The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (21 page)

I would have told you about how, when it was time for me to leave, she asked me with her hands to stay, but it was enough that you said, “I envy you your gorilla.”

I warn you: Don’t get me started on dogs! Volunteers from the shelter arrive with orphaned dogs to walk. Karen has become loquacious, but only when a dog is present. On the days the dogs come, Karen sings the same song, only changing the words to fit each newcomer: “Sad-eyed Mongrel (Mastiff, Shepherd) of the Lowlands.”

Since the dogs began to visit, Karen has been going to chapel. There, although she does not have religion, she lights a candle—“for Saint Bernard,” she says, her only joke.

The dogs from the shelter take a great deal of pleasure in pissing on pine needles and lapping at mud puddles when you volunteer to walk them in the woods behind the pound. We can do this sometimes. Karen has become enamored of the shelter’s mascot, a dog who, because of his age, is unlikely to be adopted. Banker came to visit once, but frightened another guest, so every day that she is allowed, Karen drags a vinyl chair across the concrete floor and positions it in front of Banker’s cage when the weather is too bad for her to take him outside.

In the first flush of companionship, Karen and Banker had rolled in the woods, and Karen, careless in a sleeveless blouse, had found patches of rash from poison ivy crusting into epaulettes on her shoulders.

Sometimes I go with her to the shelter, and that is how I heard about the job that she lost. She said a dove was walking north on Madison Avenue, walking with a limp, when it turned left at 73rd Street and entered Pierre Deux. Karen was on her way to a job interview, but she followed the bird into the store. The bird was hurt, that was clear, so Karen said she wrapped it in a remnant of French challis and took it to the hospital known as the Mayo Clinic for animals. She said she wrote out a check for the bird’s costly treatment, then put it in a cab for Brooklyn where there is a sanctuary for such cases. She took the driver’s number, told him the person at the other end would call her when he arrived.

She said she missed her interview. So did this make her compassionate, Karen asked, or just ambivalent?

Banker had gone from a sit to lying down. The dog’s eyes remained on Karen the entire time. When she finished speaking, he thumped his tail.

“Good boy,” Karen said.

A young woman came over to the pen with a large plastic scoop. She opened Banker’s kennel and removed his dish, filled it with food and put it back in the part of the kennel that was unroofed and open to the air. The woman left to tend the other dogs, and Karen spoke to Banker; she said it was exhausting to always have two jobs—your job, and the job of being able to do your job in the first place.

A blue jay dove into Banker’s bowl and flew off with a kibble from his dinner.

“How do you do both?”

My guess was you worked twice as hard, but I wasn’t the one she asked.

Only Warren can pull her out of a mood. Last night she told us she was going to go look at a litter of puppies. Warren told her there was no such thing as “just looking” at puppies.

“Often you
do
see puppies that just aren’t cute enough,” he said. Then he wondered aloud what kind of puppy did we think Karen could pass up. “Let’s see,” he said in Karen’s voice, “all the internal organs are on the outside? I can live with that.”

“I like golden retrievers,” Karen said.

“You don’t think they’ve kind of got that Stepford thing going?” Warren said.

Warren is pronounced Warn, or Worn.

You know how most of us don’t say things in a memorable way? The way everything sounds already
handled
by everyone else? But Warren says, when he is angry, that he’s as mad as all outdoors. He says do I want to meet him after dinner and chew the rug? He says he can’t always follow the threat of my conversation.

When Chatty sees Warren in her old school dorm, she says she nearly calls out, “Man on the floor!”

I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon balloon.

Sometimes we go into town together. Last time, we got a ride in with the gardener. He had to stop at the Ford dealership to pick up a part for the van, and I followed Warren into the car repair dock. Warren took a cigarette out of his pack, and a uniformed employee said, “No smoking, sir. They don’t let us smoke here.” Warren took out a pack of matches and lit his cigarette. “But
you
can smoke. You’re a customer,” the mechanic said. Warren flicked his used match into the lube bay and looked straight at the guy. “I guess if
I
buy a truck here, I can smoke, too,” the guy said.

That was the day before Warren’s parents came to visit. They were coming from a small town in Texas. I told him I looked forward to meeting them, even though it always seemed that the very things others find charming about your parents—the feyness, the provincialism, the odd takes on everything—are the things that make you want to rustle up a firing squad.

Warren smoked his cigarette, held it low on his lip. At dinner the first night, Chatty had said in my ear that if Jean-Paul Belmondo had not been born, Warren would not have had a personality. She said it was hard not to notice that it was a long way from Belmondo to Warren Moore.

He pulled a folded snapshot from the pocket of his canvas pants. It was an aerial view of a small island. The island was shaped like a heart.

“They came to my island in the spring,” he said, of the last time he’d seen his parents, “when everything was in bloom and I had cleaned up the house. They were supposed to stay a week, but after two days, my mother said they had to go home. She hadn’t liked anything about it,” Warren said, “not the ride on my boat, not even that I had rigged a pot at the end of the pier and dropped the shrimp into boiling water the minute I fished them out of the ocean. I called her back in Texas. I said, ‘Dad was here last week, and he brought your evil twin.’”

The gardener had dropped us at the plant store. Warren had said he wanted to find a book on bulbs. Did he plan to be here to see fall-planted bulbs bloom next spring? The plant store is next door to a shuttered-by-day gay bar called Manhandlers. The owner of the bar also owns the plant store, which is why Warren calls it Planthandlers. He said it made him feel funny when he went in to buy tomatoes, and had to ask the owner for “Big Boys” and “Beefmaster.”

Warren paid for his book. I looked at the back of his hands where intravenous drips had left tiny scars like age spots. We all have them.

The gardener came to fetch us that day toting a paper bag filled with dozens of packs of gum. He handed a couple of packs to each of us. He said it was for the moles in the garden, that we had to chew the gum, then put it down their holes because the moles like the taste and would eat it but couldn’t digest it and it would kill them. He said he was also going to try those plastic pinwheels that you can get at carnivals, that those were supposed to work, too. Vibrations sent into the ground by the pinwheel spinning at the end of the stick.

We left Planthandlers with gum in our mouths. Outside, at the entrance to the greenhouse, a dog licked crumbs of fertilizer off the blade of a shovel.

When he is ready, Warren will return to his heart-shaped island. He says he can’t wait, but he is waiting.

A thing I haven’t told anyone is that
this
place is the place where I feel the way you would feel on a heart-shaped island, glad to open my eyes from dreams of the place I live where the boys next door are dim malevolent twins who ride their bicycles onto my lawn and say, when I go out to shoo them away, “We know you from somewhere.” “You know me from right here,” is what I tell them, and go back inside.

Tumble home. It’s a shipbuilding term I learned from Warren. It’s the place on a ship that is, if I understand him, the widest part of the bow before it narrows to cut through water—it is the point where the water parts and goes to one side of the ship or the other. To me, the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you.

I have walked barefoot on floors so badly cleaned I had to brush off my feet before sliding them between the sheets at night. Floors cleaned not at all is what I mean, because the cleaning was left to me.

Here it’s not my job so the floors are clean. Our rooms, Chatty says, are the same as years before. There are no college pennants tacked up on the walls, no posters of rock stars, either. Just serviceable furniture—a maple chest and desk, a single bed refreshed by the linen service weekly, and hangers that cannot be removed from the closet, a hotel touch. At the end of each hall is a kitchenette with baskets of apples and oranges, and packets of hot chocolate mix.

We can personalize the rooms to the extent we care to. Chatty hung curtains of crocheted lace, but I like a room that doesn’t give a person away. Though I do display a collage I made. It is a photograph of a Great Dane looking at his leg where I strapped on a photo of a Timex to his wrist. The title of this piece is “Watchdog Watching.” We’re all artists here.

Would it make you uneasy to know that I have seen the inside of your house? Anyone who bought that magazine did. It surprised me. I would have guessed you lived in spare rooms done in stinging whites and grays. But there you were by a cozy fire in a house more lodge than stage. And in the studio where you paint: orderly racks of canvases, the wood-burning stove to heat the place. But is it a good idea to have an ax in the room where you work?

And a swimming pool in the backyard. I never had a swimming pool; I swam in a willow-ringed pond. My favorite thing was staying in the longest when a thunderstorm struck (
She is the smallest child who swings the highest
my mother once wrote in a letter to my father). What can I say about myself today? That I am the last to close a window when it rains.

I am writing now beside an open window in Little Egypt. When this was school, Chatty said, they called the smoker Little Egypt because of all the Camels in it. They blew their smoke out the window that overlooks the circular drive and from which we can see everyone arrive and leave.

Little Egypt is to the second floor what the Hostility Suite is to the first floor, only gamier. I can write to you here on an old school desk, the kind that is desktop and chair in one. There is a vending machine Chatty swears is the same one whose lineup the girls used to memorize when they were snowed in and bored. She said nobody ever ate the Good & Plentys because that is what they called the Trustees, the monied donors of laboratory and pool.

There is a television in here now. I’ll watch whatever is on, such as the swimsuit special that I watched with Warren. It was actually about the
making
of the special, and it intercut footage of the models arching their backs in the surf with segments in which the photographer described what he had had to do to get that shot. Warren became irritated by the photographer’s intrusion. He said it was like being a teenager and trying to masturbate to
Petticoat Junction,
moaning, “Betty Jo, Billie Jo, Bobbie Jo…” and all of a sudden there’s—
Uncle
Joe!

My watching whatever Warren is watching is overcompensation for Chatty telling Warren what I said about his habits—that he watches too much, and what he watches is dumb. I have done this all my life, insisting, when caught out, that, “I
do
want to be your partner, and I
like
your ideas, and let’s do
many more
projects together.” Karen calls this syndrome “Tour of the Lodge.” Her family bought an old fishing lodge on a scenic lake in Maine. It had been shut down for many years before they cleaned the place up and moved in. Karen said she would be riding her bike in the nearby hills and meet people on vacation who would stop their cars and ask her if the old fishing lodge was still open. No, Karen would say, the place has been shut down for years. And the disappointed travelers would begin to reminisce about the happy times there when the family was together, and Karen would wind up saying, The truth is
we
bought the fishing lodge, and if you’ve got the time, why don’t you come on over and take a walk through. And then forfeit half a day to give nostalgic strangers a tour of the lodge.

I have left this place only one other time, to go into town with Chatty. She took me into the jewelry store—accessories. I usually wear silver (I did the day we met, you might recall), but the earrings Chatty was urging me to buy were gold domes embedded with small fake jewels.

“They look like a gift from someone who likes me but doesn’t know me very well,” I said.

“Like when you see men in pink sweaters,” Chatty said.

I turned the counter mirror, put the earrings on, hooked my hair behind my ears.

“What would I wear them with?” I asked Chatty. “They don’t go with anything I own.”

“Then you’ll have to start life anew,” Chatty said.

I think you would like Chatty, though she can be a strong cup of tea. She has hit the change of life, and told me about a niece’s wedding where she had to step back from the carved-ice swan—she thought she was going to melt it. She is given to asking leading questions (“How many feet do
you
use when you drive?”) and making pronouncements with which you cannot argue: “I would rather buy a lot of presents for ten dollars each than a few for a hundred dollars that
look
like they cost ten.”