The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel Read Free Page A

helps.
    The motto of this agency is We Never Knowingly Ruin Your Vacation.
    We do two big tours a year, and neither of them now. If I can hold on to it, it’s the job I am going to have until my parents die.
     
    I thought I would mind that Holly’s always around, but it turns out it’s okay. Mornings, we walk to the Casa de Fruta Fruit Stand and Bait Shop. Everything there is the size of something else: strawberries are the size of tomatoes, apples are the size of grapefruits, papayas are the size of watermelons. The one-day sale on cantaloupe is into its third week. We buy enough to fill a blender, plus eggs.
    But, back up—because before we get to Casa de Fruta, we have to put on faded Danskins and her ex’s boxer shorts, and then be out on the beach watching the lifeguard’s jeep drag rakes like combs through the tangled sand.
    I like my prints to be the first of the day. Holly’s the one who scrapes her blackened feet and curses the tar.
    Then the rest of the day happens. Maybe we drain a half tank cruising Holly’s territory. Holly calls it research, this looking at men on the more northern sand.
     
    “I’d sooner salt myself away and call it a life,” Holly says. “But there’s all this research.”
    Sometimes we check in on Suzy and Hard, the squatters who live at the end of the block. Their aluminum shack has been there for years. The story is he found her at the harbor. She lived from boat to boat, staying with the owner till a fight sent her one berth over.
    Suzy has massive sunburned arms and wide hips that jerk unevenly when she walks.
    Hard is tall and thin.
    His real name is Howard. But Suzy is a slurrer, so it comes out Hard. It seems to fit. Hard has shoulder-length black hair and a mouth as round and mean as a lamprey.
    If things are quiet down the block, if the air is thick and still, we float ourselves in the surf. Sometimes a rain begins while we are underwater.
     
    I don’t get used to living at the beach, to seeing that wet horizon. It’s the edge, the country’s aisle seat. But if you made me tell the truth, I’d have to say it’s not a good thing. The people who live here, what you hear them say is I’m supposed to, I’ll try, I would have.
    There is no friction here.
    It’s a kind and buoyant place.
    What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.
    Earlier today, Holly answered the phone and took a dinner reservation. Our number is one digit off from Trader Don’s, and Holly takes names when she’s in a bad mood.
    “How many in your party, sir?” she says.
    She’s afraid I won’t go through with what was not my idea. In fact, I am not a person who goes on a date. I don’t want to meet men.
    I know some already.
    We talk about those a lot, and about the ones that Holly knows, too. It’s the other thing we do together on my days off.
    “You dish, I’ll dry,” Holly says.
    I’ll kick things off by calling one a scale model of a man. Holly will say again how if her ex saw a film of the way he had treated her, he would crawl off into the bushes, touch blade, and say good-bye.
    Her ex still sends snapshots—pictures of himself on camping trips at the foot of El Capitan or on the shore of Mono Lake. He mounts the pictures on cardboard, which just makes them harder to tear up.
    He even stops by when he’s in town, and we pretend he’s welcome. The two of them, Holly and this ex of hers, sit around and depress each other. They know all of each other’s weak points and failings, so they can bring each other down in two-tenths of a second.
    When she sees him, Holly says, it’s like the sunsets at the beach—once the sun drops, the sand chills quickly. Then it’s like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don’t count now.
     
    These men, it’s not like we don’t see them coming. Our intuition is good; the problem is we ignore it.
    We keep wanting people to be different.
    But who are