by Lydia Davis
I still imagine marrying a cowboy, though less often, and the dream has changed a little. I’m so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me, though he would object strongly to any move in the direction of the West, which he dislikes. So if we went, it would not be as it was in my daydream a few years ago, with me cooking plain food or helping the cowboy with a difficult calf. It would end, or begin, with my husband and me standing awkwardly there in front of the ranch house, waiting while the cowboy prepared our rooms.
The Cedar Trees
When our women had all turned into cedar trees they would group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind. At first, with our wives gone, our spirits rose and we all thought the sound was beautiful. But then we ceased to be aware of it, grew uneasy, and quarreled more often among ourselves.
That was during the year of high winds. Never before had such tumult raged in our village. Sparrows could not fly, but swerved and dropped into calm corners; clay tiles tumbled from the roofs and shattered on the pavement. Shrubbery whipped our low windows. Night after night we drank insanely and fell asleep in one another’s arms.
When spring came, the winds died down and the sun was bright. At evening, long shadows fell across our floors, and only the glint of a knife blade could survive the darkness. And the darkness fell across our spirits, too. We no longer had a kind word for anyone. We went to our fields grudgingly. Silently we stared at the strangers who came to see our fountain and our church: we leaned against the lip of the fountain, our boots crossed, our maimed dogs shying away from us.
Then the road fell into disrepair. No strangers came. Even the traveling priest no longer dared enter the village, though the sun blazed in the water of the fountain, the valley far below was white with flowering fruit and nut trees, and the heat seeped into the pink stones of the church at noon and ebbed out at dusk. Cats paced silently over the beaten dirt, from doorway to doorway. Birds sang in the woods behind us. We waited in vain for visitors, hunger gnawing at our stomachs.
At last, somewhere deep in the heart of the cedar trees, our wives stirred and thought of us. And lazily, it seemed to us, carelessly, returned home. We looked on their mean lips, their hard eyes, and our hearts melted. We drank in the sound of their harsh voices like men coming out of the desert.
The Cats in the Prison Recreation Hall
The problem was the cats in the prison recreation hall. There were feces everywhere. The feces of a cat try to hide in a corner and when discovered look angry and ashamed like a monkey.
The cats stayed in the prison recreation hall when it rained, and since it rained often, the hall smelled bad and the prisoners grumbled. The smell did not come from the feces but from the animals themselves. It was a strong smell, a dizzying smell.
The cats could not be driven away. When shooed, they did not flee out the door but scattered in all directions, running low, their bellies hanging. Many went upward, leaping from beam to beam and resting somewhere high above, so that the prisoners playing Ping-Pong were aware that although the dome was silent, it was not empty.
The cats could not be driven away because they entered and left the hall through holes that could not be discovered. Their steps were silent; they could wait for a person longer than a person would wait for them.
A person has other concerns, but at each moment in its life, a cat has only one concern. This is what gives it such perfect balance, and this is why the spectacle of a confused or frightened cat upsets us: we feel both pity and the desire to laugh. It faces the source of danger or confusion and its only recourse is to spit a foul breath out between its mottled gums.
The prisoners were all small men that year. They had committed crimes that could not be taken very seriously and they were treated with leniency. Now, although small men are often inclined to take pride in their good health, these prisoners began to develop rashes and eczemas. The backs of their knees and the insides of their elbows stung and their skin flaked all over. They wrote angry letters to the governor of their state, who also happened to be a small man that year. The cats, they said, were causing reactions.
The governor took pity on the prisoners and asked the warden to take care of the problem.
The warden had not been inside the hall in years. He entered it and wandered around, sickened by the curious smell.
In the dead end of a corridor, he cornered an ugly tomcat. The warden was carrying a stick and the cat was armed only with its teeth and claws, besides its angry face. The warden and the cat dodged back and forth for a time, the warden struck out at the cat, and the cat streaked around him and away, making no false moves.
Now the warden saw cats everywhere.
After the evening activities, when the prisoners had been shut up in their cell blocks, the warden returned carrying a rifle. All night long, that night, the prisoners heard the sound of shots coming from the hall. The shots were muffled and seemed to come from a great distance, as though from across the river. The warden was a good shot and killed many cats—cats rained down on him from the dome, cats flipped over and over in the hallways—and yet he still saw shadows flitting by the basement windows as he left the building.
There was a difference now, however. The prisoners’ skin condition cleared. Though the bad smell still hung about the building, it was not warm and fresh as it had been. A few cats still lived there, but they had been disoriented by the odors of gunpowder and blood and by the sudden disappearance of their mates and kittens. They stopped breeding and skulked in corners, hissing even when no one was anywhere near them, attacking without provocation any moving thing.
These cats did not eat well and did not clean themselves carefully, and one by one, each in its own way and in its own time died, leaving behind it a different strong smell that hung in the air for a week or two and then dissipated. After some months, there were no cats left in the prison recreation hall. By then, the small prisoners had been succeeded by larger prisoners, and the warden had been replaced by another, more ambitious; only the governor remained in office.
Wife One in Country
Wife one calls to speak to son. Wife two answers with impatience, gives phone to son of wife one. Son has heard impatience in voice of wife two and tells mother he thought caller was father’s sister: raging aunt, constant caller, troublesome woman. Wife one wonders: is she herself perhaps another raging woman, constant caller? No, raging woman but not constant caller. Though, for wife two, also troublesome woman.
After speaking to son, much disturbance in wife one. Wife one misses son, thinks how some years ago she, too, answered phone and talked to husband’s raging sister, constant caller, protecting husband from troublesome woman. Now wife two protects husband from troublesome sister, constant caller, and also from wife one, raging woman. Wife one sees this and imagines future wife three protecting husband not only from raging wife one but also from troublesome wife two, as well as constantly calling sister.
After speaking to son, wife one, often raging though now quiet woman, eats dinner alone though in company of large television. Wife one swallows food, swallows pain, swallows food again. Watches intently ad about easy-to-clean stove: mother who is not real mother flips fried egg onto hot burner, then fries second egg and gives cheerful young son who is not real son loving kiss as spaniel who is not real family dog steals second fried egg off plate of son who is not real son. Pain increases in wife one, wife one swallows food, swallows pain, swallows food again, swallows pain again, swallows food again.
The Fish Tank
I stare at four fish in a tank in the supermarket. They are swimming in parallel formation against a small current created by a jet of water, and they are opening and closing their mouths and staring off into the distance with the one eye, each, that I can see. As I watch them through the glass, thinking how fresh they would be to eat, still alive now, and calculating whether I might buy one to cook for dinner, I also see, as thoug
h behind or through them, a larger, shadowy form darkening their tank, what there is of me on the glass, their predator.
The Center of the Story
A woman has written a story that has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting. But in this story the hurricane threatens the city without actually striking it. The story is flat and even, just as the earth seems flat and even when a hurricane is advancing over it, and if she were to show it to a friend, the friend would probably say that, unlike a hurricane, this story has no center.
It was not an easy story to write, because it was about religion, and religion was not something she really wanted to write about. Something, though, made her want to write this story. Now that it is finished, it puzzles her, and there is a peculiar yellow pall over it, either because of the religion or because of the light in the sky before the hurricane.
She can’t think where the center of the story might be.
She was reading the Bible in a time of hurricane, not because she was afraid of a major disaster, though she was afraid, or because these days also happened to be the High Holy Days, but because she needed to know exactly what was in it. She read slowly and took many notes. Outside her apartment, the weather was changing: the wind rose, the branches swayed on the young trees, and the leaves fluttered. She read about Noah and the Ark and tried to picture very exactly what she read, the better to understand it: a man hundreds of years old trying to walk and give directions to his family, the mud covering the earth after the flood receded, the stink of rot, and then the sacrifice of animals and the stink of burning hair, fur, and horn.
She did little else but read the Bible for several days, and she looked out the window often and listened to the news. Certainly the Bible and the hurricane belong in the story, though whether at the center or not she does not know. She had started the story with her landlady. Her landlady, an old woman from Trinidad, was alone in the downstairs hall talking quietly about the mayor, while she was upstairs, thinking of writing a letter to the president. Her landlady said the red carpet remnant on the hall floor was given to her by her friend the mayor. She will probably take out the president and the landlady, but leave in the Bible and the hurricane. Perhaps if she takes out things that are not interesting, or do not belong in the story for other reasons, this will give it more of a center, since as soon as there is less in a story, more of it must be in the center.
In another part of the story, a man is very ill and thinks he is dying. He was not dying, he had eaten something that poisoned him and drunk too much on top of it, but he thought he was dying, and telephoned her to come help him. This was at the very moment the hurricane was supposed to strike the city, and some of the windows in the neighborhoods between her house and his were covered with tape in the shape of asterisks. In his room, the blinds were drawn, the light was yellow, and the windows rattled. He lay on his back in bed with a hand on his bare chest. His face was gray.
It is unclear what his place is, in the story. Certainly his illness has little connection with the rest of the story except that it overcame him at the height of the hurricane. But then he also told her something on the phone about blasphemy. He had recently blasphemed in a dreadful way, he said, by committing a certain forbidden act on a Holy Day. What he realized as he did it, he said, was that for complicated reasons he was trying to hurt God, and if he was trying to hurt God he must believe in Him. He had experienced the truth of what he had been taught long ago, that blasphemy proved one’s belief in God.
This man, his illness, his fear for his life, and the blasphemy that had caused his illness, as he probably thought, and also something else he said about God that she remembered later, riding a train out of the city, could be at the center of the story, with the Bible and the hurricane at the edge of it, but there may not be enough to tell about him for him to be the center, or this may be the wrong time to tell it.
So there is the hurricane that did not strike the city but cast a yellow light over it, and there is this man, and there is the Bible, but no landlady, no president, and no newscasters, though she watched the news several times a day, every day, to see what the hurricane was going to do. The newscasters would tell her to look out the window and she would look. They would tell her that at that very moment, because the sun had just set, rams’ horns were being blown all over the city, and she would be excited, even though she could not hear any rams’ horns in her neighborhood. But though the newscasters serve to hold the story together from one day to the next, they are not in themselves very interesting and certainly not central to a story that has trouble finding its center.
In those days she also visited churches and synagogues. The last church she visited was a Baptist congregation in the north of the city. There, large black women in white uniforms asked her to sit down but she was too nervous to sit. Then, standing at the back of the crowded hall, she began to feel faint when a procession of women in red robes came toward her at a stately pace, singing. She left, found the ladies’ room, and sat in a stall watching a fly, not sure she would be able to stand up again.
In fact, close to the center of the story may be the moment when she realizes that, even though she is not a believer, she has an unusual, religious sort of peace in her, perhaps because she has been visiting churches and synagogues and studying the Bible, and that this peace has allowed her to accept the possibility of the worst sort of disaster, one even worse than a hurricane.
She rides the train up along the river away from the city. The danger of the hurricane is past. The water in the river has not risen to cover the tracks, though it is close to them. As she looks out at the water, she suddenly remembers the devil. She has not made a place for him in what she might believe, or even in the questions she is asking about what she believes. She has asked several friends whether they thought there was a God, but she has not mentioned the devil to anyone. After she remembers this, she realizes something else: the very fact that she has forgotten the devil must mean he has, at this point, no place in her beliefs, though she thinks she believes in the power of evil.
This comes close to the end of the story as it is now, but she can’t really end with the devil and a train ride. So the end is a problem, too, though less of a problem than the center. There may be no center. There may be no center because she is afraid to put any one of these elements in the center—the man, the religion, or the hurricane. Or—which is or is not the same thing—there is a center but the center is empty, either because she has not yet found what belongs there or because it is meant to be empty: there, but empty, in the same way that the man was sick but not dying, the hurricane approached but did not strike, and she had a religious calm but no faith.
Love
A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years. It was not enough for her to brush his coats, wipe his inkwell, finger his ivory comb: she had to build her house over his grave and sit with him night after night in the damp cellar.
Our Kindness
We have ideals of being very kind to everyone in the world. But then we are very unkind to our own husband, the person who is closest at hand to us. But then we think he is preventing us from being kind to everyone else in the world. Because he does not want us to know those other people, we think! He would prefer us to stay here in our own house. He says the car is old. We know that really he would prefer us to be acquainted with only a small number of people in the world, as he is. But what he says is that the car would not take us very far. We know he would prefer us to look after our own house and our own family. Our house is not clean, not completely clean. Our family is not completely clean. We think the car would serve us well enough. But he thinks we may want to go out and be kind to other people only because we would prefer not to be at home, because we would prefer not to have to try to be kind only to these three people, of all the people in the world the hardest three for us, though we can easily be kind to so many other people, such as those we meet at the stores, where we
go because there our car, he says, may safely take us.
A Natural Disaster
In our home here by the rising sea we will not last much longer. The cold and the damp will certainly get us in the end, because it is no longer possible to leave: the cold has cracked open the only road away from here, the sea has risen and filled the cracks down by the marsh where it is low, has sunk and left salt crystals lining the cracks, has risen again higher and made the road impassable.
The sea washes up through the pipes into our basins, and our drinking water is brackish. Mollusks have appeared in our front yard and our garden and we can’t walk without crushing their shells at every step. At every high tide the sea covers our land, leaving pools, when it ebbs, among our rosebushes and in the furrows of our rye field. Our seeds have been washed away; the crows have eaten what few were left.
Now we have moved into the upper rooms of the house and stand at the window watching the fish flash through the branches of our peach tree. An eel looks out from below our wheelbarrow.