by Lydia Davis
She resumes her search for her clothes and he resumes helping her. She asks him where her ring is and where her shoes are, and where her jacket is and where her purse is. He tells her where each thing is and then gets up and hands her some things even before she asks. By the time she is fully dressed to go, she sees more clearly what is happening, that her situation is very like a Hasidic tale she read on the subway the day before from a book that is still in her purse. She asks him if she can read him a story, he hesitates, and she thinks he probably doesn’t like her to read to him, even though he likes to read to her. She says it is only a paragraph, he agrees, and they sit down at the kitchen table. By now he is dressed too, in a white T-shirt and pants that fit him nicely. From the thin brown book she reads the following tale:
“ ‘There was once a man who was very stupid. When he got up in the morning it was so hard for him to find his clothes that at night he almost hesitated to go to bed for thinking of the trouble he would have on waking. One evening he took paper and pencil and with great effort, as he undressed, noted down exactly where he put everything he had on. The next morning, well pleased with himself, he took the slip of paper in his hand and read: “cap”—there it was, he set it on his head; “pants”—there they lay, he got into them; and so it went until he was fully dressed. But now he was overcome with consternation, and he said to himself: “This is all very well, I have found my clothes and I am dressed, but where am I myself? Where in the world am I?” And he looked and looked, but it was a vain search; he could not find himself. And that is how it is with us, said the rabbi.’ ”
She stops reading. He likes the story, but does not seem to like the ending—“Where am I?”—as much as he likes the beginning, about the man’s problem and his solution.
She herself feels she is like the very stupid man, not only because she couldn’t find her clothes, not only because sometimes other simple things besides getting dressed are also beyond her, but most of all because she often doesn’t know where she is, and particularly concerning this man she doesn’t know where she is. She thinks she is probably no place in the life of this man, who is also not only not in his own house, just as she is not in her own house when she visits him and in fact doesn’t know where this house is but arrives here as though in a dream, stumbling and falling in the street, but who is not altogether in his own life anymore and might well also ask himself, “Where am I?”
In fact, she wants to call herself a very stupid man. Can’t she say, This woman is a very stupid man, just the way a few weeks before she thought she had called herself a bearded man? Because if the very stupid man in the story behaves just the way she herself would behave or is even right now behaving, can’t she consider herself to be a very stupid man, just as a few weeks ago she thought anyone writing at the next table in a café might be considered to be a bearded man? She was sitting in a café and a bearded man was writing two tables away from her and two loud women came in to have lunch and disturbed the bearded man and she wrote down in her notebook that they had disturbed the bearded man writing at the next table and then saw that since she herself, as she wrote this, was writing at the next table, she was probably calling herself a bearded man. It was not that she had changed in any way, but that the words bearded man could now apply to her. Or perhaps she had changed.
She has read the tale out loud to him because it is so like what has just happened to her, but then she wonders if it is not the other way around and the tale lodged somewhere in her mind the day before and made it possible for her to forget where all her clothes were and have such trouble dressing. Later that morning, or perhaps on another morning, feeling the same stupidity leaving this man who is not quite in his life anymore, as she looks again for herself in his life and can’t find herself anywhere, there are other confusions. She cries and may be crying only because it is raining outdoors and she has been staring at the rain coming down the windowpane, and then wonders if she is crying more because it is raining or if the rain made it possible for her to cry in the first place, since she doesn’t cry very often, and finally thinks the two, the rain and the tears, are the same. Then, out on the street, there is a sudden great din coming from several places at once—a few cars honking, a truck’s loud engine roaring, another truck with loose parts rattling over an uneven road surface, a road mender pounding—and the din seems to be occurring right inside her as if her anger and confusion had emptied her and made a place in the middle of her chest for this great clashing of metal, or as if she herself had left this body and left it open to this noise, and then she wonders, Has the noise really come into me, or has something in me gone out into the street to make such a great noise?
The Housemaid
I know I am not pretty. My dark hair is cut short and is so thin it hardly hides my skull. I have a hasty and lopsided way of walking, as though I were crippled in one leg. When I bought my glasses I thought they were elegant—the frames are black and shaped like butterfly wings—but now I have learned how unbecoming they are and am stuck with them, since I have no money to buy new ones. My skin is the color of a toad’s belly and my lips are narrow. But I am not nearly as ugly as my mother, who is much older. Her face is small and wrinkled and black like a prune, and her teeth wobble in her mouth. I can hardly bear to sit across from her at dinner and I can tell by the look on her face that she feels the same way about me.
For years we have lived together in the basement. She is the cook; I am the housemaid. We are not good servants, but no one can dismiss us because we are still better than most. My mother’s dream is that someday she will save enough money to leave me and live in the country. My dream is nearly the same, except that when I am feeling angry and unhappy I look across the table at her clawlike hands and hope that she will choke to death on her food. Then no one would be there to stop me from going into her closet and breaking open her money box. I would put on her dresses and her hats, and open the windows of her room and let the smell out.
Whenever I imagine these things, sitting alone in the kitchen late at night, I am always ill the next day. Then it is my mother herself who nurses me, holding water to my lips and fanning my face with a flyswatter, neglecting her duties in the kitchen, and I struggle to persuade myself that she is not silently gloating over my weakness.
Things have not always been like this. When Mr. Martin lived in the rooms above us, we were happier, though we seldom spoke to one another. I was no prettier than I am now, but I never wore my glasses in his presence and took care to stand up straight and to walk gracefully. I stumbled often, and even fell flat on my face because I could not see where I was going; I ached all night from trying to hold in my round stomach as I walked. But none of this stopped me from trying to be someone Mr. Martin could love. I broke many more things then than I do now, because I could not see where my hand was going when I dusted the parlor vases and sponged the dining-room mirrors. But Mr. Martin hardly noticed. He would start from his fireside chair, as the glass shattered, and stare up at the ceiling in a puzzled sort of way. After a moment, as I held my breath by the glittering pieces, he would pass his white-gloved hand over his forehead and sit down again.
He never spoke a word to me, but then I never heard him speak to anyone. I imagined his voice to be warm and slightly hoarse. Perhaps he stammered when he became emotional. I never saw his face, either, because it was hidden behind a mask. The mask was pale and rubbery. It covered every inch of his head and disappeared beneath his shirt collar. In the beginning it upset me; the first time I saw it, in fact, I lost my head and ran out of the room. Everything about it frightened me—the gaping mouth, the tiny ears like dried apricots, the clumsily painted black hair in frozen waves on its crown, and the naked eye sockets. It was enough to fill anyone’s dreams with horror and in the beginning it had me tossing and turning in bed until the sheets nearly choked me.
Little by little I became used to it. I began to imagine what Mr. Martin’s real expression was. I saw pink blushes spreading o
ver his gray cheek when I caught him daydreaming over his book. I saw his mouth tremble with emotion—pity and admiration—as he watched me work. I would give him a certain little look and toss my head, and his face would break into a smile.
But now and then, when I found his pale gray eyes fixed on me, I had the uneasy feeling that I was quite wrong and that perhaps he never responded to me—a silly, inept housemaid; that if one day a different girl were to walk into the room and begin dusting he would only glance up from his book and continue to read without having noticed the change. Shaken by doubt, I would go on sweeping and scouring with numbed hands as though nothing had happened, and soon the doubt would pass.
I took on more and more work for Mr. Martin’s sake. Where at first we used to send out his laundry to be washed, I began to wash it myself, even though I did not do it as well. His linen became dingy and his trousers were badly pressed, but he did not complain. My hands became wrinkled and swollen, but I did not mind. Where before a gardener came once a week to trim the hedges in summertime and cover the rosebushes with burlap during the winter, I now took over those duties, dismissing the gardener myself and working day after day in the worst weather. At first the garden suffered, but after a time it came alive again: the roses were driven out by wildflowers of all colors and the gravel walks were disrupted by thick green grass. I grew strong and hardy and didn’t mind that my face erupted in welts and the skin of my fingers dried and cracked open, or that with so much work I grew thin and gaunt and smelled like a horse. My mother complained. But I felt that my body was an insignificant sacrifice.
Sometimes I imagined that I was Mr. Martin’s daughter, at other times his wife, at other times even his dog. I forgot that I was nothing more than a housemaid.
My mother never once laid eyes on him, and that made my relationship with him all the more mysterious. During the day she stayed below in the steamy kitchen, preparing his meals and chewing her gums nervously. Only in the evening did she step outside the door and stand hugging herself near the overblown lilac bush, looking up at the clouds. Sometimes I wondered how she could go on working for a man she had never seen, but that was her way. I brought her an envelope of money each month and she took it and hid it with the rest of her money. She never asked me what he was like and I never volunteered anything. I think she didn’t ask who he was because she hadn’t yet even figured out who I was. Perhaps she thought she was cooking for her husband and family like other women, and that I was her younger sister. Sometimes she spoke of going down the mountain, though we don’t live on a mountain, or of digging up the potatoes, though there are no potatoes in our garden. This upset me and I would try to bring her out of it by yelling suddenly or baring my teeth in her face. But nothing made any impression, and I would have to wait until at last she called me by name quite naturally. Since she showed no curiosity about Mr. Martin I was left in peace to take care of him just as I wished, to hover about him as he went out of the house on one of his infrequent walks, to linger behind the swinging door of the dining room and watch him through the crack, to brush his smoking jacket and wipe the dust from the soles of his slippers.
But this happiness didn’t last forever. I woke up particularly early one Sunday morning in midsummer to see bright sunlight streaming down the hall where I slept. For a long time I lay in bed listening to the wrens that sit and sing in the bushes outside, and watching the swallows that fly in and out of the broken window at the far end of the hallway. I got up and with great care, as always, I cleaned my face and teeth. It was hot. I slipped a freshly washed summer dress over my head and put my feet into my patent leather pumps. For the last time in my life I drowned my own smell in rosewater. Church bells began wildly to chime ten o’clock. When I went upstairs to put his breakfast on the table, Mr. Martin was not there. I waited by his chair for what felt like hours. I began to search the house. Timidly at first, then in a frantic hurry, as though he were slipping out of each room just as I came to it, I looked everywhere for him. Only after seeing that his wardrobe was stripped of his clothes and his bookcase was empty could I admit that he had gone. Even then, and for days afterwards, I thought he might come back.
A week later an old woman came with three or four shabby trunks and began to line the mantelpiece with her cheap knickknacks. Then I saw that without a word of explanation, without regard for my feelings, without even a present of money, Mr. Martin had packed up and gone for good.
•
This is only a rented house. My mother and I are included in the rent. People come and go, and every few years there is a new tenant. I should have expected that one day Mr. Martin too would leave. But I didn’t expect it. I was ill for a long time after that day and my mother, who became more and more loathsome to me, wore herself out bringing me the broth and cold cucumbers that I craved. After my illness I looked like a corpse. My breath stank. My mother would turn away from me in disgust. The tenants shuddered when I came into the room in my clumsy way, tripping over the doorsill even though my glasses again sat like a butterfly on the narrow bridge of my nose.
I was never a good housemaid, but now, though I try hard, I am so careless that some tenants believe I do not clean the rooms at all and others think I am purposely trying to embarrass them in front of their guests. But when they scold me I don’t answer. I just look at them indifferently and go on with my work. They have never known such disappointment as I have.
The Cottages
1. On the One Hand, On the Other Hand
She is seventy-nine or so, and on the one hand it’s hard to talk to her (she has come for dinner, it’s just the two of us; she eats much more than I thought an old lady would and even after several helpings of the main meal and dessert keeps digging into the raisin box with her knotted fingers and spreading raisins on her clean plate and nervously lining them up and tossing them into her mouth as she talks, and when they fall out on her lower lip tipping them back in), it’s hard to talk to her because she has only four or five things she wants to talk about and she forgets the name of every person and the name of every thing she wants to talk about and when groping to describe the thing whose name she has forgotten forgets the name of what she needs to describe to identify to me the first thing she has forgotten (she closes her eyes, leans her head back, and taps her twisted fingers on the tablecloth) and in the midst of this description, because she has gone on trying so long, forgets why she began it and stops dead or takes a different direction altogether (she talks with her eyes closed, her wiry white hair is tied back under a thin piece of yarn, and then she opens her eyes and cries out at her lolling dog to lie down and when the dog lies down stamps on his head in further irritation, and he rolls back his eyes in fear); on the other hand, even with only four or five subjects she doesn’t exhaust what she has to say because she entirely forgets that she has made a remark or asked a question and had an answer to it already, and so she asks again and I answer again, and she remarks again, and this happens at intervals all through dinner and beyond (I can’t convey the truth to her; there is my truth and her memory of it; I do not know a friend of hers but all evening she asks if I know him), but sometimes she tells me something about the Depression and the apartments she owned in the city, and then how her husband wrote his own column for the local paper and she never knew another writer as fine as he was, and then that is part of one long story and she remembers everything that happened and remembers, though she will have forgotten when I see her again, that she has told it to me now, though just barely.
2. Lillian
Lillian in her cap of white hair and her ankle socks and tied brown shoes is a small old woman who works over her sink before sunrise (I hear it through the wall of this cottage standing in the trees above the reedy lake with its black banks of mud and its dock of splintered wood), who washes her white linen by hand and hangs it on lines by the cottage and takes it down in the late morning. Now she sits reading at the picnic table a picture book about Polish Jews, with her white-framed g
lasses directed at the pictures, and when I walk by and ask, she says she is not really reading but thinking about sour apples and her daughters, she has been waiting all day for her two large daughters and waiting also to cook them the foods of their childhood; but though all day she is clean and ready, her daughters don’t come and don’t call. I look out from time to time and she is still sitting there alone, and she will not call them for fear of being a nuisance, and because she is disappointed she begins to think as she has thought before that she is too far away, she will not come back to this cottage again though she has come here for so many years, first with her husband, then without her husband, who died between one summer and the next, and she is thinking too how she makes trouble for everyone; well, no one minds! I have told her, but she will never believe that any more than she will uncover her old body to swim in company with the other old people here, and goes down to the lake alone at dawn; and now she puts away her book and her glasses and her shoes untied by the bed, and goes to bed, for it is evening, and she likes to lie and watch the darkness come down into the woods, though tonight, as sometimes before, she does not really watch, or though her eyes rest on the darkening woods, she is not so much watching as waiting, and often, now, feels she is waiting.
Safe Love
She was in love with her son’s pediatrician. Alone out in the country—could anyone blame her.
There was an element of grand passion in this love. It was also a safe thing. The man was on the other side of a barrier. Between him and her: the child on the examining table, the office itself, the staff, his wife, her husband, his stethoscope, his beard, her breasts, his glasses, her glasses, etc.
