A Story I Loved: “Today Will Be a Quiet Day” by Amy Hempel
- Staff Writer
- Aug 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 12
Another one of the great Amy Hempel’s short stories. She’s one of my favorite short story writers, in the sense that you always remember the first movie you love, the first song you really love. The primacy effect at full play.
Previously a journalist, you can see that influence in her writing- it’s crisp and clean, and it doesn’t lean much towards the sentimental. But here, in this story, along with “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”, human emotion is shown in the sense of shadows. Emotions are not being talked about, but they still exist. It’s kind of like a Schrodinger’s Cat situation- nothing is real until you confirm it’s real. Then all the possibilities collapse in on themselves, and reality sets in. And of course, in life, we can’t escape the velocity of time. But in a short story, you can stay with someone in that strange duration beyond time and space. You can stay with a person in just the time it takes for them to discover something about themselves.
That’s what we have here- in “Today Will Be a Quiet Day”. A father takes out his two children on a day outing. He worries for them, though in a very fatherly fashion, he doesn’t find the words to say it. It’s that same fear, that primal, non-logical instinct that human beings have. Once something is named, it exists. That’s the power of language, to organize things and identify them. The father and his two kids joke around. We think they seem pretty normal, pretty well-adjusted. They keep up running gags throughout the day. It’s in an offhand couple of sentences that we learn about what terrifies the father, what has become the impetus for today’s gathering. “The boy had a friend who jumped from a floor of Langley Porter. The friend had been there for two weeks, mostly playing ping-pong. All the friend said the day the boy visited and lost every game was never play ping-pong with a mental patient because it’s all we do and we’ll kill you. That night the friend had cut the red belt he wore in two and left the other half on his bed. That was this time last year when the boy was twelve years old.”
Isn’t there something almost Hemingway-ian about this sentence? It’s so clean. The rhythms of the writing and the language here are pitch-perfect, and not a word goes to waste. Hemingway wrote for the Sun. Journalists make fine writers, in my opinion, because they instinctively veer away from the schmaltzy. They know how to write pared sentences that are, as Baldwin would say, “as clean as a bone”. But still, just as in the iceberg theory, there’s an undercurrent of something going on here. The whole precipice of the story rests on this simple little paragraph, which does so much of the explaining. It haunts everything else. We go back and we can read something in the father’s interactions with his children, which are limited on the outside, because we get such a small glimpse into what the father is thinking. But we can imagine his terror.
There are other interesting motifs here- for one, that the teenaged daughter discovers that her dog did not run away, but in fact died. The anecdote is interesting for showing to the father that his daughter, for all her preening and her jokes, is still mostly innocent. His children are still children. The dialogue in this story is so interesting because it all adds up to something- even the offhand comments, the jokes. The dialogue is realistic and yet doesn’t quite feel real in some points. It’s because we’re watching from the outside, watching a conversation with three strangers, getting only tiny glimpses of their world. Sometimes, less is more, and restraint, especially for the character of the father, is everything.
At the end of the story, the father says, “I have some good news and some bad news.” His children ask to hear the bad news first. And the story ends off with this line, “‘I lied,” he said. ‘There is no bad news.’” Hempel encapsulates a whole day, and a father’s hopes and dreams for his children, as well as his fear, so well in one sentence. It's by everything he has chosen not to say, as well. It's like the shot in a silent film where everything must be portrayed by a glance, by a look of the eyes. It’s done so sparingly. Just enough. And yet the emotion is full, not starved. The story is a whole story.
Resources:
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