Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.

A few years ago, I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy. Why shouldn’t I say this to myself — living alone, excited by the brown landscape, sometimes noticing a cowboy in a pickup truck in my rearview mirror, as I drove on the broad highways of the West Coast? In fact, I realize I would still like to marry a cowboy, though by now I’m living in the East and married already to someone who is not a cowboy.

But what would a cowboy want with a woman like me — an English professor, the daughter of another English professor, not very easygoing? If I have a drink or two, I’m more easygoing, but I still speak correctly and don’t know how to joke with people unless I know them well, and often these are university people or the people they live with, who also speak correctly. Although I don’t mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country — to mention only this country.

I told myself I liked the way cowboys dressed, starting with the hat, and how comfortable they were in their clothes, so practical, having to do with their work. Many professors seem to dress the way they think a professor should dress, without any real interest or love. Their clothes are too tight or else a few years out of style and just add to the awkwardness of their bodies.

After I was hired to teach for the first time, I bought a briefcase, and then after I started teaching I carried it through the halls like the other professors. I could see that the older professors, mostly men but also some women, were no longer aware of the importance of their briefcases, and that the younger women pretended they weren’t aware of it, but the younger men carried their briefcases like trophies.

At that same time, my father began sending me thick envelopes containing material he thought would help me in my classes, including exercises to assign and quotes to use. I didn’t read more than a few pages sometimes when I was feeling strong. How could an old professor try to teach a young professor? Didn’t he know I wouldn’t be able to carry my briefcase through the halls and say hello to my colleagues and students and then go home and read the instructions of the old professor?

In fact, I liked teaching because I liked telling other people what to do. In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now that if I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people, too. I was so convinced of it that my students were convinced, too. Still, though I was a teacher outside, I was something else inside. Some of the old professors were also old professors inside, but inside, I wasn’t even a young professor. I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.

More important than the clothes a cowboy wore, and the way he wore them, was the fact that a cowboy probably wouldn’t know much more than he had to. He would think about his work, and about his family, if he had one, and about having a good time, and not much else. I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it. When I had the idea of marrying a cowboy I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.

I also imagined, though I was probably wrong about this, too, that a cowboy wouldn’t be like anyone I knew — like an old Communist, or a member of a steering committee, a writer of letters to the newspaper, a faculty wife serving tea at a student tea, a professor reading proofs with a sharp pencil and asking everyone to be quiet. I thought that when my mind, always so busy, always going around in circles, always having an idea and then an idea about an idea, reached out to his mind, it would meet something quieter, that there would be more blanks, more open spaces, that some of what he had in his mind might be the sky, clouds, hilltops, and then other concrete things like ropes, saddles, horsehair, the smell of horses and cattle, motor oil, calluses, grease, fences, gullies, dry streambeds, lame cows, stillborn calves, freak calves, veterinarians’ visits, treatments, inoculations. I imagined this even though I knew that some of the things I liked that might be in his mind, like the saddles, the saddle sores, the horsehair, and the horses themselves, weren’t often a part of the life of a cowboy anymore. As for what I would do in my life with this cowboy, I sometimes imagined myself reading quietly in clean clothes in a nice study, but at other times I imagined myself oiling tack or cooking large quantities of plain food or helping out in the barn in the early morning while the cowboy had both arms inside a cow to turn a calf so it would present properly. Problems and chores like these would be clear and I would be able to handle them in a clear way. I wouldn’t stop reading and thinking, but I wouldn’t know very many people who did a lot of that, so I would have more privacy in it, because the cowboy, though so close to me all the time, wouldn’t try to understand but would leave me alone with it. It would not be an embarrassment anymore.

I thought if I married a cowboy, I wouldn’t have to leave the West. I liked the West for its difficulties. First I liked the difficulty of telling when one season was over and another had begun, and then I liked the difficulty of finding any beauty in the landscape where I was. To begin with, I had gotten used to its own kind of ugliness, all those broad highways laid down in the valleys and the new constructions placed up on the bare hillsides. Then I began to find beauty in it, and liked the bareness and the plain brown of the hills in the dry season, and the way the folds in the hills where some dampness tended to linger would fill up with grasses and shrubs and other flowering plants. I liked the plainness of the ocean and the emptiness when I looked out over it. And then, especially since it had been so hard for me to find this beauty, I didn’t want to leave it.

I might have gotten the idea of marrying a cowboy from a movie I saw one night in the springtime with a friend of mine who was also a professor — a handsome and intelligent man kinder than I am, but even more awkward around people, forgetting even the names of old friends in his sudden attacks of shyness. He seemed to enjoy the movie, though I have no idea what was going through his mind. Maybe he was imagining a life with the woman in the movie, who was so different from his thin, nervous, and beautiful wife. As we drove away from the movie theater, on one of those broad highways with nothing ahead or behind but taillights and headlights and nothing on either side but darkness, all I wanted to do was go out into the middle of the desert, as far away as possible from everything I had known all my life, and from the university where I was teaching and the towns and the city near it with all the intelligent people who lived and worked in them, writing down their ideas in notebooks and on computers in their offices and their studies at home and taking notes from difficult books. I wanted to leave all this and go out into the middle of the desert and run a motel by myself with a little boy, and have a worn-out cowboy come along, a worn-out middle-aged cowboy, alcoholic if necessary, and marry him. I thought I knew of a little boy I could take with me. Then all I would need would be the aging cowboy and the motel. I would make it a good motel, I would look after it and I would solve any problems sensibly and right away as they came along. I thought I could be a good, tough businesswoman just because I had seen this movie showing this good, tough businesswoman. This woman also had a loving heart and a capacity to understand another fallible human being. The fact is that if an alcoholic cowboy came into my life in any important way I would probably criticize him to death for his drinking until he walked out on me. But at the time I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn’t written for me.