The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

I was fifty years old, and ten days late. If menopausal, go on estrogen; if pregnant, go on welfare.

storm doors and windows had never been put up, so, like clocks not changed from Daylight Savings Time, wouldn’t the absence of these fixtures be just right in a few more months?

I did not call the police. Two years of working a hotline, and I did not report it.

Some of the group never said the word man. Instead they said “potential rapist.” There were men who wanted to donate money, but there was a faction among us who did not feel right accepting donations from future rapists.

Sometimes the body takes over to make a decision the mind can’t make.

Mrs. Wynn used to make me Jell-O. She was a frequent babysitter, and, apart from my acquaintances in the movies, the only English person I knew.

Lesbian fights are the worst, Carolee said—nobody ever walks out and slams the door because they’re both women and want to talk about their feelings.

By the time the family voted funds for an alarm, there was nothing of value left to protect.

I was told that the only people who saw this ghost (“the White Lady”) were women who married into the family and of whom the White Lady approved. So one night I faked a rattled look and told my future husband that I had just seen a ghost when I went upstairs for more pillows.

Just when you begin to think you’ve dreamt it, it comes again.

She said she never sang the songs that people knew because to do so would be to hold the dying when the point is to help the dying let go.

I had always thought women’s clinics should replace their posters of “The Desiderata” and Erté’s Nouveau nymphs with reproductions of Hans Holbein’s An Allegory of Passion, with its caption from Petrarch’s Canzoniere: “E cosi desio me mena”—“And so desire carries me along.” It is not always a matter of being careless, you know.

It is not always desire, either. Except as the desire to save oneself by doing what one is told to do by the person who has the knife.

Successful collaborations inspire envy in me. But “collaborate,” someone once told me, also means “to betray.”

Even when it was not my fault, I was lectured on the imperative of responsibility, a sitting dog being told to sit.

You can do anything with ease if you act as though you do it all the time—dance, sunbathe nude, talk someone out of hurting you.

He said we would be lovers. He began to cry. I felt him begin to get hard.

I’m not like the guy at the film festival yesterday who asked the French director in the Q and A after his film was shown, “Are we going to get our money back?”

we walked another couple of blocks to see a second movie, one he wanted to see, and I didn’t tell him I had already seen it because by that time I just wanted to sit next to him in the dark.

There is a theory of healing based on animals in the wild. People have observed animals that barely escaped a predator, and they say these animals lie down and shake, and in so doing somehow release the trauma. Whereas human beings take it in; we don’t work it out, so it lodges in us where it produces any number of nasty effects and symptoms.

the truth is, I’m shaking—right now, writing this letter. My hand is shaking while I write. It’s saying what I can’t say—this is the way I say it.

I arrived at the lecture on my way to someplace else, an appointment with a doctor my doctor had arranged.

So instead of going to the radiologist’s office, I walked into a nondenominational church where the artist’s presentation was advertised on a plaque outside: “Finding the Mystery in Clarity.” Was this not the opposite of what most people sought? I thought, I will learn something!

He said the mind wants to make sense of a thing, the mind wants to know what something stands for.

I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog’s head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. “Because he can hear high notes we can’t?” my husband said. “No,” I said, “because he was disappointed in the choreography.” I work with these dogs every day, and their capability, their decency, shames me.

I suppose there are many things one should try not to take personally. An absence of convenient parking, inclement weather, a husband who finds that he loves someone else.

The man who would have been my employer at the record company asked me why I wanted to work there. I said, “Because I love music,” and he said, “Maybe the love affair is best carried on outside the office.”

Today I am known as the Unusual Person. This is a test wherein I pull my windbreaker up over my head from behind and stagger around the corner and lurch menacingly down the walkway toward the dog-in-training.

A Labrador eating looks like time-lapse photography.

One of the staff put a cartoon on the wall: “Why dogs never survive shipwrecks.” It’s the captain dog standing up in a lifeboat addressing the other dogs: “Those in favor of eating all the food now, say ‘Aye.’ ”

There are those of us who seek Fran out in the hope that something of her rubs off.

Last week I was in the infirmary when a Lab was brought in with the tip of his tail cut off by a car door. Yet he was so happy to see the veterinarian that he wagged his tail madly and sprayed us all with blood, back and forth, in wide arcs. The walls and cabinets, too. There is much to learn from these dogs. And we must learn these things over and over!

Down the road from the school is one of those classic mansions you admire until you notice it’s a funeral home.

Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.

There are people whose goodness brings them to do this work, and there are those of us who come here for it. Both ways work.

I picked up coffee in town, but skipped the doughnuts and scones; after fifty-two years, my body owes me nothing.

After an early spring of taking the marriage apart, I was glad to have every day the same.

I was mindful of the symmetry—trying to establish this creature’s trust, having dispatched that of my husband.

I could not tell the story enough times. An observant friend had remarked that “Those who can’t repeat the past are condemned to remember it.”

Claire, my former neighbor, said she would write to Lynne if I would give her the new address. She said, “How’s Lynney doing?” And I said, “It’s her story now.”

With the dog present, I could talk to people I could not have talked to without her.

I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed—but only if everybody will just be very very good, and very very patient, and will wait, with perfect hope, for the make-believe story to unfold.

When my mother died, my father’s early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.

I was not used to that kind of attention, and seeing through it didn’t mean I didn’t also like it.

He told me she sent him pictures of herself naked; he was midwestern enough to be stunned.

She would get to his house when it was still light enough to see fog blowing down the street from the bay window in the living room.

When my father complained about a nosy woman who detained him in the grocery store, Jane said, “That’s the trouble with people in general—you have to run into them.”

I said, “That was a long time ago,” and he said, so I understood him, “Nothing is a long time ago.”

Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?

Well, was there anybody who wasn’t here to get over something, too?