Where I'm Calling From

her,” my mother says. She hopes she hasn’t made a mistake in moving back to California. She waits before she says anything else.
    I’m standing at the window with the phone pressed to my ear, looking out at the lights from town and at the lighted houses closer by. Jill is at the table with the catalogue, listening.
    “Are you still there?” my mother asks. “I wish you’d say something.”
    I don’t know why, but it’s then I recall the affectionate name my dad used sometimes when he was talking nice to my mother—those times, that is, when he wasn’t drunk. It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, but always, hearing it, I felt better, less afraid, more hopeful about the future. “Dear,” he’d say. He called her “dear” sometimes—a sweet name. “Dear,” he’d say, “if you’re going to the store, will you bring me some cigarettes?” Or “Dear, is your cold any better?” “Dear, where is my coffee cup?”
    The word issues from my lips before I can think what else I want to say to go along with it. “Dear.” I say it again. I call her “dear.” “Dear, try not to be afraid,” I say. I tell my mother I love her and I’ll write to her, yes. Then I say good-bye, and I hang up.
    For a while I don’t move from the window. I keep standing there, looking out at the lighted houses in our neighborhood. As I watch, a car turns off the road and pulls into a driveway. The porch light goes on.
    The door to the house opens and someone comes out on the porch and stands there waiting.
    Jill turns the pages of her catalogue, and then she stops turning them. “This is what we want,” she says.
    “This is more like what I had in mind. Look at this, will you.” But I don’t look. I don’t care five cents for curtains. “What is it you see out there, honey?” Jill says. “Tell me.”
    What’s there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.

Whoever Was Using This Bed

    The call comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and it nearly scares us to death.
    “Answer it, answer it!” my wife cries. “My God, who is it? Answer it!”
    I can’t find the light, but I get to the other room, where the phone is, and pick it up after the fourth ring.
    “Is Bud there?” this woman says, very drunk.
    “Jesus, you have the wrong number,” I say, and hang up.
    I turn the light on, and go into the bathroom, and that’s when I hear the phone start again.
    “Answer that!” my wife screams from the bedroom. “What in God’s name do they want, Jack? I can’t take any more.”
    I hurry out of the bathroom and pick up the phone.
    “Bud?” the woman says. “What are you doing, Bud?”
    I say, “Look here. You have a wrong number. Don’t ever call this number again.”
    “I have to talk to Bud,” she says.
    I hang up, wait until it rings again, and then I take the receiver and lay it on the table beside the phone.
    But I hear the woman’s voice say, “Bud, talk to me, please.” I leave the receiver on its side on the table, turn off the light, and close the door to the room.
    In the bedroom I find the lamp on and my wife, Iris, sitting against the headboard with her knees drawn up under the covers. She has a pillow behind her back, and she’s more on my side than her own side. The covers are up around her shoulders. The blankets and the sheet have been pulled out from the foot of the bed. If we want to go back to sleep—I want to go back to sleep, anyway—we may have to start from scratch and do this bed over again.
    “What the hell was that all about?” Iris says. “We should have unplugged the phone. I guess we forgot.
    Try forgetting one night to unplug the phone and see what happens. I don’t believe it.”
    After Iris and I started living together, my former wife, or else one of my kids, used to call up when we were asleep and want to harangue us. They kept doing it even after Iris and I were married. So we started unplugging our phone before we went to bed. We unplugged the phone every night of the year, just about. It was a habit. This time I slipped up, that’s all.
    “Some woman wanting Bud,” I say. I’m standing there in my pajamas, wanting to get into bed, but I can’t. “She was drunk. Move over, honey. I took the phone off the hook.”
    “She can’t call again?”
    “No,” I say. “Why don’t you move over a little and give