The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (4 page)

Kirby still carries in his paper Sunday mornings.

She used to watch while Flea did the crossword puzzle. He pretended to consult her: “I can see why you’d say
dog,
but don’t you see—
cat
fits just as well?”

Boris and Kirby still scrap over his slippers. But as Flea used to say, the trouble seldom exceeds their lifespan.

Here we all still are. Boris, Kirby, Chuck—Nashville gone to ashes. Before going to bed I tell the mynah bird she may not be dumb but she’s stupid.

Flowers were delivered on our anniversary. The card said the roses were sent by F. Lee. When I called the florist, he said Flea had “love insurance.” It’s a service they provide for people who forget. You tell the florist the date, and automatically he sends flowers.

Getting the flowers that way had me spooked. I thought I would walk it off, the long way, into town.

Before I left the house, I gave Laxatone to Chuck. With the weather warming up, he needs to get the jump on fur balls. Then I set his bowl of kibbles in a shallow dish of water. I added to the water a spoonful of liquid dish soap. Chuck eats throughout the day; the soapy moat keeps bugs off his plate.

On the walk into town I snapped back into myself.

Two things happened that I give the credit to.

The first thing was the beggar. He squatted on the walk with a dog at his side. He had with him an aged sleeping collie with granular runny eyes. Under its nose was a red plastic dish with a sign that said
FOOD FOR DOG
—
DONATION
,
PLEASE
.

The dog was as quiet as any Flea had healed and then rocked in his arms while the anesthesia wore off.

Blocks later, I bought a pound of ground beef.

I nearly ran the distance back.

The two were still there, and a couple of quarters were in the dish. I felt pretty good about handing over the food. I felt good until I turned around and saw the man who was watching me. He leaned against the grate of a closed shoe-repair with an empty tin cup at his feet. He had seen. And I was giving
him—nothing.

How far do you take a thing like this? I think you take it all the way to heart. We give what we can—that’s as far as the heart can go.

This was the first thing that turned me back around to home. The second was just plain rain.

Do you know what I think?

I think it was the tremors. That’s what must have done it. The way the floor rolled like bongo boards under our feet? Remember it was you and Daddy and me having lunch? “I guess that’s not an earthquake,” you said. “I guess you’re shaking the table?”

That’s when it must have happened. A watch on a dresser, a small thing like that—it must have been shaken right off, onto the floor.

And how would Maidy know? Maidy at the doctor’s office? All those years on a psychiatrist’s couch and suddenly the couch is
moving.

Good God, she is on that couch when the big one hits.

Maidy didn’t tell you, but you know what her doctor said? When she sprang from the couch and said, “My God, was that an earthquake?”

The doctor said this: “Did it
feel
like an earthquake to you?”

I think we are agreed, you have to look on the light side.

So that’s when I think it must have happened. Not that it matters to me. Maidy is the one who wants to know. She thinks she has it coming, being the older daughter. Although where was the older daughter when it happened? Which daughter was it that found you?

When Maidy started asking about your watch, I felt I had to say it. I said, “With the body barely cold?”

Maidy said the body is not the person, that the
essence
is the person, and that the essence leaves the body behind it, along with the body’s possessions—for example, its watch?

“Time flies,” I said. “Like an arrow.

“Fruit
flies,” I said, and Maidy said, “What?”

“Fruit flies,” I said again. “Fruit flies like a banana.”

That’s how easy it is to play a joke on Maidy.

Remember how easy?

Now Maidy thinks I took your watch. She thinks because I got there first, my first thought was to take it. Maidy keeps asking, “Who took Mama’s watch?” She says, “Did
you
take Mama’s watch?”

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

“Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your
Friends
”? That Paul Anka did it, too, I said. Does “You’re Having
Our
Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

“What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

Oh, yes.

For her I would always have something else.

“Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she said. “A parable.”

“There’s more about the chimp,” I said. “But it will break your heart.”

“No, thanks,” she says, and scratches at her mask.

We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones—a pro by now—she lets hang loose.

We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It’s the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that
they
are intimate, the nurse and my friend.

“I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada.”

“That’s how dumb we were,” I say.

“You could be sisters,” the nurse says.

So how come, I’ll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?

They do not ask.

Two months, and how long is the drive?

The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death.

I mean, he died.

So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through it.

She shakes out a summer-weight blanket, showing a leg you did not want to see. Except for that, you look at her and understand the law that requires
two
people to be with the body at all times.

“I thought of something,” she says. “I thought of it last night. I think there is a real and present need here. You know,” she says, “like for someone to do it for you when you can’t do it yourself. You call them up whenever you want—like when push comes to shove.”

She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck.

“Hey,” she says, “the end o’ the line.”

She keeps on, giddy with something. But I don’t know with what.

“I can’t remember,” she says. “What does Kübler-Ross say comes after Denial?”

It seems to me Anger must be next. Then Bargaining, Depression, and so on and so forth. But I keep my guesses to myself.

“The only thing is,” she says, “is where’s Resurrection? God knows, I want to do it by the book. But she left out Resurrection.”

She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.

“Tell me,” she says, “about that chimp with the talking hands. What do they do when the thing ends and the chimp says, ‘I don’t want to go back to the zoo’?”

When I don’t say anything, she says, “Okay—then tell me another animal story. I like animal stories. But not a sick one—I don’t want to know about all the seeing-eye dogs going blind.”

No, I would not tell her a sick one.

“How about the hearing-ear dogs?” I say. “They’re not going deaf, but they are getting very judgmental. For instance, there’s this golden retriever in New Jersey, he wakes up the deaf mother and drags her into the daughter’s room because the kid has got a flashlight and is reading under the covers.”

“Oh, you’re killing me,” she says. “Yes, you’re definitely killing me.”

“They say the smart dog obeys, but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.”

“Yes,” she says, “the smarter anything knows when to disobey. Now, for example.”

She is flirting with the Good Doctor, who has just appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the IV drip before saying good morning, the Good Doctor says things like “God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake.” The Good Doctor awards himself points for the cripples he could have hit in the parking lot. Because the Good Doctor is a little in love with her, he says maybe a year. He pulls a chair up to her bed and suggests I might like to spend an hour on the beach.

“Bring me something back,” she says. “Anything from the beach. Or the gift shop. Taste is no object.”

He draws the curtain around her bed.

“Wait!” she cries.

I look in at her.

“Anything,” she says, “except a magazine subscription.”

The doctor turns away.

I watch her mouth laugh.

What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight—this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.

“It never happens when you’re thinking about it,” she once observed. “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” she said.

“Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” I said.

Like the aviaphobe who keeps the plane aloft with prayer, we kept it up until an aftershock cracked the ceiling.

That was after the big one in ’72. We were in college; our dormitory was five miles from the epicenter. When the ride was over and my jabbering pulse began to slow, she served five parts champagne to one part orange juice, and joked about living in Ocean View, Kansas. I offered to drive her to Hawaii on the new world psychics predicted would surface the next time, or the next.

I could not say that now—next.

Whose next? she could ask.

Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying
if
and now spoke of
when
? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean more natural violence.

I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

She was afraid of nothing, not even of flying.

I have this dream before a flight where we buckle in and the plane moves down the runway. It takes off at thirty-five miles an hour, and then we’re airborne, skimming the tree tops. Still, we arrive in New York on time.

It is so pleasant.

One night I flew to Moscow this way.

She flew with me once. That time she flew with me she ate macadamia nuts while the wings bounced. She knows the wing tips can bend thirty feet up and thirty feet down without coming off. She believes it. She trusts the laws of aerodynamics. My mind stampedes. I can almost accept that a battleship floats when everybody knows steel sinks.

I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.

After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions.

“Bad
earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in
Seventeen.
They pose.

A formation of low-riders pulls over to watch with a six-pack. They get vocal when the girls check their tan lines. When the beer is gone, so are they—flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

Above this aggressive health are the twin wrought-iron terraces, painted flamingo pink, of the Palm Royale. Someone dies there every time the sheets are changed. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, so the remaining residents line the balconies, rocking and not talking, one-upped.

The ocean they stare at is dangerous, and not just the undertow. You can almost see the slapping tails of sand sharks keeping cruising bodies alive.

If she looked, she could see this, some of it, from her window. She would be the first to say how little it takes to make a thing all wrong.

There was a second bed in the room when I got back to it!

For two beats I didn’t get it. Then it hit me like an open coffin.

She wants every minute, I thought. She wants my life.

“You missed Gussie,” she said.

Gussie is her parents’ three-hundred-pound narcoleptic maid. Her attacks often come at the ironing board. The pillowcases in that family are all bordered with scorch.

“It’s a hard trip for her,” I said. “How is she?”

“Well, she didn’t fall asleep, if that’s what you mean. Gussie’s great—you know what she said? She said, ‘Darlin’, stop this worriation. Just keep prayin’, down on your knees’—me, who can’t even get out of bed.”

She shrugged. “What am I missing?”

“It’s earthquake weather,” I told her.

“The best thing to do about earthquakes,” she said, “is not to live in California.”

“That’s useful,” I said. “You sound like Reverend Ike—‘The best thing to do for the poor is not to be one of them.’”

We’re crazy about Reverend Ike.

I noticed her face was bloated.

“You know,” she said, “I feel like hell. I’m about to stop having fun.”

“The ancients have a saying,” I said. “‘There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls.’”

“What’s that, Navaho?”

“Palm Royale lobby graffiti,” I said. “I bought a paper there. I’ll read you something.”

“Even though I care about nothing?”

I turned to the page with the trivia column. I said, “Did you know the more shrimp flamingo birds eat, the pinker their feathers get?” I said, “Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators? Do you know
why
Eskimos need refrigerators? Did you know that Eskimos need refrigerators because how else would they keep their food from freezing?”

I turned to page three, to a UPI filler datelined Mexico City. I read her
MAN ROBS BANK WITH CHICKEN
, about a man who bought a barbecued chicken at a stand down the block from a bank. Passing the bank, he got the idea. He walked in and approached a teller. He pointed the brown paper bag at her and she handed over the day’s receipts. It was the smell of barbecue sauce that eventually led to his capture.

The story had made her hungry, she said—so I took the elevator down six floors to the cafeteria, and brought back all the ice cream she wanted. We lay side by side, adjustable beds cranked up for optimal TV-viewing, littering the sheets with Good Humor wrappers, picking toasted almonds out of the gauze. We were Lucy and Ethel, Mary and Rhoda in extremis. The blinds were closed to keep light off the screen.

We watched a movie starring men we used to think we wanted to sleep with. Hers was a tough cop out to stop mine, a vicious rapist who went after cocktail waitresses.

“This is a good movie,” she said when snipers felled them both.

I missed her already.