The Adventures Of Bette Porter And Sissee Gardner After Yale (Part 5, Chapter 5)

PART FIVE: PHILLIPS, WISCONSIN

Chapter 5

As soon as I walked back into the house, everyone praised Howie. They all thought he was a really nice guy and promptly asked me if I was serious about him. I had written home numerous times in the last six months and mentioned that he and I were dating and so to them, we were still an item. I now told them point blank that we had become just friends so that there was no further misunderstanding.

Even though my parents had a good sized, two-story house, they still had only one telephone which was in the dining room on a corner desk, right next to a doorway that led into the kitchen. The desk also backed up to a wall that belonged to my parents downstairs bedroom, so there was absolutely no privacy to talk on the telephone unless everyone was gone or sleeping behind closed doors.

I picked up the telephone anyway, to see if it worked yet. It was still dead. My mom walked up to me and said I had gotten a phone call last night at around seven p.m.. She picked up a note book and handed it to me. I saw “Bette Porter” written down with Bette’s phone number. “She wanted to know if we had heard from you yet because she saw on the news that a storm was coming.” said mother. “She sounded pretty worried.”

Mother said that the phones went out soon after that.

I tried not to show my frustration. I picked up one of my luggage pieces and started to take it through the dining room and living room to the staircase at the front of the house. My brother Chuck helped with a smaller suit cases and a carry on. As we talked going up the steps, I had little time to dwell on how bad I felt about Bette and how totally aggravated I was that I could not get a call through to her.

As the day wore on, I probably picked up that phone every half hour and found it repeatedly dead, dead, dead! We were scattered between the living room, the dining room and the kitchen, my parents, siblings, their spouses and small children running in and out. We were a very noisy group, delighted to be together, exchanging stories about when we were all younger and just having a good time.