Your family’s screen routines

The Bread Bin

Damir, this one reached you through phones at shared meals. Here is a story about Denise, whose family lives in a group chat that runs at dinner time.

Denise's family does not live in the row house with her. It lives in a group chat on her phone. Her mother is two states away, with a new hip. There are two sisters. There is a cousin who keeps sending the same photograph of the same cat on the same wall. They are all free in the evening, and that is the hour when Denise's pan goes on. So the chat and the dinner have been eating together for years.

On a clear Saturday in September she comes back from the market with more peaches than this house can be expected to deal with. Mikolos, at his stall, held one out to her on the flat of his knife. "These are the last, Denise," he said, "the actual last." She has never once said no to that sentence.

Francis is sixteen. He comes in from the track with his bag still on his shoulder. He says the meet, the track competition, has been moved. He is running the eight hundred metres in the morning, and the coach has told them all to be there early. Then three things happen at once. The pan spits. The phone is in her hand. The cousin has sent the cat. By the time Denise looks up from all three, Francis has said something else, and the something else is gone.

She does not do anything large. She types that she will be back in a while. Then she opens the bread bin. It holds no bread. It holds rubber bands, and the lid has a dent in it from years of them. She puts the phone in with the rubber bands.

"Table's for the table," she says, "while the peaches last."

Francis looks at the bin. He looks at his own phone, which stays where it was, face down beside his fork. He goes on eating.

He says nothing more about the meet. He eats two peaches and leaves the stones in a line on the rim of his plate. He has left them like that since he was small enough to need lifting onto the chair.

Later Denise is at the sink, with the water running and her hands wet. She takes the phone out of the bin. She agrees with her cousin that the cat is a very fine cat. Her mother has written four times, to ask about nothing in particular. Denise stands there and answers all of it with one wet thumb. The pan goes cold in the water. The peaches are gone.

The Old Fold

Damir, this one comes with the report rather than from your answers. Here is a story about Nate.

Nate lives near Union Station, in an apartment with two bedrooms. One of them has a bunk bed in it. For half of each week his children are there, and the place holds four times the noise it holds for the other half.

Bea is fourteen, and she has had a phone since the year of the handovers. A handover is when the children go from one parent's home to the other's. The phone arrived the way most things arrive. The handovers went wrong twice in one month, once in the rain outside a shut library. After the second time it was obvious that somebody in the middle of the arrangement had to be able to say which house she was at. Nobody sat down about it. It was a Tuesday, and then it was done.

In January a letter comes about the phone contract. The contract has run out again, and the company asks whether he would like to renew it. He reads the letter on the platform at Union Station. Salt from the winter streets is tracked all over the station floor. The big clock above them is running its two fast minutes. Bea is further up the platform with her hood up, reading the board for a train that is not theirs. Ollie, who is eleven, is reading the letter upside down.

Nate folds the letter into his newspaper.

He has never asked himself whether that Tuesday was the right Tuesday. There was a reason with edges on it, a reason you could put your hand on. He is an engineer, and he likes a reason with edges. But it is long enough ago now to look back at. When he looks, he cannot see what the other road would have been. A Bea who waited another year: he has no drawing of her. She might be exactly this girl with her hood up. She might not. There is nobody to ask.

"Is that about Bea's phone?" Ollie says.

"It's about the bill."

"Are you going to pay it?"

"I expect so."

The train comes in. The paper goes under his arm, folded along its old fold, with the letter inside it. Ollie reads the back page over Nate's elbow the whole way, which is what he does on trains.

By the time they are home Nate has signed the form, because the handovers have not become any simpler. About the Tuesday he still has nothing he could say. He puts the letter in the drawer with the others. That is how a person files a thing that is settled, and he knows that it is only filed.

The Cold Tea

Damir, this one comes with the report rather than from your answers. Here is a story about Lena.

When Mara's phone came, Lena made one condition. Once a week she would look through it, and Mara would be in the room. Mara said yes. They have kept to it ever since. It happens on Sunday evening at the kitchen table, and it takes about as long as a cup of tea.

Lena has her reason. She is the only adult in the apartment. She works long days, and Cal, who is ten, needs her in the evenings. If something went wrong in Mara's life, there is nobody else who would notice. That is her reason. She knows it is not proof.

Sunday evening is also the one time in the week when the two of them sit at a table with nothing else to do.

On a Sunday in March the smell from the bakery comes up the street at five, as it does every day. Lena puts the kettle on. Mara, who is fourteen, puts the phone on the table, unlocked, and sits down across from her with a bowl of cereal. She eats and looks out of the window. That is how Mara spends this part of the evening, and it always has been.

Lena looks. There are names she knows and names she does not. There are jokes made of pictures, and she cannot read those at all. Much of it could mean anything. She does not find anything that worries her. She also could not say that there is nothing to find. She has never been able to say that, on any Sunday.

"Are you done?" Mara says.

"Nearly."

Some Sundays Lena thinks this is what a careful mother does. Other Sundays she thinks it is what a frightened mother does. The phone looks the same either way. She does not know what Mara makes of it. Mara has never said. Lena has never asked, because she is not sure what she would do with the answer.

She slides the phone back across the table. Mara puts it in her pocket and carries her bowl to the sink.

Next Sunday Lena will put the kettle on again. She has not decided that it is right. She has only not decided to stop.

The tea has gone cold, and she drinks it anyway.