The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

by Lydia Davis

  We are often angry at ourselves, too, for such things as carelessness and forgetfulness, and things we feel are much worse.

  Pastor Elaine uses the Bible to illustrate her lesson. “Paul put it so well,” she says, before going on to quote from Romans: “I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death?”

  This seems too strong a reaction for the mistake Pastor Elaine has made in her garden, since she is not doing what she “hates” by setting plants in the ground without proper fencing, but we read closely what she has to say because it does describe exactly what we often do. We often do what we hate. We often tell ourselves what we would like to do, most importantly that we would like to be kind to our children, and gentle with them, and patient, and then we do not do what we would like to do, but what we hate; that is, we lose our patience suddenly and shout at them, or squeeze them, or shake them, or pound our fist on the table and frighten them. And we, too, do not understand why. Is it that we do not want to do what we so much believe we want to do?

  We are sometimes aware that the ugly sounds coming from us may be overheard by the good family next door, whose younger son is an altar boy at what they call the BVM or the Perpetual. But this does not have the power to stop us.

  We are not Christian but we have a Bible belonging to a churchgoing mother of ours, and although we are not believers, we think that if we read the same words believers read, we might also be comforted or learn something. The passage quoted by Pastor Elaine is a little different in our Bible. It begins: “For that which I do I know not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

  This sounds quite like our situation, though what we do, we would not call evil but wrong. We will, we will with great determination, up in the privacy of our study, up in the bathroom, anywhere we are alone. But when it comes to performing what is good, sitting over lunch between our two children, who are not bad children, if the older one, bored, is teasing us and the younger one, tired, is fussing, our will is weak, in fact it is powerless. Then what does it mean to will, at all, if we can’t perform? All that willing, upstairs, is for nothing. It seems that we are able to will only from a very shallow place and when we draw upon all the will in us it is quickly used up and there is nothing left. Or something else, if not that, is wrong with the way we will.

  When we lose our patience so suddenly, we feel possessed, as by some outside force, almost as it is described in the next lines we read: “Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh), dwelleth no good thing.” It is as though it were not we who were doing what we do, but some being we do not recognize. Certainly we do not recognize ourselves, in our fury, as what we have so lately been, gentle, for we can be gentle. Only, this other being does not seem like sin to us, but a living demon, and does not seem to dwell in us, but only to come into us sometimes and then leave again. Unless it is in us all the time, but quiet, and is then roused by some aggravation.

  “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,” says our Bible. But if there is another law in us, it does not seem to be in our members, in our body, but elsewhere, in our passions, raging like a storm, possessing us, and warring against the law of our mind. Unless, arising in our passions, it then spreads to our members, for we can sometimes feel that into our flesh no good thing comes: our blood becomes hot and our nerves sing, when we are angry.

  A small italic c next to “in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing” refers us to two sentences in Genesis and we look through the book for those sentences. The first one we find reads: “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” The second uses many of the same words but does not mean exactly the same thing: “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” We will not say that we are filled with evil continually, because if no good thing comes into our flesh, it comes only sometimes. If we know it is not in us all the time, though, we may be able to say it is not just wrong but evil, this thing, this demon or poison that comes into us and pinches and wrinkles our features so that we are told, “You should see your face!”

  “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” the passage continues. But in our case, we often become so ashamed that we wish we might be rescued right now, in the midst of life, from this body that is sometimes so filled with no good thing and so obedient to a law that wars against the law of our mind—our sharp mind, but our weak mind. Or our sharp mind, but our weak will. Or our strong will, but our disobedient will. Is that it—that our mind is sharp and has a law, but our will is strong and disobedient?

  Toward the end of the newsletter we read that Pastor Elaine will be away for some weeks over the summer and that if we should need spiritual assistance during this time we may call any elder or the vice president, whose telephone number she gives. But in this town we would not be able to go to any elder or the vice president with our troubles.

  If we were to go to Pastor Elaine herself for spiritual assistance, she might point to another passage, one we have seen by chance in Galatians: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.” How we would like to have in us this thing, the fruit of the Spirit. We read the list again and this time read it against the list of what is sometimes in us: love, joy, peace, gentleness, and goodness. We do not seem to have faith. As for long-suffering, we do not know if it is something one can have in small amounts. And now we see that it may be in the absence of long-suffering that no good thing comes into our flesh and we become vicious, as though possessed, and in the same moment lose, for a time, all love, joy, peace, gentleness, and goodness. Yet we do not know how to gain more long-suffering. It is not enough to want it, or to will it, or to will it from such a shallow place, anyway, as we do.

  We take our usual walk to the post office and then by Pastor Elaine’s house and on to the hardware store to look for a fluorescent lightbulb. We see that Pastor Elaine has hung her wash on the line in back, above her phlox. We see through the window that the light is on in her study, although here, outside, the sun is bright. We think how we have been with our children this day or the day before, how we have stood holding the little one, so heavy, and put out our hand to push the arm of the older one to get him out of our way or to make him move faster, or driven in the car with them in the heat, damp, with a knot of rage in us, and yearned to reach inside, or outside, somewhere, and find more long-suffering, and have not known how to do it. And we wonder: What stores of anger have we laid down in the older one already? What hardness are we putting in the heart of the little one, where there was no hardness?

  A Man in Our Town

  A man in our town is both a dog and its master. The master is impossibly unjust to the dog and makes its life a misery. One minute he wants to romp with it and the next minute he slaps it down for being so unruly. He beats it severely over its nose and hindquarters because it has slept on his bed and left its hairs on his pillow, and yet there are evenings when he is lonely and pulls the dog up to lie beside him, though the dog trembles with fear.

  But the fault is not all on one side. No one else would tolerate a dog like this one. The smell of this dog is so sour and pungent that it is far more frightening and aggressive than the dog itself, who is shy and pees uncontrollably when taken by surprise. It is a foul and sopping creature.

  Yet the master should hardly notice this, since he often drinks himself sick and spends the night curled against an alley wall.

  At sundown we see him loping easily along the edge of the park, his nose to the breeze; he slows to a trot and circles to find a scent, scratches the stubble on his head and takes out a cigar
ette, lights it with trembling hands, and then sits down on a bench after wiping it with his handkerchief. He smokes quietly until his cigarette has burned down to a stub. Then he explodes into wild anger and begins punching his head and kicking himself in the legs. When he is exhausted, he turns his face up to the sky and howls in frustration. Only sometimes, then, he will pet himself on the head until he is comforted.

  A Second Chance

  If only I had a chance to learn from my mistakes, I would, but there are too many things you don’t do twice; in fact, the most important things are things you don’t do twice, so you can’t do them better the second time. You do something wrong, and see what the right thing would have been, and are ready to do it, should you have the chance again, but the next experience is quite different, and your judgment is wrong again, and though you are now prepared for this experience should it repeat itself, you are not prepared for the next experience. If only, for instance, you could get married at eighteen twice, then the second time you could make sure you were not too young to do this, because you would have the perspective of being older, and would know that the person advising you to marry this man was giving you the wrong advice because his reasons were the same ones he gave you the last time he advised you to get married at eighteen. If you could bring a child from a first marriage into a second marriage a second time, you would know that generosity could turn to resentment if you did not do the right things and resentment back to kindness if you did, unless the man you married when you married a second time for the second time was quite different in temperament from the man you married when you married a second time for the first time, in which case you would have to marry that one twice also in order to learn just what the wisest course would be to take with a man of his temperament. If you could have your mother die a second time you might be prepared to fight for a private room that had no other person in it watching television while she died, but if you were prepared to fight for that, and did, you might have to lose your mother again in order to know enough to ask them to put her teeth in the right way and not the wrong way before you went into her room and saw her for the last time grinning so strangely, and then yet one more time to make sure her ashes were not buried again in that plain sort of airmail container in which she was sent north to the cemetery.

  Fear

  Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.

  Almost No Memory

  A certain woman had a very sharp consciousness but almost no memory. She remembered enough to get by from day to day. She remembered enough to work, and she worked hard. She did good work, and was paid for it, and earned enough to get by, but she did not remember her work, so that she could not answer questions about it when people asked, as they did ask, since the work she did was interesting.

  She remembered enough to get by, and to do her work, but she did not learn from what she did, or heard, or read. For she did read, she loved to read, and she took good notes on what she read, on the ideas that came to her from what she read, since she did have some ideas of her own, and even on her ideas about these ideas. Some of her ideas were even very good ideas, since she had a very sharp consciousness. And so she kept good notebooks and added to them year by year, and because many years passed this way, she had a long shelf of these notebooks, in which her handwriting became smaller and smaller.

  Sometimes, when she was tired of reading a book, or when she was moved by a sudden curiosity she did not altogether understand, she would take an earlier notebook from the shelf and read a little of it, and she would be interested in what she read. She would be interested in the notes she had once taken on a book she was reading or on her own ideas. It would seem all new to her, and indeed most of it would be new to her. Sometimes she would only read and think, and sometimes she would make a note in her current notebook of what she was reading in a notebook from an earlier time, or she would make a note of an idea that came to her from what she was reading. Other times she would want to make a note but choose not to, since she did not think it quite right to make a note of what was already a note, though she did not fully understand what was not right about it. She wanted to make a note of a note she was reading, because this was her way of understanding what she read, though she was not assimilating what she read into her mind, or not for long, but only into another notebook. Or she wanted to make a note because to make a note was her way of thinking this thought.

  Although most of what she read was new to her, sometimes she immediately recognized what she read and had no doubt that she herself had written it, and thought it. It seemed perfectly familiar to her, as though she had just thought it that very day, though in fact she had not thought it for some years, unless reading it again was the same as thinking it again, or the same as thinking it for the first time, and though she might never have thought it again, if she had not happened to read it in her notebook. And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, though it was hard for her to understand, and troubled her to try to understand, just how they had to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her and not of her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.

  Mr. Knockly

  Last fall my aunt burned to death when the boardinghouse where she lived went up in flames. There was nothing left of her but a small pile of half-destroyed objects in one corner of her room, where I think she must have been sitting when the fire broke out: her false teeth, the frames of her glasses, her pearls, the eyelets of her leather boots, and her two long knitting needles coiled like snakes in the ash.

  It was a gray day. Friends of the dead picked their way through the rubble like lonely ants, wheeling and backtracking. Every now and then a woman cried out in horror and was taken away. The chimneys were still intact: everything else had crumbled. Rain began to fall slowly on the crowd. Two firemen, pale from sleeplessness, kicked the rubble with their boots and stopped several people from going near the house.

  My aunt was dead. Or worse than dead, since there was nothing left of her to call dead. I wondered, with some fear, what would become of her old lover Mr. Knockly, a small man, who stood in the thickest cluster of men and women, his face like a white pimple among their overcoats, staring at the ruin as though his heart had been burned out of him. When I went near him he ran away from me in his tiny boots. The collar of his jacket was turned up and his gray crew cut sparkled with rain. He moved as though he had been wounded in the legs and arms, the chest, the neck, as though he had been shot full of holes.

  I saw him again on the following Sunday, at the funeral. In front of the church there were seven coffins. It occurred to me later that the coffins must have been empty. The church was full: only one of the dead had been a complete stranger—the police were still sending photographs of his teeth to cities as far away as Chicago. Near me sat an old man with glassy eyes who was drawn like a magnet to any gathering of people: I had once seen him throwing confetti onto a parade from the window of a deserted house. In the first pew was a pious woman who spent a great deal of time in church praying. Mr. Knockly was at the back, his head bowed so far over that it was barely visible.

  He rode in the car with me
behind the hearse, but looked out the window at the scrap-iron conversion plants and did not answer when I spoke to him. In the cemetery he stood by my aunt’s coffin until it was lowered into the grave. His face was so palsied with grief, he seemed so nearly out of control, that I thought he would jump into the grave with her. But instead he turned away abruptly after the “dust to dust,” and walked alone through the gate. There was no sign of him on the road when I returned in the car.

  It was early October. The days were long and cool. I went out every evening and walked. I would leave home before the sun set and stay out until night had fallen and the sky was completely dark. I went a different way each time, through back alleys, along dirt paths by the river, away from the river, over the hill on the outskirts of town, down through the main streets. I looked into doorways, into living rooms, into store windows; I watched through the glass as people ate dinner by themselves in coffee shops; I walked behind restaurants through clouds of steam from the kitchens and through the noise of clattering dishes.

  I think I might have been searching for Mr. Knockly, though often I went where I was unlikely to find him. I didn’t even know if he was still in town: with my aunt gone, there was no reason for him to stay here. But when I saw him again, I felt as though I had wanted, all this time, to see him again.

  I was walking in the muddy lane behind a seafood restaurant, after a heavy rainstorm. The clouds had broken up and the sky was light in places, but the sun had set. I thought there was no one with me in the lane, but I heard a noise at the other end, and saw him. He was wearing a white work shirt and white apron with a red anchor on it, and he was emptying a small garbage pail into one of the large ones that stood in a row by the back door of the restaurant. As I went up to him, he was jerking the pail up and down to free the clotted garbage. His head was bowed. I spoke to him and he looked up quickly. Garbage spilled onto the ground. He stood still for a moment; the emotion that had been in his face at the funeral had died away: his eyes, his mouth, were blunt and dogged. I said something to him, and for a moment I thought he would answer: his face moved, his lips unstuck. But when I put out my hand to take hold of him, he shied away and went indoors. There was a break in the noise from the kitchen. I stood there sinking into the mud and looking at the spilled garbage: crab’s claws, sauce. The door opened a crack, and a black face blocked the light, then the door shut again. I felt uncomfortable. I felt suddenly that it was very strange for me to be there. I left.