by Amy Hempel
The nearest neighbor is not so near. Still, you can hear his country music, faint from down the road, till all hours of night. The nearest neighbor is from the South, and how he knows if he likes you is he puts on Hank Williams and do you know who that is singing? Coming in so low when you are lying in bed awake—it is the pleasure of keeping the radio on all night when you were just able to have a friend stay over, and all you cared to drink in the dark was ginger ale.
Sometimes in the dark a person will call out, “Where am I?” and really want to know. What must be the nines and tens?
Have you noticed there are no second sheets? I use the blue letter paper with my name at the top of every page. I do this because of a dream I had the first night I was here. In the dream, I went to pick up the stationery I had ordered for myself in waking life. But in the dream, there was a different name at the top of each sheet.
I did not have to puzzle over what this meant. Those people whose names were on my stationery? It seems to me that I am every one of them.
Writing to you, I am myself. And what that self is I will tell you: a graveyard. I can be a graveyard. But that is a thing you would have to find out for yourself. A person cannot tell you a thing and have you just believe them. A person has to prove it. You would find out, if you cared to, that I have told no one about you. As if anyone would believe me if I had! As I think you would be the first to agree, it is hard to know what to believe anymore.
Although this is the kind of place that can call your bluff. It’s like—let’s say you are at a mixer in high school, and a boy you don’t like keeps asking you to dance. Let’s say he keeps coming over, and each time he asks, you say, “Let’s wait for a good one.” Then “Great Balls of Fire” comes on, and what are you going to say—“I’m waiting for ‘Color My World’?”
This place was once a school for girls. For one hundred years a tony school for girls in the Georgian style with a circular drive, then mounting fiscal problems and a merger with the corresponding school for boys, only the name retained in the hyphenated name of the new institution.
After many years vacant, what was once a parlor hung with portraits of the founder, the place the girls received their guests, is now a lounge we call the Hostility Suite. The paint is fresh, the armchairs inviting, the wood polished; it stops short of fussy. It is easy to imagine mattresses being pulled off the beds upstairs, and teenaged girls in baby-doll pajamas surfing them down the stairs.
And how about this for the way life works—one of the patients used to be a student. When Chatty was away at school, this was the school she went to until she was kicked out, that is, for drinking. She plays the drinking down, says she monitored herself using the Jimi Hendrix test: Am I choking on my own vomit? No? Then I can have another drink.
Chatty has lost nearly all of her short-term memory, and she loves it. Wasn’t that the point, she asks, of drinking? But she says her recollections of school are untouched. She said a platinum screen goddess had attended in the thirties, and had sneaked out through the chapel to elope. Chatty said that every girl in the school for years after claimed that the screen star’s room was her own.
Chatty remembers jumping out of her window and running to the beach where, under a full moon, you could make shadows on the sand. She said she sabotaged convocations, substituting vegetable seeds for the flowers in the Centennial Garden, so that where should have bloomed hollyhocks—corn stalks. And in place of delphiniums, butternut squash.
School had not been, for me, the place of unalloyed joy and fulfillment that it was for her. When the other girls squealed, “Let’s jump in the car and go have hijinks,” I was the one who asked, “How far is the car?” If deferred to in any way, I would go up in a bonfire of self-immolation. Now here we both are. And I am writing to you.
I have to roll up my sleeves to do so.
Did you wonder why my clothes were too big? Why I kept having to push up the sleeve of my sweater to lift my cup of tea? This is a holdover from high school, from when I read in a women’s magazine that to make yourself look small, you should wear your clothes too big. The column went on—it said don’t stop there! It said buy yourself oversized furniture so as to look small and delicate when curled up in a chair.
Are you wondering why a person who is already small would want to make herself look smaller? That should become clear. Not everything I know is something I want to see. Though on highways and, once, on a mountain road, I have strained to see things I didn’t want to see. The worst I ever saw was a body without a head. That was when I realized that I don’t mind seeing everything as long as everything is there for me to see.
The person I strained to see on the mountain road was myself. A paramedic wouldn’t let me. He cut away my jacket and sweater, then he scissored off my shirt. It seemed to me he could have covered me up faster than he did. In the hospital, a doctor laid his hand on my shoulder. Does this hurt? he asked. Moving his hand to my collarbone, What about here? And lower. Does this feel good?
It felt like that joke that I can’t exactly remember, but that has to do with a woman being examined in a doctor’s office. I think the way it goes is that after the naked woman has been thoroughly examined, she asks what is wrong with her. And the man in the white coat says he wouldn’t know, he’s not the doctor.
When someone starts heading for the life they had before, Chatty says, “Steam your face.” She herself will lean over a pot of boiling water with a towel held tented over her head and over the pot. She puts chamomile leaves in the boiling water and says the effect is soothing. But chamomile is the tea you drank that day, and the scent of it here is too much for me.
I lost my watch the day we met. Without a watch, to find the time I pick up the remote and turn on the weather channel. Trying to find the time, I track tornadoes in the plains states. A lost watch is something I will have to look up. I, who above and beyond the normal precautions, make fortune-courting gestures such as placing my shoes at my bedroom door with one shoe pointing in and one shoe pointing out—this to prevent nightmares—although it makes me look as though I don’t know whether I am coming or going. I am superstitious, and never change the bedsheets on a Friday (it gives the devil control of your dreams). When I wanted to measure your intentions when you agreed to meet me for tea, I threw apple pips into a fire and said, “If you love me, pop and fly, if you hate me, lay and die.” A lost watch is something I will have to look up. I am superstitious, and sometimes confused, opening an umbrella before I leave the house, but never, ever, wearing sunglasses inside.
A fetish for me, sunglasses, so I was glad that you said you liked the green ones. “Show me what else you’ve got in there”—when I put the glasses back in my bag, how nicely you cued me up. Show me what else you’ve got in there. Because the last time someone said that to me, it was a gorilla that said it, the one who talks in sign language with her hands. She said the same thing to me—I sat as close to her, a famous gorilla, as I sat to you—after she, too, admired my green-rimmed glasses. I think you could see that, had you let me, I would have talked about that gorilla till brooms were thrust under our feet. The situation is this: If you stopped people on the street and asked how they felt about gorillas, I would be among the ones who lighted right up.
And she said with her hands, “Show me what else you’ve got in there.” For her, I took out everything I had and held it up so she could say to me with her hands, “Pretty”—the green-rimmed glasses, and “Put on”—a tube of lipstick! And when I held up an invitation to an opening (not one of yours), at a gallery, held it up so she could see the side of the card that showed the artist’s work, “Lousy painting” is what she signed! Because she paints, too. I wish I could tell people here that you said to that, “They all do.”
I would have told you about how, when it was time for me to leave, she asked me with her hands to stay, but it was enough that you said, “I envy you your gorilla.”
I warn you: Don’t get me started on dogs! Volunteers
from the shelter arrive with orphaned dogs to walk. Karen has become loquacious, but only when a dog is present. On the days the dogs come, Karen sings the same song, only changing the words to fit each newcomer: “Sad-eyed Mongrel (Mastiff, Shepherd) of the Lowlands.”
Since the dogs began to visit, Karen has been going to chapel. There, although she does not have religion, she lights a candle—“for Saint Bernard,” she says, her only joke.
The dogs from the shelter take a great deal of pleasure in pissing on pine needles and lapping at mud puddles when you volunteer to walk them in the woods behind the pound. We can do this sometimes. Karen has become enamored of the shelter’s mascot, a dog who, because of his age, is unlikely to be adopted. Banker came to visit once, but frightened another guest, so every day that she is allowed, Karen drags a vinyl chair across the concrete floor and positions it in front of Banker’s cage when the weather is too bad for her to take him outside.
In the first flush of companionship, Karen and Banker had rolled in the woods, and Karen, careless in a sleeveless blouse, had found patches of rash from poison ivy crusting into epaulettes on her shoulders.
Sometimes I go with her to the shelter, and that is how I heard about the job that she lost. She said a dove was walking north on Madison Avenue, walking with a limp, when it turned left at 73rd Street and entered Pierre Deux. Karen was on her way to a job interview, but she followed the bird into the store. The bird was hurt, that was clear, so Karen said she wrapped it in a remnant of French challis and took it to the hospital known as the Mayo Clinic for animals. She said she wrote out a check for the bird’s costly treatment, then put it in a cab for Brooklyn where there is a sanctuary for such cases. She took the driver’s number, told him the person at the other end would call her when he arrived.
She said she missed her interview. So did this make her compassionate, Karen asked, or just ambivalent?
Banker had gone from a sit to lying down. The dog’s eyes remained on Karen the entire time. When she finished speaking, he thumped his tail.
“Good boy,” Karen said.
A young woman came over to the pen with a large plastic scoop. She opened Banker’s kennel and removed his dish, filled it with food and put it back in the part of the kennel that was unroofed and open to the air. The woman left to tend the other dogs, and Karen spoke to Banker; she said it was exhausting to always have two jobs—your job, and the job of being able to do your job in the first place.
A blue jay dove into Banker’s bowl and flew off with a kibble from his dinner.
“How do you do both?”
My guess was you worked twice as hard, but I wasn’t the one she asked.
Only Warren can pull her out of a mood. Last night she told us she was going to go look at a litter of puppies. Warren told her there was no such thing as “just looking” at puppies.
“Often you do see puppies that just aren’t cute enough,” he said. Then he wondered aloud what kind of puppy did we think Karen could pass up. “Let’s see,” he said in Karen’s voice, “all the internal organs are on the outside? I can live with that.”
“I like golden retrievers,” Karen said.
“You don’t think they’ve kind of got that Stepford thing going?” Warren said.
Warren is pronounced Warn, or Worn.
You know how most of us don’t say things in a memorable way? The way everything sounds already handled by everyone else? But Warren says, when he is angry, that he’s as mad as all outdoors. He says do I want to meet him after dinner and chew the rug? He says he can’t always follow the threat of my conversation.
When Chatty sees Warren in her old school dorm, she says she nearly calls out, “Man on the floor!”
I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon balloon.
Sometimes we go into town together. Last time, we got a ride in with the gardener. He had to stop at the Ford dealership to pick up a part for the van, and I followed Warren into the car repair dock. Warren took a cigarette out of his pack, and a uniformed employee said, “No smoking, sir. They don’t let us smoke here.” Warren took out a pack of matches and lit his cigarette. “But you can smoke. You’re a customer,” the mechanic said. Warren flicked his used match into the lube bay and looked straight at the guy. “I guess if I buy a truck here, I can smoke, too,” the guy said.
That was the day before Warren’s parents came to visit. They were coming from a small town in Texas. I told him I looked forward to meeting them, even though it always seemed that the very things others find charming about your parents—the feyness, the provincialism, the odd takes on everything—are the things that make you want to rustle up a firing squad.
Warren smoked his cigarette, held it low on his lip. At dinner the first night, Chatty had said in my ear that if Jean-Paul Belmondo had not been born, Warren would not have had a personality. She said it was hard not to notice that it was a long way from Belmondo to Warren Moore.
He pulled a folded snapshot from the pocket of his canvas pants. It was an aerial view of a small island. The island was shaped like a heart.
“They came to my island in the spring,” he said, of the last time he’d seen his parents, “when everything was in bloom and I had cleaned up the house. They were supposed to stay a week, but after two days, my mother said they had to go home. She hadn’t liked anything about it,” Warren said, “not the ride on my boat, not even that I had rigged a pot at the end of the pier and dropped the shrimp into boiling water the minute I fished them out of the ocean. I called her back in Texas. I said, ‘Dad was here last week, and he brought your evil twin.’”
The gardener had dropped us at the plant store. Warren had said he wanted to find a book on bulbs. Did he plan to be here to see fall-planted bulbs bloom next spring? The plant store is next door to a shuttered-by-day gay bar called Manhandlers. The owner of the bar also owns the plant store, which is why Warren calls it Planthandlers. He said it made him feel funny when he went in to buy tomatoes, and had to ask the owner for “Big Boys” and “Beefmaster.”
Warren paid for his book. I looked at the back of his hands where intravenous drips had left tiny scars like age spots. We all have them.
The gardener came to fetch us that day toting a paper bag filled with dozens of packs of gum. He handed a couple of packs to each of us. He said it was for the moles in the garden, that we had to chew the gum, then put it down their holes because the moles like the taste and would eat it but couldn’t digest it and it would kill them. He said he was also going to try those plastic pinwheels that you can get at carnivals, that those were supposed to work, too. Vibrations sent into the ground by the pinwheel spinning at the end of the stick.
We left Planthandlers with gum in our mouths. Outside, at the entrance to the greenhouse, a dog licked crumbs of fertilizer off the blade of a shovel.
When he is ready, Warren will return to his heart-shaped island. He says he can’t wait, but he is waiting.
A thing I haven’t told anyone is that this place is the place where I feel the way you would feel on a heart-shaped island, glad to open my eyes from dreams of the place I live where the boys next door are dim malevolent twins who ride their bicycles onto my lawn and say, when I go out to shoo them away, “We know you from somewhere.” “You know me from right here,” is what I tell them, and go back inside.
Tumble home. It’s a shipbuilding term I learned from Warren. It’s the place on a ship that is, if I understand him, the widest part of the bow before it narrows to cut through water—it is the point where the water parts and goes to one side of the ship or the other. To me, the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you.
I have walked barefoot on floors so badly cleaned I had to brush off my feet before sliding them between the sheets at night. Floors cleaned not at all is what I mean, because the cleaning was left to me.
Here it’s not my job so the floors are clean. Our rooms, Chatty says, are the same
as years before. There are no college pennants tacked up on the walls, no posters of rock stars, either. Just serviceable furniture—a maple chest and desk, a single bed refreshed by the linen service weekly, and hangers that cannot be removed from the closet, a hotel touch. At the end of each hall is a kitchenette with baskets of apples and oranges, and packets of hot chocolate mix.
We can personalize the rooms to the extent we care to. Chatty hung curtains of crocheted lace, but I like a room that doesn’t give a person away. Though I do display a collage I made. It is a photograph of a Great Dane looking at his leg where I strapped on a photo of a Timex to his wrist. The title of this piece is “Watchdog Watching.” We’re all artists here.
Would it make you uneasy to know that I have seen the inside of your house? Anyone who bought that magazine did. It surprised me. I would have guessed you lived in spare rooms done in stinging whites and grays. But there you were by a cozy fire in a house more lodge than stage. And in the studio where you paint: orderly racks of canvases, the wood-burning stove to heat the place. But is it a good idea to have an ax in the room where you work?
And a swimming pool in the backyard. I never had a swimming pool; I swam in a willow-ringed pond. My favorite thing was staying in the longest when a thunderstorm struck (She is the smallest child who swings the highest my mother once wrote in a letter to my father). What can I say about myself today? That I am the last to close a window when it rains.
I am writing now beside an open window in Little Egypt. When this was school, Chatty said, they called the smoker Little Egypt because of all the Camels in it. They blew their smoke out the window that overlooks the circular drive and from which we can see everyone arrive and leave.
