Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

She hopes this is all just the effect of exhaustion. She thinks it will end when she finds a place to live. She will not care very much what sort of place it is, not at first, anyway. Now there are two choices: a light and roomy apartment in a neighborhood she thinks is dangerous, or a cramped and noisy railroad flat in a part of town she likes.

What happened was that coming up to a line of tollbooths on the highway, she had three quarters in her hand. The toll was fifty cents so she had to keep two quarters in her hand and put one back. The problem was that she couldn’t decide which one to put back. She kept looking down at the quarters and then up again, trying to drive at the same time, coming closer and closer to the tollbooths, veering left toward the center as though she knew that she might have to stop. Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn’t put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was.

She was frightened, not only because she had violated something but because this was not the first time she had for some minutes lost the capacity to act. And because although she had managed, in the end, to put one quarter back, drive up to the tollbooth, pay the toll, and go on where she was going, she might just as well not have been able to make any move and might have stopped the car in the center of the highway and remained there indefinitely.

And further, if she had not been able to make a decision about this one small thing, as she might not have, then she might not be able to make a decision about anything else either, because all day long there were such decisions to make, as whether to go into this room or that room, to walk down the street in this direction or the other, to leave the subway by this exit or that one. There were many ways of reasoning through every decision, and often she could not even decide which way to reason, let alone make the decision itself. And so, in this way, she might become entirely paralyzed and unable to go on with her life.

But later that day, as she stands waist high in the water, she thinks that she is right: all this is probably nothing but exhaustion. She is standing without her glasses waist high in the water on a rocky beach. She is waiting for some sort of revelation, because she feels a revelation coming, but although various other thoughts have come, not one of them seems much like a revelation to her.

She stands looking full into the gray waves that come at her crossed by a strong breeze so that they have hard facets like rocks, and she feels her eyes washed by the grayness of the water. She knows it is the greater disruption of her life that is disturbing her, not just the homelessness, but finding a home will help. She thinks that all this will probably come out all right, that it won’t end badly. Then she looks out at the smokestacks far away and nearly invisible across the sound and thinks, though, that this was not the revelation she was waiting for either.

My husband’s favorite food, in childhood, was corned beef. I found this out yesterday when friends came over and we started talking about food. At some point they asked what our favorite childhood foods had been. I couldn’t think of any, but my husband didn’t have to think before answering.

“Corned beef,” he said.

“Corned beef with an egg on it!” one of our friends added.

My husband often ate in diners before we met. He had two he liked, but he preferred the one where they did a particularly good hot roast beef sandwich. He still likes a good piece of roast beef, or steak, or hamburger mixed with sauce and spices and grilled outdoors with brochettes of onions and peppers.

But I’m the one who cooks most of his meals now. Often I make him meals with no meat in them at all because I don’t think meat is good for us. Often there is no seafood in them either, because most seafood isn’t good for us either, and there is almost never any fish in them, partly because I can’t remember which sorts of fish may be safe to eat and which are almost certainly not, but mainly because he likes fish only when it’s served in a restaurant or cooked in such a way that he can’t tell it’s fish. Often there is no cheese in our meals either, because of the problem with fat. I’ll make him a brown-rice casserole, for example, or winter vegetables with parsley sauce, or turnip soup with turnip greens, or white bean and eggplant gratin, or polenta with spicy vegetables.

“Why don’t you make the foods I like?” he asks sometimes.

“Why don’t you like the foods I make?” I answer.

Once I marinated slabs of tofu in tamari sauce, champagne vinegar, red wine, toasted marjoram, and dried Chinese mushrooms simmered in water. I marinated them for four or five days and then served them to him, sliced thin, in a sandwich with horseradish and mayonnaise, slices of red onion, lettuce and tomato. First he said the tofu was still very bland, which is what he always says about tofu, then he said that on the other hand, if he hadn’t known it was there, he wouldn’t have been able to taste the tofu anyway because there were so many other things in the sandwich. He said it was all right, and then he said he knew tofu was good for him.

Sometimes he likes what I make, and if he’s in a good mood he says so. Once I made him a cucumber salad with feta cheese and red onion and he liked it, saying it tasted Greek. Another time I made him a lentil salad with peppers and mint and he liked that, too, though he said it tasted like dirt.

But generally he doesn’t like what I cook as much as what he used to eat in diners and certainly not as much as what he used to make for himself before he met me.

For instance, he used to make a roulade of beef cooked in a Marsala sauce. He would take thin slices of top round or sirloin, dust them with flour, coat one side with crushed dill seeds, roll them around cooked Italian sausage meat, and pierce them with a toothpick. Then he would sauté them in butter and simmer them in a brown Marsala sauce with mushrooms. He would also make roulades of veal stuffed with prosciutto and Gruyère. Another favorite was a meat loaf of veal, pork, and sirloin. It would contain garlic, rosemary, two eggs, and whole-wheat bread crumbs. He would lay smoked bacon underneath it and on top of it.

Now the loaf I make for him is of ground turkey. It, too, has mushrooms, fresh whole-wheat bread crumbs and garlic in it, but in other ways it is not the same. I make it with one egg, celery, leeks, sweet red peppers, salt and pepper, and a dash of nutmeg.

Outdoors on the deck, he eats it and says nothing, gazing over the water past the willow tree. He is calm and contemplative. I don’t think he’s calm because I’m feeding him so much less meat, but because he is teaching himself to accept what I do. He doesn’t like it but knows that I believe I’m doing it for his own good.

When he says nothing about the turkey loaf, I question him, and when I press him to answer, he says that it’s all right but he’s not excited about it. He excuses himself by saying that in general he’s not very excited about food. I disagree, because I have seen him excited about food, though almost never about what I serve him. In fact, I can remember only one occasion on which he was excited by what I served him.