Lydia Davis - Break It Down

He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends. He thought it was odd that he should have been obliged to go to the apartment of this dirty stranger and handle his things. He looked over at his grandfather’s face, with its suppressed smile and carefully folded cravat. He himself had no desire to start a family. Heavily, he rose from his bed and went down to the kitchen. He returned to bed with several thick sandwiches, which he ate until he was too drowsy to keep his eyes open any longer. As he slept and suffered mild nightmares, his dog crept up beside him and wolfed down what remained of the food.

All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa. This provides work for them that they can do at home. These women are part of a larger corps of city employees engaged to call wrong numbers. The highest earner of all is an Indian from India who is able to insist that he does not have the wrong number.

Others — mainly old people — have been employed to amuse us by wearing strange hats. They wear them as though they were not responsible for what went on above their eyebrows. Two hats bob along side by side — a Homburg high up on an old man and a black veiled affair with cherries on a little woman — and under the hats the old people argue. Another old woman, bent and feeble, crosses the street slowly in front of our car, looking angry that she has been made to wear this large cone-shaped red hat that is pressing down so heavily on her forehead. Yet another old woman walks on a difficult sidewalk and is cautious about where she sets her feet. She is not wearing a hat, because she has lost her job. People of all ages are hired by the city to act as lunatics so that the rest of us will feel sane. Some of the lunatics are beggars too, so that we can feel sane and rich at the same time. There are only a limited number of jobs available as lunatics. These jobs have all been filled. For years the lunatics were locked up together in mental hospitals on islands in New York Harbor. Then the city authorities released them in large numbers to form a reassuring presence on the streets.

Naturally some of the lunatics have no trouble holding down two jobs at once by wearing strange hats as they lope and shuffle along.

Though everyone wishes it would not happen, and though it would be far better if it did not happen, it does sometimes happen that a second daughter is born and there are two sisters.

Of course any daughter, crying in the hour of her birth, is only a failure, and is greeted with a heavy heart by her father, since the man wanted sons. He tries again: again it is only a daughter. This is worse, for it is a second daughter; then it is a third, and even a fourth. He is miserable among females. He lives, in despair, with his failures.

The man is lucky who has one son and one daughter, though his risk is great in trying for another son. Most fortunate is the man with sons only, for he can go on, son after son, until the daughter is made, and he will have all the sons he could wish for and a little daughter as well, to grace his table. And if the daughter should never come, then he has a woman already, in his wife the mother of his sons. In himself he has not a man. Only his wife has that man. She could wish for a daughter, having no woman, but her wishes are hardly audible. For she is herself a daughter, though she may have no living parents.

The single daughter, the many brothers’ only sister, listens to the voice of her family and is pleased with herself and happy. Her softness against her brothers’ brutality, her calm against their destruction, is admired. But when there are two sisters, one is uglier and more clumsy than the other, one is less clever, one is more promiscuous. Even when all the better qualities unite in one sister, as most often happens, she will not be happy, because the other, like a shadow, will follow her success with green eyes.

Two sisters grow up at different times and despise one another for being such children. They quarrel and turn red. And though if there is only one daughter she will remain Angela, two will lose their names, and be stouter as a result.

Two sisters often marry. One finds the husband of the other crude. The other uses her husband as a shield against her sister and her sister’s husband, whom she fears for his quick wit. Though the two sisters attempt friendship so that their children will have cousins, they are often estranged.

Their husbands disappoint them. Their sons are failures and spend their mothers’ love in cheap towns. Strong as iron, only, is now the hatred of the two sisters for one another. This endures, as their husbands wither, as their sons desert.

Caged together, two sisters contain their fury. Their features are the same.

Two sisters, in black, shop for food together, husbands dead, sons dead in some war; their hatred is so familiar that they are unaware of it. They are sometimes tender with one another, because they forget.

But the faces of the two sisters in death are bitter by long habit.

The girl wrote a story. “But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel,” said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. “But how much better if it were a real house,” her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. “But wouldn’t a quilt be more practical,” said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. “But how much better if you dug a large hole,” said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. “But how much better if you slept forever,” said her mother.

I moved into the city just before Christmas. I was alone, and this was a new thing for me. Where had my husband gone? He was living in a small room across the river, in a district of warehouses.

I moved here from the country, where the pale, slow people all looked on me as a stranger anyway, and where it was not much use trying to talk.

After Christmas snow covered the sidewalks. Then the snow melted. Even so, I found it hard to walk, then for a few days it was easier. My husband moved into my neighborhood so that he could see our son more often.

Here in the city I had no friends either, for a long time. At first, I would only sit in a chair picking hair and dust off my clothes, and then get up and stretch and sit down again. In the morning I drank coffee and smoked. In the evening I drank tea and smoked and went to the window and back and from one room into the next room.

Sometimes, for a moment, I thought I would be able to do something. Then that moment would pass and I would want to move and not be able to move.

In the country, one day, I had not been able to move. First I had dragged myself around the house and then from the porch to the yard, and then into the garage, where finally my brain spun like a fly. There I stood, over an oil slick. I offered myself reasons for leaving the garage, but no reason was good enough.

Night came, the birds quieted down, the cars stopped going by, everything withdrew into the darkness, and then I moved.

All I retrieved from this day was the decision not to tell certain people what had happened to me. I did tell someone, of course, and right away. But he was not interested. He was not very interested in anything about me by then, and certainly not my troubles.

In the city, I thought I might begin to read again. I was tired of embarrassing myself. Then, when I began to read, it was not just one book but many at once — a life of Mozart, a study of the changing sea, and others I can’t remember now.

My husband was encouraged by these signs of activity, and he would sit down and talk to me, breathing into my face until I was exhausted. I wanted to hide from him how difficult my life was.