Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Heart weeps.

Head tries to help heart.

Head tells heart how it is, again:

You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.

Heart feels better, then.

But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.

Heart is so new to this.

I want them back, says heart.

Head is all heart has.

Help, head. Help heart.

My grandmother and I live among strangers. The house does not seem big enough to hold all the people who keep appearing in it at different times. They sit down to dinner as though they had been expected — and indeed there is always a place laid for them — or come into the drawing room out of the cold, rubbing their hands and exclaiming over the weather, settle by the fire and take up a book I had not noticed before, continuing to read from a place they had marked with a worn paper bookmark. As would be quite natural, some of them are bright and agreeable, while others are unpleasant — peevish or sly. I form immediate friendships with some — we understand each other perfectly from the moment we meet — and look forward to seeing them again at breakfast. But when I go down to breakfast they are not there; often I never see them again. All this is very unsettling. My grandmother and I never mention this coming and going of strangers in the house. But I watch her delicate pink face as she enters the dining room leaning on her cane and stops in surprise — she moves so slowly that this is barely perceptible. A young man rises from his place, clutching his napkin at his belt, and goes to help her into her chair. She adjusts to his presence with a nervous smile and a gracious nod, though I know she is as dismayed as I am that he was not here this morning and will not be here tomorrow and yet behaves as though this were all very natural. But often enough, of course, the person at the table is not a polite young man but a thin spinster who eats silently and quickly and leaves before we are done, or an old woman who scowls at the rest of us and spits the skin of her baked apple onto the edge of her plate. There is nothing we can do about this. How can we get rid of people we never invited who leave of their own accord anyway, sooner or later? Though we are of different generations, we were both brought up never to ask questions and only to smile at things we did not understand.

I am so used to it by now

that when the traffic falls silent,

I think a storm is coming.

All day long the old woman struggles with her house and the objects in it: the doors will not shut; the floorboards separate and the clay squeezes up between them; the plaster walls dampen with rain; bats fly down from the attic and invade her wardrobe; mice make nests in her shoes; her fragile dresses fall into tatters from their own weight on the hanger; she finds dead insects everywhere. In desperation she exhausts herself sweeping, dusting, mending, caulking, gluing, and at night sinks into bed holding her hands over her ears so as not to hear the house continue to subside into ruin around her.

At the back of the bus,

inside the bathroom,

this very small illegal passenger,

on its way to Boston.

The bus said “Buffalo” on the front, after all, not “Cleveland.” The backpack was from the Sierra Club, not the Audubon Society.

They had said that the bus with “Cleveland” on the front would be the right bus, even though I wasn’t going to Cleveland.

The backpack I had brought with me for this was a very sturdy one. It was even stronger than it needed to be.

I practiced many answers to their possible question about what I was carrying in my backpack. I was going to say, “It is sand for potting plants” or “It is for an aromatherapy cushion.” I would also have told the truth. But they did not search the luggage this time.

In my rolling suitcase I had the metal container, well wrapped in clothes. That was now her home, or her bed.

I had not wanted to put her in the rolling suitcase. I thought that riding on my back she would at least be near my head.

We waited for the bus. I ate an apple so old it was nearly baked like a pie apple.

I don’t know if she, too, heard and was bothered by the recorded announcement. It came over the loudspeaker every few minutes. The bad grammar in the beginning is what would have bothered her: “Due to security reasons …”

Leaving the city felt so final that I thought for a moment my money wouldn’t be good where we were going.

Before, she could not leave her house. Now she is moving.

It has been so long since she and I traveled together.

There are so many places we could go.

Christian, I’m not a

This is my husband, and this tall woman with him in the doorway is his new wife. But if he is silly with his new wife, and younger, then I become older, and he is also my son, though he once was older than I, and was my brother, in a smaller family. She, being younger even than he, is now a daughter to me, or a daughter-in-law, though she is taller than I. But if she is smarter than a young woman, and wiser, she is no longer so young, and if wiser than I, she is my older sister, so that he, if still my son, must be her nephew. But if he, very tall though she even taller, has a child who is also my child, am I then not only a mother but also a grandmother and she a great-aunt, if my sister, or an aunt, if my daughter? And has my son then run off with his child’s aunt or, worse, his own?

Your housekeeper has been Shelly.

I listen to the different boats’ horns, hoping to learn what kind of boat I’m hearing and what the signal means: is the boat leaving or entering the harbor; is it the ferry, or a whale-watching boat, or a fishing boat? At 5:33 p.m. there is a blast of two deep, resonant notes a major third apart. On another day there is the same blast at 12:54 p.m. On another, at exactly 8:00 a.m.

The boats seem to come and go at all hours, and last night I could still hear their engines sounding well into the early morning. The pier is so far away, though, that the boats are the size of dominoes and their engines can be heard only when the town is quiet.

I am staying by the harbor in a damp little blue-and-white room that smells faintly of gas from the stove. The only people I see are an old couple who live just outside town. Sometimes they have visitors as old as they are, and then they invite me to have dinner or tea with them.

I work in the mornings and early afternoon, then I go out to get my mail. If I shop, I might buy a pencil sharpener, a folder, some paper, and a postcard. Another day, I might buy some fruit, some crackers, and a newspaper.

It is the beginning of August. I am not sure I should stay for the whole month. This may be a good place to work. My neighbors are quiet and I do not even have a telephone. Still, I’m not sure. I am trying to plan out how it would be. I can work most of the day. I can visit the two old people. I can write many letters. I can walk to the library. I can swim. What is missing?

A storm is coming, and the gulls cry over the streets. They have come over the land away from the storm. There is a heavy smell of fish in the air.