Lydia Davis - The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Writer couple with well-trained schoolgirl daughter and year-old baby

Writer couple who must have harmonious household with wife free for morning work

Woman writer who must be free of household problems every morning requires helper able to do all housework including personal laundry and part care baby; must be cooperative, like to cook, have high standards of cleanliness, willing to accept new ideas, calm and firm in dealing with baby. We should wish to have dinner guests about once a week and at that time have good table service. Job is not easy but return will be fair treatment

Return for heavy job will be fair dealing, definite time off, wages $16 per week to start and chance to earn quarterly increases. Kirkland 0524

It is true that Mrs. D’s daughter is well trained, though not in all respects. She is polite and sensitive to the feelings of others. She works hard in school and earns high grades. She is not very tidy in her habits, however, and does not keep her room very neat.

She is rather beautiful, according to Mrs. D, and remarkably graceful, but not phenomenally intelligent. Mrs. D describes her to friends as a tall, tense young child, and complains that she is subject to enthusiasms and anxieties that she herself finds “very wearing.” She complains about her daughter’s high voice. A speech therapist may help.

She remarks that sometimes, when the child is with her, she herself “cannot behave like a civilized being.”

It is true that Mrs. D is fair in her treatment of her maids. She also tends to develop intensely personal relationships with them. She is inquisitive as to their lives and thoughts. This can inspire affection on the part of the maid, or resentment, depending on the maid’s personality. It can lead to complicated patterns of vulnerability and subsequent ill will not always comfortable for maid or employer. Mrs. D tends to be highly critical of her maids, as she is of herself and her family.

Mrs. D confides to a friend:

The best thing about it, the really unbelievable thing, is that she can be an excellent maid and at the same time a person capable of appreciating the kind of qualities such families as yours and ours have.

Mrs. D sees her family, and the families of her friends, as enlightened and sympathetic to the working classes, as well as stylish, smart, witty, and cultured as regards literature, art, music, and food. In the area of music, for instance, she and her family enjoy certain pieces by the classical composers, although they also favor the more popular musicals and, over the years, will spend Sunday afternoons listening to recordings of Oklahoma! Finian’s Rainbow, South Pacific, and Annie Get Your Gun.

Just when I run into the most marvelous dream of a maid that won’t happen again in a century, we sublet our apartment for six weeks and this maid doesn’t want to leave town. She may be influenced by her boyfriend, a twenty-four-year-old who is somehow intellectual-looking despite his position as driver of a florist wagon.

Our maid’s name is Virginia. She may not turn out to be the gem for temporary work that I had hoped I was sending you.

She is not the sort who starts out like a whirlwind.

She has a sort of nervous shyness.

She is extremely slow on laundry, but it probably wouldn’t matter so much in your case since you send out more things.

She can’t catch up with the ironing. But if you take a firm hand it ought not to be a problem. Also, you ought to make out a schedule for her.

Mrs. D writes a long description of Virginia:

When she came to see me for her first interview she sat sideways on the chair not looking at me. Sometimes she looked directly at me and smiled, and then she looked intelligent and sweet, but much of the time she had a hangdog heavy dull look to her face. Her voice was slow, rough, and hesitant, though her sentences were well formulated. She talked to me about her other job. She said to me, “Maybe I’m too conscientious, I don’t know. I never seem to catch up with the ironing, I don’t know. The man changes his underwear every day.”

When she spoke of desserts, her eyes lit up. “I know thousands of desserts I like to make,” she said.

She said she had been left alone very early and hadn’t had much schooling and that was why she had happened to get into domestic service.

She and I tried to work out a good schedule. She did not want to work after putting the dinner on the table at six, but she wanted to have her own dinner before leaving, otherwise she would have to eat in a restaurant. So we tried that, but there is something extraordinarily prickly about waiting on yourself, going in and out of the kitchen, when a servant is sitting there eating. And she did eat an enormous meal.

She had a pathological interest in her own diet. She was a fiend about salads and milk and fruit, all the things that cost the most.

I missed one of the baby’s blankets, the best one, which I had crocheted a border for, all around. Then one day I left the iron on all afternoon on the back porch and that’s when I found the baby’s blanket. She had used it to cover the ironing board. What else might she do? Too soon after, the baby’s playpen came apart in her hands.

Now my distrust was deepened to a certainty: she was not the person on whom to base any permanent plans. It was also obvious that she could not keep up with the ironing or anything else.

She acted dissatisfied and glum if she stayed beyond two o’clock. I had to sympathize, because what she wanted to do was go to the YWCA, where she and a few of the other domestics were taking some very improving courses.

All her friends were urging her to get a job in a defense plant. I asked her about it and she said, “The girls all say I’m wrong, but I just don’t think I’d like factory work.”

I was rushing around most of the morning when I should have been at the typewriter. I offered her the full-time position because the one time we had company she did such a fine job. She put on a beautiful dinner, exquisitely arranged and well cooked and perfectly served. The whole thing went off exceedingly well. But she calculated that the full-time job wouldn’t be worth it to her. She also told me that if she took the full-time job she didn’t see how she could get her Christmas shopping done. That was the crowning remark.

Her experience of our household was not at its easiest. We were moving at the time, and we were still not settled before I had to rush to finish a story. But she could not see that this was a chance to make herself useful to a coming writer who could thereafter afford to pay her better.

It is not clear what Mrs. D’s ambitions are. She writes easily and fluently, and has no difficulty conceiving plots for her stories. Over lunch she and Mr. D often exchange ideas for stories or characters, though Mr. D rarely has time now to write fiction. Mrs. D’s plots often involve domestic situations like her own. The characters, usually including a husband and wife, are skillfully and sympathetically drawn; they have complex relationships with recognizable small frictions, hurts, and forgiveness. She is particularly good with the speech of young children. However, the stories often have a vein of wistful sentimentality that works to their detriment.