The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

“She can do in a paragraph what it takes other writers a page to do.”

“The other day I was playing Scrabble with Karen. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose?”

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.

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.

It takes me fifty-five minutes to drive one way, and I wish the commute were longer.

And losing yourself on the freeway is like living at the beach—you’re not aware of lapsed time, and suddenly you’re there, where it was you were going.

His real name is Howard. But Suzy is a slurrer, so it comes out Hard. It seems to fit. Hard has shoulder-length black hair and a mouth as round and mean as a lamprey.

Sometimes a rain begins while we are underwater.

just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.

He mounts the pictures on cardboard, which just makes them harder to tear up.

I say an omen that big can be ignored.

“Luck isn’t luck,” the father told his kids. “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”

He turned off the freeway onto a wide commercial drive of franchised food and failing business.

Through the horns going off behind him, through the fists of his daughter beside him, the father stayed stopped.

It is the best thing on television is what my husband, Flea, said.

My love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back?

He’s a real teenager of a dog—if Boris didn’t have whiskers, he’d have pimples.

Here’s a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.

I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed—not sex—but sex was how we got there.

in the morning Chuck purrs against my throat, and it feels like prayer.

Mrs. Kaiser came to visit after her own dog died. When Kirby laid a paw in her lap, Mrs. Kaiser burst into tears. I thought, God love a dog that hustles.

After F. Lee’s death, someone asked me how I was. I said that I finally had enough hangers in the closet. I don’t think that that is what I meant to say.

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

“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.

She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck. “Hey,” she says, “the end o’ the line.”

“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.”

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.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

He has had a buoyant feeling of fate since he learned Freud died the day he was born.

I told her I couldn’t help it. I get rational when I panic.

“Hold on,” the driver said. “I know every bump in these roads, and I’ve never been able to miss one of them.”

I stopped telling people how handsome their dogs were; too many times what they said was, “You want him?”

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

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

this nurse makes every other woman look like a sex-change. Unfortunately, she’s in love with the Lord.

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

With the unphotogenic’s eagerness to pose, she increased her chances of the one good shot that would let her relax, having proof at last that she had once looked good, just once.

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

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

Sydney Lawton Square is a park for a transient population; there are no benches. You can walk it end to end in minutes.

Eve Grant is Wesley Grant’s future former wife.

About Eve Grant, Wesley has said that he married the most beautiful woman he ever saw and learned the irrelevance of beauty.

She wrote an article on spec for the Sunday paper and had it returned six weeks later. Wesley asked the editor what was wrong with it, wasn’t it boring enough?

His grandmother started it when he was a boy. She used to tickle Wesley beyond fun, he said, until he felt trapped and helpless and would have cried except that he learned to give in to it, and at that moment felt relief and calm move in. It is this tickling and giving in that makes him funny, he thinks. Like every kind of recovery, comedy demands surrender.

I get something out of this, too.

He said, “Every night I come out here and tell you what a great show we have and you know, it’s the God’s honest truth. But tonight I really mean it.”

“I meet a person, and in my mind I’m saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogotá. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.

“My God,” the man says quietly. He stares a thousand miles into the bed.

“Is it different when it’s human instead of when it’s dog?”