The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

It had been suggested that I rub my leg with ice, to bring up the scars, before I hiked my skirt three years later for the court. But there was no ice in the judge’s chambers, so I did not get a chance to pass or fail that moral test.

That was before his mother died. She died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said, “Any place I hang myself is home.”

“Come on, Jack, what’s wrong with talking in elevators?” For that matter, I could say it. I could catch my friend’s eye, and I could be the one to say, “He’s right. Look here, it’s not as if the Cubs lost.”

Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber, thinking it was zucchini. That’s the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

“Am I thinking the wrong things? Should I wonder, instead, what took you so long?”

When I can get my bearings, I make light of what could happen. I say the cool thing I’ve been saving up to say; I say, “Stop it, Big Guy. Stop it some more.” And then he says the cool thing he has been saving, or, being Big Guy, has made up on the spot. He says, “I always give a woman what she wants—whether she wants it or not.”

if it’s true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

“The Pepto-Abysmal Room,” Miss Locey said. “It’s never the color on the test card, is it? Always it turns out—bolder.”

It was the age-old question Miss Locey put next. From her bed of pain she ran it by me—if you took only half a pill, did it work full-strength for half as long, or half-strength for the regular time?

“Turquoise is the birthstone for December,” she said. “It’s a sympathetic stone; it will save you from suffering a fall—it will crack itself instead.”

Then I told Miss Locey the name for what had happened, what the thing that happened diving was called, that divers called it “rapture of the deep.” And she said what I had always thought, which is that it’s odd—it’s eerie—when a bad thing has a pretty name.

The first three days are the worst, they say, but it’s been two weeks, and I’m still waiting for those first three days to be over.

Mrs. Wynn produced Polaroids of herself, taken every week at the clinic the past month. “So when you reach your goal weight, you can look back and see how good you didn’t look,” she explained.

“Something something something never / Love for an hour is love forever.” If that’s true, I thought, then we’re in business.

Jean recalled the time she asked the bartender about Sister Marianne, if he had ever considered the M word, and the bartender had said back, “Murder?”

“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.

Sometimes I play dumb when it would be so much better to—be dumb?

“Everything I did with you was love.” “That was awfully sweet of that fucking idiot to say,” Lee said.

“What does it tell you that a young athlete takes this drug and dies?” The boys fight for the microphone until one of them grabs it away. He says, “Man, you have got to build up to that dose.”

‘Photography is death.’ After that,” says the student, “I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life.”

Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. “Don’t report a rape,” the women are told. “Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn’t do anything with it—cops figure that guy is sick.”

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

For the price of a cup of coffee a day, my friend Deborah adopted a child.

You see, in the beginning, in the garden of Eden, man and animals had perfect accord between them. But when man discovered sin, a chasm opened up that divided man, on one side, from all of the animals, on the other side. The chasm widened, our mother said, until at the last possible moment, it was only the dog that leaped across the abyss to spend eternity with man.

the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

This is where a death means something else to someone else. Because while I am resting easy, there is someone who needs help to get to sleep.

My mother said men, unless they were sober, what they meant when they asked you to marry was that you looked nice in that dress, or they liked your hair that way.

Mostly I did things around her, the way nurses change the sheets with the patient still in bed.

When I have to say something, here is what I can say—that when I was born, my mother wore me like a fur.

MRS. KOGEN would open her refrigerator. She would look inside and say to her kids, “What do you mean there’s nothing to eat? There’s a tomato, an onion . . .”

MRS. LINDEN was beautiful in spirit and in fact. Her wish, she told her daughter, was to be a beautiful woman and surprise people because she was a beautiful woman who was kind.

MRS. JOHNS, even after Danny was up in her teens, still threw out her arm across the passenger seat to protect Danny when the car was coming to a fast stop.

Roll all of the mothers up into one and The Good Times with My Mother would not get me into even enough water to soak a box of prunes.

Sometimes it feels as though I won’t be able to live until I can sleep in a position of my own—not

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

What did come under discussion when everyone met in the evening was why, when people go to the beach, they always lie with their feet to the ocean. Asking ourselves this question was the most work that most of us called upon ourselves to do.

to Fay’s way of thinking there was shame in being weak, even if the stronger was a freakish ocean wave.

“Not too much,” Will said, holding out his paper plate. “Just enough much.”

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.

He poured us drinks, said, “This’ll change your handwriting.”

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

the men who run the bulldozers and things don’t call what they are clearing a row. I made a point of finding out. They call it a plot line.

The best is an aerial view of the road you take to get here. Seeing this ahead of time, you would choose to go somewhere else.

I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.

And sometimes I long for days when nothing happens. “Not every clocktick needs a martyr.”

This is not bragging; given the soil here, you can shake the seeds out like salt on a baked potato, tamp not a spicule of soil on top of them, and up they will come to a height greater than you would want.

The person I strained to see on the mountain road was myself. A paramedic wouldn’t let me. He cut away my jacket and sweater, then he scissored off my shirt. It seemed to me he could have covered me up faster than he did. In the hospital, a doctor laid his hand on my shoulder. Does this hurt? he asked. Moving his hand to my collarbone, What about here? And lower. Does this feel good?

The situation is this: If you stopped people on the street and asked how they felt about gorillas, I would be among the ones who lighted right up.

She says she had always acted as if she were God’s Gift, and then it had turned out—she was God’s Gift.