Free Eye of Flame by Pamela Sargent Page B

sounds exploded behind her eyes as a series of flashes. She pulled a pillow over her face, yearning for the dark silence to return. After months of nagging, she had finally persuaded Nick to get rid of their old black telephone with the rotary dial and the bell that hit her with the force of a lightning bolt, but this chirper wasn’t much better.
    The phone kept chirping. Cheryl prayed for it to stop, unable to bring herself to pick up the receiver. Nick was probably calling from his office, checking up on her, seeing if she was out of bed yet. She could tell him that she had gone out to a job interview. Pressing the pillow more tightly around her ears, she composed a possible story for her husband. Adele from Ronald Associates had called to tell her that the personnel manager at Trahel Engineering was looking for a new file clerk, had seen Cheryl’s résumé, and wanted to interview her at eleven. That would be detailed enough to satisfy Nick, who would be delighted that she had miraculously managed to answer the phone and too busy to check on her story.
    The phone stopped chirping. Cheryl peered out from under the pillow. The glowing numerals of the clock-radio told her that it was almost eleven now. She had to get up. If she could pull herself together and go out on a few errands, she would not be here to answer the phone.
     
    Years ago, when Cheryl was a small child, the sound of a telephone ringing had filled her with dread. She did not know why; it had always been that way. She had once thought that she must have picked up the receiver and heard something so frightening or upsetting that she had blocked it from her mind, recalling only that the telephone had carried the horror to her. But what could she have heard? Why had her parents known nothing about such a call? Surely she would have run to them, however emotionally distant they were, for comfort.
    So, she had concluded years later, something else had to be at the root of her fear. Maybe it was the intrusiveness of the instrument, the fact that she was forced to pick it up without knowing who was calling or what she would hear. The chaotic outside world, the world her parents had tried to escape inside their neat orderly house in a dull small town, was always threatening to intrude through the phone. Cheryl could not know whether the call was from her best friend Marcy or from that creep Julie Colton, who always rushed to tell her what everybody was allegedly saying about Cheryl behind her back. She might be dreaming that Joe Wentworth, the best-looking boy at school, was finally going to ask her out, then pick up the phone only to discover that Mrs. Nance, her math teacher, wanted to see one of her parents for a conference on why Cheryl was doing so badly in that subject. She could answer to find that her life was on the verge of some precipice. The torment of wondering whether the voice at the other end was going to launch her into ecstasy or plunge her into depression was usually so great that she could not bring herself to answer the phone at all. The ringing would stop, and her life would remain as it was, placid and undisturbed, at least for a while.
    She had supposed that the other kids, even Marcy, sometimes thought she was weird for being so abrupt with them whenever one of their calls did get through to her. Unlike them, she didn’t mind when her mother or father picked up the phone first, and she usually hung up as quickly as possible instead of staying on for hours and hours to gossip. She could even feel relieved when her mother told a friend that Cheryl was doing her homework and could not come to the phone. She could not explain to anyone, even Marcy, how the ringing made her tense with terror.
    By the time Cheryl graduated from high school, she could barely bring herself to say anything over the phone even when she was able to answer it. Sometimes words lodged in her throat, forcing her to hang up as she gasped for breath. Sometimes the