The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  On one side of me was a man who spoke only in phone numbers. You would ask him how he felt, he would say, “924-3130.” Or he would say, “757-1366.” We guessed what these numbers might be, but nobody spent the dime.

  There was sometimes, on the other side of me, a twelve-year-old boy. His lashes were thick and dark from blood-pressure medication. He was next on the transplant list, as soon as—the word they used was harvest—as soon as a kidney was harvested.

  The boy’s mother prayed for drunk drivers.

  I prayed for men who were not discriminating.

  Aren’t we all, I thought, somebody’s harvest?

  The hour would end, and a floor nurse would wheel me back to my room. She would say, “Why watch that trash? Why not just ask me how my day went?”

  I spent fifteen minutes before going to bed squeezing rubber grips. One of the medications was making my fingers stiffen. The doctor said he’d give it to me till I couldn’t button my blouse—a figure of speech to someone in a cotton gown.

  The lawyer said, “Charitable works.”

  He opened his shirt and showed me where an acupuncture person had dabbed at his chest with cola syrup, sunk four needles, and told him that the real cure was charitable works.

  I said, “Cure for what?”

  The lawyer said, “Immaterial.”

  As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

  The accident happened at sunset, so that is when I felt this way the most. The man I had met the week before was driving me to dinner when it happened. The place was at the beach, a beach on a bay that you can look across and see the city lights, a place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it.

  A long time later I went to that beach myself. I drove the car. It was the first good beach day; I wore shorts.

  At the edge of the sand I unwound the elastic bandage and waded into the surf. A boy in a wet suit looked at my leg. He asked me if a shark had done it; there were sightings of great whites along that part of the coast.

  I said that, yes, a shark had done it.

  “And you’re going back in?” the boy asked.

  I said, “And I’m going back in.”

  I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I’m going to start now to tell you what I left out of “The Harvest,” and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.

  There was no other car. There was only the one car, the one that hit me when I was on the back of the man’s motorcycle. But think of the awkward syllables when you have to say motorcycle.

  The driver of the car was a newspaper reporter. He worked for a local paper. He was young, a recent graduate, and he was on his way to a labor meeting to cover a threatened strike. When I say I was then a journalism student, it is something you might not have accepted in “The Harvest.”

  In the years that followed, I watched for the reporter’s byline. He broke the People’s Temple story that resulted in Jim Jones’s flight to Guyana. Then he covered Jonestown. In the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle, as the death toll climbed to nine hundred, the numbers were posted like donations on pledge night. Somewhere in the hundreds, a sign was fixed to the wall that said JUAN CORONA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT.

  In the emergency room, what happened to one of my legs required not four hundred stitches but just over three hundred stitches. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true—nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

  My lawyer was no attorney-at-last. He was a partner in one of the city’s oldest law firms. He would never have opened his shirt to reveal the site of acupuncture, which is something that he never would have had.

  “Marriageability” was the original title of “The Harvest.”

  The damage to my leg was considered cosmetic although I am still, fifteen years later, unable to kneel. In an out-of-court settlement the night before the trial, I was awarded nearly $100,000. The reporter’s car insurance went up $12.43 per month.

  It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

  The man of a week, whose motorcycle it was, was not a married man. But when you thought he had a wife, wasn’t I liable to do anything? And didn’t I have it coming?

  After the accident, the man got married. The girl he married was a fashion model. (“Do you think looks are important?” I asked the man before he left. “Not at first,” he said.)

  In addition to being a beauty, the girl was worth millions of dollars. Would you have accepted this in “The Harvest”—that the model was also an heiress?

  It is true we were headed for dinner when it happened. But the place where you can see everything without having to listen to any of it was not a beach on a bay; it was the top of Mount Tamalpais. We had the dinner with us as we headed up the twisting mountain road. This is the version that has room for perfect irony, so you won’t mind when I say that for the next several months, from my hospital bed, I had a dead-on spectacular view of that very mountain.

  I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn’t believe it.

  On the day of my third operation, there was an attempted breakout in the Maximum Security Adjustment Center, adjacent to Death Row, at San Quentin prison. “Soledad Brother” George Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old black man, pulled out a smuggled-in .38-caliber pistol, yelled, “This is it!” and opened fire. Jackson was killed; so were three guards and two “tier-tenders,” inmates who bring other prisoners their meals.

  Three other guards were stabbed in the neck. The prison is a five-minute drive from Marin General, so that is where the injured guards were taken. The people who brought them were three kinds of police, including California Highway Patrol and Marin County sheriff’s deputies, heavily armed.

  Police were stationed on the roof of the hospital with rifles; they were posted in the hallways, waving patients and visitors back into their rooms.

  When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

  On the news that night, there was footage of the riot. They showed my surgeon talking to reporters, indicating, with a finger to his throat, how he had saved one of the guards by sewing up a slice from ear to ear.

  I watched this on television, and because it was my doctor, and because hospital patients are self-absorbed, and because I was drugged, I thought the surgeon was talking about me. I thought that he was saying, “Well, she’s dead. I’m announcing it to her in her bed.”

  The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon’s referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

  The great white sharks in the waters near my home attack one to seven people a year. Their primary victim is the abalone diver. With abalone steaks at thirty-five dollars a pound and going up, the Department of Fish and Game expects the shark attacks to show no slackening.

  The Most Girl Part of You

  Jack “Big Guy” Fitch is trying to crack his teeth. He swishes a mouthful of ice water, then straightaway throws back slugs of hot coffee.

  “Like in Antarctica,” he says, where, if you believe what Big Guy tells you, the people are forever cracking their teeth when they come in from the cold and gulp their coffee down.

  I believe what Big Guy tells you. I’m his partner in crime, so I’m chewing on the shaved ice, too. I mean, someone that good-looking tells you what to do, you pretty much do what he says.

  Big Guy (he is so damn big!) can make you do anything. He made us become blood brothers
—brothers, even though I am a girl—back when we were clumsy little dopes playing with jacks. He got a sewing needle and was going to stick our fingers, until I chickened out. I pointed to the sore on his elbow and the abrasions on my knee, and, in fact, what we became was scab brothers.

  But this business with the teeth—I say Big Guy is asking for it. He hasn’t done something like this since the seventh grade when he ate a cigarette for a dollar. Now when he brushes his teeth at night, he says he treats the gums like the cuticle of a nail. He says he pushes them back with the hard bristles of the brush, laying the enamel clear.

  This is a new Big Guy, a bafflement to us all. The old one trimmed the perforated margins from sheets of stamps. He kept a chart posted beside his bed that showed how his water intake varied from day to day. The old Big Guy ate sandwiches with a knife and fork. He wore short-sleeved shirts!

  That was before his mother died. She died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said, “Any place I hang myself is home.” In the movie version, that is where his father would have slapped him.

  But of course his father did not—didn’t slap him, didn’t even hear him. Although Big Guy’s father has probably heard what Big Guy says about the Cubs. It’s the funniest thing he can imagine; it’s what he doesn’t have to imagine, because his father really said it when he had to tell his son what the boy’s mother had done.

  “And what’s more—” his father had said.

  It may have been the sheer momentum of bad news, because in the vast thrilling silence after Big Guy heard the news, his father had added, “And what’s more, the Cubs lost.”

  “So you see,” Big Guy says these days about matters large and small, “it’s not as if the Cubs lost.”

  Any minute now he could say it again—here, between the swishing and gulping, in the round red booth of the airport coffee shop, with his tired, traveling grandparents sitting across the table. They flew in for the services, and they are flying home today. Big Guy drove so fast that now we have time to kill. He thinks the posted speed limit is what you can’t go below. He has just earned a learner’s permit, so he drives every chance he gets. I have six months on Big Guy; this makes me the adult in the eyes of the DMV.

  The grandfather orders breakfast from the plastic menu. He says he will have “the ranch-fresh eggs, crisp bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.” Big Guy finds this excruciating. More so when his grandmother reads from the menu aloud.

  “What about the golden French toast with maple syrup?” she says. “Jack, honey, how about the Belgian waffle?”

  Before his grandmother can say “flapjacks” instead of “pancakes,” Big Guy signals the waitress and points to what he wants on the menu.

  The rest of us order. Then the grandfather addresses his grandson. “So,” he says. He says, “So, what do you say?”

  “What?” says Big Guy. “Oh. I don’t know. I don’t know what I say.”

  The past few days have seen us in many a bistro. It hasn’t been easy for Big Guy. His grandfather is always trying to take waitresses into his confidence, believing they will tell him the truth about what is good that day. Big Guy finds this excruciating. He says, “Gramps, have some dignity—snub them.”

  But his grandfather goes on, asking, with equal gravity, for more coffee and what Big Guy plans to do after high school.

  Big Guy heads for a glass of water. Ice water. Then his hand moves in slow motion (this for my benefit) toward the refilled cup of coffee.

  “Like in Egypt,” he says, an aside, a reference to my telling him how Egyptians used to split stone—how they tunneled under a boulder and chipped a narrow fissure in the underside of the rock. How they lit a fire there, let it slow-burn for several days. How, when they poured cold water on top of the rock, the thing cracked clean as lightning.

  We will have to eat quickly if the grandparents are going to make their flight. While we wait for the return of the grandfather’s new best friend, he teases his grandson about something that happened yesterday, something that Big Guy found excruciating. The grandfather says, “Come on, Jack, what’s wrong with talking in elevators?”

  For that matter, I could say it. I could catch my friend’s eye, and I could be the one to say, “He’s right. Look here, it’s not as if the Cubs lost.”

  Big Guy is the person I tell everything to. In exchange for my confessions, Big Guy tells me secrets which I can’t say what they are or else they wouldn’t be our secrets.

  Sewing is one of the secrets between us. Only Big Guy knows how considerably I had to cheat to earn the Girl Scout merit badge in sewing. It’s a fact that my seamstress badge is glued to the green cotton sash.

  So it had to be a joke when Big Guy asked me to teach him to sew. I cannot baste a facing or tailor-tack a dart, but I can thread the goddamn needle and achieve a fairly even running stitch. It was the running stitch I taught Big Guy; he picked it up faster than I ever did. He practiced on a square of stiff blue denim, and by “practiced” I mean that Big Guy did it once.

  That was a week ago today, or, to put it another way, it was the day after Mrs. Fitch did it. Now I am witness to her son’s seamsmanship, to the use that he has put his skill to.

  He met me at the door to his room with one hand held behind his back. I had to close my eyes to create suspense before he brought his hand forward. I opened my eyes, and that’s when my stomach grabbed.

  Where I think he has sewn two fingers together, I see that it is both worse than that and not as bad. On the outer edge of his thumb, stitched into the very skin, my name is spelled out in small block print. It is spelled out in tight blue thread. My name is sewn into the skin of his hand!

  Big Guy shows me that he still holds the threaded needle. In my presence, he completes the final stitch, guiding the needle slowly. I watch the blue thread that trails like a vein and turns milky as it tunnels through the bloodless calloused skin.

  I can’t sew, but my mother you would swear had majored in Home Ec. She favors a shirtwaist dress for at-home, and she calls clothes “garments.” She makes desserts with names like Apple Brown Betty, and when she serves them, usually with a whipped topping product, she says, “M.I.K.,” which abbreviation means, “More in Kitchen.”

  Big Guy is in thrall to her, to her tuna fish sandwiches on soft white bread, to her pink lemonade from frozen concentrate cans. He likes to horrify my mother by telling her what he would otherwise be eating: salt sandwiches, for example, or Fizzies and Space Food Sticks.

  Big Guy is a welcome guest. At my house, he is the man of the house—the phrase my mother uses. My father’s been dead for most of my life. We are more of a family at these lunches and dinners where, once again, the man of the house is at the head of the table.

  Big Guy cooks corn by placing the opened can on the burner. For breakfast, he tells my mother, he pours milk into the cardboard boxes of Kellogg’s miniature assortment. Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber, thinking it was zucchini. That’s the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

  One thing he can make is a melted cheese sandwich, open-faced and melted under the broiler. It’s what he brought to his mother for lunch when she was sick. He brought her two months’ worth of melted cheese.

  Big Guy says he brought her one that day.

  “The last thing I said to her,” Big Guy remembers, “was, ‘Mom, guess what kids at school have?’ I told her, ‘Sunglasses,’ and she said, ‘Save your money.’”

  Big Guy wanted to know, What about me?

  “You were there,” I remind him. “Remember about her hair?”

  The last thing I had said to Mrs. Fitch was that I liked her hair. Big Guy had accused me of trying to get in good, but it was true—I did like her hair.

  Later—it’s a long story how—Big Guy got a copy of the coroner’s report. The coroner described Mrs. Fitch’s auburn hair as being “worn in a female fashion.”

  I’m doing
my homework in bed, drinking ginger ale, feeling a little woopsy. I’m taking a look at a book on French grammar because is there anything cooler than talking in a foreign language? (“Dites-moi,” Big Guy says to me whenever I have a problem.)

  I turn the page and see that Big Guy has been there first. In addition to reading my mail, he writes in the margins of my books, usually the number of shopping days left until his birthday.

  Here in the French grammar, there is no telling why, Big Guy has written, “Dots is spots up close. Spots is dots far away.”

  I read this, and then there he is in my room. Big Guy can do that—walk into my bedroom when I am in the bed. Years ago, at school, the girls were forced to watch a film called The Most Girl Part of You. I had gone home and told my mother that Jack and I weren’t doing anything. My mother, who hadn’t asked if we were, had said, “More’s the pity.”

  In other words, it is all my mother can do to keep from dimming the lights for us.

  The truth is—it does something to me, seeing him in my bedroom.

  Big Guy does the female thing in a mood—goes shopping, or changes the part in his hair. So when I see his hair is puffed and no doubt painful at the roots for being brushed in another direction, I am tipped off.

  I don’t have to ask.

  “No need to go to Antarctica,” he says, and smiles a phony smile so I can see where his front tooth has been broken off on the diagonal.

  “From ice water?” I say.

  Big Guy says his bike collided with a garbage truck. “Actually,” he says, “it wasn’t an accident.

  “And speaking of Antarctica,” he says, to change the subject, “did you know that no matter how hungry an Eskimo gets, he will never eat a penguin?”

  “Why is that?”

  Big Guy, triumphant: “Because Eskimos live at the North Pole, and penguins live at the South Pole!”

  And then he is gone, gone downstairs to eat more funny food, to fix himself a glass of Fizzies, or, if they have stopped making Fizzies, powdered dry Kool-Aid on a wet licked finger.