The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (15 page)

There is an indescribable sound from the choking dog, and like a person who suffers the pain of an injured twin, Mrs. Carlin gasps and drops to the floor.

That is where the couple who come in from the Fossil Hall find her. The man touches two fingers to Mrs. Carlin’s wrist, then touches the side of her neck. The woman calls for a guard, and stands back.

In Belize, the eyes of a fallen jaguar reflect the green of leaves.

My dog—I found him on the dining room table, stepping around the bowl of fruit, licking the beeswax candles.

My cat is another one—eats anything but food. I watch her select a tulip in a vase. When her teeth pierce the petal, I startle her away with sharply clapped hands.

A moment later, and again the cat stalks. She crouches in front of the next flower over, tasting the four-inch petal of a parrot tulip as if she is thinking,
That
one is the one I am not supposed to eat.

My brother keeps a boa constrictor for a pet. The preying snake suffers from a vitamin deficiency, so my brother buys a large jar of powdered high-potency supplement. Before each meal, he dips live mice in water, then drops them in the jar. He shakes the covered jar until each mouse wears a healthy coat of vitamins A through E. Then he feeds the coated mice to the snake.

When my brother and I were young, I mixed dirt with his scrambled eggs. My mother let me feed him in his high chair on the porch. I would leave my brother alone and go off into the garden. I’d return with a handful of soil from under the pansies; with the dirt and whatever things lived in the dirt, I laced his eggs.

For years, in seafood places, my brother ordered for me. “The lady will have the Slug Louie,” he told the waiter. “And please, if it’s no trouble, she would like her roll
au beurre
.”

All my life I have been afraid of milk. I thought that if you drank too much, your bones would outgrow your skin, your teeth overrun your lips.

There is a story that mothers read to their children wherein the little girl speaks and the mother answers back:

—Mother, what do witches eat?

—Milk and potatoes and
you,
my sweet.

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

This was not superstition; it was sixth sense, or second sight. Clairvoyance. It was something she said she knew the way she said she knew the moment her children were conceived. It was how she said she knew which song would be played on the radio next, how she knew to circle one more time around the block before a parking space would open along a curb solid with cars.

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

She booked, for herself and my father, a cabin aboard the ship that would cruise to the mouth of the Amazon River at the point in the world where the comet could best be seen.

This was a trip my mother had to plan a year ahead. From several lines that were making the trip, my mother chose a Greek ship, the Sun Line’s
Golden Odyssey,
first reading aloud from glossy brochures about the first-rate entertainment, the swimming pools, and the food—the recreational pleasures of elegant cruising at its best.

She said that the real draw was astronomers on board—and not just any amateurs, either, but world-class authorities on extragalactic astronomy and archaeoastronomy—even planetarium directors, specialists in star photometry and eclipse meteorology—even an American astronaut and the author of the popular science text
Did a Comet Kill Off the Dinosaurs?

These would screen instructive films for the passengers and offer lectures every day (“The Flaming Star and Genghis Khan—
A
.
D
. 1222”), at sea.

Two weeks after it was put on the books, this particular cruise sold out. An information packet was sent out shortly after. In it was the news that eight of the scheduled passengers had seen the comet in its earlier manifestation. As that was seventy-six years ago, I heard my mother picture her shipmates in various stages of decrepitude.

Often, all my life, my mother took risks. She outsailed the storm, the stray dog did not bite, the wobbly ladder held.

“Don’t worry,” she always said. “I will live to see the comet.”

If couples can grow to look alike, then my parents’ ailments came to resemble each other. My mother took something for an arthritic condition. My father took something else for the very same thing. So that on the plane to San Juan to meet up with the ship, when my mother discovered she had not packed her pills, it made all the sense in the world for my father to say, “Don’t panic,” she should help herself to his.

But en route to see the legendary portent of disaster, my mother’s luck ran out. Minutes after takeoff, her hands began to itch. Then her arms, and then her neck. Then her face and then her feet.

Your normally dignified mother, my father said, was scratching herself like a wild thing. As my father recollects, my mother managed to be flushed and pale at the same time. He said my mother’s scratching became a dance when she began to itch inside. By the time they were leaving the plane in San Juan, my mother—still itching—was wheezing, too. Had they waited much longer, they learned soon after, my mother would have stopped breathing entirely.

In the local hospital they did what they could to set her back to right, advising her to squash the travel bug and lie low for at least a week. My mother agreed to meet the doctor halfway, promising to rest if she could rest aboard the ship.

After leaving San Juan, the
Golden Odyssey
stopped in the port of Martinique. In Martinique, there were $30,000 emeralds for sale at the end of the pier.

At the island of Grenada, the seas were too rough to transfer to land by boat. The astronaut was seasick right along with exactly 86 percent of the passengers. Those who did not succumb were encouraged to play bridge and to sip freezing tropical drinks.

Matters did not improve when the ship neared Trinidad. According to my father, a freak accident on the promenade deck left an elderly man more dead than alive. What the man had not seen when he reached for his can of soda was the bee that had flown in through the pop-top hole. When he drank from the can, he swallowed the bee, which then managed to sting him in the throat on its dark way down.

All this time my mother was reading trash in the luxury of her cabin. My father attended the lectures and would thereafter recite them to my mother down below.

Trinidad was the first site from which the comet would be clearly visible. The passengers had been briefed in deep-sky photography—tripods were a must, so were time exposures of at least one minute. And since the motion of the ship would mean a celestial event that was blurred, the good captain arranged for a nighttime expedition.

He rented forty-five taxicabs (out of the forty-seven such that were on the island) to pick up his passengers, five passengers to a cab, and to drive them for two hours along a one-lane jungle road to the other side of the island.

In one of the taxis, the crew had sent coffee and sandwiches; in another, the cargo was a portable toilet.

Speeding through the jungle at midnight, the taxicab drivers talked snakes. They said there
were
no more snakes on Trinidad since the government imported the mongoose. It had done its job so well—eating not only poisonous snakes but birds’ eggs, too—that in the daylight they would see that there were no more exotic birds.

Where the jungle stopped, at a point of slippery shale dotted with patches of sisal, a group of stoop-shouldered stargazers set up their telescopes and tripods.

This is the part my father made me see—all those people stumbling in the dark, under no moon, unable to shine a light or strike a match because a time exposure would be ruined.

And because of the hour, no one had dressed; these were men and women in bathrobes and peignoirs crashing into each other in the dark, slipping on the rocky point of what the guides referred to as Tripod National Forest.

It became an adventure, my father said, to see anything that night at all.

And then one of the astronomers had pointed out a tennis ball in the sky, to the southeast of red Antares on the side of the constellation Scorpio. He told them the tail depended on the body’s rotation in relation to the moon. Consequently, he said, they would not see a tail that night, just a faint pink fuzzy business like a wisp of cotton candy.

Alone in her cabin, my mother saw nothing from a porthole.

With approximately the same degree of difficulty, those passengers who were greatly motivated repeated the midnight excursion, this time by bus, at the mouth of the Amazon River, on the northwest shore of Belém.

Their pockets filled with souvenirs of voodoo charms and crocodile teeth, the experts agreed—it was the poorest sighting of the starry visitor in two thousand years, anywhere in the world.

But guess who went out for a second look!

One might as well do what one could, my father reasoned. “When in southern latitudes,” he said, and loaded up his camera with 1000 ASA.

At the end of the voyage, a charter plane flew my parents home.

When his film was developed, my father passed around envelopes that contained photographs of the equatorial sky. He pointed to the minuscule dot that was the entire point of the trip.

Neither my mother nor my father seemed disappointed that the sighting wasn’t more than it was. Did my father ever say, What kind of screwball operation
is
this? And did my mother once say, with regard to his pictures, Which of these specks of dust is the comet?

My mother was content with this thought: that the pills that almost took her life may actually have
saved
it by preventing her from seeing the incarnation of her doom.

The last envelope contained pictures of the captain’s guests for dinner the final night: my mother, her arm around my father’s empty chair, and two older couples who had promised to stay in touch.

Then there were pictures of a smiling Greek crew, several undistinguished views of the port at Martinique, and one successful close-up of a boy about five years old.

My mother said she had wanted a picture of the only person on board the ship who would get another chance to greet the heavenly apparition.

For the price of a cup of coffee a day, my friend Deborah adopted a child. She adopted one of the children on Channel 5. Except the word I think they use on Channel 5 is
sponsor.
She sponsored one of the Sally Struthers children, or maybe it was one of the Linda Evans children. Maybe they are the same children. In any case, it was a child that my friend Deborah saw advertised late at night.

According to the profile sent to my friend by the agency overseas, the child had two living parents. Both parents held jobs. In the photo, the child appeared healthy, well-fed, and well—even fashionably—clothed. The report the agency included said that Deborah’s sponsorship would provide the child with much-needed supplies for school.

My friend Deborah thought, school supplies?

She telephoned the agency’s twenty-four-hour toll-free number. She asked them to reassign her cup-of-coffee-a-day money to a child who was not so well off as that child was. The agency obliged and presented my friend Deborah with a new child, whose need for food and medicine overtook the need for pencils and books.

Deborah encouraged her own two children to write letters to the new child, to the translator who translated back and forth between them and the new child and between the new child and them.

After a time, the new child’s letters stopped. Alarmed, my friend Deborah made inquiries. The agency replied that the new child did not like to visit the Center. But my friend Deborah thinks that there must be more to the matter than this. The Center?

So I asked my friend Deborah, What if you got the new child a dog? What if to the price of a cup of coffee a day, you added the price of a can of dog food a day? Would the agency overseas—would someone there in his country get the new child a dog?

I was thinking about Pal.

Original Pal is buried in a flower bed, his whiskers pushing up as stems at the end of which are configured, each spring, marigolds and impatiens. Pal was a shepherd mix who had been trained for Search and Rescue. This was less a community service than an adjunct to family safety. My mother used to say she lived precariously, meaning through her children—though I was a girl who had never broken a bone; I had to make do with faking out the eye chart so that I could get glasses and wrapping bent paper clips around my teeth for braces.

Often enough, Pal would strike out into the hills and find someone with something broken or something torn. Original Pal was so happy to save someone that we were always taking up positions of repose and waiting for him to find us and lick us so that we could tell him, Good dog, Good dog, Good dog.

But I can’t help thinking about Pal Junior.

No relation, Pal Junior would, in times of stress, lie on his back on the terrace in the sun until he had sunburned his stomach. Pal Junior would wade into a stream and sit down, just sit there in the middle of a streaming stream that divided at his shoulders as though around a bigger Pal.

Pal Junior was part something and part something. In a cardigan with leather elbow patches, with his white fur brushed into spikes around his face, Pal Junior was Albert Einstein saving man.

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 said to my friend Deborah, What does it mean, the Center? Would Struthers or maybe Evans know?