Read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Online
Authors: Lydia Davis
But the minister was a young woman from the Harvard Divinity School, full of information, with an emphatic and direct manner; the music played on the organ was well chosen and performed; the soloist sang well from the organ loft; and the hymns were familiar old ones. Downstairs, after the service, sweet lemonade was served, with rounds of toast covered with sliced egg and olives laid out on a table that stood between the door to the musty basement thrift shop and the outer doorway with its rectangle of bright sunlight.
Later, on the street, I was thinking about a funny story the minister had told. A bronzed man on a motorcycle with impenetrable dark glasses and a bandanna around his forehead passed me and gave me a long dark look. I had been smiling, inadvertently, at him.
Recent dreams about animals: I was about to take an exam given by Z. when a small animal, a shrew or a mouse, escaped and I went off to help catch it. At that point I discovered other loose animals, larger ones. I alerted people and tried to get the animals back into their cages. This was taking place in a school, and the animals were probably connected with the exam.
On another night I was the one who let four animals loose in a field—a brown-and-white goat, a palomino horse, and two other large animals whose descriptions I was going to advertise so that they could be recovered. I stood watching the horse gallop into the field among other horses.
Yesterday I was sitting in the backseat of the old people’s car. We were driving out to the ocean beach. The old man made a statement that shocked me, though neither he nor the old woman noticed it. I sat there shocked behind the old woman, who had great trouble driving straight into the setting sun.
•
I go for a long walk on a railroad track near the old people’s house. The rails have been taken up, and the bed is straight and narrow and visible ahead of me for a great distance. A thin, bearded man dressed in layers of ragged clothing comes ambling along toward me with his black dog, which ranges around him nosing in the underbrush. The old people’s cat, which has been walking with me, turns broadside to the dog and arches its back.
Last night, after midnight, walking barefoot near the kitchen sink, I stepped on something slippery and hard. On the mat lay what looked like some animal part, a glistening innard of uniform color and texture. I bent down to examine it: it was a slug. I was afraid I had killed it. I picked it up: it was cool and moist. As I held it in my palm, this dollop of glistening muscle, two bumps appeared at one end of it and then grew steadily into two long horns, as below them symmetrically two more bumps grew into slighter protrusions that I guessed were eyes, and at the same time the body thinned out and tensed, and then the slug set off and glided around my wrist and up my arm.
Tonight I heard the footsteps of a neighbor returning down the concrete path, then more footsteps, then many more all at once, and they continued so long and so steadily that I realized they were not footsteps: it was the rain. Heavy drops splashed on the leaves in the garden and on the planks of the wooden decks. Then, among the splashes of rain, I did hear the footsteps of a neighbor coming home, and it was the man above me, now walking over my ceiling.
•
Yesterday I rode a bicycle along a winding macadam trail past lily-choked ponds and through a thin forest of young beeches. On my way back, I stopped on the pier to watch fishermen mending their nets before they set out to sea. They pull large comblike implements through the squares of the net and tie knots in it. One man holds the net while the other does the mending with quick, economical motions. Small clusters of tourists stand on the pier above looking down at them respectfully where they work in the boats.
Not far away, three men fished off the pier for mackerel, casting again and again, pulling up silver fish that fought hard, all muscle, then unhooking them and slipping them carefully into a Styrofoam cooler where they flopped so violently that the cooler shook and thudded for a while after it was closed.
At the same time, a bright red oil truck was fueling the boats. It would stop next to them on the pier where they were tied two or three deep alongside and send the long hose down into one, over one into the next, and then into the third. At the same time, a steel cable that extended the length of the pier into what seemed to be a fish-packing shed was being wound mechanically onto a drum in one of the fishing boats. The winding went on and on. A group of tourists watched this carefully, too.
The tourists took pictures of the fishermen mending their nets. If a tourist asked a fisherman to smile, the fisherman would glance up soberly, with a neutral expression on his face, and keep still for the picture, but he would not smile.
I went out to eat recently with the two old people and two old friends of theirs. We sat in a room surrounded by water and they all ordered lobster. The plates came, and the red lobsters looked pretty lying on their lettuce leaves next to their little white cups of melted butter. Now the conversation died and the table was silent except for the furious cracking, pulling, and prying of those old people, who suddenly showed such competent physical strength, intent on destroying their lobsters.
People I see here: the clerk at the post office; the friendly checkout woman at the supermarket; my neighbors; my landlady; the woman across the garden, who once asked me in a neutral, curious tone what I was doing here; last night, a plump, gregarious off-duty bartender attending the free movie at the public library, though I did not speak to him. He wore a bandanna tied around his forehead and cowboy boots. He was there to see the 1954 movie, whose title I forget. Most of the small audience were old people calling back and forth to each other.
“Everybody’s here!” someone cried.
I felt I was included in “everybody,” though I was sitting by myself waiting for the movie to begin. I listened to the bartender talk to the other people. Then we all watched the movie.
A plumber came to my room yesterday to fix the shower. He told me his family had lived here for generations. He said that these days there isn’t much cod or haddock and the fishermen are taking shellfish off the Great Bank about six miles west of the tip of the land; the beds there seem to be inexhaustible.
I have seen great crates of these shellfish, which I thought were quahogs, coming up onto the pier, hoisted by a small crane on a boat. The crates were stacked on the wharf while tractor trailers from Maryland with their engines running prepared to load them. Seagulls ran around on the asphalt with their wings raised threatening one another over the scraps. Only one gull sat on a crate at the top of a stack and pulled the slimy, elastic flesh of a quahog up through the slats, leaning back as he pulled, bending forward to get another grip, and leaning back again in the midst of a great noise from the boat’s engines.
This was at twilight, and as the sky darkened, the lights on the boats grew brighter, and a handful of tourists watched, standing gingerly at the edge of the pier. The young fishermen, bare-chested, wearing shorts and high rubber boots, went about their work steadily, maneuvering hooks, hoisting a dredger, then a large piece of grating. The boat’s engine throbbed, sometimes thundered.
On another night it was later. I was the only one watching. Sparks flew up into the darkness from a boat where something was being welded or soldered. Another boat set out to sea after blowing its whistle. A black fisherman ran to the stern of the boat as it pulled away. He looked up, smiled, and waved.
I have just come back from looking at the motorcycles on the pier. They are parked side by side in great numbers near the snack bars that sell such surprisingly good Portuguese fish soup. They are of all kinds, plain and fancy. The fancy ones are decorated with antlers, and with leopard skins.
More crickets are singing now as the air grows colder and colder. It is the last day of August and the season is changing suddenly. Just as it is time for me to leave, the historian, too, has finished his tour and will be returning to Europe.
He says,
“When I first met you
I didn’t think you would turn out to be so … strange.”
At night he was a different man. If she knew him as he was in the morning, at night she hardly recognized him: a pale man, a gray man, a man in a brown sweater, a man with dark eyes who kept his distance from her, who took offense, who was not reasonable. In the morning, he was a rosy king, gleaming, smooth-cheeked and smooth-chinned, fragrant with perfumed talc, coming out into the sunlight with a wide embrace in his royal red plaid robe …
*
She waits near the highway before the entrance of HoJo’s for the van going south. She is going south to meet a plane coming from the west. Waiting with her is a thin, dark-haired young woman who does not stop walking back and forth restlessly near her luggage. They are both early and wait for some time. In her purse she has two books,
Worstward Ho
and
West with the Night
. If it is quiet and she reads
Worstward Ho
on the way south, when she is fresh, she can read
West with the Night
on the way back up north, when it will be later and she will be tired.
†
The van arrives and she takes care to sit on the right side, so that as they travel south the sun will not come in through her window but through the windows across the aisle from her. It is early morning, and the sun shines in through the windows from the east. Later in the day, as she returns north, she thinks, it may be late enough so that the sun will come through the windows from the west.
The highway she travels crosses and recrosses a meandering stream that passes now northeast and now northwest under her. As long as she is alone, sitting in the back of the van, she does not read but looks out the window.
Soon the van pulls up in front of a shopping mall. The restless young woman with the dark hair immediately stands up and remains standing in the aisle looking at the other passengers and out the windows. Two women board the van. They smell heavily of face powder as they walk past her to sit in the back near her. Now, since she is no longer alone, she begins to read.
The van is quiet, so she reads
Worstward Ho
. The first words are: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” She is not very pleased by these words.
*
But soon after, she reads a sentence she likes better: “Whither once whence no return.” After that, for a while, some sentences are pleasing and some are not.
The van travels almost due south down the highway. Sometimes it leaves the highway, the sunlight circling around behind all of them, to make a stop and pick up more passengers. At each stop, the restless young woman stands up and looks around in a commanding way. The passengers who get on to the van are mostly women.
She reads on comfortably for some miles, but when the road turns, and the van turns with it, east and then north of east, the sun is in her eyes and she cannot read
Worstward Ho
.
†
She waits, and when the road turns east again and then south, a shadow falls on the page and she can read. With difficulty, though the light is good, she reads such words as “As now by way of somehow on where in the nowhere all together?”
‡
If the van turns briefly north, so that the sun is at her right shoulder, the light is no longer in her eyes but flickering on the page of the book, illuminating but further confusing such already confusing words as “What when words gone? None for what then.”
*
Now the shade of a tree by a small gas station allows her to go on to read: “But say by way of somehow on somehow with sight to do.” While the driver makes a phone call, one woman leaves the van to try to find a working bathroom, fails, and returns to the van.
The van resumes going south and she reads with pleasure and some understanding: “Now for to say as worst they may only they only they.” And then with more pleasure: “With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.” And then soon there is something a little different: “So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.”
The sun in another small gas station stops her from reading, heat and brightness coming in her window, what was the west window when the van was heading south but probably must be considered the east window just at this moment. While the driver makes another phone call, two women, now, leave the van to try to find a working bathroom, fail, and return to the bus.
†
The van heads south again.
‡
Though she is several pages farther along, some of the words are the same again: “Next fail see say how dim undimmed to worsen. How nohow save to dimmer still. But but a shade so as when after nohow somehow on to dimmer still.”
Then there is something new at the bottom of the page: “Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing.”
Then a combination: “Longing that all go. Dim go.”
Soon after, with confusion, she reads: “Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid.” She misunderstands and reads again: “Whenever said said said missaid.” Then a third time, and when she imagines a pause in the middle of it, she understands better.
*
At the next stop, the van driver calls out for “folks Benson and Goodwin.” The Benson couple and the single Goodwin, sitting forward in the van, identify themselves as “Two Benson and one Goodwin.” It takes the driver a very long time to find their papers. While he is searching, three women, now, leave the van, find a working bathroom, and return to the van.
Now each time the van stops, it stops with the sun coming in what was the west window but is now the east window, preparing to turn right and head south into the sun again. Now she has grown used to waiting with the sun on her face and on the page and watching the asphalt outside and the other passengers inside until the van turns and goes on south.
†
Near the end of the book, she reads: “No once. No once in pastless now,” and just now the van passes a cemetery near the airport and she sees many white stone angels, their wings raised.
‡
By the time she reaches the end of her trip south, the southernmost point in the van’s route, from which it will head north again, she has finished the book, which is not long. Although she has liked many of the words that came in between, its last words, “Said nohow on,” say as little to her as its first, “On. Say on. Be said on.”