In A Tub by Amy Hempel, 1985
The magic trick:
Drilling down on a specific kind of anxiety
This one reminds me of the great television show of our times, I Think You Should Leave. There is a sketch in the third season where Tim Robinson’s character loses his mind while competing in a VR grocery shopping game show. Obviously, that’s basically the exact same premise as Amy Hempel’s lovely “In A Tub.”
No, of course not. But… I do have a point. In the sketch, Robinson gets sent down an existential rabbit hole when he can’t figure out how to move in the VR. Soon he’s asking, “How do we move our bodies ever?”
It’s funny, of course, because it’s Tim Robinson. But it’s also the core of a certain kind of modern anxiety – probably tied to OCD, based on what I’ve experienced in my family. You get to thinking way too closely about things. Every act of breathing gets noted. And once noted? It feels impossible. Or just weird. Why are my lungs filling up like this? How does that even work?
Or – bringing it back to Amy Hempel – a heart that, paid attention to, seems to have stopped.
“In A Tub” takes us inside that anxiety, and it’s such a fertile territory for various meanings and symbols, you can take the story a lot of different ways.
And that’s quite a trick on Hempel’s part.
The selection:
My heart – I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had. It was early afternoon, the middle of the week. I chose a pew in the center of the rows. Episcopal or Methodist, it didn’t make any difference. It was as quiet as a church. I thought about the feeling of the long missed beat, and the tumble of the next ones as they rushed to fill the space. I sat there – in the high brace of quiet and stained glass – and I listened.
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