Tumble Home by AMY HEMPEL

Author:AMY HEMPEL
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The man ran groups. He took a token fee from people wanting to quit—smoking, drinking, eating too much. “Picture the thing you want to live without.” “My husband,” one woman whispered to another. I shut my eyes with the rest of them and tried to conjure fear, what I want to live without.

The counselors here say we often mistake excitement for apprehension, for fear. They say it is up to us, that we can forcibly jog ourselves from one state into the other. But it sounds to me like my favorite joke when I was a girl: What is Pollyanna’s epitaph? “I’m glad I’m dead.”

The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappucino to go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappucino. And then think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and I buy the gloves. And it hits me—how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theatre, it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib.

No one has ever told me that I am good with children. Shortly before I came here I went to a dinner party. The hostess was setting the table—there were eight of us that night—when her daughter, a barefoot seven-year-old, demanded we play the game.

I had not played the game before. You had to build a tower out of narrow cross-placed pieces of wood, then pull away the pieces one at a time without making the tower collapse.

I am not good at games, and the girl was sure of her moves. Yet somehow I was good at this, and when the girl removed the piece that made the tower fall, she ran to her mother screaming, “I didn’t lose!”

The mother put the child to bed and lay beside the child for a while in the bed.

When I go to sleep, I sleep on the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in—lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.

I don’t fall asleep with my body on the bed in the same way my mother was found.

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