by Lydia Davis
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 over 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 glasses 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.
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 lambswool. 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 only be able to see things 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 which 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 h
er 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 only looking forward 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.
