Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

  He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

  “Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light.

  They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

  NEW STORIES

  Boxes

  My mother is packed and ready to move. But Sunday afternoon, at the last minute, she calls and says for us to come eat with her. “My icebox is defrosting,” she tells me. “I have to fry up this chicken before it rots.” She says we should bring our own plates and some knives and forks. She’s packed most of her dishes and kitchen things. “Come on and eat with me one last time,” she says. “You and Jill.”

  I hang up the phone and stand at the window for a minute longer, wishing I could figure this thing out.

  But I can’t. So finally I turn to Jill and say, “Let’s go to my mother’s for a good-bye meal.”

  Jill is at the table with a Sears catalogue in front of her, trying to find us some curtains. But she’s been listening. She makes a face. “Do we have to?” she says. She bends down the corner of a page and closes the catalogue. She sighs. “God, we been over there to eat two or three times in this last month alone. Is she ever actually going to leave?”

  Jill always says what’s on her mind. She’s thirty-five years old, wears her hair short, and grooms dogs for a living. Before she became a groomer, something she likes, she used to be a housewife and mother.

  Then all hell broke loose. Her two children were kidnapped by her first husband and taken to live in Australia. Her second husband, who drank, left her with a broken eardrum before he drove their car through a bridge into the Elwha River. He didn’t have life insurance, not to mention property-damage insurance. Jill had to borrow money to bury him, and then—can you beat it?—she was presented with a bill for the bridge repair. Plus, she had her own medical bills. She can tell this story now. She’s bounced back. But she has run out of patience with my mother. I’ve run out of patience, too. But I don’t see my options.

  “She’s leaving day after tomorrow,” I say. “Hey, Jill, don’t do any favors. Do you want to come with me or not?” I tell her it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I’ll say she has a migraine. It’s not like I’ve never told a lie before.

  “I’m coming,” she says. And like that she gets up and goes into the bathroom, where she likes to pout.

  We’ve been together since last August, about the time my mother picked to move up here to Longview from California. Jill tried to make the best of it. But my mother pulling into town just when we were trying to get our act together was nothing either of us had bargained for. Jill said it reminded her of the situation with her first husband’s mother. “She was a clinger,” Jill said. “You know what I mean? I thought I was going to suffocate.

  It’s fair to say that my mother sees Jill as an intruder. As far as she’s concerned, Jill is just another girl in a series of girls who have appeared in my life since my wife left me. Someone, to her mind, likely to take away affection, attention, maybe even some money that might otherwise come to her. But someone deserving of respect? No way. I remember—how can I forget it?—she called my wife a whore before we were married, and then called her a whore fifteen years later, after she left me for someone else.

  Jill and my mother act friendly enough when they find themselves together. They hug each other when they say hello or good-bye. They talk about shopping specials. But Jill dreads the time she has to spend in my mother’s company. She claims my mother bums her out. She says my mother is negative about everything and everybody and ought to find an outlet, like other people in her age bracket. Crocheting, maybe, or card games at the Senior Citizens Center, or else going to church. Something, anyway, so that she’ll leave us in peace. But my mother had her own way of solving things. She announced she was moving back to California. The hell with everything and everybody in this town. What a place to live!

  She wouldn’t continue to live in this town if they gave her the place and six more like it.

  Within a day or two of deciding to move, she’d packed her things into boxes. That was last January. Or maybe it was February. Anyway, last winter sometime. Now it’s the end of June. Boxes have been sitting around inside her house for months. You have to walk around them or step over them to get from one room to another. This is no way for anyone’s mother to live.

  After a while, ten minutes or so, Jill comes out of the bathroom. I’ve found a roach and am trying to smoke that and drink a bottle of ginger ale while I watch one of the neighbors change the oil in his car. Jill doesn’t look at me. Instead, she goes into the kitchen and puts some plates and utensils into a paper sack. But when she comes back through the living room I stand up, and we hug each other. Jill says, “It’s okay.” What’s okay, I wonder. As far as I can see, nothing’s okay. But she holds me and keeps patting my shoulder. I can smell the pet shampoo on her. She comes home from work wearing the stuff. It’s everywhere. Even when we’re in bed together.

  She gives me a final pat. Then we go out to the car and drive across town to my mother’s.

  I like where I live. I didn’t when I first moved here. There was nothing to do at night, and I was lonely. Then I met Jill. Pretty soon, after a few weeks, she brought her things over and started living with me. We didn’t set any long-term goals.

  We were happy and we had a life together. We told each other we’d finally got lucky. But my mother didn’t have anything going in her life. So she wrote me and said she’d decided on moving here. I wrote her back and said I didn’t think it was such a good idea. The weather’s terrible in the winter, I said.

  They’re building a prison a few miles from town, I told her. The place is bumper-to-bumper tourists all summer, I said. But she acted as if she never got my letters, and came anyway. Then, after she’d been in town a little less than a month, she told me she hated the place. She acted as if it were my fault she’d moved here and my fault she found everything so disagreeable. She started calling me up and telling me how crummy the place was. “Laying guilt trips,” Jill called it. She told me the bus service was terrible and the drivers unfriendly. As for the people at the Senior Citizens—well, she didn’t want to play casino.

  “They can go to hell,” she said, “and take their card games with them.” The clerks at the supermarket were surly, the guys in the service station didn’t give a damn about her or her car. And she’d made up her mind about the man she rented from, Larry Hadlock. King Larry, she called him. “He thinks he’s superior to everyone because he has some shacks for rent and a few dollars. I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on him.”

  It was too hot for her when she arrived, in August, and in September it started to rain. It rained almost every day for weeks. In October it turned cold. There was snow in November and December. But long before that she began to put the bad mouth on the place and the people to the extent that I didn’t want to hear about it anymore, and I told her so finally. She cried, and I hugged her and thought that was the end of it. But a few days later she started in again, same stuff. Just before Christmas she called to see when I was coming by with her presents. She hadn’t put up a tree and didn’t intend to, she said. Then she said something else. She said if this weather didn’t improve she was going to kill herself.

  “Don’t talk crazy
,” I said.

  She said, “I mean it, honey. I don’t want to see this place again except from my coffin. I hate this g.d. place. I don’t know why I moved here. I wish I could just die and get it over with.”

  I remember hanging on to the phone and watching a man high up on a pole doing something to a power line. Snow whirled around his head. As I watched, he leaned out from the pole, supported only by his safety belt. Suppose he falls, I thought. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to say next. I had to say something. But I was filled with unworthy feelings, thoughts no son should admit to. “You’re my mother,” I said finally. “What can I do to help?”

  “Honey, you can’t do anything,” she said. “The time for doing anything has come and gone. It’s too late to do anything. I wanted to like it here. I thought we’d go on picnics and take drives together. But none of that happened. You’re always busy. You’re off working, you and Jill. You’re never at home. Or else if you are at home you have the phone off the hook all day. Anyway, I never see you,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. And it wasn’t. But she went on as if she hadn’t heard me. Maybe she hadn’t.

  “Besides,” she said, “this weather’s killing me. It’s too damned cold here. Why didn’t you tell me this was the North Pole? If you had, I’d never have come. I want to go back to California, honey. I can get out and go places there. I don’t know anywhere to go here. There are people back in California. I’ve got friends there who care what happens to me. Nobody gives a damn here. Well, I just pray I can get through to June. If I can make it that long, if I can last to June, I’m leaving this place forever. This is the worst place I’ve ever lived in.”

  What could I say? I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even say anything about the weather. Weather was a real sore point. We said good-bye and hung up.

  Other people take vacations in the summer, but my mother moves. She started moving years ago, after my dad lost his job. When that happened, when he was laid off, they sold their home, as if this were what they should do, and went to where they thought things would be better. But things weren’t any better there, either. They moved again. They kept on moving. They lived in rented houses, apartments, mobile homes, and motel units even. They kept moving, lightening their load with each move they made. A couple of times they landed in a town where I lived. They’d move in with my wife and me for a while and then they’d move on again. They were like migrating animals in this regard, except there was no pattern to their movement. They moved around for years, sometimes even leaving the state for what they thought would be greener pastures. But mostly they stayed in Northern California and did their moving there. Then my dad died, and I thought my mother would stop moving and stay in one place for a while.

  But she didn’t. She kept moving. I suggested once that she go to a psychiatrist. I even said I’d pay for it.

  But she wouldn’t hear of it. She packed and moved out of town instead. I was desperate about things or I wouldn’t have said that about the psychiatrist.

  She was always in the process of packing or else unpacking. Sometimes she’d move two or three times in the same year. She talked bitterly about the place she was leaving and optimistically about the place she was going to. Her mail got fouled up, her benefit checks went off somewhere else, and she spent hours writing letters, trying to get it all straightened out. Sometimes she’d move out of an apartment house, move to another one a few blocks away, and then, a month later, move back to the place she’d left, only to a different floor or a different side of the building. That’s why when she moved here I rented a house for her, and saw to it that it was furnished to her liking. “Moving around keeps her alive,” Jill said. “It gives her something to do. She must get some kind of weird enjoyment out of it, I guess.” But enjoyment or not, Jill thinks my mother must be losing her mind. I think so, too. But how do you tell your mother this? How do you deal with her if this is the case? Crazy doesn’t stop her from planning and getting on with her next move.

  He is waiting at the back door for us when we pull in. She’s seventy years old, has gray hair, wears glasses with rhinestone frames, and has never been sick a day in her life. She hugs Jill, and then she hugs me. Her eyes are bright, as if she’s been drinking. But she doesn’t drink. She quit years ago, after my dad went on the wagon. We finish hugging and go inside. It’s around five in the afternoon. I smell whatever it is drifting out of her kitchen and remember I haven’t eaten since breakfast. My buzz has worn off.

  “I’m starved,” I say.

  “Something smells good,” Jill says.

  “I hope it tastes good,” my mother says. “I hope this chicken’s done.” She raises the lid on a fry pan and pushes a fork into a chicken breast. “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s raw chicken. I think it’s done.

  Why don’t you sit down? Sit anyplace. I still can’t regulate my stove. The burners heat up too fast. I don’t like electric stoves and never have. Move that junk off the chair, Jill. I’m living here like a damned gypsy. But not for much longer, I hope.” She sees me looking around for the ashtray. “Behind you,” she says. “On the windowsill, honey. Before you sit down, why don’t you pour us some of that Pepsi? You’ll have to use these paper cups. I should have told you to bring some glasses. Is the Pepsi cold? I don’t have any ice. This icebox won’t keep anything cold. It isn’t worth a damn. My ice cream turns to soup.

  It’s the worst icebox I’ve ever had.”

  She forks the chicken onto a plate and puts the plate on the table along with beans and coleslaw and white bread. Then she looks to see if there is anything she’s forgetting. Salt and pepper! “Sit down,” she says.

  We draw our chairs up to the table, and Jill takes the plates out of the sack and hands them around the table to us. “Where are you going to live when you go back?” she says. “Do you have a place lined up?”

  My mother passes the chicken to Jill and says, “I wrote that lady I rented from before. She wrote back and said she had a nice first-floor place I could have. It’s close to the bus stop and there’s lots of stores in the area. There’s a bank and a Safeway. It’s the nicest place. I don’t know why I left there.” She says that and helps herself to some coleslaw.

  “Why’d you leave then?” Jill says. “If it was so nice and all.” She picks up her drumstick, looks at it, and takes a bite of the meat.

  “I’ll tell you why. There was an old alcoholic woman who lived next door to me. She drank from morning to night. The walls were so thin I could hear her munching ice cubes all day. She had to use a walker to get around, but that still didn’t stop her. I’d hear that walker scrape, scrape against the floor from morning to night. That and her icebox door closing.” She shakes her head at all she had to put up with. “I had to get out of there. Scrape, scrape all day. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t live like that.

  This time I told the manager I didn’t want to be next to any alcoholics. And I didn’t want anything on the second floor. The second floor looks out on the parking lot. Nothing to see from there.” She waits for Jill to say something more. But Jill doesn’t comment. My mother looks over at me.

  I’m eating like a wolf and don’t say anything, either. In any case, there’s nothing more to say on the subject. I keep chewing and look over at the boxes stacked against the fridge. Then I help myself to more coleslaw.

  Pretty soon I finish and push my chair back. Larry Hadlock pulls up in back of the house, next to my car, and takes a lawn mower out of his pickup. I watch him through the window behind the table. He doesn’t look in our direction.

  “What’s he want?” my mother says and stops eating.

  “He’s going to cut your grass, it looks like,” I say.

  “It doesn’t need cutting,” she says. “He cut it last week. What’s there for him to cut?”

  “It’s for the new tenant,” Jill says. “Whoever that turns out to be.”

  My mother takes this in and then goes bac
k to eating.

  Larry Hadlock starts his mower and begins to cut the grass. I know him a little. He lowered the rent twenty-five a month when I told him it was my mother. He is a widower—a big fellow, mid-sixties. An unhappy man with a good sense of humor. His arms are covered with white hair, and white hair stands out from under his cap. He looks like a magazine illustration of a farmer. But he isn’t a farmer. He is a retired construction worker who’s saved a little money. For a while, in the beginning, I let myself imagine that he and my mother might take some meals together and become friends.

  “There’s the king,” my mother says. “King Larry. Not everyone has as much money as he does and can live in a big house and charge other people high rents. Well, I hope I never see his cheap old face again once I leave here. Eat the rest of this chicken,” she says to me. But I shake my head and light a cigarette.

  Larry pushes his mower past the window.

  “You won’t have to look at it much longer,” Jill says.

  “I’m sure glad of that, Jill. But I know he won’t give me my deposit back.”

  “How do you know that?” I say.

  “I just know,” she says. “I’ve had dealings with his kind before. They’re out for all they can get.”

  Jill says, “It won’t be long now and you won’t have to have anything more to do with him.”

  “I’ll be so glad.”

  “But it’ll be somebody just like him,” Jill says. “I don’t want to think that, Jill,” my mother says.

  She makes coffee while Jill clears the table. I rinse the cups. Then I pour coffee, and we step around a box marked “Knickknacks” and take our cups into the living room.