Where I'm Calling From

doctor and the hospital because they insist on force-feeding her to keep her alive. Can you believe it? It’s insane. They strap her down three times a day so they can run this tube into her throat.
    They feed her breakfast, lunch, and dinner that way. And they keep her plugged into this machine, too, because her lungs don’t want to work on their own. It said in the paper that she’s begging them to unplug her, or else to just let her starve to death. She’s having to plead with them to let her die, but they won’t listen. She said she started out wanting to die with some dignity. Now she’s just mad and looking to sue everybody. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that one for the books?” she says. “I have these headaches sometimes,” she says. “Maybe it has something to do with the vein. Maybe not. Maybe they’re not related. But I don’t tell you when my head hurts, because I don’t want to worry you.”
    “What are you talking about?” I say. “Look at me. Iris? I have a right to know. I’m your husband, in case you’ve forgotten. If something’s wrong with you, I should know about it.”
    “But what could you do! You’d just worry.” She bumps my leg with her leg, then bumps it again. “Right? You’d tell me to take some aspirin. I know you.”
    I look toward the window, where it’s beginning to get light. I can feel a damp breeze from the window.
    It’s stopped raining now, but it’s one of those mornings where it could begin to pour. I look at her again.
    “To tell you the truth, Iris, I get sharp pains in my side from time to time.” But the moment I say the words I’m sorry. She’ll be concerned, and want to talk about it. We ought to be thinking of showers; we should be sitting down to breakfast.
    “Which side?” she says.
    “Right side.”
    “It could be your appendix,” she says. “Something fairly simple like that.”
    I shrug. “Who knows? I don’t know. All I know is it happens. Every so often, for just a minute or two, I feel something sharp down there. Very sharp. At first I thought it might be a pulled muscle. Which side’s your gallbladder on, by the way? Is it the left or right side? Maybe it’s my gallbladder. Or else maybe a gallstone, whatever the hell that is.”
    “It’s not really a stone,” she says. “A gallstone is like a little granule, or something like that. It’s about as big as the tip of a pencil. No, wait, that might be a kidney stone I’m talking about. I guess I don’t know anything about it.” She shakes her head.
    “What’s the difference between kidney stone and gallstone?” I say. “Christ, we don’t even know which side of the body they’re on. You don’t know, and I don’t know. That’s how much we know together. A total of nothing. But I read somewhere that you can pass a kidney stone, if that’s what this is, and usually it won’t kill you. Painful, yes. I don’t know what they say about a gallstone.”
    “I like that ‘usually,’” she says.
    “I know,” I say. “Listen, we’d better get up. It’s getting really late. It’s seven o’clock.”
    “I know,” she says. “Okay.” But she continues to sit there. Then she says, “My grandma had arthritis so bad toward the end she couldn’t get around by herself, or even move her fingers. She had to sit in a chair and wear these mittens all day. Finally, she couldn’t even hold a cup of cocoa. That’s how bad her arthritis was. Then she had her stroke. And my grandpa,” she says. “He went into a nursing home not long after Grandma died. It was either that or else somebody had to come in and be with him around the clock, and nobody could do that. Nobody had the money for twenty-four-hour-a-day care, either. So he goes into the nursing home. But he began to deteriorate fast in there. One time, after he’d been in that place for a while, my mom went to visit him and then she came home and said something. I’ll never forget what she said.” She looks at me as if I’m never going to forget it, either. And I’m not. “She said, ‘My dad doesn’t recognize me anymore. He doesn’t even know who I am. My dad has become a vegetable.’ That was my mom who said that.”
    She leans over and covers her face with her hands and begins to cry. I move down there to the foot of the bed and sit beside her. I take her hand and hold it in my lap. I put my arm around her. We’re sitting together looking at the headboard and at the nightstand. The clock’s