Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

  “That’s some dream,” he managed to say and felt drowsily that he should say something more. “You remember Bonnie Travis? Fred Travis’ wife? She used to have color dreams, she said.”

  She looked at the sandwich in her hand and took a bite. When she had swallowed, she ran her tongue in behind her lips and balanced the saucer on her lap as she reached behind and plumped up the pillow.

  Then she smiled and leaned back against the pillow again.

  “Do you remember that time we stayed overnight on the Tilton River, Mike? When you caught that big fish the next morning?” She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Do you remember that?” she said.

  She did. After scarcely thinking about it these last years, it had begun coming back to her lately. It was a month or two after they’d married and gone away for a weekend. They had sat by a little campfire that night, a watermelon in the snow-cold river, and she’d fried Spam and eggs and canned beans for supper and pancakes and Spam and eggs in the same blackened pan the next morning. She had burned the pan both times she cooked, and they could never get the coffee to boil, but it was one of the best times they’d ever had. She remembered he had read to her that night as well: Elizabeth Browning and a few poems from the Rubalyat, They had had so many covers over them that she could hardly turn her feet under all the weight. The next morning he had hooked a big trout, and people stopped their cars on the road across the river to watch him play it in.

  “Well? Do you remember or not?” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “Mike?”

  “I remember,” he said. He shifted a little on his side, opened his eyes. He did not remember very well, he thought. What he did remember was very carefully combed hair and loud half-baked ideas about life and art, and he did not want to remember that.

  “That was a long time ago, Nan,” he said.

  “We’d just got out of high school. You hadn’t started to college,” she said.

  He waited, and then he raised up onto his arm and turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. “You about finished with that sandwich, Nan?” She was still sitting up in the bed.

  She nodded and gave him the saucer.

  “I’ll turn off the light,” he said.

  “If you want,” she said.

  Then he pulled down into the bed again and extended his foot until it touched against hers. He lay still for a minute and then tried to relax.

  “Mike, you’re not asleep, are you?”

  “No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”

  “Well, don’t go to sleep before me,” she said. “I don’t want to be awake by myself.”

  He didn’t answer, but he inched a little closer to her on his side. When she put her arm over him and planted her hand flat against his chest, he took her fingers and squeezed them lightly. But in moments his hand dropped away to the bed, and he sighed.

  “Mike? Honey? I wish you’d rub my legs. My legs hurt,” she said.

  “God,” he said softly. “I was sound asleep.”

  “Well, I wish you’d rub my legs and talk to me. My shoulders hurt, too. But my legs especially.”

  He turned over and began rubbing her legs, then fell asleep again with his hand on her hip.

  “Mike?”

  “What is it, Nan? Tell me what it is.”

  “I wish you’d rub me all over,” she said, turning onto her back. “My legs and arms both hurt tonight.”

  She raised her knees to make a tower with the covers.

  He opened his eyes briefly in the dark and then shut them. “Growing pains, huh?”

  “Oh God, yes,” she said, wiggling her toes, glad she had drawn him out. “When I was ten or eleven years old I was as big then as I am now. You should’ve seen me! I grew so fast in those days my legs and arms hurt me all the time. Didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t I what?”

  “Didn’t you ever feel yourself growing?”

  “Not that I remember,” he said.

  At last he raised up on his elbow, struck a match, and looked at the clock. He turned his pillow over to the cooler side and lay down again.

  She said, “You’re asleep, Mike. I wish you’d want to talk.”

  “All right,” he said, not moving.

  “Just hold me and get me off to sleep. I can’t go to sleep,” she said.

  He turned over and put his arm over her shoulder as she turned onto her side to face the wall.

  “Mike?”

  He tapped his toes against her foot.

  “Why don’t you tell me all the things you like and the things you don’t like.”

  “Don’t know any right now,” he said. “Tell me if you want,” he said.

  “If you promise to tell me. Is that a promise?

  He tapped her foot again.

  “Well…” she said and turned onto her back, pleased. “I like good foods, steaks and hash-brown potatoes, things like that. I like good books and magazines, riding on trains at night, and those times I flew in an airplane.” She stopped. “Of course none of this is in order of preference. I’d have to think about it if it was in the order of preference. But I like that, flying in airplanes. There’s a moment as you leave the ground you feel whatever happens is all right.” She put her leg across his ankle. “I like staying up late at night and then staying in bed the next morning. I wish we could do that all the time, not just once in a while. And I like sex. I like to be touched now and then when I’m not expecting it. I like going to movies and drinking beer with friends afterward. I like to have friends. I like Janice Hendricks very much. I’d like to go dancing at least once a week. I’d like to have nice clothes all the time. I’d like to be able to buy the kids nice clothes every time they need it without having to wait. Laurie needs a new little outfit right now for Easter. And I’d like to get Gary a little suit or something. He’s old enough. I’d like you to have a new suit, too. You really need a new suit more than he does. And I’d like us to have a place of our own. I’d like to stop moving around every year, or every other year. Most of all,” she said, “I’d like us both just to live a good honest life without having to worry about money and bills and things like that. You’re asleep,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “I can’t think of anything else. You go now. Tell me what you’d like.”

  “I don’t know. Lots of things,” he mumbled.

  “Well, tell me. We’re just talking, aren’t we?”

  “I wish you’d leave me alone, Nan.” He turned over to his side of the bed again and let his arm rest off the edge. She turned too and pressed against him.

  “Mike?”

  “Jesus,” he said. Then: “All right. Let me stretch my legs a minute, then I’ll wake up.”

  In a while she said, “Mike? Are you asleep?” She shook his shoulder gently, but there was no response.

  She lay there for a time huddled against his body, trying to sleep. She lay quietly at first, without moving, crowded against him and taking only very small, very even breaths. But she could not sleep.

  She tried not to listen to his breathing, but it began to make her uncomfortable. There was a sound coming from inside his nose when he breathed. She tried to regulate her breathing so that she could breathe in and out at the same rhythm he did. It was no use. The little sound in his nose made everything no use. There was a webby squeak in his chest too. She turned again and nestled her bottom against his, stretched her arm over to the edge and cautiously put her fingertips against the cold wall. The covers had pulled up at the foot of the bed, and she could feel a draft when she moved her legs. She heard two people coming, up the stairs to the apartment next door.

  Someone gave a throaty laugh before opening the door. Then she heard a chair drag on the floor. She turned again. The toilet flushed next door, and then it flushed again. Again she turned, onto her back this time, and tried to relax. She remembered an article she’d once read in a magazine: If all the bones and muscles and joints in the body could join together in perfec
t relaxation, sleep would almost certainly come. She took a long breath, closed her eyes, and lay perfectly still, arms straight along her sides. She tried to relax. She tried to imagine her legs suspended, bathed in something gauze-like. She turned onto her stomach. She closed her eyes, then she opened them. She thought of the fingers of her hand lying curled on the sheet in front of her lips. She raised a finger and lowered it to the sheet. She touched the wedding band on her ring finger with her thumb. She turned onto her side and then onto her back again.

  And then she began to feel afraid, and in one unreasoning moment of longing she prayed to go to sleep.

  Please, God, let me go to sleep.

  She tried to sleep.

  “Mike,” she whispered.

  There was no answer.

  She heard one of the children turn over in the bed and bump against the wall in the next room. She listened and listened but there was no other sound. She laid her hand under her left breast and felt the beat of her heart rising into her fingers. She turned onto her stomach and began to cry, her head off the pillow, her mouth against the sheet. She cried. And then she climbed out over the foot of the bed.

  She washed her hands and face in the bathroom. She brushed her teeth. She brushed her teeth and watched her face in the mirror. In the living room she turned up the heat. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, drawing her feet up underneath the nightgown. She cried again. She lit a cigarette from the pack on the table. After a time she walked back to the bedroom and got her robe.

  She looked in on the children. She pulled the covers up over her son’s shoulders. She went back to the living room and sat in the big chair. She paged through a magazine and tried to read. She gazed at the photographs and then she tried to read again. Now and then a car went by on the street outside and she looked up. As each car passed she waited, listening. And then she looked down at the magazine again.

  There was a stack of magazines in the rack by the big chair. She paged through them all.

  When it began to be light outside she got up. She walked to the window. The cloudless sky over the hills was beginning to turn white. The trees and the row of two-story apartment houses across the street were beginning to take shape as she watched. The sky grew whiter, the light expanding rapidly up from behind the hills. Except for the times she had been up with one or another of the children (which she did not count because she had never looked outside, only hurried back to bed or to the kitchen), she had seen few sunrises in her life and those when she was little. She knew that none of them had been like this. Not in pictures she had seen nor in any book she had read had she learned a sunrise was so terrible as this.

  She waited and then she moved over to the door and turned the lock and stepped out onto the porch. She closed the robe at her throat. The air was wet and cold. By stages things were becoming very visible.

  She let her eyes see everything until they fastened on the red winking light atop the radio tower atop the opposite hill.

  She went through the dim apartment, back into the bedroom. He was knotted up in the center of the bed, the covers bunched over his shoulders, his head half under the pillow. He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched. As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.

  She wet her lips with a sticking sound and got down on her knees. She put her hands out on the bed.

  “God.’ she said. “God, will you help us, God?” she said.

  They're Not Your Husband

  Earl Ober was between jobs as a salesman. But Doreen, his wife, had gone to work nights as a waitress at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop at the edge of town. One night, when he was drinking, Earl decided to stop by the coffee shop and have something to eat. He wanted to see where Doreen worked, and he wanted to see if he could order something on the house.

  He sat at the counter and studied the menu.

  “What are you doing here?” Doreen said when she saw him sitting there.

  She handed over an order to the cook. “What are you going to order, Earl?” she said. “The kids okay?”

  “They’re fine,” Earl said. “I’ll have coffee and one of those Number Two sandwiches.”

  Doreen wrote it down.

  “Any chance of, you know?” he said to her and winked.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t talk to me now. I’m busy.”

  Earl drank his coffee and waited for the sandwich. Two men in business suits, their ties undone, their collars open, sat down next to him and asked for coffee. As Doreen walked away with the coffeepot, one of the men said to the other, “Look at the ass on that. I don’t believe it.”

  The other man laughed. “I’ve seen better,” he said.

  “That’s what I mean,” the first man said. “But some jokers like their quim fat.”

  “Not me,” the other man said.

  “Not me, neither,” the first man said. “That’s what I was saying.”

  Doreen put the sandwich in front of Earl. Around the sandwich there were French fries, coleslaw, dill pickle.

  “Anything else?” she said. “A glass of milk?”

  He didn’t say anything. He shook his head when she kept standing there.

  “I’ll get you more coffee,” she said.

  She came back with the pot and poured coffee for him and for the two men. Then she picked up a dish and turned to get some ice cream. She reached down into the container and with the dipper began to scoop up the ice cream. The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display.

  The two men sitting beside Earl exchanged looks. One of them raised his eyebrows. The other man grinned and kept looking at Doreen over his cup as she spooned chocolate syrup over the ice cream.

  When she began shaking the can of whipped cream, Earl got up, leaving his food, and headed for the door. He heard her call his name, but he kept going.

  He checked on the children and then went to the other bedroom and took off his clothes. He pulled the covers up, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to think. The feeling started in his face and worked down into his stomach and legs. He opened his eyes and rolled his head back and forth on the pillow.

  Then he turned on his side and fell asleep.

  In the morning, after she had sent the children off to school, Doreen came into the bedroom and raised the shade. Earl was already awake.

  “Look at yourself in the mirror,” he said.

  “What?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just look at yourself in the mirror,” he said.

  “What am I supposed to see?” she said. But she looked in the mirror over the dresser and pushed the hair away from her shoulders.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well, what?” she said.

  “I hate to say anything,” Earl said, “but I think you better give a diet some thought. I mean it. I’m serious. I think you could lose a few pounds. Don’t get mad.”

  “What are you saying?” she said.

  “Just what I said. I think you could lose a few pounds. A few pounds, anyway,” he said.

  “You never said anything before,” she said. She raised her nightgown over her hips and turned to look at her stomach in the mirror.

  “I never felt it was a problem before,” he said. He tried to pick his words.

  The nightgown still gathered around her waist, Doreen turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder. She raised one buttock in her hand and let it drop.

  Earl closed his eyes. “Maybe I’m all wet,” he said.

  “I guess I could afford to lose. But it’d be hard,” she said.

  “You’re right, it won’t be easy,” he said. “But I’ll help.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. She dropped her nightgown and looked at him and then she took her nightgown off.
r />   They talked about diets. They talked about the protein diets, the vegetable-only diets, the grapefruit-juice diets. But they decided they didn’t have the money to buy the steaks the protein diet called for. And Doreen said she didn’t care for all that many vegetables. And since she didn’t like grapefruit juice that much, she didn’t see how she could do that one, either.

  “Okay, forget it,” he said.

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “I’ll do something.” “What about exercises?” he said.

  “I’m getting all the exercise I need down there,” she said.

  “Just quit eating,” Earl said. “For a few days, anyway.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll try. For a few days I’ll give it a try. You’ve convinced me.”

  “I’m a closer,” Earl said.

  Earle figured up the balance in their checking account, then drove to the discount store and bought a bathroom scale. He looked the clerk over as she rang up the sale.

  At home he had Doreen take off all her clothes and get on the scale. He frowned when he saw the veins.

  He ran his finger the length of one that sprouted up her thigh.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  He looked at the scale and wrote the figure down on a piece of paper.

  “All right,” Earl said. “All right.”

  The next day he was gone for most of the afternoon on an interview.

  The employer, a heavyset man who limped as he showed Earl around the plumbing fixtures in the warehouse, asked if Earl were free to travel.