Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Now that the fall semester has begun, the woman who gave both parties is back at work at the college. Nearly every day, I read notices that she sends out to all the faculty. She has a very sharp and funny mind, a good education, and an interesting background, but her notices are deliberately neutral in tone and strictly practical. Some are about empty cardboard boxes free for the taking, some about stray cats on the campus, and a great many about misuse of the Xerox machines. Only now and then can I detect from something she says about a page of sonnets left in her office, or from her rhetorically balanced sentences, or from her use of the word criterion, how sharp she is.

Since the dentist’s wife now has her degree, she is no longer studying with my husband, but I do not remember what she is doing, though I was told, probably by my husband.

We have been eating the tomatoes from our garden, though the harvest is not as good as it has been in other years. A woodchuck has dug a hole down under the fence and up among the tomato plants and has been eating the tomatoes as they ripen. My husband puts heavy stones in the hole, but during the night the woodchuck moves them.

I thought this was the end of it, that I would hear no more about the dentist and the results of the season’s planting. I thought there was a slight embarrassment all around. But last week my husband came home from his three-month cleaning with a bag of onions and told me that the issue had been tacitly resolved, that he and the dentist had talked about the long dry spells coming at the wrong times and how the summer had been a poor one for tomatoes. Even the dentist’s plants had not done well. And yesterday, during the insertion of my bonded filling, the dentist told me how he makes grape jelly. I am relieved that there are apparently no hard feelings. The dentist’s onions are pretty, small and fresh. I will want to think of some way of preparing them so that they will be particularly noticeable as we eat them.

My heart seems to be beating a little faster now. If it is true that I have been thinking more slowly, I have still been able to learn new things and remember them, in the past few months. I forget what we actually gave to our sailor friend, and there are other things I know I have forgotten, and still others that I must have forgotten, but I have learned the history of the word embarrassment and many other word histories, I have been introduced to the corkscrew willow, I have learned the term bonded filling, and many other new definitions from the dictionaries, for instance that the verb flense means “to cut up a whale,” and that the adjective next is the superlative of nigh. I have learned two new terms for familiar things: in music, the Alberti bass, and in grammar, the Oxford comma. I have had new thoughts about the westward expansion of the United States. I have heard the expression dead soldiers twice in two days and learned that it means empty bottles. Maybe it also means anything that is no more use to anyone, since I first heard it from a woman at a plant nursery who was looking through a bin of gourds and tossing out the rotten ones. I learned from the dentist that if I make grape jelly I should heat the sugar in the oven before adding it to the grape juice. I have learned more about the Kennedy family and particularly Edward Kennedy from a magazine in the dentist’s office. I had no trouble, after a few minutes, recognizing Dvořák’s New World Symphony on the radio while I was having my bonded filling put in. After reading the introduction again, having read it years ago and forgotten what I learned from it, I have learned yet again how Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast came to be written, that when Dana was a student at Harvard he fell ill and could not continue his studies, went to sea to recover his health, and subsequently wrote about his experiences, so that it is the book of a young man, whereas I had thought of it as the book of an older man just because it has been a classic for so many decades. What I don’t know yet is why I see it so often in secondhand bookstores and at library sales.

Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals.

In the city of Frydlant in Bohemia where all the people are anyway pale as ghosts and dressed in dark winter clothes, an old woman was unable any longer to bear the inevitable falling of her life into destitution and disgrace, and went mad and murdered out of pity her husband, her two sons, and her daughter, out of anger her neighbors on one side and her neighbors across the street, who had scorned her family, out of revenge the grocer from whom she had had to beg for credit, and the pawnbroker, and two moneylenders, then a streetcar conductor whom she did not know, and finally — rushing with her long knife into the Town Hall — the young mayor and one of his councilmen as they sat puzzling over an amendment.

I imagine that when I am old, I will be alone, and in pain, and my eyes will be too weak to read. I am afraid of those long days. I like my days to be happy. I try to think what would be a happy way to spend those difficult days. It may be that the radio will be enough to fill those days. An old person has her radio, I have heard it said. And I have heard it said that in addition to her radio, she has her happy memories. When her pain is not too bad, she can go over her happy memories and be comforted. But you must have happy memories. What bothers me is that I’m not sure how many happy memories I will have. I am not even sure just what makes a happy memory, the kind that will both comfort me and give me pleasure when I can’t do anything else. Just because I enjoy something now does not mean that it will make a happy memory. In fact, I know that many of the things I enjoy now will not make good happy memories later. I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do? Another thing I enjoy is eating candy by myself while I read a book in the evening, but I don’t think that will make a good happy memory either. I like to play the piano, I like to look at the plants that come up in the yard beginning in March, I enjoy walking with my dog, and looking down into his face at his good eye and his bad eye, I like to see the sky in the late afternoon, especially in November, I like petting my cats, hearing their cries, and holding them. But I suspect that the memory of my pets will not be enough, either, even if I love them. There are things that make me laugh, but often they are grim things, and they will not make a good happy memory either, unless I share them with someone else. Then it is not the amusement but the sharing of it that makes the happy memory. It seems as though a happy memory has to involve other people. I think of all the different people. I think of the good encounters with people. Most of the people I talk to on the telephone are friendly, even when I have called a wrong number. I have a happy memory of stopping my car by the side of the road to talk to a woman about her garden. I talk to the people who work in the post office and the drugstore, and I used to talk to the people at the bank before they put an automated teller machine in the lobby. When a man came to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, we talked about the history of this town. I enjoy my conversations with the librarian down the street. I enjoy the friendly messages I receive from bookstores selling secondhand books. But I don’t think any of these encounters will make a memory that will comfort me when I am old. Maybe a happy memory can’t involve people who were only strangers or casual friends. You can’t be left alone, in your old age and pain, with memories that include only people who have forgotten you. The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories. A lively dinner party does not make a good happy memory if no one there cared very much for any of the others. I think of some of the good or meaningful times I have had with the people close to me, to see if they would make good happy memories. Meeting a friend at a railway station on a sunny day seems to have made a good happy memory, even though later we talked about some difficult things, like starvation and dehydration. There were walks in the woods with friends looking for mushrooms that may make happy memories. There have been a few times of gardening together as a family that may make a good happy memory. Working together at some arduous cooking one evening is a happy memory so far. There was a good trip out to a department store. Sitting by the bedside of someone who was dying may actually make a good happy memory. My mother and I once carried a piece of coal on a train to Newcastle together. My mother and I once played cards with some longshoremen on a snowy morning waiting for a ship to come in. There was a time when I lived in a foreign city and returned again and again to a certain botanical garden to look at a certain cedar of Lebanon, and that is a happy memory, even though I was alone. My neighbor across the street once brought a plate of cake to the back door during a time of mourning. But I can see that if someday she and I were to become estranged, that would spoil the happy memory. I see that happy memories can be erased. A happy memory can be erased if you do the same thing on another day and you are not happy, for instance if on another day you garden or cook together with bad feeling. I can see that an experience does not make a happy memory if it started out well but ended badly. There is no happy memory if there was something nice about an experience but also some problem, if two of you enjoyed an outing but the third was sitting at home angry because you were so late returning. You have to make sure, somehow, that nothing spoils the thing while it is happening, and then that no later experience erases it. I could have happy memories. I can see that the things I do with another person, and with a feeling of warmth toward that person, and with a person who will want to have me in his or her happy memory may make a good happy memory, while the things I do alone and especially with a feeling of ambition, or pride, or power, even if they are good in themselves, will not make a good happy memory. It is all right to have candy and enjoy it, but I should remember that the memory of candy will not be a happy one. If I am playing a board game with people close to me and we are happy, I must be sure we don’t quarrel before the end of it. I must be sure that at some later time we don’t play another board game that is unhappy. I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often. I should add them up, now and then: what are my happy memories so far?