Where I'm Calling From

dream, right?” she says. “Don’t get weird on me. I won’t say any more. I see I can’t. I can see it isn’t a good idea.” She brings her fingers to her lips slowly, the way she does sometimes when she’s thinking. Her face shows how hard she’s concentrating; little lines appear on her forehead. “I’m sorry that you weren’t in the dream. But if I told you otherwise I’d be lying to you, right?”
    I nod. I touch her arm to show her it’s okay. I don’t really mind. And I don’t, I guess. “What happened then, honey? Finish telling the dream,” I say. “And maybe we can go to sleep then.” I guess I wanted to know the next thing. The last I’d heard, she’d been dancing with Jerry. If there was more, I needed to hear it.
    She plumps up the pillow behind her back and says, “That’s all I can remember. I can’t remember any more about it. That was when the goddamn phone rang.”
    “Bud,” I say. I can see smoke drifting in the light under the lamp, and smoke hangs in the air in the room. “Maybe we should open a window,” I say.
    “That’s a good idea,” she says. “Let some of this smoke out. It can’t be any good for us.”
    “Hell no, it isn’t,” I say.
    I get up again and go to the window and raise it a few inches. I can feel the cool air that comes in and from a distance I hear a truck gearing down as it starts up the grade that will take it to the pass and on over into the next state.
    “I guess pretty soon we’re going to be the last smokers left in America,” she says. “Seriously, we should think about quitting.” She says this as she puts her cigarette out and reaches for the pack next to the ashtray.
    “It’s open season on smokers,” I say.
    I get back in the bed. The covers are turned every which way, and it’s five o’clock in the morning. I don’t think we’re going to sleep any more tonight. But so what if we don’t? Is there a law on the books? Is something bad going to happen to us if we don’t?
    She takes some of her hair between her fingers. Then she pushes it behind her ear, looks at me, and says,
    “Lately I’ve been feeling this vein in my forehead. It pulses sometimes. It throbs. Do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t know if you’ve ever had anything like that. I hate to think about it, but probably one of these days I’ll have a stroke or something. Isn’t that how they happen? A vein in your head bursts? That’s probably what’ll happen to me, eventually. My mother, my grandmother, and one of my aunts died of stroke. There’s a history of stroke in my family. It can run in the family, you know. It’s hereditary, just like heart disease, or being too fat, or whatever. Anyway,” she says, “something’s going to happen to me someday, right? So maybe that’s what it’ll be—a stroke. Maybe that’s how I’ll go. That’s what it feels like it could be the beginning of. First it pulses a little, like it wants my attention, and then it starts to throb. Throb, throb, throb. It scares me silly,” she says. “I want us to give up these goddamn cigarettes before it’s too late.” She looks at what’s left of her cigarette, mashes it into the ashtray, and tries to fan the smoke away.
    I’m on my back, studying the ceiling, thinking that this is the kind of talk that could only take place at five in the morning. I feel I ought to say something. “I get winded easy,” I say. “I found myself out of breath when I ran in there to answer the phone.”
    “That could have been because of anxiety,” Iris says. “Who needs it, anyway! The idea of somebody calling at this hour! I could tear that woman limb from limb.”
    I pull myself up in the bed and lean back against the headboard. I put the pillow behind my back and try to get comfortable, same as Iris. “I’ll tell you something I haven’t told you,” I say. “Once in a while my heart palpitates. It’s like it goes crazy.” She’s watching me closely, listening for whatever it is I’m going to say next. “Sometimes it feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. I don’t know what the hell causes it.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” she says. She takes my hand and holds it. She squeezes my hand. “You never said anything, honey. Listen, I don’t know what I’d do if something ever happened to you. I’d fold up.
    How often does it happen? That’s scary, you know.” She’s still holding my hand. But her fingers slide to my wrist, where my