The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  Mary had a little lamb, I am humming when I leave the shop. Its feet were—its fleece was white as wool.

  Dale Anne wanted a nap, so Dr. Diamond and I went out for margaritas. At La Rondalla, the colored lights on the Virgin tell you every day is Christmas. The food arrives on manhole covers and mariachis fill the bar. Dr. Diamond said that in Guadalajara there is a mariachi college that turns out mariachis by the classful. But I could tell that these were not graduates of even mariachi high school.

  I shooed the serenaders away, but Dr. Diamond said they meant well.

  Dr. Diamond likes for people to mean well. He could be president of the Well-Meaning Club. He has had a buoyant feeling of fate since he learned Freud died the day he was born.

  He was the person to talk to, all right, so I brought up the stomach pains I was having for no bodily reason that I could think of.

  “You know how I think,” he said. “What is it you can’t stomach?”

  I knew what he was asking.

  “Have you thought about how you will feel when Dale Anne has the baby?” he asked.

  With my eyes, I wove strands of tinsel over the Blessed Virgin. That was the great thing about knitting, I thought—everything was fiber, the world a world of natural resource.

  “I thought I would burn that bridge when I come to it,” I said, and when he didn’t say anything to that, I said, “I guess I will think that there is a mother who kept hers.”

  “One of hers might be more accurate,” Dr. Diamond said.

  I arrived at the yarn shop as Ingrid turned over the CLOSED sign to OPEN. I had come to buy Shetland wool for a Fair Isle sweater. I felt nothing would engage my full attention more than a pattern of ancient Scottish symbols and alternate bands of delicate design. Every stitch in every color is related to the one above, below, and to either side.

  I chose the natural colors of Shetland sheep—the chalky brown of the Moorit, the blackish brown of the black sheep, fawn, gray, and pinky beige from a mixture of Moorit and white. I held the wool to my nose, but Ingrid said it was fifty years since the women of Fair Isle dressed the yarn with fish oil.

  She said the yarn came from Sheep Rock, the best pasture on Fair Isle. It is a ten-acre plot that is four hundred feet up a cliff, Ingrid said. “Think what a man has to go through to harvest the wool.”

  I was willing to feel an obligation to the yarn, and to the hardy Scots who supplied it. There was heritage there, and I could keep it alive with my hands.

  Dale Anne patted capers into a mound of raw beef, and spread some onto toast. It was not a pretty sight. She offered some to me, and I said not a chance. I told her Johnny Carson is someone else who won’t go near that. I said, “Johnny says he won’t eat steak tartare because he has seen things hurt worse than that get better.”

  “Johnny was never pregnant,” Dale Anne said.

  When the contractions began, I left a message with the hospital and with Dr. Diamond’s lab. I turned off the air conditioner and called for a cab.

  “Look at you,” Dale Anne said.

  I told her I couldn’t help it. I get rational when I panic.

  The taxi came in minutes.

  “Hold on,” the driver said. “I know every bump in these roads, and I’ve never been able to miss one of them.”

  Dale Anne tried to squeeze my wrist, but her touch was weightless, as porous as wet silk.

  “When this is over…” Dale Anne said.

  When the baby was born, I did not go far. I sublet a place on the other side of town. I filled it with patterns and needles and yarn. It was what I did in the day. On a good day, I made a front and two sleeves. On a bad day, I ripped out stitches from neck to hem. For variety, I made socks. The best ones I made had beer steins on the sides, and the tops spilled over with white angora foam.

  I did not like to work with sound in the room, not even the sound of a fan. Music slowed me down, and there was a great deal to do. I planned to knit myself a mailbox and a car, perhaps even a dog and a lead to walk him.

  I blocked the finished pieces and folded them in drawers.

  Dr. Diamond urged me to exercise. He called from time to time, looking in. He said exercise would set me straight, and why not have some fun with it? Why not, for example, tap-dancing lessons?

  I told him it would be embarrassing because the rest of the class would be doing it right. And with all the knitting, there wasn’t time to dance.

  Dale Anne did not look in. She had a pretty good reason not to.

  The day I went to see her in the hospital, I stopped at the nursery first. I saw the baby lying facedown. He wore yellow duck-print flannels. I saw that he was there—and then I went straight home.

  That night the dreams began. A giant lizard ate people from the feet upward, swallowing the argyles on the first bite, then drifting into obscurity like a ranger of forgotten death. I woke up remembering and, like a chameleon, assumed every shade of blame.

  Asleep at night, I went to an elegant ball. In the center of the dance floor was a giant aquarium. Hundreds of goldfish swam inside. At a sign from the bandleader, the tank was overturned. Until someone tried to dance on the fish, the floor was aswirl with gold glory.

  Dr. Diamond told a story about the young daughter of a friend. The little girl had found a frog in the yard. The frog appeared to be dead, so her parents let her prepare a burial site—a little hole surrounded by pebbles. But at the moment of the lowering, the frog, which had only been stunned, kicked its legs and came to.

  “Kill him!” the girl had shrieked.

  I began to take walks in the park. In the park, I saw a dog try to eat his own shadow, and another dog—I am sure of it—was herding a stand of elms. I stopped telling people how handsome their dogs were; too many times what they said was, “You want him?”

  When the weather got nicer, I stayed home to sit for hours.

  I had accidents. Then I had bigger ones. But the part that hurt was never the part that got hurt.

  The dreams came back and back until they were just—again. I wished that things would stay out of sight the way they did in mountain lakes. In one that I know, the water is so cold, gas can’t form to bring a corpse to the surface. Although you would not want to think about the bottom of the lake, what you can say about it is—the dead stay down.

  Around that time I talked to Dr. Diamond.

  The point that he wanted to make was this: that conception was not like walking in front of traffic. No matter how badly timed, it was, he said, an affirmation of life.

  “You have to believe me here,” he said. “Do you see that this is true? Do you know this about yourself?”

  “I do and I don’t,” I said.

  “You do and you do,” he said.

  I remembered when another doctor made the news. A young retarded boy had found his father’s gun, and while the family slept, he shot them all in bed. The police asked the boy what he had done. But the boy went mute. He told them nothing. Then they called in the doctor.

  “We know you didn’t do it,” the doctor said to the boy, “but tell me, did the gun do it?”

  And yes, the boy was eager to tell him just what that gun had done.

  I wanted the same out, and Dr. Diamond wouldn’t let me have it.

  “Dr. Diamond,” I said, “I am giving up.”

  “Now you are ready to begin,” he said.

  I thought of Andean alpaca because that was what I planned to work up next. The feel of that yarn was not the only wonder—there was also the name of it: Alpaquita Superfina.

  Dr. Diamond was right.

  I was ready to begin.

  Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.

  Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat.

  Dr. Diamond answered the door. He said Dale Anne had run to the store. He was leaving, too, flying to a conference back East. The baby was asleep, he said, I should make myself at home.

  I left my bag of knitting in the hall and went into Dale Anne’s kitchen. It had
been a year. I could have looked in on the baby. Instead, I washed the dishes that were soaking in the sink. The scouring pad was steel wool waiting for knitting needles.

  The kitchen was filled with specialized utensils. When Dale Anne couldn’t sleep she watched TV, and that’s where the stuff was advertised. She had a thing to core tomatoes—it was called a Tomato Shark—and a metal spaghetti wheel for measuring out spaghetti. She had plastic melon-ballers and a push-in device that turned ordinary cake into ladyfingers.

  I found pasta primavera in the refrigerator. My fingers wanted to knit the cold linguini, laying precisely cabled strands across the oily red peppers and beans.

  Dale Anne opened the door.

  “Look out, gal,” she said, and dropped a shopping bag on the counter.

  I watched her unload ice cream, potato chips, carbonated drinks, and cake.

  “It’s been a long time since I walked into a market and expressed myself,” she said.

  She turned to toss me a carton of cigarettes.

  “Wait for me in the bedroom,” she said. “West Side Story is on.”

  I went in and looked at the color set. I heard the blender crushing ice in the kitchen. I adjusted the contrast, then Dale Anne handed me an enormous peach daiquiri. The goddamn thing had a tide factor.

  Dale Anne left the room long enough to bring in the take-out chicken. She upended the bag on a plate and picked out a leg and a wing.

  “I like my dinner in a bag and my life in a box,” she said, nodding toward the TV.

  We watched the end of the movie, then part of a lame detective program. Dale Anne said the show owed Nielsen four points, and reached for the TV Guide.

  “Eleven-thirty,” she read. “The Texas Whiplash Massacre: Unexpected stop signs were their weapon.”

  “Give me that,” I said.

  Dale Anne said there was supposed to be a comet. She said we could probably see it if we watched from the living room. Just to be sure, we pushed the couch up close to the window. With the lights off, we could see everything without it seeing us. Although both of us had quit, we smoked at either end of the couch.

  “Save my place,” Dale Anne said.

  She had the baby in her arms when she came back in. I looked at the sleeping child and thought, Mercy, Land Sakes, Lordy Me. As though I had aged fifty years. For just a moment then I wanted nothing that I had and everything I did not.

  “He told his first joke today,” Dale Anne said.

  “What do you mean he told a joke?” I said. “I didn’t think they could talk.”

  “Well, he didn’t really tell a joke—he poured his orange juice over his head, and when I started after him, he said, ‘Raining?’”

  “‘Raining?’ That’s what he said? The kid is a genius,” I told Dale Anne. “What Art Linkletter could do with this kid.”

  Dale Anne laid him down in the middle of the couch, and we watched him or watched the sky.

  “What a gyp,” Dale Anne said at dawn.

  There had not been a comet. But I did not feel cheated, or even tired. She walked me to the door.

  The knitting bag was still in the hall.

  “Open it later,” I said. “It’s a sweater for him.”

  But Dale Anne had to see it then.

  She said the blue one matched his eyes and the camel one matched his hair. The red would make him glow, she said, and then she said, “Help me out.”

  Cables had become too easy; three more sweaters had pictures knitted in. They buttoned up the front. Dale Anne held up a parade of yellow ducks.

  There were the Fair Isles, too—one in the pattern called Tree of Life, another in the pattern called Hearts.

  It was an excess of sweaters—a kind of precaution, a rehearsal against disaster.

  Dale Anne looked at the two sweaters still in the bag. “Are you really okay?” she said.

  The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? “Four,” she will say, “—three,” and years later, “Three,” she will say, “—four.”

  It’s the little steps that help. Weather, breakfast, crossing with the light—sometimes it is all the pleasure I can bear to sleep, and know that on a rack in the bath, damp wool is pinned to dry.

  Dale Anne thinks she would like to learn to knit. She measures the baby’s crib and I take her over to Ingrid’s. Ingrid steers her away from the baby pastels, even though they are machine-washable. Use a pure wool, Ingrid says. Use wool in a grown-up shade. And don’t boast of your achievements or you’ll be making things for the neighborhood.

  On Fair Isle there are only five women left who knit. There is not enough lichen left growing on the island for them to dye their yarn. But knitting machines can’t produce their designs, and they keep on, these women, working the undyed colors of the sheep.

  I wait for Dale Anne in the room with the patterns. The songs in these books are like lullabies to me.

  K tog rem st. Knit together remaining stitches.

  Cast off loosely.

  Going

  There is a typo on the hospital menu this morning. They mean, I think, that the pot roast tonight will be served with buttered noodles. But what it says here on my breakfast tray is that the pot roast will be severed with buttered noodles.

  This is not a word you want to see after flipping your car twice at sixty per and then landing side-up in a ditch.

  I did not spin out on a stretch of highway called Blood Alley or Hospital Curve. I lost it on flat dry road—with no other car in sight. Here’s why: In the desert I like to drive through binoculars. What I like about it is that things are two ways at once. Things are far away and close with you still in the same place.

  In the ditch, things were also two ways at once. The air was unbelievably hot and my skin was unbelievably cold.

  “Son,” the doctor said, “you shouldn’t be alive.”

  The impact knocked two days out of my head, but all you can see is the cut on my chin. I total a car and get twenty stitches that keep me from shaving.

  It’s a good thing, too, that that is all it was. This hospital place, this clinic—it is not your City of Hope. The instruments don’t come from a first-aid kit, they come from a toolbox. It’s the desert. The walls of this room are not rose-beige or sanitation-plant green. The walls are the color of old chocolate going chalky at the edges.

  And there’s a worm smell.

  Though I could be mistaken about the smell.

  I’m given to olfactory hallucinations. When my parents’ house was burning to the ground, I smelled smoke three states away.

  Now I smell worms.

  The doctor wants to watch me because I knocked my head. So I get to miss a few days of school. It’s okay with me. I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed. Anyway, the accident was a learning experience.

  You know—pain teaches?

  One of the nurses picked it up from there. She was bending over my bed, snatching pebbles of safety glass out of my hair. “What do we learn from this?” she asked.

  It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave—and the liar said it really happened—was that once while drinking orange juice, he’d realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar “realizations.”

  Is he kidding? I thought.

  Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough.

  Once I had food poisoning and realized I was trapped inside my body.

  What interests me now is this memory thing. Why two days? Why two days? The last I know is not getting carded in a two-shark bar near the Bonneville flats. The bartender served me tequila and he left the bottle out. He asked me where I was going, and I said I
was just going. Then he brought out a jar with a scorpion in it. He showed me how a drop of tequila on its tail makes a scorpion sting itself to death.

  What happened after that?

  Maybe those days will come back and maybe they will not. In the meantime, how’s this: I can’t even remember all I’ve forgotten.

  I do remember the accident, though. I remember it was like the binoculars. You know—two ways? It was fast and it was slow. It was both.

  The pot roast wasn’t bad. I ate every bit of it. I finished the green vegetables and the citrus vegetables too.

  Now I’m waiting for the night nurse. She takes a blood pressure about this time. You could call this the high point of my day. That’s because this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she’s in love with the Lord.

  But she’s a sport, this nurse. When I can’t sleep she brings in the telephone book. She sits by my bed and we look up funny names. Calliope Ziss and Maurice Pancake live in this very community.

  I like a woman in my room at night.

  The night nurse smells like a Christmas candle.

  After she leaves the room, for a short time the room is like when she was here. She is not here, but the idea of her is.

  It’s not the same—but it makes me think of the night my mother died. Three states away, the smell in my room was the smell of the powder on her face when she kissed me good night—the night she wasn’t there.

  Pool Night

  This time it happened with fire. Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water. Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.

  Maybe I wasn’t losing everything. But I didn’t try to save it. That is what makes it like the first time. They had to lead me out of the house, and not because I didn’t know my way out in the smoke.