Lydia Davis - Can't and Won't - Stories

Yours sincerely.

P.S. This also makes my purchase even more extravagant. 13 ounces at $15 would have been about $18/pound; 8 ounces at $15 is $30/pound!

She knows she is in Chicago.

But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.

Ödön von Horváth was once walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered, at some distance from the path, the skeleton of a man. The man had evidently been a hiker, since he was still wearing a knapsack. Von Horváth opened the knapsack, which looked almost as good as new. In it, he found a sweater and other clothing; a small bag of what had once been food; a diary; and a picture postcard of the Bavarian Alps, ready to send, that read, “Having a wonderful time.”

We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners. We frown.

Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich onto my newspaper. Bad habits.

I would not report this if I were the one picking my nose. I look again and he is still at it.

As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.

A priest is about to come visit us — or maybe it is two priests.

But the maid has left the vacuum cleaner in the hall, directly in front of the front door.

I have asked her twice to take it away, but she will not.

I certainly will not.

One of the priests, I know, is the Rector of Patagonia.

I know we’re supposed to be happy on this day. How odd that is. When you’re very young, you’re usually happy, at least you’re ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there’s less to be happy about. Also, you start losing people — your family. Ours weren’t necessarily easy, but they were ours, the hand we were dealt. There were five of us, actually, like a poker hand — I never thought of that before.

We’re beyond the river and into New Jersey now, we’ll be in Philadelphia in about an hour, we pulled out of the station on time.

I’m thinking especially about her — older than me and older than our brother, and so often responsible for us, always the most responsible, at least till we were all grown up. By the time I was grown up, she already had her first child. Actually, by the time I was twenty-one, she had both of them.

Most of the time I don’t think about her, because I don’t like to feel sad. Her broad cheeks, soft skin, lovely features, large eyes, her light complexion, blond hair, colored but natural, with a little gray in it. She always looked a little tired, a little sad, when she paused in a conversation, when she rested for a moment, and especially in a photograph. I’ve searched and searched for a photo in which she doesn’t look tired or sad, but I can find only one.

They said she looked young, and peaceful, in her coma, day after day. It went on and on — no one knew exactly when it would end. My brother told me she had a glow over her face, a damp sheen — she was sweating lightly. The plan was to let her breathe on her own, with a little oxygen, until she stopped breathing. I never saw her in the coma, I never saw her at the end. I’m sorry about that now. I thought I should stay with our mother and wait it out here, holding her hand, till the phone call came. At least that’s what I told myself. The phone call came in the middle of the night. My mother and I both got out of bed, and then stood there together in the dark living room, the only light coming from outside, from the streetlamps.

I miss her so much. Maybe you miss someone even more when you can’t figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then she left home.

I think she left right after she was done with college. She moved away to the city. I would have been about seven. I have some memories of her in that house, before she moved away. I remember her playing music in the living room, I remember her standing by the piano, bent a little forward, her lips pursed around the mouthpiece of her clarinet, her eyes on the sheet music. She played very well then. There were always little family dramas about the reeds she needed for the mouthpiece of her clarinet. Years later, miles away from there, when I was visiting her, she would bring out the clarinet again, not having played it in a long time, and we would try to play something together, we would work our way, hit or miss, through something. You could sometimes hear the full, round tones that she had learned how to make, and her perfect sense of the shape of a line of music, but the muscles of her lips had weakened and sometimes she lost control. The instrument would squeak or remain silent. Playing, she would force the air into the mouthpiece, pressing hard, and then, when there was a rest, she would lower the instrument for a moment, expel the air in a rush, and then take a quick breath before starting to play again.

I remember where the piano was in our house, just inside the archway into that long, low-ceilinged room shadowed by pine trees outside the front windows, with sun coming in the side windows, on the open side, from the sunny yard, where the rosebushes grew against the house and the beds of iris lay out in the middle of the lawn, but I don’t remember her there on this holiday. Maybe she didn’t come home for that. She was too far away to come back very often. We didn’t have a lot of money, so there probably wasn’t much for train fares. And maybe she didn’t want to come back very often. I wouldn’t have understood that then. I told our mother I would give up all the few dollars I had saved if it would bring her home again for a visit. I was very serious about this, I thought it would help, but our mother just smiled.

I missed her so much. When she still lived at home she often looked after us, my brother and me. On the day I was born, on that hot summer afternoon, she was the one who stayed with my brother. They were dropped off at the county fair. She led him around the rides and booths for hours and hours, both of them hot and thirsty and tired, in that flat basin of fairground where years later we watched the fireworks. My father and mother were miles away, across town, at the hospital on the top of the hill.

When I was ten, the rest of us moved, too, to the same city, so for a few years we all lived close by. She would come over to our apartment and stay for a while, but I don’t think she came very often, and I don’t really understand why not. I don’t remember family meals together with her, I don’t remember excursions in the city together. At the apartment, she would listen carefully when I practiced the piano. She would tell me when I played a wrong note, but sometimes she was wrong about that. She taught me my first word in French: she made me say it over and over till I had the pronunciation just right. Our mother is gone now, too, so I can’t ask her why we didn’t see her more often.

There won’t be any more animal-themed presents from her. There won’t be any more presents from her at all.

Why those animal-themed presents? Why did she want to remind me of animals? She once gave me a mobile made of china penguins — why? Another time, a seagull of balsa wood that hung on strings and bobbed its wings up and down in the breeze. Another time, a dish towel with badgers on it. I still have that. Why badgers?