My wife pulled the bathroom door shut. The mechanism clicked and the jumble of ticks the doorknob had made at the touch of her hand ended and I scratched at the little rubber plug in the back of the flip phone without thinking about what it was at first. My daughter was standing on the chair next to me, palms down on the table, leaning over my arm, and of course that thought rose up that the chair would slide back or the table leaf would give and she’d snap flailing like a snipped rope and I’d grab for her, catch her before she hit the floor but wouldn’t be fast enough to save her from hitting some part of her body on some part of the table or chair and my grasping would squeeze her arm or side too hard somewhere. And there would be tears. But, she was four years old and hadn’t fallen off a chair in a quarter of a decade, so I pushed the thought back down.
“Who’s phone is that?”
“Mommy’s.”
“Why is it like that?”
“Like two pieces? No touchscreen? That’s how pretty much every phone used to be. They didn’t have touchscreens.”
“Did you talk on it like this?” She took the phone from my hand andheld it to her cheek. “Hello, hello, grandma? Cheetah? Is this a kitty?”
“Yep. Exactly like that.”
She snapped the phone shut and opened it again and the rings on the shower bar rang and the curtain crumpled mutedly across the bar as my wife pulled the shower open. The phone thumped on the table and the table’s old great-grandfather legs creaked and it’s surface bumped the wall behind it, leaving another speck of coffee stain on the cream paint, as again my daughter leaned on it, palms down.
“What is that?”
She was pointing at that little round rubber plug. Silver paint had been rubbed off of it at some point, letting the grey-green bare polymer peek through. That was not the first time I had thought about what could actually be underneath that plug. I’d had phones like that of course, years ago, with the little rubber plugs, but had never wanted to take the plugs out for fear of destroying the phone somehow. Which was stupid, thinking about it now. Those plugs were clearly meant to come out and be looked under, with it’s squishy texture and miniscule triangular notch for tool insertion. It was begging to come out of this old dead phone.
“I think it’s a way to open the phone, and see what’s inside. Wanna see?”
My daughter nodded. The house coughed up bathwater in a vibrating fit from the basement until my wife pulled the shower switch on the faucet and the pipes calmed. Bathtime always sounded like the house was being bombed. I never figured out why the bath faucet made so much complaint, while the shower pipe hardly made a sound. It never bothered me much so I always ignored it.
I thought about where my tools were, out in the cold garage. Maybe telling her we could see what was inside the phone wasn’t such a good idea after all. But then I figured I’d check the junk drawer for a stray screwdriver I hadn’t put away. I went in the kitchen and pulled the white junk drawer open by its chrome pull. There was a whole plastic box of thin black screwdrivers, the kind meant for small jobs, leaning up on its side in the drawer, next to all the useful junk. I brought the little flat box back to the dining room. The screwdrivers inside rattled around. One or more of them had apparently escaped the clips they were supposed to be held in place by, probably due to years of use and freezing and heating in the garage.
My daughter was playing with the phone’s hinge. The whole phone was a swishy stylized thing with unnecessary bends of plastic and decorative metal swoops and bevels around the glass faced LED displays. Above the hinge the top part of the phone had two screens. One on the front and one on the back, and the hinge itself had a cylinder in its middle where the camera lens was. The camera could rotate around the hinge and take pictures of the phone’s user or rotate back and take pictures in front of the user. The battery and battery cover on the back was nowhere to be found, fallen off or thrown away long ago. Being so many years old, the hinge willingly flopped far back, looked like farther than it was supposed to. If it wasn’t for the plastic curves and bevels the phone could have laid face down flat with the hinge bent back.
“Alright, there should be one in here that can get this thing open.”
I squeezed the plastic screwdriver box to release the latch inside and swung its door open so it lay flat on the table. The slenderest of the 6 screwdrivers was still held fast in place, but the biggest one and the smaller of the middle two were the ones that had gotten free of their clasps. They lay diagonal across their brothers. I laid them back in their troughs. I snapped the thinnest one out, a flat-head, and began prying at the phone’s little rubber plug.
“Are you taking it apart?”
“Yeah. Want to see what’s inside?”
“Uh huh. What’s inside?”
“We’ll find out.”
It was more difficult than I thought to pry the plug loose from its socket, but eventually I was able to get the screwdriver down the triangular notch, apply pressure to the bottom of the plug and wiggle it up. The rubber cylinder extruded out of the hole like pulling on a secret brick in an ancient wall. It expanded and relaxed into the air, probably for the first time since it was put together at the factory a decade ago. We could finally see what it was covering all this time. Like I’d thought, a phillips-head screw about 2 millimeters wide sat at the bottom, the linchpin of the whole device.
The second smallest screwdriver was, thankfully, a phillips, and its tip fit snugly into the head of the tiny screw. It took some doing (the screw turned out to have been glued in) but I eventually got it turning. After that my fingers were sore and I flexed them and rubbed them on my pant leg. A few more turns and I heard a faint click like a cat stepping on a loose floorboard. The screw was free. I turned the phone over above my palm and a nothing happened. Something must have been holding it in, maybe one of those little plastic rings. I inserted my fingernails in need of trimming into the crack around the back of the phone and ran them around popping little snaps that helped hold the phone’s case together, but it still wouldn’t come apart. Then suddenly all the screws on the phone’s back stood out to me. They’d all been underneath where the battery would usually nest.
Those screws came loose much easier, having not been subjected to a decade of punishment under a cylinder of rubber, and soon we had a little family of screws rolling around the table. My daughter picked one up and I heard my wife drop something or knock something over in the shower that went bouncing on the tub floor a few times. My daughter was squinting at the screw which looked slightly bigger in her hand than it did in mine.
I inserted my fingernails again into the crack around the phone’s edge and pulled. The whole thing fell into about 10 different little pieces, bouncing all every which way. Molded plastic buttons, the volume ones smooth and purple, the camera one a bumpy texture (like the surface of the moon, to an aphid) and painted chrome for no discernible reason other than to just be shiny. Also, there was an odd polygon of brown circuit board with golden flows of circuitry between radios, processors, speakers, and a microphone.
All this fell out in a 20 inch radius and I noticed one of the screws seemed to have bounced somewhere unseen. Then I felt the weight of a bad thought. I remembered that this was my wife’s dead mother’s cell phone.
I went through a few stages. At first I tried denying that this phone was important, that it couldn’t have much sentimental value, that my reason for tearing it apart was for our daughter to learn something, to expand her curious mind, and that outweighed anything. I thought of hiding the evidence, of lying. I thought of bargaining, I don’t know what for but maybe there was some way to make up for it before my wife found out. But those were the thoughts of a surprised mind scrambling for a solution, a squirrel deciding wrongly which direction to run away from an oncoming car, of flushed cheeks, of sweaty armpits when the sound of the shower ended.
“Okay, now. Oops. Let’s put it back together.”
My voice wasn’t steady and I wondered if my daughter noticed.
“C-Can you try to find the little screw that fell on the floor?”
“Sure!”
“And any other pieces you can find?”
She leaped off the chair and all the little pieces on the table shifted and rolled around. I felt blind, unable to see all the pieces at once. Okay, first lay the phone flat on the table, put the circuit board back in, wait, something fell out after the circuit board. A piece of one of the speakers? No, something that hooks to the camera. There was a tiny circuit board and a kind of slot in the phone case that looked like it would fit in. I tried putting it in there but I had it upside down and backward and the shower curtain was opening and I could smell my wife’s shampoo already, saw her stepping out of the tub and wrapping the towel around herself.
The small board slotted in perfectly once I’d turned it around and flipped it over. It was an engineering miracle. I placed the big board on top of it. Still, there were the buttons, and the two round little speakers had to fit in somehow. I knew where the buttons went at least. They had cubbies they were supposed to slot into in the side of the phone. I fast discovered that they had to be put into their compartments simultaneously with the main circuit board, and that this phone was definitely not meant to be put together by human fingers, but by a machine.
“Can you help me hold this part, honey?”
“I couldn’t find anything down there. Just this.”
She stood up from under the table holding a Lego Friends hairbrush.
“That’s okay. Just hold this part down.”
With her help I was able to get the board back into its spot and the buttons in place. A rustling came from the bathroom, my wife picking up her clothes. I could feel a throbbing in my chest and head and my body grew more flushed. The heater turned on. I really felt like getting up and turning it off.
I heard the loose ticking of the bathroom doorknob when my wife’s hand turned it, the mechanism sliding open and the speakers were still hanging out of the phone by wires. I hadn’t realized part of them needed to fit under the circuit board or else the phone case wouldn’t close all the way. I clicked most of the plastic shut as bathroom door swung open.
I must have looked strange, sitting there smiling up at her next to our daughter, clutching the phone in my right hand and half closed screwdriver box under the table as casual as possible. She had a white towel wrapped around her body, locks of her short hair wet at the ends, about to drip. She half smiled back and disappeared the other way down the hall. Our bedroom door closed and I took a breath.
I cracked the phone open again with my nails and with my thumb on the bottom of the circuit board I held the buttons in their slots while prying up the top to put the speakers back where they went, hastily, messily shoving their wires in wherever they would go. Now the phone wouldn’t quite click back together right. There was a gap in the top. I’d shoved the wires too hastily, or done something wrong putting the speakers back in. Good enough though. I screwed the tiny screws, all but the missing one. The little rubber plug, with some good effort, slid back into its hole.
The phone was never quite the same.