Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Eventually we got onto the highway and then of course I had to go to the bathroom. I always have to go to the bathroom when we get onto a major highway. Luckily we came to a rest stop pretty soon, and since we were there anyway we sat down at a picnic table to eat our sandwiches. The picnic table wasn’t all that clean — it had a few sticky spills and some bird lime on it — but the sun was warm and I was just beginning to relax and enjoy watching the people walk past us to the restrooms when Junior came back from the restrooms and asked me for money for a soda. He always asks for a soda if he sees a soda machine, and I usually say No, which is what I said this time.

Now he decided to make an issue of it, and said he wouldn’t get back in the car if we didn’t get him a soda, and he went off over the grass toward the Dog Walk Area and sat down to sulk on some kind of large bent pipe sticking up out of the grass. So then Mac, who is more likely to give in than I am, said to let him have his soda, and I called Junior back and gave him the money and he went off and came back with the soda. I made the mistake of reading the ingredients, though, and when I saw how much caffeine there was in it, I began going on about that and I wouldn’t stop, even back in the car, until I saw that now Junior was getting upset again and the whole thing was pointless. So I shut up and started cleaning my hands with some pre-moistened towelettes called Wet Ones which have a sickly sweet smell to them, and the smell filled the car so badly that now the two of them turned on me.

After that, Junior was pretty cheerful because the soda made him feel a few years older, I could see it by the way he slouched with his knees apart and his hands dangling, and the atmosphere in the car improved even more when a crowd of men and women on motorcycles passed us going about 90 miles per hour. Mac said he hoped they would get stopped for speeding, and the thought of that cheered him up so much he started a conversation with me. He asked me what kind of car we should get when we bought a new car. He pointed out a Dodge Caravan, and Junior woke up from his daydream and said he wanted a Corvette. Mac asked where he was going to get the $30,000. Junior didn’t have an answer, then he thought to ask how much Mac had paid for our Voyager. $7,000, Mac said, which stumped Junior but didn’t seem fair to me, because he didn’t tell Junior he had gotten it second-hand, so I threw in that information just to make it fair, and of course Junior said he would get his Corvette second-hand too. Cars aren’t my favorite subject, though, so pretty soon we had run it into the ground and I went back to doing what I had been doing, which was looking out the window.

We passed a spot where the Highway Department had cleared the forest by the side of the road and planted some trees. The trees were covered with shriveled reddish foliage and obviously dying. This started me thinking about deforestation, and then about the disappearance of family farms, which somehow took me back to caffeine levels again. At that point, I started trying to identify the new trees I had learned on our vacation, and when I gave up on that I just watched the fat on my arm ripple in the wind from the open window.

Things went on pretty much like that. At some point I began to think I had spider bites on my legs; later Mac asked me if I had put something strange in the sandwiches; Junior rolled up the toll ticket to make a telescope, and Mac yelled at him; but then we all quieted down to watch the remains of a pretty dramatic accident by the side of the road.

At the rest stop I had been thinking that about 50 percent of the people I saw looked as though they’d had a better vacation than we had. But then 50 percent of them looked as though they’d had a worse one, so I felt alright about it.

When we were twenty minutes from home, Junior wanted to stop at a Holiday Inn and spend the night and couldn’t understand why we said no. But I realized about then that as a family we have a certain kind of loyalty to each other, and the way it works is that no two of us will get mad at the third one at the same time, except occasionally, as in the case of the Wet Ones.

He and I are both teachers in the university system and we will be teachers until we are too old to teach, and we would certainly like to be given a special chair at our universities, but what we have gotten so far is the wrong kind of special chair, a special chair belonging to a friend, a chair that swivels and has splayed feet and is special to her for reasons we can’t remember. We who teach in the university system would like a special chair so that we would be paid more and not have to teach as much and not have to sit on so many committees — we would sit instead on our special chair. But we have not been given any special chairs by our universities, only this strange heavy chair belonging to our friend, who moved away many years ago and had to leave it behind, and who does not want to give it up for reasons we have forgotten or never knew. All this time we have been employed by our universities only to teach from year to year without even the security of tenure. But now one of us has had some good luck and has been given a job with tenure, though not by his own university, and in leaving his present job, the job without tenure, he must also leave behind the chair special to our friend, because he is moving far away and there will not be room for it where he is going. Even though there is a great deal of large empty space in the state where he is going, more empty space than practically any other state but Wyoming, he will be living there in a very small house, too small for an extra chair, especially such a heavy one made out of a wine barrel. And so I will be the one to keep our friend’s chair for her now; it has passed from him to me, though not without effort, since it is so heavy. And perhaps, I am thinking, her special chair with its strange red vinyl upholstery, with its bunghole in the back, and its genuine cork, will now bring me good luck of a professional kind too.

These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:

It should be so simple. You do what you can while he is awake, and then once he is asleep, you do what you can only do when he is asleep, beginning with the most important thing. But it is not so simple.

You ask yourself what is the most important thing. It should be easy to say which thing has priority and go and do it. But not just one thing has priority, and not just two or three. When several things have priority, which of the several things having priority is given priority?

In the time in which you can do something, the time when he is asleep, you can write a letter that has to be written immediately because many things depend on it. And yet if you write the letter, your plants will not get watered and it is a very hot day. You have already put them out on the balcony hoping the rain will water them, but this summer it almost never rains. You have already taken them in from the balcony hoping that if they are out of the wind they will not have to be watered as often, but they will still have to be watered.

And yet if you water the plants, you will not write the letter, on which so much depends. You will also not tidy the kitchen and living room, and later you will become confused and cross because of the disorder. One counter is covered with shopping lists and pieces of glassware your husband bought at a liquidation sale. It should be simple enough to put the glassware away, but you can’t put it away until you wash it, you can’t wash it until the sink is clear of dirty dishes, and you can’t wash the dishes until you empty the drainboard. If you begin by emptying the drainboard, you may not get any farther, while he is asleep, than washing the dishes.