Read Online The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel and Rick Moody - Free Book Online
Authors: Amy Hempel and Rick Moody
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park and went in and hauled him out.
Most of us saw that happen. But during the days of cleanup it was not what anyone mentioned. We talked about the racehorses loose from Centennial Track, how they had cantered over lawns and stumbled on buried sprinkler heads. Indoors were rolls of wet toilet paper swelling on bathroom rods. We found letters, and water had washed off the ink.
We talked about Bunny Winton, who ordered a new living room the first morning after. She said she was happy to see her armchairs go, the padded arms cat-scratched down to cotton batting.
“You open up or you shut down,” Bunny said, and went out and got her hair styled new.
Film crews photographed the swim team at the club. They were lined up by the snack bar, waiting to get a tetanus shot so they could shovel mud. Bunny made the nightly news; the Vidifont spelled out VICTIM on her chest.
They showed her in a tree wrapping washcloths around a branch so that the wet bent wood would not squeak against the roof.
The first time was fifteen years ago, on what was, or on what would have been, Pool Night.
“It’s all in the mouth,” he said, and showed me again and again. Grey said, “If the mouth is relaxed, the person looks good.”
We were looking at pictures of ourselves and family. The looking was my mother’s idea—my mother, who was the thoughtful one. Here’s what my mother thought of when she heard that Bunny Winton had lost her photograph album: She put me to work on ours. Grey came over to help me—at her invitation, of course.
Grey was Bunny and the doctor’s son, the child they could not now watch grow up in snapshots, page after page. Until my mother remembered that he grew up in ours. We would pull every picture that included Grey Winton, print up another, and present a new album to his grateful parents.
Grey was a junior lifeguard at the pool. He tanned to the color of the corn flakes he ate each morning, and I knew girls who saved his chewed gum.
Grey was the only boy excused from working cleanup. That was the week he was under observation.
He and my brother were Aquazaniacs.
They trained with a coach to do slapstick acrobatics off the high dive at the pool. There were six Aquazaniacs in 1890s stripes who hurled themselves into the water in syncopated ways. Grey would stand on my brother’s shoulders and together they dove as the Twelve-Foot Man.
In the pratfall sport of Clown Diving, the Walk-Around Gainer is a popular stunt. This is where you run to the end of the board and then keep on running, out in the air, a cartoon, so fast you flip over backward.
“Put gravity at your service” is how they said they did it.
But during rehearsal, Grey candied out. He hit his head on the board coming down. It would have kept him from diving on Pool Night, if we had had Pool Night. But the rain date gave him time to try to perfect the Fire Dive.
In the album there were pictures of Grey in water. The first one was in our bathtub, playing Stormy Ocean with my brother as a baby. Later, they pole a raft across a lake, poking an oar at snapping turtles. There’s a picture of the three of us on skates, on ice. Around my neck I wear snowballs of rabbit fur on black velvet cord. The pictures that follow show the boys pulling the snowballs off, then coming from behind, the velvet rope stretched out tight—a garrote.
Some of the photographs were Polaroid ones. They were faded, but the fugitive images remained. Emulsion on others had turned metallic bronze; the snapshots held deep tarnish, like a mirror.
There were quite a few pictures of Bunny, too. With the unphotogenic’s eagerness to pose, she increased her chances of the one good shot that would let her relax, having proof at last that she had once looked good, just once.
The doctor couldn’t make it to the picnics or to the skating—so he didn’t show up in the pictures, either. The effect was of him saying after the flood: What I lose will always be
Most of us saw that happen. But during the days of cleanup it was not what anyone mentioned. We talked about the racehorses loose from Centennial Track, how they had cantered over lawns and stumbled on buried sprinkler heads. Indoors were rolls of wet toilet paper swelling on bathroom rods. We found letters, and water had washed off the ink.
We talked about Bunny Winton, who ordered a new living room the first morning after. She said she was happy to see her armchairs go, the padded arms cat-scratched down to cotton batting.
“You open up or you shut down,” Bunny said, and went out and got her hair styled new.
Film crews photographed the swim team at the club. They were lined up by the snack bar, waiting to get a tetanus shot so they could shovel mud. Bunny made the nightly news; the Vidifont spelled out VICTIM on her chest.
They showed her in a tree wrapping washcloths around a branch so that the wet bent wood would not squeak against the roof.
The first time was fifteen years ago, on what was, or on what would have been, Pool Night.
“It’s all in the mouth,” he said, and showed me again and again. Grey said, “If the mouth is relaxed, the person looks good.”
We were looking at pictures of ourselves and family. The looking was my mother’s idea—my mother, who was the thoughtful one. Here’s what my mother thought of when she heard that Bunny Winton had lost her photograph album: She put me to work on ours. Grey came over to help me—at her invitation, of course.
Grey was Bunny and the doctor’s son, the child they could not now watch grow up in snapshots, page after page. Until my mother remembered that he grew up in ours. We would pull every picture that included Grey Winton, print up another, and present a new album to his grateful parents.
Grey was a junior lifeguard at the pool. He tanned to the color of the corn flakes he ate each morning, and I knew girls who saved his chewed gum.
Grey was the only boy excused from working cleanup. That was the week he was under observation.
He and my brother were Aquazaniacs.
They trained with a coach to do slapstick acrobatics off the high dive at the pool. There were six Aquazaniacs in 1890s stripes who hurled themselves into the water in syncopated ways. Grey would stand on my brother’s shoulders and together they dove as the Twelve-Foot Man.
In the pratfall sport of Clown Diving, the Walk-Around Gainer is a popular stunt. This is where you run to the end of the board and then keep on running, out in the air, a cartoon, so fast you flip over backward.
“Put gravity at your service” is how they said they did it.
But during rehearsal, Grey candied out. He hit his head on the board coming down. It would have kept him from diving on Pool Night, if we had had Pool Night. But the rain date gave him time to try to perfect the Fire Dive.
In the album there were pictures of Grey in water. The first one was in our bathtub, playing Stormy Ocean with my brother as a baby. Later, they pole a raft across a lake, poking an oar at snapping turtles. There’s a picture of the three of us on skates, on ice. Around my neck I wear snowballs of rabbit fur on black velvet cord. The pictures that follow show the boys pulling the snowballs off, then coming from behind, the velvet rope stretched out tight—a garrote.
Some of the photographs were Polaroid ones. They were faded, but the fugitive images remained. Emulsion on others had turned metallic bronze; the snapshots held deep tarnish, like a mirror.
There were quite a few pictures of Bunny, too. With the unphotogenic’s eagerness to pose, she increased her chances of the one good shot that would let her relax, having proof at last that she had once looked good, just once.
The doctor couldn’t make it to the picnics or to the skating—so he didn’t show up in the pictures, either. The effect was of him saying after the flood: What I lose will always be
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