The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had.

The sound that I make is not food.

Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down.

The beach is near the airport—so this town doesn’t even have the class L.A. lacks. What it has is airline personnel. For them, it’s a twelve-minute shuttle from the concourse home—home meaning a complex of apartments done in fake Spanish Colonial.

Also, there’s a courtyard fountain that splashes onto mosaic tiles. What’s irritating is that the tiles were chemically treated to “age” them from the start. What you want to say is, Look, relics are leftovers, you know?

And losing yourself on the freeway is like living at the beach—you’re not aware of lapsed time, and suddenly you’re there, where it was you were going.

My job fits right in. I do nothing, it pays nothing, but—you guessed it—it’s better than nothing. A sense of humor helps.

The one-day sale on cantaloupe is into its third week. We buy enough to fill a blender, plus eggs.

I don’t get used to living at the beach, to seeing that wet horizon. It’s the edge, the country’s aisle seat. But if you made me tell the truth, I’d have to say it’s not a good thing. The people who live here, what you hear them say is I’m supposed to, I’ll try, I would have.

What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.

These men, it’s not like we don’t see them coming. Our intuition is good; the problem is we ignore it. We keep wanting people to be different. But who are the people you meet down here? There are two kinds to choose from: those who are going under and those who aren’t moving ahead.

There’s a thing that happens here, and I thought about it then. Highway One, the coast route, has many scenic lookout points. What happens is that people fall over these cliffs, craning to see to the bottom of them. Sometimes the floor is brush, and sometimes it is rock. It’s called going west on Highway One. There is even a club for the people who fall, membership being awarded posthumously.

Will Rogers called vets the noblest of doctors because their patients can’t tell them what’s wrong. The doctor has to reach, and he reaches with his heart.

The pick of the litter was named Memphis. They are supposed to have Egyptian names. Flea misunderstood and named his Nashville. A woman back East owns Boston.

A sight like that will put a hem in your dress.

Here’s a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband’s bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.

We give what we can—that’s as far as the heart can go.

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

the Good Doctor says things like “God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake.”

After a quake, the six o’clock news airs a film clip of first-graders yelling at the broken playground per their teacher’s instructions. “Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

‘There are times when the wolves are silent; there are times when the moon howls.’ ”

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

I could be doing this, too. But I had had the procedure instead. That was after the father had asked me, Was I sure? To his credit, he meant—sure that I was, not sure was it he. He said he had never made a girl pregnant before. He said that he had never even made a girl late.

“I thought I would burn that bridge when I come to it,” I said, and when he didn’t say anything to that, I said, “I guess I will think that there is a mother who kept hers.” “One of hers might be more accurate,” Dr. Diamond said.

I was willing to feel an obligation to the yarn, and to the hardy Scots who supplied it. There was heritage there, and I could keep it alive with my hands.

I stopped telling people how handsome their dogs were; too many times what they said was, “You want him?”

I wished that things would stay out of sight the way they did in mountain lakes. In one that I know, the water is so cold, gas can’t form to bring a corpse to the surface. Although you would not want to think about the bottom of the lake, what you can say about it is—the dead stay down.

I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed.

Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn’t enough.

I do remember the accident, though. I remember it was like the binoculars. You know—two ways? It was fast and it was slow. It was both.

I thought the present was the safer bet. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

You would put quotes around this “park” the way you might send traffic fines to the Hall of “Justice.”

Eve Grant is Wesley Grant’s future former wife.

About Eve Grant, Wesley has said that he married the most beautiful woman he ever saw and learned the irrelevance of beauty.

“I really admire you,” I told him. “I couldn’t go out there and make people laugh if I were sick.” “Don’t be silly,” he said. “You couldn’t do it if you were well.”

Wesley sat back down beside me and said it was time to change his life. He wanted to. “But how does a person start?” “Small,” I said. “Start small and work up. The way you would clean a house. You start in one room. Maybe you give yourself more time than you need to finish that room, just so you finish it. Then you go on to the next one. You start small, and then everything you do gets bigger.”

“And because, too, I love her to death. I watch that girl like a movie. ‘Eve Grant Does Three Hours of Laundry.’ I’m watching.”

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogotá. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.

Move enough times and you will never defrost a freezer.

I’ve heard stranger things than that, but those were in my head.

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

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.

What happened to one of my legs required four hundred stitches, which, when I told it, became five hundred stitches, because nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

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

“Do you think looks are important?” I asked the man before he left. “Not at first,” he said.

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

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

I said that, yes, a shark had done it. “And you’re going back in?” the boy asked. I said, “And I’m going back in.”

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.