Where I'm Calling From

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