THIS IS DORIS RONN by Jessica Lind Peterson
One day, we will all be sea.
– Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor
Hi Deb. Hi. I wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. And . . . I need to talk to Ted or somebody about cleaning the apartment. So if you will call me back when you can. Bye bye.
* * *
Lone Star. Lone Ranger. Lone Survivor.
Lone Lone Lone
My grandma lives alone.
She snores very loudly.
She puts off doing her dishes until the next day.
* * *
If I ever saw my grandma with a smooth face it would startle me. I like her wiggly layers. She taught me how to swim in our lake by placing her hands under me, holding me up to the surface of the water, and then, very gently, letting me go.
When I called my grandma with the news that my marriage was falling apart, she told me that the day she found out my grandpa was sleeping with another woman she almost rammed her car into a tree. But she didn’t do it because, she said, that would have been a stupid thing to do.
My grandma has one blue tooth. I have never asked her why, it just never occurred to me to question it. She had a knee replacement last year and I drove home to be with her on the day of her surgery. I held her hand until the doctor came to put her under. We were laughing because earlier, on her way to the bathroom, she hadn’t realized her gown was untied in the back. I sure gave them all a show, she said. As they wheeled her into surgery, I was thinking I might not see her again.
She has already chosen her funeral songs.
But this is not a story about my grandma. This is a story about Doris Ronn. Doris Ronn may be someone’s grandma, but she’s not my grandma. Doris Ronn calls my number often by mistake. She leaves messages on my voicemail and I save them. Once, I was waiting to take my seat at a play reading when she called me for the third time that day. I had already explained to her that I am not Deb, that she is dialing the wrong number. Still, I go outside and dial her back.
Doris? I say.
Yes? she says. This is Doris Ronn.
Doris, you keep calling me, but I am not who you are looking for.
Well, that can’t be, she says. I have your number right here.
And we go round and round like this.
* * *
The strange song sounded like a ghost at first. A low, moaning whisper at the bottom of the Puget Sound. Probably nothing. But maybe something. The classified sensors had been spread across the ocean floor by the Navy three years earlier. They were looking for Soviet submarines, but instead of submarines, they found a symphony. The ocean floor pulsing with noise. Aliveness. Oysters babbling. Tiny fish snapping the tendons of their pectoral fins. Contracting their bladder muscles. Showing off. Demanding attention. Battling for ground. Getting directions. Grunts and sighs and yelps and screams and songs and squeaks and murmurs and babbles. And then there was that whale.
Whoam Whoam Whoam. A call of its own. Off the charts. Higher than high.
The Mariah Carey of whales. One technician heard the recordings and took note.
* * *
This is Doris Ronn.
If you would call me or come in and see me I would appreciate it.
* * *
“A unique whale call with 50–52 Hz emphasis from a single source has been tracked over 12 years in the central and eastern North Pacific. No other calls with similar characteristics have been identified in the acoustic data from any hydrophone system in the North Pacific basin. Only one series of these 52‑Hz calls has been recorded at a time, with no call overlap, suggesting that a single whale produced the calls.”[1]
Marine biologist William A. Watkins spent the last years of his life tracking and researching the 52‑Hz whale, otherwise known as the loneliest whale on earth. He followed the whale’s call for 12 years. He never saw Whale. He only heard Whale.
Why wouldn’t you show yourself, you lonely wailing animal?
I hope they in the sea.
buried him
* * *
I wonder how long she has been alone. I wonder if she watches The Price is Right with the volume cranked way up. I wonder if she notices her creamer is spoiled. I wonder if she bathes. I wonder if she sweeps. I wonder if she wears a long nightgown to bed. I wonder if she ever sat doubled over on the toilet, suspecting a miscarriage. I wonder if her breasts still look like breasts. I wonder if her pubic hair has fallen off. I wonder if she misses dancing. I wonder if she knits white afghans for her great-grandchildren and pins notes to them with her full name, the date and washing instructions on them. I wonder if she knows about the internet. I wonder if her hands are gnarled into loose fists. I wonder if her chin sags. I wonder if she is afraid of falling because her best friend spent an entire night face down on her kitchen floor and her body was cold when the downstairs neighbor found her. I wonder if her husband ever called her a Fat Ass, if he died from complications related to smoking. I wonder if he wore an oxygen tank for nine years, if she brought him a tray of raw onion slices and bologna and crackers every afternoon while he slowly suffocated. I wonder if she was quietly relieved when he finally died. I wonder if she does Sudoku, writes birthday cards, bakes banana bread. I wonder if she has dreams where she is flying, swooping through trees, zooming past buildings, if she wakes up with a gasp every time she flies downward, just before hitting the ground.
* * *
Deb? Is that you? . . . Deb? . . . I’m calling you.
* * *
A List of Whale Facts
1. The blue whale is one of the loudest animals on earth.
2. Their calls can be heard underwater for hundreds of miles.
3. Calls last anywhere from five to thirty minutes.
4. Calls often repeat themselves.
5. Whales call for long periods of time after losing a member of their pod.
6. Some researchers say whales cannot feel sad because whales are not human.
7. The call of a normal blue whale is 10‑40 Hz.
8. If a whale’s call is 52 Hz, other whales most likely cannot hear it.
9. If other whales cannot hear it, that whale will be very alone.
10. If that whale is very alone, this seems very sad.
11. If this seems very sad, this is very sad.
* * *
Hi Deb. This is Doris Ronn. Um . . . I just wanted to say hi to you. And…
* * *
My grandma was slowly going blind in one of her eyes. She did not tell anyone about this. She did not want us to worry. Instead, she got herself up in the middle of the night to practice playing her piano in the dark. Just to see if I could still play, is what she said.
But this is not a story about my grandma. This is a story about Doris Ronn.
It has been five months since I’ve heard from Doris Ronn, and I’m starting to wonder where she went. I think of calling, just to check in, but something stops me.
* * *
Doris Ronn heard a sound while she lay awake in bed one night. At first, she wondered if she was dreaming. It was a low sound. A soft sound. Haunting almost. Barely audible.
Whoam Whoam Whoam
The sound throbbed so softly she felt it in the back of her throat. It vibrated into her, this lonely tuba sound. It whirred in a beautiful, deep melody. Like a cat purring on her throat, she could feel this. She wondered if her hearing aid was acting up. She had recently gotten a new one at Sam’s Club and had been having trouble with the background noise being too loud. But when she put her finger to her ear to feel for it, it wasn’t there. She felt for her glasses, pushed herself slowly on to her elbows and clicked on the bedside lamp. Nothing was there. The mattress dampened in a warm pool beneath her. She was scared, but also ready. She had been waiting for this.
* * *
It was four in the morning and my grandma thought she would get up and make herself some peanut butter crackers with honey. But what happened was that she ended up on her bedroom floor, unable to stand. She felt very strange. Everything wobbled. The chair, the dresser, everything. She felt as if she were floating. This is it, she thought. She crawled to her kitchen on her hands and knees and banged on the floor with the handle of a broom.
This kind of an ending is just not fair. All of her smiling, all of her music. Shouldn’t it all end with twirling or at least a graceful bow? I didn’t even lie awake in bed, feeling something was off. She pounded and pounded.
* * *
Over the years, Doris Ronn’s body had sorted itself into an arrangement of brittle bones and sagging skin that tried to look like her, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t her at all. She could see a flaking scalp through white tufts of matted hair, feel arms hanging knobbed like sticks at her sides. It amazed her that she could make those arms move, being that they weren’t even hers. She had been asking around a lot lately. Stopping people in the hallway of her apartment building. Trying to find out what had happened to herself. Do you know where I went? She would ask the mailman, the dog walker, the pock-faced teenager collecting carts in the grocery store parking lot. Their reaction was always the same. Raised eyebrows. A soft chuckle. Why won’t you help me? she would shout at them. She was growing tired of averted eyes, tired of searching for herself. So she began to wait for her ending.
Doris Ronn did not bother with the mattress, she somehow knew she wouldn’t be back. And anyway, the idea of letting the wet be excited her. She pulled on the frayed blue robe that hung on the back of her bedroom door. She suddenly felt more alive, wrapped in blue like this. The throbbing sound grew louder, more urgent, and she let it fill her now. She even began to hum along playfully, to match the tone with her own voice. She slipped her gnarled feet into her Crocs, made her way to the front door and walked out. The sound was a call now, she knew that, and she knew she had to follow it.
She took the elevator down to the dimly lit first floor and walked past the receptionist, who was asleep with her face on the desk. She passed the solarium with all those sleeping parakeets, walked out the double doors and into the salty night air. Because it was the middle of the night, there were no cars to worry about, and she crossed the street as quickly as the feet that didn’t belong to her would allow. She hadn’t walked this fast in years. She made her way across the boardwalk and paused as cool sand filled her shoes. She should be colder, wearing only a nightgown and a thin blue robe, but the sound in her ears and in the back of her throat warmed her from the inside, as if she had swallowed a small piece of sun.
* * *
At first, when I realize she has taken her hands away, I feel myself begin to sink. I cannot do this alone. My small body takes on more water and I’m sure I will be swallowed. But then I look up, and I think I can see her wrinkled neck stretched tight against the sky. She is laughing, her blue tooth peeking out from under her tongue like a secret jewel.
I close my eyes and let myself float.
* * *
One reason why
whales breach is
to quickly transmit
information such as
location.
* * *
The sky was black and piled with stars. Small waves caressed her hairless ankles, pulling sand from underneath her feet, beckoning her. Not too far from the beach where she stood, but far enough for great deepness, she saw the glistening giant shoot straight out of the water; a writhing, slick submarine meeting surface in a fantastic explosion of water and whale. She reacted normally, as if she were merely seeing a bus stopping at a stoplight. Her eyes would not leave the spot where it had met water. She felt a kind of primordial softness towards this creature, as if they had once swung together on a swing set or they shared the same birthday. Immediately, Doris Ronn knew that this was her caller. She was really far away from her apartment, from her television, from the leftover rotisserie chicken in her refrigerator. She was really going somewhere now. She enjoyed the feeling of something wanting her this badly, the feeling of being pulled further and further in.
* * *
It was her inner ear. Peripheral vestibular disorder. That is what was causing her to feel like she was floating. I heard about it three days later and I cried and cried because no one had even thought to call me. While sitting on my kitchen floor leaning my back against the refrigerator I thought how silly I was being. It was just an ear problem. She was okay. As she told me the whole story on the phone I could hear The Young and the Restless blaring in the background. My grandma even laughed about the whole thing. I’m just falling apart, sweetheart.
* * *
The call was louder than ever now, it crowded her ears and filled her throat and the backs of her eyelids with its heavy pulse. She called back in harmony, rising a third above, right where her voice was at its most colorful. Deep under the water, she found that she hardly even missed breathing.
The whale waited. He wasn’t worried about being found. He was as big as the biggest dinosaur that ever lived, a floating ghost giant. He was both the shadow of the building and the building. And he was used to waiting.
The great pulling stopped and her white hair swirled around her face like sea grass. This was the moment in her life where Doris Ronn could have been mistaken for a mermaid. It was there under the surface of the ocean, wrapped tight in wet blue, that the two callers finally met face to face. One was creature. The other was person. It doesn’t matter which was which. If a smile had a sound that is the sound they both made.
This is not the sad part, so do not look away.
The salt would work quickly on the body that didn’t belong to Doris Ronn, undressing her layer by layer, until all that was left was soft light wrapped in blue robe. It was no coincidence that her caller was also blue, that the ocean that cradled them both was blue. Blue is a very good ending to things.
* * *
Recently, sensors off the coast of California picked up whale calls with the same frequency as the 52-Hz whale. The recordings suggest that there is now more than one whale with a uniquely high-pitched call.
We only see them when they come up for air.
[1]. William A. Watkins, “Twelve years of tracking 52-Hz whale calls from a unique source in the North Pacific,” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967063704001682
Jessica Lind Peterson’s play “What I Learned From Grizzly Bears” is published in the Smith & Kraus anthology “The Best 10‑Minute Plays of 2006.” Her essay “Tall, Straight Sisters” recently appeared in River Teeth.