The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

“I’d sooner salt myself away and call it a life,” Holly says. “But there’s all this research.”

Then she’ll carry herself to the bedroom like a completed jigsaw puzzle.

“Sure thing,” Holly says. “From the people who brought you Fat Chance.”

Think about cats. They stumble and fall, then quickly begin to wash—I meant to do that. Pretense is deception, and cats pretend: Who, me? They move in next door where the food is better and meet you in the street and don’t know your name, or their name.

What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight—this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.

“Bad earth!” they shout, because anger is stronger than fear.

But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers the way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.

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

Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They’d serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.

The little girl had found a frog in the yard. The frog appeared to be dead, so her parents let her prepare a burial site—a little hole surrounded by pebbles. But at the moment of the lowering, the frog, which had only been stunned, kicked its legs and came to. “Kill him!” the girl had shrieked.

But the part that hurt was never the part that got hurt.

I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

The new place brings a rush of settlement. Paper towels and spray cleaners, plastic bags to line plastic wastebaskets. There is glossy shelf paper to cut for the cabinets, and my name to put on the mailbox. It’s the same thing again, three months later. Move enough times and you will never defrost a freezer.

She says the key thing here is process—what she looks for on the Happiness Question. Does this happiness come from a person, place, or process? I tell her I don’t know, that sometimes I just have to move.

He thought his kids were as self-contained as one of those dogs you sometimes see carrying home its own leash.

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.

I see my face reflected in the window and face the sad truth—that I happen to look my best when there is no one there to see.

My head against a small synthetic pillow, I think: Mothers. They teach their daughters to use pumice on their heels, and to roll a lemon inside its skin before slicing, to bring out the juice. 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.

Mrs. Farrell would sing the words “in the bathtub” after the title of each Sunday’s hymns. “Abide with Me in the Bathtub,” she would sing in a whisper. “God Is Working His Purpose Out—in the Bathtub,” Mrs. Farrell sang.

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.

A call went out to Dr. Bob to please start up a sing-along. Dr. Bob protested. “I couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles,” he said.

He thought that traveling alone was like being in therapy—the things you found out about yourself.

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