The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

“Four languages?” “Oh, God no,” she said. “I’m exaggerating so you can get to know me faster.”

Sometimes Mrs. Wynn calls when I’m home not smoking. She calls me instead of eating, the way other people call someone instead of taking a drink.

They’re wrong about that part. It’s your life—it’s the rest of your life that’s the worst.

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.”

In a biker bar called the Stretchmark Cafe, the tables of loudly muscled men ignore the strippers and leer at slides of choppers projected on the cafe walls.

The day of the wedding, before a S.W.A.T. team of beauticians arrived to do the bride, the young son from the groom’s first marriage gave his new stepmother a picture he had drawn of a scowling Green Beret with a sword through his flaming head.

For her second time around, the bride

chose ivory tea-length lace, better flowers and better food, better music and a better man.

Jean said, “Men.” She said, “They hate you at first. But all you have to do is be funny and sad and tall and thin and short and fat and wear them down, wear them down.” “You can look on the bright side,” I said, “but think of the men who have unexplainably fled after they got to know us a little.”

His telephone rings. I imagine it is a woman calling, and because I am the wife, I answer in the voice that says, I’ve had it ten times today and I live here. This is what marriage means to me.

When Mrs. Lawton phoned in the threat, the threat was already a fact.

The woman looked up and past me, out the opened window. “The devil is beating his wife,” she said. It was a sunny day, and a rain shower had begun, and I had not heard that expression—that explanation—since I was a child.

“We don’t speak the same language,” Lee went on, “so we assume that we like each other. Cuts out a lot of the ‘What did you mean by that?’s.”

And then Jean told a story about the man she would have married, about a dinner they had shared, the point of which seemed to me to be that things get worse before they get really terrible.

Jean said she thought she might still hear from Larry but that hoping he would call was like the praying you do after the bowling ball has left your hand.

“And his family, my God,” Jean said. “These are people so boring it would have to come from a gene.”

“The deeply boring give themselves away first by the exchange of facts,” Jean said.

“This one is for the surgeon,” Jean said and dropped a strap, exposing the breast she was going to lose.

That is when I told them that my husband was killed in a plane crash, the one in Tenerife. There is precedent here for a lie of this kind, or rather, a lie at this time.

You walk off a plane and even think about getting a refund! You get one—one—one trip for the price of two.

“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!”

Women who live alone in fear of intruders call the local precinct for advice. “Keep your doorknobs highly polished,” an officer tells them. “When someone breaks in, we can get clear prints.”

A beautiful familiar woman is escorted from a nightclub. A visiting Southern girl says, “S’cuse me, ma’am, but aren’t you a friend of my mama’s back in Sumner?” “I’m Elizabeth Taylor,” the woman says, “and fuck you.”

I don’t know what to say about this. I am as cut off from meaning and completion as all of these crippled people.

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.

The black cat seems to know every smooth cat pose there is. She is burning for discovery in front of the camera.

The boys look at Gully, still bent over her fish. Pierson spanks her lightly on the back; her body twitches, but the cat does not leave her dish.

She strokes the cat’s fur for the cat’s pleasure, then for her own, and back, and forth, until the pleasures run together and the two of them sleep through the night.

They whine at Mrs. Carlin till she stops the car for ice cream. They eat it in the car, being quiet long enough to look out the windows and see lightning bugs spark the blue dusk.

one of the lightning bugs flies into the windshield. Mrs. Carlin has to sit up straight and lift her chin to see above the glowing smear that streaks her line of vision like a comet.

Mrs. Carlin carries the newspaper into the house and trades it for the car keys.

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.

My mother said she would die when she saw the comet.

If couples can grow to look alike, then my parents’ ailments came to resemble each other.

Speeding through the jungle at midnight, the taxicab drivers talked snakes. They said there were no more snakes on Trinidad since the government imported the mongoose. It had done its job so well—eating not only poisonous snakes but birds’ eggs, too—that in the daylight they would see that there were no more exotic birds.

This is the part my father made me see—all those people stumbling in the dark, under no moon, unable to shine a light or strike a match because a time exposure would be ruined.

It became an adventure, my father said, to see anything that night at all.

He pointed to the minuscule dot that was the entire point of the trip.

My mother was content with this thought: that the pills that almost took her life may actually have saved it by preventing her from seeing the incarnation of her doom.

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.

Original Pal is buried in a flower bed, his whiskers pushing up as stems at the end of which are configured, each spring, marigolds and impatiens.

“Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?”

In California, you are not supposed to sleep beneath bookshelves or paintings or mirrors on the wall. But in my father’s house, when my father is away, I sleep in his bed and gamble that the painting of a potter’s wheel will not shake loose and crush my skull in the hours of a quaking town at night.

Sometimes, when the cannon goes off at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in—lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

it is possible that my legs are bent where my mother’s legs were straight.

She says it is not enough that a pill helps her sleep through the night—somehow, she has to get through the day.

A short time later, and her voice has lost weight. She is speaking so fast that her thoughts lose their breath catching up.

I see my face reflected in the window and face the sad truth—that I happen to look my best when there is no one there to see.

MRS. NELSON administered SAT tests to students. She tried to impress upon us the importance of scoring high. She did an imitation of herself as a doctor, checking the patient’s pulse, blood pressure, and SAT scores.

Wildflowers galloped across thorn-free fields, stopping only when cut and placed in water.