It was silver aluminum, with blue panels halfway up each side. Glass topped the blue walls, giving a clear view of both the user and those outside the booth.
The bifold door sported rusty, inset hinges that creaked a complaint when you pushed inside. Above the door, the word “PHONE” shouted its glow into the night air.
It was taller than the tallest man in town, and the space inside could accommodate several kids or one girthy adult with only a bit of wobbling to get the door closed.
The hulking, gritty phone was black steel, partially overlaid with fingerprint-smudged chrome. In the center of the chrome, numbered pushbuttons waited for poking digits.
The numbers atop each button were faded from furtive index fingers. The “O” was particularly smudged and a bit sticky to the touch: Fuzzy’s tavern was down the street and many over-served guzzlers swerved to the booth to ask the operator to help them call home.
The phone booth always smelled like sweat and potato chips. Shoe outlines and barefoot prints trampled Rorschach studies of nearly every person in town.
All in all, it was a Petrie dish of germs, but the summer I turned fifteen, I fell in love amid every filthy surface of that phone booth.
A boy asked for my phone number. My heart dropped, because we didn’t have a home phone. I told him about the phone booth on the corner.
“I’ll call you there,” he mumbled.
That night, I galloped to the corner of Main and Hibbard, clattered into the booth, and creaked the door closed.
A light glared from the ceiling; I cracked the door open a smidge; that would make the light go off. I didn’t want to be on display to everyone walking and driving by. This would be a private call.
At 8 p.m., a jangle loud enough to summon volunteer firefighters blared from the phone. I grabbed the handset, leaned my forehead against the pitted box, and whispered what I thought was a sultry, “Hello?”
“Is that you? Are you okay?”
I modulated my voice to normal-girl volume and smiled. He called. I had a boyfriend on the phone.
All summer, my boyfriend and I talked, chuckled, stuttered, and breathed heavily to each other inside this magical phone booth. Same time, each appointed weeknight. I stitched my life around the call time and made sure to be there, hand atop the handset and heart pounding.
I tried to get there early to block other users from ruining my date. If someone was inside the booth, jabbering unimportant words and wasting time. I’d lean my body against the glass door, backside squished toward the caller, and huff repeatedly.
I had to get in there, and it had to be NOW.
Once inside, the booth belonged to me. If someone headed my way, dime in fist, I picked up the phone and pretended to talk until they stormed off.
I felt clever and breathless in my delinquency.
On the corner in my small town, in a box of stale air and buzzing insects, I listened to a voice slightly deeper than mine share grudging/embarrassed words of affection and lofty, improbable goals for our future.
My boyfriend played his radio for me. “Stand By Your Man” came sailing from his house to my tingling ears.
“That’s what I want you to do,” he croaked. I swooned and promised.
Sometimes, we both listened to nothing…in long, heart-pounding silences of sharing thoughts across telephone poles. It was true, first, love.
We talked and giggled across phone lines for many weeks; he, in his kitchen with the cord squashed against a closed bathroom door. Me, standing inside a metal box, twirling a lock of hair, and believing our love would last forever.
Our calls eventually slowed and stopped for reasons I can’t recall. We finally installed a phone at home, and I spent the rest of my teen years perched nearby, waiting for calls from other boys.
But when I visit my hometown and drive past that now-empty corner, I still see me there, huddled dreamily inside a dirty-beautiful metal box…the most romantic place in town.
