Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

“I was fifteen or sixteen, I guess,” she said. “I was home from boarding school. Maybe it was summer. I don’t know where my parents were. They were often away. They often left me alone there, sometimes for the evening, sometimes for weeks at a time. The phone rang. It was a boy I didn’t know. He said he was a friend of a boy from school — I can’t remember who. We talked a little and then he asked me if I wanted to have dinner with him. He sounded nice enough so I said I would, and we agreed on a day and a time and I told him where I lived.

“But after I got off the phone, I began thinking, worrying. What had this other boy said about me? What had the two of them said about me? Maybe I had some kind of a reputation. Even now I can’t imagine that what they said was completely pure or innocent — for instance, that I was pretty and fun to be with. There had to be something nasty about it, two boys talking privately about a girl. The awful word that began to occur to me was fast . She’s fast . I wasn’t actually very fast. I was faster than some but not as fast as others. The more I imagined the two boys talking about me the worse I felt.

“I liked boys. I liked the boys I knew in a way that was much more innocent than they probably thought. I trusted them more than girls. Girls hurt my feelings, girls ganged up on me. I always had boys who were my friends, starting back when I was nine and ten and eleven. I didn’t like this feeling that two boys were talking about me.

“Well, when the day came, I didn’t want to go out to dinner with this boy. I just didn’t want the difficulty of this date. It scared me — not because there was anything scary about the boy but because he was a stranger, I didn’t know him. I didn’t want to sit there face to face in some restaurant and start from the very beginning, knowing nothing. It didn’t feel right. And there was the burden of that recommendation—‘Give her a try.’

“Then again, maybe there were other reasons. Maybe I had been alone in that apartment so much by then that I had retreated into some kind of inner, unsociable space that was hard to come out of. Maybe I felt I had disappeared and I was comfortable that way and did not want to be forced back into existence. I don’t know.

“At six o’clock, the buzzer rang. The boy was there, downstairs. I didn’t answer it. It rang again. Still I did not answer it. I don’t know how many times it rang or how long he leaned on it. I let it ring. At some point, I walked the length of the living room to the balcony. The apartment was four stories up. Across the street and down a flight of stone steps was a park. From the balcony on a clear day you could look out over the park and see all the way across town, maybe a mile, to the other river. At this point I think I ducked down or got down on my hands and knees and inched my way to the edge of the balcony. I think I looked over far enough to see him down there on the sidewalk below — looking up, as I remember it. Or he had gone across the street and was looking up. He didn’t see me.

“I know that as I crouched there on the balcony or just back from it I had some impression of him being puzzled, disconcerted, disappointed, at a loss what to do now, not prepared for this — prepared for all sorts of other ways the date might go, other difficulties, but not for no date at all. Maybe he also felt angry or insulted, if it occurred to him then or later that maybe he hadn’t made a mistake but that I had deliberately stood him up, and not the way I did it — alone up there in the apartment, uncomfortable and embarrassed, chickening out, hiding out — but, he would imagine, in collusion with someone else, a girlfriend or boyfriend, confiding in them, snickering over him.

“I don’t know if he called me, or if I answered the phone if it rang. I could have given some excuse — I could have said I had gotten sick or had to go out suddenly. Or maybe I hung up when I heard his voice. In those days I did a lot of avoiding that I don’t do now — avoiding confrontations, avoiding difficult encounters. And I did a fair amount of lying that I also don’t do now.

“What was strange was how awful this felt. I was treating a person like a thing. And I was betraying not just him but something larger, some social contract. When you knew a decent person was waiting downstairs, someone you had made an appointment with, you did not just not answer the buzzer. What was even more surprising to me was what I felt about myself in that instant. I was behaving as though I had no responsibility to anyone or anything, and that made me feel as though I existed outside society, some kind of criminal, or didn’t exist at all. I was annihilating myself even more than him. It was an awful violation.”

She paused, thoughtful. We were sitting inside now, because it was raining. We had come inside to sit in a sort of lounge or recreation room provided for guests of that lakeside camp. The rain fell every afternoon there, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. Across the water, the white pines and spruces were very still against the gray sky. The water was silver. We did not see any of the water birds we sometimes saw paddling around the edges of the lake — teals and loons. Inside, a fire burned in the fireplace. Over our heads hung a chandelier made of antlers. Between us stood a table constructed of a rough slab of wood resting on the legs of a deer, complete with hooves. On the table stood a lamp made from an old gun. She looked away from the lake and around the room. “In that book about the Adirondacks I was reading last night,” she remarked, “he says this was what the Adirondacks was all about, I mean the Adirondacks style: things made from things.”

A month or so later, when I was home again and she was back in the city, we were talking on the telephone and she said she had been hunting through one of the old diaries she had on her shelf there, that might say exactly what had happened — though of course, she said, she would just be filling in the details of something that did not actually happen. But she couldn’t find this incident written down anywhere, which of course made her wonder if she had gotten the dates really wrong and she wasn’t even in boarding school anymore by then. Maybe she was in college by then. But she decided to believe what she had told me. “But I’d forgotten how much I wrote about boys,” she added. “Boys and books. What I wanted more than anything else at the age of sixteen was a great library.”

Remember that thou art but dust.

I shall try to bear it in mind .

“Meet the sourpuss,” says the Grouch to their friends.

“Oh, shut up,” says Old Mother.

The Grouch and Old Mother are playing Scrabble. The Grouch makes a play.

“Ten points,” he says. He is disgusted.

He is angry because Old Mother is winning early in the game and because she has drawn all the s’s and blanks. He says it is easy to win if you get all the s’s and blanks. “I think you marked the backs,” he says. She says a blank tile doesn’t have a back.

Now he is angry because she has made the word qua . He says qua is not English. He says they should both make good, familiar words like the words he has made— bonnet, realm , and weave —but instead she sits in her nasty corner making aw, eh, fa, ess , and ax . She says these are words, too. He says even if they are, there is something mean and petty about using them.

Now the Grouch is angry because Old Mother keeps freezing all the food he likes. He brings home a nice smoked ham and wants a couple of slices for lunch but it is too late — she has already frozen it.