The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  Little Egypt is to the second floor what the Hostility Suite is to the first floor, only gamier. I can write to you here on an old school desk, the kind that is desktop and chair in one. There is a vending machine Chatty swears is the same one whose lineup the girls used to memorize when they were snowed in and bored. She said nobody ever ate the Good & Plentys because that is what they called the Trustees, the monied donors of laboratory and pool.

  There is a television in here now. I’ll watch whatever is on, such as the swimsuit special that I watched with Warren. It was actually about the making of the special, and it intercut footage of the models arching their backs in the surf with segments in which the photographer described what he had had to do to get that shot. Warren became irritated by the photographer’s intrusion. He said it was like being a teenager and trying to masturbate to Petticoat Junction, moaning, “Betty Jo, Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo…” and all of a sudden there’s—Uncle Joe!

  My watching whatever Warren is watching is overcompensation for Chatty telling Warren what I said about his habits—that he watches too much, and what he watches is dumb. I have done this all my life, insisting, when caught out, that, “I do want to be your partner, and I like your ideas, and let’s do many more projects together.” Karen calls this syndrome “Tour of the Lodge.” Her family bought an old fishing lodge on a scenic lake in Maine. It had been shut down for many years before they cleaned the place up and moved in. Karen said she would be riding her bike in the nearby hills and meet people on vacation who would stop their cars and ask her if the old fishing lodge was still open. No, Karen would say, the place has been shut down for years. And the disappointed travelers would begin to reminisce about the happy times there when the family was together, and Karen would wind up saying, The truth is we bought the fishing lodge, and if you’ve got the time, why don’t you come on over and take a walk through. And then forfeit half a day to give nostalgic strangers a tour of the lodge.

  I have left this place only one other time, to go into town with Chatty. She took me into the jewelry store—accessories. I usually wear silver (I did the day we met, you might recall), but the earrings Chatty was urging me to buy were gold domes embedded with small fake jewels.

  “They look like a gift from someone who likes me but doesn’t know me very well,” I said.

  “Like when you see men in pink sweaters,” Chatty said.

  I turned the counter mirror, put the earrings on, hooked my hair behind my ears.

  “What would I wear them with?” I asked Chatty. “They don’t go with anything I own.”

  “Then you’ll have to start life anew,” Chatty said.

  I think you would like Chatty, though she can be a strong cup of tea. She has hit the change of life, and told me about a niece’s wedding where she had to step back from the carved-ice swan—she thought she was going to melt it. She is given to asking leading questions (“How many feet do you use when you drive?”) and making pronouncements with which you cannot argue: “I would rather buy a lot of presents for ten dollars each than a few for a hundred dollars that look like they cost ten.”

  I am the only one who seems to like her jokes. She tells them wrong, and I think her way is better. The one about Christa McAuliffe and Donna Rice both going down on the Challenger? Chatty told it this way: They both had sex all over Florida.

  Chatty is surprised I like her. She says women who have only met her in line at a movie don’t like her. She says she had always acted as if she were God’s Gift, and then it had turned out—she was God’s Gift.

  Chatty seems content here. She says what is there to rush home to except threatening stacks of third-class mail.

  Chatty believes in poltergeists, and I am the only person here who does, too. I believe in it all. Can I tell you about London?—how outside of London, in a manor house run by the National Trust, I saw the ghost of a girl throw the ghost of a ball in an orchard for her little ghost dog? The girl was skipping soundlessly; the dog’s jaws worked but there was no bark to hear. I saw them through an upstairs window, on the pane of which was scratched the date the mistress of the house had jumped. The date was the 1600s, and I knew to look for it from the guidebook to the house. The book said nothing about a ghost girl and dog.

  The hair did not rise on my arms beneath my coat. The ghosts were a bonus and a comfort on the third and final stop of the tour I was on. I had lagged behind the group that had gone on ahead to look at ebonized, gilded armchairs in a dead duke’s bedchamber.

  We had stopped first at a cathedral whose famous spire was hidden under a tower of scaffold. The cathedral’s famous choir was in concert in another country, so I bought tapes of their anthems and an evensong service, and breathed musty incense as the hour was marked by carillon. Grazing nearby were sheep descended from those whose wool, the sale of it, had built the cathedral. There were cows in the fields, too. I had just learned what the ancients used for shovels, that the trenches surrounding the site were dug from chalk with the shoulder blades of cattle.

  The guidebook said that the mistress of the house had scratched the date in the window with the diamond in her ring. This is something I have always wanted to do—scratch on glass with a diamond.

  A heavy fog had opened and then filled itself in. I wanted to stay at the window of that house, and never mind the veneered pianofortes and the lacquered candlestands. The girl and her dog were still visible below, keeping to the gravel path inside the court, then pausing for the girl to sit and rest on a weathered goblin-carved bench.

  I watched until the girl stood up and led her dog, a kind of spaniel, to the South Gate of the garden. I could see, on the overthrow, the family coat of arms, and then the girl and her dog were gone. I looked up the gardens in the guidebook. There was a view from the South Gate of the formal avenues, the labyrinth of boxwood and yew. Close up, I could see the family motto as well as their coat of arms; translated from the Latin: No man can harm me unpunished.

  The girl had not seemed to see me watching, although maybe ghosts know? Without having to turn to look up at you? These ghosts were not the first ghosts I had seen, but they were the first ones I saw that moved, as when the girl, who was dressed in a long white pinafore and short leather lace-up boots, threw the ball and her spaniel dog let it bounce on the ground before he jumped up to catch it in the air.

  The ghosts I had seen before were at Stonehenge. They were the ghosts of roads—the long pairs of parallel lines leading up to the site, barely visible in the sod of surrounding fields. The roads of prehistory—dents now like the tracks a vacuum cleaner leaves in thick carpet. They made me think of American baseball fields and of the men who mow them daily, criss-crossing the green in different patterns every day, and of how—if the home team won—the men would repeat the pattern they had mowed the winning day.

  On the bus on the way to our third and final stop, there was the cicada sound of automatic cameras on rewind.

  And then the ghosts. And the stopped clocks. Stopped at the moment the duke had died.

  The watch I lost the day we met was a cheap watch with twelve dots of radium green for the numbers, but with none of the stuff painted on the hands. Knowing this did not keep me from looking in the dark at my arm, where what I could see was my watch but not the time.

  I’m glad for the poltergeist here, the one that unscrews lightbulbs in the lamps, that leaves them loose in their sockets.

  One day I asked the gardener what had gone wrong with my tulips. The last time I planted tulips (I am going back years here), they had bloomed right out of the ground—they had bloomed without stems, and had looked like ground cover. The gardener said the problem was low self-esteem. Then he laughed at my expression and said the bulbs had been confused, they must not have been planted deep enough and so had gotten warm, then cold, then warm again, until finally, confused, they had given up and bloomed.

  I didn’t tell the gardener that I had planted them half as deep as recommended to save them the work of pushing up
through all that dirt. It seems that there is a lesson here, staring me in the face. I told you about the tulips to tell you something ordinary. The way, watching a movie, you find you want to scream, “Doesn’t anyone eat or sleep in this film?”

  All I remember of church when I was a child is a part of a sermon about the ordinary. The title of the sermon was “The Blessing of Dailiness,” and had to do with why we should thank God for our toothbrush in the morning. We should thank God that each day must begin with an ordinary ritual, and not go immediately into crisis. It’s a time-honored fact that after a close call, we all embrace the ordinary. But that is because it has become miraculous. Or we have—alive to see it.

  In England, in another century, the “ordinary” was a clergyman appointed to prepare criminals for the death penalty. The clergyman would wind up his day in a house whose every fixture and appointment sprang from, and paid homage to, a politer way of living. How did he prepare them, the criminals, do you think?

  You know, I often feel the effect of a place only after I leave it.

  England!

  Outside of London, a surprise I got was: the site was roped off. You had to view the site like an exhibit in a museum. It made me give up to learn that until a few years ago, you could hire a man in the village to chip off pieces of Stonehenge for you, to keep as souvenirs.

  The guide gave us twenty minutes. Those of us on the tour found out that you cannot walk the circumference of the site and return to the bus in twenty minutes. You could walk the roped path, mud through the sheep-cropped grass, until the anxiety of being late and missing the bus turned you back around. At a point on the path, I held out my arm and cupped my hand so that it looked as though I was holding the site in my hand.

  The highway you drive in on is very close to the monument. It is possible to pull over onto the shoulder and lean out a window and take a picture without leaving the car. I watched people do that. It was jarring, like finding the rope-laden stanchions holding us back.

  I have seen things my mother never saw.

  I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.

  In a locked metal box I took when my mother died, there is a button she would pin to her jacket on the days she led tours as a docent at the museum. “Art Has Drawing Power”—she never got tired of it.

  My mother took me to the art museum once on a day she worked as a guide. I followed her on her rounds; it was a sunny day when few people wanted to be inside. I tagged along with a couple of stragglers who insisted they be given a tour.

  Her remarks that day were perfunctory. I suspected her of cutting back the usual presentation. And then it became obvious. Who was there for her to impress? She showed us into the Seventeenth-Century Gallery. She motioned toward the portraits mounted on darkened walls, and said, “Dutch. Seventeenth century.”

  She was going to lead us into another wing!

  But I had studied in secret to surprise her. I got the attention of the visitors, and before my mother could usher them out, I offered up the history of Protestant Baroque. How I loved what I had memorized—with neither Catholic churches to embellish with religious images, nor a court to foot the bill for grandiose art, with the Calvinist edict not to corrupt God’s majesty with fantasy, “So it was to the objects in the world around him that the Dutch painter turned,” I intoned.

  Apple-polishing toady.

  “You’re in my way,” my mother said through her teeth when I came to the end of my speech.

  The button I wore at the time said, “You Look the Part.”

  Warren rides a bike to the dining hall wearing a T-shirt that has printed on it, “One Less Car.” He got it in town at the place whose best-selling T-shirt in summer says, “So Many Tourists, So Few Bullets.” Tourists are the ones who invariably snap them up.

  Summer slows us down. Does it slow you down, too? I like to close a book I’ve been reading on the porch and picture you swimming in your backyard pool. I see you swimming alone, with no one waiting to wrap you in a robe when you climb out. This letter is a robe I hold out to you.

  The article didn’t say if you swam before or after you work. Wouldn’t the chlorine bother you if you swam before you painted? But maybe you have that new filtration system, the one that uses ions. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a pool unless I come out with eyes red and stinging.

  I told you I never had a pool, but that gives the wrong impression. My best friend was a champion swimmer. We wanted to be wet, and every weekday we were. Even after a shower, our skin smelled chlorinated. With a strainer on the end of a stick, we would flip the turtles, moles, and frogs from out of our neighbors’ pools. The builder of these pools had since gone out of business, and no longer honored his service contracts. Sometimes we would have missed a frog from the time before. Trapped in the filter, floating in chlorine, the frog would bleach out white. Green or white, the frogs’ eyes were open as we sailed them over fences into other people’s yards.

  Warren caught me on the porch with a catalog of your work. He leaned over my shoulder and said, “What does he get for a painting like that?”

  I didn’t answer, and he practiced the trick he swears he can do where you flex your arm when a mosquito lights on it so the mosquito can’t detach itself until the sheer force of your blood pressure makes the mosquito explode. He has not succeeded yet, though earlier I saw him rid Little Egypt of a hornet, luring it out with a dead fly placed on the offered straw of a broom. When proud of himself, he chants tongue twisters for us. He made up “Shoes and socks shock Chatty.” Sometimes when I pass his door at night, I can hear from behind it the rapid refrains of “sifted thistles” and “mixed biscuits.”

  Last night I was in the library waiting to go in to dinner. I shifted my legs away from Warren, and snagged my stockings on the wicker chair. As though it had been his fault, I shot Warren a sour look, so he went on to dinner without me. I opened the book in whose margins he had scribbled, “How foolish we were to fear loneliness!” and next to a particularly Latinate passage, “Oh, get off your stilts.”

  Dinner was one of those times when the past gets a good going-over. Chatty and Warren and Karen all have access to their pasts. Does it matter that I can’t remember if the living room couch I built a fort behind was black or tweed or plaid? Or if something I think I did turns out to be in Jane Eyre? So much of the time, what I came away with from a day was the shape of my mother’s barrette, and not what she said to me. They were always made of tortoiseshell; some of them were oval, some were square. The barrettes were large, and held a low ponytail. It is the easiest way to keep hair out of your face, but I won’t do it—it makes me look too much like her. Warren has a heart-shaped island, and I have a heart-shaped face. Karen has the face I would want if I could choose, but maybe you would say that the unconventional face is the one you would rather paint? Forget about her—just keep thinking about me.

  Didn’t you think it was odd to find raisins in your “fresh” fruit salad?

  When I was in school, I often got sick from the fear of classes. I fought off the feeling by keeping a fistful of raisins with me. Before going into a class, I would shake part of a box of raisins into my hand, and close my fingers tight around them. Steadily, throughout the hour of class, I would take a single raisin—now warm and plump with sweat—and slip it into my mouth when the teacher couldn’t see. I never chewed the raisins. I would swallow each one as a hedge against the nausea, and so get through each class. I needed the most raisins in math, the fewest in English. I kept this up until I finished junior high, just as, years later, I swallowed pills, tranquilizers, to get me through a day, no longer staving off nausea but a feeling of approaching doom. For me, raisins are still so completely pharmacological that I’m surprised when I see them in grocery stores, in cellophane-wrapped “lunchbox” packages of six.

  I can’t stand raisins now, and was relieved when you separated them and left them on your plate. As you might imagine, folks here take exception to what is
on their plates, too. My first night here, Chatty warned me away from the fruit drinks, concocted as they are in the blender the gardener used once to whip up a frothy pitcher of mole repellant—equal parts cod liver oil and dish-washing detergent—which he painted along the rodents’ corded trails in the garden.

  Despite Chatty’s success with the long-gone Centennial Garden, she says she can’t bring herself to spend any time in this one. Warren said, “It could be argued that you do not get the full measure of the experience here if you don’t take advantage of the garden,” and Chatty told him, “We’re what’s going on here, so by having dinner with you, I’m taking in the attractions.” She took a small pouch out of the pocket of her smock and emptied it onto the tablecloth. “Coquilles sucre,” she said, sliding one at a time across the cloth to my place with her finger. Sugar shells, hard as rocks, in scuffed colors of coral, white, and blue, like pieces of sea glass, their shine tumbled off in salt water.

  “One of the attendants gets them for me in town,” Chatty said.

  Other people bring their own food to the table, as long as it has been approved ahead of time. Chatty told me a woman had gagged when she tried to swallow but instead inhaled a dry spoonful of Spirulina, a faddish powdered supplement that was meant to be stirred in fruit juice and would turn it an evil green.

  Karen swallows Gore Vidal. Then she swallows Donald Trump. She takes a blue capsule and a gold spansule—a B-complex and an E—and puts them on the tablecloth a few inches apart. She points the one at the other. “Martha Stewart,” she says, “meet Oprah Winfrey.” She swallows them both without water.

  My first night, unsolicited, Warren leaned across the table and confided, “The way to keep an ice-cream cone from dripping on your shirt? Before you put ice cream into one of those pointed cones, put in a miniature marshmallow to plug up any leaks. You can eat it at the end,” he pointed out.