Can't and Won't

by Lydia Davis

  Suddenly, after she was gone, things of hers became more valuable than they had been before—her letters, of course, though there weren’t many of them, but also things she had left behind in my house after her last visit, like her jacket, a dark blue windbreaker with some logo on it. A detective novel I tried to read and couldn’t. A tub of frozen clams in the freezer, and a jar of tartar sauce, marked down, in the door of the fridge.

  * * *

  We’re moving pretty fast now. When you slide by it all so quickly, you think you won’t ever have to get bogged down in it again—the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We’re really speeding. The ride is smooth. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that’s jiggling. We’re all jiggling a little.

  There aren’t many people in the car, and they’re pretty quiet today. I don’t mind telling someone if he talks too long on his cell phone. I did that once. I gave this man ten minutes, maybe even more, maybe twenty, and then I went and stood there next to him in the aisle. He was hunched over with his finger pressed against his free ear. He didn’t get angry. He looked up at me, smiled, waved his hand in the air, and ended the call before I was back in my seat. I don’t do business on my cell phone on the train. They should know better.

  * * *

  There were also gifts of a different kind that she gave—the effort she went to for other people, the work she put into preparing meals for friends. The wanderers she took into her house, to live for weeks or months—kids passing through, but also, one year, that thin old Indian who spent every day arranging her books in the bookcases, and who ate so little and meditated so long. And later her old father, her actual father, the one she first met when she was already grown up, not my father, not the father who raised her. She had had a dream about him, that he was very ill. She had set out to find him, and she had found him.

  She was so tired by the end of the day that whenever I was there visiting, when we all sat watching some program or movie on television in the evening, she would fall asleep. First she was awake for a while, curious about the actors—who is that, didn’t we see him in…?—and then she would grow quiet, she was quiet for so long that you would look over and see that her head was leaning to the side, the lamplight shining on her light hair, or her head was bowed over her chest, and she would sleep until we all stood up to go to bed.

  What was the last present she gave me? Seven years ago. If I had known it was the last, I would have given it such careful attention.

  If it wasn’t animal-themed or made by some indigenous person, then it was probably some kind of a bag, not an expensive bag, but one that had a special feature, a trick to it, like it folded into itself when it was empty, and then zipped up and had a little clip on it so you could clip it onto another bag. I have a few of those stored away.

  She carried them herself, and other kinds of bags, always open and full of things—an extra sweater, another bag, a couple of books, a box of crackers, a bottle of something to drink. There was a generosity in how much she packed and carried with her.

  One time when she came to visit—I’m thinking of her bags leaning in a group against a chair of mine. I was nearly paralyzed, not knowing what to do. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to leave her alone, that wouldn’t have been right, but I also wasn’t used to having company. After a while, the panicky feeling passed, maybe just because time passed, but there was a moment when I thought I was going to collapse.

  Now I can look at that same bed where she slept and wish she would come back at least for a little while. We wouldn’t have to talk, we wouldn’t even have to look at each other, but it would be a comfort just to have her there—her arms, her broad shoulders, her hair.

  I want to say to her, Yes, there were problems, our relationship was difficult to understand, and complicated, but still, I would like just to have you sitting there on the daybed where you did sleep for a few nights once, it’s your part of the living room now, I’d like to just look at your cheeks, your shoulders, your arms, your wrist with the gold watchband on it, a little tight, pressing into the flesh, your strong hands, the gold wedding ring, your short fingernails, I don’t have to look you in the eyes or have any sort of communion, complete or incomplete, but to have you there in person, in the flesh, for a while, pressing down the mattress, making folds in the cover, the sun coming in behind you, would be very nice. Maybe you would stretch out on the daybed and read for a while in the afternoon, maybe fall asleep. I would be in the next room, nearby.

  Sometimes, after dinner, if she was very relaxed and I was sitting next to her, she would put her hand on my shoulder and let it rest there for a while, so that I felt it warmer and warmer through the cotton of my shirt. I sensed then that she did love me in a way that wouldn’t change, whatever her mood might be.

  * * *

  That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by—but now it’s time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

  Because after the dramas of the deaths themselves, those complicated dramas that went on for days, for both of them, there was the quieter and simpler fact of missing them. He would not be there to come out of his room at home with a picture or a letter to show us, he would not be there to tell us the same stories over again, about when he was a young boy—pronouncing the names that meant so much to him and so little to us: Clinton Street where he was born, Winter Island where they went in the summers when he was little, him watching the back of the horse that trotted ahead of them pulling their carriage, his pneumonia when he was a child, weakened and lying in bed reading, day after day, in that cousin’s house in Salem, going to the Y on Saturdays to swim with the other boys, where it was the usual thing for all the boys to swim naked, and how that bothered him, the Perkins family next door. He would not be there having his first cup of coffee in the morning at eleven o’clock, or reading by the light from the window in an armchair. She would not be making pancakes for us in the mornings at the rented beach house, wide fat blueberry pancakes a little underdone in the middle, standing over the pan, quiet and concentrating, or talking as she worked, in her flowered blouse and straight pants, in her comfortable flats or her moccasins, the familiar shape of her toes in them stretching the fabric or the leather. She would not go out swimming in the rough waves of the harbor, even in stormy weather, her eyes a lighter blue than the water. She would not stand with our mother waist-deep in the water near the shore talking, with a little frown on her face either from the sunlight or from concentrating on what they were talking about. She would never again make oyster stew the way she did one Christmas Eve, on that visit to our mother and father’s house after her husband died, the crunch of sand in our mouths in the milky broth, sand in the bottoms of our spoons. She would not take a child on her lap, her own child, as on that same visit, when they were all so sad and confused, or someone else’s child, and rock that child quietly back and forth, her broad strong arms around the child’s chest, resting her cheek against the child’s hair, her face sad and thoughtful, her eyes distant. She would not be there on the sofa in the evenings, exclaiming in surprise when she saw an actor she knew in a movie or a show, she would not fall asleep there, suddenly quiet, later in the evening.

  The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal—we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.

  There was also some confusion in my mind, in the months afterwards. It was not that I thought she was still alive. But at the same time I couldn’t believe that she was actually gone. Suddenly the choice wasn’t so simple: either alive or not alive. It was as though not being alive di
d not have to mean she was dead, as though there were some third possibility.

  * * *

  Her visit, that time—now I don’t know why it seemed so complicated. You just go out and do something together, or sit and talk if you stay inside. Talking would have been easy enough, since she liked to talk. Of course it’s too simple to say that she liked to talk. There was something frantic about the way she talked. As though she were afraid of something, fending something off. After she died, that was one thing we all said—we used to wish she would stop talking for a while, or talk a little less, but now we would have given anything to hear her voice.

  I wanted to talk, too, I had things to say in answer to her, but it wasn’t possible, or it was difficult. She wouldn’t let me, or I would have to force my way into the conversation.

  I wish I could try again—I wish she would come and visit again. I think I would be calmer. I’d be so glad to see her. But it doesn’t work that way. If she came back, she’d be back for more than just a little while, and maybe I wouldn’t know what to do, after all, any better than the last time I saw her. Still, I’d like to try.

  Another present was a board game involving endangered species. A board game—there was that optimism again. Or she was doing what our mother used to do—giving me something that required another person, so that I would have to bring another person into my life. I actually meet plenty of people, I even meet them traveling. Most people are basically pretty friendly. It’s true that I still live alone, I’m just more comfortable that way, I like having everything the way I want it. But having a board game wasn’t going to encourage me to bring someone home to play it with me.

  * * *

  There aren’t that many of us in the car, though more than I would have expected on this particular day. Of course I think they’re all on their way to some place that’s welcoming and friendly, where people are waiting for them with things to eat and drink, like little sausages and eggnog. But that may not be true. And they may be thinking the same thing about me—if they are thinking anything about me.

  And some of them who may not be going anywhere special may be glad, though that’s a little hard to believe, because you’re made to feel, by all the hype, by all the advertising, really, but also by the things your friends say, that you should be somewhere special, with your family, or with your friends. If you’re not, you get that old feeling of being left out, another feeling you learned when you were a child, in school probably, at the same time that you learned to get excited seeing all those wrapped presents, no matter what you eventually found in them, besides what you wanted.

  I’m not as cheerful as I used to be, I know. A friend of mine said something about it, after I lost both of them, three weeks apart, that summer: he said, your grief spreads into all sorts of different areas of your life. Your grief turns into depression. And after a while you just don’t want to do anything. You just can’t be bothered.

  Another friend—when I told him, he said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.” So strange. By the time he found out I had a sister, I no longer had a sister.

  It’s beginning to rain, little drops driven sideways across the windowpane. Streaks and dots across the glass. The sky outside is darker and the lights in the car, the ceiling light and the little reading lights over the seats, seem brighter. The farms are passing now. There’s no wash hanging out, but I can see the clotheslines stretched between the back porches and the barns. The farms are on both sides of the tracks, there are wide-open spaces between them, the silos far apart over the landscape, with the farm buildings clustered around them, like churches in their little villages in the distance.

  * * *

  Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.

  For a while, it was hard for me to think or speak about one of them separate from the other. For a while, though not anymore, they were always linked together in my mind because they died so close to each other in time. It was hard not to imagine her waiting for him somewhere, and him coming. We were even comforted by it—we imagined that she would take care of him, wherever they were. She was younger and more alert than he was. She was taller and stronger. But would he be pleased, or would he be annoyed? Would he want to be by himself?

  I didn’t even know if he wanted me to stay there next to the bed while he was dying. I had taken the bus to the city where he and my mother lived, to be with him. There would be no chance of recovery, for him, or going back from where he was, because they had stopped feeding him. He wasn’t speaking or hearing, or even seeing, anymore, so there was no way to know what he wanted. He didn’t look like himself. His eyes were half open, but they didn’t see anything. His mouth was half open. He didn’t have his teeth in. Once, I put a little wet sponge to his lower lip, because of the dryness, and his mouth clamped shut on it suddenly.

  You think you should sit with someone who is dying, you think it must be a comfort to them. But when he was alive, when we lingered at the dinner table, or in the living room talking and laughing, after a while he always got up and left us and went into his own room. Later, when he was doing the dishes, he would say no, he didn’t want any help. Even when we were visiting him in the nursing home, after an hour or two he would ask us to leave.

  Our mother consulted a psychic, later, after they were gone, to see if she could get in touch with them. She didn’t really believe in that sort of thing, but some friend of hers had recommended this psychic and she thought it might be interesting and couldn’t hurt to try, so she met with her and told her things about them, and let her try to communicate with them.

  The woman said she reached both of them. Our father was agreeable and cooperative, though he didn’t say much, something noncommittal, that he was “all right.” My mother thought that after the trouble they had gone to, to reach him, he might have said more. But our sister turned away and was cross, and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. We were very interested in this, even though we had trouble believing it. We felt that at least the psychic believed it and thought she had had that experience.

  The two kinds of grief were different. One kind, for him, was for an end that came at the right time, that was in the natural order of things. The other kind of grief, for her, was for an end that came unexpectedly and much too soon. She and I were just beginning a good correspondence—now it will never continue. She was just beginning a project of her own that meant a lot to her. She had just rented a house near us where we would be able to see her much more often. A different phase of her life was just beginning.

  * * *

  Strange, the way things look when you’re watching them out a train window. I don’t get tired of that. Just now I saw an island in the river, a small one with a grove of trees on it, and I was going to look more carefully at it, because I like islands, but then I looked away for a moment and when I looked back it was gone. Now we’re passing some woods again. Now the woods are gone and I can see the river again and the hills in the distance. The things close to the tracks flash by so fast, and the things in the middle distance flow past more quietly and steadily, and the things in the far distance stay still, or sometimes they seem to be moving forward, just because the things in the middle distance are moving backward.

  Actually, even though things in the far distance seem to be staying still, or even moving forward a little, they are moving back very slowly. Those treetops on a hill in the far distance were even with us for a while, but when I looked again, they were behind us, though not far behind.

  * * *

  I kept noticing things, in the days after she died and then after he died: a white bird flying up seemed to mean something, or a white bird landing nearby. Three crows on the branch of a tree meant something. Three days after he died, I woke up from a dream about Elysian fields, as though he had now gone into them, as though he had hovered near us for a while, for three days, eve
n floating over our mother’s living room, and had then gone on, into the Elysian fields, maybe before going farther, to whatever place he was going to go and stay.

  I wanted to believe all this, I tried hard to believe it. After all, we don’t know what happens. It’s such a strange thing—that once you are dead, you do know the answer, if you know anything at all. But whatever the answer is, you can’t communicate it to the ones who are still alive. And before you die, you can’t know whether we live on in some form after we die, or just come to an end.

  It’s like what that woman in the store said to me the other day. We were talking about the little expressions our mothers liked to use over and over again—“To each his own,” or “They meant well.” She said her mother was Christian, and devout, and that she believed in an afterlife of the soul. But this woman herself did not believe, and would gently make fun of her mother. And whenever that happened, her mother would say to her, with a good-humored smile: When we die, one of us is going to be very surprised!

  Our father himself believed that it was all in the body, and specifically in the brain, that it was all physical—the mind, the soul, our feelings. He had once seen a man’s brains spread over the asphalt of a driveway after an accident. He had stopped his car on the street and got out to look. My sister was a little girl then. He told her to wait for him in the car. When the body was no longer alive, he said, it was all over. But I wasn’t so sure.