Lydia Davis - Almost No Memory

He knows the characters because he used to watch the show when he lived alone in the city. When I lived alone in the city I watched it, too. It was on late at night, and there was a certain intimacy and intensity to watching it alone that way, with the darkness and quiet outside the windows. I watched with such concentration that I forgot everything else and entered the lives of those characters in that other city.

The intensity is gone now. In the late afternoon, the sun comes in the window almost horizontally across the living-room floor, there are wooden blocks everywhere on the rug, the baby is often playing beside me, I play with him to keep him busy, and I look up at the screen as often as I can. The baby is happy, and his noise, at the top of his voice, is often too loud for me to hear what the characters are saying, especially, it always seems, when they say something funny: there will be a remark that sets up the joke, the baby will yell over the next remark, and then there will be the laughter of the audience, so I know I’ve missed something that would probably have amused me, too, because the show is funny most of the time — it is well written and well acted and even on a bad day it has one or two truly funny moments. So I certainly can’t forget where I am, or my own life.

Glenn Gould did not have children. He was not married. I don’t know what he felt about women, even if I now know he liked the ugly singer and this show in which one woman is the central character and other women play important parts. I don’t know whether he taped the show so that he wouldn’t miss any of the episodes when he was away from the house performing, or, when that ended, recording, or for other reasons, or whether he taped it while he watched it, in order to build up a library of the series.

My routine with the baby is that I leave the house at about four o’clock, stop by the post office to pick up the mail, go on to the park, let the baby play for a while, go around by the hardware store or the library, and head home in time for the show, which starts at 5:30. The streets are broad and peaceful, which is one reason we moved here, and the trees are in full leaf now. In fact, the main reason we moved here was so that I could do just what I’m doing, walk with the baby around the back streets and to the stores and the park.

When I walked in the city there was always a great deal to look at, and I could walk a mile or two without noticing how far I had gone. Every building was different, every person was different. Every building had some kind of interesting detail on its cornice or above its windows and doorways, and the streets were so crowded that I passed another person every few seconds no matter what the time of day. Even the sky was more interesting there than it is here, because it spread out so softly behind and above the towers and the sharp upper edges of the buildings.

There is not much to look at in this town of bare and plain houses and yards, so I look hard at what there is, lawns, ornamental trees and foundation plantings, sometimes a very modest and carefully limited flower bed lining a front walk for a few yards or forming a small island in a lawn. I look at the shapes of the houses, the rooflines, the garages, trying to find something to think about. For instance, I will realize that a certain garage set back behind a house must once have been a small barn, with a horse and carriage in it and hay in the hayloft above.

Many of the houses are old, and must have had a henhouse out back, a fruit tree or two, a vegetable garden, and grapevines. Then little by little properties were neatened, shade trees and hedges were cut down, vines uprooted, trim removed from porches, porches removed from houses, and outbuildings dismantled. There are just a few interesting things to see: on a dead-end street, three disused greenhouses side by side with a “For Sale” sign in the grass in front of them; one slightly wild yard with a picket fence, overgrown shrubs and trees, and a fish pond; and a few old barns, though the oldest, once a livery stable, was set on fire by teenagers around Christmas and burned to the ground.

The only livestock in town is kept by a former prisoner of war and his wife, who have a small house and yard near the grocery store, a tall hedge in front tangled in vines and decorated with windblown trash from the street, a driveway deep in pine needles instead of asphalt. They keep ducks and geese in back, surrounded by several layers of high fencing that conceals them from the eyes of customers in the adjacent bank parking lot. Only on certain days in the warm weather do I remember the birds are there because the smell of manure hangs over the sidewalk, and then again on certain days in winter because the geese honk when it begins to snow.

If I go directly from the post office to the hardware store or the library without going to the park, I pass the Reformed Church and Pastor Elaine’s house. It is a large house, though she lives alone. Stout tree roots have buckled the sidewalk next to it and the baby carriage jolts over that spot. At the hardware store, the two women in charge always speak kindly to the baby. They are both mothers, though their children are older and come into the store after school to do their homework and help out at the cash register. To reach the library I cross the street by the butcher shop, at the only traffic light in town. On the way back, I sometimes stop in at the grocery store to buy milk and bananas. I get home in time for the show, put the carriage on the back porch by the trumpet vine, take the baby into the living room, and settle on the floor with him.

He has changed in the months since I started watching the show here. Now he can stand up and is tall enough to reach over the edge of the table and touch the controls. The show does not change the same way, going forward chronologically, but jumps around in time. One day it jumped all the way back to the beginning of the series, to what appeared to be the first episode. I told my husband about it, but, maybe because I was excited and pleased, he was not very interested, and only shrugged.

Because the show jumps around in time, hairstyles are different every day, sometimes longer and flatter, sometimes shorter and more buoyant, sometimes so dated they look silly. Sometimes the fashions of the clothes are silly too, sometimes merely prim. When the clothes and hairstyles look silly, I feel sillier watching the show, and when they are closer to what I would wear myself, I feel less silly, though now, after what Mitch told me, I no longer feel embarrassed to be watching it.

At the end of the half hour I am sorry the show is over. I hunger for more. If I could, I would watch another half hour, and another, and another. I wish the baby would go to sleep and my husband would not come home for dinner. I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited. I want to go on looking through a window into someone else’s life, someone else’s office, someone else’s apartment, a friend coming in the door, a friend staying for supper, usually salad, a woman tossing salad, always neatly dressed. There is order in that other world. Mary says that order is possible and, since she is gentle and kind if somewhat brittle, that kindness is possible, too. The friend who comes down from upstairs and stays for supper is not so tidy, and is not always kind, but sometimes selfish, so there is also room for human failing, and for a kind of recklessness or passion.

Another comedy follows this one, and now and then I try to watch it just in order to stay somewhere else for a while, but it is not well acted or well written, it is not funny, even the audience laughter sounds forced, and I can’t believe it. Instead, I go into the kitchen and begin to prepare dinner, if the baby will not stop me by holding onto my legs.