Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

But the minister was a young woman from the Harvard Divinity School, full of information, with an emphatic and direct manner; the music played on the organ was well chosen and performed; the soloist sang well from the organ loft; and the hymns were familiar old ones. Downstairs, after the service, sweet lemonade was served, with rounds of toast covered with sliced egg and olives laid out on a table that stood between the door to the musty basement thrift shop and the outer doorway with its rectangle of bright sunlight.

Later, on the street, I was thinking about a funny story the minister had told. A bronzed man on a motorcycle with impenetrable dark glasses and a bandanna around his forehead passed me and gave me a long dark look. I had been smiling, inadvertently, at him.

Recent dreams about animals: I was about to take an exam given by Z. when a small animal, a shrew or a mouse, escaped and I went off to help catch it. At that point I discovered other loose animals, larger ones. I alerted people and tried to get the animals back into their cages. This was taking place in a school, and the animals were probably connected with the exam.

On another night I was the one who let four animals loose in a field — a brown-and-white goat, a palomino horse, and two other large animals whose descriptions I was going to advertise so that they could be recovered. I stood watching the horse gallop into the field among other horses.

Yesterday I was sitting in the backseat of the old people’s car. We were driving out to the ocean beach. The old man made a statement that shocked me, though neither he nor the old woman noticed it. I sat there shocked behind the old woman, who had great trouble driving straight into the setting sun.

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I go for a long walk on a railroad track near the old people’s house. The rails have been taken up, and the bed is straight and narrow and visible ahead of me for a great distance. A thin, bearded man dressed in layers of ragged clothing comes ambling along toward me with his black dog, which ranges around him nosing in the underbrush. The old people’s cat, which has been walking with me, turns broadside to the dog and arches its back.

Last night, after midnight, walking barefoot near the kitchen sink, I stepped on something slippery and hard. On the mat lay what looked like some animal part, a glistening innard of uniform color and texture. I bent down to examine it: it was a slug. I was afraid I had killed it. I picked it up: it was cool and moist. As I held it in my palm, this dollop of glistening muscle, two bumps appeared at one end of it and then grew steadily into two long horns, as below them symmetrically two more bumps grew into slighter protrusions that I guessed were eyes, and at the same time the body thinned out and tensed, and then the slug set off and glided around my wrist and up my arm.

Tonight I heard the footsteps of a neighbor returning down the concrete path, then more footsteps, then many more all at once, and they continued so long and so steadily that I realized they were not footsteps: it was the rain. Heavy drops splashed on the leaves in the garden and on the planks of the wooden decks. Then, among the splashes of rain, I did hear the footsteps of a neighbor coming home, and it was the man above me, now walking over my ceiling.

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Yesterday I rode a bicycle along a winding macadam trail past lily-choked ponds and through a thin forest of young beeches. On my way back, I stopped on the pier to watch fishermen mending their nets before they set out to sea. They pull large comblike implements through the squares of the net and tie knots in it. One man holds the net while the other does the mending with quick, economical motions. Small clusters of tourists stand on the pier above looking down at them respectfully where they work in the boats.

Not far away, three men fished off the pier for mackerel, casting again and again, pulling up silver fish that fought hard, all muscle, then unhooking them and slipping them carefully into a Styrofoam cooler where they flopped so violently that the cooler shook and thudded for a while after it was closed.

At the same time, a bright red oil truck was fueling the boats. It would stop next to them on the pier where they were tied two or three deep alongside and send the long hose down into one, over one into the next, and then into the third. At the same time, a steel cable that extended the length of the pier into what seemed to be a fish-packing shed was being wound mechanically onto a drum in one of the fishing boats. The winding went on and on. A group of tourists watched this carefully, too.

The tourists took pictures of the fishermen mending their nets. If a tourist asked a fisherman to smile, the fisherman would glance up soberly, with a neutral expression on his face, and keep still for the picture, but he would not smile.

I went out to eat recently with the two old people and two old friends of theirs. We sat in a room surrounded by water and they all ordered lobster. The plates came, and the red lobsters looked pretty lying on their lettuce leaves next to their little white cups of melted butter. Now the conversation died and the table was silent except for the furious cracking, pulling, and prying of those old people, who suddenly showed such competent physical strength, intent on destroying their lobsters.

People I see here: the clerk at the post office; the friendly checkout woman at the supermarket; my neighbors; my landlady; the woman across the garden, who once asked me in a neutral, curious tone what I was doing here; last night, a plump, gregarious off-duty bartender attending the free movie at the public library, though I did not speak to him. He wore a bandanna tied around his forehead and cowboy boots. He was there to see the 1954 movie, whose title I forget. Most of the small audience were old people calling back and forth to each other.

“Everybody’s here!” someone cried.

I felt I was included in “everybody,” though I was sitting by myself waiting for the movie to begin. I listened to the bartender talk to the other people. Then we all watched the movie.

A plumber came to my room yesterday to fix the shower. He told me his family had lived here for generations. He said that these days there isn’t much cod or haddock and the fishermen are taking shellfish off the Great Bank about six miles west of the tip of the land; the beds there seem to be inexhaustible.

I have seen great crates of these shellfish, which I thought were quahogs, coming up onto the pier, hoisted by a small crane on a boat. The crates were stacked on the wharf while tractor trailers from Maryland with their engines running prepared to load them. Seagulls ran around on the asphalt with their wings raised threatening one another over the scraps. Only one gull sat on a crate at the top of a stack and pulled the slimy, elastic flesh of a quahog up through the slats, leaning back as he pulled, bending forward to get another grip, and leaning back again in the midst of a great noise from the boat’s engines.

This was at twilight, and as the sky darkened, the lights on the boats grew brighter, and a handful of tourists watched, standing gingerly at the edge of the pier. The young fishermen, bare-chested, wearing shorts and high rubber boots, went about their work steadily, maneuvering hooks, hoisting a dredger, then a large piece of grating. The boat’s engine throbbed, sometimes thundered.

On another night it was later. I was the only one watching. Sparks flew up into the darkness from a boat where something was being welded or soldered. Another boat set out to sea after blowing its whistle. A black fisherman ran to the stern of the boat as it pulled away. He looked up, smiled, and waved.

I have just come back from looking at the motorcycles on the pier. They are parked side by side in great numbers near the snack bars that sell such surprisingly good Portuguese fish soup. They are of all kinds, plain and fancy. The fancy ones are decorated with antlers, and with leopard skins.