by Amy Hempel
Mrs. Lawton began. “The man told me a story about the day he had everything. He was eight years old, he said, and was spending, in a hospital bed, what his parents believed was the last day of his life. And his parents brought from home every one of his toys, plus new ones bought for him just for that day, everything the eight-year-old boy had ever wanted.
“The next day, the man told me, the doctor said he was not going to perish, after all; that he instead had another, a highly contagious, disease. The boy would live, the doctor said, and then ordered all the infected toys destroyed.
“‘One day I had everything,’ the man said, ‘and the next day I had nothing.’ He said this as though he were giving instruction.
“‘But your life,’ I said to the man. ‘You had nothing but your life,’” Mrs. Lawton said.
She waited a beat, then went on.
“Now, I wish that that man had told me something that began, ‘No one else knows this…’ so that I could tell the thing to every one of you. What is the point of these hot collisions if not to be able to prove you were there?
“Listen to what he said to me,” Mrs. Lawton said. “He said he almost fainted from not touching me,” she said. “He said that to me the first time I saw him and the last time I saw him. The day was the same,” Mrs. Lawton said. “The day I had everything.”
I wish I could say smart things just by saying them. Because Mrs. Lawton’s story made me feel something. But the moment was lost; the story seemed to be a sort of cue, or simply a conversation stopper. The Club members were on their feet, not exactly reeling, but neither were they moving with dispatch toward the door.
Jean, the soft-porn guest of honor, was changing in the open into another of her gifts, a black lace camisole and matching tap pants. Her face was flushed. She no longer looked as though she found the world intolerably apocalyptic.
I heard a perfectly groomed blond woman talking to Jean while she was undressing. “A facial didn’t seem like enough,” the blond woman was saying, “so I pointed myself toward the jeweler. When people ask me how I’m doing, I say, Look at these pearls! Later,” I heard the blond woman say, “I put the necklace on the living room floor because what I really need is a new Oriental.”
In the kitchen, I happened onto a sort of “You think that’s bad” contest. “Him?” a woman said. “The only book he ever read was the first chapter of Iacocca.”
In a little while it was just Lee and me and Jean and Mrs. Lawton. Jean was talking about Larry again, and looking the worse for it. “I pictured us stewing apples at Christmas, all that cozy Currier and Ives shit…all that time thinking, What we have—love sometimes passes for it, when I should have been thinking, Love passes.”
Mrs. Lawton told Jean to tell Lee and me the last thing Larry had said before he left, and Jean said that his last words to her had been, “Everything I did with you was love.”
“That was awfully sweet of that fucking idiot to say,” Lee said.
That cracked Jean up, and then she seemed to think of something that cracked her up more. What she thought of, she shared with the three of us, and I ran straight to the bathroom and wrote down what she said; I wanted to be able to pass it along.
Jean was trying to describe what she felt it would be like to be married to Larry; she said it would be like staying in a bad hotel and being forced to send postcards of it to your friends with arrows pointing to “my room.”
I’m glad I wrote that down.
When I came back into Mrs. Lawton’s living room, the women had recovered. Lee’s mascara had smeared. Everyone turned to me.
“What kind of luck are you having, Lee’s friend?” This from Jean.
It came back to me why the Club had given Jean this party, and I felt ashamed for my answer. But I told Jean the truth.
“I met someone,” I said. “I’m happy. I’m probably in love.”
Jean didn’t know me, and Mrs. Lawton didn’t know me, but that didn’t stop them from shrieking with glee. Mrs. Lawton asked how we met. I told an unexceptional story.
“And he called you?” Jean said.
“He called me that night,” I said.
“Tell me everything,” Jean said, moving closer. “Start from ring-ring-ring.”
To Those of You Who Missed
Your Connecting Flights
Out of O’Hare
To those of you who missed your connecting flights out of O’Hare, I offer my deepest apology.
What they did I had no way of knowing they would do because the last time this happened it was handled without the fuss. The last time it happened it affected no one else—I just walked off the plane before the stewardess locked the door, and my luggage, not me, was what reached my destination.
Did I know when I walked off Flight 841 that my suitcase would have to be pulled from the plane, a black fabric suitcase the handler had to find amidst the hundreds of other bags, and all of you passengers waiting?
And how about the pilot checking the toilets for a bomb, a stewardess doing likewise in the overhead compartment above what was, for maybe two minutes, my seat—6C.
I’m right about this—it didn’t used to be this way. The agents on the ground, the ones who check you in, they used to see you coming off the plane and they knew what it meant and they knew you were not to blame and the looks that they gave you said, Better luck next time, and We hope you try again.
Now they are angry. The looks and accusations—making hundreds of passengers late!
That is when I told them that my husband was killed in a plane crash, the one in Tenerife.
There is precedent here for a lie of this kind, or rather, a lie at this time. On a talk show once, a comic told the story: how he boarded a plane to make a headline date in Vegas, but the plane that he boarded was a plane bound for Pittsburgh. When our comic finds out, the plane has begun its slow roll into position.
This man, this comic, was able to persuade the crew to return the plane to the gate. And how did he avoid the collective wrath of the passengers? When the plane came to a stop and the walkway was stretched to the door, the comic stood up and summoned a tone of voice. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I won’t take this kind of treatment from an airline!”
The comic, looking indignant, then walked off the plane.
But you, the passengers of Flight 841, I want you to know the truth.
Starting with 6B, my would-be white-knuckle neighbor, buckling tight your seat belt as if it makes any goddamned difference. I mean—Sir, let me ask you a question: Do the newspapers ever say, “Whereas the survivors—the list follows—are those who buckled their seat belts”?
I want to take you, the passengers whom I have inconvenienced, into my confidence. Because if you are like me, you know that some of us are not the world, some of us are not the children, some of us will not help make a brighter day. Some of us are the silent sufferers of a noisy disease. And that is all I have to say about fear.
But! By making yourself scarce at the nation’s airports, by deciding for the grounded comfort of a train, you will find yourself traveling through the City of Spires and the cities of steel, the country’s richest pasture land and the Santa Fe Trail, across the Purgatoire River near the Sangre de Cristo range—just big sky and small talk and rhyming to yourself from a catalog of sights: pale deer at dawn on the edge of a lawn.
Past low pink tamarisk and Ponderosa pine, and Shoemaker Canyon lined with cottonwood trees that are home to wild turkeys beside the narrow Mora River.
Past the Forked Lightning Ranch that was once Greer Garson’s home near the Sandia (“Watermelon”) Mountains—they turn bright red at sunset and the trees on the side look like seeds.
Do I sound as if I work for the railroad?
The tragedy of the settlers on Starvation Peak—the Kneeling Nuns, a formation of rock.
It cost me some money to see this. You walk off a plane and even think about getting a refund! You get one—one—one trip fo
r the price of two.
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea.
You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.
And Lead Us Not
into Penn Station
On the nicer side of not a nice street, between God Bless the Cheerful Giver and his dog, and There But for the Grace of God Go I and his dog, a wino engaged me in the following Q and A:
Miss, am I bleeding?
Yes, yes you are.
Where?
From the nose.
And the mouth?
No.
Just the nose?
Yes.
I wonder how that happened.
Everything you can think of is going on here. Plus things that you can’t think of, too. Those things are going on in groups. Men who have sex with vacuum cleaners—these men are now outpatients, in therapy down the block.
Today, when a blind man walked into the bank, we handed him along to the front of the line where he ordered a BLT.
A boy on a tricycle pedals past a mother and son. “Why can’t you ride a tricycle?” the mother says to her son. “That boy is younger than you! Why can’t you even go to Harvard!”
Under a streetlight, a man and woman are talking. The man says he feels sure that the woman is going to shoot him and that he can’t help but wonder what caliber she has chosen.
Women who live alone in fear of intruders call the local precinct for advice. “Keep your doorknobs highly polished,” an officer tells them. “When someone breaks in, we can get clear prints.”
The neighborhood drug dealer kicks out his wife. He moves in a girlfriend and the wife finds out. The wife lets herself back into the house and steals a hundred thousand dollars that the drug dealer can’t report missing. The drug dealer’s wife goes to India, where she sends her husband a cable: “The people here are poor so I gave them all your money.”
On the occasion of a star athlete’s accidental overdose, a TV reporter takes his questions to the street. “What do you learn from this?” he asks the truant boys in a vacant lot. “What does it tell you that a young athlete takes this drug and dies?”
The boys fight for the microphone until one of them grabs it away. He says, “Man, you have got to build up to that dose.”
A man stops into a bar and rests his shopping bag on a stool. He waves the bartender over to see where inside the bag is the head of a man.
“Auction at the old wax museum,” the man says. “All anyone wanted was Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King. I picked up Richard Speck here for next to nothing.”
A beautiful familiar woman is escorted from a nightclub. A visiting Southern girl says, “S’cuse me, ma’am, but aren’t you a friend of my mama’s back in Sumner?” “I’m Elizabeth Taylor,” the woman says, “and fuck you.”
A famous artist is approached by a student. “You don’t remember me,” the student says correctly, “but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, ‘Photography is death.’ After that,” says the student, “I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life.”
“Leave me alone,” says the artist. “Photography is life.”
A man falls to the sidewalk in what looks to be an epileptic fit. A well-dressed woman throws her weight against a parking sign. When it bends to the ground, she forces a corner of the “Tow-away Zone” into the seizing man’s mouth. “This way,” she says, “he won’t bite his tongue.”
Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. “Don’t report a rape,” the women are told. “Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn’t do anything with it—cops figure that guy is sick.”
I don’t know what to say about this. I am as cut off from meaning and completion as all of these crippled people.
These are the things that go on around here. After a while these things add up to enough weight to wear a person down. I am wearing down.
In the Animal Shelter
Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want—these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind.
They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, “How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?”
The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, “Will they go to good homes?” And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, “How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?”
But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.
At The Gates
of the Animal Kingdom
Ten candles in a fish stick tell you it’s Gully’s birthday. The birthday girl is the center of attention; she squints into the popping flash cubes. The black cat seems to know every smooth cat pose there is. She is burning for discovery in front of the camera.
Gully belongs to Mrs. Carlin. Mrs. Carlin has had her since the cat was six weeks old and slept on the stove, curled inside a saucepan warmed by the pilot light. Mrs. Carlin has observed every one of Gully’s birthdays, wrapping the blue felt mice filled with catnip, wrapping the selection of frozen entrees from Mrs. Paul’s, and photographing the birthday girl with her guests.
This year, Gully’s guests include the Patterson boys, Pierson and Bret, fourteen and ten, and their cat, Bert. Though it would be more accurate to say that Mrs. Carlin and Gully are the boys’ guests, as the party is being held in the Patterson home.
Mrs. Carlin is staying with the boys for the week that their parents are in an eastern city for Mr. Patterson’s annual business conference. It is a condition of Mrs. Carlin’s employment that Gully come with her. She had explained to Mrs. Patterson that one time a cat-sitter came to feed Gully, “and Gully—there is no other word for it—screamed.”
After she serves Gully’s birthday cake, Mrs. Carlin brings the boys their dinner. The boys examine their plates with suspicion, and then with disbelief.
Between the two halves of the sesame seed bun, where there should have been catsup on a hamburger, rare, the boys see what looks like catsup on a cassette tape. It is actually tomato sauce on a slice of sautéed eggplant.
“Didn’t our mother tell you what we eat?” says Pierson, the older boy.
“We eat hamburgers,” says Bret. “We like hamburgers and smashed potatoes.”
Mrs. Carlin tells them that she is making the rules now. She says, “Meat’s no treat for those you eat.”
She waits to let this sink in. “While I am looking after you,” she tells the boys, “we will eat nothing with parents.”
The boys look at each other so that Mrs. Carlin will see the look. They wish that Scooter were still alive to eat from their plates beneath the table.
In Alaska, begins the voice, wild gray wolves are flushed from hiding and shot with rifles from low-flying planes.
Mrs. Carlin loses her thought. She excuses herself from the table and returns a moment later with a photograph album from her suitcase.
“Duncan’s parties were always more lively,” Mrs. Carlin tells the boys.
Duncan, asleep in another room, is her elderly long-haired dachshund, his muzzle gone white, a perfect widow’s peak in the center of his narrow forehead. Duncan was another condition of Mrs. Carlin’s employment.
Through the years, the photos show the dachshund born of a Christmas litter poised on a silver platter, an apple held slack in his mouth; Duncan, a hand-knit sweater covering his rump, heading down a snow-covered hill on a toboggan; Duncan grinning at his “cake” of ste
ak tartare, his guests straining their leads to reach their party favor chew-toys.
Mrs. Carlin thinks that reminiscing may be why the voice starts up again. This time what she hears is: A veal calf cramped in a pen in Montana is forced to sleep on its feet.
Mrs. Carlin asks the boys if they would mind eating alone. She goes to her room and takes two aspirin.
The boys look at Gully, still bent over her fish. Pierson spanks her lightly on the back; her body twitches, but the cat does not leave her dish.
“Takes a smacking and keeps on snacking,” Pierson says.
Mrs. Carlin doesn’t come out of her room until it’s bedtime for the boys.
“We can have Ovaltine,” says Bret. But Mrs. Carlin pours them glasses of plain milk and gives them each a tablespoon of peanut butter to go with it.
“It stimulates your dreams,” is what she tells them and promises a trip to the aquarium if they are good.
In their own comfortable room, in the Pattersons’ soft bed, Gully and Duncan take their cat and dog places—Gully at the head, and Duncan at the foot of the bed. During the night, when Duncan stretches and moves to the other side, Mrs. Carlin’s feet seek the warm place where he had lain.
She angles her face on a plane with the cat’s and breathes in the air that Gully breathes out—air that she thought would be warm but which is cool.
In a research lab in eastern Pennsylvania, a hole is drilled in the head of a young macaque…
Mrs. Carlin draws Gully closer. She scratches the cat’s stomach, then strokes the sleek flank that shines like a seal. She strokes the cat’s fur for the cat’s pleasure, then for her own, and back, and forth, until the pleasures run together and the two of them sleep through the night.
“The other sitters never took us on a field trip,” says Bret.
Mrs. Carlin has taken the boys to the aquarium. The boys are warming up to her—she keeps them entertained. She tells them what she knows about the animal kingdom—that twenty newborn possums will fit in a teaspoon, that the female lynx automatically becomes infertile when the number of snowshoe hares decreases. From Mrs. Carlin the boys have learned that emperor penguins sometimes ride an ice floe as far north as Rio!