Where I'm Calling From

me some of those covers?”
    She takes her pillow and puts it on the far side of the bed, against the headboard, scoots over, and then she leans back once more. She doesn’t look sleepy. She looks fully awake. I get into bed and take some covers. But the covers don’t feel right. I don’t have any sheet; all I have is blanket. I look down and see my feet sticking out. I turn onto my side, facing her, and bring my legs up so that my feet are under the blanket. We should make up the bed again. I ought to suggest that. But I’m thinking, too, that if we kill the light now, this minute, we might be able to go right back to sleep.
    “How about you turning off your light, honey?” I say, as nice as I can.
    “Let’s have a cigarette first,” she says. “Then we’ll go to sleep. Get us the cigarettes and the ashtray, why don’t you? We’ll have a cigarette.”
    “Let’s go to sleep,” I say. “Look at what time it is.” The clock radio is right there beside the bed. Anyone can see it says three-thirty.
    “Come on,” Iris says. “I need a cigarette after all that.”
    I get out of bed for the cigarettes and ashtray. I have to go into the room where the phone is, but I don’t touch the phone. I don’t even want to look at the phone, but I do, of course. The receiver is still on its side on the table.
    I crawl back in bed and put the ashtray on the quilt between us. I light a cigarette, give it to her, and then light one for myself.
    She tries to remember the dream she was having when the phone rang. “I can just about remember it, but I can’t remember exactly. Something about, about—no, I don’t know what it was about now. I can’t be sure. I can’t remember it,” she says finally. “God damn that woman and her phone call. ‘Bud,’” she says.
    “I’d like to punch her.” She puts out her cigarette and immediately lights another, blows smoke, and lets her eyes take in the chest of drawers and the window curtains. Her hair is undone and around her shoulders. She uses the ashtray and then stares over the foot of the bed, trying to remember.
    But, really, I don’t care what she’s dreamed. I want-to go back to sleep is all. I finish my cigarette and put it out and wait for her to finish. I lie still and don’t say anything.
    Iris is like my former wife in that when she sleeps she sometimes has violent dreams. She thrashes around in bed during the night and wakes in the morning drenched with sweat, the nightgown sticking to her body. And, like my former wife, she wants to tell me her dreams in great detail and speculate as to what this stands for or that portends. My former wife used to kick the covers off in the night and cry out in her sleep, as if someone were laying hands on her. Once, in a particularly violent dream, she hit me on the ear with her fist. I was in a dreamless sleep, but I struck out in the dark and hit her on the forehead.
    Then we began yelling. We both yelled and yelled. We’d hurt each other, but we were mainly scared.
    We had no idea what had happened until I turned the lamp on; then we sorted it out. Afterward, we joked about it—fistfighting in our sleep. But then so much else began to happen that was far more serious we tended to forget about that night. We never mentioned it again, even when we teased each other.
    Once I woke up in the night to hear Iris grinding her teeth in her sleep. It was such a peculiar thing to have going on right next to my ear that it woke me up. I gave her a little shake, and she stopped. The next morning she told me she’d had a very bad dream, but that’s all she’d tell me about it. I didn’t press her for details. I guess I really didn’t want to know what could have been so bad that she didn’t want to say. When I told her she’d been grinding her teeth in her sleep, she frowned and said she was going to have to do something about that. The next night she brought home something called a Niteguard-something she was supposed to wear in her mouth while she slept. She had to do something, she said.
    She couldn’t afford to keep grinding her teeth; pretty soon she wouldn’t have any. So she wore this protective device in her mouth for a week or so, and then she stopped wearing it. She said it was uncomfortable and, anyway, it was not very cosmetic. Who’d want to kiss a woman wearing a thing like that in her mouth, she said. She had something there, of course.
    Another time I woke up because she was stroking my face and