The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (14 page)

In the kitchen, I happened onto a sort of “You think
that’s
bad” contest. “Him?” a woman said. “The only book he ever read was the first chapter of
Iacocca.
”

In a little while it was just Lee and me and Jean and Mrs. Lawton. Jean was talking about Larry again, and looking the worse for it. “I pictured us stewing apples at Christmas, all that cozy Currier and Ives shit…all that time thinking, What we have—love sometimes passes for it, when I should have been thinking, Love passes.”

Mrs. Lawton told Jean to tell Lee and me the last thing Larry had said before he left, and Jean said that his last words to her had been, “Everything I did with you was love.”

“That was awfully sweet of that fucking idiot to say,” Lee said.

That cracked Jean up, and then she seemed to think of something that cracked her up more. What she thought of, she shared with the three of us, and I ran straight to the bathroom and wrote down what she said; I wanted to be able to pass it along.

Jean was trying to describe what she felt it would be like to be married to Larry; she said it would be like staying in a bad hotel and being forced to send postcards of it to your friends with arrows pointing to “my room.”

I’m glad I wrote that down.

When I came back into Mrs. Lawton’s living room, the women had recovered. Lee’s mascara had smeared. Everyone turned to me.

“What kind of luck are you having, Lee’s friend?” This from Jean.

It came back to me why the Club had given Jean this party, and I felt ashamed for my answer. But I told Jean the truth.

“I met someone,” I said. “I’m happy. I’m probably in love.”

Jean didn’t know me, and Mrs. Lawton didn’t know me, but that didn’t stop them from shrieking with glee. Mrs. Lawton asked how we met. I told an unexceptional story.

“And he called you?” Jean said.

“He called me that night,” I said.

“Tell me everything,” Jean said, moving closer. “Start from ring-ring-ring.”

To those of you who missed your connecting flights out of O’Hare, I offer my deepest apology.

What they did I had no way of knowing they would do because the last time this happened it was handled without the fuss. The last time it happened it affected no one else—I just walked off the plane before the stewardess locked the door, and my luggage, not me, was what reached my destination.

Did I know when I walked off Flight 841 that my suitcase would have to be pulled from the plane, a black fabric suitcase the handler had to find amidst the hundreds of other bags, and all of you passengers waiting?

And how about the pilot checking the toilets for a bomb, a stewardess doing likewise in the overhead compartment above what was, for maybe two minutes, my seat—6C.

I’m right about this—it didn’t used to be this way. The agents on the ground, the ones who check you in, they used to see you coming off the plane and they knew what it meant and they knew you were not to blame and the looks that they gave you said, Better luck next time, and We hope you try again.

Now they are angry. The looks and accusations—making hundreds of passengers late!

That is when I told them that my husband was killed in a plane crash, the one in Tenerife.

There is precedent here for a lie of this kind, or rather, a lie at this time. On a talk show once, a comic told the story: how he boarded a plane to make a headline date in Vegas, but the plane that he boarded was a plane bound for Pittsburgh. When our comic finds out, the plane has begun its slow roll into position.

This man, this comic, was able to persuade the crew to return the plane to the gate. And how did he avoid the collective wrath of the passengers? When the plane came to a stop and the walkway was stretched to the door, the comic stood up and summoned a tone of voice. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I won’t take this kind of treatment from an airline!”

The comic, looking indignant, then walked off the plane.

But you, the passengers of Flight 841, I want you to know the truth.

Starting with 6B, my would-be white-knuckle neighbor, buckling tight your seat belt as if it makes any goddamned difference. I mean—Sir, let me ask you a question: Do the newspapers ever say, “Whereas the survivors—the list follows—are those who buckled their seat belts”?

I want to take you, the passengers whom I have inconvenienced, into my confidence. Because if you are like me, you know that some of us are not the world, some of us are not the children, some of us will not help make a brighter day. Some of us are the silent sufferers of a noisy disease. And that is all I have to say about fear.

But! By making yourself scarce at the nation’s airports, by deciding for the grounded comfort of a train, you will find yourself traveling through the City of Spires and the cities of steel, the country’s richest pasture land and the Santa Fe Trail, across the Purgatoire River near the Sangre de Cristo range—just big sky and small talk and rhyming to yourself from a catalog of sights: pale deer at dawn on the edge of a lawn.

Past low pink tamarisk and Ponderosa pine, and Shoemaker Canyon lined with cottonwood trees that are home to wild turkeys beside the narrow Mora River.

Past the Forked Lightning Ranch that was once Greer Garson’s home near the Sandia (“Watermelon”) Mountains—they turn bright red at sunset and the trees on the side look like seeds.

Do I sound as if I work for the railroad?

The tragedy of the settlers on Starvation Peak—the Kneeling Nuns, a formation of rock.

It cost me some money to see this. You walk off a plane and even
think
about getting a refund! You get one—one—one trip for the price of two.

A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea.

You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.

On the nicer side of not a nice street, between God Bless the Cheerful Giver and his dog, and There But for the Grace of God Go I and his dog, a wino engaged me in the following Q and A:

Miss, am I bleeding?

Yes, yes you are.

Where?

From the nose.

And
the mouth?

No.

Just the nose?

Yes.

I wonder how that happened.

Everything you can think of is going on here. Plus things that you can’t think of, too. Those things are going on in groups. Men who have sex with vacuum cleaners—these men are now outpatients, in therapy down the block.

Today, when a blind man walked into the bank, we handed him along to the front of the line where he ordered a BLT.

A boy on a tricycle pedals past a mother and son. “Why can’t
you
ride a tricycle?” the mother says to her son. “That boy is younger than you! Why can’t you even go to Harvard!”

Under a streetlight, a man and woman are talking. The man says he feels sure that the woman is going to shoot him and that he can’t help but wonder what caliber she has chosen.

Women who live alone in fear of intruders call the local precinct for advice. “Keep your doorknobs highly polished,” an officer tells them. “When someone breaks in, we can get clear prints.”

The neighborhood drug dealer kicks out his wife. He moves in a girlfriend and the wife finds out. The wife lets herself back into the house and steals a hundred thousand dollars that the drug dealer can’t report missing. The drug dealer’s wife goes to India, where she sends her husband a cable: “The people here are poor so I gave them all your money.”

On the occasion of a star athlete’s accidental overdose, a TV reporter takes his questions to the street. “What do you learn from this?” he asks the truant boys in a vacant lot. “What does it tell you that a young athlete takes this drug and dies?”

The boys fight for the microphone until one of them grabs it away. He says, “Man, you have got to build
up
to that dose.”

A man stops into a bar and rests his shopping bag on a stool. He waves the bartender over to see where inside the bag is the head of a man.

“Auction at the old wax museum,” the man says. “All anyone wanted was Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King. I picked up Richard Speck here for next to nothing.”

A beautiful familiar woman is escorted from a nightclub. A visiting Southern girl says, “S’cuse me, ma’am, but aren’t you a friend of my mama’s back in Sumner?” “I’m Elizabeth Taylor,” the woman says, “and fuck you.”

A famous artist is approached by a student. “You don’t remember me,” the student says correctly, “but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, ‘Photography is death.’ After that,” says the student, “I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life.”

“Leave me alone,” says the artist. “Photography is life.”

A man falls to the sidewalk in what looks to be an epileptic fit. A well-dressed woman throws her weight against a parking sign. When it bends to the ground, she forces a corner of the “Tow-away Zone” into the seizing man’s mouth. “This way,” she says, “he won’t bite his tongue.”

Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. “Don’t report a rape,” the women are told. “Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn’t do anything with it—cops figure that guy is sick.”

I don’t know what to say about this.
I
am as cut off from meaning and completion as all of these crippled people.

These are the things that go on around here. After a while these things add up to enough weight to wear a person down. I am wearing down.

Every time you see a beautiful woman,
someone
is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want—these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind.

They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, “How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?”

The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, “Will they go to good homes?” And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, “How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?”

But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.

Ten candles in a fish stick tell you it’s Gully’s birthday. The birthday girl is the center of attention; she squints into the popping flash cubes. The black cat seems to know every smooth cat pose there is. She is burning for discovery in front of the camera.

Gully belongs to Mrs. Carlin. Mrs. Carlin has had her since the cat was six weeks old and slept on the stove, curled inside a saucepan warmed by the pilot light. Mrs. Carlin has observed every one of Gully’s birthdays, wrapping the blue felt mice filled with catnip, wrapping the selection of frozen entrees from Mrs. Paul’s, and photographing the birthday girl with her guests.

This year, Gully’s guests include the Patterson boys, Pierson and Bret, fourteen and ten, and their cat, Bert. Though it would be more accurate to say that Mrs. Carlin and Gully are the
boys’
guests, as the party is being held in the Patterson home.

Mrs. Carlin is staying with the boys for the week that their parents are in an eastern city for Mr. Patterson’s annual business conference. It is a condition of Mrs. Carlin’s employment that Gully come with her. She had explained to Mrs. Patterson that one time a cat-sitter came to feed Gully, “and Gully—there is no other word for it—screamed.”

After she serves Gully’s birthday cake, Mrs. Carlin brings the boys their dinner. The boys examine their plates with suspicion, and then with disbelief.

Between the two halves of the sesame seed bun, where there should have been catsup on a hamburger, rare, the boys see what looks like catsup on a cassette tape. It is actually tomato sauce on a slice of sautéed eggplant.

“Didn’t our mother tell you what we eat?” says Pierson, the older boy.

“We eat hamburgers,” says Bret. “We like hamburgers and smashed potatoes.”

Mrs. Carlin tells them that
she
is making the rules now. She says, “Meat’s no treat for those you eat.”

She waits to let this sink in. “While I am looking after you,” she tells the boys, “we will eat nothing with parents.”

The boys look at each other so that Mrs. Carlin will see the look. They wish that Scooter were still alive to eat from their plates beneath the table.

In Alaska,
begins the voice,
wild gray wolves are flushed from hiding and shot with rifles from low-flying planes.

Mrs. Carlin loses her thought. She excuses herself from the table and returns a moment later with a photograph album from her suitcase.

“Duncan’s parties were always more lively,” Mrs. Carlin tells the boys.

Duncan, asleep in another room, is her elderly long-haired dachshund, his muzzle gone white, a perfect widow’s peak in the center of his narrow forehead. Duncan was another condition of Mrs. Carlin’s employment.

Through the years, the photos show the dachshund born of a Christmas litter poised on a silver platter, an apple held slack in his mouth; Duncan, a hand-knit sweater covering his rump, heading down a snow-covered hill on a toboggan; Duncan grinning at his “cake” of steak tartare, his guests straining their leads to reach their party favor chew-toys.

Mrs. Carlin thinks that reminiscing may be why the voice starts up again. This time what she hears is:
A veal calf cramped in a pen in Montana is forced to sleep on its feet.

Mrs. Carlin asks the boys if they would mind eating alone. She goes to her room and takes two aspirin.

The boys look at Gully, still bent over her fish. Pierson spanks her lightly on the back; her body twitches, but the cat does not leave her dish.

“Takes a smacking and keeps on snacking,” Pierson says.

Mrs. Carlin doesn’t come out of her room until it’s bedtime for the boys.

“We can have Ovaltine,” says Bret. But Mrs. Carlin pours them glasses of plain milk and gives them each a tablespoon of peanut butter to go with it.

“It stimulates your dreams,” is what she tells them and promises a trip to the aquarium if they are good.

In their own comfortable room, in the Pattersons’ soft bed, Gully and Duncan take their cat and dog places—Gully at the head, and Duncan at the foot of the bed. During the night, when Duncan stretches and moves to the other side, Mrs. Carlin’s feet seek the warm place where he had lain.

She angles her face on a plane with the cat’s and breathes in the air that Gully breathes out—air that she thought would be warm but which is cool.

In a research lab in eastern Pennsylvania, a hole is drilled in the head of a young macaque…

Mrs. Carlin draws Gully closer. She scratches the cat’s stomach, then strokes the sleek flank that shines like a seal. She strokes the cat’s fur for the cat’s pleasure, then for her own, and back, and forth, until the pleasures run together and the two of them sleep through the night.

“The other sitters never took us on a field trip,” says Bret.

Mrs. Carlin has taken the boys to the aquarium. The boys are warming up to her—she keeps them entertained. She tells them what she knows about the animal kingdom—that twenty newborn possums will fit in a teaspoon, that the female lynx automatically becomes infertile when the number of snowshoe hares decreases. From Mrs. Carlin the boys have learned that emperor penguins sometimes ride an ice floe as far north as Rio!

That morning, Pierson complained of a stuffy head. Mrs. Carlin had told him it was sleeping with a pillow over his face that had done it. She told him what he had was called a “turtle headache,” and Pierson had asked her if everything had to be animals.

Mrs. Carlin leads the boys to her favorite part of the aquarium. It is a darkened hall with a green-lit tank that circles the room. You stand in the center, in the hole of the doughnut, and turn to watch the hundreds of ocean fish swim around you. It is called the Roundabout, and it leaves you dizzy and reaching for the glass if you turn around too many times.

The boys study the reference cards with pictures of the fish. They claim to be able to match the following in the tank: the stingray, of course, plus yellowtail, striped bass, red snapper, tarpon, and the seven-gill shark.

Always there are those few fish who swim against the tide. These are the ones that Mrs. Carlin follows. For her, the darkness and water and steady current of silent fins is immeasurably soothing. She gives herself over to the whirling sensation which, she believes, leaves her open to what she cannot control when it suddenly comes to her what day it is.

In North Atlantic waters off the Faroe Islands, it is the day of “Grindabod,” the return of the pilot whales, when fishing boats herd the whales by hundreds toward the shore. There, fishermen swing grappling hooks into the whales’ flesh to ensure that the others will ignore their own safety; a whale will not abandon an injured mate.

Knives are drawn, and cleave through to the spinal cord. The whales thrash once more; in a sea of blood, they snap their own necks.

A handkerchief held to her mouth, Mrs. Carlin urges the boys out of the Roundabout.

During the ride home, the boys poke each other and make fun of their teachers. They whine at Mrs. Carlin till she stops the car for ice cream. They eat it in the car, being quiet long enough to look out the windows and see lightning bugs spark the blue dusk.

“In South America,” says Mrs. Carlin, a tremor in her voice, “the women weave fireflies in their hair.”

And then one of the lightning bugs flies into the windshield. Mrs. Carlin has to sit up straight and lift her chin to see above the glowing smear that streaks her line of vision like a comet.

“Come here, Bert,” says Bret. “Little Bert-Bert, little trout, little salmon.”

Mrs. Carlin stands listening in the open doorway of Bret’s bedroom, where he is supposed to be dressing for school. He has lifted one side of his quilt and is calling for the cat under the bed.

“Where’s that little naughty-pants? That furry soft furry darn thing?”

Bert stays under the bed.

Bret gives up, then sees Mrs. Carlin and knows that she has heard his string of endearments.

He tries to recover, says, “Dad calls him ‘the cockroach.’”

His look suggests that someone else has overheard him like this and will not let him forget it—his brother, Mrs. Carlin feels sure.

The night before, while the three of them watched television, Pierson had made fun of
her
when her eyes filled with tears during a cat food commercial. The folks at Purina see me coming, was all that she could say as, privately, she was made aware that
at an animal shelter in Oklahoma, an attendant did not clean the feces off the bowl that he used to scoop dog food from a sack.

Mrs. Carlin is not ashamed of what she has come to call “the Tender Vittles emotion.” And she does not want Bret to be ashamed of showing affection. So she asks if he will help her groom Duncan.

Duncan lies across a pillow on Mrs. Carlin’s bed; he doesn’t move when Bret drags the brush across his back. When Bret brushes harder, Duncan closes his eyes.

“Takes a bruising and keeps on snoozing,” says Bret, proud of the rhyme.

Mrs. Carlin laughs and smooths the dog’s fur. “Takes an adoring and keeps on snoring,” she says, and props Duncan up. She shows Bret how to draw the wire bristles gently down the dog’s hind legs. Then she asks Bret to get Duncan’s pills from the inside pocket of her suitcase.

Duncan takes lanoxin for his rackety old heart. Mrs. Carlin examines the small plastic bottle and—the Tender Vittles emotion—thinks how unbearably dear it is that her pet’s medication is labeled “Duncan Carlin.”

Bret watches Mrs. Carlin stroke the dog’s white throat to help get the pill down. He says, “I wish Scooter could have lived forever.”

Mrs. Carlin looks up quickly. She pictures a plastic bottle labeled “Scooter Patterson.”

She says something that is meant to be of comfort. She says, “Try to remember that God is rubbing Scooter’s tummy.”

She is surprised when Bret starts to laugh.

In her mind, Mrs. Carlin says to Duncan and Gully: You have made my happiness for thirteen years. Gully and the three cats before her, Duncan and the two pups before him—she owes them her life. It is for them she writes checks and congressmen to try to protect the ones she will never know.

Mrs. Carlin gets the boys off to school, then stands distracted on the Pattersons’ front lawn. She walks slowly to the mailbox that is empty of mail. Then she follows the gravel drive lined with ice plants back to the house, just missing the spot where a neighborhood dog has done his business.

Mrs. Carlin slips a section from the morning paper and moves to clean up the mess. But it proves, up close, to be a cluster of whorled bronze snails, glistening with secretion, stuck to curled dead leaves.

Mrs. Carlin carries the newspaper into the house and trades it for the car keys.

She drives with one finger on the wheel at six o’clock—what the Patterson boys call “the accident-prone grip.” She is tired, and tired of the voices that are sometimes visions—mar-mosets whose eyelids are sewn shut with thick waxed thread. Mrs. Carlin is tired of knowing when a rabbit is blinded to improve the scouring power of a popular oven cleaner.

The aquarium hasn’t opened by the time Mrs. Carlin gets there, so she waits in the car.

She is tired of the voices. She says
no
to the voices. It occurs to Mrs. Carlin that the voices take a no-ing and keep on going.

She is the first visitor of the day. When the aquarium is open, Mrs. Carlin has the Roundabout to herself.

The fish—do they never rest?—are streaming behind the glass. First, Mrs. Carlin spots the single hump-backed bluefish. From the shadow of a stingray swims a pair of sand tiger sharks.

She pivots just fast enough to track a school of amberjack the circumference of the tank. Then she plays a game with herself. She makes herself see the fish frozen in resin as in a diorama, feels
herself
the moving figure, the way, when a slow train starts, there is that disconcerting moment when it
could
be the landscape moving and not the train.

Then she lets the resin dissolve, freeing the fish to sluice through kelp and waves of their own kind.

Suddenly there is sound in the room. But not in the room—in Mrs. Carlin’s head. She stands still and concentrates on what she seems to hear:
An infant gorilla, orphaned in Zimbabwe, makes a sound in the night like “Woooo, Woooo.”

Mrs. Carlin leans against the glass tank for balance. They should limit your time in the Roundabout, she thinks. They should pull you out after so many minutes the way they do in a sauna.

And then she has a vision, clear as if she were there—a Korean family looking for a picnic site. At a shaded clearing in a bamboo forest a mat is spread, a fire built up. The family’s dog, a handsome blond shepherd, is called by his master and gleefully runs to the call.

Mrs. Carlin sees the owner slip a noose around its neck. It is “Bok Day” in South Korea, “Land of the Morning Calm.”

It is the picnic of death that Mrs. Carlin attends.

It takes two of this family to tug the dog to a height above the flames. The dog will be hung from a tree to strangle slowly as its fur singes over the fire. The point of slow death is to tenderize the meat.