The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

by Amy Hempel

  I don’t really care what is on the table, as long as it isn’t raisins. Tonight we ordered in pizza, and the pizza-with-everything looked like a bad neighborhood. It is after dinner that I think about home. Across the way there are beer bottles lined up alongside the grave of the young man whose motorcycle stalled on the tracks. Not empties, but full bottles of Budweiser, capped. The malevolent twins steal in and drink them warm, hiding behind a towering hedge that encircles a trio of well-tended graves—the doctor who took two wives, sisters. The twins drink their bottles of stolen beer and think no one hears them snorting at dusk, then they put on wigs—black Afros from the sixties—and pretend to have sex in the hammock back of their house.

  A woman on horseback walks the gravel paths. She is someone the twins have spied on, watching from the woods as she mucked stalls dressed in a string bikini, muttering “Perverts” at the yardmen who stared. In summer, in the cemetery, she climbs down and clips the white French lilacs that grow in one spot, spliced by rotting cedar. In the fall, she helps herself to dried hydrangea clusters, voluptuous, no doubt, on her dining room table. Her horse lifts its tail, and unleashed dogs escape nearby yards to come and feast, snapping, the way they scramble for clippings from hooves in her stable.

  High winds redistribute bouquets, and Alice Parker’s roses blow to Grace Hall one row over; carnations intended for Henry Hand work loose from a vase and are trapped by the stone of Red Howell, Senior, interred at Indianapolis.

  At dinner this evening, Warren talked about his pet. He said he had had a spider monkey named Elmer and Chatty interrupted, having heard it as “monkey spider,” to tell the table about the one she and her ex-husband had seen (from where they lay beneath mosquito netting covering their bed) climb into a wardrobe in their rented villa in Nevis.

  “We left the island without our clothes,” Chatty said.

  Warren continued. “My parents rented a place in Hatteras where we were supposed to spend the summer. Me and my sister and our parents and Elmer and about a million crazed mosquitoes. My dad read where you could order chameleons through the mail, so he bought two dozen of them, and let them loose in the house. My mother called it a harmonious solution, until we got home from the beach the next day and Elmer met us at the top of the stairs with what turned out to be the last two chameleons, one in each fist. When he saw us,” Warren said, “he waved them over his head like pennants. When my mother screamed at him, Elmer brought one fist to his mouth and bit the head off the chameleon. Then he did the same thing with the other.”

  I asked him if monkeys know right from wrong, and Warren said, “Elmer was a goblin from hell. He used to jump on the dogs’ backs and make them carry him around the house until they learned to duck under the coffee table and knock the bastard off.”

  Warren burned himself putting out a cigarette, and Karen began to cry. Warren took a long drink from his Coke can.

  “Thought you quit,” Chatty said.

  Chatty looked beneficently around the table. “I am getting better,” she said. “So the others are starting to fail.”

  That time I was in London, I went to an elegant dinner for which the chef assembled a roast turkey inside of which was lodged a goose, inside of which was a duck that housed a chicken that contained a game hen—all of them boned and served with a dark, tart currant sauce. I think of that dinner, of the chef slicing through the five fowl, when I imagine what kind of woman you like. A woman who contains a series of surprises? There are clues in the women you have had, though the thought of asking you what you like is like the team of artists who hired a marketing firm to find out what Americans want in a painting. The artists painted the result of the poll which found that what we want is a blue painting the size of a dishwasher with a biblical figure and landscape.

  I am so suggestible. When Chatty asks if I am hungry, I say, “I could be.” I would try to become the woman you wanted without even knowing I was trying. As it is, I am barely the woman I am.

  And what if you don’t like the person you are? Where do you find the parts to make yourself into some other kind of person? Can it be something you read in a book, a gesture you see on the street? Half-smile of a teacher, the walk of a girl on the beach.

  I would like to go to a matinee with you. Any afternoon, any theater, I would not care what we saw. I would like to sit next to you in the dark in a public place and lean over from time to time to better hear your caustic asides.

  I want to ask the questions I failed to ask that day when all I could think was: He is sitting across the table from me, and he has ordered fruit salad! I was like the woman who met Anaïs Nin and walked with her in Central Park, and couldn’t help exclaiming that Anaïs Nin was eating a hot dog. The woman’s incredulity bothered Anaïs Nin, just as I am sure my behavior bothered you. But surely you are used to it.

  I want to know everything about you. So I tell you everything about myself.

  A psychic once told me that I was too honest. It was the first thing he said to me before he had turned over palm or card. He was not urging duplicity; I think he meant for me to be what a certain kind of woman calls “clever.”

  The psychic was right, yet I am such a fraud:

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  “My father lives out West.”

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother is dead.”

  “Of what?”

  “She did it herself,” I said, and let you think that that was hard on a girl, a tragedy.

  Is this where I exhibited a ruinous lapse of judgment? Asking if you had known my mother when you were both in art school? You might have known each other. Yet is this an instance where I might instead have been clever, and not pointed out how much older than me you are? Worse, did you think I was suggesting that you knew my mother well? That maybe she posed for you?

  The truth is, it was hard on me. Not her death—her life. The only surprise when she killed herself was that she had killed herself. I said to my father, “I always thought if she killed anyone, the one she killed would be me.” And my father said, “I know.”

  My only job was not to get killed. At home, at school, at the movies, at a party, riding a horse, rowing a boat, skating on ice, raking the gravel drive, getting the mail, swimming in a lake, hiking in the mountains, on a bike, in a tent, in a church, in a car, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, on Halloween, Christmas, and Easter, awake and asleep, I had no other job.

  Two slips of the tongue: I said to Chatty, “In all important ways, I believe I am her evil,” instead of “equal.” And when Chatty voiced an opinion, I added, “I feel the shame.”

  She has been dead twenty years, and listen to what happened to me on the street. Of all the things I could have said to the woman on the sidewalk, the woman I had never seen before, the woman who, unprovoked, had made a fist and brought it down on the side of my face, what I had said was, “Get out of me!” As though the demon was not an overweight woman in an out-of-season straw hat who had said as she swung her fist at me, “This is what you want!”

  The other day I was playing Scrabble with Karen. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?

  Sometimes, in the kitchenette here, I open a French cookbook so as not to think about her. Better to try to find out, what is a pomelo? Where could one find lemongrass to crush with a mallet for eggplant?

  Before I came here, I asked my father a question and gave him a year to answer. The question I asked him is: What is it about me that most resembles my mother?

  And I will wonder during this year that follows, did I do the right thing? What will come of it? Will I get something valuable to have? And know that he will make something up, most likely, to give his daughter a gift. And in the year of waiting I will answer the question for him. The way you are most like your mother? You play tricks on people’s minds. You are unlovable. I see in your eyes the love of death.

  I’ll give you
one year, I said.

  Have you detected a curious lack of medical authority here? It is only missing from my letter. There are counselors for us, wise and complex people who do not intrude but are always available—why have I not written about them sooner? They are one of the consolations, here in the present. They live in a separate wing of the main building, and drop in throughout the week. We can call them at night if we need to. Some are young and still in training. They follow the doctor, and are courteous and kind. They take it as an article of faith that bad things that happen are “occasions for transformation,” that creating distance from them is different from denying they were bad.

  They are not averse to joining us in games. One time we all played charades. We were uniformly bad at the game. I pulled a hard one that no one could guess, no one came close to this person’s name. In a private session several days later, when my counselor asked if I had any questions, I said yes—“How would you have done ‘Nancy Reagan’?”

  At the same time each evening, a counselor checks to see that no one is going out. What he asks us sounds like, “Urine for the night?”

  One night last week we had a bad moment. One of the guests—she’s new—has the same name as a well-known actress. Chatty began to tell a story about the actress and as soon as she said the woman’s name, she glanced at the one in the Hostility Suite with us and said, “I mean the real Anne Bancroft.”

  Our Anne Bancroft is not so crazy she didn’t recognize an insult. She sat up straight in her lounger, and then she left the room.

  That is not a bad way to handle an insult if you don’t have a ready comeback. I learned my lesson in a foreign country. I was visiting a friend in Paris. We were riding to the Louvre in a cab. I insisted my friend let me handle the transaction, though I knew I didn’t know enough French. By accident I undertipped the driver. He turned on me, an American touriste. I recognized the word putain—the driver had called me a whore. I remember that I tried for a French hauteur, and said, “Je suis, suis-je!” I realized that what I was saying was English with French clothes on, and slunk away in defeat. (A saleswoman at a pet store later neutralized the cabbie. I went to a fancy shop on the Rue de Trop Cher to buy a friend’s dog a collar. The saleswoman, before she would show me the collars, asked, “What kind of dog is he?” I said, “He’s a beagle,” and the saleswoman said, “No, no—I mean, what’s he like?”)

  The first time I walked one of the nearby shelter dogs, I broke into futile tears. I said to one of the counselors, “There are twelve million others in this country alone that I am not able to help!” And she said, “It doesn’t have to be complete, your help. The goal is not to erase the problem. You do it to make the choice, to give and get joy in this life.”

  And I said to her, still in tears, “But it is not enough!” And then I asked her, “What is enough? Enough energy, attention, effort, et cetera.” She said, “The answer lies in the practice. In balance with what comes naturally.” I said, “How can I, a six, help anyone else until I am better?” And she said, “Helping someone else can make you better.”

  In large part, we are meant to heal each other. The garden is a metaphor. Seeding, tending, weeding, watering—all leading up to the harvest. Although leave it to Warren to point out these words that are synonymous with “plant”: hide, secrete, conceal, bury, entomb.

  Warren says, of the place he was before this, “My counselor was a moron, and he helped me.”

  There is one counselor here we suspect of being something more. She gives such encouraging and optimistic guidance that one day I asked if I could tape her. We set a time to meet for a talk on the patio off the parlor. I turned on my pocket-sized tape recorder and showed her where to speak into the mike. She delivered a kind of pep talk, one I could now replay and refer to as the need arose.

  The need arose the very next day, so I grabbed my tape recorder, fitted in her tape, and went up to deserted Little Egypt. I pressed the “On” button, and closed my eyes. I let myself believe her good words; they displaced my bad thoughts for the length of an hour. When it was over, I pressed the “Off” button. Nothing happened. The tape continued to wind in its cartridge. I held the “Off” button down with my thumb, and still the tape played, though there was no more voice to hear. I ran downstairs with it, found Warren in the Hostility Suite. I handed him the tape recorder, said, “Can you turn this off for me?” Warren was not able to turn the machine off until he had smacked the recorder into his palm and then against the table edge to empty the batteries out.

  Not graduating is how Chatty left this place the first time. This time, all she will have to do is call a car, just as I have done. I have learned to specify town car so the company does not send over a limousine. I remember to tell them to tell the driver to bring along something to read.

  With my bags packed and in the car with me, it is like the concert I went to—a chamber quartet—at what was once a private home, a Victorian mansion. In the music room there was a birdcage that had finches in it. The cage was a replica of the house it was inside of, down to the mansard roof and broad-stepped porch. That night I arrived early and heard the musicians already playing. Thinking my watch was slow and I was actually late, I hurried in. The musicians were playing—not tuning up, but performing the evening’s program—to an empty house. And the finches were singing along! When they finished, the cellist explained to me that before every concert given in the house, the musicians played first for the finches so the birds would tire themselves out singing, and would then remain quiet during the concert that was scheduled.

  Chatty assures me I will know, I will “just know” when to leave. How does she come by such certainty?

  Who said sanity is free? That is the answer to Karen’s complaint about always having to do two jobs.

  Don’t you find that there is no right place to begin? When you try to make sense of a thing that has happened? That everything is as important, or as unimportant, as everything else? A poet writes, “He opens a book at random, and consults randomness.” To me, this is what it seems. To me and, Warren has pointed out, a million other people.

  I pretend I know you well. I say to Warren, “I have a friend who—” and Warren says, “You have too many friends.”

  I waited so long to write to you. I liked knowing, as it came to me throughout the course of a day, that I would be writing a letter to you. It made me think of a doctor here, a man who said he’d have liked to have treated Marilyn Monroe, what a lift it would have given him to look in his appointment book and see her name. He had lifted up for a moment on the toes of his shoes.

  Warren taped a one-word sign to his wall. The word that he wakes to is: Headlong. Writing to you, it is my word, too. And, hey—here’s hoping you like blue! This is the color my mother used to use, though she chose the stock with a ragged edge, and I prefer my edges sharp. She fit what she had to say on a thank-you note.

  The pond is surrounded by winter-stripped trees, packed so close together the lack of leaves doesn’t matter. There is no seeing through them to the single man and woman who proceed across the cracked black ice on borrowed skates. No crack of the puck. No Rock ’n’ Skate, no Rap ’n’ Skate, no programmed medleys threatening disco. The sound of speed on blades. Turtles float below. We are humming “The Nutcracker Suite.”

  My consolations are many, their power no less for not including you. I said to a psychic just after our tea, “There is a person I met,” and the psychic cut me off, saying, “He is a thief. He will steal your soul.”

  The man ran groups. He took a token fee from people wanting to quit—smoking, drinking, eating too much. “Picture the thing you want to live without.” “My husband,” one woman whispered to another. I shut my eyes with the rest of them and tried to conjure fear, what I want to live without.

  The counselors here say we often mistake excitement for apprehension, for fear. They say it is up to us, that we can forcibly jog ourselves from one state into the other. But it sounds to me like my fa
vorite joke when I was a girl: What is Pollyanna’s epitaph? “I’m glad I’m dead.”

  The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino to go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and I buy the gloves. And it hits me—how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theater, it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib.

  No one has ever told me that I am good with children. Shortly before I came here I went to a dinner party. The hostess was setting the table—there were eight of us that night—when her daughter, a barefoot seven-year-old, demanded we play the game.

  I had not played the game before. You had to build a tower out of narrow cross-placed pieces of wood, then pull away the pieces one at a time without making the tower collapse.

  I am not good at games, and the girl was sure of her moves. Yet somehow I was good at this, and when the girl removed the piece that made the tower fall, she ran to her mother screaming, “I didn’t lose!”

  The mother put the child to bed and lay beside the child for a while in the bed.

  When I go to sleep, I sleep on the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in—lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.