I click the phone icon in the Skype window on my laptop and hear the funny bloopity blip noise as it makes a call. One ring, two rings, and Alice picks up.
"Hello?"
"There's no video. Are you decent?"
"Not quite."
(Panicked pause) "Are you alone?"
(Laughter) "Yes, I'm alone! I'm just not camera-ready!"
"Oh!"
The video comes up and I see my daughter hastily smoothing down the sweater that I sent her last month. She's got a job teaching English to elementary school students in South Korea. We Skype each other because it's free, fun and surprising. I make a mental note to let her do the calling from now on. It's no problem for me to answer a Skype call. I live with two teenagers, so I'm always "camera-ready."
Alice settles in on her bed with the laptop in front of her. I can see the cherry blossoms coming out from either side of her head, left over decor from a previous tenant who lived in her apartment. To her right I can see part of a tiny refrigerator with a microwave on top of it. On her left are the pictures in CD covers that I sent out in the last package. I notice that she's changed some of them out.
The biggest drawback to using Skype to communicate is that the video also contains a miniature video of me in the corner. My eyes are always drawn to pictures of myself, I guess because I find myself endlessly fascinating.
Right now I think that my nose looks too big, so I scoot back a bit from the laptop and that makes my features more proportional. Unfortunately, my face is now a tiny circle in the middle of a big rectangular space. The graphic designer in me can't live with that, so I angle the laptop cover so that my head is more toward the top of the screen. My daughter is too polite to notice me not paying attention to her while all this is going on and continues to tell me about her day.
She's recounting how she taught her fifth grade class, all boys, how to play a drinking game she learned in college, called the Five Finger Game. Each person holds up one hand and swears that they never, ever did a certain thing, usually something sexual. Anyone else who can't make the same claim has to put a finger down and take a drink.
With the fifth graders there is no drinking or talk about sex. Instead they treat it as an opportunity to punish one of their classmates by deciding in advance who is going to lose the game and then craftily asking questions that will make this happen as quickly as possible. First person: "My name is not (insert name of agreed-upon-loser-boy here)." Second through fourth persons: "I am not holding up (four, three, two, one) fingers."
Alice, being a nice person and with no previous experience of other people's children, is appalled by this ("They're so mean!") and decides to make new rules. No one can use the "I am not holding up however many fingers" gambit and the teacher (Alice) gets to go first. They agree. She holds up one hand and says, "I am not Korean." Much whining ensues and then they pull themselves together and working as a team, eliminate her forthwith from the game. She doesn't care. She got them all down one finger, mwahahaha!
It's two in the morning in Busan, South Korea. I know she's tired but she wants to talk some more and I let her. I am happy to watch and listen while she recounts her attempts to purchase shampoo with only the pictures on the labels to guide her (she doesn't speak or write Korean). She laughs, gets up to check to see if her dinner is done cooking, bounces back on the bed, peers over my shoulder when one of her brothers passes behind me and calls out to him to come and talk.
We take turns showing each other what's new since the last time we Skyped. She shows me some illustrations that she's drawing of "Bob," a cartoon character that she uses in her classes to communicate tricky vocabulary words like "thin" and "fat" and "handsome" and "ugly." I show her the dead shrubbery in the back yard that her father spray-painted gold and silver in time for Christmas.
Skyping with Alice reminds me of when she was in high school and she used to come sit on my bed late at night and tell me everything she was thinking or feeling. I would drink it all in, thinking that it wouldn't last forever and that I should enjoy her company while I could. It wasn't long after that she left for a year to go to school in France. Then she went to Senegal for six months during her junior year at college. Now she's halfway around the world. She's planning to go to France again next year.
With Skype, I hear the sound of her voice and watch the movement of her hands and enjoy the play of emotions on her face. I'm so glad I can have this, so grateful that she shares her life with me this way. It's like having my own little reality channel called Alice TV. I don't know how long it'll be on or when the next episode will be. I only know that I never get tired of watching it.
