The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (45 page)

Then there is another sort of company in the letters I have not answered. If I answer the letters, those patient or impatient people waiting for answers are no longer present to me. If I answer the letters, I suppose I may be in some cases present to them, then. But, though not telling myself this is the reason, I don’t answer these letters. And yet this is selfish, and of course impolite. I answer some, in fact. But most go unanswered for weeks, months, more than a year, several years, or forever. Several times, I have waited so long to answer a letter that the person has moved away. Once, I waited so long to answer a postcard that my friend died.

But maybe these people are no longer waiting for answers by now anyway; maybe their attention is no longer on me, and this company is only an illusion: the friendly or neutral words are still there on various sheets of paper in different envelopes, but in the minds of these people who wrote the unanswered letters the words for what they are thinking about me, if they think of me at all, are no longer friendly or neutral but unfriendly, dismissive, even disgusted. I believe I have this company, but I do not have it, unless believing this is enough, and I do in some form have this company, whatever they may be thinking.

When I answer one of these letters, true, sometimes all I receive in return, weeks later, is a brief, tired reply. But more often the reply comes quickly and is full, warm, even delighted; and then, just because it is so generous and such wonderful company, it may sit again on my bedside, or on my desk, or on my pile of correspondence, for weeks or months or longer before I answer it.

If they try to add and subtract to see whether the relationship is equal, it won’t work. On his side, he is giving $50,000, she says. No, $70,000, he says. It doesn’t matter, she says. It matters to me, he says. What she is giving is a half-grown child. Is that an asset or a liability? Now, is she supposed to feel grateful to him? She can feel grateful, but not indebted, not that she owes him something. There has to be a sense of equality. I just love to be with you, she says, and you love to be with me. I’m grateful to you for providing for us, and I know my child is sometimes a trouble to you, though you say he is a good child. But I don’t know how to figure it. If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.

It was not possible, and yet it happened; and not suddenly, but very slowly, not a miracle, but a very natural thing, though it was impossible. A girl in our town turned into a stone. But it is true that she had not been the usual sort of girl even before that: she had been a tree. Now a tree moves in the wind. But sometime near the end of September she began not to move in the wind anymore. For weeks she moved less and less. Then she never moved. When her leaves fell they fell suddenly and with a terrible noise. They crashed onto the cobblestones and sometimes broke into fragments and sometimes remained whole. There would be a spark where they fell and a little white powder lying beside them. People, though I did not, collected her leaves and put them on the mantelpiece. There never was such a town, with stone leaves on every mantelpiece. Then she began to turn gray: at first we thought it was the light. With wrinkled foreheads, twenty of us at a time would stand in a circle around her shading our eyes, dropping our jaws—and so few teeth we had among us it was something to see—and say it was the time of day or the changing season that made her look gray. But soon it was clear that she was simply gray now, just that, the way years ago we had to admit that she was simply a tree now, and no longer a girl. But a tree is one thing and a stone is another. There are limits to what you can accept, even of impossible things.

The younger sister is bored in the shop and rings the bell. The older sister comes slowly down the stairs and asks the younger sister why she rang the bell.

The reason is simple: to see her come down. Because she is so fat and moves so slowly; the stairs buckle and creak under her, she has trouble breathing, she holds the banister as if it were still her father’s hand, her plump knees knock against each other. It is very amusing to the younger sister and breaks the tedium of the morning.

She says none of this out loud. Out loud she says, “There has been a mistake in yesterday’s figures.” But of course the older sister cannot find the mistake, though she goes over the figures many times. Her dress is tight under her arms and her ankles are swollen from standing so long.

The younger sister cannot play this trick very often, or she would be found out. But that makes it all the more exciting to her.

The two sisters, no longer young, are forced to sleep in the same bed. They dream of different things and carefully hide their dreams from each other in the morning. Sometimes they touch by accident in the bed and fly apart as though they had been burned. They do not sleep well and are not refreshed in the morning. One wakes early, goes to the toilet, and would like to resume sleeping. But there is no joy in going back to bed when her sister lies there already sweating like a sow in the early heat.

My sister with thighs like pillars. She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People. No, then what is this passion of hers? It is terrifying to see her cloudy eyes become sharp when my dinner is put on the table. I am afraid she will devour not only the dinner but me and my poor life too. Beside her laughter, mine is like the cheeping of a bird in the ivy. No, she never laughs. I never laugh. Her silence, though, is so much greater than mine that mine is like a wisp of smoke in a rain cloud.

One day the younger sister smacked the older sister in the face. She did it out of frustration and boredom with her life. She regretted it immediately. Not because she had hurt her sister, who stood paralyzed, her hand to her cheek and her hat rolling over the floor, but because now her sister would weep and moan and speak of the incident for months, to the younger sister’s shame and anger. She had wanted to diminish her sister in some way, even destroy her, but instead she had given her new dignity.

Two sisters, like stone, who do not speak to each other. They have nothing in common but their parentage. One rises early and the other late; one will not eat animal products and the other will not eat whole grains; one has a rash in the summertime and the other cannot wear wool; one will not go to the movies for fear of strange men and the other will not watch television; in every election their votes cancel each other, and they are as no one. Only in their mutual distrust are they alike.

My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother. Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is saying to me, I hear a noise in the background, she says my name, and waits. Then I know my father has come into the room during her conversation and asked who she is talking to. Sometimes, at that point, he interjects a question for me, but often he asks her something that has nothing to do with me, while I wait at the other end of the phone. After she and I have gone on talking, he may come into the room again, having thought of something else he wants to say. When I hear his voice in the background I stop whatever I am saying to my mother and wait.

Sometimes she forces him to get on the phone. “Tell her yourself,” she says. He gets on the phone and without saying hello tells me what it is he wants me to know and then gets off without saying goodbye. Back on the phone, she says, “He’s gone.”

Although he has never liked to talk on the phone, he has always liked to write letters. He usually prefers to write a letter that includes some kind of instruction, or at least a transmission of what he thinks will be new information. For a while, we carried on a correspondence whose regularity was unusual for my family, in which very little has ever been regular or systematic. Then I didn’t hear from him for some weeks. Maybe I was the one who did not answer his last letter. I told my mother to tell him I would like to hear from him, and he then sent me some clippings from the Crime Beat section of their local paper. In the top margin he had written: “The underside of Cambridge life.” Some entries he had marked with a dark line of ink down the side margin.

On another clipping he had underlined certain sentences:

In the top margin of this clipping he had written: “Strange weapons dept.”

After this he sent me an article he had written. He occasionally wrote an article or a letter to a newspaper about something that had come up in connection with the Bible or some other religious topic. The articles and letters were clever, and by now I was interested in the Bible and religious topics myself.

This one, on circumcision, was called “The Unkindest Cut” and opened with a sentence about the “male organ.” In his thin, shaky handwriting, he had noted in the margin at the top of the article that I shouldn’t feel I had to read this, nor should my husband feel he had to read it. He was sincere, but he often attached disclaimers to the articles and letters he sent and I generally disregarded them.

Yet when I tried to read the article, I found it hard to read so much about the male organ as written by my father. I asked my husband if he would read it and tell me the gist of it but he did not really want to read it either. I did not know what to do about this situation, since it would have been awkward even to mention it to my father, but in time, as I took no action, I began to forget it. My father had probably forgotten it long before, since his memory has become more and more undependable, as he and my mother both point out.

But the letters he was sending me for a while were about the household he grew up in: besides his mother and father, there were two grandmothers and a grandfather who was slightly mad, maids, cooks, and cleaning women who came and went, and his grandmothers’ female nurse-companions and his grandfather’s male nurse-companions, who also came and went. His father’s mother owned the house and dominated it, to his mother’s annoyance. I have seen this house, which still stands in a street not far from where they live, and it looks to me surprisingly modest to have held such a number and variety of people. The last time it was sold, he read about the sale in the paper and wrote to the new owners, explaining that he had been born in the upstairs front room and had played in the hayloft of the small barn. The new owners were pleased to hear from him and sent him photographs of the house.

He would write to me in some detail and in the midst of it apologize, saying that what lay immediately ahead would be tedious and that I could read fast or skim if I liked. He said he was trying to recover facts that he had not thought of for most of a century. But I would write back asking for even more detail, because I wanted to come as close as I could to a way of life that seemed to me precious for several reasons, one being simply that even the memory of it was slipping away, because fewer and fewer people were alive who had experienced it.

Most recently we had gotten into a correspondence about the furnace in the house where he grew up. He said that while he lived there, changes had occurred, but they were all additions, and what was there to begin with remained. For instance, a gas stove was installed in the kitchen alongside the coal stove. His grandmother felt that for certain things the coal stove was more economical. A new oil furnace was added in the basement, but the huge old coal furnace remained. At some point electricity was added to gas for lighting. His grandmother kept both because in a storm, she warned them, the electricity might fail.

He remembered how one of the cleaning women used to comb her long hair in the kitchen at the end of the day, so that she could go forth suitably neat. She would then extract the hairs from the comb and put them not in the stove, which required the effort of lifting one of the iron covers, but on top of the stove, where they burned to an ash that remained visible until someone thought to remove it.

In the early days, he said, a “furnaceman” would come at about seven in the morning to shake down the big furnace, remove ashes and clinkers, and shovel more coal in from one of the two big bins whose board sides projected into the cellar, resting on the cellar floor. An early furnaceman was named Frank and his grandmother continued to call subsequent ones “Frank” as her memory for names weakened. The furnace was a matter of constant concern in very cold weather. Even when his father was home, his grandmother would go down to investigate, and then, in order to force his father to act, would do something deliberately noisy to it. He would shout, “Mother, Mother,” pounding on the floor with his foot, and rush down the cellar stairs. She was not supposed to go down them, for they had no banisters, and there was a drop on either side to the cellar floor below. The only lighting came from the open door of the kitchen, from tiny dirty outdoor windows at ground level, and from a gas pipe that came down from the ceiling and supplied the same kind of feeble, naked flame that his mother used in her room to heat her curling iron.