The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

  In a Tub

  My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had.

  It was early afternoon, the middle of the week. I chose a pew in the center of the rows. Episcopal or Methodist, it didn’t make any difference. It was as quiet as a church.

  I thought about the feeling of the long missed beat, and the tumble of the next ones as they rushed to fill the space. I sat there—in the high brace of quiet and stained glass—and I listened.

  At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath.

  My cat takes naps in the windowbox. Her gray chin is powdered with the iridescent dust from butterfly wings. If I tap on the glass, the cat will not look up.

  The sound that I make is not food.

  When I was a girl I sneaked out at night. I pressed myself to hedges and fitted the shadows of trees. I went to a construction site near the lake. I took a concrete-mixing tub, slid it to the shore, and sat down inside it like a saucer. I would push off from the sand with one stolen oar and float, hearing nothing, for hours.

  The birdbath is shaped like that tub.

  I look at my nails in the harsh bathroom light. The scare will appear as a ripple at the base. It will take a couple of weeks to see.

  I lock the door and run a tub of water.

  Most of the time you don’t really hear it. A pulse is a thing that you feel. Even if you are somewhat quiet. Sometimes you hear it through the pillow at night. But I know that there is a place where you can hear it even better than that.

  Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and listen for the playfulness of your heart.

  Tonight Is a Favor to Holly

  A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o’clock, I am not going to answer the door. The problem is the front. I cut the bangs myself; now I look like Mamie Eisenhower.

  Holly says no, I look like Claudette Colbert. But I know why she says that is so I will meet this guy. Tonight is a favor to Holly.

  What I’d rather do is what we usually do—mix our rum and Cokes, and drink them on the sand while the sun goes down.

  We live the beach life.

  Not the one with sunscreen and resort wear. I mean, we just live at the beach. Out the front door is sand. There’s the ocean, and we see it every day of the year.

  The beach is near the airport—so this town doesn’t even have the class L.A. lacks. What it has is airline personnel. For them, it’s a twelve-minute shuttle from the concourse home—home meaning a complex of apartments done in fake Spanish Colonial.

  It copies the Spanish missions in every direction. But show me the mission with wrought-iron handrails running up the side.

  Also, there’s a courtyard fountain that splashes onto mosaic tiles. What’s irritating is that the tiles were chemically treated to “age” them from the start. What you want to say is, Look, relics are leftovers, you know?

  The place is called Rancho La Brea, but what it’s really called, because of the stewardesses, is Rancho Libido. Inside, the apartments have white sparkle ceilings.

  Holly’s no stewardess, and neither am I. We’re renting month to month while our house is restored from the mud and water damage of the last slide.

  Holly sings backup, and sometimes she records. The idea was she would tour, and I’d mostly have the place to myself. But she’s not touring. The distribution on her last release was half what she expected. The record company said they had to reorganize their marginal talent, so while Holly looks for another label, she’s home nights and my three days off.

  Four days a week I drive to La Mirada, to the travel agency where I have a job. It takes me fifty-five minutes to drive one way, and I wish the commute were longer. I like radio personalities, and I like to change lanes. And losing yourself on the freeway is like living at the beach—you’re not aware of lapsed time, and suddenly you’re there, where it was you were going.

  My job fits right in. I do nothing, it pays nothing, but—you guessed it—it’s better than nothing.

  A sense of humor helps.

  The motto of this agency is We Never Knowingly Ruin Your Vacation.

  We do two big tours a year, and neither of them now. If I can hold on to it, it’s the job I am going to have until my parents die.

  I thought I would mind that Holly’s always around, but it turns out it’s okay. Mornings, we walk to the Casa de Fruta Fruit Stand and Bait Shop. Everything there is the size of something else: strawberries are the size of tomatoes, apples are the size of grapefruits, papayas are the size of watermelons. The one-day sale on cantaloupe is into its third week. We buy enough to fill a blender, plus eggs.

  But, back up—because before we get to Casa de Fruta, we have to put on faded Danskins and her ex’s boxer shorts, and then be out on the beach watching the lifeguard’s jeep drag rakes like combs through the tangled sand.

  I like my prints to be the first of the day. Holly’s the one who scrapes her blackened feet and curses the tar.

  Then the rest of the day happens. Maybe we drain a half tank cruising Holly’s territory. Holly calls it research, this looking at men on the more northern sand.

  “I’d sooner salt myself away and call it a life,” Holly says. “But there’s all this research.”

  Sometimes we check in on Suzy and Hard, the squatters who live at the end of the block. Their aluminum shack has been there for years. The story is he found her at the harbor. She lived from boat to boat, staying with the owner till a fight sent her one berth over.

  Suzy has massive sunburned arms and wide hips that jerk unevenly when she walks.

  Hard is tall and thin.

  His real name is Howard. But Suzy is a slurrer, so it comes out Hard. It seems to fit. Hard has shoulder-length black hair and a mouth as round and mean as a lamprey.

  If things are quiet down the block, if the air is thick and still, we float ourselves in the surf. Sometimes a rain begins while we are underwater.

  I don’t get used to living at the beach, to seeing that wet horizon. It’s the edge, the country’s aisle seat. But if you made me tell the truth, I’d have to say it’s not a good thing. The people who live here, what you hear them say is I’m supposed to, I’ll try, I would have.

  There is no friction here.

  It’s a kind and buoyant place.

  What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.

  Earlier today, Holly answered the phone and took a dinner reservation. Our number is one digit off from Trader Don’s, and Holly takes names when she’s in a bad mood.

  “How many in your party, sir?” she says.

  She’s afraid I won’t go through with what was not my idea. In fact, I am not a person who goes on a date. I don’t want to meet men.

  I know some already.

  We talk about those a lot, and about the ones that Holly knows, too. It’s the other thing we do together on my days off.

  “You dish, I’ll dry,” Holly says.

  I’ll kick things off by calling one a scale model of a man. Holly will say again how if her ex saw a film of the way he had treated her, he would crawl off into the bushes, touch blade, and say good-bye.

  Her ex still sends snapshots—pictures of himself on camping trips at the foot of El Capitan or on the shore of Mono Lake. He mounts the pictures on cardboard, which just makes them harder to tear up.

  He even stops by when he’s in town, and we pretend he’s welcome. The two of them, Holly and this ex of hers, sit around and depress each other. They know all of e
ach other’s weak points and failings, so they can bring each other down in two-tenths of a second.

  When she sees him, Holly says, it’s like the sunsets at the beach—once the sun drops, the sand chills quickly. Then it’s like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don’t count now.

  These men, it’s not like we don’t see them coming. Our intuition is good; the problem is we ignore it.

  We keep wanting people to be different.

  But who are the people you meet down here?

  There are two kinds to choose from: those who are going under and those who aren’t moving ahead.

  I think Suzy and Hard have more energy than us all. Last night I heard them in the alley. Suzy was screaming. She yelled, “Hard! Look out! You wanna give someone an accident?”

  I could see all this from the kitchen. I could see Hard pick up a hubcap and pitch it at Suzy. Suzy squealed and limped away, even though it was her arm he had clipped her on. But then she whirled around and rushed at him. She grabbed his throwing hand and brought it to her mouth. She opened wide to bite. But the scream that followed was hers. The alley is lighted, so I could actually see the white teeth in his hand. Hard stood with his feet apart, and turned sideways. Like a discus-thrower going for the record, he hurled Suzy’s dentures onto the roof of Rancho Libido.

  I’m hoping this story will break the ice tonight.

  Oh, I’ll go out with this guy for Holly.

  My hair is too short, but I’ve got teeth in my mouth. I’ll be Claudette or Mamie, and he’ll be a pretty strange customer himself. He’ll be a pimp who’s gone through est.

  He’ll be Hard’s brother.

  He’ll be so dumb there aren’t any examples.

  All right, I’m smiling when I say this. But the favor I’ll expect in return is to not have to do it again.

  At least I can look forward to getting home. Holly will be waiting up. She’ll make us a Cobra Kiss—that’s putting the rum in pomegranate juice. We’ll have seconds. Then she’ll carry herself to the bedroom like a completed jigsaw puzzle.

  I’ll get the lights and come after.

  The one light I leave on makes the ceiling dance like galaxies. We’re hoping next month we can say good-bye to the sparkle ceilings of Rancho Libido. Our old place is cleaning up nicely. Tighter-fitting seals are on the windows, and plywood reinforcements flank the walls. When the next big rain sets off slides, it won’t be us at the bottom of the hill, trapped beneath collapsed architecture.

  For now, we have our angled beds. Holly’s faces east because she claims that facing east wakes you calm and alert. My own goes north to south; unless I’m mistaken, east to west is how they sleep you in your grave.

  Sometimes we talk about trips. The joke is, the places we think of are beaches, the ones on the folders in my travel office.

  What we need to do is move—find some landlocked place where at least half the year the air is cool and dry. It’s likely we’ll do it, too.

  “Sure thing,” Holly says. “From the people who brought you Fat Chance.”

  The truth is, the beach is like excess weight. If we lost it, what would the excuse be then?

  A couple of years ago, I did go away.

  I went east.

  A mistake. A few months later the movers packed me up.

  There’s a thing that happens here, and I thought about it then. Highway One, the coast route, has many scenic lookout points. What happens is that people fall over these cliffs, craning to see to the bottom of them. Sometimes the floor is brush, and sometimes it is rock. It’s called going west on Highway One. There is even a club for the people who fall, membership being awarded posthumously.

  That’s what I thought of when the moving van crashed. It spilled my whole life down a mud ravine, where for two weeks rain kept a crew from hauling it out. Mold embroidered the tablecloths, and newts danced in my shoes.

  The message was heavy-handed, but I changed lanes and continued west toward home.

  I say an omen that big can be ignored.

  Celia Is Back

  “Luck isn’t luck,” the father told his kids. “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”

  The boy backed up his father’s statement. “That’s what the big winners say,” he agreed.

  The boy and his sister were entering contests. The kitchen table was littered with forms and the entry blanks off cereal boxes. The boy held a picture of a blue Rolls-Royce, the grand prize in a sweepstakes he was too young to enter.

  “Do you think it has to be blue?” he asked. “Do you think I can get it in a different color?”

  “You can’t drive,” the girl said. “So it’s a moot point.”

  She tore a sheet of paper from a legal pad and drew up an affidavit. It promised her the Rolls when her father won it in the sweepstakes next fall. She penciled in a line on the paper for his signature, and a line below that, and titled the second one Witnessed By.

  The father had time before his weekly appointment, so he poured himself coffee and filled in some of the blanks. In spite of what he said, the father knew he had luck. In the time that he had been home, he had won two prizes. He had won a week for two in Hawaii, airfare included, and a ride in a hotair balloon.

  Sweepstakes were easy, the father explained. There was nothing to guess, no jingle to compose, no skill required at all. You wrote your name and address, then you soaked the paper in water so that it dried stiff and crackly, and was therefore easy for the judge to get a grip on in the bin. You could enter a sweepstakes as often as you liked—you could flood it if the prize or the winning was worth the bother.

  The father held his hand up like an Indian saying How. “Remember the Three P’s,” he told his kids. “Patience, Perseverance, and Postage. The people who win these things know the Three P’s.”

  Contests were different from sweepstakes, he said. You needed talent to win a contest, or at least you needed the knack.

  “S-O-S,” the father informed. “What you want to remember is: Be Simple, be Original, be Sincere. That’s the winning system.”

  When the sweepstakes entries were completed and stamped, the kids detained their father for the Jell-O pudding contest.

  They said, “Daddy will help us—Daddy always wins!”

  “All right,” the father said. “But don’t make me late for my appointment.”

  You had to tell the judges why you liked Jell-O pudding. You had to complete the sentence, “I like Jell-O pudding because———.”

  First, the father looked at what his kids had written down. “It’s sincere,” he said. “But what about original?” He said that the first thing that popped into their heads would have popped into the heads of other people, too.

  The father said, “Think. What is the thing about Jell-O pudding? What is really the thing?”

  He paused for so long that the kids looked at each other.

  “What?” the girl said.

  The father closed his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. He said, “I like Jell-O pudding because I like a good hearty meal after a brisk walk on a winter’s day—something to really warm me up.”

  The boy giggled and the girl giggled.

  The father looked confused. “This is the Jell-O pudding contest, isn’t that what you said?” he said. “Well, okay then,” he said. “I like Jell-O pudding because it has a tough satin finish that resists chipping and peeling. No, no,” he said, “I mean, I like Jell-O pudding because it has a fruitier taste. Because it’s garden fresh,” he said. “Because it goes on dry to protect me from wetness longer. Oh, Jell-O pudding,” the father said. “I like it because it’s more absorbent than those other brands. Won’t chafe or ride up.”

  He opened his eyes and saw his son leave the room. The sound that had made the father open his eyes was the pen that the boy had thrown to the floor.

  “You may already be a winner,” the father said.

  He closed his eyes again. “You know,” he continued, “most pudding makes me ed
gy. But not Jell-O pudding. That’s because it has no caffeine. Tastes right—and is built to stay that way.

  “Yes, I like Jell-O pudding because it’s the one thing to take when you really want to bufficate a headache. Or when you need to mirtilize bad breath, unless you want your bad breath to mirtilize you.”

  This time the sound that brought him around was the sound of his car keys swinging on their chain. His daughter held the keys. She said, “Daddy, come on. You’ll be late.”

  “That’s what I told you, didn’t I?” the father said. “I said, ‘Don’t make me late for my appointment.’”

  He followed his daughter out to the car. “Did I tell you the thing about Jell-O?” he said.

  His motor skills were not impaired.

  He drove slowly, carefully, the girl on the seat beside him. He turned off the freeway onto a wide commercial drive of franchised food and failing business. The place he was going to was blocks away.

  A red light stopped him opposite the House of Marlene. There was a handwritten sign in a grimy window. The sign said, CELIA, FORMERLY OF MR. EDWARD, HAS REJOINED OUR STAFF.

  The father’s hands relaxed on the wheel.

  Celia, he thought.

  Celia has come back to make everything okay. The wondrous Celia brings her powers to bear.

  The traffic light turned green. Is she really back? he wondered. Is Celia back to stay?

  Through the horns going off behind him, through the fists of his daughter beside him, the father stayed stopped.

  Everything will be fine, he thought, now that Celia’s here.

  Nashville Gone to Ashes

  After the dog’s cremation, I lie in my husband’s bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of “liquor” and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television is what my husband, Flea, said.