Ring Ring
smartphones
The box was wrapped in silver foil with a curl of blue ribbon, and Diane had been picturing Mira’s face opening it for three weeks.
“Happy birthday, sweet girl,” Tom said, sliding it across the kitchen island. He had made pancakes shaped like the number sixteen, which had come out looking more like two lopsided eights, and he was pretending this was the joke he’d intended.
Mira lifted the box. She weighed it in her hands the way she weighed everything now, with a small considering pause that Diane had started to notice around her thirteenth birthday and had never stopped noticing since. Then she peeled the foil back at the seam, careful, the way she opened library books.
The phone inside was the new model. Diane had stood in the store for forty minutes choosing the color. Tom had taken on an extra shift at the hospital to cover it. They had agreed, finally, that sixteen was the age, that all her friends had had one for years, that they had been the unreasonable ones, the holdouts, the parents who made their daughter borrow a classmate’s screen to scan into the school cafeteria.
“Oh,” Mira said. “Wow. Thank you.”
She smiled. The smile arrived a quarter-second after it should have, and it set in her cheeks like something she was holding up rather than something she was doing.
“Do you like the color?” Diane said.
“It’s perfect, Mom. Really.”
She came around the island and hugged them both, one arm around each, the phone still in its box pressed flat against Tom’s back. Then she went upstairs to get ready for school, and Diane stood at the sink rinsing the pancake batter from the bowl, listening to her daughter’s footsteps go quiet on the carpet of the landing.
That night Diane knocked on Mira’s door and found her at her desk with the box still sealed. The silver foil had been smoothed and folded into a neat square beside the lamp.
“Can I sit?”
Mira nodded at the bed. Diane sat.
She had rehearsed the conversation through the dishwasher cycle and the laundry fold and the drive home from the grocery store. She wanted to say: I saw your face this morning, and I have been seeing it all day, and your father has been seeing it too, and we are not angry, we are confused, and we love you, and if there is something wrong with the gift we can fix it, and if there is something wrong with you we want to know, and please, please, do not perform gratitude for us, we did not raise you to perform.
“Honey,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Mira looked at the folded foil. She picked at one of the corners.
“It’s a really nice phone, Mom.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
A long pause. Mira’s mouth made a few false starts, the shape of words she discarded before they could leave.
“Nobody uses them anymore,” she said. “Not at school. Not the people I, you know. Not the people.”
“What do you mean nobody uses them? Everyone uses them.”
“Everyone’s parents use them. Everyone’s, like, aunts.” She looked up, and her eyes had the bright film of someone trying not to cry about something embarrassing. “We all watched the documentaries in health class. We had the unit on it, the dopamine stuff and the algorithm stuff and the, the hijacking. Everybody’s seen what it does to you. If you pull one out at lunch people just look at you. It’s like, oh, she’s still on those? Like you’re vaping in the bathroom or something. It’s cringe, Mom. It’s so cringe.”
Diane sat with her hands in her lap.
“I told Hannah I was getting one and she said her mom got her a film camera for her birthday and she put it on her shelf and now she has, she has actual photos, and a journal, and she goes to the park, and I, I sat there and I told her that was so cool, and I came home and you guys were so excited, and I just.”
She put her face in her hands.
Diane went downstairs. Tom was in the den with a book on his knee and the news muted on the screen. She told him. He listened without interrupting, which was how she knew he was taking it seriously. Then he stood up and went into the garage.
He came back twenty minutes later carrying something heavy in both hands. It had a curling fabric cord and a rotary dial yellowed to the color of old teeth, and a receiver that sat in its cradle with the weight of a small animal. He had wiped it down. He set it on the kitchen table and went up the stairs and knocked on Mira’s door, and Diane stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened.
“Sweet girl,” he said. “Come down. Your mother and I want to try again.”