by Lydia Davis
Problem
X is with Y, but living on money from Z. Y himself supports W, who lives with her child by V. V wants to move to Chicago but his child lives with W in New York. W cannot move because she is having a relationship with U, whose child also lives in New York, though with its mother, T. T takes money from U, W takes money from Y for herself and from V for their child, and X takes money from Z. X and Y have no children together. V sees his child rarely but provides for it. U lives with W’s child but does not provide for it.
What an Old Woman Will Wear
She looked forward to being an old woman and wearing strange clothes. She would wear a shapeless dark brown or black dress of thin material, perhaps with little flowers on it, certainly frayed at the neck and hem and under the arms, and hanging lopsided from her bony shoulders down past her bony hips and knees. She would wear a straw hat with her brown dress in the summer, and then in the cold weather a turban or a helmet and a warm coat of something black and curly like lamb’s wool. Less interesting would be her black shoes with their square heels and her thick stockings gathered around her ankles.
But before she was that old, she would still be a good deal older than she was now, and she also looked forward to being that age, what would be called past the prime of her life and slowing down.
If she had a husband, she would sit out on the lawn with her husband. She hoped she would have a husband by then. Or still have one. She had once had a husband, and she wasn’t surprised that she had once had one, didn’t have one now, and hoped to have one later in her life. Everything seemed to happen in the right order, generally. She had also had a child; the child was growing, and in a few more years the child would be grown and she would want to slow down and have someone to talk to.
She told her friend Mitchell, as they were sitting together on a park bench, that she was looking forward to her late middle age. That was what she could call it, since she was now past what another friend had called her late youth and well into her early middle age. It will be so much calmer, she said to Mitchell, because of the absence of sexual desire.
Absence? he said, and he seemed angry, although he was no older than she.
The lessening of sexual desire, then, she said. He looked dubious, as far as she could tell, though he was out of sorts that afternoon and had only looked either dubious or angry at everything she had said so far.
Then he answered, as though it was one thing he was sure of, while she was certainly not sure of it, that there would be more wisdom at that age. But think of the pain, he went on, or at best the problems with one’s health, and he pointed to a couple in late middle age who were entering the park together, arm in arm. She had already been watching them.
Right now they are probably in pain, he said. It was true that although they were upright, they held on to each other too firmly and the footsteps of the man were tentative. Who knew what pain they might be suffering? She thought of all the people of late middle age and old age in the city whose pain was not always visible on their faces.
Yes, it was in old age that everything would break down. Her hearing would go. It was already going. She had to cup her hands around her ears in certain situations to distinguish words at all. She would have operations for cataracts on both eyes, and before that she would be able to see things only straight ahead in spots like coins, nothing to the sides. She would misplace things. She hoped she would still have the use of her legs.
She would go into the post office wearing a straw hat that sat too high up on her head. She would finish her business and make her way from the counter out past the line of people waiting that would include a little baby flat on its back in its carriage. She would spot the baby, smile a greedy, painful smile with a few teeth showing, say something out loud to the line of people, who would not respond, and go over to look at the baby.
She would be seventy-six, and she would have to lie down for a while because she had been talking and planned to talk again later in the evening. She was going to a party. She was going to the party only to make sure that certain people knew she was still alive. At the party, nearly everyone would avoid talking to her. No one would admire it when she drank too much.
She would have trouble sleeping, waking often in the night and staying awake early in the morning when it was still dark, feeling as alone in the world as she would ever feel. She would go out early and sometimes dig up a small plant from a neighbor’s garden, looking first to see that her neighbor’s blinds were down. When she sat in a train or a bus with her eyes fixed on the scenery outside the window, she would hum without stopping for an hour at a time in a high-pitched, quavering voice that sounded a little like a mosquito, so that people around her would become irritated. When she stopped humming, she would be asleep with her head tipped back and her mouth open.
But first there would be the slowing down, a little past the prime, when there would not be as much going on, not as much as there was now, when she wouldn’t expect as much, not as much as she did now, when she either would or would not have achieved a certain position that was not likely to change, and best of all when she would have developed some fixed habits, so she would know they were going to sit out on the lawn after supper, for example, she and her husband, and read their books, in the long evenings of summer, her husband in shorts and she in a clean skirt and blouse with her bare feet up on the edge of his chair, and maybe even her mother or his mother there too, reading a book, and the mother would be twenty years older than she was, and therefore well into her old age, though still able to dig in the garden, and they would all dig in the garden together, and pick up leaves, or plan the garden together; they would stand under the sky on this little piece of ground here in the city, planning it out together, the way it should be, surrounding them as they sit in the evening on three folding chairs close together, reading and rarely saying a word.
But she was not looking forward only to that age, she said to Mitchell, when things would slow down and when she would have a husband who had slowed down too, she was also looking forward to a time about twenty years after that when she could wear any hat she wanted to and not care if she looked foolish, and wouldn’t even have a husband to tell her she looked foolish.
Her friend Mitchell did not appear to understand her at all.
Though of course she knew it might be true that when the time came, a hat and that freedom would not make up for everything else she had lost with the coming of old age. And now that she had said this out loud, she thought maybe there was no joy, after all, in even thinking about such freedom.
The Sock
My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower, and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to stand or sit at the right angle to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind and this one least of all.
They came out here last summer for a few weeks to see my son, who is his and mine. There were some touchy moments, but there were also some good times, though of course even the good times were a little uneasy. The two of them seemed to expect a lot of accommodation from me, maybe because she was sick—she was in pain and sulky, with circles under her eyes. They used my phone and other things in my house. They would walk up slowly from the beach to my house and shower there, and later walk away clean in the evening, with my son between them, hand in hand. I gave a party and they came and danced with each other, impressed my friends, and stayed till the end. I went out of my way for them, mostly because of our boy. I thought we should all get along for his sake. By the end of their visit I was tired.
The night before they went, we had a plan to eat out in a Vietnamese restaurant with his mother. His mother was flying in from another city, and then the three of them were going off together the
next day, to the Midwest. His wife’s parents were giving them a big wedding party so that all the people she had grown up with, the stout farmers and their families, could meet him.
When I went into the city that night to where they were staying, I took what they had left in my house that I had found so far: a book, next to the closet door, and somewhere else a sock of his. I drove up to the building and I saw my husband out on the sidewalk flagging me down. He wanted to talk to me before I went inside. He told me his mother was in bad shape and couldn’t stay with them, and he asked me if I would please take her home with me later. Without thinking I said I would. I was forgetting the way she would look at the inside of my house and how I would clean the worst of it while she watched.
In the lobby, they were sitting across from each other in two armchairs, these two small women, both beautiful in different ways, both wearing heavy lipstick, different shades, both frail, I thought later, in different ways. The reason they were sitting here was that his mother was afraid to go upstairs. It didn’t bother her to fly in an airplane, but she couldn’t go up more than one story in an apartment building. It was worse now than it had been. In the old days she could be on the eighth floor if she had to, as long as the windows were tightly shut.
Before we went out to dinner my husband took the book up to the apartment, but he had stuck the sock in his back pocket without thinking when I gave it to him out on the street and it stayed there during the meal in the restaurant, where his mother sat in her black clothes at the end of the table opposite an empty chair, sometimes playing with my son, with his cars, and sometimes asking my husband and then me and then his wife questions about the peppercorns and other strong spices that might be in her food. Then after we all left the restaurant and were standing in the parking lot, he pulled the sock out of his pocket and looked at it, wondering how it had got there.
It was a small thing, but later I couldn’t forget the sock, because there was this one sock in his back pocket in a strange neighborhood way out in the eastern part of the city in a Vietnamese ghetto, by the massage parlors, and none of us really knew this city but we were all here together and it was odd, because I still felt as though he and I were partners; we had been partners a long time, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the other socks of his I had picked up, stiff with his sweat and threadbare on the sole, in all our life together from place to place, and then of his feet in those socks, how the skin shone through at the ball of the foot and the heel where the weave was worn down; how he would lie reading on his back on the bed with his feet crossed at the ankles so that his toes pointed at different corners of the room; how he would then turn on his side with his feet together like two halves of a fruit; how, still reading, he would reach down and pull off his socks and drop them in little balls on the floor and reach down again and pick at his toes while he read; sometimes he shared with me what he was reading and thinking, and sometimes he didn’t know whether I was there in the room or somewhere else.
I couldn’t forget it later, even though after they were gone I found a few other things they had left, or rather his wife had left them in the pocket of a jacket of mine—a red comb, a red lipstick, and a bottle of pills. For a while these things sat around in a little group of three on one counter of the kitchen and then another, while I thought I’d send them to her, because I thought maybe the medicine was important, but I kept forgetting to ask, until finally I put them away in a drawer to give her when they came out again, because by then it wasn’t going to be long, and it made me tired all over again just to think of it.
Five Signs of Disturbance
Back in the city, she is alone most of the time. It is a large apartment that is not hers, though it is not unfamiliar either.
She spends the days by herself trying to work and sometimes looking up from her work to worry about how she will find a place to live, because she can’t stay in this apartment beyond the end of the summer. Then, in the late afternoon, she begins to think she should call someone.
She is watching everything very closely: herself, this apartment, what is outside the windows, and the weather.
There is a day of thunderstorms, with dark yellow and green light in the street, and black light in the alley. She looks into the alley and sees foam running over the concrete, washed out from the gutters by the rain. Then there is a day of high wind.
Now she stands by the door watching the doorknob. The brass doorknob is moving by itself, very slightly, turning back and forth, then jiggling. She is startled, then she hears a foot shuffle on the other side of the doorsill, and a cloth brush against the panel, and other soft noises, and realizes after a moment that this is the doorman who has come to clean the outside of the door. But she does not go away until the doorknob stops moving.
She looks at the clock often and is aware of exactly what time it is now, and then ten minutes from now, even though she has no need to know what time it is. She also knows exactly how she is feeling, uneasy now, angry ten minutes from now. She is sick to death of knowing what she is feeling, but she can’t stop, as though if she stops watching for longer than a moment, she will disappear (wander off).
There is a bright light coming from the kitchen. She did not turn a light on there. The light is coming from the open window (it is late summer). It is morning.
On another day, the early, low sun shines on the park across the street, on the near edge of it, so that one bare trunk, and the outer leaves of the trees on this side of the grove, are whitened with sunlight as though someone has thrown a handful of gray dust over them. Behind them, darkness.
Before her as she stands at the front window looking out at the park, the plants on the windowsill have dropped some of their leaves.
She knows that if she speaks on the telephone, her voice will communicate something no one will want to listen to. And she will have trouble making herself heard.
In the midst of the random noises from the courtyard (she catalogs them in the evening: the clatter of dishes, an electric guitar, a woman’s laughter, a toilet flushing, a television, running water), suddenly a quarrel begins, between a man and his mother (he shouts in his deep voice, “Mother!”).
She thinks, having come back after some years, that this is a place full of difficulty.
She watches a great deal of television, even though there is very little that she likes and she also has trouble focusing the picture. She watches anything that comes in clearly, even though she may find it offensive. One evening she watches one face in a movie for two hours and feels that her own face has changed. Then, the next night at the same hour, she is not watching television and she thinks: The hour may be the same but the night is not the same.
Later, when she lists and counts the signs of disturbance, at least two are associated with the television.
Now she can’t put it off any longer. She has to go out and look for a place to live. She doesn’t want to do this, because she doesn’t want to say to herself that she really has no place of her own. She would rather do nothing about the problem and stay inside this apartment all day.
Several times she goes out to look at apartments. She can’t afford to pay much, and so she looks at the very cheapest apartments. She looks at one above a candy store and one above an Italian men’s social club. The third one she looks at is nothing but a shell with a large hole in the floor of the back room, and the garden is overgrown with brambles. The real-estate agent apologizes to her.
She is glad when it grows too late in the afternoon to look at anything more and she can go back to the apartment and watch television and eat and drink.
She often cries over what she sees on television. Usually it is something on the evening news, a death or many deaths somewhere, or an act of heroism, or a film of a newborn baby with a disease. But sometimes an ad, if it involves old people or children, will also make her cry. The younger the child is, the more easily she cries, but even a film of an adolescent will sometimes make her cry, though she does not lik
e adolescents. Often, after the news is over, she is still catching her breath as she walks out to the kitchen.
She eats dinner in front of the television. After another hour or two she begins drinking. She drinks until she is drunk enough so that she drops things and her handwriting becomes hard to read and she leaves out some of the letters from certain words and has to read all the words over again carefully, adding the missing letters and after that printing some words a second time above the illegible script.
She is forgetting the idea she had about moderation.
She does the dishes so wildly that soap flies everywhere and water splashes on the floor and the front of her clothes. During the day she washes her hands often, rubbing them together briskly, almost violently, because she feels that everything she touches is coated with grease.
She stands by the door and hears someone whistling in the marble lobby.
One day she sees an apartment she is willing to take. It is not very pretty, but she is ready to take it because she wants to have a home again, she wants to be bound to this city by a lease, she doesn’t want to go on feeling the way she does, loose in the world, the only one without any place. She imagines that when she moves in, she will have a party. She signs some papers. The agent will call her later and tell her whether the deal has gone through or not. She walks home and shops for food with a sort of forced tranquillity, as though if she moves too quickly something will break. She continues to move this way, gently, with deliberation, the rest of the day. Then, later in the evening, the agent calls and tells her she has lost the apartment. The owner has decided suddenly not to rent it. She can hardly believe this explanation.
