The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  I see his schoolbooks where he left them on my dresser; I see my chance.

  I skip the texts and make for his spiral notebook, there to leave searing commentary in the margins. I find handwriting which only after a moment becomes the words that I am reading.

  Big Guy has written: “If we had trimmed the cat’s claws before she snagged the bedspread? If we’d had French toast for breakfast instead of eggs? If we had gone to the movies instead of Dad being tired?”

  The bottom half of the page is filled with inky abstract drawings. On the next page he continues: “Am I thinking the wrong things? Should I wonder, instead, what took you so long?”

  I reason that if he left it here, he wanted me to see it.

  Big Guy takes me to a party the same day he goes to the dentist. There are refreshments for an hour, then the lights go out in the basement and the records start to play.

  Big Guy says, “May I challenge you to a dance?”

  I move into his arms—it is the first time we have danced—and the hand that is at the small of my back catches as it slides across the silk of my good new dress. I don’t have to look to know what it is. It’s the dry, jagged skin from where he pulled my threaded name out of the place where he had sewn it.

  Big Guy leads me to the side of the room where a black light turns our white clothes purple. The black light does something else, I notice. When Big Guy talks, it turns the capped tooth dingy gray. Another girl notices; she says that is why you never see a black light used in Hollywood.

  “Get it?” she says.

  This is the birth of vanity for my date. Big Guy says it’s time to go, and if I want to go with him, I can. Of course I do—it’s so cheap to leave with someone who is not the person you came with!

  To show that I can give it as well as I can take it, I say, “Big Guy, come on, it’s not as if the Cubs lost.”

  He says, “Cut me some slack,” and we get into Mr. Fitch’s car. I tune in the Oldies station and mouth a Motown hit, the words of which clash ridiculously with Big Guy’s and my frame of reference. When I stop knowing enough of the words, I hum along with the radio.

  “We hum,” Big Guy informs, “because people are evolved from insects. Humming, buzzing—you see what I mean?”

  This is something he probably heard the same place he learned about the cracking teeth of Antarctica.

  Big Guy drives me home. Nobody is there, not that it would matter if anybody was. I sit on the couch in the family room, in the dark. Big Guy finds the Oldies station on my mother’s antique Zenith. The music comes in faintly; you would have to strain to hear the words if, unlike myself, you did not know the words already.

  Then it’s both of us sitting in the humid dark, Big Guy buzzing along with the radio, me scratching the mosquito bites I always get. A few minutes of this and Big Guy is off to the bathroom. He comes back with a small pink bottle. He sings, “You’re gonna need an ocean / of calamine lotion” as he dabs it on the hot white bites.

  I tell him he ought to chill it first, so he takes the bottle into the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator, and calls me in to look.

  He shows me where a moth has been drawn by the single light. Its wings beat madly in the cold air; they drag across the uncovered butter, dust the chocolate pudding, graze the lipstick smear on the open end of a milk carton.

  We try to get the thing out, but it flaps behind a jar of wheat germ, and from there into the vegetable Humidrawer. At that point, Big Guy shuts the door.

  “I’ve got another idea,” he says. “Wait for me on the couch.”

  He comes back with a razor blade. He says, “This will take the itch out.” He drags the blade twice across a bite on the back of my wrist; the tiny X turns red as blood comes up to the cut surface.

  I am too amazed to say anything, so Big Guy continues, razoring Xs into bites on my legs and arms.

  Now, I think—now we could become blood brothers.

  But that is not what Big Guy is thinking, and finally I come to know it. I submit to his crude doctoring until he cuts an X into a bite on my shoulder. Suddenly he lowers his head until it isn’t the blade but his mouth on my skin.

  I had only been kissed once before. The fellow had made me think of those kids whose mouths cover the spigot when they drink from a fountain. When I had pulled away from him, this fellow had said, “B-plus.”

  Big Guy is going to kiss me.

  And here is the thrill of my short life: He does.

  And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.

  When I can get my bearings, I make light of what could happen. I say the cool thing I’ve been saving up to say; I say, “Stop it, Big Guy. Stop it some more.”

  And then he says the cool thing he has been saving, or, being Big Guy, has made up on the spot. He says, “I always give a woman what she wants—whether she wants it or not.”

  And that is the end of the joking around; we get it out of our systems. We take the length of the couch, squirming like maggots in ashes.

  I’m not ready for this, but here is what I come up with: He’s a boy without a mother.

  I look beyond my own hesitation; I find my mother, Big Guy’s father. We are on this couch for our newly and lastingly widowed parents as well.

  Big Guy and I are still dressed. I am bleeding through my clothes from the razored bites when Big Guy pushes his knee up between my legs.

  “If you have to get up,” he says, “don’t.”

  I play back everything that has happened to me before this. I want to ask Big Guy if he is doing this, too. I want him to know what it clearly seems to me: that if it’s true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

  Rapture of the Deep

  I was the one they sent when it was Halloween night and Miss Locey couldn’t move. I am not a nurse. I am barely a typist. But she didn’t need me to type, or to take the shorthand I don’t have, either. She hired me from an agency at an hourly rate to hand out candy on Halloween night.

  Because look how it looked: a car in the driveway, a light on upstairs. But nobody answers the door. I know what I would have done as a child if there was somebody home on Halloween night who did not bother to answer the door. I would have come back later with shaving cream and eggs, with toilet paper and friends.

  Even if she lay in her room in the dark, there was still the car in the drive.

  And there were worse things even than shaving cream and eggs. What about “leaners”? Kids would fill a trash can with water, with worse than water, and lean it against your door so that when you opened the door, you flooded your Persian rugs.

  Miss Locey had thought of all of these things. She said she feared a “lawn job”—where teenage boys drive a car across your yard and leave deep ruts when they spin out and drive away.

  I come from a quieter place. I told her what we ever did was to pack an extra mask so we could visit the same house twice, a house that gave Mars bars, for example. Even then, I told Miss Locey, there were those who saw us coming. The man who owned an ice cream franchise gave out Flying Saucers so if we came back for more, they would melt in the bottom of our bags.

  We were talking in Miss Locey’s bedroom. It smelled of new paint; the walls were a shade of deep raspberry.

  “The Pepto-Abysmal Room,” Miss Locey said. “It’s never the color on the test card, is it? Always it turns out—bolder.”

  Miss Locey reached for a bottle of pills it turned out she couldn’t reach. I offered to get them for her, but I didn’t say her name when I did. She was only a few years older than myself. But she didn’t say to call her by whatever was her first name, so I didn’t, when I talked to her, call her anything.

  “I was sure I was pregnant,” Miss Locey was saying. “So I struck a bargain with God: ‘Dear God,’ I prayed, ‘let me get my period and I’ll do exercises the res
t of my life.’ Two days later, I had to keep up my side. I climbed up on that exercise bike, and right away threw out my back,” Miss Locey said.

  When she reached for the pills—it was a muscle relaxant she was taking—I saw Miss Locey’s hands. She wore a ring on every finger. On some fingers she wore two. Not just bands, but stones, rings with jewels.

  It was the age-old question Miss Locey put next. From her bed of pain she ran it by me—if you took only half a pill, did it work full-strength for half as long, or half-strength for the regular time?

  I was a girl from an agency. I told her just as strong for half as long, but the way that I said it said what I thought, which was, Your guess is as good as mine.

  “If I had been pregnant, I’d be having it in December.”

  Computation had Miss Locey laid up for nearly seven months. Was this woman a malingerer? Was she hurt worse than she said?

  Miss Locey extended an index finger wearing an oval stone. “Turquoise is the birthstone for December,” she said. “It’s a sympathetic stone; it will save you from suffering a fall—it will crack itself instead.”

  She turned the ring around on her finger. “Turquoise turns pale when the wearer is sick. It loses its color completely when you die.”

  I told her I was born in the pearl month. But the ring that I wear does not have a pearl.

  “On the plus side,” Miss Locey said, “I don’t have to go to a costume party.”

  I was back upstairs after the steady trick-or-treaters had slowed to the older kids every half hour or so. A horror movie, the sound off, was on TV.

  “A friend of mine called to ask where he could find a wheelchair,” Miss Locey said. “He wanted to go as George Wallace.”

  She said, “This is the fellow who had such a disappointment last year. He dressed up in pyjamas and carried a bottle of Diet Pepsi. He was supposed to be Brian Wilson, but everybody guessed Hugh Hefner.”

  Miss Locey lifted one knee to her chest, and held it there to a count of ten. Her knuckles went white above the rings.

  “A ring for every hand on my finger,” Miss Locey said. She corrected herself with a comic take. “It’s just that I’m so relaxed,” she said.

  She let go of her knee and let her leg slide down.

  “The rings belonged to my mother,” Miss Locey said. “They did before I tricked her out of them.”

  She waved a jeweled hand slowly in the air as though she were helping nail polish to dry.

  “My mother had the hands for them,” Miss Locey said. “Long fingers and almond nails, no half-moons, no veins showed in her hands. My mother spoke five languages.

  “One day I asked her how to say, ‘You may have all of my rings’ in Spanish. When she told me, I asked her how to say it in French. I made her say ‘You may have all of my rings’ in all five languages.

  “My mother was a sport,” Miss Locey said. “She gave me the pearls on the spot, the rest when she died.”

  Still flat on her back, Miss Locey held her arms straight out in front of her. It made her look like she was rising from a coffin to go haunting. Instead, she took inventory of her mother’s rings and their powers, how garnet cheered the heart and strengthened the mind, how the emerald chased away stupidity and reconciled quarreling lovers, how her pearls, if ground up and boiled with meat, would cure a fever and chills. She wore a zircon, “an inferior diamond,” to procure riches and honor. The red coral cured indigestion, is what she said.

  The stones Miss Locey didn’t wear were opal and onyx. The former, she said, was fatal to love, and onyx, the color of darkness, kept you awake.

  I was thinking I preferred this to a horoscope when Miss Locey described her favorite.

  “Topaz,” she said. “It cures madness and brightens the wit. Powdered and put in wine, it cures insomnia. It was used by mariners without a moon,” she said.

  That’s when I felt I should have been born in the topaz month. “Used by mariners without a moon.”

  “Let me see,” Miss Locey said and reached for the hammered gold band that is the only ring I wear.

  I didn’t slip it off—I don’t take this ring off—but I let her take my hand. She turned it over, so the palm was up.

  “It’s dented here and here,” she said. “It’s what—eighteen karat?”

  I told her the dents were from a man’s teeth. From where he bit the gold to show me how soft, then bit my finger, to show me how soft.

  The ring was a gift from that man, I said. But it was never a wedding ring because he died before getting married was something we could do. On vacation, on an island, he took up scuba diving. He did it without supervision, although he had never done it before. He went down deeper than you are ever supposed to go; that is what made him giddy, I was told—and why he didn’t think to come back up.

  I told Miss Locey that I still needed to hear from the God that had betrayed me. An explanation would not be enough. An apology would not be enough. I needed for that God to look up to me, I said. I needed for him to have to tilt his head way back to look up to me, exposing his throat.

  “Maybe you should take one of these,” Miss Locey said. “You don’t look very relaxed.”

  Then I told Miss Locey the name for what had happened, what the thing that happened diving was called, that divers called it “rapture of the deep.” And she said what I had always thought, which is that it’s odd—it’s eerie—when a bad thing has a pretty name.

  She said it herself. She said, “Rapture of the deep.” She said it sounded to her “like a dive into Liberace’s coat, staying under too long, and coming up coughing up rubies and pearls.”

  She twisted her rings.

  She wore stones to guard against drunkenness and fear.

  The doorbell rang for the last time that night. I went downstairs. Instead of handing the kids a candy bar each, I let them scoop out a handful apiece.

  Before going up to say good night, I made Miss Locey a cup of tea. I carried it upstairs, and while she wrote out a check, I turned up the volume on a movie-of-the-week.

  Miss Locey thanked me for coming and asked me to get the porch light on my way out.

  I did one other thing on my way out first.

  With the habitual kleptomania of temporary employment, I dropped the remaining Halloween candy into my purse, alongside boxes of paper clips and refills of Scotch tape.

  I was home before I remembered where I had left the remote control, that it was beyond Miss Locey’s reach. According to TV Guide, Miss Locey’s channel went off at two o’clock. If she could sleep through the static, Miss Locey would wake at five to a televised exercise class. She would open her eyes to women in colored tights, all still working out their sides of deals with God.

  Du Jour

  The first three days are the worst, they say, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m still waiting for those first three days to be over.

  One day into the program, I realized the only thing that made me smart was nicotine. Now I can’t plan a trip from the bed to the bathroom. I don’t find the front door 50 percent of the time. In my head there’s a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.

  But better to be alive and well and not thinking than thinking and smoking and dead.

  That is the point I’ve reached: Stop smoking, or else. The point is also: Stop smoking, or lose my job.

  I make soup at a place that has fifty-two different kinds. I’ve made all fifty-two of them at one time or another; lately I only do the specialty of the day. I make Mulligatawny and Senegalese—the kind you would take a taste of for the sound of their names.

  The owner called me over one day and showed me the bowls his customers had sent back. He said, “It’s the seasoning, babe. It’s the red pepper ratio.”

  I knew I was in the wrong on this; let’s face it—three packs a day will do it to your taste buds. But I don’t take criticism, so the next minute I tore into it with Mr. Licalsi.

  “So what?” I screamed. “So what! So they don’t lik
e the fucking gazpacho!”

  And Mr. Licalsi, he said, “Jesus, girl—and you eat with that mouth?”

  Sometimes I lose it personality-wise because I don’t know what to do instead of smoke. I’m gaining weight of course; everybody does. But not because I’m eating more of anything. I’m gaining weight because I’ve stopped coughing. Coughing was exercise for me.

  The weight problem is how I met Mrs. Wynn. She’s in the weight-control section of the program, and I saw her at the weekly weigh-in. How could I miss her? She was loud and big, and she wore a powder blue T-shirt with navy letters that said LIFE IS UNCERTAIN—EAT DESSERT FIRST. I heard her explain bariatrics to another compulsive eater, how women gain from the bottom up and lose from the top down.

  Mrs. Wynn and I got to talking because there we both were. She told me this was her first serious diet attempt since Metrecal was introduced in the 1960s. That had been a bust, she said, because it hadn’t been clear to a consumer such as herself that Metrecal was what you had instead of lunch and dinner.

  The program that is monitored at the clinic was guaranteed to leave you a broken husk, she said, “but a thin broken husk.”

  Mrs. Wynn is a singer in a supper club. Her husband owns the Club Volare, where three nights a week, after the band that plays Italian favorites, after the Greek dancer and the Bronx/Israeli torch singer, after the belly dancer and the bouzouki-player’s solo, after the multitalented Spanish girl and a brief intermission, Mrs. Wynn sings the songs she records in four languages. She is down from six nights a week—just as she is down from five thousand to twelve hundred calories a day—since a heart attack in the spring.

  “No kidding,” I said to Mrs. Wynn. “Four languages?”

  “Oh, God no,” she said. “I’m exaggerating so you can get to know me faster.”

  To further that end even further, Mrs. Wynn produced Polaroids of herself, taken every week at the clinic the past month. “So when you reach your goal weight, you can look back and see how good you didn’t look,” she explained.