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Authors: Amy Hempel and Rick Moody

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BOOK: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
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I began to take walks in the park. In the park, I saw a dog try to eat his own shadow, and another dog—I am sure of it—was herding a stand of elms. I stopped telling people how handsome their dogs were; too many times what they said was, “You want him?”

When the weather got nicer, I stayed home to sit for hours.

I had accidents. Then I had bigger ones. But the part that hurt was never the part that got hurt.

The dreams came back and back until they were just—again. I wished that things would stay out of sight the way they did in mountain lakes. In one that I know, the water is so cold, gas can’t form to bring a corpse to the surface. Although you would not want to think about the bottom of the lake, what you can say about it is—the dead stay down.

Around that time I talked to Dr. Diamond.

The point that he wanted to make was this: that conception was not like walking in front of traffic. No matter how badly timed, it was, he said, an affirmation of life.

“You have to believe me here,” he said. “Do you see that this is true? Do you know this about yourself?”

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

“You do and you
do,
” he said.

I remembered when another doctor made the news. A young retarded boy had found his father’s gun, and while the family slept, he shot them all in bed. The police asked the boy what he had done. But the boy went mute. He told them nothing. Then they called in the doctor.

“We know
you
didn’t do it,” the doctor said to the boy, “but tell me, did the
gun
do it?”

And yes, the boy was eager to tell him just what that gun had done.

I wanted the same out, and Dr. Diamond wouldn’t let me have it.

“Dr. Diamond,” I said, “I am giving up.”

“Now you are ready to begin,” he said.

I thought of Andean alpaca because that was what I planned to work up next. The feel of that yarn was not the only wonder—there was also the name of it: Alpaquita Superfina.

Dr. Diamond was right.

I was ready to begin.

Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.

Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat.

 

Dr. Diamond answered the door. He said Dale Anne had run to the store. He was leaving, too, flying to a conference back East. The baby was asleep, he said, I should make myself at home.

I left my bag of knitting in the hall and went into Dale Anne’s kitchen. It had been a year. I could have looked in on the baby. Instead, I washed the dishes that were soaking in the sink. The scouring pad was steel wool waiting for knitting needles.

The kitchen was filled with specialized utensils. When Dale Anne couldn’t sleep she watched TV, and that’s where the stuff was advertised. She had a thing to core tomatoes—it was called a Tomato Shark—and a metal spaghetti wheel for measuring out spaghetti. She had plastic melon-ballers and a push-in device that turned ordinary cake into ladyfingers.

I found pasta primavera in the refrigerator. My fingers wanted to knit the cold linguini, laying precisely cabled strands across the oily red peppers and beans.

Dale Anne opened the door.

“Look
out, gal,” she said, and dropped a shopping bag on the counter.

I watched her unload ice cream, potato chips, carbonated drinks, and cake.

“It’s been a long time since I walked into a market and expressed myself,” she said.

She turned to toss me a carton of cigarettes.

“Wait for me in the bedroom,” she said. “
West Side Story
is on.”

I went in and looked at the color set. I heard the blender crushing ice in the kitchen. I adjusted the contrast, then Dale Anne handed me an enormous peach daiquiri. The goddamn thing had a tide factor.

Dale Anne left the room long enough to bring in the take-out chicken. She upended the bag on a plate and picked out a leg and a wing.

“I like my dinner in a bag and my life in a box,” she said, nodding toward the TV.

We watched the end of the movie, then part of a lame detective program. Dale Anne said the show
owed
Nielsen four points, and reached for the
TV Guide.

“Eleven-thirty,” she read. “
The Texas Whiplash Massacre
: Unexpected stop signs were their weapon.”

“Give me that,” I said.

 

Dale Anne said there was supposed to be a comet. She said we could probably see it if we watched from the living room. Just to be sure, we pushed the couch up close to the window. With the lights off, we could see everything without it seeing us. Although both of us had quit, we smoked at either end of the couch.

“Save my place,” Dale Anne said.

She had the baby in her arms when she came back in. I looked at the sleeping child and thought, Mercy, Land Sakes, Lordy Me. As though I had aged fifty years. For just a moment then I wanted nothing that I had and everything I did not.

“He told his first joke today,” Dale Anne said.

“What do you mean he told a joke?” I said. “I didn’t think they could talk.”

“Well, he didn’t really
tell
a joke—he poured his orange juice over his head, and when I started after him, he said, ‘Raining?’”

“‘Raining?’ That’s what he said? The kid is a genius,” I told Dale Anne. “What Art Linkletter could do with this kid.”

Dale Anne laid him down in the middle of the couch, and we watched him or watched the sky.

 

“What a gyp,” Dale Anne said at dawn.

There had not been a comet. But I did not feel cheated, or even tired. She walked me to the door.

The knitting bag was still in the hall.

“Open it later,” I said. “It’s a sweater for him.”

But Dale Anne had to see it then.

She said the blue one matched his eyes and the camel one matched his hair. The red would make him glow, she said, and then she said, “Help me out.”

Cables had become too easy; three more sweaters had pictures knitted in. They buttoned up the front. Dale Anne held up a parade of yellow ducks.

There were the Fair Isles, too—one in the pattern called Tree of Life, another in the pattern called Hearts.

It was an excess of sweaters—a kind of precaution, a rehearsal against disaster.

Dale Anne looked at the two sweaters still in the bag. “Are you really okay?” she said.

 

The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? “Four,” she will say, “—three,” and years later, “Three,” she will say, “—four.”

It’s the little steps that help. Weather, breakfast, crossing with the light—sometimes it is all the pleasure I can bear to sleep, and know that on a rack in the bath, damp wool is pinned to dry.

Dale Anne thinks she would like to learn to knit. She measures the baby’s crib and I take her over to Ingrid’s. Ingrid steers her away from the baby pastels, even though they are machine-washable. Use a pure wool, Ingrid says. Use wool in a grown-up shade. And don’t boast of your achievements or you’ll be making things for the neighborhood.

On Fair Isle there are only five women left who knit. There is not enough lichen left growing on the island for them to dye their yarn. But knitting machines can’t produce their designs, and they keep on, these women, working the undyed colors of the sheep.

I wait for Dale Anne in the room with the patterns. The songs in these books are like lullabies to me.

K tog rem st.
Knit together remaining stitches.

Cast off loosely.

Going

There is a typo on the hospital menu this morning. They mean, I think, that the pot roast tonight will be served with buttered noodles. But what it says here on my breakfast tray is that the pot roast will be
severed
with buttered noodles.

This is not a word you want to see after flipping your car twice at sixty per and then landing side-up in a ditch.

I did not spin out on a stretch of highway called Blood Alley or Hospital Curve. I lost it on flat dry road—with no other car in sight. Here’s why: In the desert I like to drive through binoculars. What I like about it is that things are two ways at once. Things are far away and close with you still in the same place.

In the ditch, things were also two ways at once. The air was unbelievably hot and my skin was unbelievably cold.

“Son,” the doctor said, “you shouldn’t be alive.”

The impact knocked two days out of my head, but all you can see is the cut on my chin. I total a car and get twenty stitches that keep me from shaving.

It’s a good thing, too, that that is all it was. This hospital place, this clinic—it is not your City of Hope. The instruments don’t come from a first-aid kit, they come from a toolbox. It’s the desert. The walls of this room are not rose-beige or sanitation-plant green. The walls are the color of old chocolate going chalky at the edges.

And there’s a worm smell.

Though I could be mistaken about the smell.

I’m given to olfactory hallucinations. When my parents’ house was burning to the ground, I smelled smoke three states away.

Now I smell worms.

The doctor wants to watch me because I knocked my head. So I get to miss a few days of school. It’s okay with me. I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed. Anyway, the accident was a learning experience.

You
know—pain teaches?

One of the nurses picked it up from there. She was bending over my bed, snatching pebbles of safety glass out of my hair. “What do we learn from this?” she asked.

It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave—and the liar said it really happened—was that once while drinking orange juice, he’d realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar “realizations.”

Is he kidding? I thought.

Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough.

Once I had food poisoning and realized I was trapped inside my body.

 

What interests me now is this memory thing. Why two
days
? Why
two
days? The last I know is not getting carded in a two-shark bar near the Bonneville flats. The bartender served me tequila and he left the bottle out. He asked me where I was going, and I said I was just going. Then he brought out a jar with a scorpion in it. He showed me how a drop of tequila on its tail makes a scorpion sting itself to death.

What happened after that?

Maybe those days will come back and maybe they will not. In the meantime, how’s this: I can’t even remember all I’ve forgotten.

I do remember the accident, though. I remember it was like the binoculars. You know—two ways? It was fast and it was slow. It was both.

 

The pot roast wasn’t bad. I ate every bit of it. I finished the green vegetables and the citrus vegetables too.

Now I’m waiting for the night nurse. She takes a blood pressure about this time. You could call this the high point of my day. That’s because this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she’s in love with the Lord.

But she’s a sport, this nurse. When I can’t sleep she brings in the telephone book. She sits by my bed and we look up funny names. Calliope Ziss and Maurice Pancake live in this very community.

I like a woman in my room at night.

The night nurse smells like a Christmas candle.

After she leaves the room, for a short time the room is like when she was here. She is not here, but the idea of her is.

It’s not the same—but it makes me think of the night my mother died. Three states away, the smell in my room was the smell of the powder on her face when she kissed me good night—the night she wasn’t there.

Pool Night

This time it happened with fire. Just the way it happened before, the time it happened with water. Someone was losing everything—to water, to fire—and not trying not to.

Maybe I wasn’t losing everything. But I didn’t try to save it. That is what makes it like the first time. They had to lead me out of the house, and not because I didn’t know my way out in the smoke.

The first time, no one said anything. Or we talked about everything but. It was twenty-eight years since the river topped its banks, all that time since a flood skunked the reservoir and washed out people’s homes.

We watched the water come, when it did. From patios late at night, the neighborhood watched the water move. A flash of light like strobe light would go off on the ground as the watery debris snapped a high-tension tower. When the wires touched the water, that part of town went black. This was the thing we watched—the city going dark along the path of the flood.

It was not supposed to reach us.

And then it did.

Evacuation was calm and quick, except for Dr. Winton. Dr. Winton drank down most of his liquor cabinet and stared at the Red Cross volunteers who put their van in park and went in and hauled him out.

Most of us saw that happen. But during the days of cleanup it was not what anyone mentioned. We talked about the racehorses loose from Centennial Track, how they had cantered over lawns and stumbled on buried sprinkler heads. Indoors were rolls of wet toilet paper swelling on bathroom rods. We found letters, and water had washed off the ink.

We talked about Bunny Winton, who ordered a new living room the first morning after. She said she was happy to see her armchairs go, the padded arms cat-scratched down to cotton batting.

“You open up or you shut down,” Bunny said, and went out and got her hair styled new.

Film crews photographed the swim team at the club. They were lined up by the snack bar, waiting to get a tetanus shot so they could shovel mud. Bunny made the nightly news; the Vidifont spelled out
VICTIM
on her chest.

They showed her in a tree wrapping washcloths around a branch so that the wet bent wood would not squeak against the roof.

The first time was fifteen years ago, on what was, or on what would have been, Pool Night.

 

“It’s all in the mouth,” he said, and showed me again and again. Grey said, “If the mouth is relaxed, the person looks good.”

We were looking at pictures of ourselves and family. The looking was my mother’s idea—my mother, who was the thoughtful one. Here’s what my mother thought of when she heard that Bunny Winton had lost her photograph album: She put me to work on ours. Grey came over to help me—at her invitation, of course.

Grey was Bunny and the doctor’s son, the child they could not now watch grow up in snapshots, page after page. Until my mother remembered that he grew up in ours. We would pull every picture that included Grey Winton, print up another, and present a new album to his grateful parents.

Grey was a junior lifeguard at the pool. He tanned to the color of the corn flakes he ate each morning, and I knew girls who saved his chewed gum.

Grey was the only boy excused from working cleanup. That was the week he was under observation.

 

He and my brother were Aquazaniacs.

They trained with a coach to do slapstick acrobatics off the high dive at the pool. There were six Aquazaniacs in 1890s stripes who hurled themselves into the water in syncopated ways. Grey would stand on my brother’s shoulders and together they dove as the Twelve-Foot Man.

In the pratfall sport of Clown Diving, the Walk-Around Gainer is a popular stunt. This is where you run to the end of the board and then keep on running, out in the air, a cartoon, so fast you flip over backward.

“Put gravity at your service” is how they said they did it.

But during rehearsal, Grey candied out. He hit his head on the board coming down. It would have kept him from diving on Pool Night, if we had had Pool Night. But the rain date gave him time to try to perfect the Fire Dive.

In the album there were pictures of Grey in water. The first one was in our bathtub, playing Stormy Ocean with my brother as a baby. Later, they pole a raft across a lake, poking an oar at snapping turtles. There’s a picture of the three of us on skates, on ice. Around my neck I wear snowballs of rabbit fur on black velvet cord. The pictures that follow show the boys pulling the snowballs off, then coming from behind, the velvet rope stretched out tight—a garrote.

Some of the photographs were Polaroid ones. They were faded, but the fugitive images remained. Emulsion on others had turned metallic bronze; the snapshots held deep tarnish, like a mirror.

There were quite a few pictures of Bunny, too. With the unphotogenic’s eagerness to pose, she increased her chances of the one good shot that would let her relax, having proof at last that she had once looked good, just once.

The doctor couldn’t make it to the picnics or to the skating—so he didn’t show up in the pictures, either. The effect was of him saying after the flood: What I lose will always be lost.

“His problem is the past,” Grey said about his father. “He says only do things you have done before and liked. Whereas me, what’s
coming
is the thing I’m looking out for.”

I thought the present was the safer bet. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

 

Grey trusted water. He continued to trust it after the flood. He believed it would save him, and he counted on this for the Fire Dive.

I saw him do it once, which is all the times he did it.

When the swimming pool was filtered and rechlorinated, he carried a can of gasoline to the high board. He wore a sweatshirt with a hood and matching drawstring pants. He dove into the water with the top and bottoms on, then pulled himself out by the ladder on the side. It was night, and I had my camera ready.

He sprinkled his wet clothes with gasoline as though he were watering plants. He said wet cloth would pull the fuel away from his skin.

He said to imagine this: that the moment he hit the water aflame, when he made this dive on the next Pool Night, that’s when he would have a cannon go off!

Then he struck a lighter and he lit himself up good.

 

I got it all on film—the human torch, the flaming spiral twists that he scripted in the air, the hiss of reclaimed life when the water took him in.

It only lasted seconds. It seemed an extravagant risk, and that is how I put it.

He said, “I made those seconds live.”

I took one more picture that night. It was after Grey had walked me home. He found a box of photograph corners, the black stick-on kind that frame the picture on the page. He opened up our album, pasted four of them in place.

It was
Grey
who took the picture; the picture he took was of me. It was candid—I wasn’t posed—and the instant, the Polaroid, is what he used. When the blank square of film emerged from the camera, he tore it off and slipped it in the corners on the page, and then he closed the album cover before the image could develop.

That picture is something I lost in the fire.

One thing smoke does is lower your voice. It did not sound like me, thanking the firefighters. I said thanks, but I did not feel grateful. I stood aside and watched, breathing the tarry air. I watched myself lose all that I was losing, and I knew why Dr. Winton had stayed inside his house.

I know about this now.

I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
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