The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

  With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

  On top of the warm set is big white Chuck, catching a portion of his four million winks. His tail hangs down and bisects the screen. On top of the dresser, and next to the phone, is the miniature pine crate that holds Nashville’s gritty ashes.

  Neil the Lion cops the year’s top honors. The host says Neil is on location in Africa, but accepting for Neil is his grandson Winston. A woman approaches the stage with a ten-week cub in her arms, and the audience all goes Awwww. The home audience, too, I bet. After the cub, they bring the winners on stage together. I figure they must have been sedated—because none of them are biting each other.

  I have my own to tend to. Chuck needs tomato juice for his urological problem. Boris and Kirby need brewer’s yeast for their nits. Also, I left the vacuum out and the mynah bird is shrieking. Birds think a vacuum-cleaner hose is a snake.

  Flea sold his practice after the stroke, so these are the only ones I look after now. These are the ones that always shared the house.

  My husband, by the way, was F. Lee Forest, D.V.M.

  The hospital is right next door to the house.

  It was my side that originally bought him the practice. I bought it for him with the applesauce money. My father made an applesauce fortune because his way did not use lye to take off the skins. Enough of it was left to me that I had the things I wanted. I bought Flea the practice because I could.

  Will Rogers called vets the noblest of doctors because their patients can’t tell them what’s wrong. The doctor has to reach, and he reaches with his heart.

  I think it was that love that I loved. That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. I thought, My love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back?

  Things might have collapsed right there. But the furious care he gave the animals gave me hope and kept me waiting.

  I did not take naturally to my husband’s work. For instance, I am allergic to cats. For the past twenty years, I have had to receive immunotherapy. These are not pills; they are injections.

  Until I was seventeen, I thought a ham was an animal. But I was not above testing a stool sample next door.

  I go to the mynah first and put the vacuum cleaner away. This bird, when it isn’t shrieking, says only one thing. Flea taught it what to say. He put a sign on its cage that reads TELL ME I’M STUPID. So you say to the bird, “Okay, you’re stupid,” and the bird says, real sarcastic, “I can talk—can you fly?”

  Flea could have opened in Vegas with that. But there is no cozying up to a bird.

  It will be the first to go, the mynah. The second if you count Nashville.

  I promised Flea I would take care of them, and I am. I screened the new owners myself.

  Nashville was his favorite. She was a grizzle-colored saluki with lightly feathered legs and Nile-green eyes. You know those skinny dogs on Egyptian pots? Those are salukis, and people worshiped them back then.

  Flea acted like he did, too.

  He fed that dog dates.

  I used to watch her carefully spit out the pit before eating the next one. She sat like a sphinx while he reached inside her mouth to massage her licorice gums. She let him nick tartar from her teeth with his nail.

  This is the last time I will have to explain that name. The pick of the litter was named Memphis. They are supposed to have Egyptian names. Flea misunderstood and named his Nashville. A woman back East owns Boston.

  At the end of every summer, Flea took Nashville to the Central Valley. They hunted some of the rabbits out of the vineyards. It’s called coursing when you use a sight hound. With her keen vision, Nashville would spot a rabbit and point it for Flea to come after. One time she sighted straight up at the sky—and he said he followed her gaze to a plane crossing the sun.

  Sometimes I went along, and one time we let Boris hunt, too.

  Boris is a Russian wolfhound. He is the size of a float in the Rose Bowl Parade.

  He’s a real teenager of a dog—if Boris didn’t have whiskers, he’d have pimples. He goes through two nylabones a week, and once he ate a box of nails.

  That’s right, a box.

  The day we loosed Boris on the rabbits he had drunk a cup of coffee. Flea let him have it, with Half-and-Half, because caffeine improves a dog’s trailing. But Boris was so excited, he didn’t distinguish his prey from anyone else. He even charged me—him, a whole hundred pounds of wolfhound, cranked up on Maxwell House. A sight like that will put a hem in your dress. Now I confine his hunting to the park, let him chase park squab and bald-tailed squirrel.

  The first thing F. Lee said after his stroke, and it was three weeks after, was “hanky panky.” I believe these words were intended for Boris. Yet Boris was the one who pushed the wheelchair for him. On a flat pave of sidewalk, he took a running start. When he jumped, his front paws pushed at the back of the chair, rolling Flea yards ahead with surprising grace.

  I asked how he’d trained Boris to do that, and Flea’s answer was, “I didn’t.”

  I could love a dog like that, if he hadn’t loved him first.

  Here’s a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.

  Cold nights I pull his socks on over my hands. I read in his bed. People still write from when Flea had the column. He did a pet Q and A for the newspaper. The new doctor sends along letters for my amusement. Here’s one I liked—a man thinks his cat is homosexual.

  The letter begins, “My cat Frank (not his real name)…”

  In addition to Flea’s socks, I also wear his watch.

  A lot of us wear our late-husband’s watch.

  It’s the way we tell each other.

  At bedtime, I think how Nashville slept with Flea. She must have felt to him like a sack of antlers. I read about a marriage breaking up because the man let his Afghan sleep in the marriage bed.

  I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed—not sex—but sex was how we got there.

  In the mornings, I am not alone. With Nashville gone, Chuck comes around.

  Chuck is a white-haired, blue-eyed cat, one of the few that aren’t deaf—not that he comes when he hears you call. His fur is thick as a beaver’s; it will hold the tracing of your finger.

  Chuck, behaving, is the Nashville of cats. But the most fun he knows is pulling every tissue from a pop-up box of Kleenex. When he gets too rowdy, I slow him down with a comb. Flea showed me how. Scratching the teeth of a comb will make a cat yawn. Then you have him where you want him—any cat, however cool.

  Animals are pure, Flea used to say. There is nothing deceptive about them. I would argue: Think about cats. They stumble and fall, then quickly begin to wash—I meant to do that. Pretense is deception, and cats pretend: Who, me? They move in next door where the food is better and meet you in the street and don’t know your name, or their name.

  But in the morning Chuck purrs against my throat, and it feels like prayer.

  In the morning is when I pray.

  The mailman changed his mind about the bird, and when Mrs. Kaiser came for Kirby and Chuck, I could not find either one. I had packed their supplies in a bag by the door—Chuck’s tomato juice and catnip mouse, Kirby’s milk of magnesia tablets to clean her teeth.

  You would expect this from Chuck. But Kirby is responsible. She’s been around the longest, a delicate smallish golden retriever trained by professionals for television work. She was going to get a series, but she didn’t grow to size. Still, she can do a number of useless tricks. The one that wowed them in the waiting room next door was Flea putting Kirby under arrest.

  “Kirby,” he’d say, “I’m afraid you are under arrest.” And the dog would back up flush to the wall. “I am going to have to frisk you, Kirb,” and she’d slap her paws against the wall, standing still while Flea patted her sides.
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br />   Mrs. Kaiser came to visit after her own dog died.

  When Kirby laid a paw in her lap, Mrs. Kaiser burst into tears.

  I thought, God love a dog that hustles.

  It is really just that Kirby is head-shy and offers a paw instead of her head to pat. But Mrs. Kaiser remembered the gesture. She agreed to take Chuck, too, when I said he needed a childless home. He gets jealous of kids and has asthma attacks. Myself, I was thinking, with Chuck gone I could have poinsettias and mistletoe in the house at Christmas.

  When they weren’t out back, I told Mrs. Kaiser I would bring them myself as soon as they showed. She was standing in the front hall talking to Boris. Rather, she was talking for Boris.

  “ ‘Oh,’ he says, he says, ‘what a nice bone,’ he says, he says, ‘can I have a nice bone?’”

  Boris walked away and collapsed on a braided rug.

  “ ‘Boy,’ he says, he says, ‘boy, am I bushed.’”

  Mrs. Kaiser has worn her husband’s watch for years.

  When she was good and gone, the animals wandered in. Chuck carried a half-eaten chipmunk in his mouth. He dropped it on the kitchen floor, a reminder of the cruelty of a world that lives by food.

  After F. Lee’s death, someone asked me how I was. I said that I finally had enough hangers in the closet. I don’t think that that is what I meant to say. Or maybe it is.

  Nashville died of her broken heart. She refused her food and simply called it quits.

  An infection set in.

  At the end, I myself injected the sodium pentobarbital.

  I felt upstaged by the dog, will you just listen to me!

  But the fact is, I think all of us were loved just the same. The love Flea gave to me was the same love he gave them. He did not say to the dogs, I will love you if you keep off the rug. He would love them no matter what they did.

  It’s what I got, too.

  I wanted conditions.

  God, how’s that for an admission!

  My husband said an animal can’t disappoint you. I argued this, too. I said, Of course it can. What about the dog who goes on the rug? How does it feel when your efforts to alter behavior come to nothing?

  I know how it feels.

  I would like to think bigger thoughts. But it looks like I don’t have a memory of our life that does not include one of the animals.

  Kirby still carries in his paper Sunday mornings.

  She used to watch while Flea did the crossword puzzle. He pretended to consult her: “I can see why you’d say dog, but don’t you see—cat fits just as well?”

  Boris and Kirby still scrap over his slippers. But as Flea used to say, the trouble seldom exceeds their lifespan.

  Here we all still are. Boris, Kirby, Chuck—Nashville gone to ashes. Before going to bed I tell the mynah bird she may not be dumb but she’s stupid.

  Flowers were delivered on our anniversary. The card said the roses were sent by F. Lee. When I called the florist, he said Flea had “love insurance.” It’s a service they provide for people who forget. You tell the florist the date, and automatically he sends flowers.

  Getting the flowers that way had me spooked. I thought I would walk it off, the long way, into town.

  Before I left the house, I gave Laxatone to Chuck. With the weather warming up, he needs to get the jump on fur balls. Then I set his bowl of kibbles in a shallow dish of water. I added to the water a spoonful of liquid dish soap. Chuck eats throughout the day; the soapy moat keeps bugs off his plate.

  On the walk into town I snapped back into myself.

  Two things happened that I give the credit to.

  The first thing was the beggar. He squatted on the walk with a dog at his side. He had with him an aged sleeping collie with granular runny eyes. Under its nose was a red plastic dish with a sign that said FOOD FOR DOG—DONATION, PLEASE.

  The dog was as quiet as any Flea had healed and then rocked in his arms while the anesthesia wore off.

  Blocks later, I bought a pound of ground beef.

  I nearly ran the distance back.

  The two were still there, and a couple of quarters were in the dish. I felt pretty good about handing over the food. I felt good until I turned around and saw the man who was watching me. He leaned against the grate of a closed shoe-repair with an empty tin cup at his feet. He had seen. And I was giving him—nothing.

  How far do you take a thing like this? I think you take it all the way to heart. We give what we can—that’s as far as the heart can go.

  This was the first thing that turned me back around to home. The second was just plain rain.

  San Francisco

  Do you know what I think?

  I think it was the tremors. That’s what must have done it. The way the floor rolled like bongo boards under our feet? Remember it was you and Daddy and me having lunch? “I guess that’s not an earthquake,” you said. “I guess you’re shaking the table?”

  That’s when it must have happened. A watch on a dresser, a small thing like that—it must have been shaken right off, onto the floor.

  And how would Maidy know? Maidy at the doctor’s office? All those years on a psychiatrist’s couch and suddenly the couch is moving.

  Good God, she is on that couch when the big one hits.

  Maidy didn’t tell you, but you know what her doctor said? When she sprang from the couch and said, “My God, was that an earthquake?”

  The doctor said this: “Did it feel like an earthquake to you?”

  I think we are agreed, you have to look on the light side.

  So that’s when I think it must have happened. Not that it matters to me. Maidy is the one who wants to know. She thinks she has it coming, being the older daughter. Although where was the older daughter when it happened? Which daughter was it that found you?

  When Maidy started asking about your watch, I felt I had to say it. I said, “With the body barely cold?”

  Maidy said the body is not the person, that the essence is the person, and that the essence leaves the body behind it, along with the body’s possessions—for example, its watch?

  “Time flies,” I said. “Like an arrow.

  “Fruit flies,” I said, and Maidy said, “What?”

  “Fruit flies,” I said again. “Fruit flies like a banana.”

  That’s how easy it is to play a joke on Maidy.

  Remember how easy?

  Now Maidy thinks I took your watch. She thinks because I got there first, my first thought was to take it. Maidy keeps asking, “Who took Mama’s watch?” She says, “Did you take Mama’s watch?”

  In the Cemetery

  Where Al Jolson Is Buried

  “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

  I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

  The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

  “Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

  I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your Friends”? That Paul Anka did it, too, I said. Does “You’re Having Our Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

  “What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

  Oh, yes.

  For her I would always have something else.

  “Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons.”

  “Oh, that’s g
ood,” she said. “A parable.”

  “There’s more about the chimp,” I said. “But it will break your heart.”

  “No, thanks,” she says, and scratches at her mask.

  We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones—a pro by now—she lets hang loose.

  We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It’s the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

  She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.

  “I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada.”

  “That’s how dumb we were,” I say.

  “You could be sisters,” the nurse says.

  So how come, I’ll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?

  They do not ask.

  Two months, and how long is the drive?

  The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death.

  I mean, he died.

  So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through it.