BEEPERS — EMILY COSTA
/The old man sells Dad beepers in a dark store that smells like we’re inside a cigarette. Other guys sit on folding chairs and watch. The old man sounds like he needs to clear out his lungs, like he needs to cough for a whole year to get it all out. He has a voice like a baby rattle. He has glasses halfway between regular and sun. They’re brown-yellow, but you can see his eyes. I don’t want to see his eyes, especially when he’s talking to me. He’s like the old man at the candy wholesaler. I don’t want to talk to them, these old men, but they always talk to me. Dad says she’s just shy, but they keep on me. At the wholesaler, I usually run off because it’s big enough to run off in. I run until no one is around and then I slide my hands over the big smooth bags of Frooties, the boxes of Sour Punch Straws. But the beeper store is small and there’s nowhere to go. I stay and watch them argue about price.
Dad sells the beepers he buys from the old man. He sells them in a glass case in the front of the video store. Beepers are just one extra Dad is trying out. He sells incense, pogs, video games. He is thinking of selling ice cream, of buying the empty spot next door.
Dad has a beeper. It’s just black. If I had a beeper, I’d get see-through blue or pink or purple. I don’t need one, though. I don’t go anywhere like Dad does. Dad goes everywhere. Sometimes I’m with him, sometimes he takes me and my sisters, but then Mom comes to pick us up at the video store. We give her a hard time about leaving. Dad lets us take candy. Later, we eat it in front of the TV without him.
But we have a black cordless phone. We have an answering machine with a robot man’s voice and we check messages as soon as we get home. When we need Dad to call us, we dial his number, then our home number, and wait.
When we want to say I love you, we press 1-4-3 and wait.
When it’s an emergency, we press 9-1-1 and wait.
We wait, we wait.
Emily Costa teaches freshmen at Southern Connecticut State University, where she received her MFA. Her writing can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Memoir Mixtapes, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter @emilylauracosta.
