The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (32 page)

We passed a spot where the Highway Department had cleared the forest by the side of the road and planted some trees. The trees were covered with shriveled reddish foliage and obviously dying. This started me thinking about deforestation, and then about the disappearance of family farms, which somehow took me back to caffeine levels again. At that point, I started trying to identify the new trees I had learned on our vacation, and when I gave up on that I just watched the fat on my arm ripple in the wind from the open window.

Things went on pretty much like that. At some point I began to think I had spider bites on my legs; later Mac asked me if I had put something strange in the sandwiches; Junior rolled up the toll ticket to make a telescope, and Mac yelled at him; but then we all quieted down to watch the remains of a pretty dramatic accident by the side of the road.

At the rest stop I had been thinking that about 50 percent of the people I saw looked as though they’d had a better vacation than we had. But then 50 percent of them looked as though they’d had a worse one, so I felt all right about it.

When we were twenty minutes from home, Junior wanted to stop at a Holiday Inn and spend the night and couldn’t understand why we said no. But I realized about then that as a family we have a certain kind of loyalty to one another, and the way it works is that no two of us will get mad at the third one at the same time, except occasionally, as in the case of the Wet Ones.

He and I are both teachers in the university system and we will be teachers until we are too old to teach, and we would certainly like to be given a special chair at our universities, but what we have gotten so far is the wrong kind of special chair, a special chair belonging to a friend, a chair that swivels and has splayed feet and is special to her for reasons we can’t remember. We who teach in the university system would like a special chair so that we would be paid more and not have to teach as much and not have to sit on so many committees—we would sit instead on our special chair. But we have not been given any special chairs by our universities, only this strange heavy chair belonging to our friend, who moved away many years ago and had to leave it behind, and who does not want to give it up for reasons we have forgotten or never knew. All this time we have been employed by our universities only to teach from year to year without even the security of tenure. But now one of us has had some good luck and has been given a job with tenure, though not by his own university, and in leaving his present job, the job without tenure, he must also leave behind the chair special to our friend, because he is moving far away and there will not be room for it where he is going. Even though there is a great deal of large empty space in the state where he is going, more empty space than practically any other state but Wyoming, he will be living there in a very small house, too small for an extra chair, especially such a heavy one made out of a wine barrel. And so I will be the one to keep our friend’s chair for her now; it has passed from him to me, though not without effort, since it is so heavy. And perhaps, I am thinking, her special chair with its strange red vinyl upholstery, with its bunghole in the back, and its genuine cork, will now bring me good luck of a professional kind too.

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

It should be so simple. You do what you can while he is awake, and then once he is asleep, you do what you can do only when he is asleep, beginning with the most important thing. But it is not so simple.

You ask yourself what is the most important thing. It should be easy to say which thing has priority and go and do it. But not just one thing has priority, and not just two or three. When several things have priority, which of the several things having priority is given priority?

In the time in which you can do something, the time when he is asleep, you can write a letter that has to be written immediately because many things depend on it. And yet if you write the letter, your plants will not get watered and it is a very hot day. You have already put them out on the balcony hoping the rain will water them, but this summer it almost never rains. You have already taken them in from the balcony hoping that if they are out of the wind they will not have to be watered as often, but they will still have to be watered.

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.

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! Someday 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!

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.

“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 backseat 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 over 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.