Where I'm Calling From

Thirty-five dollars? Forty dollars or less, including tax. I could have sent her a radio through the mail. I could have had somebody in the store do it, if I didn’t want to go to the trouble myself. Or else I could have sent her a forty-dollar check along with a note saying, This money is for your radio, mother. I could have handled it in any case. Forty dollars—are you kidding? But I didn’t. I wouldn’t part with it. It seemed there was a principle involved. That’s what I told myself anyway—there’s a principle involved here.
    Ha.
    Then what happened? She died. She died. She was walking home from the grocery store, back to her apartment, carrying her sack of groceries, and she fell into somebody’s bushes and died.
    I took a flight out there to make the arrangements. She was still at the coroner’s, and they had her purse and her groceries behind the desk in the office. I didn’t bother to look in the purse they handed me. But what
    she had from the grocery store was a jar of Metamucil, two grapefruits, a carton of cottage cheese, a quart of buttermilk, some potatoes and onions, and a package of ground meat that was beginning to change color. Boy! I cried when I saw those things. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t think I’d ever quit crying. The woman who worked at the desk was embarrassed and brought me a glass of water. They gave me a bag for my mother’s groceries and another bag for her personal effects—her purse and her dentures. Later, I put the dentures in my coat pocket and drove them down in a rental car and gave them to somebody at the funeral home.
    The light in Amanda’s kitchen is still on. It’s a bright light that spills out on to all those leaves. Maybe she’s like I am, and she’s scared. Maybe she left that light burning as a night-light. Or maybe she’s still awake and is at the kitchen table, under the light, writing me a letter. Amanda is writing me a letter, and somehow she’ll get it into my hands later on when the real day starts.
    Come to think of it, I’ve never had a letter from her since we’ve known each other. All the time we’ve been involved—six months, eight months—and I’ve never once seen a scrap of her handwriting. I don’t even know if she’s literate that way.
    I think she is. Sure, she is. She talks about books, doesn’t she? It doesn’t matter of course. Well, a little, I suppose. I love her in any case, right?
    But I’ve never written anything to her, either. We always talked on the phone or else face to face.
    Molly, she was the letter writer. She used to write me even after we weren’t living together. Vicky would bring her letters in from the box and leave them on the kitchen table without a word. Finally the letters dwindled away, became more and more infrequent and bizarre. When she did write, the letters gave me a chill. They were full of talk about “auras” and “signs.” Occasionally she reported a voice that was telling her something she ought to do or some place she should go. And once she told me that no matter what happened, we were still “on the same frequency.” She always knew exactly what I felt, she said.
    She “beamed in on me,” she said, from time to time. Reading those letters of hers, the hair on the back of my neck would tingle. She also had a new word for destiny: Karma. “I’m following out my karma,” she wrote. “Your karma has taken a bad turn.”
    I’d like to go to sleep, but what’s the point? People will be getting up soon. Vicky’s alarm will go off before much longer. I wish I could go upstairs and get back in bed with my wife, tell her I’m sorry, there’s been a mistake, let’s forget all this-then go to sleep and wake up with her in my arms. But I’ve forfeited that right. I’m outside all that now, and I can’t get back inside! But say I did that. Say I went upstairs and slid into bed with Vicky as I’d like to do. She might wake up and say, You bastard. Don’t you dare touch me, son of a bitch.
    What’s she talking about, anyway? I wouldn’t touch her. Not in that way, I wouldn’t.
    After I left Molly, after I’d pulled out on her, about two months after, then Molly really did it. She had her real collapse then, the one that’d been coming on. Her sister saw to it that she got the care she needed. What am I saying? They put her away. They had to, they said. They put my wife away. By then I was living with Vicky, and trying not to drink whiskey. I couldn’t do anything