Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

by Lydia Davis

  And yet this specialist seemed to avoid looking at me. At least he avoided it when he first walked into the room—he looked down at my file instead. He did eventually look at me, with his head cocked a little to one side and a slight smile on his face that seemed to express a private amusement that was not completely unfriendly. But he looked at me only when he was ready to deliver his opinion, which he had already formed by reading the numbers in my file.

  Meanwhile, my husband has been having trouble with his tomato plants. The dentist gave him four or five healthy, well-grown plants, neatly potted in peat pots, and they are doing well. In return, my husband is supposed to give him four or five of another variety. But most of these arrived in the mail half dead. Some died, two are doing fairly well, and the rest are not dead, but are not growing, either, at least not visibly. My husband does not want to give away the only two that are thriving. He also does not want to give the dentist spindly and sickly plants. He is waiting, time is passing, but the plants that were not growing well are not growing any better.

  I have been trying to see if I am thinking more slowly than before. In my translation work, for instance, I see that I sometimes try to find an equivalent in English before I really understand the French. Then I realize that I don’t understand the French, even after trying several times, and I cast my eye rather listlessly here and there within the paragraph hoping the meaning of it will fall into place by itself, which it sometimes does. But today it does not, and then my mind wanders. I go back to work on it, look in the dictionary again, reading every word of a very long entry, but there’s nothing in the dictionary that helps me. I want to put something down, anything at all, just to mark the place so that I can go on translating and come back to the problem later. I need to put down something noticeably wrong, so that later I will see that the spot needs work, but everything I think of is so poor that it is embarrassing. I don’t know why I should be embarrassed, if there is no one to see it, but I am embarrassed and will not go on until I put down something decent, though wrong. At least, this morning, as I was studying the dictionary carefully in order to see if I really wanted to use the word, I learned more about embarrassment and its earlier, concrete meaning of encumbrance or obstruction.

  But then, even though I had been awake since six o’clock and had been working for an hour already, someone who didn’t know me, in fact someone from the doctor’s office, said to me on the phone, “Sounds like you’re not up yet. Can you call me back when you are?” I was not insulted, but I was a little worried. I apparently sounded very slow on the phone, even if I did not think I was very slow. Now, if I do this whole translation, which is an important job, with my mind not working very clearly, but not knowing that my mind isn’t working very clearly, then the translation may not be very good—though I may not know that. And if it isn’t very good—that would really be unfortunate, since some of my future income may depend on it.

  Actually, what the receptionist or nurse took to be slowness may be something else, an attitude I now have that is more casual toward health-care professionals. I used to be very respectful of them and slightly intimidated. Now I have noticed that I want to make fun of the men and joke with the women, or I should say, joke with both men and women, but rather more aggressively with the men.

  I first noticed this a few years ago with my oral surgeon. I liked him and respected him, but I noticed after a while that I would not deal in a straightforward, courteous way with him, but had to make some kind of a joke. That shocked me, because all my life I have been so respectful of health-care professionals, or have at least behaved with respect, whatever I thought of them privately. The jokes just popped out as though someone else had taken over for a moment. Once, for instance, I saw a skull in his office and made what was no doubt the obvious joke—that it must be a former patient. He was startled, but did not seem to mind. Another time, when he had just hurt me badly by giving me a long injection in my gum, I bit down hard on his index finger. That was not a joke, and I did not do it on purpose. His two female assistants were amazed but also delighted. Although he frowned in pain and shook his finger in the air, the doctor took it very well and said it happened from time to time, that it was actually a reflex. I slightly antagonized my present doctor, or physician’s assistant, by saying that I did not like taking medicine because I did not like being dependent on any drug. What if I were lost in a jungle without my thyroid medicine? I asked her, and it is true that I always believe that some day I may be lost in a jungle, even though we do not call them jungles anymore, and we are losing them anyway, so that the word jungle is becoming just an idea. She said I would get along well enough without it until I could find my way out of the jungle.

  There was a small emergency situation quite recently, though, in which I was not tempted to make fun of the doctor. He was a young doctor, I admired his decisiveness and his technical skill, and I was also quiet because of my pain. I had bruised my finger badly, and what he had to do was to release some of the pressure under the nail. He did this in what he said was the best way, but also the old-fashioned way, using nothing but a candle and a large paper clip.

  The receptionist or nurse this morning thought I wasn’t “up” yet because I didn’t know the exact dose or the full name of my thyroid medicine. But I was careless about that information because of my skeptical attitude toward the health-care profession and because I do not try to conceal that attitude. I did not mean to be disrespectful to her in particular. But after she said this, I noticed two other possible signs of poor functioning: a real estate dealer I called on the phone later in the morning thought at first that I was another real estate dealer. I asked her why she thought this. She had trouble answering, but I guessed that it might have been my lack of enthusiasm, or a coldness in my tone of voice. Then, still later, when I was talking to my husband on the telephone, I was so confusing, contradictory, and long-winded that he compared me to a legal brief he was reading. This document is fifty pages long and concerns a possible class action against an insurance company for misrepresentation.

  After wondering for some weeks what to do about the tomato plants, my husband told me he was going to explain to the dentist that none of the plants was good enough to give him, though that is not strictly true. Then, just hours later, he told me that he had changed his mind. He was going to patch the soaker hose and give the plants a little more time.

  But on the other hand, it occurs to me that maybe my brain is working well enough but simply more slowly than usual. Maybe the quality of my work will be good but I will take longer than usual to make it good. Or maybe the dose of thyroid supplement I’m taking, which has been increased once without much effect, will be increased to the proper level soon enough so that by the time I reach the final draft of this translation I will be thinking sharply and quickly again. Then I wonder if I will think even better than before this whole condition began, because my brain will have been trying so hard in the meantime, without adequate support from my thyroid, that maybe it will have developed new cells. But I don’t know enough about the brain’s anatomy to know if that is possible.

  Or maybe some of the time I go ahead quickly enough but without producing very high quality work, while some of the time I go ahead slowly and produce better quality work, so that it is a choice: either go slowly and do good work, or go quickly and do poor work. But then, those have always been the two options in translation, I see, so I should say that now the choice is: go even more slowly than before and do adequately good work, or go more quickly and do really poor work.

  But with any luck, the dosage will gradually be raised high enough so that in a couple of months I will be able to do work that is both quick and adequately good or quite good. The dosage can’t be raised too abruptly or my heart will suffer.

  I had thought at first, If my brain is working this well with inadequate amounts of thyroid hormone, how well my brain will work with the proper amounts of thyroid hormone! But then I began to distrust the
thought, because what seemed like good working of the brain seemed good to that very same brain that was lacking the proper dose of hormone, and that brain could be quite mistaken.

  Another question I had recently was this: is the rather pessimistic turn that my thoughts have taken these days due to the state of the world, which is bad and which gets worse more quickly than one can hope to save it, so that I become quite scared? Or is it due simply to the low level of my thyroid hormone, which would mean that maybe the world is not really in such a frightening state and seems that way only to me? So that I could say to myself: Remember your low thyroid hormone level and have faith that the world will be all right?

  What an insult to the mind, I think then, that the chemicals of the body and nothing else are causing my thoughts, which I take so seriously, to move in a certain direction. What an insult to the amazing brain that such a simple thing as a level of chemicals should point it in a certain direction. Then I think, No, it’s not an insult, I can think of it not as an insult, but as part of another fascinating system. I can say, I would prefer to see it as part of a single, interesting system. Then I think, And, after all, it is this amazing brain that, in thinking this, is being so magnanimous to the dumb body. Though of course maybe it is the chemicals of the dumb body that are permitting the amazing brain to be magnanimous.

  Now I have been to the dentist again for a cleaning and checkup, and he has found a large cracked filling in a tooth that he said should really have a crown or a cap. He said he had predicted this years ago. But when I objected to more major work, and asked for a postponement, he consented to treat it with a bonded filling that might or might not last for a long time. I was a little surprised that he agreed to this. I wondered if he was losing his enthusiasm, or losing the conviction—which all my dentists seem to have had—that all work on my teeth should be as extreme and as complete as possible. I also noticed that he was curiously silent about tomatoes, saying nothing, either, about the other vegetables in his garden, or about his harvests. We talked instead about crowded holiday spots and the westward expansion of the United States during the nineteenth century. His grandfather had actually lived in the days of the westward expansion and used to talk to him about it. He said it was surprising how recent that time was.

  Our talk extended out into the reception area while I paid my bill and took a pencil from the box of gift pencils. Considering the rapid population growth, he said, he did not want to come back after he died. I agreed that I would not want to come back either, at least not as a person, adding the qualification, which I believe, that if we have to come back we may be safer coming back as cockroaches. The receptionist and dental hygienist, who were listening, looked surprised at this.

  Now that the fall semester has begun, the woman who gave both parties is back at work at the college. Nearly every day, I read notices that she sends out to all the faculty. She has a very sharp and funny mind, a good education, and an interesting background, but her notices are deliberately neutral in tone and strictly practical. Some are about empty cardboard boxes free for the taking, some about stray cats on the campus, and a great many about misuse of the Xerox machines. Only now and then can I detect from something she says about a page of sonnets left in her office, or from her rhetorically balanced sentences, or from her use of the word criterion, how sharp she is.

  Since the dentist’s wife now has her degree, she is no longer studying with my husband, but I do not remember what she is doing, though I was told, probably by my husband.

  We have been eating the tomatoes from our garden, though the harvest is not as good as it has been in other years. A woodchuck has dug a hole down under the fence and up among the tomato plants and has been eating the tomatoes as they ripen. My husband puts heavy stones in the hole, but during the night the woodchuck moves them.

  I thought this was the end of it, that I would hear no more about the dentist and the results of the season’s planting. I thought there was a slight embarrassment all around. But last week my husband came home from his three-month cleaning with a bag of onions and told me that the issue had been tacitly resolved, that he and the dentist had talked about the long dry spells coming at the wrong times and how the summer had been a poor one for tomatoes. Even the dentist’s plants had not done well. And yesterday, during the insertion of my bonded filling, the dentist told me how he makes grape jelly. I am relieved that there are apparently no hard feelings. The dentist’s onions are pretty, small and fresh. I will want to think of some way of preparing them so that they will be particularly noticeable as we eat them.

  My heart seems to be beating a little faster now. If it is true that I have been thinking more slowly, I have still been able to learn new things and remember them, in the past few months. I forget what we actually gave to our sailor friend, and there are other things I know I have forgotten, and still others that I must have forgotten, but I have learned the history of the word embarrassment and many other word histories, I have been introduced to the corkscrew willow, I have learned the term bonded filling, and many other new definitions from the dictionaries, for instance that the verb flense means to cut up a whale, and that the adjective next is the superlative of nigh. I have learned two new terms for familiar things: in music, the Alberti bass, and in grammar, the Oxford comma. I have had new thoughts about the westward expansion of the United States. I have heard the expression dead soldiers twice in two days and learned that it means empty bottles. Maybe it also means anything that is no more use to anyone, since I first heard it from a woman at a plant nursery who was looking through a bin of gourds and tossing out the rotten ones. I learned from the dentist that if I make grape jelly I should heat the sugar in the oven before adding it to the grape juice. I have learned more about the Kennedy family and particularly Edward Kennedy from a magazine in the dentist’s office. I had no trouble, after a few minutes, recognizing Dvoák’s “New World Symphony” on the radio while I was having my bonded filling put in. After reading the introduction again, having read it years ago and forgotten what I learned from it, I have learned yet again how Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast came to be written, that when Dana was a student at Harvard he fell ill and could not continue his studies, went to sea to recover his health, and subsequently wrote about his experiences, so that it is the book of a young man, whereas I had thought of it as the book of an older man just because it has been a classic for so many decades. What I don’t know yet is why I see it so often in secondhand bookstores and at library sales.

  Information from the North Concerning the Ice:

  Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals.

  Murder in Bohemia

  In the city of Frydlant in Bohemia where all the people are anyway pale as ghosts and dressed in dark winter clothes, an old woman was unable any longer to bear the inevitable falling of her life into destitution and disgrace, and went mad and murdered out of pity her husband, her two sons, and her daughter, out of anger her neighbors on one side and her neighbors across the street, who had scorned her family, out of revenge the grocer from whom she had had to beg for credit, and the pawnbroker, and two moneylenders, then a streetcar conductor whom she did not know, and finally—rushing with her long knife into the Town Hall—the young mayor and one of his councilmen as they sat puzzling over an amendment.

  Happy Memories

  I imagine that when I am old, I will be alone, and in pain, and my eyes will be too weak to read. I am afraid of those long days. I like my days to be happy. I try to think what would be a happy way to spend those difficult days. It may be that the radio will be enough to fill those days. An old person has her radio, I have heard it said. And I have heard it said that in addition to her radio, she has her happy memories. When her pain is not too bad, she can go over her happy memories and be comforted. But you must have happy memories. What bothers me is that I’m not sure how many happy memories I will have. I am not even sure just what makes a happy memory, the kind
that will both comfort me and give me pleasure when I can’t do anything else. Just because I enjoy something now does not mean that it will make a happy memory. In fact, I know that many of the things I enjoy now will not make good happy memories later. I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do? Another thing I enjoy is eating candy by myself while I read a book in the evening, but I don’t think that will make a good happy memory either. I like to play the piano, I like to look at the plants that come up in the yard beginning in March, I enjoy walking with my dog, and looking down into his face at his good eye and his bad eye, I like to see the sky in the late afternoon, especially in November, I like petting my cats, hearing their cries, and holding them. But I suspect that the memory of my pets will not be enough, either, even if I love them. There are things that make me laugh, but often they are grim things, and they will not make a good happy memory either, unless I share them with someone else. Then it is not the amusement but the sharing of it that makes the happy memory. It seems as though a happy memory has to involve other people. I think of all the different people. I think of the good encounters with people. Most of the people I talk to on the telephone are friendly, even when I have called a wrong number. I have a happy memory of stopping my car by the side of the road to talk to a woman about her garden. I talk to the people who work in the post office and the drugstore, and I used to talk to the people at the bank before they put an automated teller machine in the lobby. When a man came to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, we talked about the history of this town. I enjoy my conversations with the librarian down the street. I enjoy the friendly messages I receive from bookstores selling secondhand books. But I don’t think any of these encounters will make a memory that will comfort me when I am old. Maybe a happy memory can’t involve people who were only strangers or casual friends. You can’t be left alone, in your old age and pain, with memories that include only people who have forgotten you. The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories. A lively dinner party does not make a good happy memory if no one there cared very much for any of the others. I think of some of the good or meaningful times I have had with the people close to me, to see if they would make good happy memories. Meeting a friend at a railway station on a sunny day seems to have made a good happy memory, even though later we talked about some difficult things, like starvation and dehydration. There were walks in the woods with friends looking for mushrooms that may make happy memories. There have been a few times of gardening together as a family that may make a good happy memory. Working together at some arduous cooking one evening is a happy memory so far. There was a good trip out to a department store. Sitting by the bedside of someone who was dying may actually make a good happy memory. My mother and I once carried a piece of coal on a train to Newcastle together. My mother and I once played cards with some longshoremen on a snowy morning waiting for a ship to come in. There was a time when I lived in a foreign city and returned again and again to a certain botanical garden to look at a certain Cedar of Lebanon, and that is a happy memory, even though I was alone. My neighbor across the street once brought a plate of cake to the back door during a time of mourning. But I can see that if some day she and I were to become estranged, that would spoil the happy memory. I see that happy memories can be erased. A happy memory can be erased if you do the same thing on another day and you are not happy, for instance if on another day you garden or cook together with bad feeling. I can see that an experience does not make a happy memory if it started out well but ended badly. There is no happy memory if there was something nice about an experience but also some problem, if two of you enjoyed an outing but the third was sitting at home angry because you were so late returning. You have to make sure, somehow, that nothing spoils the thing while it is happening, and then that no later experience erases it. I could have happy memories. I can see that the things I do with another person, and with a feeling of warmth toward that person, and with a person who will want to have me in his or her happy memory may make a good happy memory, while the things I do alone and especially with a feeling of ambition, or pride, or power, even if they are good in themselves, will not make a good happy memory. It is all right to have candy and enjoy it, but I should remember that the memory of candy will not be a happy one. If I am playing a board game with people close to me and we are happy, I must be sure we don’t quarrel before the end of it. I must be sure that at some later time we don’t play another board game that is unhappy. I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often. I should add them up, now and then: what are my happy memories so far?