and I could hear them grinding. The sound had kind of a voice to it, though, you know what I mean? After a minute I realized it was my idiot husband calling out to me just the way he used to, calling over and over like a baby, and then I saw him come crawling out of the wall in front of me, crying about how I hadn’t fed him! He knocked the dang tv over and scared the wits out of me, pulling himself towards me, wailing about how hungry he was.” She shrugged. “That’s when I fell down the stairs.”

Jenkins stuck his hands in the pockets of his apron, trying out responses in his head before speaking.

“You think the telephone did all that?”

She scowled, retreating into the neck brace.

“I don’t know what else it would have been, Mikey.” She sucked through the gap in her teeth.

“Well why the heck would you want another one, then?” he said. She looked him up and down for a long moment before shaking her head and beginning to roll slowly down the aisle, slowly enough that Jenkins was sure she had more to say. He could see her jaw working, the movement exaggerated by the neck brace, as she crept away.
“I’m gonna feed him.”