Where I'm Calling From

become a Yuppie. That wasn’t his thing. He’d get out of my hair, he said, if he could just borrow enough from me, this one last time, to buy a ticket to Germany.
    I didn’t hear anything from my former wife. I didn’t have to. We both knew how things stood there.
    My mother wrote that she was having to do without support hose and wasn’t able to have her hair tinted.
    She’d thought this would be the year she could put some money back for the rainy days ahead, but it wasn’t working out that way. She could see it wasn’t in the cards. “How are you?” she wanted to know.
    “How’s everybody else? I hope you’re okay.”
    I put more checks in the mail. Then I held my breath and waited.
    While I was waiting, I had this dream one night. Two dreams, really. I dreamt them on the same night.
    In the first dream, my dad was alive once more, and he was giving me a ride on his shoulders. I was this little kid, maybe five or six years old. Get up here, he said, and he took me by the hands and swung me onto his shoulders. I was high off the ground, but I wasn’t afraid. He was holding on to me. We were holding on to each other. Then he began to move down the sidewalk. I brought my hands up from his shoulders and put them around his forehead. Don’t muss my hair, he said. You can let go, he said, I’ve got you. You won’t fall. When he said that, I became aware of the strong grip of his hands around my ankles. Then I did let go. I turned loose and held my arms out on either side of me. I kept them out there like that for balance. My dad went on walking while I rode on his shoulders. I pretended he was an elephant. I don’t know where we were going. Maybe we were going to the store, or else, to the park so he could push me in the swing.
    I woke up then, got out of bed, and used the bathroom. It was starting to get light out, and it was only an hour or so until I had to get up. I thought about making coffee and getting dressed. But then I decided to go back to bed. I didn’t plan to sleep, though. I thought I’d just lie there for a while with my hands behind my neck and watch it turn light out and maybe think about my dad a little, since I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. He just wasn’t a part of my life any longer, waking or sleeping. Anyway, I got back in bed. But it couldn’t have been more than a minute before I fell asleep once more, and when I did I got into this other dream. My former wife was in it, though she wasn’t my former wife in the dream.
    She was still my wife. My kids were in it, too. They were little, and they were eating potato chips. In my dream, I thought I could smell the potato chips and hear them being eaten. We were on a blanket, and we were close to some water. There was a sense of satisfaction and well-being in the dream. Then, suddenly, I found myself in the company of some other people—people I didn’t know—and the next thing that happened was that I was kicking the window out of my son’s car and threatening his life, as I did once, a long time ago. He was inside the car as my shoe smashed through the glass. That’s when my eyes flew open, and I woke up. The alarm was going off. I reached over and pushed the switch and lay there for a few minutes more, my heart racing. In the second dream, somebody had offered me some whiskey, and I drank it. Drinking that whiskey was the thing that scared me. That was the worst thing that could have happened. That was rock bottom. Compared to that, everything else was a picnic. I lay there for a minute longer, trying to calm down. Then I got up.
    I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table in front of the window. I pushed my cup back and forth in little circles on the table and began to think seriously about Australia again. And then, all of a sudden, I could imagine how it must have sounded to my family when I’d threatened them with a move to Australia. They would have been shocked at first, and even a little scared. Then, because they knew me, they’d probably started laughing. Now, thinking about their laughter, I had to laugh, too. Ha, ha, ha. That was exactly the sound I made there at the table—ha, ha, ha-as if I’d read somewhere how to laugh.
    What was it I planned to do in Australia, anyway? The truth was, I wouldn’t be going there any more than I’d be going to Timbuktu, the moon, or the North Pole. Hell, I didn’t want to go to Australia. But once I understood this, once I understood I wouldn’t be