by Amy Hempel
I don’t fall asleep with my body on the bed in the same way my mother was found. It must be a thing I go into when I am asleep. And still I cannot be sure that, limb for limb, I am in the same position. My mother’s legs, when I saw her, were covered by the sheet; it is possible that my legs are bent where my mother’s legs were straight.
Sometimes it feels as though I won’t be able to live until I can sleep in a position of my own—not in the way my mother’s body was found on the bed, but in a way that is mine—even if it is only a sort of dead man’s float where you don’t use a muscle but clasp both your knees and let your head sink into the pillow, rocking gently as a baby, tipping your head to the side to take in air, conserving your strength until help arrives, or until you can save yourself, there in bed.
Consolation is a beautiful word. Everyone skins his knee—that doesn’t make yours hurt any less. The standard line here.
Karen’s consolation is a dog. Mine, too, some of the time. In the lobby of the shelter you can buy a bag of biscuits and pass them out through the kennel bars while an attendant readies a dog for you to walk. Last time I went I collected the loose fur from the dogs just groomed to make a present to the gardener to stuff guess where. Then I walked Shauna. She is a young shepherd mix who had a litter of ten that had to be weaned early, at the age of five weeks, because the mother developed mastitis from nursing so many.
The attendant handed me Shauna’s leash, and Shauna leaped into the air. Her belly sagged, and was covered with long scabs, but once outside she ran for a mile, pulling me along at the end of a leash. When I finally had to rest, I said, “Shauna, shhh,” and she sat down and leaned against my leg, waiting.
When I brought her back to the shelter, I went to see her puppies in a private room. They were no more than eight inches long. I sat on the floor and they moved as a single mass onto me. They were crying and mewing like kittens. They licked and bit and tried to suck as they moved up my arms and chest, clinging to my neck and reaching up to bat at my face and nose, around my ears.
Once I walked Shauna in a nearby park where a group of people holding leads stood huddled in conversation while their dogs, off-leash, played close by. Shauna and I stood at the edge of both groups, and I heard a woman brag, “Barney makes on command.” Another woman observed her dog as it was mounted by two others in succession; she said that her dog’s social life was better than her own.
I was watching TV in Little Egypt with Chatty when a dog food commercial came on. A litter of tumbling pups crossed the screen, and Chatty said to me, “I guess you’re happy.”
I’ve never heard it said of you that you had dogs as pets. Though surely when you were a boy, a boy on a working farm, there must have been a dog that you befriended?
Do you find consolation in a person? In a woman? I found it once with a man, but I lost my combs. This was the last time I saw him. In the cab going home is when I saw the combs, one on top of the other on the table beside his couch. It would have been better if he had been the one to remove them, but when they interfered with the travel of his hands, I was the one who reached up and slipped the combs out. They are just cheap plastic, their job not to ornament but to secure and vanish in hair. It is not like leaving behind an earring, something that needs to be joined with a mate. The combs cost nothing, so he did not think to return them. But they’re the only ones that work in my kind of hair, and you can’t often find the ones that blend in with your hair. They tend to be packaged in assortments of a dozen, in garish bright primary colors. Before I left that night, I used his hairbrush when we finished. I left long hairs caught in the bristles, making of his hairbrush a kind of reliquary.
Where is the consolation in this? It is in humiliation, which brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.
“You a student over at the college?” The cabdriver, gunning for a tip.
I still want those combs back. I need all the things I left behind back. Better to find consolation in a place. At the beach. A day at the beach when everything rhymes: crabs picked clean, one thong—green, flies blown in on a warm land breeze, parking lot rainbow in a pool of gasoline; diving sea-gulls, blasted boat hulls, sea-scarred plastic, rusted bedstead, rotting refuse, fish now dead.
Sometimes I worry that we don’t talk about ideas. But Warren says, “I hate ideas,” and Chatty says, “Ideas, sugar, are not sexy.”
So a lot of the time it’s moisturizers and accessories, physical fitness and hair. And still so many ways to go wrong, as when I said to Chatty, hadn’t she colored her hair, and Chatty’s frosty reply, that she had not colored her hair, she had enhanced it.
We talk about clothes. On the theory that generic elements improve with repetition, Chatty wears two identical cashmere sweaters, layered one over the other. My own closet, an ugly-dress bonanza, yields sacklike black washed silk. Chatty can wear what she likes; she eats two desserts a night and you would never know it. Whereas the rest of us would gain weight even if we had food poisoning.
Karen presents herself in tooth-torn shirts. She showed up in the Hostility Suite with a miniature dachshund from the shelter. She held the dog in her lap, and while Chatty went on at some length about the plans she had for her wardrobe, Karen ran her opal ring down over the dog’s ears—ears she had made stand up like a rabbit’s—the way you thread the ends of a silk scarf through a scarf ring. Karen said that she had had this kind of dog when she was just out of college, and had taken the dog to restaurants where she would wipe out an ashtray with her napkin, and crumble part of a hamburger into it for her dog. She said she would get her dog’s leash and ask the dog—not, Want to go for a walk? but, Want to go out to lunch?
Chatty told Karen that one thing’s for sure—when you have a child, your dog becomes a pet. That would not happen to me. I can’t stand the sound of a person eating, but I love the sound of a dog crunching down on kibble. I love a dog’s appetite. The appetite of a baby is a frightening thing to me. I watch a mother spoon food into her baby’s mouth, then spoon back in what the baby spits out; to me, it is the job of spackling. If I had a baby, I would change overnight from a woman who worries about the calories in the glue of an envelope to someone who goes to the corner for coffee, a nightgown showing beneath my coat, the hem of that gown clawed to shreds by a cat.
My mother gave away my dogs; when she died, she died with cats. A calico cat sat tucked like a hen on her chest, as though it were hatching her death. A Siamese cat, when my mother was gone, yowled in her empty room.
I don’t know that I have ever seen a cat in one of your paintings. Or a dog. All those paintings, portraits of friends, and not one friend that was dog. My first friend was a Labrador retriever. His name was Needles, and I would saddle him up with a folded bath towel held on with my father’s belt. Needles obeyed only one command in the house. He would run into the living room and you would have to call out, “Swerve!”—one of us would have to call it out—and he would swerve just before he would have crashed into the glass-topped table.
My mother gave him away.
I was at school. When I came home, there was on my desk a dimestore turtle swimming the shallow moat around a ramped plastic island—island of the plastic palm—in search of specks of lettuce.
Surely it is in part the medication, but we have hung our libidos on hooks outside the door. Do men play a version of the game women do, when a woman asks herself in, say, a shopping center, If I had to go to bed with someone in this store, which one would it be? Here, Warren is the best of the lot. If I can return to the high school mixer, a girl would go up to another girl and say of one of the boys, “He’s really cute.” And suddenly the girl to whom this was said, a girl who had not previously noticed this fellow, was taking another look and thinking to herself, “He is really cute.”
Where was I going with this? I mean to say that if Chatty said such a thing to me, I still wouldn’t see it, given a push.
That gorilla I met, the one who signs, was given a push
, but it didn’t work. The people with whom she lives wanted her to mate. They brought in a suitable male, younger and larger than she, and set them up to cohabit. The female gorilla signed to him things like, “Hurry up” (and give her more bananas), and “Truck not yours” (a Tonka Toy truck). Neither gorilla would make a move, so the people rented an X-rated film and screened it for the primates. It held the gorillas’ attention, and when the film was over, the female gorilla signed to the male, “Climb up my back.” But he did not have her language skills, and did not otherwise take the hint.
My libido, what is left of it, flows in your direction. By the time I recognized you in the bookstore and boldly asked if I could buy you a cup of coffee, I had already constructed you in my mind, even though a voice in my head cried out: Don’t confuse the painting with the painter—let’s not forget the example of Picasso!
Given the hours I think of you, given the hours in my white-sheeted bed, you would think I could cook up a scene or two. But I can picture nothing that has not already happened. And so I am stuck with: a cup of tea in a public place on a winter afternoon. A failure of imagination? Or a self-protecting check, a screen blacked out when the home team plays.
Except I let myself imagine that you are painting my portrait. I offered myself as model to a teacher when I was a teen (having just read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). I worked up my nerve to do this—didn’t he sometimes paint nudes? But he painted me fully clothed. He painted me looking out a window, looking away. Yearning? The painter had just quit drinking. I was not what he was interested in.
When you paint me, I sit in a darkened room. I lean toward a dark desk, quill pen in my hand. I am dressed in a fur-trimmed yellow satin mantle; my hair is beribboned and pulled back from my face. Does this sound familiar? Are you with me on this? “Woman Writing a Letter,” by Vermeer.
Look at me. My concerns—are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We’ve read our Shakespeare. “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
And what are my chances of enacting “Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window”? I have, as you can see, no wiles or guile, the things I would need to elicit a letter from you in return. I would change this if I could, this curse of earnestness. Am I out of my mind?—putting my cards on the table! A woman should conceal, not reveal. Now my lipstick is chewed off, my lingerie is dingy, my high heels scuffed and broken.
There was reportedly a painting of a woman writing a letter that was found in Vermeer’s studio at his death.
I would like to know—did you see me that day as a woman? Did you think of me just as a fan? The way you have painted women—do you see us that way in the flesh? Do you ask permission to paint someone, or does she offer herself to you? Or do you paint a woman from memory, taking her without her knowing? Are you clinical as a doctor, or do you fall in love a little? Do you start out painting one woman and end up painting another?
This is what happens to me. I start out being myself, and end up being my mother. It isn’t something I try to do. In fact, I try hard not to. That is the crucial difference: I don’t want to end my life, but I can’t keep myself from trying.
The pills that she swallowed were mine. They were pills prescribed to me because I couldn’t sleep. With as much thoughtfulness as she showed me in her life, she left one behind in the vial. Presumably, it would be hard for me to sleep the night we found her.
I have never slept better.
I saw a movie in which two girls share an apartment. One day, one of the girls opens the other’s diary and makes an entry in it as though she is the diary owner. It scared me, that scene, because what—except for dying—could be scarier than merging?
Men are afraid this will happen with women. Often, after an intimate visit, a man will pick a fight. Have you done this yourself? I find you can count on it. And the closer you have been, the more snappish after. To separate himself, to keep from being pulled in. I have learned to head this off. I find an excuse to take myself away. I find this is easier all around. Even if where I take myself is into the next room, to sit and listen to music.
Do you listen to music while you work? I would if I were a painter. You know the way children ask which of your senses you would give up if you had to make a choice—your hearing or your sight? Before I saw your paintings, I would have given up my sight. It is the choice I used to make.
Warren and I watch reruns in Little Egypt, seventies sitcoms. A man tries to teach his friend a lesson. He says, Do you see what happens when you assume? You make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” But what is a life without assumptions?
Failing to engage us with clothes, Chatty makes us talk to her about men. As many men as we remember. Some, like you, have been painters. Maybe all of them have been painters. Even the gardener here, when he isn’t numbing our minds with endless talk of bud count and petal length, will set up an easel during his break, and produce a passable landscape. He will tell us the story of the Chinese paintings in which the time of day could be ascertained by the dilation of the cat’s pupils and the degree to which the peonies had opened. Happy pastime, painting. And when it is a man’s work, it is work he will enjoy. Although Warren feels it isn’t work if it isn’t hard. “Why do you think they call it work?” he says. With no need of segue, Chatty is off on Edward, the man she says we will meet when he comes to call on her here.
“Edward is bad,” Chatty says, not without pride. “But he doesn’t think he is bad. He thinks I can’t see things clearly.”
“And you can’t,” Warren says.
“You think the moment he behaves untenably, you’ll leave,” Chatty says. “But you find yourself saying, ‘He’s been so nice until now…’ So you think, ‘I’ll ignore it,’ and pretty soon you’re ignoring New York City. And then watch—he’ll have to put me out the door.”
“He could change.” My tentative entry into the conversation.
Chatty looks at me as though she does not know where to begin. She says that instances of change are anecdotal, deep-seated fantasy. “The New Testament has versions of it over and over: the whore becomes a saint, Paul on the road to Damascus. I mean,” she says, “Christianity acknowledges that for a person to change his nature is miraculous.”
“It’s not as if we change, either,” Karen puts in.
“What I think,” Chatty says, “is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they’re even. The thing to remember,” Chatty says as though reminding herself, “is that a man is not obligated to love you. Once you reach that philosophical state, he feels your grip loosening, and you retain your dignity. Otherwise, you go nuts, you’re subject to the dark undertow of it all.”
And I say, “Can’t a normal person take a walk on the dark side? If she watches where she took her last step?” Thinking of you, and thinking this is the moment when Chatty will ask, What is the deal with this guy? And knowing if I told her your parting words to me—“We’ll see each other again”—she would look at me with pity, not giving your words the right spin.
But Chatty just passes a bowl of bitter scrotalized olives. “When I get out of here, Edward wants me to visit,” she says. “He’s fixing up his house, and I’m afraid he will want me to help. He’ll open a section of Sheetrock—there’ll be clouds of bees and rotting honey. I call his house The Hive. I told him to hire help, but the local help is Lawrence Home Improvement—Larry and his scrap-hoarding teenaged son. Larry’s motto is: Pound to Fit, Paint to Match.”
“But you’re good at all that,” I tell her. “You know what goes with what.”
“It’s hopeless,” Chatty says. “I’ll say, Paint this trim lobster bisque, and I come back and they’ve made it terra-cotta.”
Which brings me back to the question, How does she come by such certainty? How does anyone? My mother, believing she could give away my dog—and she could!
And what about the certainty I feel regarding you? You could say that an hour is not a lot to
go on. But always, before, a thing didn’t work because I was too young and too old. Too dumb and too smart. But I learn from my mistakes. The certainty I feel—it is something to hit back with. So in a manner of speaking, I now have a stick that is bigger than the stick I was beaten with.
Except let’s not think of it as something larger of the same type. Maybe, instead of a stick, it just looks like a stick. Maybe it is really a snake. And it moves like a river. Maybe it is a river, and we can go someplace on it, someplace new.
“You still writing that letter?” Chatty says.
Warren: Why do dogs roll in dead animals? (Because live ones won’t let them.)
Warren caught sight of a mouse in Little Egypt. He traced its path back to a nest of Raisinettes, the chocolate gone chalky in the dust beneath the couch. He told us he had caught mice as a boy, that once he skinned a trap-killed mouse and made a mouse-skin rug for his sister’s dollhouse. And then he was telling us again about Elmer, about Elmer his little spider monkey, climbing to the top of their Christmas tree, pelting the family with ornaments he had pulled from their places on the branches.
“We yelled at him to stop,” Warren said, “and Elmer threw them harder.”
That was Elmer’s last Christmas, Warren told us. Elmer caught cold on New Year’s Eve. He died in Warren’s arms in the car Mrs. Moore drove along icy streets to the vet. Is there an animal story that doesn’t end in tears? This one. Warren said the family gathered to bury Elmer in the backyard. “The dogs came, too,” Warren said. “They stood with us at the edge of Elmer’s grave, and kicked in some of the dug-out dirt. They couldn’t wait to see that sucker in the ground.”
Chatty has been having her insights again. A fall from a horse, a blow to her head some twenty years ago, left her able to approach a stranger in the park and say, I’m sorry about your husband. How did you know? the woman would then say to Chatty.