by Amy Hempel
She shakes out a summer-weight blanket, showing a leg you did not want to see. Except for that, you look at her and understand the law that requires two people to be with the body at all times.
“I thought of something,” she says. “I thought of it last night. I think there is a real and present need here. You know,” she says, “like for someone to do it for you when you can’t do it yourself. You call them up whenever you want—like when push comes to shove.”
She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck.
“Hey,” she says, “the end o’ the line.”
She keeps on, giddy with something. But I don’t know with what.
“I can’t remember,” she says. “What does Kübler-Ross say comes after Denial?”
It seems to me Anger must be next. Then Bargaining, Depression, and so on and so forth. But I keep my guesses to myself.
“The only thing is,” she says, “is where’s Resurrection? God knows, I want to do it by the book. But she left out Resurrection.”
She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.
“Tell me,” she says, “about that chimp with the talking hands. What do they do when the thing ends and the chimp says, ‘I don’t want to go back to the zoo’?”
When I don’t say anything, she says, “Okay—then tell me another animal story. I like animal stories. But not a sick one—I don’t want to know about all the seeing-eye dogs going blind.”
No, I would not tell her a sick one.
“How about the hearing-ear dogs?” I say. “They’re not going deaf, but they are getting very judgmental. For instance, there’s this golden retriever in New Jersey, he wakes up the deaf mother and drags her into the daughter’s room because the kid has got a flashlight and is reading under the covers.”
“Oh, you’re killing me,” she says. “Yes, you’re definitely killing me.”
“They say the smart dog obeys, but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.”
“Yes,” she says, “the smarter anything knows when to disobey. Now, for example.”
She is flirting with the Good Doctor, who has just appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the IV drip before saying good morning, the Good Doctor says things like “God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake.” The Good Doctor awards himself points for the cripples he could have hit in the parking lot. Because the Good Doctor is a little in love with her, he says maybe a year. He pulls a chair up to her bed and suggests I might like to spend an hour on the beach.
“Bring me something back,” she says. “Anything from the beach. Or the gift shop. Taste is no object.”
He draws the curtain around her bed.
“Wait!” she cries.
I look in at her.
“Anything,” she says, “except a magazine subscription.”
The doctor turns away.
I watch her mouth laugh.
What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight—this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.
“It never happens when you’re thinking about it,” she once observed. “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” she said.
“Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” I said.
Like the aviaphobe who keeps the plane aloft with prayer, we kept it up until an aftershock cracked the ceiling.
That was after the big one in ’72. We were in college; our dormitory was five miles from the epicenter. When the ride was over and my jabbering pulse began to slow, she served five parts champagne to one part orange juice, and joked about living in Ocean View, Kansas. I offered to drive her to Hawaii on the new world psychics predicted would surface the next time, or the next.
I could not say that now—next.
Whose next? she could ask.
Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean more natural violence.
I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not.”
She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.
I have this dream before a flight where we buckle in and the plane moves down the runway. It takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we’re airborne, skimming the tree tops. Still, we arrive in New York on time.
It is so pleasant.
One night I flew to Moscow this way.
She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats when everybody knows steel sinks.
I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.
After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions.
“Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.
But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.
A formation of low-riders pulls over to watch with a six-pack. They get vocal when the girls check their tan lines. When the beer is gone, so are they—flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Above this aggressive health are the twin wrought-iron terraces, painted flamingo pink, of the Palm Royale. Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, so the remaining residents line the balconies, rocking and not talking, one-upped.
The ocean they stare at is dangerous, and not just the undertow. You can almost see the slapping tails of sand sharks keeping cruising bodies alive.
If she looked, she could see this, some of it, from her window. She would be the first to say how little it takes to make a thing all wrong.
There was a second bed in the room when I got back to it!
For two beats I didn’t get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin.
She wants every minute, I thought. She wants my life.
“You missed Gussie,” she said.
Gussie is her parents’ three-hundred-pound narcoleptic maid. Her attacks often come at the ironing board. The pillowcases in that family are all bordered with scorch.
“It’s a hard trip for her,” I said. “How is she?”
“Well, she didn’t fall asleep, if that’s what you mean. Gussie’s great—you know what she said? She said, ‘Darlin’, stop this worriation. Just keep prayin’, down on your knees’—me, who can’t even get out of bed.”
She shrugged. “What am I missing?”
“It’s earthquake weather,” I told her.
“The best thing to do about earthquakes,” she said, “is not to live in California.”
“That’s useful,” I said. “You sound like Reverend Ike—‘The best thing to do for the poor is not to be one of them.’”
We’re crazy about Reverend Ike.
I noticed her face was bloated.
“You know,” she said, “I feel like hell. I’m about to stop having fun.”
“The ancients have a saying,” I said. “‘There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls.’”
“What’s that, Navaho?”
“Palm Royale lobby graffiti,” I said. “I bought a paper there. I’ll read you something.”
“Even though I care about nothing?”
I turned to the page with the trivia column. I said, “Did you know the more shrimp flamingo birds eat, the pinker their feathers get?” I said, “Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators? Do you know why Eskimos need refrigerators? Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators because how else would they keep their food from freezing?”
I turned to page three, to a UPI filler datelined Mexico City. I read her MAN ROBS BANK WITH CHICKEN, about a man who bought a barbecued chicken at a stand down the block from a bank. Passing the bank, he got the idea. He walked in and approached a teller. He pointed the brown paper bag at her and she handed over the day’s receipts. It was the smell of barbecue sauce that eventually led to his capture.
The story had made her hungry, she said—so I took the elevator down six floors to the cafeteria, and brought back all the ice cream she wanted. We lay side by side, adjustable beds cranked up for optimal TV-viewing, littering the sheets with Good Humor wrappers, picking toasted almonds out of the gauze. We were Lucy and Ethel, Mary and Rhoda in extremis. The blinds were closed to keep light off the screen.
We watched a movie starring men we used to think we wanted to sleep with. Hers was a tough cop out to stop mine, a vicious rapist who went after cocktail waitresses.
“This is a good movie,” she said when snipers felled them both.
I missed her already.
A Filipino nurse tiptoed in and gave her an injection. The nurse removed the pile of Popsicle sticks from the nightstand—enough to splint a small animal.
The injection made us both sleepy. We slept.
I dreamed she was a decorator, come to furnish my house. She worked in secret, singing to herself. When she finished, she guided me proudly to the door. “How do you like it?” she asked, easing me inside.
Every beam and sill and shelf and knob was draped in gay bunting, with streamers of pastel crepe looped around bright mirrors.
“I have to go home,” I said when she woke up.
She thought I meant home to her house in the canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.
I felt weak and small and failed.
Also exhilarated.
I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They’d serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
Without a word, she yanked off her mask and threw it on the floor. She kicked at the blankets and moved to the door. She must have hated having to pause for breath and balance before slamming out of Isolation, and out of the second room, the one where you scrub and tie on the white masks.
A voice shouted her name in alarm, and people ran down the corridor. The Good Doctor was paged over the intercom. I opened the door and the nurses at the station stared hard, as if this flight had been my idea.
“Where is she?” I asked, and they nodded to the supply closet.
I looked in. Two nurses were kneeling beside her on the floor, talking to her in low voices. One held a mask over her nose and mouth, the other rubbed her back in slow circles. The nurses glanced up to see if I was the doctor—and when I wasn’t, they went back to what they were doing.
“There, there, honey,” they cooed.
On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried, I enrolled in a “Fear of Flying” class. “What is your worst fear?” the instructor asked, and I answered, “That I will finish this course and still be afraid.”
I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
What do I remember?
I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty-fifty chance two will have the same birthday. Who cares whether or not it’s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.
I review those things that will figure in the retelling: a kiss through surgical gauze, the pale hand correcting the position of the wig. I noted these gestures as they happened, not in any retrospect—though I don’t know why looking back should show us more than looking at.
It is just possible I will say I stayed the night.
And who is there that can say that I did not?
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.
for Jessica Wolfson
Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep
The mohair was scratchy, the stria too bulky, but the homespun tweed was right for a small frame. I bought slate-blue skeins softened with flecks of pink, and size-10 needles for a sweater that was warm but light. The pattern I chose was a two-tone V-neck with an optional six-stitch cable up the front. Pullovers mess the hair, but I did not want to buttonhole the first time out.
From a needlework book, I learned to cast on. In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spider-webs at birth. The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water.
Learning to knit was the obvious thing. The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole—this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding. Because symptoms mean just what they are. What about the woman whose empty hand won’t close because she cannot grasp that her child is gone?
“Would you get me a Dr Pep, gal, and would you turn up the a-c?”
I put down my knitting. In the kitchen I found some sugar-free, and took it, with ice, to Dale Anne. It was August. Air-conditioning lifted her hair as she pressed the button on the Niagara bed. Dr. Diamond insisted she have it the last month. She was also renting a swivel TV table and a vibrating chaise—the Niagara adjustable home.
When the angle was right, she popped a Vitamin E and rubbed the oil where the stretch marks would be.
I could be doing this, too. But I had had the procedure instead. That was after the father had asked me, Was I sure? To his credit, he meant—sure that I was, not sure was it he. He said he had never made a girl pregnant before. He said that he had never even made a girl late.
I moved in with Dale Anne to help her near the end. Her husband is often away—in a clinic or in a lab. He studies the mind. He is not a doctor yet, but we call him one by way of encouragement.
I had picked up a hank of yarn and was winding it into a ball when the air conditioner choked to a stop.
Dale Anne sighed. “I will cook in this robe. Would you get me that flowered top in the second drawer?”
While I looked for the top, Dale Anne twisted her hair and held it tight against her head. She took one of my double-pointed six-inch needles and wove it in and out of her hair, securing the twist against her scalp. With the hair off her face, she looked wholesome and very young—“the person you would most like to go camping with if you couldn’t have sex,” is how she put it.
I turned my back while Dale Anne changed. She was as modest as I was. If the house caught fire one night, we would both die struggling to hook brassieres beneath our gowns.
I went back to my chair, and as I did, a sensational cramp snapped me over until I was nearly on the floor.
“Easy, gal—what’s the trouble?” Dale Anne started out of bed to come see.
I said it sometimes happens since the procedure, and Dale Anne said, “Let’s not talk about that for at least ten years.”
I could not think of what to say to that. But I didn’t have to. The front door opened, earlier than it usually did. It was Dr. Diamond, home from the world of spooks and ghosts and loony bins and Ouija boards. I knew that a lack of concern for others was a hallmark of mental illness, so I straightened up and said, after he’d kissed his pregnant wife, “You look hot, Dr. Diamond. Can I get you a drink?”
I buy my materials at a place in the residential section. The owner’s name is Ingrid. She is a large Norwegian woman who spells needles “kneedles.” She wears sample knits she makes up for the class demonstrations. The vest she wore the day before will be hanging in the window.
There are always four or five women at Ingrid’s round oak table, knitting through a stretch they would not risk alone.
Often I go there when I don’t need a thing. In the small back room that is stacked high with pattern books, I can sift for hours. I scan the instructions abbreviated like musical notation: K10, sl 1, K2 tog, psso, sl I, K10 to end. I feel I could sing these instructions. It is compression of language into code; your ability to decipher it makes you privy to the secrets shared by Ingrid and the women at the round oak table.
In the other room, Ingrid tells a customer she used to knit two hundred stitches a minute.
I scan the French and English catalogs, noting the longer length of coat. There is so much to absorb on each visit.