Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Many of the houses are old, and must have had a hen-house out back, a fruit tree or two, a vegetable garden, and grapevines. Then little by little properties were neatened, shade trees and hedges were cut down, vines uprooted, trim removed from porches, porches removed from houses, and outbuildings dismantled. There are just a few interesting things to see: on a dead-end street, three disused greenhouses side by side with a For Sale sign in the grass in front of them; one slightly wild yard with a picket fence, overgrown shrubs and trees, and a fish pond; and a few old barns, though the oldest, once a livery stable, was set on fire by teenagers around Christmas and burned to the ground.

The only livestock in town is kept by a former prisoner of war and his wife, who have a small house and yard near the grocery store, a tall hedge in front tangled in vines and decorated with windblown trash from the street, a driveway deep in pine needles instead of asphalt. They keep ducks and geese in back, surrounded by several layers of high fencing that conceals them from the eyes of customers in the adjacent bank parking lot. Only on certain days in the warm weather do I remember the birds are there because the smell of manure hangs over the sidewalk, and then again on certain days in winter because the geese honk when it begins to snow.

If I go directly from the post office to the hardware store or the library without going to the park, I pass the Reformed Church and Pastor Elaine’s house. It is a large house, though she lives alone. Stout tree roots have buckled the sidewalk next to it and the baby carriage jolts over that spot. At the hardware store, the two women in charge always speak kindly to the baby. They are both mothers, though their children are older and come into the store after school to do their homework and help out at the cash register. To reach the library I cross the street by the butcher shop, at the only traffic light in town. On the way back, I sometimes stop in at the grocery store to buy milk and bananas. I get home in time for the show, put the carriage on the back porch by the trumpet vine, take the baby into the living room, and settle on the floor with him.

He has changed in the months since I started watching the show here. Now he can stand up and is tall enough to reach over the edge of the table and touch the controls. The show does not change the same way, going forward chronologically, but jumps around in time. One day it jumped all the way back to the beginning of the series, to what appeared to be the first episode. I told my husband about it, but, maybe because I was excited and pleased, he was not very interested, and only shrugged.

Because the show jumps around in time, hairstyles are different every day, sometimes longer and flatter, sometimes shorter and more buoyant, sometimes so dated they look silly. Sometimes the fashions of the clothes are silly too, sometimes merely prim. When the clothes and hairstyles look silly, I feel sillier watching the show, and when they are closer to what I would wear myself, I feel less silly, though now, after what Mitch told me, I no longer feel embarrassed to be watching it.

At the end of the half hour I am sorry the show is over. I hunger for more. If I could, I would watch another half hour, and another, and another. I wish the baby would go to sleep and my husband would not come home for dinner. I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited. I want to go on looking through a window into someone else’s life, someone else’s office, someone else’s apartment, a friend coming in the door, a friend staying for supper, usually salad, a woman tossing salad, always neatly dressed. There is order in that other world. Mary says that order is possible and, since she is gentle and kind if somewhat brittle, that kindness is possible, too. The friend who comes down from upstairs and stays for supper is not so tidy, and is not always kind, but sometimes selfish, so there is also room for human failing, and for a kind of recklessness or passion.

Another comedy follows this one, and now and then I try to watch it just in order to stay somewhere else for a while, but it is not well acted or well written, it is not funny, even the audience laughter sounds forced, and I can’t believe it. Instead, I go into the kitchen and begin to prepare dinner, if the baby will not stop me by holding on to my legs.

I am still trying to understand just how Glenn Gould identified with the orderly woman and the passionate woman, just what sort of companionship he found with these two women and the other characters, if that’s what it was. He was something of a recluse, by choice. He arranged his life as he wanted it, scheduled his outside appointments as it suited him, watched television when he needed to, and was able to be selfish without hurting anyone. He was a generous and considerate friend, but he didn’t meet his friends in person very often because he believed that personal encounters were distracting and unnecessary. He said he could comprehend a person’s essence better over the phone. He had long conversations with his friends over the phone, always with a cup of tea in front of him. These conversations usually started at midnight, just before he went to work, since he slept through the day and worked through the night.

Hummingbirds make explosions in the dying white flowers — not only the white flowers are dying but old women are falling from branches everywhere — in smoking pits outside the city, other dead things, too, are burning — and what can be done? Few people know. Dogs have been lost in more than one place, and their owners do not love the countryside anymore. No — old women have fallen and lie with their cancerous cheeks among the roots of oak trees. Everywhere, everywhere. And the earth is sprouting things we do not dare look at. And the smoking pits have consumed other unnamable things, things we are glad to see go. The smoke, tall and thick as mountains, makes our landscape. There are no more mountains. Long ago they were gone, not even in the memory of our grandfathers. The cloud, low over our heads, is our sky. It has been a long age since anyone saw a sky, saw anything blue. The fog is our velvet, our armchair, our bed. The trees are purple in it. The candles of flowers are out now. The fog is soft, it has no claws, not yet. Our grandmothers’ purple teeth crave. They crave things we would not even recognize anymore, though our grandmothers remember — they cry out at a bridge. Too many things to name are gone and we are left with this clowning earth, these cynical trees — shadows, all, of themselves. And we, too, are beyond help. Some only are less cancerous than others, that is all, some have more left, of their bones, of their hair, of their organs. Who can find a way around the smoking pits, the greedy oaks? Who can find a path to take among the lost and dying dogs back to where the hummingbirds, though mad, still explode the flowers, flowers still though dying?

If I were not me and overheard me from below, as a neighbor, talking to him, I would say to myself how glad I was not to be her, not to be sounding the way she is sounding, with a voice like her voice and an opinion like her opinion. But I cannot hear myself from below, as a neighbor, I cannot hear how I ought not to sound, I cannot be glad I am not her, as I would be if I could hear her. Then again, since I am her, I am not sorry to be here, up above, where I cannot hear her as a neighbor, where I cannot say to myself, as I would have to from below, how glad I am not to be her.

At the family gathering, the great-grandmothers were put out on the sun porch. But because of some problem with the children, at the same time as the brother-in-law had fallen into a drunken stupor, the great-grandmothers were forgotten by everyone for a very long time. When we opened the glass door, made our way through the rubber trees, and approached the sunlit old women, it was too late: their gnarled hands had grown into the wood of their cane handles, their lips had cleaved together into one membrane, their eyeballs had hardened and were immovably focused out on the chestnut grove where the children were flashing to and fro. Only old Agnes had a little life left in her, we could hear her breath sucking through her mouth, we could see her heart laboring beneath her silk dress, but even as we went to her she shuddered and was still.