Can't and Won't

by Lydia Davis

  I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable

  I’m tired.

  The people in front of us are taking a long time choosing their ice cream.

  My thumb hurts.

  A man is coughing during the concert.

  The shower is a little too cold.

  The work I have to do this morning is difficult.

  They have seated us too close to the kitchen.

  There’s a long line at the shipping counter.

  I’m cold sitting in the car.

  The cuff of my sweater is damp.

  The shower is weak.

  I’m hungry.

  They’re quarreling again.

  This soup doesn’t have much taste.

  My navel orange is a little dry.

  I didn’t get two seats to myself on the train.

  He is keeping me waiting.

  They have gone off and left me alone at the dinner table.

  She says my breathing is incorrect.

  I need to go to the bathroom, but someone is in there.

  I’m a little tense.

  The back of my neck feels prickly.

  The cat has ringworm.

  The person behind me on the train is eating something very smelly.

  It’s too hot in that room for me to practice the piano.

  He calls me when I’m working.

  I bought sour cream by mistake.

  My fork is too short.

  I’m so tired I won’t do well at my lesson.

  This apple has brown spots on it.

  I ordered a dry corn muffin, but when it came, it wasn’t dry.

  He chews so loudly I have to turn on the radio.

  This pesto is hard to blend.

  The wart on my thumb is growing back.

  I can’t have anything to eat or drink this morning because of the test.

  She has parked her Mercedes across the end of my driveway.

  I ordered an oat bran raisin muffin lightly toasted, but it wasn’t lightly toasted.

  My tea water takes too long to boil.

  The seam in the toe of my sock is twisted.

  It’s too cold in that room for me to practice the piano.

  He doesn’t pronounce foreign words correctly.

  My tea is too milky.

  I’ve been in the kitchen too long.

  There’s cat saliva on my new sock.

  My seat doesn’t have a back.

  The blender is leaking at the bottom.

  I can’t decide whether to go on reading this book.

  I missed the view of the river from the train because it got dark.

  The raspberries are sour.

  The pepper grinder doesn’t grind very well.

  The cat has peed on my telephone.

  My Band-Aid is wet.

  The store is out of decaf hazelnut coffee.

  My sheets get all twisted in the dryer.

  The carrot cake was a little stale.

  When I toast the raisin bread, the raisins get very hot.

  The bridge of my nose is a little dry.

  I’m sleepy, but I can’t lie down.

  The sound system in the examining room is playing folk music.

  I don’t look forward very much to that sandwich.

  They have a new weatherman on the radio.

  Now that the leaves are off the trees, we can see the neighbor’s new deck.

  I don’t think I like my bedspread anymore.

  In the restaurant they are playing a loop of soft rock music.

  My glasses frames are cold.

  There is St. André cheese on the platter, but I can’t have any.

  The clock is ticking very loudly.

  Judgment

  Into how small a space the word judgment can be compressed: it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes, makes a decision.

  The Chairs

  story from Flaubert

  Louis has been in the church in Mantes looking at the chairs. He has been looking at them very closely. He wants to learn as much as he can about the people from looking at their chairs, he says. He started with the chair of a woman he calls Madame Fricotte. Maybe her name was written on the back of the chair. She must be very stout, he says—the seat of the chair has a deep hollow in it, and the prayer stool has been reinforced in a couple of places. Her husband may be a rich man, because the prayer stool is upholstered in red velvet with brass tacks. Or, he thinks, the woman may be the widow of a rich man, because there is no chair belonging to Monsieur Fricotte—unless he’s an atheist. In fact, perhaps Madame Fricotte, if she is a widow, is looking for another husband, since the back of her chair is heavily stained with hair dye.

  My Friend’s Creation

  We are in a clearing at night. Along one side, four Egyptian goddesses of immense size are positioned in profile and lit from behind. Black shapes of people come into the clearing and slip across the silhouettes. A moon is pasted against the dark sky. High up on a pole sits a cheerful, red-cheeked man who sings and plays a pipe. Now and then, he climbs down from his pole. He is my friend’s creation, and my friend asks me, “What shall he be singing?”

  dream

  The Piano

  We are about to buy a new piano. Our old upright has a crack all the way through the sounding board, and other problems. We would like the piano shop to take it and resell it, but they tell us it is too badly damaged and cannot be resold to anyone else. They say it will have to be pushed over a cliff. This is how they will do it: Two truck drivers take it to a remote spot. One driver walks away down the lane with his back turned while the other shoves it over the cliff.

  dream

  The Party

  A friend and I are on our way to some sort of grand festivity. I am riding in the car of someone I do not know who is vaguely familiar to me. My friend is ahead of us in a different car, a white one. We drive for what seems like hours through deserted streets, making for a hill at the edge of the city. We keep losing our way and stopping to ask directions, because the map that has been given to us is imprecise and hard to read.

  At last we come to the top of a steep incline, go on up a curving driveway lit by lanterns among the trees, and come to a stop under a lofty, flood-lit, stone windmill. We leave the cars and walk across the gravel past noisy fountains. The suburbs of the city are spread out below and behind us. We enter the windmill. Inside, a small woman dressed in black and white guides us down whitewashed stairwells, along stone corridors, around several corners, and finally down one last, broader flight of stairs.

  At the bottom is a vast, circular room, its raftered ceiling lost in darkness. Filling the room nearly to its edges, and dwarfing the crowd of guests who have arrived before us, is a giant carousel, motionless and crossed by powerful beams of light: white horses, four abreast, are harnessed to open carriages that rock back and forth on their bases; a ship with two figureheads rises high out of static green waves. Around the carousel, the guests shrink back from it, sipping champagne with timid smiles.

  We are so surprised that we have not yet moved from the bottom of the steps. Now, though the carousel is still motionless, the calliope begins bleating and gurgling with a deafening noise and the room shudders. A woman with a handbag over her arm approaches one of the horses and stares at its bulging eye. One by one, the guests mount the carousel, not eagerly or happily, but fearfully.

  dream

  The Cows

  Each new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play.

  They amble into view from the far side of the barn with their rhythmic, graceful walk, and it is an occasion, like the start of a parade.

  Sometimes the second and third come out in stately procession after the first has stopped and stands still, staring.

  They come from behind the barn as though something is going to happen, and then nothing happens.

  Or we pull back the curtain i
n the morning and they are already there, in the early sunlight.

  They are a deep, inky black. It is a black that swallows light.

  Their bodies are entirely black, but they have white on their faces. On the faces of two of them, there are large patches of white, like a mask. On the face of the third, there is only a small patch on the forehead, the size of a silver dollar.

  They are motionless until they move again, one foot and then another—fore, hind, fore, hind—and stop in another place, motionless again.

  So often they are standing completely still. Yet when I look up again a few minutes later, they are in another place, again standing completely still.

  When they all three stand bunched together in a far corner of the field by the woods, they form one dark irregular mass, with twelve legs.

  They are often crowded together in the large field. But sometimes they lie down far apart from one another, evenly spaced over the grass.

  Today, two appear halfway out from behind the barn, standing still. Ten minutes go by. Now they are all the way out, standing still. Another ten minutes go by. Now the third is out and they are all three in a line, standing still.

  The third comes out into the field from behind the barn when the other two have already chosen their spots, quite far apart. She can choose to join either one. She goes deliberately to the one in the far corner. Does she prefer the company of that cow, or does she prefer that corner, or is it more complicated—that that corner seems more appealing because of the presence of that cow?

  Their attention is complete, as they look across the road: They are still, and face us.

  Just because they are so still, their attitude seems philosophical.

  I see them most often out the kitchen window over the top of a hedge. My view of them is bounded on either side by leafy trees. I am surprised that the cows are so often visible, because the portion of the hedge over which I see them is only about three feet long, and, even more puzzling, if I hold my arm straight out in front of me, the field of my vision in which they are grazing is only the length of half a finger. Yet that field of vision contains a part of their grazing field that is hundreds of square feet in area.

  That one’s legs are moving, but because she is facing us directly she seems to be staying in one place. Yet she is getting bigger, so she must be coming this way.

  One of them is in the foreground and two are farther back, in the middle ground between her and the woods. In my field of vision, they occupy together in the middle ground the same amount of space she occupies alone in the foreground.

  Because there are three, one of them can watch what the other two are doing together.

  Or, because there are three, two can worry about the third, for instance the one lying down. They worry about her even though she often lies down, even though they all often lie down. Now the two worried ones stand at angles to the other, with their noses down against her, until at last she gets up.

  They are nearly the same size, and yet one is the largest, one the middle-sized, and one the smallest.

  One thinks there is a reason to walk briskly to the far corner of the field, but another thinks there is no reason, and stands still where she is.

  At first she stands still where she is, while the first walks away briskly, but then she changes her mind and follows.

  She follows, but stops halfway there. Is it that she has forgotten why she was going there, or that she has lost interest? She and the other are standing in parallel positions. She is looking straight ahead.

  How often they stand still and slowly look around as though they have never been here before.

  But now, in an access of emotion, she trots a few feet.

  I see only one cow, by the fence. As I walk up to the fence, I see part of a second cow: one ear sticking sideways out the door of the barn. Soon, I know, her whole face will appear, looking at me.

  They are not disappointed in us, or do not remember being disappointed. If, one day, when we have nothing to offer them, they lose interest and turn away, they will have forgotten their disappointment by the next day. We know, because they look up when we first appear and don’t look away.

  Sometimes they advance as a group, in little relays.

  One gains courage from the one in front of her and moves forward a few steps, passing her by just a little. Now the one farthest back gains courage from the one in front and moves forward until she, in turn, is the leader. And so in this way, taking courage from one another, they advance, as a group, towards the strange thing in front of them.

  In this, functioning as a single entity, they are not unlike the small flock of pigeons we sometimes see over the railway station, wheeling and turning in the sky continuously, making immediate small group decisions about where to go next.

  When we come close to them, they are curious and come forward. They want to look at us and smell us. Before they smell us, they blow out forcefully, to clear their passages.

  They like to lick things—a person’s hand or sleeve, or the head or shoulders or back of another cow. And they like to be licked: while she is being licked, she stands very still with her head slightly lowered and a look of deep concentration in her eyes.

  One may be jealous of another being licked: she thrusts her head under the outstretched neck of the one licking, and butts upwards till the licking stops.

  Two of them are standing close together: now they both move at the same moment, shifting into a different position in relation to each other, and then stand still again, as if following exactly the instructions of a choreographer.

  Now they shift so that there is a head at either end and two thick clusters of legs in between.

  After staying with the others in a tight clump for some time, one walks away by herself to the far corner of the field: at this moment, she does seem to have a mind of her own.

  Lying down, seen from the side, her head up, feet bent in front of her, she forms a long, acute triangle.

  Her head, from the side, is nearly an isosceles triangle, with a blunted corner where her nose is.

  In a moment of solitary levity, as she leads the way out across the field, she bucks once and then prances.

  Two of them are beginning a lively game of butt-your-head when a car goes by and they stop to look.

  She bucks, stiffly rocking back and forth. This excites another one to butt heads with her. After they are done butting heads, the other one puts her nose back down to the ground and this one stands still, looking straight ahead, as though wondering what she just did.

  Forms of play: head-butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot towards you; circling one another; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.

  She moos towards the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos again in a high falsetto. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.

  Today, they are positioned exactly one behind the next in a line, head to tail, head to tail, as though coupled like the cars of a railway train, the first looking straight forward like the headlight of the locomotive.

  The shape of a black cow, seen directly head-on: a smooth black oval, larger at the top and tapering at the bottom to a very narrow extension, like a teardrop.

  Standing with their back ends close together now, they face three of the four cardinal points of the compass.

  Sometimes one takes the position for defecating, her tail, raised at the base, in the curved shape of a pump handle.

  They seem expectant this morning, but it is a combination of two things: the strange yellow light before a storm and their alert expressions as they listen to a loud woodpecker.

  Spaced out evenly over the pale yellow-green grass of late November, one, two, and three, they are so still, and their legs so thin, in comparison to their bodies, that when they stand sideways to u
s, sometimes their legs seem like prongs, and they seem stuck to the earth.

  How flexible, and how precise, she is: she can reach one of her back hooves all the way forward, to scratch a particular spot inside her ear.

  It is the lowered head that makes her seem less noble than, say, a horse, or a deer surprised in the woods. More exactly, it is her lowered head and neck. As she stands still, the top of her head is level with her back, or even a little lower, and so she seems to be hanging her head in discouragement, embarrassment, or shame. There is at least a suggestion of humility and dullness about her. But all these suggestions are false.

  He says to us: They don’t really do anything.

  Then he adds: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.

  Their grace: as they walk, they are more graceful when seen from the side than when seen from the front. Seen from the front, as they walk, they tip just a little from side to side.

  When they are walking, their forelegs are more graceful than their back legs, which appear stiffer.

  The forelegs are more graceful than the back legs because they lift in a curve, whereas the back legs lift in a jagged line like a bolt of lightning.

  But perhaps the back legs, while less graceful than the forelegs, are more elegant.

  It is because of the way the joints in the legs work: Whereas the two lower joints of the front leg bend the same way, so that the front leg as it is raised forms a curve, the two lower joints of the back leg bend in opposite directions, so that the leg, when raised, forms two opposite angles, the lower one gentle, pointing forward, the upper one sharp, pointing back.

  Now, because it is winter, they are not grazing but only standing still and staring, or, now and then, walking here and there.