Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance

Neither Vi nor Helen is very interested in world or national news in areas such as economics, politics, literature, or art. They are both keenly interested in news of disasters and in human interest stories involving a universal theme in a particularly dramatic form — love, loss, betrayal, perversion, gross injury or disability, death. They may also, exceptionally, comment on some recent legislation that will affect them directly. But the news that engages them most is strictly local, concerning those close to them — and this includes not only their immediate friends and family but also their friends’ extended family; in these areas they are quite up-to-date on the latest information, most often remembering all names and ages and relationships of those involved.

Now that Helen spends so many hours sitting in her chair by her bed, unable to read or watch television, she confides that her main leisure activity, when she is alone, is to remember and relive incidents and episodes from her past life.

Travel

Vi learned to drive at the age of sixty. Her last surviving cousin never drove a car, and it didn’t do her any good, Vi says, always to be standing on street corners in all types of weather waiting for a bus or a taxi. Certain friends of Vi’s will drive around town but will not drive to any other town, but Vi is not afraid to drive a fair distance.

She drives a large car that was her second husband’s particular pride: he always kept it perfectly cleaned and shined. She says he would be so ashamed to see how she takes care of it, although it looks fairly clean and tidy to anyone else. True, she does allow dust to gather on the dashboard and tiny scraps of litter on the floor.

The fact that Helen never drove a car meant that in later life she and two of her friends shared their weekly trip out for groceries; thus, the necessary chore became a pleasant social occasion.

Vi travels regularly within the country and occasionally out of the country, whereas Helen no longer travels and rarely did.

Vi goes to Washington to visit her granddaughter, and sometimes farther south to attend a wedding or funeral. She either drives with her daughter or takes the bus with a friend. Other, local trips are either by car, when she drives herself, or in the church van, when the choir is going off somewhere to sing.

Helen has traveled very little in her life, though members of her extended family have gone to Sweden to visit historical family sites. She took several vacations in New England with her husband and sons and, after she was widowed, two trips to Florida with her brother. In all of her life, she has lived away from her hometown only once: after she graduated from high school, her brother drove her down to New York City, where she settled in Brooklyn and studied dressmaking for one year at the Pratt Institute. After she was married and raising her two sons, she rarely went farther from home than to Hartford by train.

For many years now, travel for Helen has been limited to drives around town and into the countryside as a passenger. She looks out the window, and despite her near-blindness manages to identify old landmarks from her younger years: a friend’s farm, the group home where her friend Robert lives with his large collection of first-edition books, the house where she once worked as a maid, her friends’ florist shop, the house on Oak Street where her family first lived after they left the farm, and the house in back of it that her father built.

Pets and Other Animals

Both Helen and Vi are very fond of animals and have had pets and domestic animals in their lives from early childhood.

Vi is more partial to dogs; she has more stories about them, and photographs of them. But she is also amused by cats, especially one small black cat that tries to grab the dust cloth out of her hand where she works — helping her to clean, she says. Her backyard is full of strays and neighborhood cats, though she does not feed them. The old woman next door feeds them, she says, and although some of the other neighbors object, Vi sees no harm in it, since this is one of the old woman’s few pleasures and she will be gone from this world soon enough. When Vi talks about this old woman, she seems to forget that she herself, being eighty-five, is also an old woman.

In Helen’s early life, there were the two horses, as well as the cows, calves, cats and kittens, and a large flock of chickens. In her adult life, she has almost always had a cat as a pet. She used to feed strays at her back door, and one winter arranged a cardboard box shelter for one of them under the outside staircase. She would walk out over the ice with small, careful steps just before dark to set his evening meal down in the snow. There are cats in the nursing home, and one in particular, a large Persian, will occasionally wander in to visit her. She speaks to him, smiles, and reaches her hand down to him, though in her eyes he is only an orange blur.

Hope kept an overweight female cat throughout her later years, with sometimes harmony between them and sometimes ill will. She was sure the cat harbored resentments and indulged in some calculated bad behavior. When, eventually, she was advised by a home health expert that the cat posed a certain hazard to her by crouching in dark corners, getting underfoot, and occasionally attacking her ankles, she immediately arranged for it to be put down by the local vet before her family could intervene.

Although Helen, when she lived at home, kept a bird feeder well supplied outside the kitchen window where she could watch it over her morning coffee, she had no great love of, or interest in, other sorts of wild creatures.

Vi, the same in this respect, particularly dislikes snakes and often repeats a long story about finding one in her yard and going after it with a shovel. When she was a child in Virginia, the windows were kept open in the summertime and lizards would climb up to sun themselves on the windowsills. The children were scared of the lizards and wanted to kill them. But Vi’s grandmother told them the lizards would not hurt them, to let the lizards stay there and enjoy the sun, and they would go away when they were ready.

Neither Helen nor Vi is particularly interested in the natural world beyond the confines of the garden. Nature for Helen, when she still lived at home, manifested itself either as a practical problem — trees shading the house, the lawn that did not grow well, the hedge that needed clipping, acorns in the driveway — or a domesticated thing of beauty like her favorite, the azalea shrub, or the dogwood in blossom. Her work in the yard was caretaking work rather than designing and planting, with the exception of the geraniums, which she liked to see set out in the spring in a row by the front porch. Every spring, too, she looked for the first blooms of the flowering bulbs.

She also enjoyed nature in the form of the landscape as seen from the car window on a Sunday drive.

Religion

Both Helen and Vi have maintained close involvement with their churches all their lives, although the church has loomed larger in Vi’s life than in Helen’s. Their churches have constituted their most important larger community, both social and spiritual.

In youth and middle age, Helen participated in the church’s ladies’ auxiliary group and helped out with such projects as bake sales for fund-raising. Every summer her family attended the church picnics. She said grace before every meal while she still lived at home. It is important to her that every family member be baptized, although her gentle insistence about this has sometimes had no effect. Her religious beliefs do not explicitly enter or color her conversation. She now rarely goes to a church service because the chapel in her nursing home is Catholic.