The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (34 page)

The Grouch is exasperated again. Again, Old Mother has been criticizing him. This time he says, “You should have married a man who didn’t drink or smoke. And who also had no hands or feet. Or arms or legs.”

Old Mother tells the Grouch she feels ill. She thinks she may soon have to go into the bathroom and be sick. They have been quarreling, and so the Grouch says nothing. He goes into the bathroom, however, and washes the toilet bowl, then brings a small red towel and lays it on the foot of the bed where she is resting.

Weeks later, Old Mother tells the Grouch that one of the kindest things he ever did for her was to wash the toilet bowl before she was sick. She thinks he will be touched, but instead, he is insulted.

“Can’t you agree with me about anything?” asks the Grouch.

Old Mother has to admit it: she almost always disagrees with him. Even if she agrees with most of what he is saying, there will be some small part of it she disagrees with.

When she does agree with him, she suspects her own motives: she may agree with him only so that at some future time she will be able to remind him that she does sometimes agree with him.

Old Mother has her favorite armchair, and the Grouch has his. Sometimes, when the Grouch is not at home, Old Mother sits in his chair, and then she also picks up what he has been reading and reads it herself.

Old Mother is dissatisfied with the way they spend their evenings together and imagines other activities such as taking walks, writing letters, and seeing friends. She proposes these activities to the Grouch, but the Grouch becomes angry. He does not like her to organize anything in his life. Now the way they spend this particular evening is quarreling over what she has said.

Both the Grouch and Old Mother want to make love, but he wants to make love before the movie, whereas she wants to make love either during it or after. She agrees to before, but then if before, wants the radio on. He prefers the television and asks her to take her glasses off. She agrees to the television, but prefers to lie with her back to it. Now he can’t see it over her shoulder because she is lying on her side. She can’t see it because she is facing him and her glasses are off. He asks her to move her shoulder.

Old Mother hears the footsteps of the Grouch in the lower hall as he leaves the living room on his way to bed. She looks around the bedroom to see what will bother him. She removes her feet from his pillow, stands up from his side of the bed, turns off a few lights, takes her slippers out of his way into the room, and shuts a dresser drawer. But she knows she has forgotten something. What he complains about first is the wrinkled sheets, and then the noise of the white mice running in their cage in the next room.

“Maybe I could help with that,” says Old Mother sincerely as they are driving in the car, but after what she did the night before she knows he will not want to think of her as a helpful person. The Grouch only snorts.

Old Mother shares a small triumph with the Grouch, hoping he will congratulate her. He remarks that someday she will not bother to feel proud of that sort of thing.

•

“I slept like a log,” he says in the morning. “What about you?”

Well, most of the night was fine, she explains, but toward morning she slept lightly trying to keep still in a position that did not hurt her neck. She was trying to keep still so as not to bother him, she adds. Now he is angry.

“How did you sleep?” she asks him as he comes downstairs late.

“Not very well,” he answers. “I was awake around one thirty. You were still up.”

“No, I wasn’t still up at one thirty,” she says.

“Twelve thirty, then.”

“You were very restless,” says the Grouch in the morning. “You kept tossing and turning.”

“Don’t accuse me,” says Old Mother.

“I’m not accusing you, I’m just stating the facts. You were very restless.”

“All right: the reason I was restless was that you were snoring.”

Now the Grouch is angry. “I don’t snore.”

Old Mother is lying on the bathroom floor reading, her head on a small stack of towels and a pillow, a bath towel covering her, because she has not been able to sleep and doesn’t want to disturb the Grouch. She falls asleep there on the bathroom floor, goes back to bed, wakes again, returns to the bathroom, and continues to read. Finally the Grouch, having woken up because she was gone, comes to the door and offers her some earplugs.

•

The Grouch wants to listen to Fischer-Dieskau singing, accompanied by Brendel at the piano, but to his annoyance he finds that Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Brendel is also accompanied by Old Mother humming, and he asks her to stop.

Old Mother makes an unpleasant remark about one of their lamps.

The Grouch is sure Old Mother is insulting him. He tries to figure out what she is saying about him, but can’t, and so remains silent.

The Grouch is on his way out with heavy boxes in his arms when Old Mother thinks of something else she wants to say.

“Hurry up, I’m holding these,” says the Grouch.

Old Mother does not like to hurry when she has something to say. “Put them down for a minute,” she tells him.

The Grouch does not like to be delayed or told what to do. “Just hurry up,” he says.

In the middle of an argument, the Grouch often looks at Old Mother in disbelief that is either real or feigned: “What a minute,” he says. “Wait just a minute.”

Well into an argument, Old Mother often begins to cry in frustration. Though her frustration and her tears are genuine she also hopes the Grouch will be moved to pity. The Grouch is never moved to pity, only further exasperated, saying, “Now you start sniveling.”

The Grouch often arrives home asking such questions as:

“What is this thing? Are you throwing coffee grounds under this bush? Did you mean to leave the car doors unlocked? Do you know why the garage door is open? What is all that water doing on the lawn? Is there a reason all the lights in the house are on? Why was the hose unscrewed?”

Or he comes downstairs and asks:

“Who broke this? Where are all the bath mats? Is your sewing machine working? When did this happen? Did you see the stain on the kitchen ceiling? Why is there a sponge on the piano?”

Old Mother says, “Don’t always criticize me.”

The Grouch says, “I’m not criticizing you. I just want certain information.”

They often disagree about who is to blame: if he is hurt by her, it is possible that she was harsh in what she said; but it is also possible that her intentions were good and he was too sensitive in his reaction.

For instance, the Grouch may be unusually sensitive to the possibility that a woman is ordering him around. But this is hard to decide, because Old Mother is a woman who tends to order people around.

Old Mother is excited because she has a plan to improve her German. She tells the Grouch she is going to listen to Advanced German tapes while she is out driving in the car.

“That sounds depressing,” says the Grouch.

The Grouch is cross about his own work when he comes home and therefore cross with her. He snaps at her: “I can’t do everything at once.”

She is offended and becomes angry. She demands an apology, wanting him to be sincere and affectionate.

He apologizes, but because he is still cross, he is not sincere and affectionate.

She becomes angrier.

Now he complains: “When I’m upset, you get even more upset.”

“I’m going to put on some music,” says the Grouch.

Old Mother is immediately nervous.

“Put on something easy,” she says.

“I know that whatever I put on, you won’t like it,” he says.

“Just don’t put on Messiaen,” she says. “I’m too tired for Messiaen.”

The Grouch comes into the living room to apologize for what he has said. Then he feels he must explain why he said it, though Old Mother already knows. But as he explains at some length, what he says makes him angry all over again, and he says one or two more things that provoke her, and they begin arguing again.

Now and then Old Mother wonders just why she and the Grouch have such trouble getting along. Perhaps, given her failures of tact, she needed a man with more confidence. Certainly, at the same time, given his extreme sensitivity, he needed a gentler woman.

They receive many Chinese fortunes. The Grouch finds it correct that her mentality is “alert, practical, and analytical,” especially concerning his faults. He finds it correct that “The great fault in women is to desire to be like men,” but it has not been true, so far, most of the time anyway, that “Someone you care about seeks reconciliation” or that “She always gets what she wants through her charm and personality.”

Certainly the Grouch wanted a strong-willed woman, but not one quite as strong-willed as Old Mother.

The Grouch puts on some music. Old Mother starts crying. It is a Haydn piano sonata. He thought she would like it. But when he put it on and smiled at her, she started crying.

Now they are having an argument about Charpentier and Lully: he says he no longer plays Charpentier motets when she is at home because he knows she does not like them.

She says he still plays Lully.

He says it’s the Charpentier motets she doesn’t like.

She says it’s the whole period she doesn’t like.

Now she has put her stamps in his stamp box, thinking to be helpful. But the stamps are of many different denominations and have stuck together in the damp weather. They argue about the stamps, and then go on to argue about the argument. She wants to prove he was unfair to her, since her intentions were good. He wants to prove she was not really thinking of him. But because they cannot agree on the sequence in which certain remarks were made, neither one can convince the other.

The Grouch needs attention, but Old Mother pays attention mainly to herself. She needs attention too, of course, and the Grouch would be happy to pay attention to her if the circumstances were different. He will not pay her much attention if she pays him almost none at all.

•

Old Mother is in the bathroom for an inordinately long time. When she comes out, the Grouch asks her if she is upset with him. This time, however, she was only picking raspberry seeds out of her teeth.

I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight … He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the new year, but so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

My friend is interesting but he is not in his apartment.

Their conversation appears interesting but they are speaking a language I do not understand.

They are both reputed to be interesting people and so I’m sure their conversation is interesting, but they are speaking a language I understand only a little, so I catch only fragments such as “I see” and “on Sunday” and “unfortunately.”

This man has a good understanding of his subject and says many things about it that are probably interesting in themselves, but I am not interested because the subject does not interest me.

Here is a woman I know coming up to me. She is very excited, but she is not an interesting woman. What excites her will not be interesting, it will simply not be interesting.

At a party, a highly nervous man talking fast says many smart things about subjects that do not particularly interest me, such as the restoration of historic houses and in particular the age of wallpaper. Yet, because he is so smart and because he gives me so much information per minute, I do not get tired of listening to him.

Here is a very handsome English traffic engineer. The fact that he is so handsome, and so animated, and has such a fine English accent makes it appear, each time he begins to speak, that he is about to say something interesting, but he is never interesting, and he is saying something, yet again, about traffic patterns.