The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

by Lydia Davis

  He liked to use his pen for other things as well: he made lists on scraps of white paper, which he saved in a little pile. One list showed what he must remember to do when he visited the city again (Walk in the poorer neighborhoods, Take pictures of certain streets), another what he must do before he left the country (Visit the lake, Take a daylong walk). On another scrap of paper he had written out a tentative schedule for the perfect day, with times set aside for physical exercise, work, serious reading, and correspondence. Then there was a scheme he was outlining for a set of camping equipment that would include a writing table and a cookstove and weigh less than forty pounds. And there were more lists—for example, insoluble problems he was encountering in his study of languages, with suggestions for where to find the answers (and on the list of what he must do in the city he would then add: Visit the library).

  But far from helping to organize his life, the lists became very confusing to him. Working on a list, he would send himself into a certain room to check a book title or the date and forget why he had gone there, distracted by the sight of another unfinished project. He received from himself a number of unrelated instructions that he could not remember, and spent entire mornings uselessly rushing from room to room. There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands. There were mornings when he woke under a weight of discouragement so heavy that he could not get out of bed but lay there all day watching the sunlight move across the floor and up the wall.

  7

  Wassilly’s conception of himself: Wassilly had been an exceptionally healthy, agile, and physically fearless boy—and so he continued to think of himself. Even when he fell prey to a variety of ailments that followed one after another with hardly a pause for several years, he persisted in regarding each ailment as unusual—even interesting—in a man of his good health. He would not admit that he was becoming frail, until one day his sister dropped in to see him where he lay suffering from a painful sinus attack, and in her blunt way said that she had never known anyone to get sick so often.

  He took up yoga for a time after that, and did a shoulder stand every morning, since according to his book this would “drain one’s sinuses and at the same time redistribute one’s weight.” (There his housekeeper would find him, staring up at a fold of his stomach, his chin pressed into his thyroid.)

  He resolved to eat more wisely, taking his protein mainly from yogurt.

  Vitamin D, said another book he consulted, was the most difficult vitamin to obtain naturally, and was formed on the oil of the skin by the sun’s rays in the hours from ten to two in the months from May to September in Western countries (in the Northern Hemisphere). Accordingly, on the morning of May first, Wassilly exposed most of his skin to the feeble sun, lying for half an hour shivering in his backyard before he could not stand it any longer and gave up. Later, in the summer, he decided to combine the shoulder stand and the sunbath. He went out at noon and pointed his toes at the sky, but becoming dizzy he immediately lost all interest and for a time abandoned both yoga and sunbathing.

  The key to everything, he decided, was to relax.

  8

  Wassilly, suddenly enlightened, saw that there was a terrible discrepancy between his conception of himself and the reality. He admired himself and at times felt slightly superior to others, not because of what he really was and what he had really done with himself, but rather because of what he could do, what he would soon do, what he would accomplish in the years ahead, what he would one day become and remain, and for the courage of his spirit. Sometimes he dreamt of obstacles which he would overcome with glory: fatal illness, permanent blindness, a flood or fire where lives could be saved, a long march as a refugee through mountainous country, a dramatic opportunity to defend his principles. But since under these circumstances it would actually be easier—not more difficult—to perform honorably, it followed that the tedium of his present situation was the most difficult obstacle of all.

  One important thing was not to forget what he hoped to achieve in life. Another important thing was not to confuse a romantic picture of himself—as a doctor in Africa, for example—with a real possibility. And he tried not to lose sight of the fact that he was an adult in an adult world, with responsibilities. This was not easy: he would find himself sitting in the sun cutting out paper stars for a Christmas tree at the very moment other men were working to support large families or representing their countries in foreign places. When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest.

  9

  Wassilly’s immobility: In midwinter, Wassilly’s brother died. His father asked him to go to the apartment and sort through his brother’s things. Wassilly’s brother had lived alone in the city. Wassilly had never visited him there, because for some years his brother had not wanted to see him.

  The door of the apartment had many locks and Wassilly did not know which were closed and which open, so it took him some time to get inside. Once inside, he was taken aback by the squalor and nakedness of the apartment: it looked like the home of a very poor man. There was nothing on the walls or floors. The furniture was shabby, and there was very little of it.

  Wassily walked through the rooms. Signs of his brother were everywhere. In the bathroom, a web of black fingermarks surrounded the light switch. There was a ring in the tub, and a crust of dirt in the basin and the toilet. In the kitchen glass bottles and jars were crowded into one corner. Sheaths and roots of garlic buds covered the table like a light snow. It was as though his brother would be coming back at any moment.

  Wassilly walked into the living room, where the only furniture was a desk, a cupboard, a few chairs, and the unmade bed from which his brother had been taken to the hospital. On the floor under the window, piles of papers and notebooks collapsed out into the room. Wassilly poked through them and found nothing. He pulled a folding wooden chair out into the middle of the room and sat down. He looked out the window at the brick walls of the apartment buildings that abutted this one, enclosing a courtyard and a spindly locust tree.

  Wassilly tried to think about his brother—the stooped, thick figure, the slow speech, the hesitations. But again and again his mind wandered. The room was dark, even though the sun shone on the buildings nearby. A neighbor banged something against the wall behind the kitchen stove and immediately afterwards a door slammed in the hallway. Wassilly began to doze off, his chin on his overcoat lapel.

  Startled awake by the silence, he looked around the room, so unfamiliar to him. The sun now shone across one wall. Wassilly and his brother had been far apart in age. Wassilly’s earliest memories concerned his brother’s leaving, returning, and leaving again. Silently he came home, silently left. And Wassilly always at the window, itching with excitement. It was years before Wassilly’s admiration withered. By then his brother had no desire to see him anyway.

  Wassilly stood up from the folding chair and unbuttoned his overcoat. He had begun to feel slightly nervous. Was this a responsible way to behave? he asked himself. He had come to sort out his brother’s things: by now he should have been nearly finished. Yet for an hour he had been sitting in the same position. What would his brother have done in his place? he wondered. His brother would not have come to the apartment at all. He would not even have gone to the funeral.

  Wassilly thought of taking off his overcoat but did not. He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and put all the tubes and bottles into a cardboard box for his own use. He felt like a thief. He pulled the towels off the racks and mats off the floor and stuffed them into a large laundry bag. When it came to throwing away his brother’s toothbrush, he felt sick and could not go on.

  •

  A week later, Wassilly woke up in the right frame of min
d, he thought, to do the job. He returned to his brother’s apartment. Yet he accomplished no more this time than the last. Something in the very air of the apartment immobilized him. After a few hours he left, carrying away a framed photograph of his grandfather that he had found facedown on the mantelpiece. When he got home he wrote to his sister and asked her to do the job for him.

  He lay back on his bed that evening, his dog beside him on the floor, and stared over at the photograph of his grandfather, whose eyes twinkled at him out of a dark corner. He could not move, as though the despair of his family life sat on his chest. Layer upon layer of sadness held him down—that he had not seen his brother more, that he had not liked him, that his brother had died alone, that a member of his family should have lived in such squalor. But if his brother had been a stranger, what did the rest matter? Not for the first time, he puzzled over the curious nature of families—that family bonds tended to keep together people who had little in common.

  He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends. He thought it was odd that he should have been obliged to go to the apartment of this dirty stranger and handle his things. He looked over at his grandfather’s face, with its suppressed smile and carefully folded cravat. He himself had no desire to start a family. Heavily, he rose from his bed and went down to the kitchen. He returned to bed with several thick sandwiches, which he ate until he was too drowsy to keep his eyes open any longer. As he slept and suffered mild nightmares, his dog crept up beside him and wolfed down what remained of the food.

  City Employment

  All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa. This provides work for them that they can do at home. These women are part of a larger corps of city employees engaged to call wrong numbers. The highest earner of all is an Indian from India who is able to insist that he does not have the wrong number.

  Others—mainly old people—have been employed to amuse us by wearing strange hats. They wear them as though they were not responsible for what went on above their eyebrows. Two hats bob along side by side—a homburg high up on an old man and a black veiled affair with cherries on a little woman—and under the hats the old people argue. Another old woman, bent and feeble, crosses the street slowly in front of our car, looking angry that she has been made to wear this large cone-shaped red hat that is pressing down so heavily on her forehead. Yet another old woman walks on a difficult sidewalk and is cautious about where she sets her feet. She is not wearing a hat, because she has lost her job.

  People of all ages are hired by the city to act as lunatics so that the rest of us will feel sane. Some of the lunatics are beggars too, so that we can feel sane and rich at the same time. There are only a limited number of jobs available as lunatics. These jobs have all been filled. For years the lunatics were locked up together in mental hospitals on islands in New York Harbor. Then the city authorities released them in large numbers to form a reassuring presence on the streets.

  Naturally some of the lunatics have no trouble holding down two jobs at once by wearing strange hats as they lope and shuffle along.

  Two Sisters

  Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters.

  Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father, since the man wanted sons. He tries again: again it is only a daughter. This is worse, for it is a second daughter; then it is a third, and even a fourth. He is miserable among females. He lives, in despair, with his failures.

  The man is lucky who has one son and one daughter, though his risk is great in trying for another son. Most fortunate is the man with sons only, for he can go on, son after son, until the daughter is made, and he will have all the sons he could wish for and a little daughter as well, to grace his table. And if the daughter should never come, then he has a woman already, in his wife the mother of his sons. In himself he has not a man. Only his wife has that man. She could wish for a daughter, having no woman, but her wishes are hardly audible. For she is herself a daughter, though she may have no living parents.

  The single daughter, the many brothers’ only sister, listens to the voice of her family and is pleased with herself and happy. Her softness against her brothers’ brutality, her calm against their destruction, is admired. But when there are two sisters, one is uglier and more clumsy than the other, one is less clever, one is more promiscuous. Even when all the better qualities unite in one sister, as most often happens, she will not be happy, because the other, like a shadow, will follow her success with green eyes.

  Two sisters grow up at different times and despise each other for being such children. They quarrel and turn red. And though if there is only one daughter she will remain Angela, two will lose their names, and be stouter as a result.

  Two sisters often marry. One finds the husband of the other crude. The other uses her husband as a shield against her sister and her sister’s husband, whom she fears for his quick wit. Though the two sisters attempt friendship so that their children will have cousins, they are often estranged.

  Their husbands disappoint them. Their sons are failures and spend their mothers’ love in cheap towns. Strong as iron, only, is now the hatred of the two sisters for each other. This endures, as their husbands wither, as their sons desert.

  Caged together, two sisters contain their fury. Their features are the same.

  Two sisters, in black, shop for food together, husbands dead, sons dead in some war; their hatred is so familiar that they are unaware of it. They are sometimes tender with each other, because they forget.

  But the faces of the two sisters in death are bitter by long habit.

  The Mother

  The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a doll-house. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

  Therapy

  I moved into the city just before Christmas. I was alone, and this was a new thing for me. Where had my husband gone? He was living in a small room across the river, in a district of warehouses.

  I moved here from the country, where the pale, slow people all looked on me as a stranger anyway, and where it was not much use trying to talk.

  After Christmas snow covered the sidewalks. Then the snow melted. Even so, I found it hard to walk, then for a few days it was easier. My husband moved into my neighborhood so that he could see our son more often.

  Here in the city I had no friends either, for a long time. At first, I would only sit in a chair picking hair and dust off my clothes, and then get up and stretch and sit down again. In the morning I drank coffee and smoked. In the evening I drank tea and smoked and went to the window and back and from one room into the next room.

  Sometimes, for a moment, I thought I would be able to do something. Then that moment would pass and I would want to move and not be able to move.

  In the country, one day, I had not been able to move. First I had dragged myself around the house and then from the porch to the yard, and then into the garage, where finally my brain spun like a fly. There I stood, over an oil slick. I offered myself reasons for leaving the garage, but no reason was good enough.

  Night came, the birds quieted down, the cars stopped going by, everything withdrew into the darkness, and then I moved.

  All I retrieved from this day was the decision not to tell certain people what had happened to me. I did tell someone, of course, and right away. But he was not interested. He was n
ot very interested in anything about me by then, and certainly not my troubles.

  In the city, I thought I might begin to read again. I was tired of embarrassing myself. Then, when I began to read, it was not just one book but many at once—a life of Mozart, a study of the changing sea, and others I can’t remember now.

  My husband was encouraged by these signs of activity, and he would sit down and talk to me, breathing into my face until I was exhausted. I wanted to hide from him how difficult my life was.

  Because I did not immediately forget what I read, I thought my mind was getting stronger. I wrote down facts that struck me as facts I should not forget. I read for six weeks and then I stopped reading.

  In the middle of the summer, I lost my courage again. I began to see a doctor. Right away I was not happy with him and I made an appointment with a different doctor, a woman, though I didn’t give up the first doctor.

  The woman’s office was in an expensive street near Gramercy Park. I rang her doorbell. To my surprise, the door was opened not by her but by a man in a bow tie. The man was very angry because I had rung his doorbell.

  Now the woman came out of her office and the two doctors began to argue. The man was angry because the woman’s patients were always ringing his doorbell. I stood there between them. After that visit I did not go back.

  For weeks I did not tell my doctor that I had tried someone else. I thought this might hurt his feelings. I was wrong. In those days it bothered me that he allowed himself to be endlessly abused and insulted as long as I continued to pay his fee. He protested: “I only allow myself to be insulted up to a certain point.”