Lydia Davis - Break It Down

Because I did not immediately forget what I read, I thought my mind was getting stronger. I wrote down facts that struck me as facts I should not forget. I read for six weeks and then I stopped reading.

In the middle of the summer, I lost my courage again. I began to see a doctor. Right away I was not happy with him and I made an appointment with a different doctor, a woman, though I didn’t give up the first doctor.

The woman’s office was in an expensive street near Gramercy Park. I rang her doorbell. To my surprise, the door was opened not by her but by a man in a bow tie. The man was very angry because I had rung his doorbell.

Now the woman came out of her office and the two doctors began to argue. The man was angry because the woman’s patients were always ringing his doorbell. I stood there between them. After that visit I did not go back.

For weeks I did not tell my doctor that I had tried someone else. I thought this might hurt his feelings. I was wrong. In those days it bothered me that he allowed himself to be endlessly abused and insulted as long as I continued to pay his fee. He protested: “I only allow myself to be insulted up to a certain point.”

After every session with him, I thought I would not go back. There were several reasons for this. His office was in an old house hidden from the street by other buildings and set in a garden full of little paths and gates and flower beds. Now and then, as I entered or left the house, I glimpsed a strange figure descending the stairs or disappearing through a doorway. He was a short, stout man with a shock of dark hair on his head, tightly buttoned up to the neck in a white shirt. As he passed me he would look at me, but his face revealed nothing, even though I was certainly there, coming up the stairs. This man disturbed me all the more because I did not understand what his relationship with my doctor might be. Halfway through every session I would hear a male voice call one word down the stairway: “Gordon.”

Another reason I did not want to continue seeing my doctor was that he did not take notes. I thought he should take notes and remember the facts about my family: that my brother lived by himself in one room in the city, that my sister was a widow with two daughters, that my father was high-strung, demanding, and easily offended, and that my mother criticized me even more than my father. I thought my doctor should study his notes after each session. Instead, he came running down the stairs behind me to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I thought this behavior showed a lack of seriousness on his part.

He laughed at certain things I told him, and this outraged me. But when I told him other things that I thought were funny, he did not even smile. He said rude things about my mother, and this made me want to cry for her sake and for the sake of some happy times in my childhood. Worst of all, he often slumped down in his armchair, sighed, and seemed distracted.

Remarkably, every time I told him how uneasy and how unhappy he made me feel, I liked him better. After a few months, I did not have to tell him this anymore.

I thought a very long time went by between visits, and then I would see him again. It was only a week, but many things always happened in a week. For instance, I would have a bad fight with my son one day, my landlady would serve me an eviction notice the next morning, and that afternoon my husband and I would have a long talk full of hopelessness and decide that we could never be reconciled.

I had too little time, now, to say what I wanted to, in each session. I wanted to tell my doctor that I thought my life was funny. I told him about how my landlady tricked me, how my husband had two girlfriends and how these women were jealous of each other but not of me, how my in-laws insulted me over the phone, how my husband’s friends ignored me, and then how I kept tripping on the street and walking into walls. Everything I said made me want to laugh. But near the end of the hour I was also telling him how face to face with another person I couldn’t speak. There was always a wall. “Is there a wall between you and me now?” he would ask. No, there was no wall there anymore.

My doctor saw me and looked past me. He heard my words and at the same time he heard other words. He took me apart and put me together in another pattern and showed me this. There was what I did, and there was why he thought I did it. The truth was not clear anymore. Because of him, I did not know what my feelings were. A swarm of reasons flew around my head, buzzing. They deafened me, and I was always confused.

Late in the fall I slowed down and stopped speaking, and early in the new year I lost most of my ability to reason. I slowed down still further, until I hardly moved. My doctor listened to the hollow clatter of my footsteps on the stairs and told me he had wondered if I would have the strength to climb all the way up.

In those days I saw only the dark side of everything. I hated rich people and I was disgusted by the poor. The noise of children playing irritated me and the silence of old people made me uneasy. Hating the world, I longed for the protection of money, but I had no money. All around me women shrieked. I dreamed of some peaceful asylum in the country.

I continued to observe the world. I had a pair of eyes, but no longer much understanding, and no longer any speech. Little by little my capacity to feel was going. There was no more excitement in me, and no more love.

Then spring came. I had become so used to the winter that I was surprised to see leaves on the trees.

Because of my doctor, things began to change for me. I was more unassailable. I did not always feel that certain people were going to humiliate me.

I started laughing at funny things again. I would laugh and then I would stop and think: True, all winter I did not laugh. In fact, for a whole year I did not laugh. For a whole year I spoke so quietly that no one understood what I said. Now people I knew seemed less unhappy to hear my voice on the telephone.

I was still afraid, knowing that one wrong move could expose me. But I began to be excited now. I would spend the afternoon alone. I was reading books again and writing down certain facts. After dark, I would go out on the street and stop to look in shop windows, and then I would turn away from the windows, and in my excitement I would bump into the people standing next to me, always other women looking at clothes. Walking again, I would stumble over the curbstone.

I thought that since I was better, my therapy should end soon. I was impatient, and I wondered: How did therapy come to an end? I had other questions too: for instance, How much longer would I continue to need all my strength just to take myself from one day to the next? There was no answer to that one. There would be no end to therapy, either, or I would not be the one who chose to end it.

See the vaches ambling up the hill, head to rump, head to rump. Learn what a vache is. A vache is milked in the morning, and milked again in the evening, twitching her dung-soaked tail, her head in a stanchion. Always start learning your foreign language with the names of farm animals. Remember that one animal is an animal , but more than one are animaux , ending in a u x . Do not pronounce the x . These animaux live on a ferme . There is not much difference between that word, ferme , and our own word for the place where wisps of straw cover everything, the barnyard is deep in mud, and a hot dunghill steams by the barn door on a winter morning, so it should be easy to learn. Ferme .

We can now introduce the definite articles le, la, and les , which we know already from certain phrases we see in our own country, such as le car, le sandwich, le café, les girls . Besides la vache , there are other animaux on la ferme , whose buildings are weather-beaten, pocked with rusty nails, and leaning at odd angles, but which has a new tractor. Les chiens cringe in the presence of their master, le fermier , and bark at les chats as les chats slink mewing to the back door, and les poulets cluck and scratch and are special pets of le fermier’s children until they are beheaded by le fermier and plucked by la femme of le fermier with her red-knuckled hands and then cooked and eaten by the entire famille . Until further notice do not pronounce the final consonants of any of the words in your new vocabulary unless they are followed by the letter e , and sometimes not even then. The rules and their numerous exceptions will be covered in later lessons.