Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

The younger sister is bored in the shop and rings the bell. The older sister comes slowly down the stairs and asks the younger sister why she rang the bell.

The reason is simple: to see her come down. Because she is so fat and moves so slowly; the stairs buckle and creak under her, she has trouble breathing, she holds the banister as if it were still her father’s hand, her plump knees knock against each other. It is very amusing to the younger sister and breaks the tedium of the morning.

She says none of this out loud. Out loud she says, “There has been a mistake in yesterday’s figures.” But of course the older sister cannot find the mistake, though she goes over the figures many times. Her dress is tight under her arms and her ankles are swollen from standing so long.

The younger sister cannot play this trick very often, or she would be found out. But that makes it all the more exciting to her.

The two sisters, no longer young, are forced to sleep in the same bed. They dream of different things and carefully hide their dreams from each other in the morning. Sometimes they touch by accident in the bed and fly apart as though they had been burned. They do not sleep well and are not refreshed in the morning. One wakes early, goes to the toilet, and would like to resume sleeping. But there is no joy in going back to bed when her sister lies there already sweating like a sow in the early heat.

My sister with thighs like pillars. She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People. No, then what is this passion of hers? It is terrifying to see her cloudy eyes become sharp when my dinner is put on the table. I am afraid she will devour not only the dinner but me and my poor life too. Beside her laughter, mine is like the cheeping of a bird in the ivy. No, she never laughs. I never laugh. Her silence, though, is so much greater than mine that mine is like a wisp of smoke in a raincloud.

One day the younger sister smacked the older sister in the face. She did it out of frustration and boredom with her life. She regretted it immediately. Not because she had hurt her sister, who stood paralyzed, her hand to her cheek and her hat rolling over the floor, but because now her sister would weep and moan and speak of the incident for months, to the younger sister’s shame and anger. She had wanted to diminish her sister in some way, even destroy her, but instead she had given her new dignity.

Two sisters, like stone, who do not speak to one another. They have nothing in common but their parentage. One rises early and the other late; one will not eat animal products and the other will not eat whole grains; one has a rash in the summertime and the other cannot wear wool; one will not go to the movies for fear of strange men and the other will not watch television; in every election their votes cancel one another, and they are as no one. Only in their mutual distrust are they alike.

My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother. Sometimes she abruptly stops what she is saying to me, I hear a noise in the background, she says my name, and waits. Then I know my father has come into the room during her conversation and asked who she is talking to. Sometimes, at that point, he interjects a question for me, but often he asks her something that has nothing to do with me, while I wait at the other end of the phone. After she and I have gone on talking, he may come into the room again, having thought of something else he wants to say. When I hear his voice in the background I stop whatever I am saying to my mother and wait.

Sometimes she forces him to get on the phone. “Tell her yourself,” she says. He gets on the phone and without saying hello tells me what it is he wants me to know and then gets off without saying goodbye. Back on the phone, she says, “He’s gone.”

Although he has never liked to talk on the phone, he has always liked to write letters. He usually prefers to write a letter that includes some kind of instruction, or at least a transmission of what he thinks will be new information. For a while, we carried on a correspondence whose regularity was unusual for my family, in which very little has ever been regular or systematic. Then I didn’t hear from him for some weeks. Maybe I was the one who did not answer his last letter. I told my mother to tell him I would like to hear from him, and he then sent me some clippings from the Crime Beat section of their local paper. In the top margin he had written: “The underside of Cambridge life.” Some entries he had marked with a dark line of ink down the side margin.

“…A Jefferson Park man entered the dispute, slashing the teen just below the right eye with an unidentified weapon. While this happened, the Jackson Circle man stole the bike. Later, police found a Jackson Street man riding the bike. Police arrested the Jackson Circle man, Jackson Street man and Jefferson Park man and charged them with assault with a dangerous weapon (knife) and armed robbery.”

On another clipping he had underlined certain sentences:

“Police officers recovered two martial arts swords and a meat cleaver.”

“At 10 pm an employee of the Cantab Lounge reported that a suspect who had been shut off at the bar assaulted her by throwing a glass at her.”

“A Cambridge resident reported that he was assaulted with a fingernail clipper by a suspect who was throwing trash around the doorway at Eddy’s Place.”

“A Rindge Avenue resident reported that her daughter hit her over the head with a glass.”

“A Rindge Avenue resident reported that she was assaulted with a large pin by two other neighborhood residents.”

In the top margin of this clipping he had written: “Strange weapons dept.”

After this he sent me an article he had written. He occasionally wrote an article or a letter to a newspaper about something that had come up in connection with the Bible or some other religious topic. The articles and letters were clever, and by now I was interested in the Bible and religious topics myself.

This one, on circumcision, was called “The Unkindest Cut” and opened with a sentence about the “male organ.” In his thin, shaky handwriting, he had noted in the margin at the top of the article that I shouldn’t feel I had to read this, nor should my husband feel he had to read it. He was sincere, but he often attached disclaimers to the articles and letters he sent and I generally disregarded them.

Yet when I tried to read the article, I found it hard to read so much about the male organ as written by my father. I asked my husband if he would read it and tell me the gist of it but he did not really want to read it either. I did not know what to do about this situation, since it would have been awkward even to mention it to my father, but in time, as I took no action, I began to forget it. My father had probably forgotten it long before, since his memory has become more and more undependable, as he and my mother both point out.

But the letters he was sending me for a while were about the household he grew up in: besides his mother and father, there were two grandmothers and a grandfather who was slightly mad, maids, cooks, and cleaning women who came and went, and his grandmothers’ female nurse-companions and his grandfather’s male nurse-companions, who also came and went. His father’s mother owned the house and dominated it, to his mother’s annoyance. I have seen this house, which still stands in a street not far from where they live, and it looks to me surprisingly modest to have held such a number and variety of people. The last time it was sold, he read about the sale in the paper and wrote to the new owners, explaining that he had been born in the upstairs front room and had played in the hayloft of the small barn. The new owners were pleased to hear from him and sent him photographs of the house.