by Lydia Davis
Helen has traveled very little in her life, though members of her extended family have gone to Sweden to visit historical family sites. She took several vacations in New England with her husband and sons and, after she was widowed, two trips to Florida with her brother. In all of her life, she has lived away from her hometown only once: after she graduated from high school, her brother drove her down to New York City, where she settled in Brooklyn and studied dressmaking for one year at the Pratt Institute. After she was married and raising her two sons, she rarely went farther from home than to Hartford by train.
For many years now, travel for Helen has been limited to drives around town and into the countryside as a passenger. She looks out the window, and despite her near-blindness manages to identify old landmarks from her younger years: a friend’s farm, the group home where her friend Robert lives with his large collection of first-edition books, the house where she once worked as a maid, her friends’ florist shop, the house on Oak Street where her family first lived after they left the farm, and the house in back of it that her father built.
Pets and Other Animals
Both Helen and Vi are very fond of animals and have had pets and domestic animals in their lives from early childhood.
Vi is more partial to dogs; she has more stories about them, and photographs of them. But she is also amused by cats, especially one small black cat that tries to grab the dust cloth out of her hand where she works—helping her to clean, she says. Her backyard is full of strays and neighborhood cats, though she does not feed them. The old woman next door feeds them, she says, and although some of the other neighbors object, Vi sees no harm in it, since this is one of the old woman’s few pleasures and she will be gone from this world soon enough. When Vi talks about this old woman, she seems to forget that she herself, being eighty-five, is also an old woman.
In Helen’s early life, there were the two horses, as well as the cows, calves, cats and kittens, and a large flock of chickens. In her adult life, she has almost always had a cat as a pet. She used to feed strays at her back door, and one winter arranged a cardboard box shelter for one of them under the outside staircase. She would walk out over the ice with small, careful steps just before dark to set his evening meal down in the snow. There are cats in the nursing home, and one in particular, a large Persian, will occasionally wander in to visit her. She speaks to him, smiles, and reaches her hand down to him, though in her eyes he is only an orange blur.
Hope kept an overweight female cat throughout her later years, with sometimes harmony between them and sometimes ill will. She was sure the cat harbored resentments and indulged in some calculated bad behavior. When, eventually, she was advised by a home health expert that the cat posed a certain hazard to her by crouching in dark corners, getting underfoot, and occasionally attacking her ankles, she immediately arranged for it to be put down by the local vet before her family could intervene.
Although Helen, when she lived at home, kept a bird feeder well supplied outside the kitchen window where she could watch it over her morning coffee, she had no great love of, or interest in, other sorts of wild creatures.
Vi, the same in this respect, particularly dislikes snakes and often repeats a long story about finding one in her yard and going after it with a shovel. When she was a child in Virginia, the windows were kept open in the summertime and lizards would climb up to sun themselves on the windowsills. The children were scared of the lizards and wanted to kill them. But Vi’s grandmother told them the lizards would not hurt them, to let the lizards stay there and enjoy the sun, and they would go away when they were ready.
Neither Helen nor Vi is particularly interested in the natural world beyond the confines of the garden. Nature for Helen, when she still lived at home, manifested itself either as a practical problem—trees shading the house, the lawn that did not grow well, the hedge that needed clipping, acorns in the driveway—or a domesticated thing of beauty like her favorite, the azalea shrub, or the dogwood in blossom. Her work in the yard was caretaking work rather than designing and planting, with the exception of the geraniums, which she liked to see set out in the spring in a row by the front porch. Every spring, too, she looked for the first blooms of the flowering bulbs.
She also enjoyed nature in the form of the landscape as seen from the car window on a Sunday drive.
Religion
Both Helen and Vi have maintained close involvement with their churches all their lives, although the church has loomed larger in Vi’s life than in Helen’s. Their churches have constituted their most important larger community, both social and spiritual.
In youth and middle age, Helen participated in the church’s ladies’ auxiliary group and helped out with such projects as bake sales for fund-raising. Every summer her family attended the church picnics. She said grace before every meal while she still lived at home. It is important to her that every family member be baptized, although her gentle insistence about this has sometimes had no effect. Her religious beliefs do not explicitly enter or color her conversation. She now rarely goes to a church service because the chapel in her nursing home is Catholic.
Vi’s strong faith occasionally enters her conversation, when she refers to “God’s will” or, more jocularly, describes what God might have in mind for her future. When she used to visit the local prison, she would incorporate some Christian teaching in her conversations with the prisoners. She likes to spend time at Bible study with her best friend on a warm Saturday evening in summer. They take chairs out into the backyard, and as it grows dark they read aloud to each other from Scripture, discussing each passage in preparation for the following day’s Bible class.
Hope reacted against her mother’s strong religious convictions by rejecting all organized religions and in fact all forms of spirituality, as well as, though indirectly, by joining, at one stage, the Communist Party.
Vi spends most of every weekend on church activities. She was for a time president of an official churchwomen’s group, the Deaconesses. She sings in the choir, which involves going to choir rehearsals as well as occasionally traveling to other churches, often in distant towns, to give performances. Congregations of different churches also visit each other: often her church will visit another for a supper, or her church will prepare a supper to host another church, when she will bake and help wash up afterward. She will exclaim later over the quantity of food consumed by the other congregation.
In her walk around the nursing home, Helen will sometimes ask family members to look for the names of acquaintances. She will always stop in front of the chapel. Here, next to the open stained-glass doors, a signboard with a black background and removable white letters bears the names of those residents who are in the hospital or recently deceased and in need of a candle and/or a prayer. She will ask to have the names read to her in case they include someone she knows.
Personal Habits
Both Vi’s and Helen’s eating habits are sensible, Vi’s diet marginally more balanced since she includes more fresh fruits and vegetables. Neither is particularly health-conscious; their good habits are also the habits of their families of origin.
Both have always practiced moderation, eaten regular meals, and enjoyed food and the preparation of food, although Vi has been more explicitly enthusiastic about food than Helen. Both have eaten predominantly home cooking (including baking) all their lives, and although they enjoy restaurant meals have tended to eat very little food that could be called convenience, junk, or fast food, with the exception of sandwiches and pastries. When they were children, of course, neither one ever ate in a restaurant.
When Vi was growing up on the farm in Virginia, the family ate their own fruits and vegetables—fresh in season and home-canned in winter—and the animals they raised themselves. They bought almost nothing but sugar in a sack, which the children would carry home—and on the way, Vi says, being mischievous and fun-loving, they would sneak a taste by sucking a corner of the sack.
In contrast t
o her light lunch when she is working at a cleaning job, Vi has a hearty breakfast and dinner. For breakfast she has a glass of milk, a glass of juice, cereal, eggs, bacon, and toast. With her second husband she used to have pancakes on Sundays, with coffee. She drinks quite a lot of milk now, but did not when she was younger. When she goes home after a day of work, she says, she makes herself a nice dinner. In the cold weather she likes to start with a bowl of soup. “A little bowl?” “No, a medium-sized bowl.” Then she has some meat, perhaps meatballs, pork chops, or chicken and vegetables. She makes the soup and the meatballs herself. She likes her own cooking. She does not care for meat now, though, as much as she used to; she likes vegetables and fruit more.
Helen used to order a Reuben sandwich when she went out to lunch: corned beef and cheese on rye bread. She would, however, eat only half the sandwich, taking the other half home for her next day’s lunch. She liked to go out for doughnuts after church with her friends. They would also have breakfast together in a restaurant every Wednesday, before they did their grocery shopping. In her later years, her cupboards used to contain a good deal of canned food as well as Lipton tea, Sanka, boxes of pastries and cookies, and spices, flour, and sugar for baking. She liked sweets, but ate them in small quantities. She would have a piece of fruit during the day. She would buy prepared seafood salad for sandwiches. For family dinners, she regularly made mashed potatoes and what she called a “salad,” which consisted of an aspic mold containing grated carrots, Jell-O, and pineapple. Earlier in her life, she would bake pastries and breads for her family, setting the dough to rise on the radiators in winter.
Both Vi and Helen like rhubarb and welcome a chance to have it fresh out of a friend’s or family’s garden and eat it stewed. Vi bends down herself and gives each stalk a vigorous twist at the base to break it off, collecting half a dozen to take home with her. In Helen’s case, her family brings it to her already stewed and ready to eat, but there is always the danger that a member of the nursing home staff will remove the tub of slimy-looking fruit and throw it out, as happened once, before Helen has a chance to enjoy it.
Hope has been adamant, all her life, in planning a healthy food program for herself. Now, every day, under her instruction, her live-in companion prepares for her, for lunch, a bean soup, a small salad, and a small bowl of popcorn, followed by a fruit and yogurt dessert. She sometimes calls out to her companion several times to see if lunch is ready yet or to request additional services that delay the preparation of the meal. When the time comes, she makes her way slowly to the dining area via the kitchen, where she may give a few more instructions. While she eats, she wears a cracked green plastic tennis visor over her eyes to shade them from the overhead chandelier and watches a book program on the television.
Neither Helen nor Vi ever smoked. When she was small, Vi and her cousin Joe had tried smoking their grandmother’s pipe when she was away. There wasn’t much tobacco in it, but Vi became very sick. Later, she didn’t dare tell her grandmother why she was so sick. If her grandparents had found out what she had done, she says, “I woulda had some sores now” from it. This bad experience discouraged her from ever wanting to smoke again.
Hope had the occasional cigarette in her twenties, during the years when, stylish and attractive, she also tended to form various short-lived attachments to, often, wealthy and well-born lovers and traveled abroad, sometimes at their expense. However, smoking did not agree with her and she did not continue.
Vi does not habitually drink alcohol at all. She says she likes her Manishevitz, but the last time she drank any, in fact, was many years ago: an employer used to invite her to breakfast and offer her a small glass, but that employer is long gone. Helen, before she moved into the nursing home, would occasionally be persuaded to have a little sweet wine after a holiday meal: seated in her customary place at one end of the dining table, in front of a glass-fronted cupboard containing sets of delicate sherry glasses and some commemoration plates and mugs, she would sip it slowly and thoughtfully. Now she does not have wine or any other alcohol.
Hope, by contrast, has drunk wine and mixed drinks all her life, enjoying an altered state of mind in which she is more apt to make risqué or tactless remarks, and whether or not company is present, she often has a glass of wine with her dinner.
For guests, she likes to open a bottle of champagne: When they arrive at the door, she is immediately distracted by the thought of the champagne and barely greets them before sending them to find it in the refrigerator. After the champagne has been drunk, she will sometimes have her guests bring out a leftover bottle of wine from the refrigerator, though it is ice-cold and may be sour.
Both Helen and Vi are thrifty by habit. Vi’s second husband would look out for sales and buy, for instance, ten large bottles of bleach for thirty-nine cents a bottle. Vi, too, buys in quantity. She keeps these extra supplies on her small enclosed side porch.
Helen has a metal serving spoon which she used to stir things on the stove for so long that it is worn down nearly straight on one side.
When her daughter was a child, Vi was given nice hand-me-down children’s clothes, including party dresses, by her employers. She would pack them carefully away until her daughter was the right size for them, then wrap them festively and present them for birthdays and Christmases as though they were new. Her daughter never suspected. Now Vi’s daughter in turn brings her good clothing from yard sales. Vi rarely buys a piece of new clothing for herself.
Vi does not buy more food than she needs, and she does not let it spoil. The same was true of Helen when she lived at home and cooked for herself. Vi drinks Lipton tea, and she uses each teabag twice, sometimes three times.
Helen, by now, in the restricted space of the nursing home, feels somewhat oppressed and burdened by her possessions, though she has so few. More inclined to give than receive, she resists offers of presents, though she sometimes appears secretly pleased by them; “No, no,” she will say gently, “don’t bring me anything. I don’t need anything!” Sometimes, only, she may ask for a bag of cough drops or a bar of soap.
Vi is quite open about liking to receive presents. She appreciates framed photographs, plants, and boxes of chocolates. At the end of her day’s work, she likes to take home, in the growing season, either produce from an employer’s vegetable patch or a perennial plant dug up out of the ground. But she likes gifts of money more than anything else. On the occasion of her eighty-fifth birthday, not only her employers but most of her friends gave her money.
Whether in order to make an economical choice or, more likely, to save trouble for her family, Helen, some years ago, went with her older son to a local funeral parlor, chose a casket, and paid in advance for the casket and funeral arrangements. With the same foresight, she had already chosen the nursing home in which she now lives.
Health
Vi is rarely ill, having only the occasional cold in her head and chest.
She has some arthritis in her left shoulder, which prevents her raising her left arm above shoulder height. She has to compensate when working by using her other arm for some things. For a time she was given physical therapy for it, but it didn’t get much better. She believes, though, that if you have arthritis, you have to use the affected limb, otherwise it will get worse and worse. She will cite the examples of several friends who moved less and less until they could not move at all. She has no other physical problems and takes no medication.
Although Helen’s eyesight and hearing are poor, she takes no prescription medications, her only pills being vitamins and an occasional aspirin. She had no medical problems until the age of eighty, when she began to develop macular degeneration, which has grown progressively worse. Sometime after she turned ninety, a friend of hers noticed, on their weekly grocery shopping trip, that her ankles were badly swollen. Helen went to the doctor and it was discovered that her heart had begun to beat more slowly and erratically. She was fitted with a pacemaker. Following insertion of the pacemaker, medical pr
oblems began that appeared to have been caused by the medical interventions themselves. For instance, a heart medication upset her stomach. This in turn caused her to lose weight and weaken, making her more prone to falling. One fall resulted in a broken hip. She entered her present nursing home on a temporary basis for treatment and then arranged to stay there permanently. In the nursing home, a treatment with a medicated shampoo led to a chronic and persistent skin irritation that she will apparently never be free of. Two of her medical problems, then—her macular degeneration and her erratic heartbeat—occurred naturally and spontaneously, whereas the others—the weight loss with resultant weakness, the fall and fracture, and the skin condition—resulted from medical intervention.
Helen’s well-being is dependent, now, on the environment of the nursing home and the treatment she receives there.
Physical Appearance
Both Helen and Vi take pride in their appearance. Both, like Hope, were attractive and popular with boys and men when they were younger. Their figures are strong, slender, and youthful. They have smooth, clear skin, Helen’s pale but with a diffused rosy color and Vi’s a rich, even brown.
Vi’s face is round, her eyes are dark brown and sparkling and slant upward a little at the outer edges. Her eyebrows are straight and thick. Her lips are often parted, as though she is about to speak or smile, and then her lower lip curves downward. Helen’s blue eyes are dim now, the whites yellowish. Both Helen and Vi wear large glasses, though Vi often removes hers for a photograph. Vi’s hands are shapely and dark brown. Her fingers are slim and fairly straight; only the last joint of the index finger is a little bent and swollen. Helen’s fingers are quite crooked.
A photograph of Helen taken when she was about twenty years old shows her leaning against the front porch of the large white house, her hands behind her back. Her head is tilted to one side, and she is smiling. Her black dress is low-waisted, with a V neck, a loosely knotted black tie at the V, and a flared, pleated, knee-length skirt. She wears clear stockings and black heeled pumps with ankle straps. She has a string of pearls around her neck. Her long, dark hair is parted and tied back.