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    Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories
    Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories
    Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

    By Amy Hempel

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    About this ebook

    Critically acclaimed master of the short story Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home is narrated by people with skewed visions of home. Not exactly crazy, they become obsessed and irrational as their inner logic leads them astray. In the title novella, a woman living in a psychiatric halfway house writes to a man she has met only once. Proceeding in brief vignettes that link and illuminate, she recounts her peculiar life with the other patients. The accretions of anecdote lead deeper and deeper into the psyche and history of the narrator, gradually revealing the reason for her urgent letter.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMay 28, 1998
    ISBN9781439105122
    Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

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    • 5/5
      a prodigious collection of stories; hempel's masterful use of language alone makes this worth reading

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    • 2/5
      Simple gist: Insubstantial. How's that for minimalism?

    Book preview

    Tumble Home - Amy Hempel

    Praise for Amy Hempel’s Tumble Home

    As we read, we learn that to discover meaning in stray pieces of our universe is a happy, curative act. … Hempel makes haunting bits of beauty out of motley scraps.

    —ADAM BEGLEY, People

    Hempel writes with an effortless wit … showing us the larger shapes of our lives by capturing their most fleeting and fragmentary moments.

    —ELIZABETH GLEICK, The New York Times Book Review

    What sets them apart from every other writer’s characters is the quality of their wit and intellect and the rigor and compassion of their creator.

    —DAVID GATES, Newsweek

    Amy Hempel’s outstanding short stories pack enough gut-wrenching emotion and skewed wit, in greatly abbreviated pieces, to power several Tolstoy-length epics.

    —REBECCA RADNER, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

    [Hempel’s] most realized characters balm heartbreak with humor and find a way to endure, often searingly wounded, but unvanquished. … We sense ourselves in the presence of a poet.

    —ANDY SOLOMON, Chicago Tribune

    The details assemble … into deeply moving Gothic tales.

    —SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS, Los Angeles Times Book Review

    ALSO BY AMY HEMPEL

    REASONS TO LIVE

    AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

    TUMBLE HOME

    AMY HEMPEL

    SCRIBNER

    New York  London  Toronto  Sydney  Tokyo  Singapore

    SCRIBNER

    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    www.SimonandSchuster.com

    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

    Copyright © 1997 by Amy Hempel

    All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

    First Scribner trade paperback edition 2004

    SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

    For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

    DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

    Set in Garamond No. 3

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    7 9 10 8 6

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

    Hempel, Amy.

    Tumble home: a novella and short stories / Amy Hempel.

    p.  cm.

    Contents: Weekend—Church cancels cow—The children’s party—Sportsman—Housewife—The annex—The new lodger—Tumble home.

    I. Title.

    PS3558.E47916T86   19987

    813′.54—dc21  97-9681

    CIP

    ISBN 0-684-83375-1

    0-684-83887-7(Pbk)

    eISBN 978-1-439-10512-2

    Weekend appeared first in Harper’s; Sportsman appeared first in GQ; The Annex in The Yale Review; The New Lodger in The Quarterly; Church Cancels Cow in The Alaska Quarterly Review; Housewife in Micro Fiction. Parts of Tumble Home appeared first in Epoch, Elle, and Salmagundi.

    Dedication

    For my brothers, GARDINER and PETER

    Acknowledgments

    For various kinds of generosity in respect of this book, I want to thank Deborah Berke, Christine Burgin, Bernard Cooper, Liz Darhansoff, Martha Gallahue, Nan Graham, A. M. Homes, R. S. Jones, Sheila Kohler, David Leavitt, Robert Polito, Hannah Siegel, Amy Tan, Anne Kaiser Taylor, Lily Tuck, Kathryn Walker, William Wegman, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

    I am especially grateful for the crucial parts played by Mark Richard, Pearson Marx, Jill Ciment, Jim Shepard, Benjamin Taylor, and, of course, Pete Dandridge.

    Contents

    Weekend

    Church Cancels Cow

    The Children’s Party

    Sportsman

    Housewife

    The Annex

    The New Lodger

    Tumble Home

    Notes

    The game was called on account of dogs—Hunter in the infield, Tucker in the infield, Bosco and Boone at first base. First-grader Donald sat down on second base, and Kirsten grabbed her brother’s arm and wouldn’t let him leave third to make his first run.

    Unfair! her brother screamed, and the dogs, roving umpires, ran to third.

    Good power! their uncle yelled, when Joy, in a leg cast, swung the bat and missed. Now put some wood to it.

    And when she did, Joy’s designated runner, Cousin Zeke, ran to first, the ice cubes in his gin and tonic clacking like dog tags in the glass.

    And when Kelly broke free from Kirsten and this time came in to make the run, members of the Kelly team made Tucker in the infield dance on his hind legs.

    It’s not who wins— their coach began, and was shouted down by one of the boys, "There’s first and there’s forget it."

    Then Hunter retrieved a foul ball and carried it off in the direction of the river.

    The other dogs followed—barking, mutinous.

    Dinner was a simple picnic on the porch, paper plates in laps, the only conversation a debate as to which was the better grip for throwing shoes.

    After dinner, the horseshoes were handed out, the post pounded in, the rules reviewed with a new rule added due to falling-down shorts. The new rule: Have attire.

    The women smoked on the porch, the smoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men and children played on even after dusk when it got so dark that a candle was rigged to balance on top of the post, and was knocked off and blown out by every single almost-ringer.

    Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

    Pheasant feathers in a plastic jack-o’-lantern—this is the way people decorate graves in October across from my house. In winter they tie wreaths to the stones like evergreen pendants in December. The halved-apple faces of owls on a branch will spook you, walking at dusk as I do with my dog who finds the one real pumpkin, small on a stem, and carries it off and flings it and retrieves, leaving on the pumpkin the marks of her teeth, the only desecration in these rows of tended plots.

    Or not, according to the woman at the wheel of the red Honda Civic that appears from behind the Japanese maple and proceeds past the hedge of arborvitae where she slows and then rolls down her window to say, You should keep that dog on a leash. She says, That dog left faces on my mother’s grave.

    When I realize she means feces, I say my dog didn’t do it. She says yes, my dog did it. I say, "Did you see this dog leave feces on the grave? She says, I found faces on my mother’s grave. I had to clean them off." I say there are other dogs that walk here. I say my dog goes in the woods before the place where the headstones start.

    I leave her talking to me from her car. I walk away with my dog in the direction of my house, and she follows in her car so I turn back around and lead her through the cemetery and sit down on a random grave and take a wire brush from the pocket of my coat and begin to groom my dog, brushing slowly from the ends up to the skin so as not to tug and hurt her. I stay where I am until the woman drives away, and I stay until she reappears. When she leaves the second time, she leaves rubber in the road.

    For days I see her car across the street, parked on the little-used access road, her at the wheel just watching my house where my dog patrols the yard, unmistakeable dog. I write down her license plate number, so what. I pull weeds with my back to her. And after thoughts of worse things than bricks coming flying through the windows of my house, I pull off grass-stained gloves and cross to her car and say, "You know, I’m on your side about this. I have relatives buried here, and I don’t want to find faces on their graves."

    She says, "You have relatives buried here?"

    For peace of mind I will lie about any thing at any time.

    In fact, she says, she has counted three dogs the other day from her car. Like counting cows, in the game I played in cars when the family went out on long drives. My brother and I were told to count cows in the fields we passed along the way, me counting cows on one side of the road, my brother counting cows on the other. But if we passed a church, the person on whose side the church appeared had to start their count over again.

    Why did church cancel cow? The question was not a question back then, and when I try to think why, the best I can guess is—because we were having fun? Until I mention it to my brother who says, Don’t you remember? You don’t remember. It was cemetery, not church, that cancels cow.

    And why it comes to me now.

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