Saturday Nights
By Sylvia Allen
PROMPT—Never will I forget ...
When I was 20 I had a job in a crisis center in Santa Cruz, California. I had kind of bonded with my co-worker Daisy Leong. She and I worked the Saturday night shift on the crisis line because none of the volunteers would do it.
Saturdays tended to be hours of nothing happening, and then suddenly the lines would erupt with drama, police, ambulances, threats of violence, desperate voices begging for help. But there were those hours in between with nothing to do but wait for the phone to ring.
Here’s how I remember Daisy, and those Saturday nights. The center is a dingy storefront squeezed between a cowboy bar and a sad little thrift store. Most of the front room is taken up by a long, scarred wooden desk where we sit and answer the lines. Scattered on it are telephones, binders, pens, and dirty ashtrays.
The center has, of course, no air conditioning, so on this summer night trickles of sweat start under my arms and trace my ribs. Daisy’s thin, faded red t-shirt shows off the roundness of her shoulders and her small breasts, and there’s a patch of sweat that makes a V down the front.
Daisy rocks back in her chair and purses her rosebud lips. We’re talking about one of the calls I had earlier that evening. The smell of spilled beer seeps in from next door, and as always, the jukebox in the bar is the background to our conversation.
"So I'm doing active listening with the guy as hard as I can," I say. "And he's got me hooked. His wife left him because of his using, and took the kids, and he got clean and sober but now she’s marrying someone else, and he’s started using again, and now he’s thinking about killing himself… Checks all the boxes. And then.” I sigh. “Then he says, ‘Miss, can I ask you something?’”
Daisy snickers.
“And that's when I knew. ‘What color,' he says—"
"'What color is your underwear?'" Daisy and I chant together.
"I have to give it to him,” I say, “he got me fair and square.”
"He did," Daisy says. She sits forward again, letting the front legs of the chair hit the floor, and leans close to me. I get distracted by the way she moves her hands when she’s talking. "So, the thing I really want to know about this, hon—" She picks up a pen in her rounded fingers and points it at me soberly, deliberately, with concern. "What color is it?"
I try to laugh but it doesn’t come out right. Through the wall we share with the bar, drunken male voices swell in chorus: "I'm a Rhine-stone cow-boy!” THUD! as boots hit the wall on the other side.
My face feels hot and I’m breathing fast, I’m not sure why. I open the call log and look down at it. Daisy rocks way back in her chair again, lifts the heavy hair off her neck, and looks up at the ceiling.
"Well, here it is another Saturday night,” she says, “and I'm sittin' by the phone, waitin' for it to ring.”
Sylvia Allen has been a writer all her life, starting at age four. She was a tech writer and ghostwriter for 30 years. Now she writes fiction and memoir. She is married to Martha Shelley, the gay rights activist. She is Jewish and disabled. She sings. She was raised by wolves. Sylvia writes from the United States.
