The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2 page)

From such a life comes work that is consonant with what is greatest, what is most inspiring and transportative about the history of literature over the course of the last few centuries. Hempel, I’d argue, knows as much as anyone since Kafka about the tendency of human beings to do much better at dreaming than living. How to explain where these stories come from, short of prying open the writer? If it were Hempel herself trying to answer the question, she would avoid reply, and would come up instead with some howlingly funny line to deflect away the sad fact that some questions are simply unanswerable. The best we can do is to try to keep on living and to take pleasure where it is available, especially, for example, in the pleasure of language. You are about to participate in that particular pleasure, richly.

It’s all about the sentences.

—Rick Moody

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.

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 each 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.