The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (30 page)

It was one and two and three and four and five o’clock in the morning. Whatever time it was, it was time to take the test. You did not have to wait until morning anymore; the instructions on the box said that for an accurate result you could dip the strip of litmus paper in a “clear stream of urine” any time of day. My waiting until morning was habit, a nod to the old days when “first morning’s urine” was going to give you the answer. Though not at home. You had to go to a clinic then. Sometimes on the ceilings of exam rooms was a sign: “A woman can never be too thin or too rich, or too close to the end of the table.”

I was fifty years old, and ten days late.

If menopausal, go on estrogen; if pregnant, go on welfare.

If I
was
pregnant, I did not know who to blame—my husband, whom I did not live with, or the man in the auditorium, whom I did not report.

I did what I had always done the night before taking the test: I watched
The Uninvited.

“The cold…is no mere matter of degrees Fahrenheit, but a drawing of warmth from the vital centers of the living.”

The Uninvited,
made in 1944, stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as the English brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald, who happen upon a stately empty house on a cliff in Cornwall when they are on vacation. The two are so won over by the place they decide to buy it and leave their London lives—he a composer and music critic, she a budding homemaker—for these “haunted shores.”

“That’s not because there are
more
ghosts here than in other places, mind you, it’s just that the people who live hereabouts are more…”

I am courting ghosts at a place where ghosts are studied as a subset of the paranormal. I participate in experiments at an institute in the South. Last week I was placed in a private room and given a photograph to hold. I was supposed to try to “send” the image to a woman in another room down the hall. The photograph I held was a likeness of Frankenstein, a still from the movie. For nearly half an hour I stared and directed the thought:
Frankenstein, Frankenstein,
at the woman down the hall. A researcher came to get us and took us downstairs to appear before the staff.

“Well?” the researcher prompted.

The woman from down the hall said, “I don’t know, I kept getting Frank, Frank—
Frank Sinatra
?”

And I screamed, “That’s a match!”—wanting so much the unexplainable in my life.

I had not been living in my house for months. I had accepted a job house-sitting, if you can call that a job, for a professor on sabbatical from a university in the South. He had hired a cleaning lady and a gardener, so all I had to do was occupy space and forward his mail. He would return for spring break, at which time I was to return to my house up North. Since it was winter up there, I returned for a night every three or four weeks; I had to check for burst pipes and whatever else could happen in my absence.

When I was back home, I read the local newspaper’s weekly police blotter. It featured the usual thefts—houses closed for the winter are routinely broken into—as well as a range of conceptual crimes. Someone had turned up the thermostat in a beach house in the dunes. This person took nothing, but turned the temperature to ninety degrees, which, by the time it was discovered, had badly warped the floors. In another house, the owners discovered that someone had emptied the kitchen cabinets. Nothing had been stolen, but every item in the cabinets had been lined up neatly on the counters.

One kind of damage presented itself on my first visit home: the house smelled of mice, and when I lay still on the couch, I heard them scrabbling in the cabinets and behind the walls. There was no point setting out traps—I would be leaving the next day and anything caught would decompose in the weeks until my next visit. I could hear mice in a drawer. I yanked it open and found droppings like fat, dark grains of rice surrounding a diamond-and-sapphire pin my mother-in-law had given me when I married her son. When the marriage ended, I thought of giving the pin back to my husband; his parents had since died, and the pin had been a gift to his mother from his father. I thought about it, but I did nothing about it, and now the timeworn jewelry was in this sorry setting when it should have been safe in a tiny velvet pouch.

All of us should be safe in a tiny velvet pouch.

Well, I left the thing loose in the drawer.

And of course a pipe did burst, but luckily one outside, positioned to irrigate a cutting garden long since abandoned, the garden my husband’s project, so I kept the water turned off except to flush a toilet when I would turn the relevant lever in the basement, go back upstairs and flush, then turn off the water again. Think of it as fancy camping, I told myself, and it was fine, this manner of thinking.

For instance, storm doors and windows had never been put up, so, like clocks not changed from Daylight Savings Time, wouldn’t the absence of these fixtures be just right in a few more months?

Lightbulbs, that was a different matter. They were often burned out, however much they had not been used. So I just as often had to stand on one foot to change them in the kitchen.

“Important decisions have to be made quickly,” says Pamela Fitzgerald.

“Anyway, how do you even know it’s for sale?” says brother Roderick.

“Life isn’t as cruel as that—it’s
got
to be,” says Pamela Fitzgerald.

Important decisions do have to be made quickly. Once the test stick is removed from its foil packet, once the “absorbent tip” is placed in the urine flow for at least five seconds, or dipped into a clean container of this person’s urine, also for no fewer than five seconds, the result will be indicated in three minutes.

A decision will be made quickly, and not at all quickly forgotten.

There is a “sealed splashguard” on the test stick. Still, it seems smarter to collect the urine and place the test stick in the container. So the first decision of the morning is whether to go in a tumbler or a measuring cup. In crystal or in cookware?

At the video store in the town in the South, I rent
Topper
and
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
—romantic, playful, companionable ghosts—but they don’t compare with the ghost who sobs all night on the estate of Windward House where, from a cliff, young Mary Meredith falls (or is pushed?) to her death.

The night before taking the test the first time I had to take it, I watched
The Uninvited
on television, on the all-night oldies channel. I took it as a sign, its broadcast that night. The next morning, every minute of which I watched approach, I tested positive. It was a spring day in Southern California. It was 1970, and I was in college.

One week later, I signed a statement that would be sent to a committee of physicians. In it, I threatened to take my life if I were not allowed to terminate the pregnancy. A woman I barely knew had coached me to say this; she was the wife of a friend of a friend and had been moved to help a young thing she barely knew because she had been the young thing’s age and it had not been easy for her. Or so I seemed to have thought.

I was a girl again.

I stood in the student union, studying the bulletin board.

What could have been better proof of girlhood reacquired?

It is the little terrier, Bobby, who first gets Pamela and Rick into Windward House. Bobby sets off across the lawn after a squirrel and squeezes in after it when the squirrel slips through an open window. Bobby chases the squirrel up the chimney, but refuses to mount the stairs, where his owners will find, behind the locked door of the studio, an unexplained chill and a despair that engulfs all who enter.

My own house is situated across the street from a cemetery. The lawn of “the Boneyard,” as I call the place, is littered with dozens of chewed-out marrow bones. Neighbors would complain if the privet did not thrive and block the yard from view. The bones come frozen in packages of six; neighbor dogs get one apiece when they stop by to visit. They follow me across the lawn, back behind the backyard to where the growth has been too much to keep up with. The cold frame where seedlings made a dash for it is filled with weeds, and the rows of sunflowers and gladioli and irises are lost under grasses so long they bend and swirl into bedding for deer. The grasses have buried the rows of strawberries that my husband protected with net until the morning I went to pick some to serve with cream and found a box turtle caught in the webbing, dead. Like the “ghost nets” left behind by fishermen, seines that float loose to entangle porpoises and diving gulls.

That day I ripped off the net.

Let everything eat.

I did not call the police. Two years of working a hotline, and I did not report it.

We always offered to accompany victims to court. We offered follow-up support until a woman called to say she was moving and could a few of us come over and help her pack.

Some of the group never said the word
man.
Instead they said “potential rapist.” There were men who wanted to donate money, but there was a faction among us who did not feel right accepting donations from future rapists.

Here is what I would have had to say, if I had been a caller: “Hello? Hello? Oh, man, I did not call the police because I had invited the man in. My clothes? I took them off myself.”

The time I tried to keep it, I did not try for very long. Although one week did seem to me like a long time. I was sick enough to be in a hospital with an intravenous drip plugged into my wrist. There was an antiemetic I could ask for twice a day that made life tolerable for a little less than half an hour. Sometimes the body takes over to make a decision the mind can’t make. This was one of the doctors. She said sometimes a woman thinks she wants a child when what she really wants is the father of the child.

Stella Meredith was only three years old when her mother died at Windward House. Now twenty, she lives with her grandfather, the Commander (Donald Crisp), in town. Stella, played by Gail Russell, meets the Fitzgeralds when they come to inquire about buying the deserted house on the cliff. Stella is rude to them, tells them the house is not for sale. But her grandfather arrives as she is ushering them out, and, keen to provide for Stella after he is gone, sells the Fitzgeralds the house on the spot. The grandfather does not mention the disturbances the new owners will find. Stella, meanwhile, has caught Roderick Fitzgerald’s eye; later, he will readily accept her apology and invite Stella to dinner at her former home.

The act of taking the test made me feel sick. Before I could insert the test strip into the glass, I had to lie down and wait for the room to get steady. I wanted the hospital staple, Jell-O, cubed in a bowl on a tray. At home—a different story; was the problem sliced bananas or canned pears? The weight of diced peaches, the pits in the cherries? Waterlogged chunks of pineapple, fan-shaped mandarin oranges; they sank to the bottom or they rested on the surface—you had to know more about Jell-O than I did.

Mrs. Wynn used to make me Jell-O. She was a frequent babysitter, and, apart from my acquaintances in the movies, the only English person I knew. She was inventive, and once pasted the feet of paper dolls to either side of a Mexican jumping bean. She attached tissue skirts that covered the beans and then placed the dolls on a plate set on top of a chafing dish. In due course, the “fairies” had all been made to dance.

When I was sick, Mrs. Wynn performed a trick she called “the Passenger to Boulogne.” She brought to my bedroom an orange and a wineglass and a penknife and handkerchief. She prepared the orange by cutting into the rind the best ears, nose, and mouth her skill could devise. She then smoothed out the handkerchief and stretched it lightly over the mouth of the wineglass; she set the carved orange thereon. When she saw that she had my attention, she moved the handkerchief backward and forward over the top of the glass, imparting to the orange a rolling motion and what she described to her woozy audience as the agonies of a seasick passenger making the Channel crossing. The performance, she explained, was supposed to end by draping the handkerchief like a hood over the “head” and squeezing the orange into the glass. In deference to my condition, however, Mrs. Wynn demurred, saying some people found it disagreeably realistic.