The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (19 page)

“What are you doing with a psychic?” Alex asked.

“Vicki set it up,” Jack said.

“She say anything about us?” Alex said. “Not Vicki, the psychic?”

“Trina,” Jack said. “She said my departed cousin Barry is still looking out for me.”

“You
hated
Barry,” Alex said. “
Barry’s
looking out for you?”

“She said he was in the room with us,” Jack told Alex. “I told her to get him out of there!”

Jack didn’t tell Alex that he had invited the psychic to dinner. They talked about her mother, who had been as much his mother as hers.

“Alex,” Jack said after a while, “we’ve managed to talk for an hour without either one of us crying.”

And Alex said, “Hang up right now.”

When she had recovered, she phoned Jack back. She was wistful and reminiscent, as though her mother’s life had already ended. Alex said her mother was the oldest person kids called by her first name. She said she had so many friends, and always remembered which sorrow went with which person. Jack said their friends from high school, when they came back to visit their parents, always called on
her
mother, too.

When the conversation ended, Jack thought about all the things he hadn’t seen coming. He walked the residential streets until dark, saw timed lights lighting and dimming, controlled by preset clocks.

The next day: “What did you think of Trina?” Vicki said.

“High marks,” Jack said, “but there’s still the long program and the free skating.” He almost told Vicki what he hadn’t told Alex, that the psychic had predicted a turbulent year ahead with the love of his life.

Vicki was assembling an ambitious salad of smoked trout and red lettuce and grapefruit—substituted, she said, for a citrus type of fruit you couldn’t get in this country.

Earlier, Jack had heard her on the phone with the doctor; he heard her say “setback” and thought they were talking about him till he could tell they were talking about a patient.

“Me, me, me,” Jack had chanted to himself.

He looked at the French cookbook she’d left open on the counter, and said, “Cauliflower
Grenobloise
?”

“I’ve made it before,” Vicki said. “It’s not as throw-uppy as it sounds.”

Without looking up from her work, she said, “Not that I’m pushing you out the door, but I was thinking we should get you some books on tape for when you drive home.”

“You don’t think they’re kind of dangerous?” Jack said. “I’m listening to the book and it’s a really good part when I reach the house, so I pull into the garage and close the door and keep the car running to find out what happens and they find me in the car the next morning dead?”

Vicki handed him a jar of seedy mustard sealed with wax. “Can you do this for me?”

Jack opened the jar, then poured himself a scotch. He tore off the corner of a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn, summoning Banker and Boss. The dogs had been napping in the herb garden, and came inside wagging thyme, basil, and dill through the kitchen. Jack flicked kernels at the older dog, who caught them with a snap in the air.
The clean way a dog enlists your heart,
he thought.

Vicki mixed a vinaigrette and joined him, minus the scotch. She tried in vain to control the pup. “You can’t train a dog with popcorn flying through the air,” Jack said.

“Then give it a rest,” Vicki said to Jack. “Watch this.”

She got the puppy to sit but couldn’t get him to lie down. She tried to ask a question about Alex’s mother, but the puppy wanted to play, so her question was spliced and punctuated with commands—“Do you DOWN think you will NO go to California SIT to be with Alex?”—a kind of canine Tourette’s.

“Everyone’s out there now,” Jack said. “It’s later she’ll maybe need help.”

“What about you?”

“I always need help,” Jack said, and reached across the table for the smaller of the local papers. He turned to the “Tide Table” and, with a couple of hours before he had to pick up Trina, asked Vicki if she wanted to take the dogs to the beach.

Jack picked up the car keys when Vicki came out of her bedroom pulling on a large faded work shirt over a modest one-piece bathing suit. Vicki opened the tailgate of her station wagon, and Banker jumped in. The puppy whimpered until Vicki bent over and lifted him.

It was late enough in the day that they had most of the beach to themselves. Jack surveyed the surf as they hopped across still-hot sand; he said, “Look—the bluefish are running!”

Bluefish churned the water in a feeding frenzy. Closer up, Jack and Vicki could see two-footers leaping, roiling in the waves not six feet from the sand, scaring up bait fish onto the shore. There was no stepping around them, the sudden numbers of them, so that fish wiggled inside sandals, fish were under their feet, inside of their shoes and they had to unbuckle those shoes and make squeamish faces as they held the shoes away from their bodies and the thin silver bait fish, inches long, rained to the sand.

“The bluefish in a school, do they know one another?” This from Vicki, who did not wait for an answer but hooted at Jack to look at Banker, who was sitting at attention a few feet out to sea with the tail of a fish waving up and down in his mouth until with one intake of breath the dog sucked the fish in and gulped it down.

Jack was instantly giddy with fish. He scooped up handfuls of fish and, fast as he could, hurled them back into the water as though their lives were not already over.

Vicki gathered shells that she scattered in the garden when they got home. She threw wet towels across the picnic table to dry.

In the shower, watching sand wash down the drain, Jack recalled the psychic’s prediction of a turbulent year ahead, and it struck him that the psychic had not said that Alex was the love of his life. He had
assumed
that was who she was talking about.

This made him happy. “I am started,” he quoted the old poem, “the tugs have left me.”

He was ready for whatever the psychic could tell him. He wanted to be told what was coming and where he had been. And if you had to, he reasoned, there was nothing wrong with faking your way to where you belonged.

Trina was shorter than Jack remembered. She had, therefore, to look up at a man, exposing her throat, which was unadorned but for the deep V of a V-necked dress to entice the eye down.

“I thought we’d go into the city,” Jack said, and headed back onto the expressway where, for the ten remaining miles, they had a view of the skyline at dusk.

Jack said, “The city looks pretty good.”

The psychic said, “Give it a minute.”

She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “
French
film,
French
film.”

The headlights hit the headstone and I hate it all over again. It is all that I can ever see, all that I can ever talk about. There is nothing else to talk about.

It is right there out in front. I mean the cemetery that is out over there across the street from our house. With the headlights turned off and the car parked outside the garage, there is enough of a moon to see that there is no missing it over there across the street in the part of the cemetery the people around here call the annex.

The annex is for when the cemetery fills up.

Anyway, there is a stone there that has the baby’s name on it. And there was a week-old bouquet of something all dried up past knowing what it was that was tied with wide white ribbon out there until the time I came home today. There was a white ribbon on it. I could have taken the ribbon away. But the woman would have come and put another one, I suppose.

This is a cemetery which has its shapely tended trees and flowerful shrubs and Halloween headstones that go back two hundred years. The thing that is different about the annex is that the annex is not landscaped. It is a wild grown-over field of scrub oak and dune grass that gets bulldozed and plowed under as the need, in somebody’s mind, arises, one row at a time. Except that 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.

From every window in the front of our house, when you look out, that gravestone is what you see—from the sunporch, from the living room, from the dining room, from the bedroom upstairs, from the garage where my husband and I have been cleaning out the junk that belonged to the previous owners, which is why I cannot now find the shovel when I reach up to the place where it should be.

There is every other kind of tool hanging from nails pounded in. My husband is good at all the housey things that require these bucksaws and shingling hammers and extension ladders, the pitchfork and pruning shears, the lazy boy, the pick.

You see what it is? It is a two-car garage with a loft where we haven’t had time yet to make the big effort to clean out the crap from the previous owners, why didn’t they clean out their own crap, is what I want to know. The oversized stuffed animals, the rotten throw pillows, the mildewed best-sellers from other summers, everything cheap and ruined and left behind.

Where is the shovel?

Can you believe it? The flowers were baby’s breath.

I wanted to ask my husband if you call it a baby at the age of five months.

I mean five
unborn
months!

According to him, my husband, the date on the stone is only the month and the year. But I have not crossed the street to see if that is really what the stone says.

I can tell you it’s got an arch across the top. But no cherubs that I can see.

And I can see.

For days after the burial, I would go inside the house, leaving weeds unpulled in the border of portulaca; I would leave the hose coupling loose and spitting, and hide out in the kitchen while the woman visited the site. I would pour myself a glass of lemonade and carry it into the dining room and look across the street to where the woman had parked her rental car and was standing there looking at her dead baby.

She came with some new flowers today. I saw her come with them. They are a big bunch of purple cosmos. Local—what’s in bloom right now.

The other thing she did was plant a row of impatiens that I happen to know will not last any time at all in this heat.

She would know it, too, if she actually lived around here.

Well, she doesn’t, thank God.

Something else, which is that she was wearing a sweater that I could tell was from a catalog that I had just been looking at that I myself get in the mail, too. I could see the ribbing at the neck and wrists. She was wearing it in plum. I was going to order it in black.

Was.

Although black is not a very smart color to wear around here. Not with the dust that is forever finding its way onto everything I wear. Not when you have to go into a filthy garage with its leftover heaps of plastic crap.

What did he use the shovel for last?

To move our scraps onto the compost pile, chances are. But he would not have left the shovel outside, would he? He is careful with tools. He is careful, and he has a good eye. He was the one who kept me from throwing out the one good thing the previous owners left behind—an ice bucket with a procession of penguins marching right around the middle of it.

There was a high chair left behind in the garage, too. It was a pretty good one, I suppose—if you could get yourself not to see Donald Duck saying “Let’s eat!” painted on it. The lousy thing was that he cleaned it up and drove it over to the house she was going to rent for the summer. I suppose he thought it would be a useful thing for her to have for when she had the baby. Well, she never had it!

Maybe he should have also taken over the chess set the previous owners left behind. I mean, you never can tell about babies, can you.

I bet we never get the high chair back. Someone who buries her baby in your front yard is not going to think to give you back anything you ever lent her. Not that she’d have to go out of her way to do it. I mean, she’s there every day—at the annex, that is.

And now our dog goes over there to bark at her when she comes.

She’s usually happy to just tag along with us around the yard as we garden. She likes to dig in the dirt, nap in the sun. The usual. At the end of each day we walk her across the street and through the annex to a pond beyond the cemetery where she swims out under a covered bridge to fetch her ball and sticks. We don’t want the dog to cross the street without us, but that is what she does when there is a person who gets out of a car and stands there so close by.

When we first moved here, we didn’t know the streetlight was going to shine in our bedroom window. Is this why we’re up so much—because of the light? Or is it because we know that I have what she already had and still wants?

I can almost believe that somewhere is the person who could look across the street and see a vision of perfect peace, the resting place of someone who, unlike the rest of us, was only encouraged and adored.

When sunlight hits the headstone so, it flashes through the branches of the copper beech we planted to obscure it. If I stare long enough, it will burn a hole through my head.

For the rest of my habitation in this house, in this marriage, her baby will be buried in my life unless I can make my way to back behind the stacks of shingles and to back behind the row of storm doors and to back behind the rolled hammock—and maybe find the goddamn shovel.