The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (22 page)

I am the only one who seems to like her jokes. She tells them wrong, and I think her way is better. The one about Christa McAuliffe and Donna Rice both going down on the
Challenger
? Chatty told it this way: They both had sex all over Florida.

Chatty is surprised I like her. She says women who have only met her in line at a movie don’t like her. She says she had always acted as if she were God’s Gift, and then it had turned out—she
was
God’s Gift.

Chatty seems content here. She says what is there to rush home to except threatening stacks of third-class mail.

Chatty believes in poltergeists, and I am the only person here who does, too. I believe in it all. Can I tell you about London?—how outside of London, in a manor house run by the National Trust, I saw the ghost of a girl throw the ghost of a ball in an orchard for her little ghost dog? The girl was skipping soundlessly; the dog’s jaws worked but there was no bark to hear. I saw them through an upstairs window, on the pane of which was scratched the date the mistress of the house had jumped. The date was the 1600s, and I knew to look for it from the guidebook to the house. The book said nothing about a ghost girl and dog.

The hair did not rise on my arms beneath my coat. The ghosts were a bonus and a comfort on the third and final stop of the tour I was on. I had lagged behind the group that had gone on ahead to look at ebonized, gilded armchairs in a dead duke’s bedchamber.

We had stopped first at a cathedral whose famous spire was hidden under a tower of scaffold. The cathedral’s famous choir was in concert in another country, so I bought tapes of their anthems and an evensong service, and breathed musty incense as the hour was marked by carillon. Grazing nearby were sheep descended from those whose wool, the sale of it, had built the cathedral. There were cows in the fields, too. I had just learned what the ancients used for shovels, that the trenches surrounding the site were dug from chalk with the shoulder blades of cattle.

The guidebook said that the mistress of the house had scratched the date in the window with the diamond in her ring. This is something I have always wanted to do—scratch on glass with a diamond.

A heavy fog had opened and then filled itself in. I wanted to stay at the window of that house, and never mind the veneered pianofortes and the lacquered candlestands. The girl and her dog were still visible below, keeping to the gravel path inside the court, then pausing for the girl to sit and rest on a weathered goblin-carved bench.

I watched until the girl stood up and led her dog, a kind of spaniel, to the South Gate of the garden. I could see, on the overthrow, the family coat of arms, and then the girl and her dog were gone. I looked up the gardens in the guidebook. There was a view from the South Gate of the formal avenues, the labyrinth of boxwood and yew. Close up, I could see the family motto as well as their coat of arms; translated from the Latin: No man can harm me unpunished.

The girl had not seemed to see me watching, although maybe ghosts know? Without having to turn to look up at you? These ghosts were not the first ghosts I had seen, but they were the first ones I saw that moved, as when the girl, who was dressed in a long white pinafore and short leather lace-up boots, threw the ball and her spaniel dog let it bounce on the ground before he jumped up to catch it in the air.

The ghosts I had seen before were at Stonehenge. They were the ghosts of roads—the long pairs of parallel lines leading up to the site, barely visible in the sod of surrounding fields. The roads of prehistory—dents now like the tracks a vacuum cleaner leaves in thick carpet. They made me think of American baseball fields and of the men who mow them daily, criss-crossing the green in different patterns every day, and of how—if the home team won—the men would repeat the pattern they had mowed the winning day.

On the bus on the way to our third and final stop, there was the cicada sound of automatic cameras on rewind.

And then the ghosts. And the stopped clocks. Stopped at the moment the duke had died.

The watch I lost the day we met was a cheap watch with twelve dots of radium green for the numbers, but with none of the stuff painted on the hands. Knowing this did not keep me from looking in the dark at my arm, where what I could see was my watch but not the time.

I’m glad for the poltergeist here, the one that unscrews lightbulbs in the lamps, that leaves them loose in their sockets.

One day I asked the gardener what had gone wrong with my tulips. The last time I planted tulips (I am going back years here), they had bloomed right out of the ground—they had bloomed without stems, and had looked like ground cover. The gardener said the problem was low self-esteem. Then he laughed at my expression and said the bulbs had been confused, they must not have been planted deep enough and so had gotten warm, then cold, then warm again, until finally, confused, they had given up and bloomed.

I didn’t tell the gardener that I had planted them half as deep as recommended to save them the work of pushing up through all that dirt. It seems that there is a lesson here, staring me in the face. I told you about the tulips to tell you something ordinary. The way, watching a movie, you find you want to scream, “Doesn’t anyone eat or sleep in this film?”

All I remember of church when I was a child is a part of a sermon about the ordinary. The title of the sermon was “The Blessing of Dailiness,” and had to do with why we should thank God for our toothbrush in the morning. We should thank God that each day must begin with an ordinary ritual, and not go immediately into crisis. It’s a time-honored fact that after a close call, we all embrace the ordinary. But that is because it has become miraculous. Or
we
have—alive to see it.

In England, in another century, the “ordinary” was a clergyman appointed to prepare criminals for the death penalty. The clergyman would wind up his day in a house whose every fixture and appointment sprang from, and paid homage to, a politer way of living. How did he prepare them, the criminals, do you think?

You know, I often feel the effect of a place only after I leave it.

England!

Outside of London, a surprise I got was: the site was roped off. You had to view the site like an exhibit in a museum. It made me give up to learn that until a few years ago, you could hire a man in the village to chip off pieces of Stonehenge for you, to keep as souvenirs.

The guide gave us twenty minutes. Those of us on the tour found out that you cannot walk the circumference of the site and return to the bus in twenty minutes. You could walk the roped path, mud through the sheep-cropped grass, until the anxiety of being late and missing the bus turned you back around. At a point on the path, I held out my arm and cupped my hand so that it looked as though I was holding the site in my hand.

The highway you drive in on is very close to the monument. It is possible to pull over onto the shoulder and lean out a window and take a picture without leaving the car. I watched people do that. It was jarring, like finding the rope-laden stanchions holding us back.

I have seen things my mother never saw.

I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.

In a locked metal box I took when my mother died, there is a button she would pin to her jacket on the days she led tours as a docent at the museum. “Art Has Drawing Power”—she never got tired of it.

My mother took me to the art museum once on a day she worked as a guide. I followed her on her rounds; it was a sunny day when few people wanted to be inside. I tagged along with a couple of stragglers who insisted they be given a tour.

Her remarks that day were perfunctory. I suspected her of cutting back the usual presentation. And then it became obvious. Who was there for her to impress? She showed us into the Seventeenth-Century Gallery. She motioned toward the portraits mounted on darkened walls, and said, “Dutch. Seventeenth century.”

She was going to lead us into another wing!

But I had studied in secret to surprise her. I got the attention of the visitors, and before my mother could usher them out, I offered up the history of Protestant Baroque. How I loved what I had memorized—with neither Catholic churches to embellish with religious images, nor a court to foot the bill for grandiose art, with the Calvinist edict not to corrupt God’s majesty with fantasy, “So it was to the objects in the world around him that the Dutch painter turned,” I intoned.

Apple-polishing toady.

“You’re in my way,” my mother said through her teeth when I came to the end of my speech.

The button I wore at the time said, “You Look the Part.”

Warren rides a bike to the dining hall wearing a T-shirt that has printed on it, “One Less Car.” He got it in town at the place whose best-selling T-shirt in summer says, “So Many Tourists, So Few Bullets.” Tourists are the ones who invariably snap them up.

Summer slows us down. Does it slow you down, too? I like to close a book I’ve been reading on the porch and picture you swimming in your backyard pool. I see you swimming alone, with no one waiting to wrap you in a robe when you climb out. This letter is a robe I hold out to you.

The article didn’t say if you swam before or after you work. Wouldn’t the chlorine bother you if you swam before you painted? But maybe you have that new filtration system, the one that uses ions. I don’t feel like I’ve been in a pool unless I come out with eyes red and stinging.

I told you I never had a pool, but that gives the wrong impression. My best friend was a champion swimmer. We wanted to be wet, and every weekday we were. Even after a shower, our skin smelled chlorinated. With a strainer on the end of a stick, we would flip the turtles, moles, and frogs from out of our neighbors’ pools. The builder of these pools had since gone out of business, and no longer honored his service contracts. Sometimes we would have missed a frog from the time before. Trapped in the filter, floating in chlorine, the frog would bleach out white. Green or white, the frogs’ eyes were open as we sailed them over fences into other people’s yards.

Warren caught me on the porch with a catalog of your work. He leaned over my shoulder and said, “What does he get for a painting like that?”

I didn’t answer, and he practiced the trick he swears he can do where you flex your arm when a mosquito lights on it so the mosquito can’t detach itself until the sheer force of your blood pressure makes the mosquito explode. He has not succeeded yet, though earlier I saw him rid Little Egypt of a hornet, luring it out with a dead fly placed on the offered straw of a broom. When proud of himself, he chants tongue twisters for us. He made up “Shoes and socks shock Chatty.” Sometimes when I pass his door at night, I can hear from behind it the rapid refrains of “sifted thistles” and “mixed biscuits.”

Last night I was in the library waiting to go in to dinner. I shifted my legs away from Warren, and snagged my stockings on the wicker chair. As though it had been his fault, I shot Warren a sour look, so he went on to dinner without me. I opened the book in whose margins he had scribbled, “How foolish we were to fear loneliness!” and next to a particularly Latinate passage, “Oh, get off your stilts.”

Dinner was one of those times when the past gets a good going-over. Chatty and Warren and Karen all have access to their pasts. Does it matter that I can’t remember if the living room couch I built a fort behind was black or tweed or plaid? Or if something I think I did turns out to be in
Jane Eyre
? So much of the time, what I came away with from a day was the shape of my mother’s barrette, and not what she said to me. They were always made of tortoiseshell; some of them were oval, some were square. The barrettes were large, and held a low ponytail. It is the easiest way to keep hair out of your face, but I won’t do it—it makes me look too much like her. Warren has a heart-shaped island, and I have a heart-shaped face. Karen has the face I would want if I could choose, but maybe you would say that the unconventional face is the one you would rather paint? Forget about her—just keep thinking about me.

Didn’t you think it was odd to find raisins in your “fresh” fruit salad?

When I was in school, I often got sick from the fear of classes. I fought off the feeling by keeping a fistful of raisins with me. Before going into a class, I would shake part of a box of raisins into my hand, and close my fingers tight around them. Steadily, throughout the hour of class, I would take a single raisin—now warm and plump with sweat—and slip it into my mouth when the teacher couldn’t see. I never chewed the raisins. I would swallow each one as a hedge against the nausea, and so get through each class. I needed the most raisins in math, the fewest in English. I kept this up until I finished junior high, just as, years later, I swallowed pills, tranquilizers, to get me through a day, no longer staving off nausea but a feeling of approaching doom. For me, raisins are still so completely pharmacological that I’m surprised when I see them in grocery stores, in cellophane-wrapped “lunchbox” packages of six.