When Max Called
  Joan McMillan

Those years after my mother’s divorce,
we descended with her into the depths of her drinking,
a murkiness thick as the tar hidden under silvery pools at La Brea.
She slept after work, pillow-linen creasing her face,
she woke and drank, slept and woke again,
then she showered and doused herself with White Shoulders,
the house smelling of perfume and drowsiness,
and she would wait for a phone call from a man named Max,
whom she’d met at the Norwood,
a bar at the corner of Nordhoff and Woodley.
She had given her number to Max,
last in a series of men she picked up in bars,
each one a little shabbier than the last.
Max was sodden and stoned,
slept on the beach winter and summer,
came to her when he was broke and needed sex and a meal,
and she stayed home in the evenings,
she stopped hanging out at the Norwood
as if turned again into a dutiful wife,
listening for the phone while she lacquered her fingernails,
removing the polish with acetone and cotton-balls,
then re-polishing, sometimes lifting the receiver
to see if it was accidentally off the hook.
We were shooed away from it, could not call friends,
as if the entire house turned on the axis of the telephone,
inscrutable in its wall-cradle.
She sat across from it under a tapestry
of fluorescent yarn flowers and gray felt cats,
she lit Salems and drank Galliano,
piss-yellow, with a cloying licorice scent.
Sometimes if I left my room after one a.m.,
I found her still waiting,
her cigarette smoldering like a baleful red eye,
her breath smoke-filled, and every night
she asked the same question,
said it to me, to my sisters,
to my four-year-old brother,
not, “How was school?” or “Do you have homework?”
but “When will Max call?”
like a litany or a hymn-refrain,
“When will Max call?” was her prayer of hoped-for salvation.

As the weeks passed and the phone stayed silent,
she paced the halls like a sentry, glass in hand,
whispering, “When will Max call?”
as if Max were God and our phone His oracle.
In her devotion, she did nothing else:
not a meal was cooked, not a book read,
not a bill paid, and once every four or five months,
it occurred, better than fifty dollars
found in a coat-pocket: Max would call,
and then each of us was chosen for a task:
one to sweep floors,
one to polish furniture with Lemon Pledge,
one to shake scatter rugs of their dust,
one to scrub the bathroom with Comet and sponges
and she too would shine,
released from the dull armor of waiting.
She combed and re-combed her thick black hair,
glossed her lips to the color of a Rome apple,
and dressed in a flowing tunic and slacks
of tropical orange and violet silk.
I used to wonder what Max really thought of us,
his blond curls full of sand,
his mind a fog of dope and beer,
his belly empty, arriving at a house
which had been scoured and polished for him,
every curtain open, food ready on the table
as if plucked from the air
like the miracle of loaves and fishes.

For weeks afterward, she talked about him
with her friends, her neighbors,
even the checkout clerk at Von’s,
and though Max had ascended back
to the beach in Santa Monica,
she was sated for a time,
she drank cup after cup of wine in thanksgiving,
she glowed like a zealot in the fire of his attention.