Read The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel Online
Authors: Amy Hempel and Rick Moody
It was hard for me to concentrate as my father showed me the H of the gear box. I was not able to coordinate the clutch, thinking what might happen when we got home. I still can’t drive a car you have to shift. Automatic is what I can manage. Isn’t there enough to pay attention to
outside
the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I’ll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it
isn’t
there. The same thing happens when I think about you. Although the trajectory is different—it is not the past, a past we haven’t shared, but the future I am taken to by how quickly you have left.
I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!
A good day. The mound in the road was not cat, but tread.
A photographer sat me down in his studio and positioned umbrella lights. He was going to make a portrait. His instructions left me hopeless—I could not look at the camera as though it was my lover. The photographer changed his tack. He said, “Give me your best ‘Fuck you’ look.” The camera, for an instant, was my mother. “Perfect!” the photographer said.
When we can’t sleep, we sneak downstairs and into the chapel, take a front pew, and hope to hear the auditory ghost, the chord that sounds at night when moonlight hits the keys through the windows in the nave. I have yet to hear it, but Chatty says it started the night the actress in the thirties made her escape.
We love our lore.
I wish I was content to think of that hour—innocent hour over cups of tea—as part of my own, a story to pass along. But I am afraid it is like the sprinkling of rain that draws the roots of plants to the surface where the sun then dries them out.
What is enough? What is ever enough?
Across the road there is an apple tree.
Every so often a car will drive past, then come back around and park beneath its branches. People will get out and start to pick the apples, pausing to bite into one, a quality check. They’ll hold out the fronts of their shirts, making hammocks for the apples, and pick and take until apples are spilling out the sides of their shirts, dropping as the people return to their car hunched over from the weight of them. I have seen a woman fill her pleated skirt, then lose every one of them, slipping on the fallen ones on the way back to her car, and drive off without even one in her hand.
In the chapel I write to you on the back of an Isaac Watts hymnal, “Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me?”
Late in the fall, the sunflowers that fill a corner of the former hockey field will look like brown showerheads ready to shower seeds at the turn of a handle till the gardener clears them for compost. “A cold compost” is what Warren tells me to put on my head for a headache.
I have taken to making bouquets, with an eye to successful still life. I know it is not your strong suit, but turns out it is mine. The counselors and guests have told me as much. One school of thought says a flower arrangement should feature one type of flower—a fountain of white tulips, say, or, in the bath, one fragrant tea rose in a bud vase on a commode. But I get good notices for odd combinations: lavender cosmos and purple flowering sage, bright yellow yarrow and orange day lilies, red rambling rose spiked with flowering chive. Desperate for a hobby on a college application, years ago I wrote, “Gardening.” Because my mother used to make me rake the leaves! And suddenly it comes to me that my mother never cut flowers and brought them into the house. Frustration pulls weeds; it does not arrange bouquets.
In the Hostility Suite, Warren answers the phone. “Chatty?” he says, and holds out the receiver. He waits until she is beside him, reaching for it, before adding, “Phone call for Karen.”
We are teasing each other.
Maybe it is the gentle weather, but I notice we can give and take it. Dinner one warm night was a barbecue outdoors. Karen wore shorts and, for the first time, a top that was tight, a stretchy sleeveless knit. Warren looked at her chest and said, “
That
was a well-kept secret.”
And Karen, she’s been reading her current events, she looked at the plate of hamburgers Warren was reaching toward; she said, “I forget how, but to produce the meat for one hamburger destroys an area of rain forest the size of a kitchen.”
“That’s not very big,” Warren said, and helped himself.
I think of Karen, saying, “I finally solved my problem of how to talk with people,” and Warren coming back with, “The hand puppets worked?”
Our own wobbly tries.
We sometimes forget why we’re here. And when in a flash we remember, it is a feeling like something we’re not fond of that has gone away but will be coming back. A quarrelsome mate off on a business trip.
Diminution. This is often a comfort, to be satisfied with less. My grandmother told me that when I was born, she made my mother carry me straightaway up a flight of stairs. It is a superstition. You carry the infant up the stairs so the child will rise in the world.
“Are you sure?” I used to ask her, my grandmother, because it felt as though I’d been carried instead to the basement, my job to just break even, to rise to the place where the rest were pushing off. This is not a complaint, just the way it seemed to me. Whereas take a person like Chatty. At Scrabble today, she made the word
hepper.
We challenged her. She said, “That’s Southern for ‘assistant’—‘He’s mah hepper.’” She was playing with us, but Warren looked it up and found it really is a word, the name for a salmon in its second year. And Chatty got to keep her points.
I chose the F. That time I could have played the N or F?
“It is up to you,” the counselor says. “And why is getting better up to you?”
“Because,” I say, my answer practiced, “I am the one who cares the most.” Even when I am not.
Remember last week’s storm that blew up from the tropics? Karen and I walked the beach the morning after, what beach there was left to walk. We saw four people haul in a large piece of something that, out of the surf, you could see was the hull of a good-sized sailboat. A hundred yards ahead, another piece of wood was being examined by an elderly man. He showed us the splintered stern with part of the boat’s name still stenciled on it in blue:—
Wood.
Karen and I continued down the beach, guessing at the name of the ruined boat:
Driftwood? Hollywood?
Firewood now, more’s the pity. Until the missing piece washed up at our feet, and all we had to do to complete the puzzle was bend down and turn it over, and—
Touch.
“
Touch Wood
.”
So it was to the objects in the world around her that the letter writer turned.
Please excuse the switch to notebook paper; I just ran out of the good stuff. And if my penmanship suffers, it is because I am not at a desk, but in a parked car, and using my knee for support.
The driver this time is polite. He has not tried to hurry me along as other of the drivers have. He brought along a book of the stripe I could hold up to the unidentified object that flies. He brought a Thermos. And has not asked me what time it is, but has only excused himself to use the facilities across the street.
It is rabbit hour, the time they come out into the open. I wish it never got any darker than this, the moment you can no longer tell that grass is green.
If you say that you think you need to stay on, the management here says, “Of course.” If you tell them you feel you are ready to move on, these same people say, “That’s right.” I didn’t tell anyone I was trying to leave—circle of well-wishers reaching to say good-bye, reaching so that arms tangle and heads knock, yourself caught in the cross-love.
I said I had to go to town to mail a letter, to get it weighed and buy the right stamps, being careful not to drop it on the ground before it is posted. That would bring bad luck. For us both.
I asked the driver, as soon as he returned, to cut around to back behind the residential homes; there’s a corridor through the dunes where you can see the ocean waves and the saltwater pond, a sanctuary for birds. Terns are quarreling in a windswept, vine-hung pine. And—worthy of your brush—three egrets stop in different poses for a second, as if they were a single bird at three consecutive moments. Now they are in motion, alighting on the sand. The tide this time of year washes hundreds of tiny starfish up onto the beach. It leaves them stranded in salty constellations, a sandy galaxy within reach.
“The need for the new love…” is from “Wait,” by Galway Kinnell, in
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words
, Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
“Not every clocktick needs a martyr” is from the poem “Turning to Look Back,” by John Woods, from
Keeping Out of Trouble,
Indiana University Press, 1968.
The gorilla who uses sign language is Koko. Incidents cited are either from the author’s visit with Koko, or from documented exchanges and observations by Koko’s teacher, Dr. Francine Patterson.
The artists referred to are Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar, whose conceptual art piece/poll was titled
The People’s Art
.
“He opens a book at random and consults randomness,” is from the poem “Sortilege,” by Eric Pankey, from
Apocrypha,
Knopf, 1993.
“Drawing is a racing yacht…” is from Robert Motherwell in “Thoughts on Drawing,” reprinted in
The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell,
edited by Stephanie Terenzio, Oxford University Press, 1992.
“…to reassert himself in the face of…” is from Robert Motherwell in conversation with the author and in “The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property” (later titled “The Modern Painter’s World”), and in
The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell,
ibid.
Catherine Tatge’s film,
Robert Motherwell and the New York School: Storming the Citadel,
for the PBS series
American Masters,
was also a valuable reference.
I picked up coffee in town, but skipped the doughnuts and scones; after fifty-two years, my body owes me nothing. I ran into a former neighbor at the deli. We were still dressed the same in barn jackets and jeans; we both worked at horse farms. Standing in line for coffee, she picked crumbs of rust off an old bulb digger that looked pornographic in her hand. My own rusted one was plunged to the hilt in a circle of tulips where I left it when I heard about Lynney.
Claire, the former neighbor, told me she hadn’t known Lynne Markson was divorced. I said she wasn’t, they weren’t, who told her they were? She said, “I thought
she
did.” She said they had run into each other in line at the Film Forum, and Lynne told her she only came into the city once a week now. Lynne told her the rest of the time she lived upstate near her husband. Claire said she thought that was an interesting slip: “near” instead of “with.”
I told her it wasn’t a slip, and the reason she was upstate started the week the dog showed up in my yard, the same week my husband moved out. I would find the dog curled under the forsythia in the morning, in a shallow dirt bed he had dug the night before. When I let my own dogs out in the yard, he would stand and stretch, then stay still while they sniffed at him. He was a beagle wearing a faded too-tight collar he would not let me close enough to remove.
He was terrified of people, so I was certain he had been abused. But he liked the company of the dogs; he made himself part of the pack. Each morning he followed my dogs from the front yard with its hill, where their tennis balls rolled away, down into the backyard, where the three of them pawed at holes in the garden rows, probably after the moles that ate the centers out of the melons.
My dogs are female, so of course I indulged the notion that he had selected my house to fill the male post just vacated by my husband, who had moved back to the city. I stayed at the beach with the dogs and filled out my share of paperwork to make the separation final.
The beagle was small enough to shimmy in under the cedar fence gate where rain had eroded a patch of dirt into a small trough. He had rolled in, shook himself off, and stayed. I put out a bowl of food for him twice a day, and kept a bucket filled with water in the shade from the wisteria. The only time I knew he left the yard was when I took my own dogs across the street to walk through the fields that end at Round Pond. He would trail us, letting their bodies brush his when they all chased rabbits and squirrels. He had the look of a harried executive; he carried himself, chest first, like a little mogul. So I called him Beagleman. “Get me Beagleman!” I would order my dogs. “I’ll take a meeting in five minutes—
front
yard.” And they would race off to get him and herd him into the front and we would file across the street, every day a parade.
I didn’t bother to fill in the dirt beds that Beagleman dug, and that my own dogs copied. The yard was a yard—it had never been an even “carpet” of green. Mowing had always been my job, one I liked, but I did not go beyond that to what more was required: grading, fertilizing, sprinklers.
Starting early in the summer, I put Beagleman’s bowl closer to the house. Then I sat on the outdoor steps without moving or looking at him while he ate. When he finished, I tossed a handful of crumbled cheese in his direction. He would follow the spray of cheese, eating a trail that led to my open hand where more cheese was offered. He would start toward me, then stop and pulsate and whimper. At that point I would toss him the cheese and try again later in the day.
In the evenings around six—this was in July when the sand at the beach is so hot—I would load my two dogs into the back of the station wagon and drive to the ocean for a swim. Beagleman would wiggle under the closed gate and stand at the top of the driveway as I backed the car into the street. He would be there when we returned at dusk, and fit himself under the gate when the three of us had passed inside.
After an early spring of taking the marriage apart, I was glad to have every day the same. I did not ask much of myself; it was enough to keep a cutting garden watered and shop at a farm stand for tomatoes and basil, and baby eggplant to grill, and that white corn that needs just three minutes in hot water with milk. It was enough to conduct classes for young beginning and intermediate riders at the farm, to keep my dogs and sometimes myself reasonably groomed, and try to win over the beagle. I was mindful of the symmetry—trying to establish this creature’s trust, having dispatched that of my husband.
This took us up through August.
Then, just before Labor Day, I kept the cheese in my hand. And Beagleman ate it, his eyes on mine. I told him he was a very good boy. He ate from my hand several times that day. I got him to follow me inside and into the kitchen, source of the cheese. I introduced him to a wall of cheese in the refrigerator. He ate from my hand while I gently touched his chin with a finger. I rubbed under his chin while he ate, and it was only another day before he let me rub his muzzle. From there it was his ears, scratching them while he sat beside me. I cut off the collar that left a dent in the skin of his neck.
At the end of the summer, he let me brush him while he rested his head on my leg. Within the week I had him upstairs, and we celebrated by having a slumber party—the three dogs up on my bed in the dark, eating popcorn and watching a movie.
Beagleman seemed to be proud of himself. He walked with confidence, he no longer hung back. He was in the front seat of the car on every errand. At night he raced ahead of me up the stairs; I would find him on my pillow on his back, waiting for me to rub his stomach.
This lasted until the lawyers said we would have to sell the house. I would be moving, I would be renting, and no one would rent to a person with three dogs. That was when I heard that Lynne Markson wanted a dog.
Back then, they had the place on the North Fork as well as the apartment on Riverside Drive. I arranged for Lynne and her husband, Whit, to visit.
Beagleman liked Lynney right away. He showed no fear, and I was proud of how far he had come. He was less comfortable around Whit. I had predicted this; he was still skittish around men, probably because a man or men had hurt him. Whit was gentle and welcoming, so we said: sleepover, trial visit. Beagleman sat in Lynney’s lap in the car on the way to the city.
A few weeks later, Whit takes Beagleman out for an evening walk. As they are about to cross Riverside Drive, Beagleman slips his leash and bolts into the street. Reflexively, Whit runs after him.
Lynne is at home when the confused doorman phones up to say her dog came back by himself. He tells her the dog walked right through the lobby and into the elevator, so he—the doorman—pressed the button for their floor and sent him up.
Lynne gets the dog inside, then runs out to find Whit.
She follows the sound of a siren, and finds him just as the ambulance pulls up.
Claire looked at me as though she had been watching a performance. Which she had. I could not tell the story enough times. An observant friend had remarked that “Those who can’t repeat the past are condemned to remember it.”
I realized I had left out the part about Christmas Eve when Beagleman got lost in Noyac. So I did not get to say, “If I had not driven back that third time—if I had gone to midnight mass instead.” I did not tell Claire that Lynne does not blame the dog, or that the dog follows her from room to room and sleeps with his head on the pillow, in her bed, in the house where she lives near her husband, who lives in rehab.
Claire, my former neighbor, said she would write to Lynne if I would give her the new address. She said, “How’s Lynney doing?” And I said, “It’s
her
story now.”
I was the one who did the back and forth; he was the one who did the every which way. He would stop in the course of the walk and talk with a friend, or a not-even friend, someone he hadn’t seen in a while, invite the person to breakfast or lunch, even if the person was more my friend than his. His invitation would be so open-faced that it would seem mean not to take it. Then he would want me to come along.
The people I stopped for when I walked the dog were strangers who wanted to pay the dog a compliment, or pay me one for having such a dog. An unusual mix that was hard to place, the dog was a maverick; she had attitude, she was willful and people responded to that. If she liked you, then you were worth liking. With the dog present, I could talk to people I could not have talked to without her.
The dog had been our second choice. My husband wanted the pretty one, and I had wanted to keep the runt. But we each picked the same runner-up.
I counted the blocks when I walked the dog, or the equivalent of blocks in the park. I liked to return the same way we had come. I walked the dog on the other side of the street, or the path, so she could have variety. But I liked things to be the same, to be where they were the last time I saw them, when I saw them for the last time.
For sixty dollars charged to my MasterCard in advance, the psychic described a wooded area near a body of water—a pond? a stream? she couldn’t be sure—with a view across an open field to a “civic-type building”—a post office? a school? she couldn’t be sure—where, according to her vision as relayed to me over the phone, the lost dog had looked for food in the last twenty-four hours.
This was less useful than the woman down the turnpike who saw the leaflet left on her windshield. She phoned to say she had seen the dog drag a deer across the tracks a hundred yards away the day before. I found the dead deer beside the tracks where the woman said, part of its flank gnawed to the bone. The dog could not have felled the deer; it must have been hit by a train. Had an approaching train scared the dog from its food?
The leaflet is all over town.
The ex-husband made it.
He advertised a reward beside a picture of the dog. But he did not consult with me first. The reward would not buy you an ordinary dinner in this town. Whenever I come across any of his posters, I add a “1” before the amount.
Despite the reward, calls come in. I chase down all sightings, even when the caller says the collar is red, not blue. But there is never any dog of any kind with any color of collar in the spot reported by the time I am able to get there.
I check construction sites. Workmen eat lunch outdoors, and a hungry dog might try them for a handout, wouldn’t she? Half a dozen calls come from builders on the beachfront. Once, when I got there, there was a deer swimming in the ocean. It appeared to be caught in the tide, and as I moved toward it—toward the deer—it managed to pull itself ahead of the surf, where it found its footing and limped ashore on a hurt front leg, to leap away when I moved closer. So I, who only wanted to help, was made to stand there watching the deer head for the dunes.
I went out again at night to lay down scent trails in the woods near my house, wearing the same shoes and socks I had been wearing for days. The moon was nearly full above a snowy field. When I had made my way into the woods, I turned and saw deer standing side by side, watching. I thought, Saints, guardian angels, my saviors, my friends.
We watched each other for a while, and then I went home, checking over my shoulder all the way for the deer. They never moved once—not that I saw.
There were three animal psychics.
I phoned them all.
The famous one you can’t get to work with you anymore unless you’re the president of something and your dog is, too. Still, this woman phoned me from the airport, she said, between flights. She gave me the names and numbers of the other psychics who found missing dogs. Where’s the one who finds missing husbands?
I called the most psychic-sounding one first, who turned out not to be available until after the holidays. What holidays? Were there holidays?
I left a message for the next one, and the third psychic answered her phone and insisted we could go to work with no delay so long as I could describe my dog to her and recite the numerals of my credit card number.
The worst thought I had was, What if the dog was just here? Right where I was standing?
Every morning and every night there is a videotape I watch. The ex-husband made it when he was my husband. It was made when the dog had first come to us and seemed to be everywhere, shared everything, offering, offering.
I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed—but only if everybody will just be very very good, and very very patient, and will wait, with perfect hope, for the make-believe story to unfold.