Where I'm Calling From
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 perfect 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
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