The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (33 page)

“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 waterbirds 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, which 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.”

“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.

“It’s hard as a rock,” he says. “And you don’t have to freeze it anyway. It’s already smoked.”

Then, since everything else he wants to eat is also frozen, he thinks he will at least have some of the chocolate ice cream he bought for her the day before. But it’s gone. She has eaten it all.

“Is that what you did last night?” he asks. “You stayed up late eating ice cream?”

He is close to the truth, but not entirely correct.

Old Mother cooks dinner for friends of theirs. After the friends have gone home, she tells the Grouch the meal was a failure: the salad dressing had too much salt in it, the chicken was overdone and tasteless, the cherries hard, etc.

She expects him to contradict her, but instead he listens carefully and adds that the noodles, also, were “somehow wrong.”

She says, “I’m not a very good cook.”

She expects him to assure her that she is, but instead he says. “You should be. Anybody can be a good cook.”

Old Mother sits dejected on a stool in the kitchen.

“I just want to teach you something about the rice pot,” says the Grouch, by way of introduction, as he stands at the sink with his back to her.

But she does not like this. She does not wish to be his student.

One night Old Mother cooks him a dish of polenta. He remarks that it has spread on the plate like a cow patty. He tastes it and says that it tastes better than it looks. On another night she makes him a brown rice casserole. The Grouch says this does not look very good either. He covers it in salt and pepper, then eats some of it and says it also tastes better than it looks. Not much better, though.

“Since I met you,” says the Grouch, “I have eaten more beans than I ever ate in my life. Potatoes and beans. Every night there is nothing but beans, potatoes, and rice.”

Old Mother knows this is not strictly true.

“What did you eat before you knew me?” she asks.

“Nothing,” says the Grouch. “I ate nothing.”

Old Mother likes all chicken parts, including the liver and heart, and the Grouch likes the breasts only. Old Mother likes the skin on and the Grouch likes it off. Old Mother prefers vegetables and bland food. The Grouch prefers meat and strong spices. Old Mother prefers to eat her food slowly and brings it hot to the table. The Grouch prefers to eat quickly and burns his mouth.

“You don’t cook the foods I like,” the Grouch tells her sometimes.

“You ought to like the foods I cook,” she answers.

“Spoil me. Give me what I want, not what you think I should have,” he tells her.

That’s an idea, thinks Old Mother.

Old Mother wants direct answers from the Grouch. But when she asks, “Are you hungry?” he answers, “It’s seven o’clock.” And when she asks, “Are you tired?” he answers, “It’s ten o’clock.” And when she insists, and asks again, “But are you tired?” he says, “I’ve had a long day.”

Old Mother likes two blankets at night, on a cold night, and the Grouch is more comfortable with three. Old Mother thinks the Grouch should be comfortable with two. The Grouch, on the other hand, says, “I think you like to be cold.”

Old Mother does not mind running out of supplies and often forgets to shop. The Grouch likes to have more than they need of everything, especially toilet paper and coffee.

On a stormy night the Grouch worries about his cat, shut outdoors by Old Mother.

“Worry about me,” says Old Mother.

Old Mother will not have the Grouch’s cat in the house at night because it wakes her up scratching at the bedroom door or yowling outside it. If they let it into the bedroom, it rakes up the carpet. If she complains about the cat, he takes offense: he feels she is really complaining about him.

Friends say they will come to visit, and then they do not come. Out of disappointment, the Grouch and Old Mother lose their tempers and quarrel.

On another day, friends say they will come to visit, and this time the Grouch tells Old Mother he will not be home when they come: they are not friends of his.

A phone call comes from a friend of hers he does not like.

“It’s for you,
angel
,” he says, leaving the receiver on the kitchen counter.

Old Mother and the Grouch have quarreled over friends, the West Coast, the telephone, dinner, what time to go to bed, what time to get up, travel plans, her parents, his work, her work, and his cat, among other subjects. They have not quarreled, so far, over special sale items, acquisitions for the house, natural landscapes, wild animals, the town governing board, and the local library.

A woman dressed all in red is jumping up and down in a tantrum. It is Old Mother, who cannot handle frustration.

If Old Mother talks to a friend out of his earshot, the Grouch thinks she must be saying unkind things about him. He is sometimes right, though by the time he appears glowering in the doorway, she has gone on to other topics.

One day in June, the Grouch and Old Mother take all their potted plants out onto the deck for the summer. The next week, the Grouch brings them all back in and sets them on the living-room floor. Old Mother does not understand what he is doing and is prepared to object, but they have quarreled and are not speaking to each other, so she can only watch him in silence.

The Grouch is more interested in money than Old Mother and more careful about how he spends it. He reads sale ads and will not buy anything unless it is marked down. “You’re not very good with money,” he says. She would like to deny it but she can’t. She buys a book, secondhand, called
How to Live Within Your Income
.

They spend a good deal of time one day drawing up a list of what each of them will do in their household. For instance, she will make their dinner but he will make his own lunch. By the time they are finished, it is time for lunch and Old Mother is hungry. The Grouch has taken some care over a tuna fish salad for himself. Old Mother says it looks good and asks him if she can share it. Annoyed, he points out that now, contrary to the agreement, he has made
their
lunch.

Old Mother could only have wanted a man of the highest ideals but now she finds she can’t live up to them; the Grouch could only have wanted the best sort of woman, but she is not the best sort of woman.

Old Mother thinks her temper may improve if she drinks more water. When her temper remains bad, she begins taking a daily walk and eating more fresh fruit.

Old Mother reads an article that says: If one of you is in a bad mood the other should stay out of her way and be as kind as possible until the bad mood passes.

But when she proposes this to the Grouch, he refuses to consider it. He does not trust her: she will claim to be in a bad mood when she is not, and then require him to be kind to her.

Old Mother decides she will dress up as a witch on Halloween, since she is often described as a witch by the Grouch. She owns a pointed black hat, and now she buys more items to make up her costume. She thinks the Grouch will be amused, but he asks her please to remove the rubber nose from the living room.

The Grouch is exasperated. Old Mother has been criticizing him again. He says to her, “If I changed that, you’d only find something else to criticize. And if I changed that, then something else would be wrong.”