Talk Stories

by Jamaica Kincaid

The Woody Herman orchestra was there, and it was led by Woody Herman himself, and it played some songs, all of them popular old American songs. “A good convention banquet will create the atmosphere of a good restaurant,” said Catherine Tritsch. “A good restaurant has to have a theme. This has a theme. American food. American music.”

  There was a waitress wearing knicker-style pants and there was a waitress who looked more or less like a colonial maiden, but all the rest of the people who were waiting on the tables were waiters, and there was no mistaking them.

  “Did you know that waiters who serve at banquets have their own union?” Catherine Tritsch asked us. “If you have so many people, you have to have so many waiters. Union rules.”

  A man got up from his table and, taking up a small American flag, led a number of people halfway around the ballroom. Then he came back to his own table, and he and the men sitting with him tied their napkins around their heads as if they were pirates.

  “These people are upscale people,” said Catherine Tritsch. “High-income people. Very cosmopolitan. This is a successful meeting.”

  Among them, Catherine Tritsch and the two hundred and eighty other people, most of whom were hotel managers and their wives, ate and drank eighteen gallons of clam chowder, three hundred lobsters, three thousand clams, four hundred ears of corn, fifteen cases of wine, seven barrels of beer, and sixty watermelons.

  —September 14, 1981

  Birthday Party at an East Side Town House

  “Hello, I am so glad you could come,” said Gwendolyn, the assistant editor of a literary magazine, greeting some of the guests at her twenty-sixth-birthday party. As she said this, she kissed each of them on the cheek. There were well over a hundred guests at the party. They all knew Gwendolyn and said how glad they were to come.

  Now she stood in the middle of the room surrounded by these friends, who were momentarily and randomly grouped together. A young man joined the group.

  “Do you know Tommy?” Gwendolyn asked her friends. “We grew up in Virginia together. His father and my father went to all the same schools.”

  “Tommy,” said a friend standing beside her, a man named George.

  “Tommy,” murmured the others.

  “I am so honored that Victor came,” she said. “He does my hair. He is a wonderful man.”

  “Victor,” said George.

  “Victor,” murmured the others.

  “That tree is too large for this room,” said a man named Maurice, pointing to a plant that if it stood in a forest would be a mere sapling.

  “But isn’t this a beautiful room?” asked Gwendolyn.

  “I think you are beautiful,” said a man named Chris.

  “Natalia writes beautifully about food,” said Maurice.

  “Food,” said Tommy.

  “A drink,” said George.

  “Maurice has almost finished writing his book,” said Gwendolyn.

  “I am trying not to mention it,” said Maurice.

  “Have you received many presents?” asked Chris.

  “Yes, but I am not opening them until tomorrow,” said Gwendolyn.

  “I am giving you a book,” said Chris. “I am giving you a book full of pictures.”

  “Oh,” said Gwendolyn. “What kind of pictures?”

  “They are the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen,” said Chris. “I have been looking at these pictures for months and months now, day after day.”

  “Will I like them?” asked Gwendolyn.

  “Yes, I think so,” said Chris. “I look at these pictures and I am emptied out. I have nothing left inside once I have seen these pictures. I feel so much when I am looking at them. Lots and lots of sensation, and then I am drained. It’s as if I had been in Los Angeles. Sensation, as you know, is the tyranny of Los Angeles.”

  “A book of pictures,” said Gwendolyn.

  “A book of pictures,” murmured her friends.

  —May 10, 1982

  Foam and Brass

  Early one morning, we went up to the National Academy of Design, on Fifth Avenue, to view a number of objects, some of a utilitarian nature, some of an aesthetic nature, that were all made of something called Prime-Foam-X. Prime-Foam-X is in fact the clay-coated paper-and-foam backing used for mounting photographs. The clay-coated paper-and-foam backing used for mounting photographs was first put on the market by the Monsanto Company, which called it Fome-Cor. Its generic name is foam board. Almost everybody who uses a clay-coated paper-and-foam backing, however, calls it Fome-Cor, the way almost everybody who has a cold uses Kleenex, and not tissue. The makers of Prime-Foam-X may have thought it unfortunate that the Monsanto product has always been No. 1 in the foam-board market. In any case, they decided to have a contest. They invited people to make objects from their product.

  At the exhibit, we were met by a woman representative of the Prime-Foam-X company—the Primex Plastics Corporation—and she showed us around. We saw a skeleton of a dinosaur with its head lowered, as if the flesh had been stripped away while it fed. We saw something that was said to be a Relativity Chronolith and seemed to have something to do with the Mayan Indians. We saw Portrait of Miss Bowles, a print of a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a frame that was made from Prime-Foam-X but attempted to look like mahogany. We saw a large cutout of a man with a blue coat, gray trousers, and a yellow-and-gray tie; his special significance was never clear to us. We saw a game that was so new it had not been patented yet. We saw a chair, hand-carved in the Queen Anne style, but we were warned that it could not support a grownup human body. We saw a portable desk, labelled “Calligrapher’s Desk.” We saw a doll-sized round house, with unreal potted plants inside it and framed paintings on the walls. We saw a collapsible lamp. We saw a present-day sports car. We saw a sports car that was said to belong in the future.

  Our guide now said that perhaps we would like to see the helicopter, which was being housed in the church next door, it being too big for the Design building. She said, “You cannot imagine the remarkable versatility of this product. The astounding thing is that no one ever thought you could do all this with a piece of foam.” We walked over to the church, and saw something that looked like a helicopter in a highly imaginative school pageant. For one thing, the frame was made from the frame of an old wicker wheelchair—stripped of its wicker. Our guide pointed to the person who had made the helicopter. It was a man, and he wore black trousers and a black tunic covered with concave mirrors—an important part of the Polaroid SX-70 Land camera.

  At noon, we went down to “21,” where Phelps Dodge Industries was giving a lunch to introduce some expensive decorative household wares, all made out of brass. They are done in something called the Federal Period, and they are a wine cooler, a basket suitable for holding fruit, a bowl suitable for holding fruit, a tray, a compote dish, and a plate. Many of the guests looked at them, and many of the guests thought them beautiful. After the lunch, which many of the guests said was delicious, a man, an executive of Phelps Dodge Industries, made a speech. He said that people had thought his company audacious, impudent, and foolhardy to go into the consumer business. He mentioned someone who had been orphaned at age eleven and had apprenticed himself to a saddlemaker. He said that brass was a hot item. He said that the competition was foreign and its products were generally of a poor quality. He said that there was no real standard for brass. He said that there was little evidence of professional design in brass products. He said that eighty-five per cent of all brass products are purchased by women. He said that some people found brass too yellow. He said that his company was the No. 2 producer of copper in this country. He seemed to have no doubt that this new venture would be a big success.

  —July 12, 1982

  Knitting

  There is a store called the Country Store & Yarn Shop in the small town of Washington, Connecticut, where one can buy all sorts of materials and instruments used in handicrafts, and especially in knitting. It is perhaps the nicest store in the world, because it is
run and owned by perhaps one of the nicest women in the world—a woman named Beatrice Morse Davenport, or Bea to almost everybody who comes into the store. Mrs. Davenport, a gentle-looking, shy, grandmotherly woman, still has the gait of a girl who is afraid she’ll be judged too tall, and she peers at objects and people from behind her glasses, her head tilted to one side, in the odd, calm way of someone who makes things with her hands. Mrs. Davenport is quite accomplished in all the needlecrafts, but she is an exceptional knitter, and it is knitting problems, a wish for knitting instruction, and the purchasing of yarns and needles that bring most people to her store. She seems happy to help solve problems, gives instruction free of charge, and offers sound advice on the purchasing of yarns and needles. We visited her in her store the other day, and while she was correcting a mistake made in an enormous afghan by a friend of ours (some stitches dropped four rows down, Mrs. Davenport had told our friend, adding that to unravel the afghan, which was about four yards wide, would mean losing many hours of work) she said these things to us:

  “My mother taught me to knit when I was about nine years old. I used to knit all my dolls’ clothes. Then I picked up things here and there and I got to be better than my mother. I had to show her how to follow a pattern. I think I made myself a sweater when I was sixteen, and then I just stopped until my first child was coming. Well, you know, if you are going to have a baby you have to make a nice baby sweater. Somebody saw the sweater I made, and wanted one like it, and so I made another sweater, and then somebody at the New York Exchange for Woman’s Work saw it and asked me to knit for them. I knitted things for the Exchange for twelve years. I stopped because I had too many other orders to fill. By that time, I was knitting for designers in New York. I knitted for a woman named Jane von Schreiber. That was in the forties. Few people know who she is today, but in those days she was quite big. Margaret Sommerfeld is another person I knitted for. And somebody named Margaret Macy. I don’t remember if I ever saw her. They would just send me a sketch of whatever it was they wanted, and I would make it. I did all this at home while my children were growing up, because I wanted to be with them. When Walt, my son, was ready for college, I began selling yam. Then, when they were all off at college, I bought a store. My first store was a part of what’s now the Washington Food Market, here in Washington.

  “Right away, I started selling Irish yarn. I imported the yarns myself from Ireland, because the yarn companies hadn’t picked up on Irish yarns yet. People would buy the yarn, but then they would want a pattern to make the yarn into something, so I would just make up a pattern for them. I love to knit so much. If you really want to know, I started to knit for people because my children had all the sweaters they could wear, and by that time I just had to keep knitting, and so I did. The whole thing excites me so much. When I see a new yarn, I think, Oh, I know what should be done with that. It’s terrible to be so enthusiastic at my age, isn’t it? But it gives me so much satisfaction. I just got a letter from a woman in England telling me about a sweater I had made for her little sister years and years ago. Her sister wore the sweater, and then I guess it was put away, because the sister’s four children all wore it at one time or another, and now this woman’s son, a cousin of the four children, is wearing it. I had forgotten what it looked like, so she sent me a picture of the little boy wearing it. Now, that’s satisfying.”

  Mrs. Davenport studied the afghan, with all the stitches picked up and correctly in place, and then she looked up and smiled. “There,” she said.

  —July 12, 1982

  Notes and Comment

  A young woman writes:

  The carpenter is at my house replacing the frames and glass panes of some windows. She (it is a woman, a round, fair woman who looks more like a cook than like a carpenter, but she is a good carpenter, as I soon see) has around her strips of wood, panes of glass, a glass cutter, a large portable electric saw, nails, hammers, and something called a caulk gun. She measures, she saws, she cuts, she sighs: it is a much more complicated job than she at first thought, the house being a very old and crooked house. The work is taking place in a bedroom, and I sit on the edge of a bed all the time, watching her. There are many things for me to do around the house; I should also go out and run some errands. But I cannot leave the carpenter’s presence. Perhaps I will be able to assist in some way; perhaps she will say something to me.

  My father was a carpenter, and a cabinetmaker, too. In the world (and it was a small world: a hundred and eight square miles, a population of sixty thousand, no deep-water harbor, so large ships had to anchor way offshore), my father was the second-best carpenter and cabinetmaker. The best carpenter was Mr. Walters, to whom my father had been apprenticed as a boy and for whom he had worked when he was a young man. Mr. Walters had been dead for a long time, even before I was born, but he was still the best carpenter and cabinetmaker. My father was so devoted to this man that he did everything just the way Mr. Walters would have done it. If, for instance, in 1955 you asked my father to build you a house and make you some simple chair to sit on in it, he would build you a house and make you a chair exactly like the house and the chair Mr. Walters would have built in 1915.

  My father left our house for work every weekday morning at seven o‘clock, by the striking of the Anglican church bell. If it was his first day on a new job, one of his apprentices would come by a little before seven o’clock to pick up my father’s toolbox. If it was one of the older apprentices, he could walk along with my father, and they might talk. If it was one of the younger boys, he would have to walk a few steps behind. At around four o’clock in the afternoon, my father returned home. If he saw me then, he would say, “Well, we got everything in place today.” And I would say, in reply, “Oh, sir, that’s very good.” After that, he would disappear into his shop, where he made furniture.

  In my father’s shop, everything was some shade of brown. First, there was the color of his skin; and he wore khaki trousers and khaki shirts, brown shoes, and a brown felt hat. He smoked cigarettes (Lucky Strikes) one after another, and he smoked so much that the thumb and the index and middle fingers of his right hand were stained brown. His hands were stained another shade of brown from handling stained wood, wood oils, and glues. Everything was brown, that is, except the red, flat carpenter’s pencil (such an unusual, distinctive shape for a pencil, I thought, and I was sadly disappointed when I discovered that it was not a good writing pencil) that he carried perched always behind his right ear. Sometimes when I went to watch him work, he would tell me little things about himself when he was a young man. He would talk about himself as if he were someone he used to know very well, someone he thought really an admirable person, someone he would like very much. Mostly, they were stories about himself as a cricketer. He never told me that he was good at playing cricket; I already knew that.

  My father made very beautiful furniture. Everybody said so—especially my mother, who would then point out that unfortunately none of this furniture was in our own house. I think almost every time she saw my father make something she would say to him that it would be nice to have one like that, and he would then promise to make another one, for her specially. But he never did. Finally, one day, he told her that the reason he was reluctant to make us up lots of furniture was that the furniture in Mrs. Walters’ house (the widow of the man to whom he had been apprenticed) was really his: that he had made it up for himself when he was a very young man; that he had lent it to Mrs. Walters after her husband died and she had moved into a smaller house, the house she still lived in; that he had always meant to ask for it back one day; and that he would ask her for it soon. He never, of course, asked for the furniture—I don’t think he could bring himself to. My mother could not believe that we were never to have that beautiful furniture; that at Christmastime, when our friends stopped by to have a glass of rum, if too many of them came by at once some of them would always have to sit on the floor. My father would visit Mrs. Walters quite often, and every once in a while my mo
ther would go along with him. Afterward, she would always be furious that she had had to leave what she began calling “my furniture” behind, and she would have a big row with herself, for my father never quarrelled with anyone—not even his wife. Once, my father took me with him on one of the visits. I got a good look at the furniture, and I began to understand my mother’s point of view. There was a dining table with six matching cane-bottomed chairs (my father did all his own caning); there was a little round table the edge of which was scalloped; there was a table with fancy decorative carvings on its sides and, above it, a mirror in a frame with decorative carvings that matched the ones on the table; and there was a sofa, a cabinet with delicate woodworking on the glass front, and two Morris chairs. (At the time, I did not know—nor, for that matter, do I think anyone else knew—that there was someone named Morris who had made chairs of which these two were replicas.) We had nothing like any of this in our house.

  Once, my father got sick, and the doctor said that it was his heart, and gave him some medicine and told him to stay home and rest. My mother, looking up heart diseases in one of her numerous medical books, said that the sickness was from all the cigarettes he smoked. At the same time, I took sick with a case of hookworm, and my mother, looking up hookworm in one of her numerous medical books, said that it was because I had walked around barefoot behind her back, and it was true that I did that. (I was disappointed when it was discovered that I had hookworm, and not beriberi. I would have liked to say to my friends when they asked why I wasn’t in school, “Oh, I have beriberi.”) Since my father couldn’t go to work and I couldn’t go to school, we spent all day together. In the mornings, I would go and lie with him in my parents’ bed. We would lie on our backs, our hands clasped behind our necks (me imitating him), and our feet up on the windowsill in the sun. We would lie there without saying a word to each other, the only sound being pttt, pttt from my father as he forced small pieces of tobacco from his mouth. He continued to smoke, though not as much as before. At midmorning, my mother would come in to look at us. As soon as she came into the room, she would always ask us to take our feet off the windowsill, and we would do it right away, but as soon as she left we would put them back. When she came, she would bring with her little things to eat. Sometimes it was barley water and a special porridge, made from seaweed; sometimes it was a beaten egg-yolks-and-milk drink, sweetened with powdered sugar; sometimes it was a custard of some kind. Whatever it was, she would say that it would help to build us up. Before she left, she would kiss us on our foreheads and say that we were her two invalids, the big one and the little one. In the afternoons, after our lunch, my father and I would go off to look for a wild elderberry bush and pick elderberries. He was sure that a draught prepared from the elderberries would make his heart get better faster than the medicine the doctor had prescribed. In fact, I think he took the medicine the doctor gave him only because he thought my mother might perhaps die herself if he didn’t. After we had picked the elderberries, we would go and sit in the Botanical Gardens under a rubber tree. Then he would tell me stories about his own father. He had not known his father very well at all, since his father was always going off somewhere—usually somewhere in South America—to work, but he never said anything that showed he found his father at fault. Once, he said, his father had taken a boat to Panama to build the Panama Canal. The boat got caught in a storm and sank. His father was in the sea for eleven days, just barely hanging on to a raft. He was rescued by a passing ship, which took him on to Panama, where he built the Panama Canal. For a long time, I thought that my father’s father had built the Panama Canal single-handed except perhaps with the help of one or two people, the way my father himself built things single-handed except with the help of one or two people.