Answering 911 by Caroline Burau

Author:Caroline Burau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2009-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

My Marsha

Marsha is a big blond woman with movie-star eyes and a man’s throaty laugh, and she laughs a lot. She is one of my favorite things to see when I get to work. Mostly because of how kind she’s been to me, and partly because if she’s sitting on the main, it means Kristen is off duty.

Marsha is becoming a friend of mine. She’s not someone I would typically get close to; she says things like “no bigger than a minute” and attaches her belief that “God always has a plan” to every life crisis you can think of, from weight gain to terminal cancer. I’m ten times more cynical than she is, yet she’s been at this job more than ten times longer.

When I get pissy on the job, she turns to me, breathes a deep breath in, and says, “In with the butterflies, out with the dragons!” which drives me crazy, because I take myself way too seriously to let a silly mantra like that ruin the foul mood I’ve let someone put me in.

Marsha doesn’t want to be a dispatcher forever, but she doesn’t know what else she can do that pays this well and offers this kind of security. She has a four-year-old boy and a mortgage and windows that need replacing.

In her free time, Marsha writes children’s books and short fiction. Somewhere between the rinse cycle and the dryer is when she gets time for that. Or just between dropping off her son for a play date and picking him up two hours early because he’s having a tantrum. She’s a tortured writer who dreams about a ten-thousand-copy first run and a book signing at Barnes & Noble, just like me.

One night, she invites me to her house, where we’re going to pluck my eyebrows, drink coffee, and dish. Marsha is an expert plucker, with perfectly sculpted ash-blonde brows. She wacks away at my unibrow with quick little tugs, while simultaneously explaining to her son why he shouldn’t dance the lambada on their kitchen table just right now.

“Mitchell!” Marsha says, raising her inside voice. “I’m thinking it’s time for your nap.”

This causes a scream, which leads to a tantrum, which ends with a nap. Marsha returns after putting Mitchell in his room, and begins plucking anew. My eyes are sore and beginning to water, but I let her keep going.

Now that we’re alone, there’s something I must know. It’s something that sticks in my cluttered, overwhelmed head every day. Whether I’m at work or not.

When will I get it?

“Get what?” She is plucking at the hairs that are above the middle of my left eye, and it hurts like a bastard.

“When did you get to the point where you didn’t feel like an idiot?”

She laughs from deep down inside. “You do. You will.”

“I will what?”

Mercifully, she rests her plucking hand on the table. Then she looks me in the eye for a long, meaningful moment. This is another thing she does that drives me crazy.

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