The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (35 page)

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

Q.

A. Jury duty.

Q.

A. The night before, we had been quarreling.

Q.

A. The family.

Q.

A. Four of us. Well, one doesn’t live at home anymore. But he was home that night. He was leaving the next morning—the same morning I had to go in to the courtroom.

Q.

A. We were all four of us quarreling. Every which way. I was just now trying to figure it out. There are so many different combinations in which four people can quarrel: one on one, two against one, three against one, two against two, etc. I’m sure we were quarreling in just about every combination.

Q.

A. I don’t remember now. Funny. Considering how heated it was.

Q.

A. Well, I put the older boy on the bus, and went on to the courthouse. No, that’s not true. He stayed home alone, I trusted him home alone for a couple of hours. He was supposed to catch the bus in front of the house. That worked out all right, he was gone when I came home later. He hadn’t taken anything, as far as I could see.

Q.

A. That’s a long story.

Q.

A. The younger one was at school and my husband was at work. I had to be at the courthouse at nine. It was a Monday.

Q.

A. I was a little late—I had trouble parking. But of course the parking lot was full because I was already late. Most of the others were there. A couple of people came in after me.

Q.

A. A big old building uptown, very old. It was the same courthouse where Sojourner Truth testified when …

Q.

A. Sojourner Truth.

Q.

A. Sojourner.

Q.

A. She was a former slave who fought for women’s rights back in the 1850s. I read that on the historic plaque they have out front. They also said she was illiterate.

Q.

A. Sojourner Truth testified there in that same building, probably in the very same courtroom we were sitting in. Although they didn’t say that, come to think of it, and you’d think they would have, since they told us how the room had just been completely restored. In fact they asked us to admire it. That was strange, under the circumstances.

Q.

A. Strange that they would begin talking about the building, the architecture, in the midst of all the instructions they were giving us. As if we were there for a tour, instead of because we had to be there.

Q.

A. It was like a big old library reading room. Or one of those large waiting rooms with high ceilings in an old train station—there’s one in New Haven, and there’s Grand Central, of course.

Q.

A. Wooden pews, actually. Like a church or an old train station. But comfortable. Surprisingly.

Q.

A. About 175.

Q.

A. They were very quiet. Some of them were reading, some were talking to each other very quietly, just a few. I think they had found someone they knew or they were just being sociable with the person next to them.

Q.

A. No, I didn’t talk to any of them, really. There was one older Italian man sitting near me. He couldn’t understand anything they said, so I told him what we were supposed to do. He said he used to work in the garment district down in the city. He was a tailor.

Q.

A. Most were just sitting there looking around or staring straight ahead. They were very calm. They were also very alert. I’m sure they felt the same thing I did, that at any moment something might happen, we might be asked to do something, go somewhere. All very expectant, all these people, under that very high ceiling.

Q.

A. Well, first they called the roll—all our names. Most of us were there. Then they told us some of what would be happening. Then we waited.

Q.

A. I don’t know—an hour, maybe.

Q.

A. I forget what we were waiting for. Something to do with the judges, or the case. There was a lot of waiting.

Q.

A. Then, after an hour, there was another instruction. I think we were told we could go out for twenty minutes if we wanted a cigarette or to go to the bathroom. I told the Italian man to be sure to come back in twenty minutes.

Q.

A. Someone employed by the court, some officer of the court. I forget if they told us. First it was a man, telling us what the day would be like, roughly, and the week. Then a woman. Still, we didn’t really know what to expect. It’s funny to think about, but we were all prepared to do whatever they told us. They could have told us to go to another room and sit there and we would have. Then they could have told us to come back and sit. They could have told half of us to go to another room, and we would have done that. We were very trusting of them.

Q.

A. Very gently. Very calmly, gently. They would say something and then leave, go out some door, come back in, say something else. They would look up from some papers and say something to us almost intimately, as though we weren’t a whole crowd. And very respectfully. It was very soothing. As though they were treating us as kindly as possible because they were about to give us some bad news. And we couldn’t answer them. We weren’t invited to, but we also didn’t dare.

Q.

A. No, it wasn’t. I thought about that: first I thought of church, then an AA meeting, then something like going to an opera, or a concert. I thought of a large town meeting. But it was different. It was much more peaceful. For one thing, we weren’t talking, none of us were talking, really. We weren’t supposed to. And also, it was peaceful because we weren’t looking for anything, we hadn’t come there looking for some kind of spiritual uplift, or rehabilitation. Also, we weren’t doing anything, we weren’t even waiting for a train, or for an appointment. Actually, we were waiting, but we didn’t know what we were waiting for, we didn’t know what to expect. So there was this sort of blank wall ahead of us.

Q.

A. A blank wall ahead of us where the rest of the day would normally be, where you could normally see more or less what was coming next.

Q.

A. Yes, but they didn’t explain much, and no one dared to ask.

Q.

A. It wasn’t emotional. Going to church would be emotional. Going to an AA meeting or even a concert would be emotional. This was the most unemotional thing you could imagine. Maybe that’s why it was such a relief.

Q.

A. After all that awful quarreling the night before. It was like some sort of therapy, some sort of treatment. A prescription. As though after such quarreling I was required by law to report to a place where I had to sit very still with other people who were sitting very still, and we would all be treated very kindly and gently until we were completely well again.

Q.

A. Not the way we do. Not like our family. It scares me. It scares the pets. God knows what it’s doing to my younger boy.

Q.

A. Yes, we had no choice. We couldn’t avoid it. By law, we had to be there. So there was no possibility of conflict—should I be here, should I not be here? And they didn’t want us in particular—it wasn’t in the least personal, it was random, we had been called randomly. And we weren’t here because we had done anything wrong. We were innocent. In fact we were more than innocent. We were good. We were good citizens, good enough to be asked to judge other citizens. The law was saying that we were good. Maybe that’s another reason it felt so deeply soothing. It was not emotional, it was not personal, and yet there was this feeling of approval. The law thinks you’re a good person, or at least good enough.

Q.

A. Yes, they checked us for weapons down at the side entrance where we came in. They didn’t use the old front entrance anymore. We went in through some modern, ugly side doors and down some steps below street level, then we went up to the second floor in an elevator.

Q.

A. There was a metal detector and a guard who looked into our bags and purses. He was very kind and gentle, too. He smiled in a kind way. The sign said something like, “No weapons beyond this point.” So it was as though symbolically, too, we were supposed to leave behind anything we could fight with. We were not going in there to fight. Anyone who entered through the metal detector and went beyond it was not dangerous, almost by definition.

Q.

A. Yes, as though we were in suspension, everything in our lives suspended, waiting. We were waiting.

Q.

A. Yes, I thought of the word
patient
. But it wasn’t that. Patience is something you need in a strained situation, a situation in which you have to put up with something uncomfortable or difficult. This wasn’t difficult. That’s what I’m trying to say: we had to be there, and so it relieved us of all personal responsibility. I don’t think there is anything else quite like it. Then you have to add on to that the spaciousness of the room. Imagine if it had been a small, crowded room with a low ceiling. Or if people had been noisy, talkative. Or if the people in charge had been confused, or rude.

Q.

A. Finally. The woman had a drum with all our names in it. She turned the drum and then picked names out of the drum one at a time to go up and sit in the jury box and be interviewed. This was going to be the interesting part—that’s what I was thinking.

Q.

A. No, we all had to stay there. All the rest of us had to stay there in case the ones being questioned were disqualified or excused. Since it was random, any one of us might be called up to replace them, so we all had to stay.

Q.

A. Again, very gently, very respectfully. And calling them by their first names, gently, like a doctor or a nurse.

Q.

A. There was an unexpected sort of excitement to it. Something ceremonious. The suspense before she called out the name—everyone thinking it might be their name next, of course. Then when the names were called, they had to go up there in front of all these people, and then they had to answer these personal questions with everyone listening and watching them. There were so many of us. We had no idea who all these people were. Then the lives of some of us were gradually revealed, all the rest of us sitting there and listening. We would hear about these people, we would hear their stories. Now we knew the names of some of them. It was like some Indian ritual, some Navajo ceremony.

Q.

A. Oh, some questions you’d expect, some general questions, like, Are you employed? What do you do for a living? Do you have a family? Then more specific questions. Do you drive? Have you ever been in an accident? Do you have any relatives on the police force? Do you have any relatives in the insurance business? Are you familiar with the Palisades Parkway?

Q.

A. The part just north of Exit 11.

Q.

A. It took a long time. I couldn’t hear very well.

Q.

A. Very calmly. They called them by their first names. And there were all these pauses. Question. Pause. One lawyer would consult another lawyer while everyone waited, so quiet, so obedient. These quiet voices, and then long silences, and this expectant atmosphere.

Q.

A. Well, so first they were special, the Chosen. Up in front of everyone. I heard enough of their answers to decide I liked them, or I didn’t like them. One woman was a real estate dealer, divorced, a cold, tense sort of woman. Grim. I didn’t like her. Then there was a tall, strong man, an artist, a family man, obviously a nice guy. I liked him right away. There was a college student who was afraid he’d miss too many days of classes, but then they pointed out to him that this was going to be a short trial and he might miss even more if he didn’t go ahead and sit on this jury. So he decided to stay on the jury. And once he was on the jury you had to see him as rather special because he was so young—he was like the child on the jury, the child prodigy, young but wise enough to stand in judgment, who would be taken care of by the older people. And then after a while you even began to dislike him and resent him for being so young, for presuming, for saying in front of everyone that he might not do this thing that he had been asked to do, then for being the child prodigy, so young and bright and being taken care of by the others.

So these ones, who stayed on the jury, they were the Chosen. And the ones who were excused, after all that questioning, when they were excused, when they had to walk back to their seats in front of everybody, they became the Unchosen, they lost all that special prestige, they were ordinary again, they were not special anymore. Or rather, the ones who were rejected for obvious or technical reasons were simply ordinary. But the ones who were rejected for mysterious reasons, for reasons that probably said something not so good about their lives and who they were, they were not just ordinary anymore, now, they had somehow been declared unfit. The others were still sitting up there.

Q.

A. No, not many. Three or four, maybe. One, I think, because he was unemployed and hadn’t driven for eleven years—no, longer than that, not since 1979. He used a bicycle to get around. It also came out that he had been in an accident in 1979, or caused one. He had been sued, but he had won. You get only part of the story.

Q.

A. He was dressed more formally than most of the others, in a dark suit and a tie. But his hair was long, in a ponytail, and he was wearing tinted glasses. They asked him about his glasses.

Q.

A. I wasn’t surprised that they excused him. He was unemployed. And it also turned out that he wasn’t married and had no children. But they don’t have to say why they’re excusing them. I wondered what he was feeling when he went back to his seat, and after that, for the rest of the day. He was so carefully dressed I thought he might have felt proud that he had been called for jury duty in the first place. Then he might have been embarrassed or humiliated that they didn’t want him after all.