by Amy Hempel
The dolls are no longer dolls; they are weather, storming into a room in the town where, down the street, a famous Woolworth’s five-and-ten is a civil rights museum, the lunch counter preserved where four black students waited to be served on the first day of February 1960. You buy a ticket to get in to see it, and you buy a ticket for the Doll Tornado, and it’s worth the price of admission, both times, to see what is commonplace now as it thunders back down.
I Stay with Syd
I wasn’t the only friend Syd’s married man hit on the time he came to see her at the beach. I could see he was going to adhere. So I did not want to talk to him. But then Syd had friends over the night before he was going home, and he invited me out west, said, “Why not this over here”—he meant me—“and that over there”—Syd—“not mingling, not taking anything away from each other?
“An amplitude!” he said.
After I turned down the married man, he brought Syd over, gave her a stagy kiss, then turned to me and said, “You’re really something.” I thought, What a hedge—why not just say you hate me? The striking part of his communication is what he doesn’t say, when saying something would make a difference. A passivity.
I went out onto the dock and examined a collection of shells. I like to say “conch” as much as I can. “Dumb conch.” Then home to attend to the business end of a sleeping pill.
Between them it was always almost over, especially at the start. Start to finish, had they done all they might have, might have taken what—a month at most? But for Syd it was a romance like a movie by she couldn’t think who. So they drew it out and one week each month I moved into the house at the beach.
I have lived here for so long. Here, and not here.
There’s a storm blowing in from the south and I’m worried a tree will fall on the house. But I’m worried about that even when it isn’t raining. Syd won’t pay what the tree man wants to prune the old oak. “Then at least move your bed,” the tree man said.
But it is not my bed to move. It is Syd’s bed, Syd out west again to visit the married man who wants her to be faithful to him.
Syd returns from the married man and wakes up in the night in tears and does not know why.
“Because you are lonely and empty inside and nothing helps?” I said, and she said, “Yeah, that too.”
I stay with Syd her first night back.
The storm makes landfall the night after she returns, and she says we might ride it out in a movie, so we drive to the old theater in the next town over, down the block from the good pizza place, and we sit too close to the screen. The air-conditioning comes and goes. The lobby had already run out of Coke before Syd could place her order.
The preview was a sci-fi thriller, big on effects. Across the screen: COMING IN SEPTEMBER! Then the lights came up, and a police officer ushered everyone out of the theater, said there was a bomb threat.
We stood with a hundred other people across the street from the theater. We were not offered passes for another night, so we figured we might get back in. Only one police car showed up. Several people left to get beer and pizza. We could smell the ocean, even in the rain. My hair was thickened with salt water. Syd pressed a white spot into my sunburned shoulder and said, “Is there an SPF higher than fifty?”
The scent of fertilizer carried from the nursery down the road where you can spend time deciding among identical flats of annuals.
Thirty minutes, and the head of the unconvincing bomb squad, his bored partner returned to the patrol car, told us we could go inside.
Most of the original audience went in and found seats. We sat farther back this time. No reason.
The projectionist started over from the beginning with the same coming attraction, the sci-fi snooze. “Now we’re getting nowhere,” Syd said.
She put an arm around my shoulder and we settled down to watch.
COMING IN SEPTEMBER!
Hurry up, summer, and end.
The Chicane
When the film with the French actor opened in the valley, I went to the second showing of the night. It was a hip romantic comedy, but it was not memorable in the way his first film had been, the bawdy picaresque that made his name.
More than thirty years ago, my aunt Lauryn had been hired to accompany him on interviews and serve as interpreter. She was a student at the university in Madrid, taking a junior year abroad from her home in the States, in the American Midwest.
Lauryn was lively and funny, a passionate girl with evenly tanned skin. The actor remained in character, and when she wrote him a month later to say that she was late, she did not hear anything back. On the day she miscarried, her best friend thousands of miles away had “a bad feeling” and called the concierge of Lauryn’s building in Madrid, otherwise Lauryn would not have survived the overdose.
She rallied with the help of her mother in Chicago, during lengthy conversations she relied on every night. One year later, she met someone who adored her. She had moved to Lisbon to translate medical documents while she completed her last college courses. Macario was next.
*
Macario was in line at the door when the Banco de Portugal opened at nine o’clock. Inside, he took a seat in the partitioned office of a personal banker while the banker secured the key to the strongbox. The personal banker escorted him to the vault, and the two men stood together as Macario unlocked the strongbox and added to its contents a tape cassette in a navy felt bag. He closed the box, and let the banker accompany him upstairs, and to the door.
The bank was in Lisbon, and the trip in from Estoril had taken half an hour. Another driver would make the trip in an hour, but Macario had raced cars for a living, and though semiretired from the circuit, drove with speed and aggression still. Racing was how he had first met Lauryn, an American girl studying languages abroad, who cut classes to go to the track. She looked Latin, not midwestern, and when he saw her at the finish line, he was pleased to find that she was fluent in Portuguese.
When Lauryn brought him home to meet her mother a couple of months later, Hillis wished her husband were alive to help. She was tired from losing her husband not yet a year before, and she made a decision to wish for her daughter’s happiness if she could not count on Lauryn’s judgment. The wedding was held in Lisbon, with a brief honeymoon at the Ritz. Hillis did not make the trip, but sent a surpassingly generous gift.
The house Macario rented for them in Estoril faced the sea. Chalet Esperanza had been built in the sixteenth century; its terraces poured bougainvillea to the ground. The newlyweds drank coffee in the morning on the bedroom terrace, close enough to the sea to spot starfish on the beach at low tide. Macario brought his bride a tiny poodle—mostly poodle—that had hung around the track for several days. The pit crews had fed it, but no one had showed up to look for it. Lauryn named the little dog Espe; she bathed her and bought the dog a wardrobe of collars. Macario took that summer to get to know his bride.
Lauryn wrote to Hillis about the blissful days they woke to. She told her mother that she walked to the market earlier than the tourists, said she was not herself a tourist since her wedding to Macario. She said she rid herself of the flat Chicago “a”—she noticed this the few times she spoke her native language. She was where she was meant to be, she said, living a life that made sense.
She was learning the history of the coastal towns, visiting the landmark churches, thriving in Estoril’s moderate summer instead of the humid heat of Illinois. She said she liked to linger in Parede, a small beach where the high iodine content in the water was said to be good for the bones; there were two orthopedic hospitals in the town. Lauryn told her mother she thought she might visit one and read to the patients in the children’s ward.
Some days she went to Tamariz, the beach beside the Estoril Casino and Gardens, or to Praia dos Pescadores for the fish market, or to the baroque Church of the Navigators to pray that Macario would always return to her but not to the track.
The Circuito Estoril at the Autódro
mo was a tricky course on the Formula 1 circuit with its bumpy straights, constant-radius corners, heavy braking zones, and a tricky chicane. The month they had the chalet, July, was a month when only motorbikes raced. Unless Macario and Lauryn extended their stay, his racing pals would not be around to tempt him back onto the course.
Each felt the other was a prize, so where was the need to continue to compete?
Such was Lauryn’s thinking, as reported to her mother, and passed along to me. Macario, she pointed out, had filled a trophy case already; did he need to risk his life now that he had a wife and, soon, a child?
Though Lauryn was twenty-one years old, and I was seventeen, she treated me not like her older sister’s child, but as someone who could profit from all that she had learned. Though I could not pick up languages the way that she could, I took in other lessons.
That summer, Lauryn started to wear loose shifts. She no longer tucked in her shirts. She took naps, and was alternately sick and ravenous. She instilled in Macario a sense of dynasty, a word she used ironically, but which he did not.
Then she made the classic mistake of taking the exotic out of its element. She took her husband home and turned him into what she could easily have found without leaving Illinois. Macario did not hold it against her, but Lauryn came to blame him for the same things that drew her to him first.
After the month in Estoril, Lauryn brought Macario home again. She wanted an American doctor, she wanted her mother’s help with the baby, she wanted Macario to take a job with the company her father used to run. She wanted an American husband, after all. When their son, James, was born, Macario pronounced it “Zhime.” Portuguese was the language they fought in.
The first two years of motherhood were a balm for Lauryn. During the pregnancy she had stopped taking medication to lift her spirits, and she did not take it up again after the baby was born. She attributed her changes in mood to the new responsibilities, to the vigilance required to protect her child and make sure he would thrive. She talked to her mother on the phone or saw her every day. I saw her every few months when I flew in from California to get away from the life that had not yet started for me. I preferred her life, the one she talked about from before the baby was born.
Macario helped with childcare when he came home from the office in the evening. Still, Lauryn said she needed a break from them all, from it all, and booked a flight to Lisbon on her twenty-third birthday.
*
Macario would not have known there was a tape if the chief of police had not been an old friend who told him. It was not generally known that the police taped international calls placed within the capital. So when Lauryn placed the call to her mother in Chicago from a room in the Lisbon Ritz on the last night of her life, the conversation was recorded by police. The chief of police not only told Macario this, he gave him a copy of the tape.
Macario listened to it once, and then put it in his strongbox at the bank. He did not tell Hillis there was a tape of the last conversation she had had with her daughter, or that he had listened to Lauryn as she made less and less sense after taking the pills. But he did tell me.
*
Hillis and I drank coffee on her terrace on the eighteenth floor of her apartment building, close enough to Lake Michigan to smell diesel fuel. She had mostly quit caffeine when Lauryn died; it fought the medication she had taken since then to calm her. But you could not lose everything at once, she maintained, and continued to drink coffee in the morning, as before. In the years since Lauryn died, she had lost her view from the terrace. It had been largely blocked by the John Hancock Building, which she had watched go up from her living room across from the office and residential tower.
Hillis did not want to talk about Lauryn, but she seemed to enjoy my visits when I came back to Chicago from the coast. Though there was not any glamour to the work that I did, my grandmother asked for particulars. In an uneasy near coincidence, I edited articles for medical publications. It was a job I knew I would leave as soon as something better appeared.
I am sure that if Lauryn had wanted a doctor to come and pump her stomach she would have phoned the front desk of the Ritz Hotel and told them to send one up to her room. She wanted to talk to her mother, and hear her mother tell her from thousands of miles away that James was sleeping in the guest room in his crib, and that it was hard to make out what she was saying—could she speak up?—and that she would feel better when she woke up in the morning, and then ask her mother to stay on the line while she sang herself to sleep.
Macario did not let me listen to the tape; I had to take his word for what was on it when he took me aside at James’s tenth birthday party and gave me this ugly gift. Why tell me then? He had no answer when I asked him.
This morning I thought to make a tape recording of my own. I wanted to tell my aunt about the party I went to in Malibu last night. The fellow who answered the door was not the host but the French actor, the rake who played a rake in his film debut, who seduced my aunt in Madrid so many years before. He had aged pretty well; he still had it, I thought.
I had wanted to play something out, so I trailed him through the house, then asked if he would step outside and show me the night sky. I introduced myself as Lauryn, and spelled out where the “y” replaced the “e.” Did I expect him to flinch? With his arm around my shoulders, he narrated what we looked up and saw. I would not have known if he was right about the constellations. His accent almost worked on me. But when he stopped talking, and leaned in for the kiss, I ducked and said, “You can remember me as the girl you showed the new moon to.”
“But, darling,” he said, “there’s a new moon every month.” Still, I wanted to tell my aunt. The days of tape cassettes were over, but the equipment must be somewhere to be found, and when I was the one who found it, wouldn’t I record a tape on which I told her the story? Wouldn’t I mail it off to Macario in a suitable felt bag so he could take it to the bank in Lisbon and unlock the strongbox and place it beside the tape of his wife chattering away in the vault?
Greed
Mrs. Greed had been married for forty years, her husband the cuckold of all time. A homely man with a notable fortune, he escorted her on errands in the neighborhood. It was a point of honor with Mrs. Greed to say she would never leave him. No matter if her affection for him was exceeded by her devotion to others. Including, for example, my husband. If she was home at night in her husband’s bed, did he care what she did with her days?
I was the one who cared.
Protected by men, money, and a lack of shame, Mrs. Greed had long been able to avoid what she had coming. She had the kind of glee that meant men did not think she slept around, they thought she had joie de vivre; they thought her a libertine, not a whore.
She had the means to indulge impetuous behavior and sleep through the mornings after nights she kept secret from her friends. She traveled the world, and turned into the person she could be in other places with people she would never see again.
She was many years older than my husband, running on the fumes of her beauty. Hers had been a conventional beauty, and I was embarrassed by my husband’s homage to it. Running through their rendezvous: a stream of regret that they had not met sooner.
He asked if she had maternal feelings for him. She said she was not sure what he wanted to hear. She told him she felt an erotic mix of passion and tenderness. If he wanted to think the tenderness maternal, let him.
When they met, he said, he had not hidden the fact that she looked like his mother, a glamorous woman who had been cruel to him and died when he was a boy. He had not said this to underscore her age, nor did she think it a fixation. She would have heard it as she felt it was intended: as a compliment, an added opportunity to bind them together. She would have been happy to be the good mother, as well as the ultimate sensate. And see how her pleasure seeking brought pleasure to those around her!
A thing between them: green apples. Never red, always green. I knew when my husband had entertained
Mrs. Greed because a trio of baskets in the kitchen would be filled with polished green apples. My husband claimed to like the look of them; I never saw him eat one. As soon as they started to soften and turn brown, I would throw them out. And there would be the baskets filled so soon again.
He told me he got them from the Italian market in town. But I checked, and the Italian market does not carry green apples. What the green apples mean to them, I don’t know, don’t want to know. But she brought them each time she entered our house, and I felt that if I had not thrown the rotting ones out, he would have held on to every one of them. The way he fetishized these apples—it made him less attractive to me.
Mrs. Greed convinced her young lover, my husband, that she was “not the type” to have “work” done, but she had had work done. She must have had a high threshold for pain. She could stay out of sight for the month or more of healing after each procedure. She had less success hiding the results of other surgeries. She claimed her athleticism had made it necessary, claimed a “sports injury” to lessen the horror of simple aging. But she could not hide the stiffness that followed, a lack of elasticity that marked her an old woman who crossed the street slowly in low-heeled shoes. I watched her cross the street like this, supported by my husband.
Maybe that was why she liked to hear complaints about his other women, that they were spoiled and petty, gossips who resented his involvement with her. Because he would not keep quiet about such a thing. At first, she felt the others had “won” because they could see him at any time. Then she saw that their availability guaranteed he would tire of them. They were impermanent, and she knew it before they did. So however much he pleaded with her to leave her husband, or at least see him more often, Mrs. Greed refused. It galled me that he wanted her more than she wanted him.
