by Lydia Davis
And yet if you water the plants, you will not write the letter, on which so much depends. You will also not tidy the kitchen and living room, and later you will become confused and cross because of the disorder. One counter is covered with shopping lists and pieces of glassware your husband bought at a liquidation sale. It should be simple enough to put the glassware away, but you can’t put it away until you wash it, you can’t wash it until the sink is clear of dirty dishes, and you can’t wash the dishes until you empty the drainboard. If you begin by emptying the drainboard, you may not get any farther, while he is asleep, than washing the dishes.
You may decide that the plants have priority, in the end, because they are alive. Then you may decide, since you must find a way of organizing your priorities, that all the living things in the house will have priority, starting with the youngest and smallest human being. That should be clear enough. But then, though you know exactly how to care for the mouse, the cat, and the plants, you are not sure how to give priority to the baby, the older boy, yourself, and your husband. It is certainly true that the larger and older the living thing is, the harder it is to know how to care for it.
The Meeting
I tried so hard, the clothes I wore, new look I had, I thought. Competent, I thought, casual. New raincoat. Brown. Things seemed all right at first, promising, in the waiting room. Top secretary offered me the comfortable chair, a cup of tea—top secretary or second secretary. Declined the tea—how could I swallow it, how could I even hold the cup? Opened my little book. Thought once I got in there he might even ask me what I was reading—Wait, he might say, is that Addison? Kept my head down, eyes on the page. Listened to the secretaries, thought I was learning the inside dope. Feeling smart. Thought I was all buttoned up. Yes, and now here we were alone for the first time, at last, and I thought we might have a special rapport, he might become a friend, at least. I thought he might say to himself: Here is this woman, this attractive woman, I’ve talked to her before, never at length, unfortunately, now she’s here across my desk from me in an attractive raincoat with some jewelry on. I thought he might say: She’s quiet but I know from what I’ve heard and from the way she sits there so composed, holding that small book bound in green leather—could it be Addison?—that she’s intelligent, though obviously shy, it will be interesting to talk to her…Here he is, the boss, and there are no distractions, there’s no one coming into the room, no one offering something from a tray, no one walking past, no one drinking next to him, no one asking him a sudden question that left me out, rudely, no one standing in a circle with him, here we are alone, my face floating over that piled desk. But he!—he rails against the whole project, he uses bad language, though it isn’t my fault, it really isn’t my fault, what he doesn’t like, the change of title, and in fact he’s wrong about that, things have to change, even titles have to change. How he jumps on me, how he strafes me, how he slangs me. I’m rocked. Of course—anyone can make an appointment to see the President, that’s the easy part. I try again, surface and take another breath, say something, he stops railing and listens, he says something back, asks me a decent question, but I can’t remember that name, I just can’t remember it, me with my shaky voice, now what can I say, don’t have a single million-dollar word, say something dumb, now he’s doing his best, he’s trying to remember his manners. But after all that yelling he says he isn’t the one who can help me, no, even though they said I should go talk to him myself, they both said that. And they know him, I thought I could trust them, just plant the idea in his head at least, they said. I guess maybe they sold me a pup. What a blunder. And I wore all this jewelry, every piece I had that was decent. He never noticed, I’m sure. No, he just said to himself: Not my concern, sorry. Wait, I thought, give me time, another five minutes. But it’s no use, now he stands up and sticks his hand across the desk at an angle and flat as a piece of cardboard, he’s offering to shake, it’s his signal, I’m supposed to leave. Well, lost opportunity, Mr. President! Old bean! We’re not all so clever, you know—not on the spot like that. Beanpole! Some day you’ll make me an offer, I’ll say I can’t help you. Such a mistake, even to go in there. So wrong. Some other frequency. Can’t do anything right. Not worth shucks. Strange hat, brown coat, drooping hem, bare neck, yellow skin, wrong jewelry, too much jewelry. So many mistakes. Electric hair. So many mistakes. Too much, too little, wrong time, wrong place, can’t do it right. Do it anyway. Spoil it. Do it again. Spoil it again. A slime, a weed. I wanted respect. Did he even see me? Did he even see my head poking up above those piles? He was seeing another appointment! This was my appointment! Maybe the raincoat gave a bad impression. Maybe I was wrong to wear brown. Maybe he thought: Uh-oh, there’s something depressing out there in the waiting room. Brown woman with a proposal, sitting in a chair with her book. And then I wasn’t prepared. Didn’t know the name. I nodded. Anyone can nod. I didn’t know what was coming! I was so dumb. I’m aching. What shame—ready to kill. Wish I’d had my mother with me. She would have said something. A gasbag. He would have said she was a gabby old woman, an ulcer—What’s she doing in here? Who let her in? Get her out of here! In her pastel suit. But there she’d be. She’d account for him. She’d give it to him—right in the clock! He’d say: Get the old bag off my dark wood paneling! That’s my mother! What a barney, hoo-ha! She’d give him a mouse, all right! He’d say: Get the old bag in her pink suit away from in front of my dark wood paneling! Get him, mother! Sic him! Old Iowa bag. Come in here with her replaced hip, her replaced knee, one leg shorter than the other, built-up shoe. Determined. She’d lam him in his little Mary, quick and smart, she’d have the edge on him. What’s this? he would have said. Kick this old lady out of here! In her spring suit. He might have used bad language about her too: Kick this old fart out of here! Maybe I should have taken my whole family in there with me. Brother watching, father watching, sister getting up to help. But Mother’s the one who would floor him. Mother would thrash him, she’d baste his jacket. She’s high-rent. She would have said, Be nice to her! He wasn’t nice to me. That’s my daughter! He wasn’t nice. She would have given him a piece of her fist. See this?—shaking it right in his pan. Names for him. She doesn’t come as a water-carrier for anyone. Annihilate him, Mother! Crush him! No more—Bam!—President of this place. New President, please! Better one, please. Oh boy! Sock! You’ll see, Mr. President! Summer-complaint! Dog’s breakfast!
Companion
We are sitting here together, my digestion and I. I am reading a book and it is working away at the lunch I ate a little while ago.
Blind Date
“There isn’t really much to tell,” she said, but she would tell it if I liked. We were sitting in a midtown luncheonette. “I’ve only had one blind date in my life. And I didn’t really have it. I can think of more interesting situations that are like a blind date—say when someone gives you a book as a present, when they fix you up with that book. I was once given a book of essays about reading, writing, book collecting. I felt it was a perfect match. I started reading it right away, in the back seat of the car. I stopped listening to the conversation in the front. I like to read about how other people read and collect books, even how they shelve their books. But by the time I was done with the book, I had taken a strong dislike to the author’s personality. I won’t have another date with her!” She laughed. Here we were interrupted by the waiter, and then a series of incidents followed that kept us from resuming our conversation that day.
The next time the subject came up, we were sitting in two Adirondack chairs looking out over a lake in, in fact, the Adirondacks. We were content to sit in silence at first. We were tired. We had been to the Adirondack Museum that day and seen many things of interest, including old guide boats and good examples of the original Adirondack chair. Now we watched the water and the edge of the woods, each thinking, I was sure, about James Fenimore Cooper. After some parties of canoers had gone by, older people in canvas boating hats, their quiet voices carrying far o
ver the water to us, we went on talking. These were precious days of holiday together, and we were finishing many unfinished conversations.
“I was fifteen or sixteen, I guess,” she said. “I was home from boarding school. Maybe it was summer. I don’t know where my parents were. They were often away. They often left me alone there, sometimes for the evening, sometimes for weeks at a time. The phone rang. It was a boy I didn’t know. He said he was a friend of a boy from school—I can’t remember who. We talked a little and then he asked me if I wanted to have dinner with him. He sounded nice enough so I said I would, and we agreed on a day and a time and I told him where I lived.
“But after I got off the phone, I began thinking, worrying. What had this other boy said about me? What had the two of them said about me? Maybe I had some kind of a reputation. Even now I can’t imagine that what they said was completely pure or innocent—for instance, that I was pretty and fun to be with. There had to be something nasty about it, two boys talking privately about a girl. The awful word that began to occur to me was fast. She’s fast. I wasn’t actually very fast. I was faster than some but not as fast as others. The more I imagined the two boys talking about me the worse I felt.
“I liked boys. I liked the boys I knew in a way that was much more innocent than they probably thought. I trusted them more than girls. Girls hurt my feelings, girls ganged up on me. I always had boys who were my friends, starting back when I was nine and ten and eleven. I didn’t like this feeling that two boys were talking about me.
“Well, when the day came, I didn’t want to go out to dinner with this boy. I just didn’t want the difficulty of this date. It scared me—not because there was anything scary about the boy but because he was a stranger, I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to sit there face to face in some restaurant and start from the very beginning, knowing nothing. It didn’t feel right. And there was the burden of that recommendation—‘Give her a try.’
“Then again, maybe there were other reasons. Maybe I had been alone in that apartment so much by then that I had retreated into some kind of inner, unsociable space that was hard to come out of. Maybe I felt I had disappeared and I was comfortable that way and did not want to be forced back into existence. I don’t know.
“At six o’clock, the buzzer rang. The boy was there, downstairs. I didn’t answer it. It rang again. Still I did not answer it. I don’t know how many times it rang or how long he leaned on it. I let it ring. At some point, I walked the length of the living room to the balcony. The apartment was four stories up. Across the street and down a flight of stone steps was a park. From the balcony on a clear day you could look out over the park and see all the way across town, maybe a mile, to the other river. At this point I think I ducked down or got down on my hands and knees and inched my way to the edge of the balcony. I think I looked over far enough to see him down there on the sidewalk below—looking up, as I remember it. Or he had gone across the street and was looking up. He didn’t see me.
“I know that as I crouched there on the balcony or just back from it I had some impression of him being puzzled, disconcerted, disappointed, at a loss what to do now, not prepared for this—prepared for all sorts of other ways the date might go, other difficulties, but not for no date at all. Maybe he also felt angry or insulted, if it occurred to him then or later that maybe he hadn’t made a mistake but that I had deliberately stood him up, and not the way I did it—alone up there in the apartment, uncomfortable and embarrassed, chickening out, hiding out—but, he would imagine, in collusion with someone else, a girlfriend or boyfriend, confiding in them, snickering over him.
“I don’t know if he called me, or if I answered the phone if it rang. I could have given some excuse—I could have said I had gotten sick or had to go out suddenly. Or maybe I hung up when I heard his voice. In those days I did a lot of avoiding that I don’t do now—avoiding confrontations, avoiding difficult encounters. And I did a fair amount of lying that I also don’t do now.
“What was strange was how awful this felt. I was treating a person like a thing. And I was betraying not just him but something larger, some social contract. When you knew a decent person was waiting downstairs, someone you had made an appointment with, you did not just not answer the buzzer. What was even more surprising to me was what I felt about myself in that instant. I was behaving as though I had no responsibility to anyone or anything, and that made me feel as though I existed outside society, some kind of criminal, or didn’t exist at all. I was annihilating myself even more than him. It was an awful violation.”
She paused, thoughtful. We were sitting inside now, because it was raining. We had come inside to sit in a sort of lounge or recreation room provided for guests of that lakeside camp. The rain fell every afternoon there, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. Across the water, the white pines and spruces were very still against the gray sky. The water was silver. We did not see any of the water birds we sometimes saw paddling around the edges of the lake—teals and loons. Inside, a fire burned in the fireplace. Over our heads hung a chandelier made of antlers. Between us stood a table constructed of a rough slab of wood resting on the legs of a deer, complete with hooves. On the table stood a lamp made from an old gun. She looked away from the lake and around the room. “In that book about the Adirondacks I was reading last night,” she remarked, “he says this was what the Adirondacks was all about, I mean the Adirondacks style: things made from things.”
A month or so later, when I was home again and she was back in the city, we were talking on the telephone and she said she had been hunting through one of the old diaries she had on her shelf there, that might say exactly what had happened—though of course, she said, she would just be filling in the details of something that did not actually happen. But she couldn’t find this incident written down anywhere, which of course made her wonder if she had gotten the dates really wrong and she wasn’t even in boarding school anymore by then. Maybe she was in college by then. But she decided to believe what she had told me. “But I’d forgotten how much I wrote about boys,” she added. “Boys and books. What I wanted more than anything else at the age of sixteen was a great library.”
Examples of Remember
Remember that thou art but dust.
I shall try to bear it in mind.
Old Mother and the Grouch
“Meet the sourpuss,” says the Grouch to their friends.
“Oh, shut up,” says Old Mother.
The Grouch and Old Mother are playing Scrabble. The Grouch makes a play.
“Ten points,” he says. He is disgusted.
He is angry because Old Mother is winning early in the game and because she has drawn all the s’s and blanks. He says it is easy to win if you get all the s’s and blanks. “I think you marked the backs,” he says. She says a blank tile doesn’t have a back.
Now he is angry because she has made the word qua. He says qua is not English. He says they should both make good, familiar words like the words he has made—bonnet, realm, and weave—but instead she sits in her nasty corner making aw, eh, fa, ess, and ax. She says these are words, too. He says even if they are, there is something mean and petty about using them.
Now the Grouch is angry because Old Mother keeps freezing all the food he likes. He brings home a nice smoked ham and wants a couple of slices for lunch but it is too late—she has already frozen it.
“It’s hard as a rock,” he says. “And you don’t have to freeze it anyway. It’s already smoked.”
Then, since everything else he wants to eat is also frozen, he thinks he will at least have some of the chocolate ice cream he bought for her the day before. But it’s gone. She has eaten it all.
“Is that what you did last night?” he asks. “You stayed up late eating ice cream?”
He is close to the truth, but not entirely correct.
Old Mother cooks dinner for friends of theirs. After the friends have gone home, she tells the Grouch the meal was a failure: the salad dre
ssing had too much salt in it, the chicken was overdone and tasteless, the cherries hard, etc.
She expects him to contradict her, but instead he listens carefully and adds that the noodles, also, were “somehow wrong.”
She says, “I’m not a very good cook.”
She expects him to assure her that she is, but instead he says, “You should be. Anybody can be a good cook.”
Old Mother sits dejected on a stool in the kitchen.
“I just want to teach you something about the rice pot,” says the Grouch, by way of introduction, as he stands at the sink with his back to her.
But she does not like this. She does not wish to be his student.
One night Old Mother cooks him a dish of polenta. He remarks that it has spread on the plate like a cow patty. He tastes it and says that it tastes better than it looks. On another night she makes him a brown rice casserole. The Grouch says this does not look very good either. He covers it in salt and pepper, then eats some of it and says it also tastes better than it looks. Not much better, though.
“Since I met you,” says the Grouch, “I have eaten more beans than I ever ate in my life. Potatoes and beans. Every night there is nothing but beans, potatoes, and rice.”
Old Mother knows this is not strictly true.
“What did you eat before you knew me?” she asks.
“Nothing,” says the Grouch. “I ate nothing.”
Old Mother likes all chicken parts, including the liver and heart, and the Grouch likes the breasts only. Old Mother likes the skin on and the Grouch likes it off. Old Mother prefers vegetables and bland food. The Grouch prefers meat and strong spices. Old Mother prefers to eat her food slowly and brings it hot to the table. The Grouch prefers to eat quickly and burns his mouth.