Can't and Won't

by Lydia Davis

  I talked to him, or you, as long as you seemed to want me to talk. It was then that you gave me instructions. You told me to call you Frank. At that moment, I was prepared to do anything you seemed to want me to do, because I was afraid that if I was not careful at that moment, everything would be ruined and the grant would vanish. This was an instinctive reaction, not a rational one. When the conversation was over, I hurried to the bus.

  I was glad, of course—I thought about the good news all the way in to the city. For the first time, also, I could observe exactly how my mind adapted to a suddenly new situation: over and over again, I caught myself thinking about something in the usual way and then told myself, No, now things are different. When this had happened enough times, at last my mind began to adapt to the new situation.

  Later that day, I was having lunch by myself in a restaurant near the public library. I ordered a half sandwich and a cup of soup, which cost about $7. After the waitress walked away, I continued to think about the menu, because, really, I would have preferred a certain favorite salad for $11. Then I realized: I could have afforded the salad! But immediately afterwards I thought, No! Be careful! If you spend half again as much as you used to spend on each thing that you buy from now on, you will soon run out of money!

  I was feeling such relief. I wanted to tell the Foundation about this immense relief. But then I thought that of course it must be obvious to you. You probably hear this from every person you help. Does every person let you know? Or are some people very quiet or very matter-of-fact? Are they very pragmatic, and do they immediately plan how they will put it to use? Are some people not even relieved, though they are happy and excited? Or not even happy and excited? Still, I wanted to tell the Foundation. I wanted to tell you that now everything was going to be all right—I would not have to worry.

  I wanted to tell you that during all of my adult life, starting at the age of twenty-one, I had worried about how I would earn enough to live on for the next year, sometimes for the next week. When I was still young, and even when I was older, my parents sometimes sent me small sums of money to help out, but the burden was on me, it was my responsibility, I knew that, and my next year’s income was never secure. Sometimes I was frightened because I had so little money and did not see how I could earn more. The fear would be something I felt physically in the pit of my stomach. It would come upon me suddenly: What was I going to do? Once, I had no money at all except for the $13 that a friend owed me. I did not want to ask her to pay it back, but I did. Most of all, I wanted to tell you that now I would not have to do the work I was doing that was so difficult for me. By that, I meant teaching.

  Teaching has always been so difficult. At times, it has been a disaster. I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m used to it, but this particular kind of work, the kind of teaching I do, has been crushing and almost debilitating. Particularly difficult was the year before I received that telephone call, and also the year in which I received it. In those days, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout, I wanted to wring my hands and complain, and I did try to complain to some people, though I could never cry or complain as much as I wanted to. Some people listened and tried to be helpful, but they could never listen long enough; the conversation always had to come to an end. I always kept most of my emotion to myself. I was still in the midst of teaching then, when the Foundation called, but with the great difference, after the call, that I thought I wouldn’t be continuing. I had two more months of it, I thought, and then I would be done with it, maybe forever.

  * * *

  I have so often sat on the bus traveling up to the college, on those mornings, wishing something would come down and rescue me, or that there would be a minor accident, one in which no one was hurt, or at least not badly hurt, that would prevent me from teaching the class.

  That is how the teaching day begins. I take a public bus from my town to the small city one hour north, where the college is. I do not drive my car, even though I could. I do not want that extra responsibility on a teaching day. I don’t want to have to think about steering the car.

  I sit there quietly in the bus looking out the window. The bus rolls me gently from side to side and presses me back into the seat when it accelerates, or drops out from under me briefly when it goes over a bump. I like the way the bus rolls me around. I do not like the song that goes through my head. It always goes through my head for a while before I notice it. It is not a song of celebration. It is a dull and repetitious song that is often in my head, and I don’t know why: it is “The Mexican Hat Dance.”

  I also wanted to tell you how I was running out of money when this news came. I had less in my bank account than I had had in years, though some small jobs would be coming in the spring. Now at last I would have enough money, thanks to you, if I didn’t die first.

  There would be enough to live on, and there would even be extra money I could spend on things I wanted or needed. I could buy a new pair of glasses, maybe more attractive ones, though that is always difficult. I could have more expensive food for dinner. But as soon as I began to think of what I might buy with the extra money, I was either ashamed or embarrassed—because although new glasses and a better dinner would be nice, they were not really necessary, and exactly how many things should I allow myself to buy that are not really necessary?

  Now a strange thing was happening. I sometimes felt removed from my life, as though I were floating above it or maybe a little to the side of it. This sensation of floating must have come from the fact that I thought I would no longer be attached to anything, or to much: I thought I would not be attached to my teaching job, and I thought I would not be attached by those many strings to all the necessary other small and large jobs that would earn me four thousand dollars, or three, or two, to cover three months, or two, or one. I was floating up and looking out over a longer distance, at more of the landscape in a circle around me.

  The department gave a little party to congratulate me on the grant. It is not such a large grant, but the department likes to make a fuss over anything that its faculty does. It wants the college administration to know about the faculty’s accomplishments and to think well of the department. But this party made me uncomfortable. The department, and maybe the college, too, now valued me more than they had before, and at the same time I now wanted to leave the college. In fact, I was secretly planning to leave it. I would either cut my ties completely or have as little to do with it as possible.

  It turned out that I could not stop teaching. But I did not know that for a while.

  * * *

  I am not always a bad teacher. My difficulty teaching is complex, and I’ve given it a lot of thought: it is probably due to a general lack of organization on my part, to begin with, combined with overpreparation, then stage fright, and, in the classroom itself, poor articulation of ideas and a weak classroom presence. I have trouble looking the students in the eye. I mumble or fail to explain things clearly. I do not like to use the blackboard.

  I do not like to use the blackboard because I do not like to turn my back on the class. I’m afraid that if I do, the students will take advantage of this to talk to one another or review notes from another course, or worse, they will stare at the back of me, and certainly not with admiration. All of last year I did not use the blackboard. This year I began to use it. When I do use it, I am so hasty and uncomfortable, and my handwriting is so poor, that the words I write are small and faint and hard to read.

  This is the way I work: I avoid the thought of the class as long as I can. Then, when there is not much time left, maybe a day or an evening, I begin to prepare it. In preparing it, unfortunately, I also begin to imagine it. In imagining it, I become so afraid of the classroom and the students that I freeze and can no longer think clearly. Sometimes I am able to control my panic—suppress it or talk myself out of it—and then, for minutes at a time, even half an hour, I am able to plan the class in a reasonable way. Then the panic sets in again and I can’t think anymore. Every plan
seems wrong, I believe that I know nothing, I have nothing to teach. And the more trouble I have planning, the more frightened I become, because time is passing and the hour for the class is drawing closer.

  The feeling I mentioned, of being removed from my life, was like what I imagine a person feels who learns she has a fatal illness. There was also a greater clarity of vision—which may also come when one is dying. It seemed that it wasn’t I who had changed but everything around me. Everything was sharper, clearer, and closer, as though, before, I had been seeing only little bits at a time, not all of it, or all of it but veiled or clouded. What was blocking my view before? Was there a veil between me and the world, or did I have blinkers on that narrowed my vision and kept me looking ahead? I did not know this until now—that I must have had a habit of not looking all around me. It was not that I had taken everything for granted before, but that I could not look at everything at once. Why? Was it so that I would not be tempted to do what I did not have the time or money to do, or so that I would not even think about something too distracting? I had to ignore so much of the world, or turn my thoughts away from it and back to the business at hand, whatever that might be. I could not let my thoughts go wherever they wished to and then on to something else.

  Now everything looked different—as if I had returned to earth and were looking at it again. Was each thing more beautiful? No, not exactly. Perhaps more completely itself, more full, more vital. Was this the way things looked to people who had come back to life from a near-death experience?

  I already knew that I had the habit of looking out from the window of a car or bus with longing at certain things in the distance that I would never visit, that I would wish to visit but that I would not visit—in one place I lived, it was an old, rundown California ranch house in a stand of eucalyptus and palm trees across an overgrown field. A long, curving dirt driveway led up to it.

  From the bus on the way up to the college these days I see something rather similar: an old farmhouse with outbuildings, with trees around it and a field between the highway and the house. It is a very simple, old frame house, and the trees are a simple group of tall shade trees.

  I used to think these places had to remain at just this distance, that I should long for them and that they should be almost imaginary, and that I should never visit them. Now, for a while, feeling as though I were outside my life, I thought I could visit them.

  At the same time, I felt closer to strangers. It was as though something had been taken away that used to stand between me and them. I don’t know if this was connected with the feeling that I was not inside my own life anymore. I suppose by “my own life” I mean the habitual worries, plans, and constraints that I thought were no longer even relevant. I noticed this feeling of closeness to strangers most of all in the bus station, which is where I see many strangers all at once in a crowd and watch them for as long as an hour or two at a time, for instance when I am waiting for the late-night bus home and I sit in the cafeteria writing a letter or reading student papers.

  I have to say that once the class is under way, the tension is not nearly as bad as during the hours leading up to it and particularly those last ten or twenty minutes just before it. The worst moment of all is the last moment, in my office, in which I get up from my chair, pick up my briefcase, and open the office door. Even five minutes, the five minutes remaining before I have to walk out of my office, are enough to give me a little feeling of protection, although that five minutes is almost too short a period of time to be of any use. But ten minutes is certainly long enough to protect me from that last minute.

  I should know by now that once it begins, the hour itself will not be as bad as those ten or twenty minutes before it, and especially that last minute. If I really knew that the hour itself would not be as bad, then I wouldn’t be so afraid of it, and then of course those ten or twenty minutes beforehand would not be so bad. But there seems to be no way, yet, to convince myself of that. And, of course, sometimes it really is very bad.

  Once, for instance, the class discussion got out of hand and offensive remarks were made by some of the students against certain groups of people, remarks which, since I did not know how to stop them quickly, may have appeared to have been made with my approval or even encouragement. Some of the other students, and I myself, became increasingly uncomfortable as the discussion continued. A more adept teacher could have broadened the discussion and rescued it, for instance by turning it into a lesson on the subject of the dangers of generalizing versus its usefulness. But I was not able to think of any way to do that right there on the spot, and the class ended with a bad feeling. Later, at home, I had some good and smart things to say that would have helped, but it was too late. I dreaded the next class and the chill that would pervade it. And I was not mistaken about the next class.

  It is not often that the discussion goes in an unfortunate direction. More often there are just moments of awkwardness. Sometimes I hesitate while speaking, for instance, not because I am about to seize upon the perfect phrase or image, but because I have lost my train of thought and need to find some conclusion for my remark that will make sense. When I hesitate, the students become particularly riveted. They are far more interested when I grope for what to say next than they are when I am speaking on and on smoothly. Then, the more intently they watch me, waiting to see what I will say next, the more I am at a loss for what to say. I am afraid of becoming completely paralyzed. I must playact, and hide the fact that I am nearly paralyzed, and push myself on to some conclusion, at least a temporary one. Then they lose interest.

  But what I dread in the classroom is not just the bad moment that I can’t rescue or the many awkward moments when I feel inadequate. It is something larger. I do not want to be the focus of attention of a large group of students who are waiting to see what I will do or say next. It is such an uneven match. There are so many on one side, in rows, staring at just one alone in front of them. My very face seems to change. It becomes more vulnerable, because it is not looked at charitably, as it would be by a friend or an acquaintance, or even a person on the other side of a counter from me in a store or a bank, but critically, as a sort of foreign object. The more bored the students are, the more my face and body become foreign objects to be examined critically. I know this because I have been a student myself.

  * * *

  It is true that the first meeting of the class is not as difficult for me as the ones that come after, because there is so much business to be done and I am perfectly competent to do it. I take attendance, and I explain the syllabus and what I will expect from them. I don’t mind fumbling among my lists and Xeroxed handouts because most teachers do that on the first day. I adopt the pose of the competent teacher, and they believe me for the space of that first class. I am greatly helped by the fact that they have had so many teachers all their lives, competent teachers, or at least confident and powerful teachers—so I can play the part of a confident, even commanding teacher and they will believe it. I’m sometimes good at acting a part and I can convince them for a while.

  There have even been good moments during a class. Sometimes the discussion is interesting and the students seem surprised and engaged. There has even been a rare class that is good from beginning to end. I do like the students—most of them anyway, though not all of them. I have always liked them, maybe because, since they depend on me to give them a good grade, they show me their best face and their sweetest nature.

  I do enjoy reading what they write. Every week there is a fresh pile of writing, most of it neatly typed and presented, if nothing else, and I always expect to find some treasure in it. And there really is always something good in it, and occasionally something, an idea or at the very least a sentence or a phrase, that is very good. The most exciting moment is when a student who has not been particularly good suddenly does something very fine. In fact, reading the students’ work and writing comments on it is my favorite part of teaching, partly because I am at home, alone, u
sually lying on my bed or on the sofa.

  But these good times and the few successful classes are far outweighed by the difficult times.

  * * *

  When I first received the news of this grant, I dreamed that I might not only stop teaching but at last leave my study and enter public life. I even thought I might run for office, though not a very high office—the school board or the town planning board. Then I wondered if I would do anything public after all. Maybe I would just continue to spend most of my time by myself in my study. Or I would stay in my study, but from there I would write a column for the local newspaper.

  Later I thought that maybe each stage of this reaction simply had to wear itself out, and at last I would return to some kind of normal condition. And maybe that was all I really wanted—to feel all the same things I was used to feeling, and to do the same things I was used to doing, the only difference being that I had a little more time, and a little less work, and a slightly higher opinion of myself.

  The college I myself had attended, my alma mater, had never been in touch with me after I graduated, not even to ask for news for the alumnae magazine or for money. Then, as soon as an announcement of the grant was printed in an academic bulletin, the president herself wrote to congratulate me. She told me that a letter would be sent inviting me to give a talk there in the spring. I waited, but received no letter. I wrote a note of inquiry and received no answer. After a few more months, my alma mater began writing to me again, but only to send the alumnae magazine and to ask for money.