The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  That morning, Pierson complained of a stuffy head. Mrs. Carlin had told him it was sleeping with a pillow over his face that had done it. She told him what he had was called a “turtle headache,” and Pierson had asked her if everything had to be animals.

  Mrs. Carlin leads the boys to her favorite part of the aquarium. It is a darkened hall with a green-lit tank that circles the room. You stand in the center, in the hole of the doughnut, and turn to watch the hundreds of ocean fish swim around you. It is called the Roundabout, and it leaves you dizzy and reaching for the glass if you turn around too many times.

  The boys study the reference cards with pictures of the fish. They claim to be able to match the following in the tank: the stingray, of course, plus yellowtail, striped bass, red snapper, tarpon, and the seven-gill shark.

  Always there are those few fish who swim against the tide. These are the ones that Mrs. Carlin follows. For her, the darkness and water and steady current of silent fins is immeasurably soothing. She gives herself over to the whirling sensation which, she believes, leaves her open to what she cannot control when it suddenly comes to her what day it is.

  In North Atlantic waters off the Faroe Islands, it is the day of “Grindabod,” the return of the pilot whales, when fishing boats herd the whales by hundreds toward the shore. There, fishermen swing grappling hooks into the whales’ flesh to ensure that the others will ignore their own safety; a whale will not abandon an injured mate.

  Knives are drawn, and cleave through to the spinal cord. The whales thrash once more; in a sea of blood, they snap their own necks.

  A handkerchief held to her mouth, Mrs. Carlin urges the boys out of the Roundabout.

  During the ride home, the boys poke each other and make fun of their teachers. They whine at Mrs. Carlin till she stops the car for ice cream. They eat it in the car, being quiet long enough to look out the windows and see lightning bugs spark the blue dusk.

  “In South America,” says Mrs. Carlin, a tremor in her voice, “the women weave fireflies in their hair.”

  And then one of the lightning bugs flies into the windshield. Mrs. Carlin has to sit up straight and lift her chin to see above the glowing smear that streaks her line of vision like a comet.

  “Come here, Bert,” says Bret. “Little Bert-Bert, little trout, little salmon.”

  Mrs. Carlin stands listening in the open doorway of Bret’s bedroom, where he is supposed to be dressing for school. He has lifted one side of his quilt and is calling for the cat under the bed.

  “Where’s that little naughty-pants? That furry soft furry darn thing?”

  Bert stays under the bed.

  Bret gives up, then sees Mrs. Carlin and knows that she has heard his string of endearments.

  He tries to recover, says, “Dad calls him ‘the cockroach.’”

  His look suggests that someone else has overheard him like this and will not let him forget it—his brother, Mrs. Carlin feels sure.

  The night before, while the three of them watched television, Pierson had made fun of her when her eyes filled with tears during a cat food commercial. The folks at Purina see me coming, was all that she could say as, privately, she was made aware that at an animal shelter in Oklahoma, an attendant did not clean the feces off the bowl that he used to scoop dog food from a sack.

  Mrs. Carlin is not ashamed of what she has come to call “the Tender Vittles emotion.” And she does not want Bret to be ashamed of showing affection. So she asks if he will help her groom Duncan.

  Duncan lies across a pillow on Mrs. Carlin’s bed; he doesn’t move when Bret drags the brush across his back. When Bret brushes harder, Duncan closes his eyes.

  “Takes a bruising and keeps on snoozing,” says Bret, proud of the rhyme.

  Mrs. Carlin laughs and smooths the dog’s fur. “Takes an adoring and keeps on snoring,” she says, and props Duncan up. She shows Bret how to draw the wire bristles gently down the dog’s hind legs. Then she asks Bret to get Duncan’s pills from the inside pocket of her suitcase.

  Duncan takes lanoxin for his rackety old heart. Mrs. Carlin examines the small plastic bottle and—the Tender Vittles emotion—thinks how unbearably dear it is that her pet’s medication is labeled “Duncan Carlin.”

  Bret watches Mrs. Carlin stroke the dog’s white throat to help get the pill down. He says, “I wish Scooter could have lived forever.”

  Mrs. Carlin looks up quickly. She pictures a plastic bottle labeled “Scooter Patterson.”

  She says something that is meant to be of comfort. She says, “Try to remember that God is rubbing Scooter’s tummy.”

  She is surprised when Bret starts to laugh.

  In her mind, Mrs. Carlin says to Duncan and Gully: You have made my happiness for thirteen years. Gully and the three cats before her, Duncan and the two pups before him—she owes them her life. It is for them she writes checks and congressmen to try to protect the ones she will never know.

  Mrs. Carlin gets the boys off to school, then stands distracted on the Pattersons’ front lawn. She walks slowly to the mailbox that is empty of mail. Then she follows the gravel drive lined with ice plants back to the house, just missing the spot where a neighborhood dog has done his business.

  Mrs. Carlin slips a section from the morning paper and moves to clean up the mess. But it proves, up close, to be a cluster of whorled bronze snails, glistening with secretion, stuck to curled dead leaves.

  Mrs. Carlin carries the newspaper into the house and trades it for the car keys.

  She drives with one finger on the wheel at six o’clock—what the Patterson boys call “the accident-prone grip.” She is tired, and tired of the voices that are sometimes visions—mar-mosets whose eyelids are sewn shut with thick waxed thread. Mrs. Carlin is tired of knowing when a rabbit is blinded to improve the scouring power of a popular oven cleaner.

  The aquarium hasn’t opened by the time Mrs. Carlin gets there, so she waits in the car.

  She is tired of the voices. She says no to the voices. It occurs to Mrs. Carlin that the voices take a no-ing and keep on going.

  She is the first visitor of the day. When the aquarium is open, Mrs. Carlin has the Roundabout to herself.

  The fish—do they never rest?—are streaming behind the glass. First, Mrs. Carlin spots the single hump-backed bluefish. From the shadow of a stingray swims a pair of sand tiger sharks.

  She pivots just fast enough to track a school of amberjack the circumference of the tank. Then she plays a game with herself. She makes herself see the fish frozen in resin as in a diorama, feels herself the moving figure, the way, when a slow train starts, there is that disconcerting moment when it could be the landscape moving and not the train.

  Then she lets the resin dissolve, freeing the fish to sluice through kelp and waves of their own kind.

  Suddenly there is sound in the room. But not in the room—in Mrs. Carlin’s head. She stands still and concentrates on what she seems to hear: An infant gorilla, orphaned in Zimbabwe, makes a sound in the night like “Woooo, Woooo.”

  Mrs. Carlin leans against the glass tank for balance. They should limit your time in the Roundabout, she thinks. They should pull you out after so many minutes the way they do in a sauna.

  And then she has a vision, clear as if she were there—a Korean family looking for a picnic site. At a shaded clearing in a bamboo forest a mat is spread, a fire built up. The family’s dog, a handsome blond shepherd, is called by his master and gleefully runs to the call.

  Mrs. Carlin sees the owner slip a noose around its neck. It is “Bok Day” in South Korea, “Land of the Morning Calm.”

  It is the picnic of death that Mrs. Carlin attends.

  It takes two of this family to tug the dog to a height above the flames. The dog will be hung from a tree to strangle slowly as its fur singes over the fire. The point of slow death is to tenderize the meat.

  There is an indescribable sound from the choking dog, and like a person who suffers the pain of an injured twin, Mrs. Car
lin gasps and drops to the floor.

  That is where the couple who come in from the Fossil Hall find her. The man touches two fingers to Mrs. Carlin’s wrist, then touches the side of her neck. The woman calls for a guard, and stands back.

  In Belize, the eyes of a fallen jaguar reflect the green of leaves.

  The Lady Will Have

  the Slug Louie

  My dog—I found him on the dining room table, stepping around the bowl of fruit, licking the beeswax candles.

  My cat is another one—eats anything but food. I watch her select a tulip in a vase. When her teeth pierce the petal, I startle her away with sharply clapped hands.

  A moment later, and again the cat stalks. She crouches in front of the next flower over, tasting the four-inch petal of a parrot tulip as if she is thinking, That one is the one I am not supposed to eat.

  My brother keeps a boa constrictor for a pet. The preying snake suffers from a vitamin deficiency, so my brother buys a large jar of powdered high-potency supplement. Before each meal, he dips live mice in water, then drops them in the jar. He shakes the covered jar until each mouse wears a healthy coat of vitamins A through E. Then he feeds the coated mice to the snake.

  When my brother and I were young, I mixed dirt with his scrambled eggs. My mother let me feed him in his high chair on the porch. I would leave my brother alone and go off into the garden. I’d return with a handful of soil from under the pansies; with the dirt and whatever things lived in the dirt, I laced his eggs.

  For years, in seafood places, my brother ordered for me. “The lady will have the Slug Louie,” he told the waiter. “And please, if it’s no trouble, she would like her roll au beurre.”

  All my life I have been afraid of milk. I thought that if you drank too much, your bones would outgrow your skin, your teeth overrun your lips.

  There is a story that mothers read to their children wherein the little girl speaks and the mother answers back:

  —Mother, what do witches eat?

  —Milk and potatoes and you, my sweet.

  Under No Moon

  My mother said she would die when she saw the comet.

  This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open along a curb solid with cars.

  My mother believed she would die when she saw the comet.

  She booked, for herself and my father, a cabin aboard the ship that would cruise to the mouth of the Amazon River at the point in the world where the comet could best be seen.

  This was a trip my mother had to plan a year ahead. From several lines that were making the trip, my mother chose a Greek ship, the Sun Line’s Golden Odyssey, first reading aloud from glossy brochures about the first-rate entertainment, the swimming pools, and the food—the recreational pleasures of elegant cruising at its best.

  She said that the real draw was astronomers on board—and not just any amateurs, either, but world-class authorities on extragalactic astronomy and archaeoastronomy—even planetarium directors, specialists in star photometry and eclipse meteorology—even an American astronaut and the author of the popular science text Did a Comet Kill Off the Dinosaurs?

  These would screen instructive films for the passengers and offer lectures every day (“The Flaming Star and Genghis Khan—A.D. 1222”), at sea.

  Two weeks after it was put on the books, this particular cruise sold out. An information packet was sent out shortly after. In it was the news that eight of the scheduled passengers had seen the comet in its earlier manifestation. As that was seventy-six years ago, I heard my mother picture her shipmates in various stages of decrepitude.

  Often, all my life, my mother took risks. She outsailed the storm, the stray dog did not bite, the wobbly ladder held.

  “Don’t worry,” she always said. “I will live to see the comet.”

  If couples can grow to look alike, then my parents’ ailments came to resemble each other. My mother took something for an arthritic condition. My father took something else for the very same thing. So that on the plane to San Juan to meet up with the ship, when my mother discovered she had not packed her pills, it made all the sense in the world for my father to say, “Don’t panic,” she should help herself to his.

  But en route to see the legendary portent of disaster, my mother’s luck ran out. Minutes after takeoff, her hands began to itch. Then her arms, and then her neck. Then her face and then her feet.

  Your normally dignified mother, my father said, was scratching herself like a wild thing. As my father recollects, my mother managed to be flushed and pale at the same time. He said my mother’s scratching became a dance when she began to itch inside. By the time they were leaving the plane in San Juan, my mother—still itching—was wheezing, too. Had they waited much longer, they learned soon after, my mother would have stopped breathing entirely.

  In the local hospital they did what they could to set her back to right, advising her to squash the travel bug and lie low for at least a week. My mother agreed to meet the doctor halfway, promising to rest if she could rest aboard the ship.

  After leaving San Juan, the Golden Odyssey stopped in the port of Martinique. In Martinique, there were $30,000 emeralds for sale at the end of the pier.

  At the island of Grenada, the seas were too rough to transfer to land by boat. The astronaut was seasick right along with exactly 86 percent of the passengers. Those who did not succumb were encouraged to play bridge and to sip freezing tropical drinks.

  Matters did not improve when the ship neared Trinidad. According to my father, a freak accident on the promenade deck left an elderly man more dead than alive. What the man had not seen when he reached for his can of soda was the bee that had flown in through the pop-top hole. When he drank from the can, he swallowed the bee, which then managed to sting him in the throat on its dark way down.

  All this time my mother was reading trash in the luxury of her cabin. My father attended the lectures and would thereafter recite them to my mother down below.

  Trinidad was the first site from which the comet would be clearly visible. The passengers had been briefed in deep-sky photography—tripods were a must, so were time exposures of at least one minute. And since the motion of the ship would mean a celestial event that was blurred, the good captain arranged for a nighttime expedition.

  He rented forty-five taxicabs (out of the forty-seven such that were on the island) to pick up his passengers, five passengers to a cab, and to drive them for two hours along a one-lane jungle road to the other side of the island.

  In one of the taxis, the crew had sent coffee and sandwiches; in another, the cargo was a portable toilet.

  Speeding through the jungle at midnight, the taxicab drivers talked snakes. They said there were no more snakes on Trinidad since the government imported the mongoose. It had done its job so well—eating not only poisonous snakes but birds’ eggs, too—that in the daylight they would see that there were no more exotic birds.

  Where the jungle stopped, at a point of slippery shale dotted with patches of sisal, a group of stoop-shouldered stargazers set up their telescopes and tripods.

  This is the part my father made me see—all those people stumbling in the dark, under no moon, unable to shine a light or strike a match because a time exposure would be ruined.

  And because of the hour, no one had dressed; these were men and women in bathrobes and peignoirs crashing into each other in the dark, slipping on the rocky point of what the guides referred to as Tripod National Forest.

  It became an adventure, my father said, to see anything that night at all.

  And then one of the astronomers had pointed out a tennis ball in the sky, to the southeast of red Antares on the side of the constellation Scorpio. He told them the tail depended on the body’s r
otation in relation to the moon. Consequently, he said, they would not see a tail that night, just a faint pink fuzzy business like a wisp of cotton candy.

  Alone in her cabin, my mother saw nothing from a porthole.

  With approximately the same degree of difficulty, those passengers who were greatly motivated repeated the midnight excursion, this time by bus, at the mouth of the Amazon River, on the northwest shore of Belém.

  Their pockets filled with souvenirs of voodoo charms and crocodile teeth, the experts agreed—it was the poorest sighting of the starry visitor in two thousand years, anywhere in the world.

  But guess who went out for a second look!

  One might as well do what one could, my father reasoned. “When in southern latitudes,” he said, and loaded up his camera with 1000 ASA.

  At the end of the voyage, a charter plane flew my parents home.

  When his film was developed, my father passed around envelopes that contained photographs of the equatorial sky. He pointed to the minuscule dot that was the entire point of the trip.

  Neither my mother nor my father seemed disappointed that the sighting wasn’t more than it was. Did my father ever say, What kind of screwball operation is this? And did my mother once say, with regard to his pictures, Which of these specks of dust is the comet?

  My mother was content with this thought: that the pills that almost took her life may actually have saved it by preventing her from seeing the incarnation of her doom.

  The last envelope contained pictures of the captain’s guests for dinner the final night: my mother, her arm around my father’s empty chair, and two older couples who had promised to stay in touch.

  Then there were pictures of a smiling Greek crew, several undistinguished views of the port at Martinique, and one successful close-up of a boy about five years old.