by Amy Hempel
“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.”
Housewife
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 Annex
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.
The New Lodger
One of the locals said at the bar, “I hear you’ve got a new lodger.” I thought, Word travels fast—I only got here last night.
In a corner booth of the Soggy Dollar, an old beach bar that also serves food, I can listen to other customers without seeming to eavesdrop; I’ve got postcards fanned out on the table. I’m trying not to say the same thing on every one.
The best is an aerial view of the road you take to get here. Seeing this ahead of time, you would choose to go somewhere else. Hugging the inside curves of the road, taking steady deep breaths, I can drive myself here, but not back. I hire one of the locals to drive my car down to the junction of the road where I can take over. I arrange for a taxi to meet us there, and I cover the large fare back.
“It’s imported,” the bartender says, and pours a glass for the guy at the bar who meant lager.
“What do you think?” the bartender says. “Should I order more?”
It is not easy to get to this beach. The one road is dangerous even in good weather, even during the day. It winds around the hills on the edge of a cliff, climbing above the ocean until it suddenly grades down. People have lost their lives on the way to this beach, or on their way home from it. Heading home puts you in the outer lane where there is no guard rail, not that it would help. There is only the occasional turnout for a scenic lookout point, and people mindful of others pull over to let them pass.
It’s a moody beach, more often foggy than bright. It is rarely warm enough to take a swim. It is pretty to look at, the cove a perfect C, and there’s the haunted house tour if you’re that hard up. For excitement: the peril of a storm that washes away a residence, fire in the dry hills, a fight that breaks out among bikers passing through. The new lager.
I hadn’t been to this town since the time, years before, when I nearly drowned. I credit the pancakes I’d had that morning for giving me something to draw on to fight the current, until I remembered not to fight the current, but to swim parallel to land until I had swum past the current and could then turn in toward shore.
I took a room in the annex to the Soggy Dollar that had not been built the last time I was here.
The first time I saw this beach was with a man who, during our stay, compared himself to Jesus, so the trip had not been a waste of time for him. Someone else brought me the second time. We rented, for a day, a cabin across from the beach with atmosphere and damp chairs. I told him it was my birthday. He left me in the cabin, and came back carrying a piece of chocolate cake. There were no plates or forks. He watched me as I ate the cake. I said, “What—am I covered with frosting?” “Every day of your life,” he said, and went home to his wife.
The third time I had those pancakes.
I’ll stay for as long as it takes. I will not get in touch with anyone on my list. Not the friends of friends who live nearby, whose gardens I must see, whose children I must meet. Nor will I visit the famed nature preserve, home of a vanishing tern. Why get acquainted with what will be left, or leaving?
Farther up the coast is where you have to go for stuffed plush whales and orange rubber crabs, for T-shirts and mugs, placemat maps. Postcards are what the store can manage. That’s okay with me. I don’t have to hunt up souvenirs. It is enough to feel the pull of the old home, pulling apart the new.
Tumble Home
…I would have traded
places with anyone raised on love,
but how would anyone raised on love
bear this death?
—Sharon Olds, from “Wonder”
I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
This is easier, I think, when your life has been tipped over and poured out. Things matter less; there is the joy of being less polite, and of being less—not more—careful. We can say everything.
Although maybe not. Like in fishing? The lighter the line, the easier it is to get your lure down deep. Having delivered myself of the manly analogy, I see it to be not a failure, but a lie. How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you. These sounds—this letter—it is my lipstick, my lingerie, my high heels.
Writing to you fills the days in this place. And sometimes I long for days when nothing happens. “Not every clocktick needs a martyr.”
The trees are all on crutches, on sawed-off braces of deadwood notched into Y-shaped crooks for support. The birds that nest in these crippled trees line their nests with the clumps of fur that come loose to float over brambled grass when the house cat is groomed out of doors. The birds are fat on seeds that did not flower. Seed packets mark our places in books. Everyone here is better than they were there, “there” being anywhere else. The fact of someplace else means we are not native. Not one of us started here first.
What got me here was a six, according to the nurse who had devised her own scale. And I remember thinking, What must be the sevens and eights if this is only a six?
I have killed two of the wrong things to kill. It is not like the city where you know what to kill. First a preying mantis (they will eat the other bugs if you give them a chance to do it) and then a firefly which, without its glow, was just a beetle in the bathroom.
Some of those of us who stay here appreciate the trend toward doctors calling their patients “guests.” But I think I would be happy to wear a plastic bracelet and a white gown that fails to cover my backside. Patients, guests, we are expected to get well enough to leave, even if it is only for an afternoon drive. When I get a pass and a car comes to pick me up, what I have the driver do is park across the street from the gate so that I have this place in sight until it is time for me to come back. The driver can keep the radio on if he likes—or if she does. All I want is to see where I’m going next.
A pass is a formality; we can leave anytime we want. I usually call a car, but others take the bus into town. The time I took the bus, I felt sure that if the side of my face were to touch the window glass, the skin would be abraded, and I spent the duration of the ride leaning into the window.
At a famous institute of technology there is a room filled with scale-model trains set up to run in perpetuity through a scale model of the town that is home to the institute. You can watch the trains power along the tracks and through the tunnels and avoid near-collisions before you notice the clock on the wall and its madly spinning hands.
The clock is on scale time, of course.
Those of us who have to leave here, even briefly, feel, I think, that time, anywhere else, is like this—like scale time.
What goes on when things go well: I see Warren pushing the house cat “out to sea” on the Styrofoam cover of the ice chest on the pond. I brush a shed hair from my collar and the hair turns out to be cornsilk.
There is the unidentified object that flies. When any one of us spots it hovering above the house, we all grab a book and run to the lawn and hold up the books to show them what kind of people we are.
Shakespeare and Tolstoy!
Run get Jane Austen!
If you take the highway to get here, you will pass our favorite sign. Posted at the entrance to the housing development a few miles back, the sign says, RESIDENTIAL HOMES. Some of the residential homes are under construction st
ill. We like the smell of cut lumber, the way post and beam meet, the men working so fast, cobwebs can’t form in the eaves.
The Southerner among us is Chatten Gaines. She will take a chair in the sun and produce a bottle of lotion, her Swiss Performing Extract, and Warren will ask, “What does it do—cartwheels?” Chatty will say to watch out he doesn’t become an outpatient.
The definition of outpatient here is: a person who has fainted, who has passed out.
I believe that moisturizing has become as important to Chatty as accessorizing—that retail verb. I can tell you that both activities are crucial to me.
The vegetable garden is open to us all, and all are encouraged to cultivate something in it. Consequently, there are rows of trendy lettuce, beans climbing poles tied up like tepees, tiny yellow tomatoes shaped like lightbulbs, kale not even the moles will eat, and my own contribution—nothing so literal as a vegetable, but row after row of perfect dwarf zinnias. This is not bragging; given the soil here, you can shake the seeds out like salt on a baked potato, tamp not a spicule of soil on top of them, and up they will come to a height greater than you would want.
I am not quite myself, I think.
But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we all are more ourselves than ever, I suppose.
I have made friends with the Southerner. Chatty is not one of those ironic nicknames as when a fat person is known as “Tiny.” Chatty says that when she was a girl away at school and the holidays were coming, her mother would ask if she was bringing home any listeners. Chatty talks about the poltergeist and what will it do next—turn up the stereo in the music room, run an upstairs shower, turn on the fan above the stove if it doesn’t like the smell of our dinner cooking?
