The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

Mornings, robins robbed the ground.

We were women in one-piece bathing suits beneath faded loose clothes, walking across dunes to call on one another, bringing bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod trailing roots, quoting the poet’s hope that, “Through gleaming gates of goldenrod / I’ll pass into the rest of God.”

Fay trained horses and Dave farmed trees, and to Fay’s way of thinking there was shame in being weak, even if the stronger was a freakish ocean wave.

“The first cold snap,” he said, “I get in my car and drive south till I can roll down the window.”

Jeff Taylor’s date, a woman who showed real estate and who kept up her nails.

That late in the season we had our timing down. We were the model of capable neighbors, filling our plates in an orderly manner, then scrambling for places in the sand close to the flames.

Rather than return for his glasses, he later explained he had driven home really fast so that he would make it back before he had an accident.

When a stray beach dog ran in to join them, we could see—phosphorescence clinging to his fur—the outline of his legs as they paddled underwater.

Joy’s designated runner, Cousin Zeke, ran to first, the ice cubes in his gin and tonic clacking like dog tags in the glass.

Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

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.

I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears.

For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.

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 melting gummy bears dripping like hot wax onto the outstretched hands of the blindfolded children beneath it.

I said to their father, quoting a lovely poem, “Tell them this: ‘The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.’ ” He said, “That’s what I used to tell myself when I cheated on my ex-wife.”

“I have deadlines,” she said soberly, inexplicably adjusting a gorilla mask over her face.

We heard the distant, slightly hysterical cry of a loon on the lake. “People think they’re related to ducks,” said a local for our benefit, “but they’re really much closer to penguins.”

In the moment before Tony and Bruce drove up—the children’s new dog barking in the car—locals and guests, we held our breath as branches broke, the magnificent rack an emblem of need that could not wait another day.

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.

At dawn he thrust a stick of Right Guard up under his shirt—the rock ’n’ roll shower—and drove until he found coffee.

“It’s one of those ‘Honey, I’m sorry’ gifts,” she said, and Jack said, “Nice. Get him angry again.”

“We put up a detached garage,” the doctor said, adding, for the nth time, “it doesn’t care if you park in it or not.” The tour concluded on the redwood deck the doctor had built himself.

She observed that Jack always said he was on his way out when he called. “It’s like you can’t make an entrance until you’ve established your exit.”

When she prefaced a remark with “She wasn’t nice enough to me not to tell you this,” Jack could tell she was in his corner.

He practiced a clear countenance in the mirror, reminded himself that this was not a date, and smoked a joint while watching a sports roundup show on TV.

She said she had so many friends, and always remembered which sorrow went with which person.

The dogs had been napping in the herb garden, and came inside wagging thyme, basil, and dill through the kitchen.

She tried to ask a question about Alex’s mother, but the puppy wanted to play, so her question was spliced and punctuated with commands—“Do you DOWN think you will NO go to California SIT to be with Alex?”—a kind of canine Tourette’s.

Jack said, “The city looks pretty good.” The psychic said, “Give it a minute.”

The headlights hit the headstone and I hate it all over again.

I wanted to ask my husband if you call it a baby at the age of five months. I mean five unborn months!

I can almost believe that somewhere is the person who could look across the street and see a vision of perfect peace, the resting place of someone who, unlike the rest of us, was only encouraged and adored.

I hadn’t been to this town since the time, years before, when I nearly drowned.

I told him it was my birthday. He left me in the cabin, and came back carrying a piece of chocolate cake. There were no plates or forks. He watched me as I ate the cake. I said, “What—am I covered with frosting?” “Every day of your life,” he said, and went home to his wife.

Why get acquainted with what will be left, or leaving?

I don’t have to hunt up souvenirs. It is enough to feel the pull of the old home, pulling apart the new.

I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies.

“Not every clocktick needs a martyr.”

There is the unidentified object that flies. When any one of us spots it hovering above the house, we all grab a book and run to the lawn and hold up the books to show them what kind of people we are. Shakespeare and Tolstoy! Run get Jane Austen!

The definition of outpatient here is: a person who has fainted, who has passed out.

kale not even the moles will eat,

I have made friends with the Southerner. Chatty is not one of those ironic nicknames as when a fat person is known as “Tiny.” Chatty says that when she was a girl away at school and the holidays were coming, her mother would ask if she was bringing home any listeners.

is the pleasure of keeping the radio on all night when you were just able to have a friend stay over, and all you cared to drink in the dark was ginger ale.

Writing to you, I am myself.

It is easy to imagine mattresses being pulled off the beds upstairs, and teenaged girls in baby-doll pajamas surfing them down the stairs.

She plays the drinking down, says she monitored herself using the Jimi Hendrix test: Am I choking on my own vomit? No? Then I can have another drink.

Chatty has lost nearly all of her short-term memory, and she loves it. Wasn’t that the point, she asks, of drinking?

I am superstitious, and never change the bedsheets on a Friday (it gives the devil control of your dreams).

I am superstitious, and sometimes confused, opening an umbrella before I leave the house, but never, ever, wearing sunglasses inside.

She said she missed her interview. So did this make her compassionate, Karen asked, or just ambivalent?