The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

Move enough times and you will never defrost a freezer.

Mrs. Deane says, “What do you suppose would happen if you just stayed put? If you just stayed still long enough to think a thing through?” “I don’t know,” I say. “I won’t feel like myself.” “Oh,” she says, “but you will—you are.”

I have seen a lot of things I would not know how to explain.

I have read by the light of the southern aurora at 3 a.m.

Things happen, or they stop happening, and who can tell you why?

The things I’ve seen I can’t explain are nothing next to what I’ve heard—musical sand, whispering lakes, a shout whose echo came back as a song. Oh, I’ve heard stranger things than that, but those were in my head.

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.

All the friend said the day the boy visited and lost every game was never play Ping-Pong with a mental patient because it’s all we do and we’ll kill you.

You think you’re safe, the father thought, but it’s thinking you’re invisible because you closed your eyes.

The girl gave her brother a look you could iron clothes with.

“The real reason she wants to change,” said the boy, “is her waist will get two inches bigger when she learns to stomach-breathe. That’s what else her teacher said.”

“Who will ever adopt you if you don’t mind your manners?” the father said.

“Then I hate California,” she said. “I hate its guts.”

The girl started the car and screamed. “Goddammit!” With the power off, the boy had tuned in the Spanish station. Mariachis exploded on ignition.

“No,” he said, “keep driving—it’s getting earlier.”

He smiled at the exact spots he knew their heads were turned to his, and doubted he would ever feel—not better, but more than he did now.

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.

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.

The Wellers with their message of affirmation were meant to warm the hearts of strangers. But I could not wait to get away from them. The Wellers had been widow and widower first.

I am looking down, where the lost wedding rings are invisible, now the color of the sand or of the sea or of the flesh.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

My blood was on the front of this man’s clothes. He said, “You’ll be okay, but this sweater is ruined.”

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.

The man of a week was already gone, the accident driving him back to his wife.

In my neighborhood there is a fellow who was a chemistry teacher until an explosion took his face and left what was left behind.

He was next on the transplant list, as soon as—the word they used was harvest—as soon as a kidney was harvested. The boy’s mother prayed for drunk drivers. I prayed for men who were not discriminating. Aren’t we all, I thought, somebody’s harvest?

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true—nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn’t believe it.

When I was wheeled out of Recovery later that day, bandaged waist to ankle, three officers and an armed sheriff frisked me.

The psychiatrist I saw at the surgeon’s referral said that the feeling was a common one. She said that victims of trauma who have not yet assimilated the trauma often believe they are dead and do not know it.

I mean, someone that good-looking tells you what to do, you pretty much do what he says.

That was before his mother died. She died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said, “Any place I hang myself is home.” In the movie version, that is where his father would have slapped him.

Sewing is one of the secrets between us. Only Big Guy knows how considerably I had to cheat to earn the Girl Scout merit badge in sewing. It’s a fact that my seamstress badge is glued to the green cotton sash.

Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber, thinking it was zucchini. That’s the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

I turn the page and see that Big Guy has been there first. In addition to reading my mail, he writes in the margins of my books, usually the number of shopping days left until his birthday.

I had only been kissed once before. The fellow had made me think of those kids whose mouths cover the spigot when they drink from a fountain.

And that is the end of the joking around; we get it out of our systems. We take the length of the couch, squirming like maggots in ashes.

if it’s true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

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.

“The Pepto-Abysmal Room,” Miss Locey said. “It’s never the color on the test card, is it? Always it turns out—bolder.”

It was the age-old question Miss Locey put next. From her bed of pain she ran it by me—if you took only half a pill, did it work full-strength for half as long, or half-strength for the regular time?

“The rings belonged to my mother,” Miss Locey said. “They did before I tricked her out of them.”

I told her the dents were from a man’s teeth. From where he bit the gold to show me how soft, then bit my finger, to show me how soft.

I told Miss Locey that I still needed to hear from the God that had betrayed me. An explanation would not be enough. An apology would not be enough. I needed for that God to look up to me, I said. I needed for him to have to tilt his head way back to look up to me, exposing his throat.

With the habitual kleptomania of temporary employment, I dropped the remaining Halloween candy into my purse, alongside boxes of paper clips and refills of Scotch tape.

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.

Sometimes I lose it personality-wise because I don’t know what to do instead of smoke. I’m gaining weight of course; everybody does. But not because I’m eating more of anything. I’m gaining weight because I’ve stopped coughing. Coughing was exercise for me.

The program that is monitored at the clinic was guaranteed to leave you a broken husk, she said, “but a thin broken husk.”