The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (16 page)

“Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?”

The man who owned the nursery, that is what he said. He thought I had come for the specials, which he was out of, but all I needed was peat. I was planning to start a rock garden, someplace to put the rock.

The Tom-rock had been underwater, under thirty feet of clear water cut by red eels beneath a pier on Lake Ontario in 1963.

She bribed me, my mother, with praise—would I be the diver to retrieve it while she watched? From the deck of the
Jolly Roger
you could see the word
Tom.
The name. The rock on the bottom was rectangular, its corners softened to curves. There was a green line drawn like a television screen, and inside the screen the name Tom, in blue.

The Tom-rock, when I brought it to the surface, was, let’s say, half the size of a shoebox.

The ice-cream cone I got for braving red eels held chocolate ice cream in cylindrical scoops.
Canadian
ice cream, Canadian rock, and no one in our family named Tom.

And now, in California, the rock that had sat on a glass coffee table in several states in several years was going to be “planted” beside slabs of granite, lichen-covered granite hauled down from the Sierras, and all of it bordered by white sweet alyssum. The Tom-rock would be as much a marker as a headstone. And hadn’t I nearly died to get it, holding my breath for so long, and those eels?

In California, you are not supposed to sleep beneath bookshelves or paintings or mirrors on the wall. But in my father’s house, when my father is away, I sleep in his bed and gamble that the painting of a potter’s wheel will not shake loose and crush my skull in the hours of a quaking town at night.

My father’s room has dimmers on the lights. There are speakers for music recessed in the walls. In my father’s room I leave the lights as near to off as they can be and still be on.

In the evening, I hear foghorns on the bay. In the morning—the dawn cannon in the army base at the head of the Golden Gate. When the fog is especially heavy, the smell that comes in through the open upstairs window under the scent of eucalyptus is the smell of wet clay, of wetted-down dust, from the bricks in the courtyard below.

When I sleep in my father’s bed, I sleep on the same side my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, when the cannon goes off at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in—lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

I don’t fall asleep with my body on the bed in the same way my mother was found. It must be a thing I go into when I am asleep. And still I cannot be sure that, limb for limb, I am in the same position. My mother’s legs, when I saw her, were covered by the sheet; it is possible that my legs are bent where my mother’s legs were straight.

This is where after this it stops being dawn and muffled cannons and waking to a morning of eucalyptus-scented fog.

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.

Neither my grandmother nor I can swallow a pill with water. When I was young and visiting my grandmother’s house, she would crush my vitamins and aspirin in a teaspoon of applesauce or of jam. Later, my grandmother and I moved on to berries for the smaller pills, a mashed banana for capsules. Together, we discovered that grapes worked well, too.

Since her daughter died, my grandmother rinses off berries at bedtime. In the morning she peels bananas. She says it is not enough that a pill helps her sleep through the night—somehow, she has to get through the day.

And now she is buying herself boxes of prunes and putting them in a jar with a quart of boiling water. Because the pills that are supposed to lift her spirits during the day have a side effect—the one for which the cure begins when you open a box of prunes and let them soften in boiling water.

My grandmother sleeps beneath a portrait of her daughter.

A short time later, and her voice has lost weight. She is speaking so fast that her thoughts lose their breath catching up.

“What is the word I want?” she says, because the word that my grandmother wants has been lifted from her tongue and carried from her head by the treatments—eight in two weeks.

She says the treatments have left her fuzzy; she cannot remember the name of the nurse, and the same nurse readied her for treatment every time.

When my grandmother calls, it is after the fact. She doesn’t talk about a thing until it is done.

“Darling, can you help me?” my grandmother says. “Help me remember the good times with your mother?”

My mother said, “What?”

I said, “I forgot. I forgot what I was going to say.”

“Then it must have been a lie,” my mother said.

California to the Midwest is forty-eight hours by train. And don’t you know that in forty-eight hours aboard a train, in probably only four, you will meet the extroverted youth with guitar who takes over the club car for spontaneous hootenannies. You will stand in line for snacks behind good clothes on bad bodies, behind the man who is so drunk he has lost his shoes, and so belligerent no one will help him find them.

A thing you would not think would be good, is—orange juice in a can. On a train, canned orange juice poured over ice tastes good.

On the Lake Shore Limited, I try to sleep in the day and take advantage of the cars at night when it is quiet enough to hear carbonation in a glass across the aisle, when you can wake from drowsing because—three rows back—someone is peeling an orange.

When the car lights go out, a porter brings me a blanket. He tucks it around my shoulders like—what else?—like a mother.

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.

Every so often we tried to shop together, tried to bake together, tried together to teach ourselves something from a how-to book. Mostly I did things
around
her, the way nurses change the sheets with the patient still in bed.

I think back to a certain Christmas morning. Back to a summer vacation on a lake. I go back further still, to the beginning of my mother and me. 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
.
PRICE
told me I didn’t have to ring their doorbell. She said I could be in their house when Karen wasn’t home, if she wasn’t back from swim team. Mrs. Price gave me blueberry cobbler. She asked me which I liked better—blueberry or peach—when she put in her weekly order from the baker who delivered in a covered truck in summer.

When I defended Mrs. Price to Karen, Karen said I sounded like a mother myself.

MRS
.
GRIFFIN
sang at bedtime, “Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four, turn around a whole lot of times, and get your ass out the door.”

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
.
BEAUDRY
, when the family returned from Yellowstone, and you asked if they saw any bears, would fix a look beyond your face and recite, “Forty-four bear, thirty-two deer, twenty-six moose…” and end with “and a par-tri-idge in a pear tree.”

MRS
.
STERN
looked at Deborah and Rita and said that she made her two best friends.

MRS
.
SMITH
, when our slips were showing, said, “It’s snowing down South.”

MRS
.
DREW
sent Patty off to board with this advice: “Never tap your feet at the symphony.”

MRS
.
ROSS
let Susan keep her underwear in a fondue pot sprayed with Estée Lauder.

MRS
.
SNYDER
let me call her Noel. Her hair went silver when she was young and she was always tanned. Men would stare at her when she took Carol and me for sundaes. Mrs. Snyder called the men
our boyfriends;
Mrs. Snyder would say to Carol and me, “Our boyfriends are still looking.”

MRS
.
BRITTON
taught Jill how to kiss.

MRS
.
NELSON
administered SAT tests to students. She tried to impress upon us the importance of scoring high. She did an imitation of herself as a doctor, checking the patient’s pulse, blood pressure, and SAT scores.

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
.
CASE
undressed in front of Alice. She and Alice wore each other’s clothes.

MRS
.
UPTON
taught Kelly limericks:

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.

MRS
.
O
’
DONNELL
, when Lindsay was older, was still saving egg cartons, from habit, in case Lindsay might need them for a project at school.

MRS
.
FARRELL
, in church with Andrea at her side, would try to make Andrea laugh out loud. 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.

MRS
.
HOBSON
. On Valentine’s Day, the Hobson children woke to find hearts on the floor of their rooms. Tiny hand-cut paper hearts of every color made a path from bedside down the stairs to their chairs at the table. Some of the paper hearts stuck to bare feet and were tracked into the bathrooms. The colored paper hearts, when wetted, bled onto the tiles.

It takes me nearly the whole of the trip to come up with even these. 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.

The next thing I know, I am leaving the train, shaking out my legs and adjusting a shoulder bag. I have slept the night sitting up in the seat, and I know that it shows on my face, in my clothes.

Sometimes it feels as though I won’t be able to live until I can sleep in a position of my own—not in the way my mother’s body was found on the bed, but in a way that is mine—even if it is only a sort of dead man’s float where you don’t use a muscle but clasp both your knees and let your head sink into the pillow, rocking gently as a baby, tipping your head to the side to take in air, conserving your strength until help arrives, or until you can save yourself, there in bed.

At the end of the platform, my grandmother is waiting. When I see her I forget. What I thought I was going to say.

Then it must have been a lie,
my mother said.

For days there was nothing to say except, What a glorious day. Wildflowers galloped across thorn-free fields, stopping only when cut and placed in water. Shopping lists grew to include carrots for the horse next door, black but for a spattered-looking black-and-white rump—a horse who ran crazed around the paddock at dusk, and whose name was Fury. The men of the house would start to drink then, but only enough to be playful late at night. They gave the kids rides on power mowers, careening over the lawns in great loops in the dark, missing the two kinds of oaks—white and red—the one with its rounded leaves, the other’s leaves in points, which the kids were taught to know by saying, White men shoot bullets and Red men shoot arrows. Mornings, robins robbed the ground. A rooster startled the cat that had been raised indoors. Nothing clever was said.

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.

We were women in one-piece bathing suits beneath faded loose clothes, walking across dunes to call on one another, bringing bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod trailing roots, quoting the poet’s hope that, “Through gleaming gates of goldenrod / I’ll pass into the rest of God.”

This is the lyric seizure that succeeds a close call. Or surge, lyric
surge,
from the name “black surge” that is given to the storm-induced seepage of sewage that closes the beach. Had the black surge come one day sooner, there would not have been this lyric surge because there would not have been the close call.

Fay’s husband called it a sea-poose. This was later, after Fay and the kids were safely on shore, after Fay had described the circular current that had kept her from raising her arms to wave for help. After Dave had finally seen what was wrong, after Dave had lost his head but his fishing buddy had not, had managed to get a rope to Fay and play her in with the kids, one by one.

Within minutes the kids were bragging, and Fay—not the type to cry—had turned snappish at her husband, Dave. Fay trained horses and Dave farmed trees, and to Fay’s way of thinking there was shame in being weak, even if the stronger was a freakish ocean wave.

We celebrated our friends’ safety with a party that night, though, in fact, the barbecue had been planned the week before to take advantage of a high full moon. We chose a stretch of sand between the ocean and a pond, posted, by the local conservators of nature, as a home for egrets.

Empty of trees, Dave’s truck hauled grills. We were each assigned a contribution; Caitlin brought hot dogs, which opened up discussion of possible past lives. Caitlin was Fay’s right hand at the stable, and a vocal vegetarian for most of her thirty years. But early in the summer a psychic had regressed her, had told Caitlin that she had been a fox in a previous life. The next day Caitlin was riding her horse when she saw a rabbit leap in a field. “My, doesn’t that look good,” she said she thought and found herself broiling a chicken for dinner.

While Dave heated coals Dr. Bob took the smaller boys off to the pond with nets. Just at dark, the boys began scooping up fish—tiny, flipping like silver dollars.

“My mother used to fry everything she found,” Dr. Bob was telling the boys. “She’d throw a hundred of these into the pan, but everything always tasted like bacon,” he said.

The shirkers got up a volleyball game while Pete and I got the bonfire going. Even with the fire, we had to put on sweaters, a fact that had Pete looking ahead already to fall. “The first cold snap,” he said, “I get in my car and drive south till I can roll down the window.”

Ben studied the steak he was asked to do black and blue for Jeff Taylor’s date, a woman who showed real estate and who kept up her nails. She had brought a locally baked boysenberry pie and, inexplicably, a bag of candy corn, which I saw some of us bite off white-orange-yellow, and others of us bite off yellow-orange-white.

Two grills over, Dave turned hamburgers and suffered the children’s humor, evinced in sidesplitting riddles such as this: What do you have if you have fourteen oranges in one hand and eight grapefruit in the other? and the children’s shrieking laughter all but drowning out the answer, which was, I believe, “Big hands.”

“I love barbecue sauce,” Dave was saying, “especially when it’s homemade.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Fay said. “I just put it in this Kraft’s squeeze bottle for convenience.”

Fay turned to one of Dr. Bob’s flock. “How much you want on that chicken leg, Will?”

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

The fire was drawing some notice by then. Jeff Taylor, a kidder you could count on at holiday time for gifts of coasters that said “Eat, drink, and remarry,” announced that later in the evening we would gather around the fire and sacrifice a virgin, amending his remarks after the requisite silence to “sacrifice an old maid” instead.

That late in the season we had our timing down. We were the model of capable neighbors, filling our plates in an orderly manner, then scrambling for places in the sand close to the flames.

Dr. Bob waved Dave and Fay over to a pot of steamers.

“I didn’t know you brought steamers,” Dave said. “I’m warning you all, I inhale these things.”

“Don’t worry,” Fay said, securing a few of the clams for herself. “I can stand on my own two feet and fight for what is mine.”

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.

“Then come here by the fire and tell the kids a ghost story,” Dave suggested.

“I don’t want to scare anybody,” Dr. Bob said.

“You already have!” said Will, and the other children screamed their approval.

Dr. Bob was something of a medical inventor, esteemed by every one of us although we could not say exactly what it was he had invented. He was the one who had tended to Fay two summers earlier after her horse, spooked by an umbrella over a roadside farm stand, threw her into a ditch.

Fay had complained only of a headache where her head had hit the dirt, but Dr. Bob knew to take her in fast. In his car, Fay’s eyes had crossed. Asked for her name, Fay gave her maiden name. By the time they got to the hospital, Fay’s speech was down to sounds—the sounds of crows and owls.

There were lessons to be learned wherever one looked, which is not to suggest that those lessons were learned. Witness the Henkins’ boy, Bill, who left a party drunk, then discovered he had left his glasses behind only after he had pulled out of the drive and was headed for the highway home. Rather than return for his glasses, he later explained he had driven home really fast so that he would make it back before he had an accident.

That was something I remembered when Caitlin told us what else the psychic had said, which was that, as a fox, Caitlin had been killed when she was struck by a speeding car on the beach access road. What Caitlin wonders now is, What if
she
hits a fox with her car?

Then Dave said, “Remember the deer?”

“Jesus, Dave,” Fay said, and got up and walked in the dark direction of the ocean.

Dave dropped the subject, but everyone knew the story as vividly as if
we
had been the one who hit the deer, then knelt by the side of the road and held the deer’s dying head in our lap, and shielded with one hand the eyes that blinked at each pair of passing headlights, affording the animal that tiny measure of relief until a state trooper showed up with a gun.

In what she must have perceived as an awkward silence, Jeff Taylor’s date jumped up and began to collect our empty Coke and beer cans, stuffing them into a plastic bag for trash.

Then we heard Fay calling out to Dave to hurry. Dave threw his paper plate into the fire and
all
of us took off running toward the shore.

We found Fay standing in the surf, surveying a rare phosphorescence in the tide. She took a step and scattered sparks, then bent over and shook her flat hands underwater like a miner at a watery mother lode panning for gold with her hands. We watched Dave run into the glowing shoals and take hold of his wife from behind. We watched both of them go over so that they were sitting on the rocky bottom. When a stray beach dog ran in to join them, we could see—phosphorescence clinging to his fur—the outline of his legs as they paddled underwater. When Dave and Fay stood up again, holding on to each other, the sudden phosphorescence was gone.

What was left of the summer passed quietly, as if in deference to that night as one befitting summer’s end. It was a time when the only pain was inflicted by bees, and an easy remedy—three kinds of weeds pressed together and rubbed on the sting—was right in your own backyard.