Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance

You mean, if he dies on a Thursday, he won’t be burned until Monday.

They take him away, once he’s dead. They keep him somewhere, and then they take him to where he’ll be burned.

Who goes with him and keeps him company once he’s dead?

No one, actually.

No one goes with him?

Well, someone will take him away, but we don’t know the person.

You don’t know the person?

It will be an employee.

Probably in the middle of the night?

Yes.

And you probably don’t know where they’ll take him either?

No.

And then no one will keep him company?

Well, he won’t be alive anymore.

So you don’t think it matters.

They will put him in a coffin?

No, it’s actually a cardboard box.

A cardboard box?

Yes, a small one. Narrow and small. It didn’t weigh much, even with him in it.

Was he a small man?

No. But as he got older he got smaller. And lighter. But still, it should have been bigger than that.

Are you sure he was in the box?

Yes.

Did you look?

No.

Why not?

They don’t really give you an opportunity.

So they burned something in a cardboard box that you trust was your father?

Yes.

How long did it take?

Hours and hours.

Burn the accountant! What a festival!

We didn’t know it would be cardboard. We didn’t know it would be so small or so light.

You were “surprised.”

I don’t know where he has gone now that he’s dead. I wonder where he is.

You’re asking that now? Why didn’t you ask that before?

Well, I did. I didn’t have an answer. It’s more urgent now.

“Urgent.”

I wanted to think he was still nearby, I really wanted to believe that. If he was nearby, I thought he would be hovering.

Hovering?

I don’t see him walking. I see him floating a few feet off the ground.

You say “I see him”—you can sit in a comfortable chair and say that you “see him.” Where do you think he is?

But if he’s nearby, hovering, is he the way he used to be, or is he the way he was at the end? He used to have all his memory. Does he get it back before he returns? Or is he the way he was near the end, with a lot of his memory gone?

What are you talking about?

At first I used to ask him a question and he would say, “No, I don’t remember.” Then he would just shake his head if I asked. But he had a little smile on his face, as though he didn’t mind not remembering. He looked as if he thought it was interesting. He seemed to be enjoying the attention. At that time he still liked to watch things. One rainy day we sat together outside the front entrance of the home, under a sort of roof.

Wait a minute. What are you calling “the home”?

The old people’s home, where he lived at the end.

That is not a home.

He watched the sparrows hopping around on the wet asphalt. Then a boy rode by on a bicycle. Then a woman walked by with a brightly colored umbrella. He pointed to these things. The sparrows, the boy on the bicycle, the woman with the colorful umbrella in the rain.

No, of course. You want to think he’s still hovering nearby.

No, I don’t think he’s there anymore.

You may as well add that he still has his memory. He would have to. If he didn’t, he would lose interest and just drift away.

I do think he was there for three days afterward, anyway. I do think that.

Why three?

Practicing at the piano:

My Alberti basses were not even.

But did my movement float this morning?

Yes!

1.

It is not that you are not qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that each year your application is not good enough. When at last your application is perfect, then you will receive the fellowship.

2.

It is not that you are not qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that your patience must be tested first. Each year, you are patient, but not patient enough. When you have truly learned what it is to be patient, so much so that you forget all about the fellowship, then you will receive the fellowship.

Introduction

The following study presents the lives of two elderly women still thriving in their eighties and nineties. Although the account will necessarily be incomplete, depending as it does in part on the subjects’ memories, it will be offered in detail whenever possible. Our hope is that, through this close description, some notion may be formed as to which aspects of the subjects’ behaviors and life histories have produced such all-around physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

Both women were born in America, one of African-American parents and one of immigrants from Sweden. The first, Vi, is eighty-five years old, currently still in very good health, working four days a week as a house-and office-cleaner, and active in her church. The other, Helen, ninety-two, is in good health apart from her weakened sight and hearing, and though she now resides in a nursing home, she lived alone and independently until one year ago, caring for herself and her large house and yard with minimal help. She still looks after her own hygiene and tidies her room.

Background

Both Vi and Helen grew up in intact families with other children and two caregivers (in Vi’s case these were her grandparents, for many years). Both were close to their siblings (in Vi’s case there were also cousins in the immediate family) and remained in close touch with them throughout their lives. Both have outlived all of them: Helen was predeceased by an older brother who reached the age of ninety and an older sister who died at seventy-eight; Vi by seven brothers, sisters and cousins, all but one of whom lived into their eighties and nineties. Her last remaining cousin died at the age of ninety-four, still going out to work as a cook.

Vi spent most of her childhood in Virginia on her grandparents’ farm. She was one of eight siblings and cousins, all of whom lived with the grandparents and were raised by them up to a certain age. Her grandfather’s farm was surrounded by fields and woods. The children went barefoot most of the time, so their physical contact with the land was constant, and intimate.

The children never saw a doctor. If one of them was sick, Vi’s grandmother would go out into the fields or woods and find a particular kind of bark or leaf, and “boil it up.” Her grandfather taught the children to recognize certain healthful wild plants, and in particular to tell the male from the female of certain flowers, since each had different properties; then they would be sent to gather the plants themselves. As a regular preventive health measure, at the beginning of each season, the grandmother would give them an infusion to “clean them out”; this would, among other benefits, rid them of the parasitic worms that were a common hazard of rural life at that time. When Vi moved up to Poughkeepsie to live with her mother, the home treatments ceased: when she had even a mild cold, her mother would take her to the doctor and he would give her medicines.

Vi’s grandparents were both hard workers. For instance, in addition to her regular work, her grandmother also made quilts for all eight of the children. She would sew after breakfast and again in the afternoon. She enjoyed it, Vi says: she would use every bit of material, including the smallest scraps. Her grandmother’s hands were nice, “straighter than mine,” says Vi. Her grandmother would also sew clothes for the children out of the printed cotton fabric of flour sacks. On the first day of school, says Vi, she and her girl cousins would be wearing “such pretty dresses.”