Varieties of Disturbance
Page 18
Insurance: “The Way to Perfection”
John Cheney’s Literary Magazine: “Television” (sections 1 and 2)
A Little Magazine: “Varieties of Disturbance”
NOON: “Absentminded,” “The Caterpillar,” “Getting to Know Your Body,” “Dog and Me,” “Insomnia,” “Jane and the Cane,” “The Good Taste Contest”
Northern Lit Quarterly: “For Sixty Cents”
Notus: “How She Could Not Drive” (as “Clouds in the Sky”)
Quick Fiction: “A Different Man”
Shiny: “Childcare,” “Passing Wind,” “How Shall I Mourn Them?”
Tolling Elves: “The Busy Road,” “The Fellowship” (as “The Fellowship: 1” and “The Fellowship: 2”), “The Fly,” “Lonely,” “Tropical Storm,” excerpts from “What You Learn About the Baby”
The World: “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho” (footnotes only, under the title “Going South While Reading Worstward Ho”), “My Son”
“Cape Cod Diary” was first published as a pamphlet by Belladonna Books (Brooklyn, 2003)
“Good Times” first appeared in The Unmade Bed (ed. Laura Chester; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1992)
“Grammar Questions” first appeared in 110 Stories (ed. Ulrich Baer; New York: New York University Press, 2002) and was reprinted in Harper’s (“Readings” section: New York, August 2002)
“How It Is Done” also appeared in New York Sex (ed. Jane DeLynn; New York: Painted Leaf Press, 1998)
Some of the material in “Kafka Cooks Dinner” was taken from Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka, tr. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken Books, 1990)
“Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho” (main text and footnotes, separately) also appeared under the title “Going South, Reads Worstward Ho” in Marc Joseph’s New and Used (London: Steidl Publishing, 2006)
“Television” appeared in The Pushcart Prize, 1989–1990 (ed. Bill Henderson; New York: Pushcart, 1989)
“Varieties of Disturbance” was reprinted in Harper’s (“Readings” section: New York, April 1993)
Excerpts from “What You Learn About the Baby” also appeared in Cradle and All (ed. Laura Chester; Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989)
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2007 by Lydia Davis
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
“Worstward Ho,” copyright © 1983 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
In “The Walk,” quotations from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, copyright © 1978 by Marcel Proust. Used by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc.; quotations from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, copyright © 2002 by Lydia Davis. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.; quotations from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, copyright © 2002 by Lydia Davis. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Lydia, 1947–
Varieties of disturbance: stories / Lydia Davis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-0627-6
I. Title.
PS3554.A9356V37 2007
813'.54—dc22
2006033431
www.fsgbooks.com
For support during the period in which many of these stories were written, the author would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the State University of New York, Albany, including the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English; and the New York State Writers Institute.
*She waits near the highway before the entrance of HoJo’s for the van going south. She is going south to meet a plane coming from the west. Waiting with her is a thin, dark-haired young woman who does not stop walking back and forth restlessly near her luggage. They are both early and wait for some time. In her purse she has two books, Worstward Ho and West with the Night. If it is quiet and she reads Worstward Ho on the way south, when she is fresh, she can read West with the Night on the way back up north, when it will be later and she will be tired.
†The van arrives and she takes care to sit on the right side, so that as they travel south the sun will not come in through her window but through the windows across the aisle from her. It is early morning, and the sun shines in through the windows
from the east. Later in the day, as she returns north, she thinks, it may be late enough so that the sun will come through the windows from the west.
The highway she travels crosses and recrosses a meandering stream that passes now northeast and now northwest under her. As long as she is alone, sitting in the back of the van, she does not read but looks out the window.
Soon the van pulls up in front of a shopping mall. The restless young woman with the dark hair immediately stands up and remains standing in the aisle looking at the other passengers and out the windows. Two women board the van. They smell heavily of face powder as they walk past her to sit in the back near her. Now, since she is no longer alone, she begins to read.
The van is quiet, so she reads Worstward Ho. The first words are: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” She is not very pleased by these words.
*But soon after, she reads a sentence she likes better: “Whither once whence no return.” After that, for a while, some sentences are pleasing and some are not.
The van travels almost due south down the highway. Sometimes it leaves the highway, the sunlight circling around behind all of them, to make a stop and pick up more passengers. At each stop, the restless young woman stands up and looks around in a commanding way. The passengers who get onto the van are mostly women.
She reads on comfortably for some miles, but when the road turns, and the van turns with it, east and then north of east, the sun is in her eyes and she cannot read Worstward Ho.
†She waits, and when the road turns east again and then south, a shadow falls on the page and she can read. With difficulty, though the light is good, she reads such words as “As now by way of somehow on where in the nowhere all together?”
‡If the van turns briefly north, so that the sun is at her right shoulder, the light is no longer in her eyes but flickering on the page of the book, illuminating but further confusing such already confusing words as “What when words gone? None for what then.”
*Now the shade of a tree by a small gas station allows her to go on to read: “But say by way of somehow on somehow with sight to do.” While the driver makes a phone call, one woman leaves the van to try to find a working bathroom, fails, and returns to the van.
The van resumes going south and she reads with pleasure and some understanding: “Now for to say as worst they may only they only they.” And then with more pleasure: “With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.” And then soon there is something a little different: “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.”
The sun in another small gas station stops her from reading, heat and brightness coming in her window, what was the west window when the van was heading south but probably must be considered the east window just at this moment. While the driver makes another phone call, two women, now, leave the van to try to find a working bathroom, fail, and return to the bus.
†The van heads south again.
‡Though she is several pages farther along, some of the words are the same again: “Next fail see say how dim undimmed to worsen. How nohow save to dimmer still. But but a shade so as when after nohow somehow on to dimmer still.”
Then there is something new at the bottom of the page: “Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing.
”
Then a combination: “Longing that all go. Dim go.”
Soon after, with confusion, she reads: “Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid.” She misunderstands and reads again: “Whenever said said said missaid.” Then a third time, and when she imagines a pause in the middle of it, she understands better.
*At the next stop, the van driver calls out for “folks Benson and Goodwin.” The Benson couple and the single Goodwin, sitting forward in the van, identify themselves as “Two Benson and one Goodwin.” It takes the driver a very long time to find their papers. While he is searching, three women, now, leave the van, find a working bathroom, and return to the van. Now each time the van stops, it stops with the sun coming in what was the west window but is now the east window, preparing to turn right and head south into the sun again. Now she has grown used to waiting with the sun on her face and on the page and watching the asphalt outside and the other passengers inside until the van turns and goes on south.
†Near the end of the book, she reads: “No once. No once in pastless now,” and just now the van passes a cemetery near the airport and she sees many white stone angels, their wings raised.
‡By the time she reaches the end of her trip south, the southernmost point in the van’s route, from which it will head north again, she has finished the book, which is not long. Although she has liked many of the words that came in between, its last words, “Said nohow on,” say as little to her as its first, “On. Say on. Be said on.”