Where I'm Calling From

The structure of “Where I’m Calling From” employs a time-bending circularity that invites readers to ponder the nature and consequences of storytelling. Lodging at Frank Martin’s rehabilitation facility, patients like the narrator are faced with the feeling of endless time to consider their addiction, their associated feelings of shame, and all the other problems in their lives. For the narrator, listening to someone else’s story is a reprieve, and he describes the effect of listening to J.P.’s stories thus: “It’s helping me relax, for one thing. It’s taking me away from my own situation” (213). The stories offer some escape from the troubling thoughts that hound the narrator, whose inner turmoil is evident in his frequent interior asides as he is reminded of something else. He begs J.P. to keep talking, even when J.P. has shocked himself into silence with his own memories. Though he listens attentively, the narrator does not care what his companion is actually talking about; he declares, “I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes” (211).

Because it is interspersed with the narrator’s own recollections, J.P.’s lengthy chronicle functions in some ways as a frame story. However, the structure makes it more complex than a frame story, as the levels of framing allow readers to understand the main characters in several different ways. As readers are witness to the narrator’s desire for a distraction, they gradually see, through his eyes, that the act of storytelling is having a profound effect on J.P. himself. In the same way that the narrator could listen to J.P. talk about anything, J.P. could be talking to any audience, or perhaps none at all. He seems to haunt himself with this story, given his frequent silences, and yet the process of creating a narrative gives him the strength and encouragement to receive Roxy’s visit on New Year’s Day with a sense of hope.

The storytelling element also allows for a manipulation of time. Events seem to be happening in the past and the present simultaneously, as evidenced by the frequent shifts between verb tenses in the recollections, sometimes even within a single sentence (for example, “She’s wearing a top hat, the sight of which knocked J.P. for a loop” [210]). While this grammatical inconsistency resembles the way people often tell stories in casual conversation, it also has the effect of transporting everyone—teller, listener, and reader—to the moment in which the memory takes place. This technique, with its sense of simultaneous present and past, has the strange quality of creating simultaneous closeness and distance, which Carver further complicates by telling J.P.’s story through the mediation of the narrator.

The sense of distance that Carver creates in this story provides a fitting backdrop for the narrator’s distance from his own story. As the narrator attempts to distract himself from his problems, he can’t help but be reminded of certain painful moments, which the reader glimpses through his internal monologues. Yet not even these monologues are entirely reliable, as they are nonlinear and often incomplete—the narrator often circles back to a story he has already told and fills in details, recontextualizing the events and any other characters involved. For example, the narrator twice recounts his second arrival at Frank Martin’s, but each version offers different information (and though the event happened prior to the narrative, he recounts some of it in present tense). The first time, he recalls his girlfriend and says, “She’s in my car. She’s drunk. But I’m drunk, too, and there’s nothing I can do” (214). His girlfriend was obviously driving while under the influence, and the narrator’s brief reference to the negligent behavior may invite an unsympathetic response from any readers who assume her conduct was hedonistic or typical of her entire character. However, the second time the narrator tells this story, he reveals that his girlfriend had been drinking because she’d received bad medical news, and that he’d left her to go to Frank Martin’s before the extent of her illness was even clear. Moreover, her relationship with her son appears to be a source of pain, as the young man screamed obscenities at her and wished suicide upon her as she left her apartment. By filling in more details gradually and retrospectively, Carver invites readers to rethink their initial assumptions—a process that, perhaps, is similar to the therapeutic “deconstruction” that a person must go through in a rehabilitation facility as they relearn how to view their life and relationships.

Although the personal histories of the narrator and J.P. constitute the main focus of the narrative, the actual timeline of the story’s action spans the few days between Christmas and New Year’s Day at Frank Martin’s. The narrative portrays the dullness of everyday life in such a facility with all its idiosyncratic realities, including withdrawal symptoms, recurrent feelings of shame, watching the landscape from the liminal space of the porch, and even the basic task of eating. Carver implies that in a situation of alcohol addiction, nothing can be taken for granted, and no task is truly basic; recovery is a life-or-death situation in which everything must be fought for. Tiny’s unexpected seizure underscores this precarity. For the narrator, who is in the early stages of recovery from addiction, everything is fraught and fragile, a reality that terrifies him. So many things feel like a potential threat, including his withdrawal symptoms, and every time he feels so much as a twinge, “I draw some breath and wait to find myself on my back, looking up, somebody’s fingers in my mouth” (209), just like Tiny.

The story ends with Roxy’s visit breaking up the monotony of everyday life at Frank Martin’s. This plot event is where past and present collide, and where the spark of hope for something different begins to flicker. For J.P., Roxy’s visit allows him to pick up his story where he left off telling it to the narrator. For the narrator, however, once he realizes that J.P. and Roxy are continuing their story without him, he understands that he exists on the outside of that story. Although he gets his “good luck” kiss from Roxy, he can neither participate in their narrative nor assume that he’ll get the second chance J.P. seems to be getting. In fact, he has already used up his second chance, which is what landed him back at Frank Martin’s. Nevertheless, Roxy’s visit encourages him to take ownership of his situation in a new way. Resolving to call his wife, he thinks, “I won’t bring up business. I won’t raise my voice. Not even if she starts something. She’ll ask me where I’m calling from, and I’ll have to tell her” (221). This indicates a sense of responsibility. He also holds out hope for reconciliation with his girlfriend, planning to call her the affectionate pet name “Sugar” (221) when he calls her. After witnessing the monotony broken and believing that something different can happen, the narrator finally has the strength to take a step forward.