Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Both Vi and Helen have mottoes on the walls of the kitchen, but Vi’s tend to be purely humorous while Helen’s — in Swedish, English, or both — are either religious (“God Bless This House”) or sentimental (“Home Sweet Home” and “Hem kara hem”) or moralistic (“Den som vinner tid, vinner allt”) or humorous with a moral message (“The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get”) or simply friendly (“Villkomen”). Also hanging in Helen’s kitchen are several pictures intended to charm or entertain, such as a photograph of a frightened kitten clinging by its front paws to a thin branch.

Though she goes back to visit her house from time to time, Helen now lives in a shared room in a pleasant nursing home. Her half of the room is on the hall side rather than the window side, and is therefore darker, but she prefers not to be moved. She has had two roommates so far. The first was bedridden and mentally incompetent, emitting only groans and shouts except for the one intermittent phrase “Oh boy oh boy.” This woman died after a year, and the space is now occupied by an active woman in her forties with chronic progressive dementia. She is in the early stages of the disease and currently functions very well, caring for the cats and birds that live in the nursing home and giving Helen whatever help she can, as with the telephone, with selecting food choices from the daily menu offerings, and with many other necessary tasks. Helen and she have become fond of each other, and Helen’s only difficulty with her is that the roommate, whether because of her disease or her medication, talks perhaps twice as fast as the average person, so that Helen, with her impaired hearing, cannot always understand her.

Because the nursing home is located in the town in which Helen has lived all her life, she regularly discovers, among the other residents, old friends or acquaintances who are in the home either for a short rehabilitation or, more usually, for permanent care. She had not been living there long, for instance, when one of her sons read off to her the names of the two women who lived directly across the hall. To her astonishment, one was Ruth, a close friend from her childhood with whom she had lost touch. Helen immediately went across the hall to visit her friend. The woman, however, was mentally incapacitated and, though Helen spent some time talking to her and recalling events from their youth, did not recognize her. Later, Helen showed her son a photograph in which she, in the front row, and Ruth, in the second, stood among ten or twelve other girls in their white confirmation dresses and curled hair, holding flowers.

Although Vi sings in church, she does not sing while she works, or at other times.

Helen sang in church regularly as part of the congregation. She also sang Swedish songs with her family when she was growing up. When she still lived at home, she would sometimes hum softly along with the hymns that were chimed by a nearby church every evening at six o’clock. In the nursing home, she has occasionally been induced to sing a few carols with the other residents during a Christmas sing-along. She sings tremulously and so faintly as to be almost inaudible, her expression vacant and her eyes, behind their wide bifocal lenses, directed into the vague distance.

Every evening before bedtime, however, she goes across the hall to sing a Swedish children’s prayer to her old friend Ruth.

When Vi’s granddaughters lived with her, she used to come home in the evening exhausted after working sometimes not just one but two jobs, and the little girls would want to teach her a new dance. “Come on, Gramma,” they would say, “come on, dance with us.” She would say, “No, I’m tired, I’m too tired.” They would say, “Come on, Gramma, come on, dance with us — it’s good exercise!” and she would give in and dance with them before she went to lie down.

Helen danced as a teenager, as often as once a week. Later, she would go to the dances where her husband was playing in the band, and still later, she and her husband would go out dancing together. When she still lived at home and her balance was good, she would occasionally catch hold of a grandchild’s hands and dance with him for a moment by the kitchen door, singing a little tune to go along with the dance.

Activities with other people have been both Vi’s and Helen’s main forms of recreation all their lives. For Vi, most recently, these have taken the form of church activities, dinners with family or friends in her home, and travel. For Helen, they have been mostly confined to visits from family and friends and occasional scheduled events in the nursing home. Earlier in her married life, besides dancing with her husband, Helen liked to give card parties at home. She also put on regular dinners with friends and family, often including such characteristically Swedish dishes as pickled herring, pickled beets, meatballs, and limpa.

Reading was a form of recreation for Helen before her eyes went, but not for Vi. When Vi reads, it is the Bible. Helen used to read the Bible and other Christian books, such as The Good Christian Wife, but also magazines and the romantic novels of popular women authors like Judith Krantz.

Vi watches some television, but not much. She has a set in her kitchen that is on most of the time, especially when her daughter is visiting, but she is often busy cooking, talking on the telephone, or visiting with friends, and only intermittently pays attention to it. She is shocked by the low level of many of the programs.

At home, Helen had a console television set in the corner of her living room and used to watch game shows and one soap opera in particular, As the World Turns. After her eyesight became so poor, she would still listen to the programs, but then she abandoned television altogether. She also listened to the radio that she kept in the kitchen on a shelf over the sink, not only the Sunday sermons and inspirational talks, but also the women’s basketball games, which she followed with some ardor: a tense moment in a game was one of the rare occasions when she was, in her own gentle way, assertive with another person, asking by the most delicate of gestures — an upraised hand and a tilt of the head — for a pause in the conversation so that she could hear the outcome of the play. She is still a fan of the UConn team. Vi does not seem to follow sports at all.

Neither Vi nor Helen is very interested in world or national news in areas such as economics, politics, literature, or art. They are both keenly interested in news of disasters and in human interest stories involving a universal theme in a particularly dramatic form — love, loss, betrayal, perversion, gross injury or disability, death. They may also, exceptionally, comment on some recent legislation that will affect them directly. But the news that engages them most is strictly local, concerning those close to them — and this includes not only their immediate friends and family but also their friends’ extended family; in these areas they are quite up-to-date on the latest information, most often remembering all names and ages and relationships of those involved.

Now that Helen spends so many hours sitting in her chair by her bed, unable to read or watch television, she confides that her main leisure activity, when she is alone, is to remember and relive incidents and episodes from her past life.

Vi learned to drive at the age of sixty. Her last surviving cousin never drove a car, and it didn’t do her any good, Vi says, always to be standing on street corners in all types of weather waiting for a bus or a taxi. Certain friends of Vi’s will drive around town but will not drive to any other town, but Vi is not afraid to drive a fair distance.