Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

by Lydia Davis

  Q.

  A. No, not really. I would have liked to be on a jury. I would have been very interested. But at the same time I had a lot of work I was supposed to be doing at home.

  Q.

  A. Yes, that was all. I didn’t have to do anything more. And I won’t be eligible again for two years.

  Q.

  A. Yes!

  A Double Negative

  At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.

  The Old Dictionary

  I have an old dictionary, about one hundred and twenty years old, that I need to use for a particular piece of work I’m doing this year. Its pages are brownish in the margins and brittle, and very large. I risk tearing them when I turn them. When I open the dictionary I also risk tearing the spine, which is already split more than halfway up. I have to decide, each time I think of consulting it, whether it is worth damaging the book further in order to look up a particular word. Since I need to use it for this work, I know I will damage it, if not today, then tomorrow, and that by the time I am done with this work it will be in poorer condition than it was when I started, if not completely ruined. When I took it off the shelf today, though, I realized that I treat it with a good deal more care than I treat my young son. Each time I handle it, I take the greatest care not to harm it: my primary concern is not to harm it. What struck me today was that even though my son should be more important to me than my old dictionary, I can’t say that each time I deal with my son, my primary concern is not to harm him. My primary concern is almost always something else, for instance to find out what his homework is, or to get supper on the table, or to finish a phone conversation. If he gets harmed in the process, that doesn’t seem to matter to me as much as getting the thing done, whatever it is. Why don’t I treat my son at least as well as the old dictionary? Maybe it is because the dictionary is so obviously fragile. When a corner of a page snaps off, it is unmistakable. My son does not look fragile, bending over a game or manhandling the dog. Certainly his body is strong and flexible, and is not easily harmed by me. I have bruised his body and then it has healed. Sometimes it is obvious to me when I have hurt his feelings, but it is harder to see how badly they have been hurt, and they seem to mend. It is hard to see if they mend completely or are forever slightly damaged. When the dictionary is hurt, it can’t be mended. Maybe I treat the dictionary better because it makes no demands on me, and doesn’t fight back. Maybe I am kinder to things that don’t seem to react to me. But in fact my house plants do not seem to react much and yet I don’t treat them very well. The plants make one or two demands. Their demand for light has already been satisfied by where I put them. Their second demand is for water. I water them but not regularly. Some of them don’t grow very well because of that and some of them die. Most of them are strange-looking rather than nice-looking. Some of them were nice-looking when I bought them but are strange-looking now because I haven’t taken very good care of them. Most of them are in pots that are the same ugly plastic pots they came in. I don’t actually like them very much. Is there any other reason to like a houseplant, if it is not nice-looking? Am I kinder to something that is nice-looking? But I could treat a plant well even if I didn’t like its looks. I should be able to treat my son well when he is not looking good and even when he is not acting very nice. I treat the dog better than the plants, even though he is more active and more demanding. It is simple to give him food and water. I take him for walks, though not often enough. I have also sometimes slapped his nose, though the vet told me never to hit him anywhere near the head, or maybe he said anywhere at all. I am only sure I am not neglecting the dog when he is asleep. Maybe I am kinder to things that are not alive. Or rather if they are not alive there is no question of kindness. It does not hurt them if I don’t pay attention to them, and that is a great relief. It is such a relief it is even a pleasure. The only change they show is that they gather dust. The dust won’t really hurt them. I can even get someone else to dust them. My son gets dirty, and I can’t clean him, and I can’t pay someone to clean him. It is hard to keep him clean, and even complicated trying to feed him. He doesn’t sleep enough, partly because I try so hard to get him to sleep. The plants need two things, or maybe three. The dog needs five or six things. It is very clear how many things I am giving him and how many I am not, therefore how well I’m taking care of him. My son needs many other things besides what he needs for his physical care, and these things multiply or change constantly. They can change right in the middle of a sentence. Though I often know, I do not always know just what he needs. Even when I know, I am not always able to give it to him. Many times each day I do not give him what he needs. Some of what I do for the old dictionary, though not all, I could do for my son. For instance, I handle it slowly, deliberately, and gently. I consider its age. I treat it with respect. I stop and think before I use it. I know its limitations. I do not encourage it to go farther than it can go (for instance to lie open flat on the table). I leave it alone a good deal of the time.

  Honoring the Subjunctive

  It invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supercede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just.

  How Difficult

  For years my mother said I was selfish, careless, irresponsible, etc. She was often annoyed. If I argued, she held her hands over her ears. She did what she could to change me but for years I did not change, or if I changed, I could not be sure I had, because a moment never came when my mother said, “You are no longer selfish, careless, irresponsible, etc.” Now I’m the one who says to myself, “Why can’t you think of others first, why don’t you pay attention to what you’re doing, why don’t you remember what has to be done?” I am annoyed. I sympathize with my mother. How difficult I am! But I can’t say this to her, because at the same time that I want to say it, I am also here on the phone coming between us, listening and prepared to defend myself.

  Losing Memory

  You ask me about Edith Wharton.

  Well, the name is very familiar.

  Letter to a Funeral Parlor

  Dear Sir,

  I am writing to you to object to the word cremains, which was used by your representative when he met with my mother and me two days after my father’s death.

  We had no objection to your representative, personally, who was respectful and friendly and dealt with us in a sensitive way. He did not try to sell us an expensive urn, for instance.

  What startled and disturbed us was the word cremains. You in the business must have invented this word and you are used to it. We the public do not hear it very often. We don’t lose a close friend or a family member very many times in our life, and years pass in between, if we are lucky. Even less often do we have to discuss what is to be done with a family member or close friend after their death.

  We noticed that before the death of my father you and your representative used the words loved one to refer to him. That was comfortable for us, even if the ways in which we loved him were complicated.

  Then we were sitting there in our chairs in the living room trying not to weep in front of your representative, who was opposite us on the sofa, and we were very tired first from sitting up with my father, and then from worrying about whether he was comfortable as he was dying, and then from worrying about where he might be now that he was dead, and your representative referred to him as “the cremains.”

  At first we did not even know what he meant. Then, when we realized, we were frankly upset. Cremains sounds like something invented as a milk substitute in coffee, like Cremora, or Coffee-mate. Or it sounds like some kind of a chipped beef dish.

  As one who works with words for a living, I must say that any invented word, like Porta-potty or Pooper-scooper, has a cheerful or even jovial ring to it that I don’t think you really intended when you invented the word cremains. In fact, my father himself, who was a professor of
English and is now being called the cremains, would have pointed out to you the alliteration in Porta Potti and the rhyme in Pooper-scooper. Then he would have told you that cremains falls into the same category as brunch and is known as a portmanteau word.

  There is nothing wrong with inventing words, especially in a business. But a grieving family is not prepared for this one. We are not even used to our loved one being gone. You could very well continue to employ the term ashes. We are used to it from the Bible, and are even comforted by it. We would not misunderstand. We would know that these ashes are not like the ashes in a fireplace.

  Yours sincerely.

  Thyroid Diary

  Tonight we are going to a party to celebrate my dentist’s wife’s graduation from college. All these years, while the dentist has been working on my teeth, his wife has been earning credits at the college, just a few at a time. Every semester, along with her other courses, she has been studying painting with my husband, who teaches painting and drawing at the college. She has been studying with him in a tutorial situation. She is an enthusiastic flower gardener and paints mostly flowers. She has written texts about her flower gardens, to go with her paintings. My husband told me that a flower painting of hers that was hanging in the Art Building at commencement time was stolen—by a student, he thought, or a student’s parents.

  I didn’t know she was actually earning a degree until we received the invitation to this party to be given by her friend, who is a faculty secretary at the college. A few days after the invitation arrived, we received another one from the same woman, but for a different date. I was sure there had been a mistake. But in fact she is simply giving two parties, and we are invited to both.

  Now I have to wonder why my serious and extensive dental work ended—which it did—just a couple of months before the dentist’s wife’s graduation. When the dentist said I didn’t need any further work, I thought I still had at least two more crowns to go. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t had more work to be done on my teeth.

  I have always been puzzled, anyway, by the economics of the thing, because I would pay the dentist, and he would presumably give his wife the money for her courses at the college, she would pay the college, the college would pay my husband a separate fee for her tutorials, and then my husband would give me money for the dentist, I would pay the dentist, the dentist would give money to his wife, and so it would continue. I thought that if no one paid anyone, it would work out just the same, but that didn’t seem quite right, either.

  This spring the dentist, who is a gardener like his wife, but grows vegetables and grapes, and has a small apple orchard, made the transactions a little more complicated by proposing to my husband that they share certain shipments of bedding plants which could be bought more economically in large quantities. He said they might share two varieties of tomatoes as well as some onions and peppers. My husband thought it over and then agreed. In general he is wary of the obligations of any sort of partnership, but he is also interested in saving money, and in this case he appreciated the gesture of goodwill and trust.

  The party we are going to tonight will be at the home of the faculty secretary in a small town on the other side of the river. But as soon as I say that, I realize I have made a mistake. This is not the party in honor of the dentist’s wife, but the other one. This one is for the faculty secretary’s nephew, who is going off on a long sea voyage. After many years of living sometimes on land and sometimes on the water, he has sold his house and will be living on his sailboat, though he still has a girlfriend here on land. I should have remembered this, because my husband and I were just discussing at lunch what to give him as a going-away present. We were considering three choices: a copy of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, or a book that my husband saw about tying knots, or a bottle of wine. My husband also suggested a bottle of good brandy, but I thought that would only encourage our friend to drink alone on his boat.

  If I’m confused about all this, it may be because of my underactive thyroid. Slow thinking is one symptom of an underactive thyroid, but I can’t tell if I’m thinking more slowly than I used to. Since my brain is the only thing I have for observing how I am thinking, I can’t be truly objective. If it is slow, it will not necessarily know that it’s slow, since it will be moving at a rate that seems appropriate to it.

  And then, there have always been days when my mind does not make connections very fast. There are always days when my mind is cloudy, or I forget things, or I feel as if I am in a different town or a different house—that something around me or about me is not normal.

  When the doctor was explaining my condition to me, I took notes. I had to stop her once or twice and ask her to repeat something so that I could write it down. I told her it helped me to remember. She said I would not have to take notes if my thyroid were more active. That made me a little angry, but I did not try to defend myself. I did not answer her that for one thing, the self-help medical books always tell you to take notes during a meeting with a doctor, and for another I have a habit of taking notes anyway, especially when I am on the telephone, and even during conversations when it is not at all necessary, when the information I am hearing is something that does not have to be remembered. I take notes on things I have just said to someone else. I write down words I have just used myself, like nice guy or responsible. I write down names of people in my family, and my own telephone number.

  I did notice, one evening when I was playing a board game with my family, that over and over again I could not remember whose turn it was or see where my piece was on the board. This could have been due to my underactive thyroid.

  I thought I wasn’t worried about my thyroid, because I believed I could correct whatever problem there was with a strategy involving diet. But maybe I am worried after all, because for the past week, ever since my doctor called me, I haven’t been sleeping well. My trouble sleeping, though, may be due to the underactive thyroid.

  My doctor is not actually a doctor, as my husband is quick to say: she’s only a physician’s assistant. He says this as though she may not know what she’s talking about. He says this in my defense, as though to protect me from her or from my condition. But I think she’s careful and competent, and I believe her. Now I’m eating only vegetables for dinner, preparing to begin my dietary strategy. I truly believe the body can cure itself of whatever is wrong with it, given the right diet and other treatments. I am only waiting for some more tests, which I will have this week, before I make a plan for my care. I’m sure that whatever diet I choose, I should not drink any alcohol, but I have already planned to make an exception for the party tonight.

  My physician’s assistant told me the thyroid gland controls every part of the body—not only the brain but also the heart, the digestion, the metabolism, the circulation, and other things I may be forgetting. In the case of a significantly underactive thyroid, everything slows down. I have a slow heartbeat, slow digestion, possibly slow thinking, a low temperature, cold hands and feet. Sometimes my heart rate goes down to fifty or below. I never knew what a thyroid gland did. Now I find out it is so important that if it were allowed to continue functioning poorly like this, I would eventually die—die early, I mean. I have never associated myself with such an unexpected part of the body as the thyroid, so it feels as though my body is suddenly strange to me, or I am strange to myself.

  Now I have learned more about what is wrong with me, and I do not think the body can always cure itself of whatever is wrong with it. Or rather, I still believe this as a general principle, but I don’t think my body can cure itself in this case, because no one seems to know enough about this particular disease, which is an auto-immune disease. It is called Hashimoto’s disease, though my husband keeps calling it Kurasawa’s, or Nagasaki’s.

  By now I have also been to the first party, given for our sailor friend, as well as the second party, given for our dentist’s wife. The parties were very different even though they were at the same hous
e. In the perennial beds, different flowers were in bloom. The first party was informal, as was appropriate for a going-away party for a sailor. Neighbors wearing casual clothes came out onto the lawn from shortcuts through the woods. At the second, there were trays of catered hors d’oeuvres and a uniformed serving woman. At that party I learned that not one, but two, of the dentist’s wife’s paintings had been stolen at commencement time. I learned that the paintings were much smaller than I had thought. One from the same series was hanging on the wall in the faculty secretary’s house. It was small enough to put in your pocket or your purse. The dentist was sitting in a wicker chair on the screened porch. I did not find it strange to see him there instead of in his office, but I also couldn’t smile at him socially in quite the same way I would at anyone else, since he knows my teeth so well, particularly my upper left incisor.

  A corkscrew willow grows by a tiny stream in the front yard of the faculty secretary’s house. At the first party, she cut a shoot of the corkscrew willow for me to take home and plant. I forgot to take it. From the second, I took several more shoots, but at home I put them in a bucket of water in the garage and forgot them for a few days. I then offered them to a friend, but forgot to give them to her, and the water in the bucket evaporated and they withered.

  I have also been up to see a specialist in Albany several times, more often than was necessary, my husband believes. My husband thinks the specialist could simply read the numbers and look at the results of the blood tests, and that like other doctors he schedules extra office visits to make more money. But a friend of mine said, “With gland problems, they like to look at you.” I do not remember which friend it was.