Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
On Amy Hempel It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about rhythm. It’s about ambiguity. It’s about the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captured in language. It’s about instants of consciousness. It’s about besieged consciousness. It’s about love trouble. It’s about death. It’s about suicide. It’s about the body. It’s about skepticism. It’s against sentimentality. It’s against cheap sentiment. It’s about regret. It’s about survival. It’s about the sentences used to enact and defend survival. In 1985, when Amy Hempel’s first collection Reasons to Live was first published, we found ourselves in the heady period of the American short-story renaissance. However briefly, it was not only acceptable to write and publish short stories (there were many more venues for them in that bygone time), but it was even possible to sell a few copies of your collection along the way. Some of this had to do with the notable Vintage Contempo
In a Tub My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had. It was early afternoon, the middle of the week. I chose a pew in the center of the rows. Episcopal or Methodist, it didn’t make any difference. It was as quiet as a church. I thought about the feeling of the long missed beat, and the tumble of the next ones as they rushed to fill the space. I sat there—in the high brace of quiet and stained glass—and I listened. At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath. My cat takes naps in the windowbox. Her gray chin is powdered with the iridescent dust from butterfly wings. If I tap on the glass, the cat will not look up. The sound that I make is not
Tonight Is a Favor to Holly A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o’clock, I am not going to answer the door. The problem is the front. I cut the bangs myself; now I look like Mamie Eisenhower. Holly says no, I look like Claudette Colbert. But I know why she says that is so I will meet this guy. Tonight is a favor to Holly. What I’d rather do is what we usually do—mix our rum and Cokes, and drink them on the sand while the sun goes down. We live the beach life. Not the one with sunscreen and resort wear. I mean, we just live at the beach. Out the front door is sand. There’s the ocean, and we see it every day of the year. The beach is near the airport—so this town doesn’t even have the class L.A. lacks. What it has is airline personnel. For them, it’s a twelve-minute shuttle from the concourse home—home meaning a complex of apartments done in fake Spanish Colonial. It copies the Spanish missions in every direction. But show me the mission with w
Celia Is Back “Luck isn’t luck,” the father told his kids. “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” The boy backed up his father’s statement. “That’s what the big winners say,” he agreed. The boy and his sister were entering contests. The kitchen table was littered with forms and the entry blanks off cereal boxes. The boy held a picture of a blue Rolls-Royce, the grand prize in a sweepstakes he was too young to enter. “Do you think it has to be blue?” he asked. “Do you think I can get it in a different color?” “You can’t drive,” the girl said. “So it’s a moot point.” She tore a sheet of paper from a legal pad and drew up an affidavit. It promised her the Rolls when her father won it in the sweepstakes next fall. She penciled in a line on the paper for his signature, and a line below that, and titled the second one Witnessed By. The father had time before his weekly appointment, so he poured himself coffee and filled in some of the blanks. In spite of what he said, the father knew
Nashville Gone to Ashes After the dog’s cremation, I lie in my husband’s bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of “liquor” and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television is what my husband, Flea, said. With Flea gone, I watch out of habit. On top of the warm set is big white Chuck, catching a portion of his four million winks. His tail hangs down and bisects the screen. On top of the dresser, and next to the phone, is the miniature pine crate that holds Nashville’s gritty ashes. Neil the Lion cops the year’s top honors. The host says Neil is on location in Africa, but accepting for Neil is his grandson Winston. A woman approaches the stage with a ten-week cub in her arms, and the audi
San Francisco 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 comi
In the CemeteryWhere Al Jolson Is Buried “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. “Di
Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep The mohair was scratchy, the stria too bulky, but the homespun tweed was right for a small frame. I bought slate-blue skeins softened with flecks of pink, and size-10 needles for a sweater that was warm but light. The pattern I chose was a two-tone V-neck with an optional six-stitch cable up the front. Pullovers mess the hair, but I did not want to buttonhole the first time out. From a needlework book, I learned to cast on. In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spider-webs at birth. The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water. Learning to knit was the obvious thing. The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole—this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding. Because symptoms mean just what they are. What about the woman whose empty hand won’t close becau
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
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
Three Popes Walk into a Bar Sydney Lawton Square is a park for a transient population; there are no benches. You can walk it end to end in minutes. The architect for the Gateway Condominiums squeezed it in between the barbecue place and the parking garage. You would put quotes around this “park” the way you might send traffic fines to the Hall of “Justice.” But this feeble attempt at nature is walking distance from the club—so that’s where I meet Wesley, at the Fountain of Four Seasons. The fountain yields dead earthworms, not coins; the worms outnumber pull-tabs, cigarettes, and leaves. At the nearby north entrance to the square there is a faded brick arch with a bronzelike plaque that says HISTORICAL SITE. All of it is contrived to suggest that something was once there, but none of it tells you what. Wesley calls out “Ahoy,” so I know he has made up his mind. “You think it’s a crime to change your mind?” he says. “Just because you are able to do a thing doesn’t mean that’s what you h
The Man in Bogotá The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge—though not, she threatens, for long. I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this. I tell the woman about a man in Bogotá. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive. Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months. When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then—that the kidnap was the be
When It’s Human Insteadof When It’s Dog It is just inside the front door. It is the first thing she sees when she stops to wipe her feet. It has been raining for a week, and it won’t be stopping soon. It’s what the people were talking about on the bus ride in, and Mrs. Hatano guesses that’s what they’ll be talking about on the bus ride going home. She wonders if the stain is from water leaking in. But the plaster isn’t buckled on the ceiling above the spot. It’s as big as a three-quart saucepan, though it is not a perfect circle. It is two weeks since Mrs. Hatano cleaned this house. The Mr. gave her time off after the Mrs. died. Before, Mrs. Hatano left at five o’clock. Now the schedule is this: She will come every day at five o’clock to make dinner for the Mr. She will do some light cleaning—a load of laundry, an upstairs dusting—then she will wash the dinner dishes, collect her forty dollars, and let herself out. No one seems to be at home. Mrs. Hatano at the kitchen counter tears
Why I’m Here “Name a time when you are happy,” is one of the questions. I am taking a test to find out what to do. The way to do this is to find out what you like. This is not obvious, the way it sounds. For example, the questions that say, “Would you prefer…” “Would you prefer to: (a) Answer questions about what you do, (b) Answer questions about what you know, (c) Answer questions about what you think?” My answer is, “Depends.” But it’s not one of the choices. I am having to think in terms of Always, Sometimes, Never. You cannot pass or fail this test; your grade is more of a profile. After the written part of the test, I talk to the vocational-guidance counselor. She is fifty or so, a short, square woman in a dress like a blender cozy. Mrs. Deane is the one who asks me when I’m happy. She says, “Tell me the thing you do anyway, and let’s find a way to get you paid for that.” I ask about a job throwing sticks for dogs to fetch, and she says, “Oh, now,” and gives me the courtesy laugh
Breathing Jesus Things turned around after I saw the Breathing Jesus. My lost diamond solitaire was recovered from under the couch. The orchestra noises in my head stopped warming up. My neighbor and I witnessed the Resurrection of Baby. I had gone to the Civic Center to see the Breathing Jesus. This was an outdoor Jesus. He was featured in the carnival they put on every springtime near the City Hall dome. An artist made this Jesus. He sat large as life on a jeweled throne in the trailer-size room that was done up as a shrine. Out in front of the shrine was a coin box for your quarter. I dropped one in the slot, and looked at the velvet-robed figure on the throne. I watched his chest rise with the intake of air, and then fall back in the instant after someone watching beside me said, “Jesus—he’s breathing.” I matched my respiration to the rhythm of His, and drew breath with the Lord until my quarter ran out. I have seen a lot of things I would not know how to explain. I’ve seen “spar
Today Will Be a Quiet Day “I think it’s the other way around,” the boy said. “I think if the quake hit now the bridge would collapse and the ramps would be left.” He looked at his sister with satisfaction. “You are just trying to scare your sister,” the father said. “You know that is not true.” “No, really,” the boy insisted, “and I heard birds in the middle of the night. Isn’t that a warning?” The girl gave her brother a toxic look and ate a handful of Raisinets. The three of them were stalled in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. That morning, before waking his children, the father had canceled their music lessons and decided to make a day of it. He wanted to know how they were, is all. Just—how were they. He thought his kids were as self-contained as one of those dogs you sometimes see carrying home its own leash. But you could read things wrong. Could you ever. The boy had a friend who jumped from a floor of Langley Porter. The friend had been there for two weeks, mostly playing Pi
Daylight Come Belle developed a craving after she was pregnant. After she delivered herself of seven healthy pups, Belle went mad for lizards, catching and eating the island chameleons—who knew how many?—till we came to expect the dog to affect protective color, to rise white from the sand and swim—a blue-pawed dog—in the sea. The lizards made Belle jumpy after dark, made her bark at the stars until one of the guests would yell, “Belle, take the rest of the night off!” There were four guests on the island. The other couple were newlyweds, seventy years old, whose wedding rings slipped from their fingers underwater where, behind borrowed masks, they watched angelfish and a spotted ray, and correctly identified a lone barracuda. The Wellers, Bing and Ruth, developed something of a craving of their own. They found they liked the fried flying fish; when the Wellers announced their choice for dinner, it sounded like they were making fun of Japanese people. At the Wellers’ feet during these
The Harvest The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me. The man was not hurt when the other car hit ours. The man I had known for one week held me in the street in a way that meant I couldn’t see my legs. I remember knowing that I shouldn’t look, and knowing that I would look if it wasn’t that I couldn’t. My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes. He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.” I screamed from the fear of pain. But I did not feel any pain. In the hospital, after injections, I knew there was pain in the room—I just didn’t know whose pain it was. What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be. The five days they didn’t know if they could save my leg or not I stretched to ten. The lawyer was the one who used the word. But I won’t get around to that until a couple of paragraphs. We were
The Most Girl Part of You Jack “Big Guy” Fitch is trying to crack his teeth. He swishes a mouthful of ice water, then straightaway throws back slugs of hot coffee. “Like in Antarctica,” he says, where, if you believe what Big Guy tells you, the people are forever cracking their teeth when they come in from the cold and gulp their coffee down. I believe what Big Guy tells you. I’m his partner in crime, so I’m chewing on the shaved ice, too. I mean, someone that good-looking tells you what to do, you pretty much do what he says. Big Guy (he is so damn big!) can make you do anything. He made us become blood brothers—brothers, even though I am a girl—back when we were clumsy little dopes playing with jacks. He got a sewing needle and was going to stick our fingers, until I chickened out. I pointed to the sore on his elbow and the abrasions on my knee, and, in fact, what we became was scab brothers. But this business with the teeth—I say Big Guy is asking for it. He hasn’t done something li
The Most Girl Part of You
Rapture of the Deep I was the one they sent when it was Halloween night and Miss Locey couldn’t move. I am not a nurse. I am barely a typist. But she didn’t need me to type, or to take the shorthand I don’t have, either. She hired me from an agency at an hourly rate to hand out candy on Halloween night. Because look how it looked: a car in the driveway, a light on upstairs. But nobody answers the door. I know what I would have done as a child if there was somebody home on Halloween night who did not bother to answer the door. I would have come back later with shaving cream and eggs, with toilet paper and friends. Even if she lay in her room in the dark, there was still the car in the drive. And there were worse things even than shaving cream and eggs. What about “leaners”? Kids would fill a trash can with water, with worse than water, and lean it against your door so that when you opened the door, you flooded your Persian rugs. Miss Locey had thought of all of these things. She said sh
Du Jour The first three days are the worst, they say, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m still waiting for those first three days to be over. One day into the program, I realized the only thing that made me smart was nicotine. Now I can’t plan a trip from the bed to the bathroom. I don’t find the front door 50 percent of the time. In my head there’s a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak. But better to be alive and well and not thinking than thinking and smoking and dead. That is the point I’ve reached: Stop smoking, or else. The point is also: Stop smoking, or lose my job. I make soup at a place that has fifty-two different kinds. I’ve made all fifty-two of them at one time or another; lately I only do the specialty of the day. I make Mulligatawny and Senegalese—the kind you would take a taste of for the sound of their names. The owner called me over one day and showed me the bowls his customers had sent back. He said, “It’s the seasoning, babe. It’s the red pepper ratio.” I knew I
Murder “Something something something never / Love for an hour is love forever.” If that’s true, I thought, then we’re in business. I showed the inscription to Jean, there in the used books store, and she said, “Maybe we should have married Jim.” Jean had five boyfriends, all named Jim. Aren’t two of the Jims best friends? I asked. No, she said, this is a whole new crop of Jims. Isn’t one of the Jims a scientist? I asked. She said I must be thinking of the Jim who had a Ph.D. The Jim she thought we should have married was the Jim that got away. Jean said, “Here,” and handed me a newer used book, a book that, in its day, had been a best-seller. She said, “This book gave me the will to live and have fun.” She said, “I read this book and went right out and got myself asked out by a man—a man who liked me,” she said, “and who didn’t even have another girlfriend.” Jean and I are bridesmaids. At last night’s rehearsal dinner, the bride spoke to us in the plural. She said, “You’ve been going
The Day I Had Everything When Mrs. Lawton phoned in the threat, the threat was already a fact. Her estranged husband said that he could hear it in her voice. So he called for an ambulance, scheduled an appointment with the city’s finest doctor, left his office early, and drove to the Lawton country home, where he closed up the house and boarded the dogs, then returned to the city and his hospitalized wife. Mr. Lawton brought Mrs. Lawton flowers—freesia and yellow iris—and he brought her a bill for five hundred dollars, plus the cost of the opera tickets he had been unable to use, plus another hundred dollars for what he called same-day service. At home a week later, Mrs. Lawton received callers. She laid an alarming buffet of Budweiser and crullers, and answered the question on everyone’s mind—whether or not she had paid her husband’s bill. I heard Mrs. Lawton’s story at the weekly meeting. My friend Lee brought me, six months after the Club was formed. Lee died ten years ago; she can’
To Those of You Who MissedYour Connecting FlightsOut of O’Hare To those of you who missed your connecting flights out of O’Hare, I offer my deepest apology. What they did I had no way of knowing they would do because the last time this happened it was handled without the fuss. The last time it happened it affected no one else—I just walked off the plane before the stewardess locked the door, and my luggage, not me, was what reached my destination. Did I know when I walked off Flight 841 that my suitcase would have to be pulled from the plane, a black fabric suitcase the handler had to find amidst the hundreds of other bags, and all of you passengers waiting? And how about the pilot checking the toilets for a bomb, a stewardess doing likewise in the overhead compartment above what was, for maybe two minutes, my seat—6C. I’m right about this—it didn’t used to be this way. The agents on the ground, the ones who check you in, they used to see you coming off the plane and they knew what it
And Lead Us Notinto Penn Station On the nicer side of not a nice street, between God Bless the Cheerful Giver and his dog, and There But for the Grace of God Go I and his dog, a wino engaged me in the following Q and A: Miss, am I bleeding? Yes, yes you are. Where? From the nose. And the mouth? No. Just the nose? Yes. I wonder how that happened. Everything you can think of is going on here. Plus things that you can’t think of, too. Those things are going on in groups. Men who have sex with vacuum cleaners—these men are now outpatients, in therapy down the block. Today, when a blind man walked into the bank, we handed him along to the front of the line where he ordered a BLT. A boy on a tricycle pedals past a mother and son. “Why can’t you ride a tricycle?” the mother says to her son. “That boy is younger than you! Why can’t you even go to Harvard!” Under a streetlight, a man and woman are talking. The man says he feels sure that the woman is going to shoot him and that he can’t help bu
In the Animal Shelter Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want—these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind. They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, “How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?” The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, “Will they go to good homes?” And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, “How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?” But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.
At The Gatesof the Animal Kingdom Ten candles in a fish stick tell you it’s Gully’s birthday. The birthday girl is the center of attention; she squints into the popping flash cubes. The black cat seems to know every smooth cat pose there is. She is burning for discovery in front of the camera. Gully belongs to Mrs. Carlin. Mrs. Carlin has had her since the cat was six weeks old and slept on the stove, curled inside a saucepan warmed by the pilot light. Mrs. Carlin has observed every one of Gully’s birthdays, wrapping the blue felt mice filled with catnip, wrapping the selection of frozen entrees from Mrs. Paul’s, and photographing the birthday girl with her guests. This year, Gully’s guests include the Patterson boys, Pierson and Bret, fourteen and ten, and their cat, Bert. Though it would be more accurate to say that Mrs. Carlin and Gully are the boys’ guests, as the party is being held in the Patterson home. Mrs. Carlin is staying with the boys for the week that their parents are in
The Lady Will Havethe Slug Louie My dog—I found him on the dining room table, stepping around the bowl of fruit, licking the beeswax candles. My cat is another one—eats anything but food. I watch her select a tulip in a vase. When her teeth pierce the petal, I startle her away with sharply clapped hands. A moment later, and again the cat stalks. She crouches in front of the next flower over, tasting the four-inch petal of a parrot tulip as if she is thinking, That one is the one I am not supposed to eat. My brother keeps a boa constrictor for a pet. The preying snake suffers from a vitamin deficiency, so my brother buys a large jar of powdered high-potency supplement. Before each meal, he dips live mice in water, then drops them in the jar. He shakes the covered jar until each mouse wears a healthy coat of vitamins A through E. Then he feeds the coated mice to the snake. When my brother and I were young, I mixed dirt with his scrambled eggs. My mother let me feed him in his high chair
Under No Moon My mother said she would die when she saw the comet. This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open along a curb solid with cars. My mother believed she would die when she saw the comet. She booked, for herself and my father, a cabin aboard the ship that would cruise to the mouth of the Amazon River at the point in the world where the comet could best be seen. This was a trip my mother had to plan a year ahead. From several lines that were making the trip, my mother chose a Greek ship, the Sun Line’s Golden Odyssey, first reading aloud from glossy brochures about the first-rate entertainment, the swimming pools, and the food—the recreational pleasures of elegant cruising at its best
The Center For the price of a cup of coffee a day, my friend Deborah adopted a child. She adopted one of the children on Channel 5. Except the word I think they use on Channel 5 is sponsor. She sponsored one of the Sally Struthers children, or maybe it was one of the Linda Evans children. Maybe they are the same children. In any case, it was a child that my friend Deborah saw advertised late at night. According to the profile sent to my friend by the agency overseas, the child had two living parents. Both parents held jobs. In the photo, the child appeared healthy, well-fed, and well—even fashionably—clothed. The report the agency included said that Deborah’s sponsorship would provide the child with much-needed supplies for school. My friend Deborah thought, school supplies? She telephoned the agency’s twenty-four-hour toll-free number. She asked them to reassign her cup-of-coffee-a-day money to a child who was not so well off as that child was. The agency obliged and presented my frie
Tom-Rock Through the Eels “Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?” The man who owned the nursery, that is what he said. He thought I had come for the specials, which he was out of, but all I needed was peat. I was planning to start a rock garden, someplace to put the rock. The Tom-rock had been underwater, under thirty feet of clear water cut by red eels beneath a pier on Lake Ontario in 1963. She bribed me, my mother, with praise—would I be the diver to retrieve it while she watched? From the deck of the Jolly Roger you could see the word Tom. The name. The rock on the bottom was rectangular, its corners softened to curves. There was a green line drawn like a television screen, and inside the screen the name Tom, in blue. The Tom-rock, when I brought it to the surface, was, let’s say, half the size of a shoebox. The ice-cream cone I got for braving red eels held chocolate ice cream in cylindrical scoops. Canadian ice cream, Canadian rock, and no one in our family named Tom
The Rest of God For days there was nothing to say except, What a glorious day. Wildflowers galloped across thorn-free fields, stopping only when cut and placed in water. Shopping lists grew to include carrots for the horse next door, black but for a spattered-looking black-and-white rump—a horse who ran crazed around the paddock at dusk, and whose name was Fury. The men of the house would start to drink then, but only enough to be playful late at night. They gave the kids rides on power mowers, careening over the lawns in great loops in the dark, missing the two kinds of oaks—white and red—the one with its rounded leaves, the other’s leaves in points, which the kids were taught to know by saying, White men shoot bullets and Red men shoot arrows. Mornings, robins robbed the ground. A rooster startled the cat that had been raised indoors. Nothing clever was said. What did come under discussion when everyone met in the evening was why, when people go to the beach, they always lie with the
Weekend The game was called on account of dogs—Hunter in the infield, Tucker in the infield, Bosco and Boone at first base. First-grader Donald sat down on second base, and Kirsten grabbed her brother’s arm and wouldn’t let him leave third to make his first run. “Unfair!” her brother screamed, and the dogs, roving umpires, ran to third. “Good power!” their uncle yelled, when Joy, in a leg cast, swung the bat and missed. “Now put some wood to it.” And when she did, Joy’s designated runner, Cousin Zeke, ran to first, the ice cubes in his gin and tonic clacking like dog tags in the glass. And when Kelly broke free from Kirsten and this time came in to make the run, members of the Kelly team made Tucker in the infield dance on his hind legs. “It’s not who wins—” their coach began, and was shouted down by one of the boys, “There’s first and there’s forget it.” Then Hunter retrieved a foul ball and carried it off in the direction of the river. The other dogs followed—barking, mutinous. Dinne
Church Cancels Cow Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern—this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who finds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots. Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, “You should keep that dog on a leash.” She says, “That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.” When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, “Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave?” She says, “I found faces on my mother’s grave. I
The Children’s Party “Bye-bye,” the baby said, his voice a little bell. “Bye-bye,” he waved, as we arrived for the party at the lake. We were stiff after driving from our house hours south in a town overrun by tourists. We put gifts on a table in the hall. The three children all had birthdays the same week. The baby’s father showed us to the porch. He poured us drinks, said, “This’ll change your handwriting.” The others were friends from across the lake who came up for a month every summer, tying their bull’s-eye or turnabout to a cleat and hopping out onto a dock. Between the back porch and the lake was a well-kept lawn with a grill, coals just lit, and a large decorated paper-bag piñata strung up in a shimmering willow. The baby’s mother and a woman I didn’t know called me over to join them beside the piñata. The woman I didn’t know asked if I had a match. I didn’t see the cigarette she held, and thought she meant to light the piñata. I told her, and we all doubled over picturing mel
Sportsman By rights, Jack should have headed west when his wife, Alex, left him, but they lived in California so he drove east, folding down the visor each morning against the sun. He didn’t wait to find a cheap motel at night, just pulled off the road and slept cramped in the car a few hours. At dawn he thrust a stick of Right Guard up under his shirt—the rock ’n’ roll shower—and drove until he found coffee. He thought that traveling alone was like being in therapy—the things you found out about yourself. Speeding across the Bonneville Salt Flats, Jack played car golf, weaving in and out of the lanes trying to roll the Ping-Pong ball in the passenger seat well into the Styrofoam coffee cup that was on its side after spilling out most of the coffee. Jack was good at this. Not that he’d been invited, but he was, he realized, going to New York, to the home of his friend the doctor, the closest thing to rehab he could find. Jack signaled and changed lanes at the exit for the Long Island E
Housewife She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”
The Annex The headlights hit the headstone and I hate it all over again. It is all that I can ever see, all that I can ever talk about. There is nothing else to talk about. It is right there out in front. I mean the cemetery that is out over there across the street from our house. With the headlights turned off and the car parked outside the garage, there is enough of a moon to see that there is no missing it over there across the street in the part of the cemetery the people around here call the annex. The annex is for when the cemetery fills up. Anyway, there is a stone there that has the baby’s name on it. And there was a week-old bouquet of something all dried up past knowing what it was that was tied with wide white ribbon out there until the time I came home today. There was a white ribbon on it. I could have taken the ribbon away. But the woman would have come and put another one, I suppose. This is a cemetery which has its shapely tended trees and flowerful shrubs and Halloween
The New Lodger One of the locals said at the bar, “I hear you’ve got a new lodger.” I thought, Word travels fast—I only got here last night. In a corner booth of the Soggy Dollar, an old beach bar that also serves food, I can listen to other customers without seeming to eavesdrop; I’ve got postcards fanned out on the table. I’m trying not to say the same thing on every one. The best is an aerial view of the road you take to get here. Seeing this ahead of time, you would choose to go somewhere else. Hugging the inside curves of the road, taking steady deep breaths, I can drive myself here, but not back. I hire one of the locals to drive my car down to the junction of the road where I can take over. I arrange for a taxi to meet us there, and I cover the large fare back. “It’s imported,” the bartender says, and pours a glass for the guy at the bar who meant lager. “What do you think?” the bartender says. “Should I order more?” It is not easy to get to this beach. The one road is dangerous
Tumble Home …I would have tradedplaces with anyone raised on love,but how would anyone raised on lovebear this death? —Sharon Olds, from “Wonder” I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table. This is easier, I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less—not more—careful. We can say everything. Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. Having delivered myself of the manly analogy, I see it to be not a failure, but a lie. How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you. These sounds—this letter—it is m
Notes “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 conversatio
Beach Town The house next door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots. Their music at night was loud, and I liked it; it was not music I knew. Mornings, I picked up the empties they had lobbed across the hedge, Coronas with the limes wedged inside, and pitched them back over. We had not introduced ourselves these three months. Between our houses a tall privet hedge is backed by white pine for privacy in winter. The day I heard the voice of a woman not the wife, I went out back to a spot more heavily planted but with a break I could just see through. Now it was the man who was talking, or trying to—he started to say things he could not seem to finish. I watched the woman do something memorable to him with her mouth. Then the man pulled her up from where she had been kneeling. He said, “Maybe you’re just hungry. Maybe we should get you something to eat.” The woman had a nimble laugh. The man said, “Paris is where you and I should go.” The woman asked what
Jesus Is Waiting I didn’t want the sunroof or the luggage rack, but neither did I want to wait the three months not to have to have them. So I took the white one anyway and put fifty thousand miles on it in just about a year. Lincoln Tunnel to Baltimore, BWI: two and three-quarter hours; Holland Tunnel to D.C. (Connecticut Avenue exit): three and a quarter hours. In Virginia, anything over ninety is now reckless driving and reckless driving costs more than speeding does and they say no excuses, you have to show up in court, but don’t believe it; I phoned in sick the day I was slated to appear and a clerk told me where to send the check. One more reckless driving ticket in Virginia and I’ll have to find the place they have the safety class that, if you take it, knocks three points off your license. Or, I don’t know, your life? Maryland and New York are the states where I can push it. No blue highways, nothing scenic. In a tornado outside Baltimore, in a broken neighborhood off I-95, I a
The Uninvited It was one and two and three and four and five o’clock in the morning. Whatever time it was, it was time to take the test. You did not have to wait until morning anymore; the instructions on the box said that for an accurate result you could dip the strip of litmus paper in a “clear stream of urine” any time of day. My waiting until morning was habit, a nod to the old days when “first morning’s urine” was going to give you the answer. Though not at home. You had to go to a clinic then. Sometimes on the ceilings of exam rooms was a sign: “A woman can never be too thin or too rich, or too close to the end of the table.” I was fifty years old, and ten days late. If menopausal, go on estrogen; if pregnant, go on welfare. If I was pregnant, I did not know who to blame—my husband, whom I did not live with, or the man in the auditorium, whom I did not report. I did what I had always done the night before taking the test: I watched The Uninvited. “The cold…is no mere matter of
Reference #388475848-5 To: Parking Violations Bureau, New York City I am writing in reference to the ticket I was issued today for “covering ‘The Empire State’” on my license plate. I include two photographs I took this afternoon that show, front and back, that the words “The Empire State” are clearly visible. I noticed several cars on the same block featuring license plates on which these words were entirely covered by the frame provided by the car dealer, and I noticed that none of these cars had been ticketed, as mine had. I don’t mean to appear insolent, but I am wondering if the ticket might have been issued by the young Hispanic guy I sometimes see patrolling the double-parked cars during the week? I ask because the other day my dog yanked the leash from my hand and ran to him and jumped up looking for a treat. He did not appear to be comfortable around dogs, and though mine is a friendly one, she’s big, and maybe the guy was frightened for a moment? It happened as I was getting
What Were the White Things? These pieces of crockery are a repertory company, playing roles in each dream. No, that’s not the way it started. He said the pieces of crockery played roles in each painting. The artist clicked through slides of still lifes he had painted over thirty years. Someone in the small, attentive audience said, “Isn’t that the cup in the painting from years ago?” Yes, it was, the artist said, and the pitcher and mixing bowl and goblet, too. Who was the nude woman leaning against the table on which the crockery was displayed? The artist didn’t say, and no one in the small, attentive audience asked. I was content to look at objects that had held the attention of a gifted man for so many years. I arrived at the lecture on my way to someplace else, an appointment with a doctor my doctor had arranged. Two days before, she was telling me his name and address and I have to say, I stopped listening, even though—or because—it was important. So instead of going to the radiol
The Dog of the Marriage 1. On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet. We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater. I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog’s head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. “Because he can hear high notes we can’t?” my husband said. “No,” I said, “because he was disappointed in the choreography.” I work with these dogs every day, and their capability, their decency, shames me. I am trying not to take things personally. This on advice from the evaluator at the school for the blind where I train dogs. She had overheard me ask a Labrador retriever, “Are you trying to ruin my day?” I suppose there are many things one should try not to take personally. An absence of convenient parking, inclement weather, a husband who finds that he
2. 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 t
3. 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, o
4. 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 ord
The Afterlife When my mother died, my father’s early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached. He was kind, cultured, youthful, and good-looking, and many women tended to him. They cooked dinner for him, and sent their housekeepers to his Victorian near the Presidio Gate. My brothers were away in college, but I, who had dropped out of school, spent a good deal of time at the house. Some of the women who looked after my father banked their right actions for later, I felt. One woman signed him up for a concert series, but it was a kind of music he didn’t much like, and he had been at a concert—chamber music—the night my mother died. One woman stocked his kitchen with candied ginger and snail shells and bottles of good red wine. I would prop bags of Oreos and Fig Newtons alongside so my brothers would find something familiar when they came home. One woman sang to him; another, when he asked if she could sing
Memoir Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
Offertory We did it twelve times—made love, all of us, to one another twelve times, the two of them doing everything two people could do to me twelve times. I was going to say only twelve times, but it wasn’t “only,” was it? It was wonderful. I began, last night, at the beginning. The rule was I had to tell the truth, and I had to tell him everything. I could start where I liked. I told him the story every night; he asked for it, for some version of it, every night. Sometimes I left out a detail so he would prompt me, and thus participate after a fashion. “The inevitability of orgasm?” he might say, and I would say, “The way she moved her hip into me first.” Sometimes I changed their names. Names were not the details that mattered to him. What mattered was the most refined particularity of our actions, and the declarative nature of my narrative. He did not want me to use language that said anything other than what it was. For me, I mean. Well, for them, her. All of us. “I want you to g
Notes The harpist who sings at the bedside of the dying is the musicologist and thanatologist Therese Schroeder-Sheker. The expert who defined animal happiness is Vicki Hearne. “Those who can’t repeat the past are condemned to remember it” is from Mark O’Donnell. The mystery writer is Patricia Highsmith. “We do not quite forgive a giver” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Gifts.” The artist is Ray Johnson, in the film How to Draw a Bunny. The lines quoted are from “The Garden of Proserpine” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
About the Author AMY HEMPEL is the author of The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Reasons to Live, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Elle; GQ; Harper’s; Playboy; The Quarterly; The Yale Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Vanity Fair. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and she teaches at the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College. She lives in New York City.
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →