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

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I have so often sat on the bus traveling up to the college, on those mornings, wishing something would come down and rescue me, or that there would be a minor accident, one in which no one was hurt, or at least not badly hurt, that would prevent me from teaching the class.

That is how the teaching day begins. I take a public bus from my town to the small city one hour north, where the college is. I do not drive my car, even though I could. I do not want that extra responsibility on a teaching day. I don’t want to have to think about steering the car.

I sit there quietly in the bus looking out the window. The bus rolls me gently from side to side and presses me back into the seat when it accelerates, or drops out from under me briefly when it goes over a bump. I like the way the bus rolls me around. I do not like the song that goes through my head. It always goes through my head for a while before I notice it. It is not a song of celebration. It is a dull and repetitious song that is often in my head, and I don’t know why: it is “The Mexican Hat Dance.”

I also wanted to tell you how I was running out of money when this news came. I had less in my bank account than I had had in years, though some small jobs would be coming in the spring. Now at last I would have enough money, thanks to you, if I didn’t die first.

There would be enough to live on, and there would even be extra money I could spend on things I wanted or needed. I could buy a new pair of glasses, maybe more attractive ones, though that is always difficult. I could have more expensive food for dinner. But as soon as I began to think of what I might buy with the extra money, I was either ashamed or embarrassed — because although new glasses and a better dinner would be nice, they were not really necessary, and exactly how many things should I allow myself to buy that are not really necessary?

Now a strange thing was happening. I sometimes felt removed from my life, as though I were floating above it or maybe a little to the side of it. This sensation of floating must have come from the fact that I thought I would no longer be attached to anything, or to much: I thought I would not be attached to my teaching job, and I thought I would not be attached by those many strings to all the necessary other small and large jobs that would earn me four thousand dollars, or three, or two, to cover three months, or two, or one. I was floating up and looking out over a longer distance, at more of the landscape in a circle around me.

The department gave a little party to congratulate me on the grant. It is not such a large grant, but the department likes to make a fuss over anything that its faculty does. It wants the college administration to know about the faculty’s accomplishments and to think well of the department. But this party made me uncomfortable. The department, and maybe the college, too, now valued me more than they had before, and at the same time I now wanted to leave the college. In fact, I was secretly planning to leave it. I would either cut my ties completely or have as little to do with it as possible.

It turned out that I could not stop teaching. But I did not know that for a while.

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I am not always a bad teacher. My difficulty teaching is complex, and I’ve given it a lot of thought: it is probably due to a general lack of organization on my part, to begin with, combined with overpreparation, then stage fright, and, in the classroom itself, poor articulation of ideas and a weak classroom presence. I have trouble looking the students in the eye. I mumble or fail to explain things clearly. I do not like to use the blackboard.

I do not like to use the blackboard because I do not like to turn my back on the class. I’m afraid that if I do, the students will take advantage of this to talk to one another or review notes from another course, or worse, they will stare at the back of me, and certainly not with admiration. All of last year I did not use the blackboard. This year I began to use it. When I do use it, I am so hasty and uncomfortable, and my handwriting is so poor, that the words I write are small and faint and hard to read.

This is the way I work: I avoid the thought of the class as long as I can. Then, when there is not much time left, maybe a day or an evening, I begin to prepare it. In preparing it, unfortunately, I also begin to imagine it. In imagining it, I become so afraid of the classroom and the students that I freeze and can no longer think clearly. Sometimes I am able to control my panic — suppress it or talk myself out of it — and then, for minutes at a time, even half an hour, I am able to plan the class in a reasonable way. Then the panic sets in again and I can’t think anymore. Every plan seems wrong, I believe that I know nothing, I have nothing to teach. And the more trouble I have planning, the more frightened I become, because time is passing and the hour for the class is drawing closer.

The feeling I mentioned, of being removed from my life, was like what I imagine a person feels who learns she has a fatal illness. There was also a greater clarity of vision — which may also come when one is dying. It seemed that it wasn’t I who had changed but everything around me. Everything was sharper, clearer, and closer, as though, before, I had been seeing only little bits at a time, not all of it, or all of it but veiled or clouded. What was blocking my view before? Was there a veil between me and the world, or did I have blinkers on that narrowed my vision and kept me looking ahead? I did not know this until now — that I must have had a habit of not looking all around me. It was not that I had taken everything for granted before, but that I could not look at everything at once. Why? Was it so that I would not be tempted to do what I did not have the time or money to do, or so that I would not even think about something too distracting? I had to ignore so much of the world, or turn my thoughts away from it and back to the business at hand, whatever that might be. I could not let my thoughts go wherever they wished to and then on to something else.

Now everything looked different — as if I had returned to earth and were looking at it again. Was each thing more beautiful? No, not exactly. Perhaps more completely itself, more full, more vital. Was this the way things looked to people who had come back to life from a near-death experience?

I already knew that I had the habit of looking out from the window of a car or bus with longing at certain things in the distance that I would never visit, that I would wish to visit but that I would not visit — in one place I lived, it was an old, rundown California ranch house in a stand of eucalyptus and palm trees across an overgrown field. A long, curving dirt driveway led up to it.

From the bus on the way up to the college these days I see something rather similar: an old farmhouse with outbuildings, with trees around it and a field between the highway and the house. It is a very simple, old frame house, and the trees are a simple group of tall shade trees.

I used to think these places had to remain at just this distance, that I should long for them and that they should be almost imaginary, and that I should never visit them. Now, for a while, feeling as though I were outside my life, I thought I could visit them.

At the same time, I felt closer to strangers. It was as though something had been taken away that used to stand between me and them. I don’t know if this was connected with the feeling that I was not inside my own life anymore. I suppose by “my own life” I mean the habitual worries, plans, and constraints that I thought were no longer even relevant. I noticed this feeling of closeness to strangers most of all in the bus station, which is where I see many strangers all at once in a crowd and watch them for as long as an hour or two at a time, for instance when I am waiting for the late-night bus home and I sit in the cafeteria writing a letter or reading student papers.