Where I'm Calling From

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