The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (24 page)

In large part, we are meant to heal each other. The garden is a metaphor. Seeding, tending, weeding, watering—all leading up to the harvest. Although leave it to Warren to point out these words that are synonymous with “plant”: hide, secrete, conceal, bury, entomb.

Warren says, of the place he was before this, “My counselor was a moron, and he helped me.”

There is one counselor here we suspect of being something more. She gives such encouraging and optimistic guidance that one day I asked if I could tape her. We set a time to meet for a talk on the patio off the parlor. I turned on my pocket-sized tape recorder and showed her where to speak into the mike. She delivered a kind of pep talk, one I could now replay and refer to as the need arose.

The need arose the very next day, so I grabbed my tape recorder, fitted in her tape, and went up to deserted Little Egypt. I pressed the “On” button, and closed my eyes. I let myself believe her good words; they displaced my bad thoughts for the length of an hour. When it was over, I pressed the “Off” button. Nothing happened. The tape continued to wind in its cartridge. I held the “Off” button down with my thumb, and still the tape played, though there was no more voice to hear. I ran downstairs with it, found Warren in the Hostility Suite. I handed him the tape recorder, said, “Can you turn this off for me?” Warren was not able to turn the machine off until he had smacked the recorder into his palm and then against the table edge to empty the batteries out.

Not graduating is how Chatty left this place the first time. This time, all she will have to do is call a car, just as I have done. I have learned to specify
town car
so the company does not send over a limousine. I remember to tell them to tell the driver to bring along something to read.

With my bags packed and in the car with me, it is like the concert I went to—a chamber quartet—at what was once a private home, a Victorian mansion. In the music room there was a birdcage that had finches in it. The cage was a replica of the house it was inside of, down to the mansard roof and broad-stepped porch. That night I arrived early and heard the musicians already playing. Thinking my watch was slow and I was actually late, I hurried in. The musicians were playing—not tuning up, but performing the evening’s program—to an empty house. And the finches were singing along! When they finished, the cellist explained to me that before every concert given in the house, the musicians played first for the finches so the birds would tire themselves out singing, and would then remain quiet during the concert that was scheduled.

Chatty assures me I will know, I will “just know” when to leave. How does she come by such certainty?

Who said sanity is free?
That
is the answer to Karen’s complaint about always having to do two jobs.

Don’t you find that there is no right place to begin? When you try to make sense of a thing that has happened? That everything is as important, or as unimportant, as everything else? A poet writes, “He opens a book at random, and consults randomness.” To me, this is what it seems. To me and, Warren has pointed out, a million other people.

I pretend I know you well. I say to Warren, “I have a friend who—” and Warren says, “You have too many friends.”

I waited so long to write to you. I liked knowing, as it came to me throughout the course of a day, that I would be writing a letter to you. It made me think of a doctor here, a man who said he’d have liked to have treated Marilyn Monroe, what a lift it would have given him to look in his appointment book and see her name. He had lifted up for a moment on the toes of his shoes.

Warren taped a one-word sign to his wall. The word that he wakes to is: Headlong. Writing to you, it is my word, too. And, hey—here’s hoping you like blue! This is the color my mother used to use, though she chose the stock with a ragged edge, and I prefer my edges sharp. She fit what she had to say on a thank-you note.

The pond is surrounded by winter-stripped trees, packed so close together the lack of leaves doesn’t matter. There is no seeing through them to the single man and woman who proceed across the cracked black ice on borrowed skates. No crack of the puck. No Rock ’n’ Skate, no Rap ’n’ Skate, no programmed medleys threatening disco. The sound of speed on blades. Turtles float below. We are humming “The Nutcracker Suite.”

My consolations are many, their power no less for not including you. I said to a psychic just after our tea, “There is a person I met,” and the psychic cut me off, saying, “He is a thief. He will steal your soul.”

The man ran groups. He took a token fee from people wanting to quit—smoking, drinking, eating too much. “Picture the thing you want to live without.” “My husband,” one woman whispered to another. I shut my eyes with the rest of them and tried to conjure fear, what I want to live without.

The counselors here say we often mistake excitement for apprehension, for fear. They say it is up to us, that we can forcibly jog ourselves from one state into the other. But it sounds to me like my favorite joke when I was a girl: What is Pollyanna’s epitaph? “I’m
glad
I’m dead.”

The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino to go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and I buy the gloves. And it hits me—how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theater, it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib.

No one has ever told me that I am good with children. Shortly before I came here I went to a dinner party. The hostess was setting the table—there were eight of us that night—when her daughter, a barefoot seven-year-old, demanded we play the game.

I had not played the game before. You had to build a tower out of narrow cross-placed pieces of wood, then pull away the pieces one at a time without making the tower collapse.

I am not good at games, and the girl was sure of her moves. Yet somehow I was good at this, and when the girl removed the piece that made the tower fall, she ran to her mother screaming, “I didn’t lose!”

The mother put the child to bed and lay beside the child for a while in the bed.

When I go to sleep, I sleep on the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in—lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

I don’t fall asleep with my body on the bed in the same way my mother was found. It must be a thing I go into when I am asleep. And still I cannot be sure that, limb for limb, I am in the same position. My mother’s legs, when I saw her, were covered by the sheet; it is possible that my legs are bent where my mother’s legs were straight.

Sometimes it feels as though I won’t be able to live until I can sleep in a position of my own—not in the way my mother’s body was found on the bed, but in a way that is mine—even if it is only a sort of dead man’s float where you don’t use a muscle but clasp both your knees and let your head sink into the pillow, rocking gently as a baby, tipping your head to the side to take in air, conserving your strength until help arrives, or until you can save yourself, there in bed.

Consolation is a beautiful word.
Everyone
skins his knee—that doesn’t make yours hurt any less. The standard line here.

Karen’s consolation is a dog. Mine, too, some of the time. In the lobby of the shelter you can buy a bag of biscuits and pass them out through the kennel bars while an attendant readies a dog for you to walk. Last time I went I collected the loose fur from the dogs just groomed to make a present to the gardener to stuff guess where. Then I walked Shauna. She is a young shepherd mix who had a litter of ten that had to be weaned early, at the age of five weeks, because the mother developed mastitis from nursing so many.

The attendant handed me Shauna’s leash, and Shauna leaped into the air. Her belly sagged, and was covered with long scabs, but once outside she ran for a mile, pulling me along at the end of a leash. When I finally had to rest, I said, “Shauna, shhh,” and she sat down and leaned against my leg, waiting.

When I brought her back to the shelter, I went to see her puppies in a private room. They were no more than eight inches long. I sat on the floor and they moved as a single mass onto me. They were crying and mewing like kittens. They licked and bit and tried to suck as they moved up my arms and chest, clinging to my neck and reaching up to bat at my face and nose, around my ears.

Once I walked Shauna in a nearby park where a group of people holding leads stood huddled in conversation while their dogs, off-leash, played close by. Shauna and I stood at the edge of both groups, and I heard a woman brag, “Barney makes on command.” Another woman observed her dog as it was mounted by two others in succession; she said that her dog’s social life was better than her own.

I was watching TV in Little Egypt with Chatty when a dog food commercial came on. A litter of tumbling pups crossed the screen, and Chatty said to me, “I guess
you’re
happy.”

I’ve never heard it said of you that you had dogs as pets. Though surely when you were a boy, a boy on a working farm, there must have been a dog that you befriended?

Do you find consolation in a person? In a woman? I found it once with a man, but I lost my combs. This was the last time I saw him. In the cab going home is when I saw the combs, one on top of the other on the table beside his couch. It would have been better if he had been the one to remove them, but when they interfered with the travel of his hands, I was the one who reached up and slipped the combs out. They are just cheap plastic, their job not to ornament but to secure and vanish in hair. It is not like leaving behind an earring, something that needs to be joined with a mate. The combs cost nothing, so he did not think to return them. But they’re the only ones that work in my kind of hair, and you can’t often find the ones that blend in with your hair. They tend to be packaged in assortments of a dozen, in garish bright primary colors. Before I left that night, I used his hairbrush when we finished. I left long hairs caught in the bristles, making of his hairbrush a kind of reliquary.

Where is the consolation in this? It is in humiliation, which brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.

“You a student over at the college?” The cabdriver, gunning for a tip.

I still want those combs back. I need all the things I left behind back. Better to find consolation in a place. At the beach. A day at the beach when everything rhymes: crabs picked clean, one thong—green, flies blown in on a warm land breeze, parking lot rainbow in a pool of gasoline; diving sea-gulls, blasted boat hulls, sea-scarred plastic, rusted bedstead, rotting refuse, fish now dead.

Sometimes I worry that we don’t talk about ideas. But Warren says, “I hate ideas,” and Chatty says, “Ideas, sugar, are not sexy.”

So a lot of the time it’s moisturizers and accessories, physical fitness and hair. And still so many ways to go wrong, as when I said to Chatty, hadn’t she colored her hair, and Chatty’s frosty reply, that she had not
colored
her hair, she had
enhanced
it.