The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

instances of change are anecdotal, deep-seated fantasy. “The New Testament has versions of it over and over: the whore becomes a saint, Paul on the road to Damascus. I mean,” she says, “Christianity acknowledges that for a person to change his nature is miraculous.”

Is there an animal story that doesn’t end in tears? This one.

I didn’t tell her about the night my mother died, a night I dreamlessly slept through the night in the room right next to hers. But then, my mother never slept with her head on my stomach, or licked my face awake.

A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room.

A friend of mine tried to get pregnant and found out she could not. I said, “The world doesn’t need more babies,” and she said she wasn’t going to do it for the world.

A passing thought: “Can a woman hurt you as much as a man?” “Worse,” I tell her. “They understand you better, so they can hurt you worse.”

“Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.”

One page was a kind of consumer’s guide, a chart of deadly combinations, which pill taken with another would make you sick, or worse. Depending on your point of view, it was cautionary or how-to.

“Spend time in your garden. Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.”

Hatred is a passionate involvement. It’s worse not to care for a person at all. Or is this a notion I hold onto to flatter myself?

When my mother died, I was her size. I could have worn any of her clothes at any time. Instead I packed them in shopping bags, and drove them to the Goodwill drop. Then I had only the fear of seeing derelicts wearing my mother’s clothes, her ghost in neighborhoods she didn’t visit, alive.

it was the first time I believed the claim that you can help a person more by asking the right question than by giving them the answer.

“San Francisco,” my mother once said, “is the only city that demands you love it.” And she did. She wanted to keep other people alive to see it. She wanted them to have her organs, transplanted. Apparently she didn’t know that the pills she took would destroy them.

How do you let something out into the world when it’s a sure thing someone out there won’t like it?

the driver says into his rearview mirror, ‘You’d better buckle your seat belts.’ And Chatty says, ‘Why? If we have an accident, I’ll be out of the car before you hit anyone.’

You could set me down in Paris, I would not find a thing to buy, if what I was there to buy was something for myself. To shop for yourself requires you to know yourself.

Most years I finish my shopping in the fall and throb until December.

Nothing, given time, is random;

I did not want to spend that Christmas with a stranger, a reportedly depressed stranger who was an intellectual and aesthetic titan who would, I feared, nail me to the floor with pointy-headed lectures on modern art.

“Drawing is a racing yacht cutting through the ocean,” he said. “Painting is the ocean itself.”

He was a kind man with whom it was hard to talk. So I listened.

My mother wore pigskin gloves to drive, even though she drove a station wagon.

When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I’ll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it isn’t there.

I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!

The photographer changed his tack. He said, “Give me your best ‘Fuck you’ look.” The camera, for an instant, was my mother. “Perfect!” the photographer said.

the auditory ghost, the chord that sounds at night when moonlight hits the keys through the windows in the nave.

suddenly it comes to me that my mother never cut flowers and brought them into the house. Frustration pulls weeds; it does not arrange bouquets.

In the Hostility Suite, Warren answers the phone. “Chatty?” he says, and holds out the receiver. He waits until she is beside him, reaching for it, before adding, “Phone call for Karen.”

We sometimes forget why we’re here. And when in a flash we remember, it is a feeling like something we’re not fond of that has gone away but will be coming back.

Diminution. This is often a comfort, to be satisfied with less.

Please excuse the switch to notebook paper; I just ran out of the good stuff. And if my penmanship suffers, it is because I am not at a desk, but in a parked car, and using my knee for support.

He brought along a book of the stripe I could hold up to the unidentified object that flies.

It is rabbit hour, the time they come out into the open. I wish it never got any darker than this, the moment you can no longer tell that grass is green.

The tide this time of year washes hundreds of tiny starfish up onto the beach. It leaves them stranded in salty constellations, a sandy galaxy within reach.

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 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.

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.”

Nobody thinks about the way sound carries across water. Even the water in a swimming pool.

They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would all be fools to expect it.

In a tornado outside Baltimore, in a broken neighborhood off I-95, I asked the attendant in a Mobil station, “Where’s anywhere else?” The man didn’t even point.

There was a multiplex and a Mexican restaurant that used baked beans in their burritos. North Carolina, but nothing Carolingian.

Here’s something I didn’t know: the drag you get from open windows uses more gas than running the air conditioner does.

The radio said Dorothy Love Coates died today. But I didn’t know she’d even been alive.

A good feeling when I see traffic cones. They weigh next to nothing and cannot hurt a car. That’s not why I mow them down.

On the day before a holiday, you feel you have a destination just by being on the road with so many people who do. Have a destination, that is.

if something goes wrong, it is not the car that’s at fault. Bad form to blame something for the damage one does. I just mow them down—and drive on.

I don’t know about the coffee at either place. I only know about the coffee if it’s in a lobby and free.

The geographic cure, these bouts of driving, with the age-old bit built in: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Maybe people should be trained like dogs. But people aren’t dogs. Besides, a dog won’t speak to you, either.

I would like to be scrambled and served with sausages at an all-night diner.

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.