Can't and Won't: Stories

Ödön von Horváth Out Walking

Ödön von Horváth was once walking in the Bavarian Alps when he discovered, at some distance from the path, the skeleton of a man. The man had evidently been a hiker, since he was still wearing a knapsack. Von Horváth opened the knapsack, which looked almost as good as new. In it, he found a sweater and other clothing; a small bag of what had once been food; a diary; and a picture postcard of the Bavarian Alps, ready to send, that read, “Having a wonderful time.”

On the Train

We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners. We frown.

Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich onto my newspaper. Bad habits.

I would not report this if I were the one picking my nose. I look again and he is still at it.

As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.

The Problem of the Vacuum Cleaner

A priest is about to come visit us — or maybe it is two priests.

But the maid has left the vacuum cleaner in the hall, directly in front of the front door.

I have asked her twice to take it away, but she will not.

I certainly will not.

One of the priests, I know, is the Rector of Patagonia.

The Seals

I know we’re supposed to be happy on this day. How odd that is. When you’re very young, you’re usually happy, at least you’re ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there’s less to be happy about. Also, you start losing people — your family. Ours weren’t necessarily easy, but they were ours, the hand we were dealt. There were five of us, actually, like a poker hand — I never thought of that before.

We’re beyond the river and into New Jersey now, we’ll be in Philadelphia in about an hour, we pulled out of the station on time.

I’m thinking especially about her — older than me and older than our brother, and so often responsible for us, always the most responsible, at least till we were all grown up. By the time I was grown up, she already had her first child. Actually, by the time I was twenty-one, she had both of them.

Most of the time I don’t think about her, because I don’t like to feel sad. Her broad cheeks, soft skin, lovely features, large eyes, her light complexion, blond hair, colored but natural, with a little gray in it. She always looked a little tired, a little sad, when she paused in a conversation, when she rested for a moment, and especially in a photograph. I’ve searched and searched for a photo in which she doesn’t look tired or sad, but I can find only one.

They said she looked young, and peaceful, in her coma, day after day. It went on and on — no one knew exactly when it would end. My brother told me she had a glow over her face, a damp sheen — she was sweating lightly. The plan was to let her breathe on her own, with a little oxygen, until she stopped breathing. I never saw her in the coma, I never saw her at the end. I’m sorry about that now. I thought I should stay with our mother and wait it out here, holding her hand, till the phone call came. At least that’s what I told myself. The phone call came in the middle of the night. My mother and I both got out of bed, and then stood there together in the dark living room, the only light coming from outside, from the streetlamps.

I miss her so much. Maybe you miss someone even more when you can’t figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then she left home.

I think she left right after she was done with college. She moved away to the city. I would have been about seven. I have some memories of her in that house, before she moved away. I remember her playing music in the living room, I remember her standing by the piano, bent a little forward, her lips pursed around the mouthpiece of her clarinet, her eyes on the sheet music. She played very well then. There were always little family dramas about the reeds she needed for the mouthpiece of her clarinet. Years later, miles away from there, when I was visiting her, she would bring out the clarinet again, not having played it in a long time, and we would try to play something together, we would work our way, hit or miss, through something. You could sometimes hear the full, round tones that she had learned how to make, and her perfect sense of the shape of a line of music, but the muscles of her lips had weakened and sometimes she lost control. The instrument would squeak or remain silent. Playing, she would force the air into the mouthpiece, pressing hard, and then, when there was a rest, she would lower the instrument for a moment, expel the air in a rush, and then take a quick breath before starting to play again.

I remember where the piano was in our house, just inside the archway into that long, low-ceilinged room shadowed by pine trees outside the front windows, with sun coming in the side windows, on the open side, from the sunny yard, where the rosebushes grew against the house and the beds of iris lay out in the middle of the lawn, but I don’t remember her there on this holiday. Maybe she didn’t come home for that. She was too far away to come back very often. We didn’t have a lot of money, so there probably wasn’t much for train fares. And maybe she didn’t want to come back very often. I wouldn’t have understood that then. I told our mother I would give up all the few dollars I had saved if it would bring her home again for a visit. I was very serious about this, I thought it would help, but our mother just smiled.

I missed her so much. When she still lived at home she often looked after us, my brother and me. On the day I was born, on that hot summer afternoon, she was the one who stayed with my brother. They were dropped off at the county fair. She led him around the rides and booths for hours and hours, both of them hot and thirsty and tired, in that flat basin of fairground where years later we watched the fireworks. My father and mother were miles away, across town, at the hospital on the top of the hill.

When I was ten, the rest of us moved, too, to the same city, so for a few years we all lived close by. She would come over to our apartment and stay for a while, but I don’t think she came very often, and I don’t really understand why not. I don’t remember family meals together with her, I don’t remember excursions in the city together. At the apartment, she would listen carefully when I practiced the piano. She would tell me when I played a wrong note, but sometimes she was wrong about that. She taught me my first word in French: she made me say it over and over till I had the pronunciation just right. Our mother is gone now, too, so I can’t ask her why we didn’t see her more often.

There won’t be any more animal-themed presents from her. There won’t be any more presents from her at all.

Why those animal-themed presents? Why did she want to remind me of animals? She once gave me a mobile made of china penguins — why? Another time, a seagull of balsa wood that hung on strings and bobbed its wings up and down in the breeze. Another time, a dish towel with badgers on it. I still have that. Why badgers?

* * *

Trenton Makes, the World Takes — out the window. How many advertising slogans will I stare at out the window today? Now there are poles falling over into the water with all their wires still strung on them — what happened to them, and why were they left there?

It’s always the ones without families who get asked to work on this day. I could have claimed that I was spending it with my brother, but he’s in Mexico.

Four hours, a little more. I’ll be there around dinnertime. I’ll eat in the hotel restaurant, if there is one. That’s always the easiest. The food is never really very good, but the people are friendly. They have to be, it’s part of their job. Friendly sometimes meaning they’ll turn the music down for me. Or they’ll say they can’t, but smile.

* * *

Was a love of animals something we shared? She must have liked them or she wouldn’t have sent me those presents. I can’t remember how she was with animals. I try to remember her different moods: so often worried, sometimes more relaxed and smiling (at the table, after a drink of wine), sometimes laughing at a joke, sometimes playful (years ago, with her children), at those times filled with sudden physical energy, lunging at someone across the lawn, under the bay tree, in the walled garden that her husband cared for so patiently.

She worried about so many things. She would imagine a bad outcome and she would elaborate on it until it grew into a story and moved far away from where it started. It could start with a prediction of rain. To one of her grown daughters, she might say something like It’s going to rain. Don’t forget your raincoat. If you get wet you might catch cold, and then you might miss the performance tomorrow. That would be too bad. Bill would be so disappointed. He’s looking forward to hearing what you think of the play. You and he have talked about it so much …

I think about that a lot — how tense she was. It’s something that must have started very early, she had such a complicated childhood. Three fathers by the time she was six years old — or two, I suppose, if you don’t count her actual father. He knew her only when she was a baby. Our mother kept leaving her with other people — a nanny, a cousin. For a morning or a day, usually, but once, at least, for weeks and weeks. Our mother had to work — it was always for a good reason.

I didn’t see her often, a long time would go by, because she lived so far away. When we saw each other again, she would put her arms around me and give me a strong hug, pressing me against her soft chest, my cheek against her shoulder. She was half a head taller, and she was broader. I was not only younger, but smaller. She had been there as long as I could remember. I always felt she would protect me or look out for me, even when I was grown up. I still sometimes think, with a pang of longing, before I realize what I’m thinking, that some older woman I see somewhere, about fourteen years older, will take care of me. When she drew back from hugging me, she would be looking off to the side or over my head. She seemed to be thinking of something else. Then, when her eyes rested on me, I wasn’t sure she saw me. I didn’t know what her feelings for me really were.

What was my place in her life? I sometimes thought that to her daughters, and even to her, I didn’t matter. The sensation would come over me suddenly, an emptiness, as if I didn’t even exist. There were just the three of them, her two girls and her, after their father died, after her second husband left. I was peripheral, our brother was, too, though he and I had been such a large part of her life early on.

I was never sure how she felt about anyone except her daughters. I could tell how much she missed them, when they were away, because she would suddenly become so quiet. Or when they were about to go away — from the rented house at the beach, saying goodbye on the front doorstep, the shiny dune grass growing in the sand beyond the cars, the gray shingle of the roof in the sun, the smell of fish and creosote, the sun reflecting off the cars, then the slam of one car door, the slam of the other car door, and her silence as she watched. It was when she was quiet that I felt I had more access to the truth of her feelings, a way to see into them, and those times were mostly in relation to her daughters.

But I think her feelings about our mother were a heavy burden in her life, at least when they were together. When our mother was far away, maybe she could forget her. Our mother was always stepping on her to get up higher, always needing to be right, always needing to be better than her, and than all of us, most of the time. The terrible innocence of our mother, too, as she did that. She had no idea, most of the time.

* * *

Our last conversation — it was on the phone, long-distance. She said she was having trouble seeing things on the right side of her field of vision. On a form she was filling out, she saw the word date and wrote in the day’s date, not seeing that there were more words to the right of it, and that she was supposed to fill in date of birth. We talked for a while, and towards the end of the conversation, I must have said something about talking again in a few days, or staying in touch about her condition, because then, in answer to that, she said she didn’t want to talk again, because she wanted to save all her strength for talking to her daughters. As she said it, her voice sounded to me distant, or exhausted, she did not soften what she was saying, or apologize. We never talked again after that. I felt pushed away, pushed out of her life. But her coolness was the sound of her own fear, her preoccupation with what was happening to her, not anything against me.

After she died, I kept going over and over it, trying to see what she felt about me, trying to measure it, find the affection or the love, measure that, make sure of it. She must have had mixed feelings about me, her much younger sister — my life at home was easier than hers had ever been. She probably felt some jealousy that went on and on, year after year, and yet she did want to be with me, she came to where I lived, she visited me, she slept in my living room, it was two nights, at least. She came more than once. Was it on one of those visits that I heard her little radio going half the night, close beside her next to the bed, muttering and singing, or was it in one of the rented beach places during the summer vacation, sand on the floor, someone else’s furniture, someone else’s art on the walls? She had trouble sleeping, she kept the radio on and read a detective novel late into the night.

And she did have me come and stay with her, and once I lived with her for a while, when I had to get away from my parents. Sometimes I thought she took me in from a sense of duty to me, her younger sister, since I was always having my own problems.

* * *

She always sent our package well ahead of time. Inside, each present was wrapped in soft tissue paper, or stiffer wrapping paper. All these presents — she picked them out, bought them, wrapped them in cheerful paper, labeled them in her large script with black or colored marker directly on the gift wrap, and sent them a couple of weeks in advance.

I know I always cared too much about my presents. This holiday was the high point of the year for me when I was a child, and that has never changed. The year culminates in this holiday and the turning of the old year to the new year, and then the circle of the year begins again, always leading up to this holiday.

The seagull ended up in a closet, the strings tangled. From time to time, I would try to untangle it, and at last I succeeded. Then I hung it from a rafter in the barn with a piece of duct tape. After a while, in the heat of the summer, the tape loosened and it fell down.

Then there was that little green stuffed elephant with sequins, from India, quite pretty. With two little cords on it, to hang it up somewhere. I hung it in a window and the green material on one side of it faded after a while in the sunlight. And a thing made of felt, with pockets, to hang on the back of a door and put things in — I’m not sure what. It had elephants on it, too, embroidered on the felt.

Now I remember — she would get these things at special handicraft fairs to benefit some organization of indigenous people. That was part of her kindness, and her conscientiousness, and part of the reason the things were a little odd and sometimes a strange match for us.

So there was always the excitement of her package arriving in the mail. The coarse brown paper a little battered from the trip overseas. The brown paper was even more exciting than the wrappings inside, because it was so drab, yet you knew that inside there would be that explosion of little packages, each wrapped in bright colored paper.

She chose my presents with me in mind, I think, but twisting the facts a little, in an optimistic sort of way, thinking I would find this thing useful or decorative. I think a lot of people, when they pick out a gift, twist the facts optimistically. But I’m not saying I’m against people trying out a different kind of gift on someone, and I’m certainly not against those handicraft fairs. Now that a few years have gone by, and I’ve changed, too, I would buy my gifts at a handicraft fair. I would do it at least in her memory.

She wouldn’t spend a lot of money on a gift. That was her conscience. She wouldn’t spend a lot on herself, either. I also believe that deep down, she probably didn’t think she deserved any better.

But she spent a lot on us at other times. Her gifts then would come out of the blue. Once, she wrote to me and asked if I wanted to go on a skiing trip in the mountains with her and the children. It was early spring and the snow was melting in muddy patches on the slopes. We skied on what snow there was. I sometimes went off on long walks. She thought I shouldn’t go by myself — if something happened to me, I would be alone and without help. But she could not forbid me to go, so I went. On the paths I took, in fact, there were many people hiking up and down, passing one another with a friendly greeting.

Years later, when I was long past the age when I should have needed any help from her, she bought me my first computer. I could have refused, but I still did not have much money. And there was something exciting about her sudden offer one afternoon, over the phone. It was late in the evening where she was. Her offer was an enveloping burst of generosity, I wanted to sink into it and stay inside it. Yes, she said, yes, she insisted, she would send me the money. The next day she called again, a little calmer — she wanted to help, she would send me some money, but not the whole amount, which was a lot in those days. I know how it must have been — late in the evening, she was thinking of me, and missing me, and the feeling grew in her and turned into a desire to do something for me, even something dramatic.

Starting at about that time, she would rent a house for us each summer, or at least pay for most of it, a house at the beach, for a week or two, a different one each year, and we would all go there and be there together. The last time we did this was the last year of my father’s life, though he didn’t come to the beach house — we left him behind in the nursing home. The next summer, he was gone, and she was gone, too.

* * *

Nearly to Philadelphia — rounding the bend, by the river, there are the boathouses on the other side, that big museum on the cliff across the water, like a building from ancient Greece. I won’t see the station this time — its high ceiling and long wooden benches and archways and preserved old signs. I could just stand there looking at it for a while, the deep space of it — I do, now and then, if I have time. Our own Penn Station was even grander. It’s gone now — that always hurts to think about. And then when you’re walking around there in that underground concourse, killing time before your train, you keep passing the photos they put up on the columns, of the old Penn Station, the long shafts of sunlight falling through the tall windows down the flights of marble stairs. As if they want to remind us of what we’re missing — strange.

Then we’ll be passing through Amish country. I never remember to watch for it, it always takes me by surprise. In the spring, the teams of mules and horses plowing the sloping fields up to the horizon — none of that today. The wash on the lines — maybe. It’s cloudy, but dry and windy. What was that I read about salting your wash in winter? Anyway, it’s not freezing today. A warm winter.

* * *

Again and again, she tried to pay our brother’s way over, to go visit her. He never went. He never said why. He finally went when she was dying, when she didn’t know it, it was too late for her to have that satisfaction — that at last he had agreed to come. He stayed there until the end. When he was not with her, he walked around the city. He took care of some of the practical things that had to be done. Then he stayed on for the funeral. I did not go over for the funeral. I had good reasons, to me they seemed good, anyway, having to do with our old mother, and the shock of it, and how far away it was, across the ocean. Really, it had more to do with the strangers who would be at the funeral, and the tenderness of my own feelings, which I did not want to share with strangers.

I could share her when she was alive. When she was alive, her presence was endless, time with her was endless, time was endless. Our mother was very old already, and when we children stopped to think about how long we might live, we thought we would live to be just as old. Then, suddenly, there was that strange problem with her vision, which turned out to be a problem not with her vision but in her brain, and then, without warning, the bleeding and the coma, and the doctors announcing that she did not have long to live.

Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.

I did not want to share her, I did not want to hear a stranger say something about her, a minister in front of the congregation, or a friend of hers who would see her in a different way. To stay with her, in my mind, to remain with her, was not easy, since it was all in my mind, since she wasn’t really there, and for that, it had to be just the two of us, no one else. There would have been strangers at the funeral, people she knew but I didn’t know, or people I knew but didn’t like, people who had cared about her or had not cared about her but thought they should attend the funeral. But now I’m sorry, or rather, I’m sorry I couldn’t have done both — gone to the funeral and also stayed home to be with our mother and nurse my own grief and my own memories.

Suddenly, after she was gone, things of hers became more valuable than they had been before — her letters, of course, though there weren’t many of them, but also things she had left behind in my house after her last visit, like her jacket, a dark blue windbreaker with some logo on it. A detective novel I tried to read and couldn’t. A tub of frozen clams in the freezer, and a jar of tartar sauce, marked down, in the door of the fridge.

* * *

We’re moving pretty fast now. When you slide by it all so quickly, you think you won’t ever have to get bogged down in it again — the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We’re really speeding. The ride is smooth. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that’s jiggling. We’re all jiggling a little.

There aren’t many people in the car, and they’re pretty quiet today. I don’t mind telling someone if he talks too long on his cell phone. I did that once. I gave this man ten minutes, maybe even more, maybe twenty, and then I went and stood there next to him in the aisle. He was hunched over with his finger pressed against his free ear. He didn’t get angry. He looked up at me, smiled, waved his hand in the air, and ended the call before I was back in my seat. I don’t do business on my cell phone on the train. They should know better.

* * *

There were also gifts of a different kind that she gave — the effort she went to for other people, the work she put into preparing meals for friends. The wanderers she took into her house, to live for weeks or months — kids passing through, but also, one year, that thin old Indian who spent every day arranging her books in the bookcases, and who ate so little and meditated so long. And later her old father, her actual father, the one she first met when she was already grown up, not my father, not the father who raised her. She had had a dream about him, that he was very ill. She had set out to find him, and she had found him.

She was so tired by the end of the day that whenever I was there visiting, when we all sat watching some program or movie on television in the evening, she would fall asleep. First she was awake for a while, curious about the actors — who is that, didn’t we see him in…? — and then she would grow quiet, she was quiet for so long that you would look over and see that her head was leaning to the side, the lamplight shining on her light hair, or her head was bowed over her chest, and she would sleep until we all stood up to go to bed.

What was the last present she gave me? Seven years ago. If I had known it was the last, I would have given it such careful attention.

If it wasn’t animal-themed or made by some indigenous person, then it was probably some kind of a bag, not an expensive bag, but one that had a special feature, a trick to it, like it folded into itself when it was empty, and then zipped up and had a little clip on it so you could clip it onto another bag. I have a few of those stored away.

She carried them herself, and other kinds of bags, always open and full of things — an extra sweater, another bag, a couple of books, a box of crackers, a bottle of something to drink. There was a generosity in how much she packed and carried with her.

One time when she came to visit — I’m thinking of her bags leaning in a group against a chair of mine. I was nearly paralyzed, not knowing what to do. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to leave her alone, that wouldn’t have been right, but I also wasn’t used to having company. After a while, the panicky feeling passed, maybe just because time passed, but there was a moment when I thought I was going to collapse.

Now I can look at that same bed where she slept and wish she would come back at least for a little while. We wouldn’t have to talk, we wouldn’t even have to look at each other, but it would be a comfort just to have her there — her arms, her broad shoulders, her hair.

I want to say to her, Yes, there were problems, our relationship was difficult to understand, and complicated, but still, I would like just to have you sitting there on the daybed where you did sleep for a few nights once, it’s your part of the living room now, I’d like to just look at your cheeks, your shoulders, your arms, your wrist with the gold watchband on it, a little tight, pressing into the flesh, your strong hands, the gold wedding ring, your short fingernails, I don’t have to look you in the eyes or have any sort of communion, complete or incomplete, but to have you there in person, in the flesh, for a while, pressing down the mattress, making folds in the cover, the sun coming in behind you, would be very nice. Maybe you would stretch out on the daybed and read for a while in the afternoon, maybe fall asleep. I would be in the next room, nearby.

Sometimes, after dinner, if she was very relaxed and I was sitting next to her, she would put her hand on my shoulder and let it rest there for a while, so that I felt it warmer and warmer through the cotton of my shirt. I sensed then that she did love me in a way that wouldn’t change, whatever her mood might be.

* * *

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by — but now it’s time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

Because after the dramas of the deaths themselves, those complicated dramas that went on for days, for both of them, there was the quieter and simpler fact of missing them. He would not be there to come out of his room at home with a picture or a letter to show us, he would not be there to tell us the same stories over again, about when he was a young boy — pronouncing the names that meant so much to him and so little to us: Clinton Street where he was born, Winter Island where they went in the summers when he was little, him watching the back of the horse that trotted ahead of them pulling their carriage, his pneumonia when he was a child, weakened and lying in bed reading, day after day, in that cousin’s house in Salem, going to the Y on Saturdays to swim with the other boys, where it was the usual thing for all the boys to swim naked, and how that bothered him, the Perkins family next door. He would not be there having his first cup of coffee in the morning at eleven o’clock, or reading by the light from the window in an armchair. She would not be making pancakes for us in the mornings at the rented beach house, wide fat blueberry pancakes a little underdone in the middle, standing over the pan, quiet and concentrating, or talking as she worked, in her flowered blouse and straight pants, in her comfortable flats or her moccasins, the familiar shape of her toes in them stretching the fabric or the leather. She would not go out swimming in the rough waves of the harbor, even in stormy weather, her eyes a lighter blue than the water. She would not stand with our mother waist-deep in the water near the shore talking, with a little frown on her face either from the sunlight or from concentrating on what they were talking about. She would never again make oyster stew the way she did one Christmas Eve, on that visit to our mother and father’s house after her husband died, the crunch of sand in our mouths in the milky broth, sand in the bottoms of our spoons. She would not take a child on her lap, her own child, as on that same visit, when they were all so sad and confused, or someone else’s child, and rock that child quietly back and forth, her broad strong arms around the child’s chest, resting her cheek against the child’s hair, her face sad and thoughtful, her eyes distant. She would not be there on the sofa in the evenings, exclaiming in surprise when she saw an actor she knew in a movie or a show, she would not fall asleep there, suddenly quiet, later in the evening.

The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal — we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting on a year that they would never experience.

There was also some confusion in my mind, in the months afterwards. It was not that I thought she was still alive. But at the same time I couldn’t believe that she was actually gone. Suddenly the choice wasn’t so simple: either alive or not alive. It was as though not being alive did not have to mean she was dead, as though there were some third possibility.

* * *

Her visit, that time — now I don’t know why it seemed so complicated. You just go out and do something together, or sit and talk if you stay inside. Talking would have been easy enough, since she liked to talk. Of course it’s too simple to say that she liked to talk. There was something frantic about the way she talked. As though she were afraid of something, fending something off. After she died, that was one thing we all said — we used to wish she would stop talking for a while, or talk a little less, but now we would have given anything to hear her voice.

I wanted to talk, too, I had things to say in answer to her, but it wasn’t possible, or it was difficult. She wouldn’t let me, or I would have to force my way into the conversation.

I wish I could try again — I wish she would come and visit again. I think I would be calmer. I’d be so glad to see her. But it doesn’t work that way. If she came back, she’d be back for more than just a little while, and maybe I wouldn’t know what to do, after all, any better than the last time I saw her. Still, I’d like to try.

Another present was a board game involving endangered species. A board game — there was that optimism again. Or she was doing what our mother used to do — giving me something that required another person, so that I would have to bring another person into my life. I actually meet plenty of people, I even meet them traveling. Most people are basically pretty friendly. It’s true that I still live alone, I’m just more comfortable that way, I like having everything the way I want it. But having a board game wasn’t going to encourage me to bring someone home to play it with me.

* * *

There aren’t that many of us in the car, though more than I would have expected on this particular day. Of course I think they’re all on their way to some place that’s welcoming and friendly, where people are waiting for them with things to eat and drink, like little sausages and eggnog. But that may not be true. And they may be thinking the same thing about me — if they are thinking anything about me.

And some of them who may not be going anywhere special may be glad, though that’s a little hard to believe, because you’re made to feel, by all the hype, by all the advertising, really, but also by the things your friends say, that you should be somewhere special, with your family, or with your friends. If you’re not, you get that old feeling of being left out, another feeling you learned when you were a child, in school probably, at the same time that you learned to get excited seeing all those wrapped presents, no matter what you eventually found in them, besides what you wanted.

I’m not as cheerful as I used to be, I know. A friend of mine said something about it, after I lost both of them, three weeks apart, that summer: he said, your grief spreads into all sorts of different areas of your life. Your grief turns into depression. And after a while you just don’t want to do anything. You just can’t be bothered.

Another friend — when I told him, he said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.” So strange. By the time he found out I had a sister, I no longer had a sister.

It’s beginning to rain, little drops driven sideways across the windowpane. Streaks and dots across the glass. The sky outside is darker and the lights in the car, the ceiling light and the little reading lights over the seats, seem brighter. The farms are passing now. There’s no wash hanging out, but I can see the clotheslines stretched between the back porches and the barns. The farms are on both sides of the tracks, there are wide-open spaces between them, the silos far apart over the landscape, with the farm buildings clustered around them, like churches in their little villages in the distance.

* * *

Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.

For a while, it was hard for me to think or speak about one of them separate from the other. For a while, though not anymore, they were always linked together in my mind because they died so close to each other in time. It was hard not to imagine her waiting for him somewhere, and him coming. We were even comforted by it — we imagined that she would take care of him, wherever they were. She was younger and more alert than he was. She was taller and stronger. But would he be pleased, or would he be annoyed? Would he want to be by himself?

I didn’t even know if he wanted me to stay there next to the bed while he was dying. I had taken the bus to the city where he and my mother lived, to be with him. There would be no chance of recovery, for him, or going back from where he was, because they had stopped feeding him. He wasn’t speaking or hearing, or even seeing, anymore, so there was no way to know what he wanted. He didn’t look like himself. His eyes were half open, but they didn’t see anything. His mouth was half open. He didn’t have his teeth in. Once, I put a little wet sponge to his lower lip, because of the dryness, and his mouth clamped shut on it suddenly.

You think you should sit with someone who is dying, you think it must be a comfort to them. But when he was alive, when we lingered at the dinner table, or in the living room talking and laughing, after a while he always got up and left us and went into his own room. Later, when he was doing the dishes, he would say no, he didn’t want any help. Even when we were visiting him in the nursing home, after an hour or two he would ask us to leave.

Our mother consulted a psychic, later, after they were gone, to see if she could get in touch with them. She didn’t really believe in that sort of thing, but some friend of hers had recommended this psychic and she thought it might be interesting and couldn’t hurt to try, so she met with her and told her things about them, and let her try to communicate with them.

The woman said she reached both of them. Our father was agreeable and cooperative, though he didn’t say much, something noncommittal, that he was “all right.” My mother thought that after the trouble they had gone to, to reach him, he might have said more. But our sister turned away and was cross, and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. We were very interested in this, even though we had trouble believing it. We felt that at least the psychic believed it and thought she had had that experience.

The two kinds of grief were different. One kind, for him, was for an end that came at the right time, that was in the natural order of things. The other kind of grief, for her, was for an end that came unexpectedly and much too soon. She and I were just beginning a good correspondence — now it will never continue. She was just beginning a project of her own that meant a lot to her. She had just rented a house near us where we would be able to see her much more often. A different phase of her life was just beginning.

* * *

Strange, the way things look when you’re watching them out a train window. I don’t get tired of that. Just now I saw an island in the river, a small one with a grove of trees on it, and I was going to look more carefully at it, because I like islands, but then I looked away for a moment and when I looked back it was gone. Now we’re passing some woods again. Now the woods are gone and I can see the river again and the hills in the distance. The things close to the tracks flash by so fast, and the things in the middle distance flow past more quietly and steadily, and the things in the far distance stay still, or sometimes they seem to be moving forward, just because the things in the middle distance are moving backward.

Actually, even though things in the far distance seem to be staying still, or even moving forward a little, they are moving back very slowly. Those treetops on a hill in the far distance were even with us for a while, but when I looked again, they were behind us, though not far behind.

* * *

I kept noticing things, in the days after she died and then after he died: a white bird flying up seemed to mean something, or a white bird landing nearby. Three crows on the branch of a tree meant something. Three days after he died, I woke up from a dream about Elysian fields, as though he had now gone into them, as though he had hovered near us for a while, for three days, even floating over our mother’s living room, and had then gone on, into the Elysian fields, maybe before going farther, to whatever place he was going to go and stay.

I wanted to believe all this, I tried hard to believe it. After all, we don’t know what happens. It’s such a strange thing — that once you are dead, you do know the answer, if you know anything at all. But whatever the answer is, you can’t communicate it to the ones who are still alive. And before you die, you can’t know whether we live on in some form after we die, or just come to an end.

It’s like what that woman in the store said to me the other day. We were talking about the little expressions our mothers liked to use over and over again—“To each his own,” or “They meant well.” She said her mother was Christian, and devout, and that she believed in an afterlife of the soul. But this woman herself did not believe, and would gently make fun of her mother. And whenever that happened, her mother would say to her, with a good-humored smile: When we die, one of us is going to be very surprised!

Our father himself believed that it was all in the body, and specifically in the brain, that it was all physical — the mind, the soul, our feelings. He had once seen a man’s brains spread over the asphalt of a driveway after an accident. He had stopped his car on the street and got out to look. My sister was a little girl then. He told her to wait for him in the car. When the body was no longer alive, he said, it was all over. But I wasn’t so sure.

There was the terror I felt one night as I was going to sleep — the sudden question that woke me up. Where was she going now? I sensed very strongly that she was going somewhere or had gone somewhere, not that she had simply stopped existing. That she, like him, had stayed nearby for a while, and then she was going — down, maybe, but also out somewhere, as though out to sea.

First, while she was still alive, but dying, I kept wondering what was happening to her. I did not hear much about it. One thing they said was that when her reflexes were worse, according to the doctors, she would move towards the pinch or the prick instead of away from it. I thought that meant that her body wanted the pain, that she wanted to feel something. I thought it meant she wanted to stay alive.

There was also that slow, dark dream I had about five days after her death. I may have had the dream just as her funeral was taking place, or just after. In the dream, I was making my way down from one level to the next in a kind of arena, the levels were wider and deeper than steps, down into a large, deep, high-ceilinged, ornately furnished and decorated room, or hall — I had an impression of dark furniture, sumptuous ornamentation, it was a hall intended for ceremony, not for any daily use. I was holding a small lantern that fit tightly over my thumb and extended outward, with a tiny flame burning in it. This was the only illumination in the vast place, a flame that wavered and flickered and had already gone out or nearly gone out once or twice. I was afraid that as I went down, as I climbed down with such difficulty, over levels that were too wide and deep to be easily straddled, the light would go out and I would be left in that deep well of darkness, that dark hall. The door I had come in by was far above me, and if I called out, no one would hear me. Without a light, I would not be able to climb back up those difficult levels.

I later realized that, given the day and the hour when I woke up from the dream, it was quite possible that I dreamt it just at the time she was being cremated. The cremation was to begin right after the funeral, my brother told me, and he told me when the funeral had ended. I thought the flickering light was her life, as she held on to it those last few days. The difficult levels descending into the hall must have been the stages of her decline, day by day. The vast and ornate hall might have been death itself, in all its ceremony, as it lay ahead, or below.

The odd problem we had afterwards was whether or not to tell our father. Our father was vague in his mind, by then, and puzzled by many things. We would wheel him up and down the hallway of his nursing home. He liked to greet the other residents with a smile and a nod. We would stop in front of the door to his room. In June, the last year he was alive, he looked at the Happy Birthday sign on the door and waved at it with his long, pale, freckled hand and asked me a question about it. He couldn’t articulate his words very well anymore. Unless you had heard him all your life, you wouldn’t know what he was saying. He was marveling over the sign, and smiling. He was probably wondering how they knew when his birthday was.

He still recognized us, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. He was not going to live much longer, though we didn’t know then how little time was left. It seemed to us important for him to know that she had died — his daughter, though she was really his stepdaughter. And yet, would he understand, if we told him? And wouldn’t it only distress him terribly, if he did understand? Or maybe he would have both reactions at once — he might understand some part of what we were saying, and then feel terrible distress at both what we had told him and his inability to understand it completely. Should his last days be filled with this distress and grief?

But the alternative seemed wrong, too — that he should end his life not knowing this important thing, that his daughter had died. Wrong that he, who had once been the head of our small family, the one who, with our mother, made the most important family decisions, the one who drove the car when we went out on a little excursion, who helped our sister with her homework when she was a teenager, who walked her to school every morning when she was in her first year of school, while our mother rested or worked, who refused or gave permission, who played jokes at the dinner table that made her and her little friends laugh, who was busy out in the backyard for a few weeks building a playhouse — that he should not be shown the respect of being told that such an important thing had happened in his own family.

He had so little time left, and we were the ones deciding something about the end of his life — that he would die knowing or not knowing. And now I’m not sure what we did, it was so many years ago. Which probably means that nothing very dramatic happened. Maybe we did tell him, out of a sense of duty, but hastily, and nervously, not wanting him to understand, and maybe there was a look of incomprehension on his face, because something was going by too quickly. But I don’t know if I’m remembering that or making it up.

* * *

On one of her visits to me, she gave me a red sweater, a red skirt, and a round clay tile for baking bread. She took a picture of me wearing the red sweater and the skirt. I think the last thing she gave me was those little white seals with perforated backs. They’re filled with charcoal, which is supposed to absorb odors. You put them in your refrigerator. I guess she thought that because I live alone, my refrigerator would be neglected and smell bad, or maybe she just thought that anyone might need this.

When did she leave the tartar sauce? You wouldn’t think a person could become attached to something like a jar of tartar sauce. But I guess you can — I didn’t want to throw it out, because she had left it. Throwing it out would mean that the days had passed, time had moved on and left her behind. Just as it was hard for me to see the new month begin, the month of July, because she would never experience that new month. Then the month of August came, and he was gone by then, too.

Well, the little seals are useful to me, at least they were seven years ago. I did put them in my refrigerator, though at the back of a shelf, where I wouldn’t have to look at their cheerful little faces and black eyes every time I opened the door. I even took them with me when I moved.

I doubt if they absorb anything anymore, after all this time. But they don’t take up much room, and there isn’t much in there anyway. I like having them, because they remind me of her. If I bend down and move things around, I can see them lying back there under the light that shines through some dried spilled things on the shelf above. There are two of them. They have black smiles painted on their faces. Or at least a line painted on their faces that looks like a smile.

Really, the only present I ever wanted, after I grew up, was something for work, like a reference book. Or something old.

Now there’s a lot of noise coming from the café car — people laughing. They sell alcohol there. I’ve never bought a drink on a train — I like to drink, but not here. Our brother used to have a drink on the train sometimes, on his way home from seeing our mother. He told me that once. This year he’s in Acapulco — he likes Mexico.

We have a couple of hours to go, still. It’s dark out. I’m glad it was light when we passed the farms. Maybe there’s a big family in the café car, or a group traveling to a conference. I see that all the time. Or to a sporting event. Well, that doesn’t actually make much sense, not today. Now someone’s coming this way, staring at me. She’s smiling a little — but she looks embarrassed. Now what? She’s lurching. Oh, a party. It’s a party — in the café car, she tells me. Everyone’s invited.

Learning Medieval History

Are the Saracens the Ottomans?

No, the Saracens are the Moors.

The Ottomans are the Turks.

My School Friend

story from Flaubert

Last Sunday I went to the Botanical Gardens. There, in the Trianon Park, is where that strange Englishman Calvert used to live. He grew roses and shipped them to England. He had a collection of rare dahlias. He also had a daughter who used to fool around with an old schoolmate of mine named Barbelet. Because of her, Barbelet killed himself. He was seventeen. He shot himself with a pistol. I walked across a sandy stretch of ground in the high wind, and I saw Calvert’s house, where the daughter used to live. Where is she now? They’ve put up a greenhouse near it, with palm trees, and a lecture hall where gardeners can learn about budding, grafting, pruning, and training — everything they need to know to maintain a fruit tree! Who thinks about Barbelet anymore — so in love with that English girl? Who remembers my passionate friend?

The Piano Lesson

I am with my friend Christine. I have not seen her for a long time, perhaps seventeen years. We talk about music and we agree that when we meet again she will give me a piano lesson. In preparation for the lesson, she says, I must select, and then study, one Baroque piece, one Classical, one Romantic, and one Modern. I am impressed by her seriousness and by the difficulty of the assignment. I am ready to do it. We will have the lesson in one year, she says. She will come to my house. But then, later, she tells me she’s not sure she will be returning to this country. Maybe, instead, we will have the lesson in Italy. Or if not Italy, then, of course, Casablanca.

dream

The Schoolchildren in the Large Building

I live in a very large building, the size of a warehouse or an opera house. I am there alone. Now some schoolchildren arrive. I see their quick little legs coming through the front door and I ask, in some fear, “Who is it, who is it?” They don’t answer. The class is very large — all boys, with two teachers. They pour into the painting studio at the back of the building. The ceiling of this studio is two or even three stories high. On one wall is a mural of dark-complexioned faces. The schoolboys crowd in front of the painting, fascinated, pointing and talking. On the opposite wall is another mural, of green and blue flowers. Only a handful of boys are looking at this one.

The class would like to spend the night here because they do not have funds for a hotel. Wouldn’t their hometown raise the money for this field trip? I ask one of the teachers. No, he says sadly, with a smile, they wouldn’t because of the fact that he, the teacher, is homosexual. After saying this, he turns and gently puts his arms around the other teacher.

Later, I am in the same building with the schoolchildren, but it is no longer my home, or I am not familiar with it. I ask a boy where the bathrooms are, and he shows me one — it’s a nice bathroom, with old fixtures and paneled in wood. As I sit on the toilet, the room rises — because it is also an elevator. I wonder briefly, as I flush, how the plumbing works in that case, and then assume it has been figured out.

dream

The Sentence and the Young Man

A sentence lies exposed to public view, in an open trash can. It is the ungrammatical sentence “Who sing!?!” We are watching it from where we stand concealed in a shadowed archway. We see a young man walk past the trash can several times, eyeing the sentence curiously. We will stay where we are, for fear that, at any moment, he will reach in quickly and fix it.

dream

Molly, Female Cat: History/Findings

Description: spayed female, calico

History:

Found in early spring at roadside curled up against snowbank

Age at time of adoption: approx. 3 yrs

Likely abandoned by previous owners

Confined to bathroom during first week

Would not eat for one week in new home, but played actively in confined space

Skin/coat: Inflamed/irritated around neck

Parasites: flea dirt found

Allowed to run free outdoors after adoption

Keeps owners company in vegetable garden

Nose/Throat: no visible lesions

Eating well, dry food

Hunts small birds, but was not able to retain grip on large blue jay

Broken tooth: upper right canine

Dental disease grade: 2–3 out of 5

Two other cats in house and they all run around in large house

Will not play with other cats

Eyes: no visible lesions

Lungs: within normal limits

Will not play with owners in presence of other cats, but will play with owners in bathroom

Lymph nodes: normal

Heart: within normal limits

Affectionate with owners, purrs and closes eyes when petted

Hangs limp in owners’ arms when picked up

Urogenital system: within normal limits

Urinates inappropriately at home on floor in 2–3 places per day

Getting worse over time, larger puddles of urine

Ears: no visible lesions

Moderate fascial skin restriction over lumbar back, significant over sacrum

Cries when petted just above tail

Sometimes cries before or after urinating

Sometimes cries after nap

Abdomen: no palpable lesions

Nervous system: within normal limits

Weight: 8.75 lbs

Ideal weight: 8.75 lbs

Does not use litter box — defecates on floor in vicinity of litter box

May have fleas

Pain score: 3 out of 10 (over sacrum)

Tolerates exam by vet, nervous but no overt hostility

Pulse: 180

Overall body condition score: 3 out of 5

* * *

Update:

Was urinating in larger quantities on floor when indoors

Chose to go outdoors every day despite adverse weather conditions

Could not be found at midday on very hot spring day

Was found in late afternoon under pine tree, panting and covered with flies

Was brought indoors and laid in cool shower stall

Stopped panting, resumed normal respiration

Died within several hours

Age at time of death: approx. 11 yrs

The Letter to the Foundation

Dear Frank and Members of the Foundation,

I was not able to finish this letter before now even though I began writing to you in my head immediately after your momentous phone call of September 29 all those many years ago. I was aware, in the first few days, of certain instructions you had given me — that I could tell the news to only two people, that I should be friendly to a college reporter, if one should approach me, that I should call you Frank. I did not think of sitting down and writing to you, because you had not specifically instructed me to do that.

I think you did say you were curious about what it was like to receive this grant, but by now I may be confusing something you said with something another person said to me, asking if I would describe for him what it was like. In any case, whether or not you asked me to describe it, I will do that.

I told you right away, Frank, that I wanted to write you a letter of thanks. You told me I really didn’t have to. I said I wanted to, though. You laughed and said, Yes, you are a scholar and a teacher of literature, so you probably have a lot to say.

The trouble is, I am an honest and truthful person and I’m not sure how truthful I can be in writing to the Foundation. I don’t want to tell you things you don’t want to hear, after all. For instance, I don’t think you want to hear that I didn’t intend to work all the time during the period of the grant.

What happened first was that I did not believe I had been given this grant. For a surprisingly long time, I didn’t believe it. I was so used to not receiving this grant. I knew about it. Our department at the college calls it the two-year grant. Other scholars I knew had gotten it. I had wanted it for many years. I had watched others receive it while I did not receive it: I was simply one of the hundreds and hundreds of scholars who ardently want one of these grants in order to be rescued at least temporarily from the life or the work they are subjected to — the heavy course load, the constant exhaustion, the annoying dean of studies or the impossibly detail-oriented acting chairwoman, the committee work, the endless office hours, the flickering fluorescent light in the office, the stains on the classroom carpeting, etc. I was deeply accustomed to being one of those who were passed over by the Foundation, who were rejected, who, in the eyes of the Foundation, should not receive this award and were less worthy than certain others. I therefore did not really believe I was one of those who had been rescued, or I was very slow to begin believing it, with the help of reminders that also seemed unreal after a while: “Good for you!” one of my colleagues would say. “What are your plans now?”

I was like an amnesiac who accepts what she is told about her life but does not remember any of it herself. Since she can’t remember any of it, she can’t deeply believe it, but she must accept it and become accustomed to it because so many people tell her the same facts over and over.

I will try to reconstruct the experience for you, since you asked.

* * *

It was just after nine in the morning when the Foundation telephoned.

I was getting ready to go into the city. I stopped what I was doing and talked to you. For a moment, I thought you might be calling for another reason. But at the same time, I was thinking that you wouldn’t telephone me at nine in the morning for anything else — you would have written me a letter. The first person I talked to was a shy, gentle woman with a quiet voice. She gave me the good news and then told me that I should call another person from the Foundation right away, a man who might or might not be in his office.

Meanwhile, even as I was talking to her and hearing the good news, I was worried that I would miss my bus. I could not miss the bus because I had an appointment down in the city to the south of where I lived. I called the other person, the man, and he was in his office, which was a relief. I think this man was probably you, although by now, all these years later, I’m not sure. He began to tease me. He tried to make me think I had misunderstood what the gentle woman had said, and that I was not really going to be getting any grant. He must have known that I would be aware that he was teasing me, and he must have known, too, that I would be surprised that he was teasing me, and even worried about it, though I didn’t know exactly in what way I should be worried. I wondered later if I was the only one you teased when talking about the good news, but since I can’t believe that, I have to believe you make a habit of teasing the people you call — if it was you, of course.

I talked to him, or you, as long as you seemed to want me to talk. It was then that you gave me instructions. You told me to call you Frank. At that moment, I was prepared to do anything you seemed to want me to do, because I was afraid that if I was not careful at that moment, everything would be ruined and the grant would vanish. This was an instinctive reaction, not a rational one. When the conversation was over, I hurried to the bus.

I was glad, of course — I thought about the good news all the way in to the city. For the first time, also, I could observe exactly how my mind adapted to a suddenly new situation: over and over again, I caught myself thinking about something in the usual way and then told myself, No, now things are different. When this had happened enough times, at last my mind began to adapt to the new situation.

Later that day, I was having lunch by myself in a restaurant near the public library. I ordered a half sandwich and a cup of soup, which cost about $7. After the waitress walked away, I continued to think about the menu, because, really, I would have preferred a certain favorite salad for $11. Then I realized: I could have afforded the salad! But immediately afterwards I thought, No! Be careful! If you spend half again as much as you used to spend on each thing that you buy from now on, you will soon run out of money!

I was feeling such relief. I wanted to tell the Foundation about this immense relief. But then I thought that of course it must be obvious to you. You probably hear this from every person you help. Does every person let you know? Or are some people very quiet or very matter-of-fact? Are they very pragmatic, and do they immediately plan how they will put it to use? Are some people not even relieved, though they are happy and excited? Or not even happy and excited? Still, I wanted to tell the Foundation. I wanted to tell you that now everything was going to be all right — I would not have to worry.

I wanted to tell you that during all of my adult life, starting at the age of twenty-one, I had worried about how I would earn enough to live on for the next year, sometimes for the next week. When I was still young, and even when I was older, my parents sometimes sent me small sums of money to help out, but the burden was on me, it was my responsibility, I knew that, and my next year’s income was never secure. Sometimes I was frightened because I had so little money and did not see how I could earn more. The fear would be something I felt physically in the pit of my stomach. It would come upon me suddenly: What was I going to do? Once, I had no money at all except for the $13 that a friend owed me. I did not want to ask her to pay it back, but I did. Most of all, I wanted to tell you that now I would not have to do the work I was doing that was so difficult for me. By that, I meant teaching.

Teaching has always been so difficult. At times, it has been a disaster. I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m used to it, but this particular kind of work, the kind of teaching I do, has been crushing and almost debilitating. Particularly difficult was the year before I received that telephone call, and also the year in which I received it. In those days, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout, I wanted to wring my hands and complain, and I did try to complain to some people, though I could never cry or complain as much as I wanted to. Some people listened and tried to be helpful, but they could never listen long enough; the conversation always had to come to an end. I always kept most of my emotion to myself. I was still in the midst of teaching then, when the Foundation called, but with the great difference, after the call, that I thought I wouldn’t be continuing. I had two more months of it, I thought, and then I would be done with it, maybe forever.

* * *

I have so often sat on the bus traveling up to the college, on those mornings, wishing something would come down and rescue me, or that there would be a minor accident, one in which no one was hurt, or at least not badly hurt, that would prevent me from teaching the class.

That is how the teaching day begins. I take a public bus from my town to the small city one hour north, where the college is. I do not drive my car, even though I could. I do not want that extra responsibility on a teaching day. I don’t want to have to think about steering the car.

I sit there quietly in the bus looking out the window. The bus rolls me gently from side to side and presses me back into the seat when it accelerates, or drops out from under me briefly when it goes over a bump. I like the way the bus rolls me around. I do not like the song that goes through my head. It always goes through my head for a while before I notice it. It is not a song of celebration. It is a dull and repetitious song that is often in my head, and I don’t know why: it is “The Mexican Hat Dance.”

I also wanted to tell you how I was running out of money when this news came. I had less in my bank account than I had had in years, though some small jobs would be coming in the spring. Now at last I would have enough money, thanks to you, if I didn’t die first.

There would be enough to live on, and there would even be extra money I could spend on things I wanted or needed. I could buy a new pair of glasses, maybe more attractive ones, though that is always difficult. I could have more expensive food for dinner. But as soon as I began to think of what I might buy with the extra money, I was either ashamed or embarrassed — because although new glasses and a better dinner would be nice, they were not really necessary, and exactly how many things should I allow myself to buy that are not really necessary?

Now a strange thing was happening. I sometimes felt removed from my life, as though I were floating above it or maybe a little to the side of it. This sensation of floating must have come from the fact that I thought I would no longer be attached to anything, or to much: I thought I would not be attached to my teaching job, and I thought I would not be attached by those many strings to all the necessary other small and large jobs that would earn me four thousand dollars, or three, or two, to cover three months, or two, or one. I was floating up and looking out over a longer distance, at more of the landscape in a circle around me.

The department gave a little party to congratulate me on the grant. It is not such a large grant, but the department likes to make a fuss over anything that its faculty does. It wants the college administration to know about the faculty’s accomplishments and to think well of the department. But this party made me uncomfortable. The department, and maybe the college, too, now valued me more than they had before, and at the same time I now wanted to leave the college. In fact, I was secretly planning to leave it. I would either cut my ties completely or have as little to do with it as possible.

It turned out that I could not stop teaching. But I did not know that for a while.

* * *

I am not always a bad teacher. My difficulty teaching is complex, and I’ve given it a lot of thought: it is probably due to a general lack of organization on my part, to begin with, combined with overpreparation, then stage fright, and, in the classroom itself, poor articulation of ideas and a weak classroom presence. I have trouble looking the students in the eye. I mumble or fail to explain things clearly. I do not like to use the blackboard.

I do not like to use the blackboard because I do not like to turn my back on the class. I’m afraid that if I do, the students will take advantage of this to talk to one another or review notes from another course, or worse, they will stare at the back of me, and certainly not with admiration. All of last year I did not use the blackboard. This year I began to use it. When I do use it, I am so hasty and uncomfortable, and my handwriting is so poor, that the words I write are small and faint and hard to read.

This is the way I work: I avoid the thought of the class as long as I can. Then, when there is not much time left, maybe a day or an evening, I begin to prepare it. In preparing it, unfortunately, I also begin to imagine it. In imagining it, I become so afraid of the classroom and the students that I freeze and can no longer think clearly. Sometimes I am able to control my panic — suppress it or talk myself out of it — and then, for minutes at a time, even half an hour, I am able to plan the class in a reasonable way. Then the panic sets in again and I can’t think anymore. Every plan seems wrong, I believe that I know nothing, I have nothing to teach. And the more trouble I have planning, the more frightened I become, because time is passing and the hour for the class is drawing closer.

The feeling I mentioned, of being removed from my life, was like what I imagine a person feels who learns she has a fatal illness. There was also a greater clarity of vision — which may also come when one is dying. It seemed that it wasn’t I who had changed but everything around me. Everything was sharper, clearer, and closer, as though, before, I had been seeing only little bits at a time, not all of it, or all of it but veiled or clouded. What was blocking my view before? Was there a veil between me and the world, or did I have blinkers on that narrowed my vision and kept me looking ahead? I did not know this until now — that I must have had a habit of not looking all around me. It was not that I had taken everything for granted before, but that I could not look at everything at once. Why? Was it so that I would not be tempted to do what I did not have the time or money to do, or so that I would not even think about something too distracting? I had to ignore so much of the world, or turn my thoughts away from it and back to the business at hand, whatever that might be. I could not let my thoughts go wherever they wished to and then on to something else.

Now everything looked different — as if I had returned to earth and were looking at it again. Was each thing more beautiful? No, not exactly. Perhaps more completely itself, more full, more vital. Was this the way things looked to people who had come back to life from a near-death experience?

I already knew that I had the habit of looking out from the window of a car or bus with longing at certain things in the distance that I would never visit, that I would wish to visit but that I would not visit — in one place I lived, it was an old, rundown California ranch house in a stand of eucalyptus and palm trees across an overgrown field. A long, curving dirt driveway led up to it.

From the bus on the way up to the college these days I see something rather similar: an old farmhouse with outbuildings, with trees around it and a field between the highway and the house. It is a very simple, old frame house, and the trees are a simple group of tall shade trees.

I used to think these places had to remain at just this distance, that I should long for them and that they should be almost imaginary, and that I should never visit them. Now, for a while, feeling as though I were outside my life, I thought I could visit them.

At the same time, I felt closer to strangers. It was as though something had been taken away that used to stand between me and them. I don’t know if this was connected with the feeling that I was not inside my own life anymore. I suppose by “my own life” I mean the habitual worries, plans, and constraints that I thought were no longer even relevant. I noticed this feeling of closeness to strangers most of all in the bus station, which is where I see many strangers all at once in a crowd and watch them for as long as an hour or two at a time, for instance when I am waiting for the late-night bus home and I sit in the cafeteria writing a letter or reading student papers.

I have to say that once the class is under way, the tension is not nearly as bad as during the hours leading up to it and particularly those last ten or twenty minutes just before it. The worst moment of all is the last moment, in my office, in which I get up from my chair, pick up my briefcase, and open the office door. Even five minutes, the five minutes remaining before I have to walk out of my office, are enough to give me a little feeling of protection, although that five minutes is almost too short a period of time to be of any use. But ten minutes is certainly long enough to protect me from that last minute.

I should know by now that once it begins, the hour itself will not be as bad as those ten or twenty minutes before it, and especially that last minute. If I really knew that the hour itself would not be as bad, then I wouldn’t be so afraid of it, and then of course those ten or twenty minutes beforehand would not be so bad. But there seems to be no way, yet, to convince myself of that. And, of course, sometimes it really is very bad.

Once, for instance, the class discussion got out of hand and offensive remarks were made by some of the students against certain groups of people, remarks which, since I did not know how to stop them quickly, may have appeared to have been made with my approval or even encouragement. Some of the other students, and I myself, became increasingly uncomfortable as the discussion continued. A more adept teacher could have broadened the discussion and rescued it, for instance by turning it into a lesson on the subject of the dangers of generalizing versus its usefulness. But I was not able to think of any way to do that right there on the spot, and the class ended with a bad feeling. Later, at home, I had some good and smart things to say that would have helped, but it was too late. I dreaded the next class and the chill that would pervade it. And I was not mistaken about the next class.

It is not often that the discussion goes in an unfortunate direction. More often there are just moments of awkwardness. Sometimes I hesitate while speaking, for instance, not because I am about to seize upon the perfect phrase or image, but because I have lost my train of thought and need to find some conclusion for my remark that will make sense. When I hesitate, the students become particularly riveted. They are far more interested when I grope for what to say next than they are when I am speaking on and on smoothly. Then, the more intently they watch me, waiting to see what I will say next, the more I am at a loss for what to say. I am afraid of becoming completely paralyzed. I must playact, and hide the fact that I am nearly paralyzed, and push myself on to some conclusion, at least a temporary one. Then they lose interest.

But what I dread in the classroom is not just the bad moment that I can’t rescue or the many awkward moments when I feel inadequate. It is something larger. I do not want to be the focus of attention of a large group of students who are waiting to see what I will do or say next. It is such an uneven match. There are so many on one side, in rows, staring at just one alone in front of them. My very face seems to change. It becomes more vulnerable, because it is not looked at charitably, as it would be by a friend or an acquaintance, or even a person on the other side of a counter from me in a store or a bank, but critically, as a sort of foreign object. The more bored the students are, the more my face and body become foreign objects to be examined critically. I know this because I have been a student myself.

* * *

It is true that the first meeting of the class is not as difficult for me as the ones that come after, because there is so much business to be done and I am perfectly competent to do it. I take attendance, and I explain the syllabus and what I will expect from them. I don’t mind fumbling among my lists and Xeroxed handouts because most teachers do that on the first day. I adopt the pose of the competent teacher, and they believe me for the space of that first class. I am greatly helped by the fact that they have had so many teachers all their lives, competent teachers, or at least confident and powerful teachers — so I can play the part of a confident, even commanding teacher and they will believe it. I’m sometimes good at acting a part and I can convince them for a while.

There have even been good moments during a class. Sometimes the discussion is interesting and the students seem surprised and engaged. There has even been a rare class that is good from beginning to end. I do like the students — most of them anyway, though not all of them. I have always liked them, maybe because, since they depend on me to give them a good grade, they show me their best face and their sweetest nature.

I do enjoy reading what they write. Every week there is a fresh pile of writing, most of it neatly typed and presented, if nothing else, and I always expect to find some treasure in it. And there really is always something good in it, and occasionally something, an idea or at the very least a sentence or a phrase, that is very good. The most exciting moment is when a student who has not been particularly good suddenly does something very fine. In fact, reading the students’ work and writing comments on it is my favorite part of teaching, partly because I am at home, alone, usually lying on my bed or on the sofa.

But these good times and the few successful classes are far outweighed by the difficult times.

* * *

When I first received the news of this grant, I dreamed that I might not only stop teaching but at last leave my study and enter public life. I even thought I might run for office, though not a very high office — the school board or the town planning board. Then I wondered if I would do anything public after all. Maybe I would just continue to spend most of my time by myself in my study. Or I would stay in my study, but from there I would write a column for the local newspaper.

Later I thought that maybe each stage of this reaction simply had to wear itself out, and at last I would return to some kind of normal condition. And maybe that was all I really wanted — to feel all the same things I was used to feeling, and to do the same things I was used to doing, the only difference being that I had a little more time, and a little less work, and a slightly higher opinion of myself.

The college I myself had attended, my alma mater, had never been in touch with me after I graduated, not even to ask for news for the alumnae magazine or for money. Then, as soon as an announcement of the grant was printed in an academic bulletin, the president herself wrote to congratulate me. She told me that a letter would be sent inviting me to give a talk there in the spring. I waited, but received no letter. I wrote a note of inquiry and received no answer. After a few more months, my alma mater began writing to me again, but only to send the alumnae magazine and to ask for money.

* * *

Then at last I began to feel normal again. For weeks I had felt vaguely ill, and afraid of accidents. I was afraid I would die. Why was I immediately afraid I would die? Was my life suddenly worth more because of this grant? Or did I think that because something good had happened to me, now something bad was going to happen? Was I afraid I would not be able to enjoy this good fortune because I would die first? It had been promised to me, and they, or you, couldn’t take it away. But you had been careful to say, in the very first letter you sent to me, that if I were to die, no one else, no one in my family, for instance, my mother or my sisters or my brother, could have it. What you didn’t need to say was that if I died, of course, I couldn’t have it either.

Or did I think that now that I had been promised something this good, I would die before I received it?

I had sudden generous impulses. I wanted to give money to my friends, and I wanted to give twenty-dollar bills to strangers in the city. I thought of donating something to the sad, shabby bus station, maybe some large plants and a shelf of books for the waiting area.

Then I was warned by a friend who had been through this before. She said to watch out: I would have an almost irresistible impulse to give all the money away.

There were many things I had wanted to do in my life and had never done because there was no time. I am not graceful, but I like to dance. I wanted to sing, even though my voice is thin and weak. But of course this award was not given to me for those things. The Foundation had not intended to support me during the time I spent dancing and singing.

I used to dream about the nice things I would buy if I had enough money. Now a combination of shame and caution stopped me from spending the money freely or foolishly. I did, though, sometimes think about what I wanted to buy. I had a list: I wanted a canoe, an old wardrobe, a better piano, a dining table, a small piece of land, a trailer to put on it, a fishpond, some farm animals, and a shed to keep them in. This was in addition to some nicer clothes.

I thought I had to be careful, though. If I bought something that was not necessary but that gave me pleasure, it might be expensive to keep, like the nice piece of land, on which I would have to pay taxes. Or it might require constant care, like the farm animals.

I never did buy any of those things.

After there was a notice in the college newspaper, I expected reactions and questions from the students at the next class. I was looking forward to the chance to talk to them about this exciting event. I wanted to talk to them about research, and how exciting it can be. I thought it would be easy to talk about this, and interesting, and it might increase their respect for me. I am much better in the classroom if I think they respect me. I prepared for this discussion, imagining their questions and thinking of some answers. But none of them had heard the news, and no one said anything about it. Since I had prepared for their interested questions and not for their blank silence, I was even stiffer and more awkward than usual.

Now I see why I have been writing to you so much about teaching. I did not dare tell myself, before, just how much it bothered me, because I had to live with it. Then I thought I would never have to teach again. That was when I could admit that it was the worst torture — to be placed in front of that audience of indifferent or even possibly mocking young students.

At first I thought my fear confronting the class was reasonable: what could be more terrifying than to stand up there in front of those ranks of critical or indifferent or contemptuous young people, exposed to their eyes and their thoughts in all my uncertainty, my unimpressive exterior, my lack of training, my lack of confidence and command. There was some truth to that. But I have done this over and over again at different schools for years now. Finally, at the start of that important year, the year of your phone call, when my fear had not lessened or vanished, as I thought it might, now that I had had some experience at this particular college, I had to face the fact that my fear was exaggerated and unnatural. Certain friends agreed with me.

For instance, on the very first day of classes the first year I taught at this college, I had what I now think was a psychosomatic injury, if that’s the right term for an injury caused purely by an emotional condition: I woke up with a large blood clot in one eye. To myself, looking in the mirror, I seemed grotesque, monstrous. I don’t know if, when I stood there confronting the class later that day, the students noticed this blood clot. Since of course they would not say anything to me about it, I never knew. And it is true that students of that age are in general more interested in their own business than in any teacher, with or without a blood clot in her eye.

Later in the term, I developed such a bad infection in the tip of one finger from an embedded sliver that I required surgery, and I wore a large bandage to class. The surgery left a permanent scar and indentation in that fingertip, and some loss of sensation. I can’t help seeing this injury, too, as a pathetic attempt to disable myself so that I could not teach.

After the finger had healed and the bandage was off, I began falling asleep at odd times, for several minutes at a time. I fell asleep not only on the bus, which was not so surprising, but also in my office, with my head down on my desk or tipped back, and in my car, in parking lots after shopping, and lying in the dentist’s chair, and sitting in a row with other patients in the office of the eye doctor, waiting for my eyes to dilate. Obviously, I must have thought that falling asleep was one way to avoid my situation for at least a little while.

During the whole term, I wore black — a black coat, black shoes, black pants, and a black sweater — as though it were some sort of protection. Black was certainly a strong color, and maybe I thought that appearing in black would convince the students that I was a strong person. I was supposed to lead them in a confident way. But I did not want to be their leader — I have never wanted to be anyone’s leader.

When I wasn’t expecting it anymore, the students began to find out about my award and to ask questions. They seemed really interested in the news. They seemed to enjoy the sudden minor campus celebrity of their teacher. The novelty, the break in routine, which I welcomed, probably relieved them, too. Whenever anything out of the ordinary takes place in the class, such as a sudden thunderstorm, or a blizzard, or an electrical outage, or my appearing with that large bandage on my finger, I relax a little and the hour goes better.

* * *

The teaching was almost over for the semester. The last class would meet in eight days.

I was feeling the approach of death, maybe because the time was coming when the Foundation would give me my first check. The only thing that could stop me from receiving the money in January was my own death. So I was thinking that the new year would inescapably bring either my death or the first check from the Foundation.

At the last class, we had a party of sorts, although I made them do some classwork first. I had carried two bottles of cider up on the bus in a backpack, along with a bag of good cider doughnuts. We arranged the chairs in a very large circle, although that was not my idea. I could not think how to conduct a party with twenty-five undergraduates. I did not think it would be very festive for them to sit in rows facing me and eating their messy doughnuts. But to move the chairs out of the way and mill around standing up, as at a cocktail party, also seemed awkward, since not all the students were friends with one another.

Now I was a little sorry to say goodbye to them. It was easier to miss them and think fondly of them when I didn’t have to be afraid of them anymore.

Once the classes were over and the burden of teaching was taken away, of course I continued to teach in my own imagination, thinking of yet another reading assignment or smart comment. I imagined them all sitting there, receptive and interested, whereas actually they were by then sitting in other classes, or still on vacation, and not giving me or my course another thought, except maybe to wonder what their grade would be.

Soon after the new year, I met with a tax advisor, and he gave me some bad news. A large part of the grant would go to paying taxes — on the grant! Another part of it would have to be put away in a special account — to avoid being taxed. What was left would not be enough to live on. I realized that I would have to continue looking for small, temporary jobs in almost the same way I did before. But I still thought I would not have to teach.

Even at first, though, I had not wanted to cut my ties to the college completely. I thought I could give some lectures. I am not afraid of standing up in front of an audience to deliver a lecture that I have written ahead of time. I could do this in exchange for a small fee, I thought. But my plan to give lectures turned out to be impossible. I was told, instead, that I could receive a very small salary if I agreed to teach a special short course each fall, for people from the community. People from the community are usually older, sometimes quite old, and often eccentric. They are also more sympathetic and more respectful of a teacher, so I welcomed this solution.

Then I was no longer afraid of dying. Was this because I had already received some of the money? Was I thinking that if I died now, I would at least not have lost all of it? I had an idea that at first seemed unrelated to my fear of dying: I should prepare for my death now, so that this preparation would be “out of the way” and I could then carry on with my life. If death was the worst thing I had to fear, then I should make my peace with it. But in fact, how could I have thought that this feeling was not related to my earlier fear of dying?

I was also about to begin my letter to the Foundation, I thought. I would tell the Foundation that I was doing everything with more care. You would probably be happy to hear that. And I would tell you that, far from acquiring more things, as I could, now that I had a little more money, I wanted to get rid of all the things I didn’t need, the things that had been stacked on top of bookcases and covered with a thick layer of sticky dust, or pushed inside cupboards, packed in boxes, or crowded into the back of a cabinet in the bathroom, mildewing.

Yet I knew that this might not interest you.

In the letter I was going to write to the Foundation, I was not sure I would tell them about my plans, although maybe I would explain that in my life as it was before, I did not have time for such things as stopping to talk to my neighbors. I was grateful to the Foundation that I could now do these things. I would not tell you that I was not yet working on any serious project, or that I presently spent my days sorting things: medications, lotions, and ointments; magazines and catalogues; socks, pens, and pencils. Maybe I was sorting things because I thought I was going to die. Or maybe I felt that I was not worthy of this award, and that if the Foundation could look in on my life for a few minutes, it would be appalled at the disorder.

I really didn’t think the Foundation had this in mind when they awarded me the grant. I was afraid they would feel they had wasted their money. It would be too late for them to take it back, but they would be disappointed or even angry.

But perhaps my own conscience would sooner or later make me return to the work I should be doing. And perhaps the Foundation was relying on the fact that in the end my conscience would not let me waste my time and therefore their money.

* * *

After I received the first installment of the grant, I was wondering if I could buy something expensive. Then, one day, I nearly bought, by mistake, a sweater that cost $267. I think that is an expensive sweater, though some people would not think so, I know. I had misread the tag and thought it cost $167, which was already expensive enough. I had taken a deep breath and decided to buy it. I did not even try it on — I was afraid I would lose my nerve. When the salesgirl wrote up the slip, I saw the mistake and had to tell her that I would not buy it after all. It was a plain red cardigan. I did not really understand why the material and the one interesting design feature made it so much more expensive than what I was used to paying.

I continued to stand there by the cash register, probably in part so that the salesgirl would think I was not embarrassed at having changed my mind because of the price. I looked down into the glass case of jewelry and admired a necklace that cost $234. It was pretty, but not so pretty that I thought I should spend that amount of money on it. Then I asked the price of a gold bracelet, and she told me that it cost nearly $400. “Gold is expensive, after all,” she said. It was a simple, delicate little bracelet with tiny, thin disks of gold strung on a piece of something I can’t remember now. It was very pretty. But no matter how pretty it was, I would never have spent $400 for it or for any piece of jewelry. In the end, I bought only what I might have bought anyway, a pair of earrings for $36.

I didn’t know if I should ever wear anything expensive. I thought I could, just once, buy one thing as expensive as that bracelet. But should I? I had at one time decided that I would own just a few clothes and that they would be simple but well made. I still had that idea. But if they were well made, did that also mean they were expensive? To dress simply was not necessarily enough if the simple clothes were very expensive. But then, maybe excellent quality would be all right if I bought the clothes secondhand. They would be secondhand, simple, old, a little worn, but of excellent quality. That seemed like a good compromise. But then I worried that if I shopped for them at a secondhand store, I would possibly be taking them away from someone else who really needed them.

* * *

I was going to be busy that spring. The spring had already been planned long before to include a number of rather tiresome short-term jobs that I could not cancel now, such as producing reader’s reports for a publisher, writing short articles, and delivering papers at minor conferences. So my life did not feel any different, and did not seem any more free than it had been, except that from time to time I remembered that I would not be teaching in the fall — as I wrongly believed. The summer would come and I would really be free of every obligation.

But by the time the summer did come, with the prospect of that short course I was now going to have to teach, so many months had passed that I had grown used to feeling two contradictory things: that everything in my life had changed; and that, really, nothing in my life had changed.

* * *

This teaching, here at the college, was not even the first time I had ever taught, as I told you earlier. In other years, some classes went well and some badly. I can remember feeling so faint during the first meeting of one class that I had to put the students to work at an exercise that I contrived on the spot, while I left the room. I went to stand on an outdoor walkway and stared at a grove of eucalyptus trees until I felt better.

Another class, a few years later, at a different college, happened to meet in a room that had once been used as an office by a close friend of mine. In this very same room I had had a series of difficult encounters with her. Maybe that was what made the class particularly hard. During the first meeting, one talented student spoke up rudely when he found out what my requirements were for the course, and he dropped out immediately. I later offended another one because I said something personal which she took the wrong way.

My office hours were scheduled for the hour before the class. None of my students ever came to see me, not once, and so I always sat in my cubicle alone. It was an evening class, and the building was almost empty at that hour, but next door to me was another cubicle occupied by a more popular and successful teacher. I would sit alone in the nearly empty building and listen to everything he said to the steady stream of his own students.

I tell myself: There are just four of these hours each week. The four hours come one at a time, two on Tuesday and then two more on Thursday — just four small hours out of the whole week. But each casts a very long, very dark shadow on the day before, even on the two days before, and that shadow is especially dark the morning of each day of classes, and then darkest of all during those terrible ten or twenty minutes before the class, which include the last, almost unbearable minute of walking out the door of my office.

I also tell myself that many people in the world have awful jobs, and that compared to those jobs, this is a good job.

I have been writing to you at length about teaching. That is because when your grant came, I thought I wouldn’t have to teach anymore. I also thought, and still think, that because you took enough interest in my work to give me the grant, you would be interested in everything about me and everything I had to say. I know this may not be true, but still I choose to believe that you care about how I am and what I am doing.

* * *

My mental habits are so fixed that I go on thinking the same things in the same way even when my circumstances have changed. But for a while, after the news, my vision of things widened. I saw more, on the peripheries, and I also observed and took pleasure in my wider vision itself. On one day, at least, I got into my car and drove into neighborhoods I had never explored before. I explored the new space, or the new time, that had been given to me. Then, maybe under the pressure of the various jobs in the spring, my vision narrowed again, I became intent on what I had to do, I concentrated on the next thing I had to do and not on my larger prospects. My vision led me only from breakfast to lunch and from lunch to dinner.

Then, when I finished all the work I was scheduled to do in the spring, a deep laziness set in, to my surprise. What began as a great relaxation, once the pressure was lifted, became an endless, boundless laziness in which I willfully refused to do most of what was asked of me unless the person asking was right there in front of me. Any request from a distance, any letter or any other communication, I simply ignored. Or I answered it quickly so as to make it go away. I said I was too busy to do whatever it was they wanted, too occupied. I was too occupied with doing nothing.

Usually I am a person of great energy. I can tackle any job, if asked, I can make myself do it, I can accomplish a whole string of tasks in succession at great speed and with great attention at the same time. Now, just when I was given such an opportunity to work on a project requiring research, for instance, all my energy deserted me suddenly, I was helpless, I said over and over again to anyone who asked me, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy, I have too much to do already.”

No one could know, after all. Maybe I was really busy and maybe I wasn’t. Sometimes I said, “Could you please ask me again in a year?” because some of them were friendly, good people and I did not want to disappoint them. I wanted to do whatever it was that they were asking, as long as I did not have to do it just then. I could certainly imagine having the will and the energy to do it at some point in the future.

I tried to think what the reason might be for this strange laziness. It might be this: I had been given something I did not have to earn, something other people considered important, but I did not feel very important myself. I had not felt very important before, and now this thing that I had been given had reduced me further. I was certainly much smaller and less important than what had been given to me. I was only a recipient, in this interaction. A recipient is not very active or important. The Foundation was active, giving me the money. It had changed my life for a while, with one decision and one phone call. I was active only to the extent of saying, Thank you! Thank you! After two years, the grant would be over. My gratitude would have been very active all that time — but would I have done anything?

Then some of my energy returned, and I was able to do some of what I had to do, though not much at a time — a single business letter on one day, and a single personal letter on another. I had not yet written the letter to the Foundation. I realize now that I was wrong to promise you a letter. You had not expected one, but because I promised one, you would now be expecting one, and you would now think that I was someone who did not do what she promised to do.

* * *

One day late in the summer that first year, I was riding the bus along the same route I always took to go to class. That day it happened to be the first part of a much longer trip that would take me far away, nowhere near the college. But I noticed, as I rode north on the bus, how the same misery closed around me, even though I was not on my way up to the college. How strange, I thought: the memory is still too vivid for me to be able to contemplate it calmly. The memory of that misery was itself too filled with misery — that misery was too close, as though it were still lying there in wait for me, as though I might slip over into that alternative reality at any moment.

It may be hard for you to believe that I find some small enjoyment in what comes before the class itself, just because it is not the class, just because I am not yet even on the campus. For instance, I take some satisfaction in the little stages of the trip itself: first the bus from my town north to that small city, then the city bus out to the college campus. The city bus costs me nothing if I show my college ID, and I enjoy this privilege more than you would think. To get from the first bus to the second, there is a brisk walk in the morning sunlight from the bus station over to the main downtown street. The walk lasts seven minutes, during which I pass a restaurant where, at that hour, an employee is always washing down the terrace and setting out the tables and chairs. After I pass this restaurant, I cross the wide main street and then turn left and walk uphill a few blocks to the city bus stop. This uphill walk is good for my heart, I always say to myself.

Before I pass the restaurant, I pass a travel agent, and of course the travel agent, combined with the restaurant, its outdoor tables and its early-morning activity, make me think of a foreign country, a place far away. I feel for just a moment as though I am far away, and that makes me wish even more that I were not here.

If I take the city bus a little later than usual, there is an extra stop on the route, and I prefer this route because it takes more time: the bus, after leaving the city limits, enters a large isolated office complex where the workers are often walking energetically around the looping sidewalks in pairs or alone. Very rarely does anyone get off or on the bus at this stop.

To comfort myself, I often think for just a moment of a certain great, strange, and difficult French poet who taught in a high school year after year because he had no other way to earn his living. Year after year, the students in the school made fun of him. Or at least that is what I remember reading somewhere.

* * *

The cafeteria in the bus station is where I spend the last part of my week, the evening before my late bus home. This evening is a peaceful time, perhaps the most peaceful of the week, filled with the enormous relief of having just finished the week of teaching and having before me the longest possible stretch of time before the next week begins, bringing with it the first class of the week.

I buy something, usually a cup of hot chocolate, in order to be able to sit down, and then I find a clean table, or I wash off a part of a table to make a clean place for my things. I settle down to read or correct papers. The tables in the cafeteria are ample and strong and well made, with smooth surfaces of a nice yellow hard plastic, with edges of light-colored laminated wood. I am perfectly happy with my cup of chocolate, my white napkin, and my book or my papers. Nothing is lacking in that interval of time. The two hours or so pass in perfect tranquillity, a tranquillity that would not be possible in a more complicated situation, one with more choices, for instance. There are noises all around me, but no noise bothers me. I listen to the staff of the cafeteria talk to one another and joke and laugh, and I feel that they are companions of a sort. I take comfort in the noises of the game machines that occupy one corner of the place, the most persistent noise being the solemn narrating voice that introduces the “18-Wheeler” game, the repeated horn blasts of the game’s tractor-trailer; the thumps, cries, and metallic crashes of another game, like heavy swords clashing or infinitely repeated roadwork; and colliding with these noises, the young and enthusiastic recorded voice that introduces the “Sports-Shooting USA” game, along with the recorded roars of the crowds of spectators.

But when the next week begins and I make my way back up to the college, heading for the first class, I have to walk past that cafeteria, which was such a sanctuary at the end of the week before. I hear its familiar noises, the calls of the employees, the tinkle and bang and clash and recorded voices of the games. I hear them, not over and over again, as I do when I sit there in the evening with my hot chocolate, but only for a moment as I walk past the door with my briefcase. I might long to be inside the cafeteria, but I do not even dare admit that. Instead, I turn my thoughts away and walk on out of the station towards the main street and the city bus, as the noises of the cafeteria recede behind me. Since that sanctuary is not within my reach just then, it is no more valuable to me than if it had never been within my reach. In fact, since I can’t enter it then, I would rather not see or hear it at all. And each time I go near it, I experience both feelings again, the relief and the dread, but the dread is stronger.

* * *

After a year had passed since I received the news, I wanted to return to what I thought of as my normal condition. I had to some extent returned to it, but I noticed that the normal condition included some of the old feelings of constraint. I did not feel the same freedom that I had felt in the beginning, soon after hearing the good news. I was worrying about time again, the way I always had. I would make schedules and more schedules. I recorded how long it took to do certain household tasks. I thought I would add up all the minutes it took to do certain necessary chores and calculate what was the least amount of time I needed to allow for this tedious work.

I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day — I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary — and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.

* * *

This feeling of arbitrariness was similar to a feeling that had come over me after an incident some years before in a diner next door to another bus station. I hope you won’t mind if I explain it. It does seem relevant, in some way, to what I experienced when the Foundation awarded me the two-year grant.

I was meeting a friend who was coming in on a bus. I was at the bus station. This was a different bus station, the one in my own hometown, not the station I have so often passed through on my way to the college. I was told that my friend’s bus was going to be quite late. After some hesitation, I decided to walk across the parking lot to the diner and have something to eat while waiting for the bus to come in.

It’s a big, popular diner, with many tables and a long counter. It has been there, on that same spot, for decades. The diner was crowded, since it was dinnertime. I was sitting at a small table, and near me an old man was sitting at the counter. A young and new waitress was taking the old man’s order. He wanted some kind of fish. In a rather bored tone of voice, she suggested the trout almondine, and he agreed. The new waitress called out the order through the kitchen hatch. An older waitress heard the order and came over.

“Mr. Harris can’t eat nuts,” she said to the new waitress. “Mr. Harris, you can’t eat nuts. You can’t have the trout almondine. It has almonds in it.”

The old man seemed a little puzzled, but he looked back down at the menu and changed his order while the new waitress watched indifferently.

I liked the fact that the older waitress was taking care of her old steady customer. Then I had a thought that was odd, though not unpleasant: I realized I could just as easily not have witnessed this scene, if I had chosen to stay in the bus station. I could have been sitting across the parking lot in the waiting room while this scene was taking place. It would still have taken place. I had never before thought so clearly about all the scenes that took place when I wasn’t there to witness them. And then, I had a stranger and less pleasant thought: not only was I not necessary to those scenes, and not necessary to those lives that continued to go on without me, but in fact, I was not necessary at all. I didn’t have to exist.

I hope you understand how that is related.

* * *

When a year had passed since I had received the news, I resolved that I would at last finish my letter to you, the Foundation. It was an appropriate day on which to finish and send the letter, since it was an anniversary.

Of course, it occurred to me that another appropriate day for writing the letter might be on the final day of the grant, about a year later, and in fact another year did go by.

But that date, too, came and went without my writing or sending the letter.

Now the beginning of the award is many years in the past, and I am still teaching. It did not protect me forever from having to teach, as I was so sure it would. In fact, although I taught a little less for two years, I never stopped altogether. I did not do such good research that I would never have to teach again. I found out that if I was to continue teaching at my college, I could not stop at all.

By now, many years have also passed since I began thinking about what I wanted to write in this letter. The period of the grant is long over. You will barely remember me, even when you consult your files. I do thank you for your patience and apologize for the long delay, and please know that I remain sincerely grateful.

All my best wishes.

The Results of One Statistical Study

People who were more conscientious

as children

lived longer.

Revise: 1

A fire does not need to be called warm or red. Remove many more adjectives.

The goose is really too silly: take the goose out. It is enough that there is a search for footprints.

The small head will be offensive: remove the small head. (But Eliot loved the small head because it was so true.) The small head is taken out, but a narrow head is put in its place.

When should the large hat appear? The woman, a traveler and teacher of the English language, was mistakenly identified by her hat and arrested for subversive activities. She could wear the large hat immediately or a little later. Should her name be Nina? The large hat is moved from the beginning to the end and then back to the beginning.

Is it fair to say he will never marry? In any case, he does become engaged to his neighbor, just in time, so it must not be said that he will never marry.

Later, Anna falls in love with a man named Hank, but it is remarked that no one would be likely to fall in love with a man named Hank. So now the man is no longer named Hank but Stefan, even though Stefan is a child living on Long Island with a sister named Anna.

Short Conversation (in Airport Departure Lounge)

“Is that a new sweater?” one woman asks another, a stranger, sitting next to her.

The other woman says it’s not.

There is no further conversation.

Revise: 2

Continue with Baby but remove Priorities. Make Priorities Priority. Cut inside Moving Forward. Add to Paradox that the boredom is contained within the interest, while the interest is contained within the boredom. Take that out. Find Time. Continue with Time. Continue with Waiting. Add to Baby that its hand is grasping the foot of a strange frog. Add Priority and Nervous to Revise: 1. Continue Kingston with Family and Supermarkets. Continue with Grouch. Start Kingston with Siberian Tiger.

Left Luggage

The problem is this: she is passing through the city and needs to spend some time in the public library. But the library coat check will not accept her suitcase — she must leave it somewhere else. The answer seems clear: she will go down the street to the railway station and leave her suitcase, and then come back to the library. She walks in the wind and the rain with a small umbrella in one hand and the handle of her rolling suitcase in the other, to the railway station. She walks all over the station looking for the left-luggage office. There are restaurants and shops, a beautiful high ceiling with constellations on it, marble floors and walls, grand staircases and sloping walkways, but there is no left-luggage office. At an information window she asks about left luggage, and the angry employee silently reaches under the counter for a flyer and hands it to her. It is the flyer of a commercial left-luggage establishment that has two addresses, neither of which is in the station. She must go either several blocks uptown or several blocks down.

She walks uptown in the wind and the rain and then several blocks east, in the wrong direction, and then several blocks west, in the right direction, and finds the address, an old, narrow building between a fast-food store and a travel agent. She rides up in the elevator with a couple who are planning to get married in Brazil. They are on their way to a notary public. The woman is explaining to the man that he needs to swear before a notary that he has not been married before. Besides the notary public and the left-luggage office, this building contains a Western Union office where money can be sent or received.

The whole of the small top floor, the sixth, is the left-luggage place — one room on the street side and one in the back. The street-side room is entirely empty and flooded with sunlight. In the back room, a long folding table has been pushed across the doorway, and a man sits at the table beside a large roll of little pale blue tickets, the sort that are given out for rides at a country fair. There are some suitcases grouped against the walls in the room behind him. He smiles and speaks to her with an Eastern European accent. His smile is friendly. Some of his teeth are crooked and some are missing. She pays $10 in advance, gives the man her suitcase, and takes a pale blue ticket. Then she goes back down in the elevator and starts walking in the wind and the rain back towards the public library, thinking about her suitcase. In her haste and confusion, she has not locked it. She hopes her foreign currency won’t be stolen.

She has just flown into the city from another city, in another country. They do it differently there, she thinks: in that place, there was a locker right in the middle of the station, and the locker opened onto a conveyor belt that took all the luggage to some holding area. There, she had deposited her suitcase in the locker, for a fee equivalent to $5, which seemed expensive to a man standing near her, who opened his eyes and his mouth wide and said, “Donnerwetter!!” When she was ready to pick up her suitcase, it was returned to her at the same place, by conveyor belt. She thinks about this as she walks. She will forget about it for a while, in the library, as she works in the quiet, chilly, thinly populated room. But as she walks, she thinks, But I am home now, and this is how we do it, in this city, in our country.

Waiting for Takeoff

We sit in the airplane so long, on the ground, waiting to take off, that one woman declares she will now write her novel, and another in a neighboring seat says she will be happy to edit it. Food is being sold in the aisle, and the passengers, either hungry from waiting or worried that they will not see food again for some time, are eagerly buying it, even food they would not normally eat. For instance, there are candy bars long enough to use as weapons. The steward who is selling the food says he was once attacked by a passenger, though not with a candy bar. Because the plane had been delayed so long, he said, the passenger threw a drink in his face, damaging one eyeball with a piece of ice.

Industry

rant from Flaubert

How nature laughs at us—

And how impassive is the ball at which the trees dance — and the grass, and the waves!

The bell of the steamship from Le Havre rings so furiously I have to stop working.

What a raucous thing a machine is.

What a racket industry makes in the world!

How many foolish professions are born of it!

What a lot of stupidity comes from it!

Humanity is turning into an animal!

To make a single pin requires five or six different specialists.

What can you expect from the people of Manchester—

who spend their lives making pins?!!

The Sky Above Los Angeles

The sky is always above a tract house in Los Angeles. As the day passes, the sun comes in the large window from the east, then the south, then the west. As I look out the window at the sky, I see cumulus clouds pile up suddenly in complex, pastel-colored geometrical shapes and then immediately collapse and dissolve. After this has happened a number of times in succession, at last it seems possible for me to begin painting again.

dream

Two Characters in a Paragraph

The story is only two paragraphs long. I’m working on the end of the second paragraph, which is the end of the story. I’m intent on this work, and my back is turned. And while I’m working on the end, look what they’re up to in the beginning! And they’re not very far away! He seems to have drifted from where I put him and is hovering over her, only one paragraph away (in the first paragraph). True, it is a dense paragraph, and they’re in the very middle of it, and it’s dark in there. I knew they were both in there, but when I left it and turned to the second paragraph, there wasn’t anything going on between them. Now look …

dream

Swimming in Egypt

We are in Egypt. We are about to go deep-sea diving. They have erected a vast tank of water on land next to the Mediterranean Sea. We strap oxygen to our backs and descend into this tank. We go all the way to the bottom. Here, there is a cluster of blue lights shining on the entrance to a tunnel. We enter the tunnel. The tunnel will lead into the Mediterranean. We swim and swim. At the far end of the tunnel, we see more lights, white ones. When we have passed through the lights, we come out of the tunnel, suddenly, into the open sea, which drops away beneath us a full kilometer or more. There are fish all around and above us, and reefs on all sides. We think we are flying, over the deep. We forget, for now, that we must be careful not to get lost, but must find our way back to the mouth of the tunnel.

dream

The Language of Things in the House

The washing machine in spin cycle: “Pakistani, Pakistani.”

The washing machine agitating (slow): “Firefighter, firefighter, firefighter, firefighter.”

Plates rattling in the rack of the dishwasher: “Neglected.”

The glass blender knocking on the bottom of the metal sink: “Cumberland.”

Pots and dishes rattling in the sink: “Tobacco, tobacco.”

The wooden spoon in the plastic bowl stirring the pancake mix: “What the hell, what the hell.”

An iron burner rattling on its metal tray: “Bonanza.”

The suction-cup pencil sharpener being peeled up from the top of the bookcase: “Rip van Winkle.”

Markers rolling and bumping in a drawer that is opened and then shut: “Purple fruit.”

The lid of a whipped butter tub being prised off and then put down on the counter: “Horóscopy.”

A spoon stirring yeast in a bowl: “Unilateral, unilateral.”

Could it be that subliminally we are hearing words and phrases all the time?

These words and phrases must be lingering in the upper part of our subconscious, readily available.

Almost always, there has to be something hollow involved: a resonating chamber.

Water going down the drain of the kitchen sink: “Late ball game.”

Water running into a glass jar: “Mohammed.”

The empty Parmesan cheese jar when set down on counter: “Believe me.”

A fork clattering on the countertop: “I’ll be right back.”

The metal slotted spoon rattling as it is put down on the stove: “Pakistani.”

A pot in the sink with water running in: “A profound respect.”

A spoon stirring a mug of tea: “Iraqi, — raqi, — raqi, — raqi.”

The washing machine in agitation cycle: “Pocketbook, pocketbook.”

The washing machine in agitation cycle: “Corporate re-, corporate re-.”

Maybe the words we hear spoken by the things in our house are words already in our brain from our reading; or from what we have been hearing on the radio or talking about to each other; or from what we often read out the car window, as for instance the sign of Cumberland Farms; or they are simply words we have always liked, such as Roanoke (as in Virginia). If these words (“Iraqi, — raqi”) are in the tissue of our brain all the time, we then hear them because we hear exactly the right rhythm for the word along with more or less the right consonants and, often, something close to the right vowels. Once the rhythm and the consonants are there, our brain, having this word somewhere in it already, may be supplying the appropriate vowels.

Two hands washing in the basin: “Quote unquote.”

Stove dial clicking on: “Rick.”

Metal rug beater being hung up on a hook against the wooden wall of the basement stairs: “Carbohydrate.”

Man’s wet foot squeaking on the gas pedal: “Lisa!”

The different language sounds are created by these objects in the following way: hard consonants are created by hard objects striking hard surfaces. Vowels are created with hollow spaces, such as the inside of the butter tub whose lid and inner volume created the sounds of the word “horóscopy”—“horó” when the lid was coming off and “scopy” when the lid was put down on the counter. Some vowels, such as the e’s in “neglected,” spoken by the plates in the dishwater, are supplied by our brain to fill out what we hear as merely consonants: “nglctd.”

Either consonants function to punctuate or to stop vowel sounds; or vowels function to fill out or to color consonants.

Wooden-handled knife hitting counter: “Background.”

Plastic salad spinner being set down on counter: “Julie! Check it out!”

Drain gurgling: “Hórticult.”

Orange juice container shaken once: “Genoa.”

Cat jumping down onto bathroom tiles: “Va bene.”

Kettle being set on clay tile: “Palermo.”

Wicker laundry basket as its lid is being opened: “Vobiscum” or “Wo bist du?”

Sneeze: “At issue.”

Winter jacket as it is being unzipped: “Allumettes.”

Grating of wire mesh dryer filter being cleaned with fingers: “Philadelphia.”

Water being sucked down drain of kitchen sink: “Dvořák.”

First release of water from toilet tank as handle is depressed: “Rudolph.”

I don’t think I’ve heard or read these words recently — does this mean I always have the word “Rudolph,” for instance, in my head, maybe from Rudolph Giuliani, but more probably from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”?

Zipper: “Rip.”

Rattling of dishwashing utensils: “Collaboration.”

Rubber flip-flop squeaking on wooden floor: “Echt.”

If you hear one of these words, and pay attention, you are more likely to hear another. If you stop paying attention, you will stop hearing them.

You can hear the squawking of ducks in the scrape of a knife on a plastic cutting board. You can hear ducks, also, in the squeaking of a wet sponge rubbing a refrigerator shelf. More friction (wet sponge) will produce a squeak, whereas less friction (dry sponge) will produce a soft brushing sound. You can hear a sort of monotonous wailing music in a fan or two fans going at once if there is some slight variation in their sound.

There is no meaningful connection between the action or object that produces the sound (man’s foot on gas pedal) and the significance of the word (“Lisa!”).

Bird: “Dix-huit.”

Bird: “Margueríte!”

Bird: “Hey, Frederíka!”

Soup bowl on counter: “Fabrizio!”

The Washerwomen

story from Flaubert

Yesterday I went back to a village two hours from here that I had visited eleven years ago with good old Orlowski.

Nothing had changed about the houses, or the cliff, or the boats. The women at the washing trough were kneeling in the same position, in the same numbers, and beating their dirty linen in the same blue water.

It was raining a little, like the last time.

It seems, at certain moments, as though the universe has stopped moving, as though everything has turned to stone, and only we are still alive.

How insolent nature is!

Letter to a Hotel Manager

Dear Hotel Manager,

I am writing to point out to you that the word “scrod” has been misspelled on your restaurant menu, so that it appears as “schrod,” with an “sch.” This word was very puzzling to me when I first read it, dining alone on the first night of my two-night stay at your hotel, in your restaurant on the ground floor off your very beautiful lobby with its carved wood panels, lofty ceiling, and rank of gold elevators. I thought this spelling must be right and I must be wrong, since here I was in New England, in Boston in fact, home of the cod and the scrod. But when I came down from my room to the lobby the following night, about to dine in your restaurant for the second time, this time with my older brother, and as I waited there in the lobby for him, which is something I generally like to do if the setting is a pleasant one and I am looking forward to a good dinner, though in fact on this occasion I was quite early and my brother was quite late, so that the wait became rather long and I began to wonder if something had happened to my brother, I was reading some literature provided to me by the friendly clerk behind the reception desk, whose manner, like that of the other staff, with the exception, perhaps, of the restaurant manager, was so natural and unaffected that my stay in your hotel was greatly enhanced by it, after I asked if he had any account of the history of your hotel, since so many interesting and famous people have stayed here or worked here or eaten or drunk here, including my own great-great-grandmother, though she was not famous, and in this literature presumably written by the hotel I read that your restaurant claimed, in fact, to have invented the word “scrod” to describe the catch of the day, in contrast to “cod,” I suppose, for which this city is also famous. I also remembered, perhaps wrongly, seeing this word elsewhere spelled “shrod,” unless that is a different word with a different meaning. I had thought, I suppose mistakenly, that “scrod” meant “young cod,” or perhaps it was “shrod” that meant “young cod” and “scrod” that meant “catch of the day,” if the word “shrod” existed at all. I don’t know much about scrod, only the old joke about the two genteel ladies returning home on the train from Boston and in the course of their conversation one of them mistaking the word “scrod” for a past tense. For a moment the previous evening, as I say, I thought this spelling might even be correct, and then I was fairly certain it was not correct, but I was unsure whether it should be shrod or scrod, if the word “shrod” existed. But nowhere else have I seen it spelled “schrod,” with an “sch.” I did eventually, on the second evening, make a connection, perhaps a false one, between this misspelling and the accent with which your restaurant manager addressed my brother and me. This manager was present in the dining room both nights I ate there and, although courteous, seemed a bit cool in his manner, not to me in particular but to everyone, and on the second evening did not seem to want to prolong the conversation I started with him in which I suggested that the restaurant might add baked beans to the menu, since baked beans are also native to Boston and the restaurant boasts of being the inventor of Boston cream pie, the official Massachusetts state dessert, as I learned from the hotel literature, as well as the Parker House roll. He seemed almost transparently impatient to end the conversation and move on, though move on to what I did not know, since he did not appear to have more of a function than to walk rather self-importantly — by which I mean with an excessively erect posture — from one end of the long, rather dim, splendid room to the other, that is, from the wide doorway through which a handful of people now and then came in from the lobby to have dinner, to what must have been the kitchen, well hidden behind some sort of bar and two large potted palms. In any case, I noticed, as he stood conversing with us, inclined slightly towards us but at each pause turning to move away, that his accent might be identified as German, and this caused me later, when I was thinking about the misspelling of “scrod,” to speculate that the very Germanic “sch” spelling was his doing. This may be quite unfair, and perhaps it was someone else, someone younger, who misspelled “scrod,” and the mistake was not caught by your manager because of his Germanic predisposition towards beginning a word with “sch.” Here I should add in his defense, parenthetically, that despite his cool manner he seemed quite open to my idea that baked beans might be included on the menu. He explained that at one time the restaurant had brought out little pots of baked beans with the rolls and butter at the start of the meal and that they had stopped doing this because so many other restaurants in Boston featured baked beans. I did not want him to think I liked the idea of the little pots at the start of the meal — far from it. I thought it was a terrible idea. Baked beans at the start of the meal would not be a good appetizer, being so heavy and sweet. No, no, I said, they should simply be listed somewhere on the menu. I happen to love baked beans, and I had been disappointed not to find them here in this Boston restaurant, along with the scrod, the Parker House rolls, and the Boston cream pie, all of which I ordered on the second night. My dinner companion, that is, my brother, was tolerant of this protracted and perhaps pointless conversation, either because he was happy enough to be sitting over a nice dinner and a glass of red wine after the difficult day he had had, going here and there in the city, which is not his native city, as he attempted to complete several pieces of business in connection with our mother’s estate, not all of which were successful, or else because my behavior reminded him, in fact, of our mother, who was so very likely to start a conversation with a stranger, or rather, it would be more truthful to say, could hardly let a stranger come anywhere near her without striking up a conversation with him, learning something about his life and letting him know about some firmly held conviction of hers, and who passed away last fall, much to our regret. Although, naturally enough, certain of her habits bothered us while she was alive, we like to be reminded of her now, because we miss her, and we are probably both adopting some of those very habits, if we had not already adopted them long ago. I think my brother even added a suggestion of his own to the manager, after sitting listening quietly to mine, though I can’t remember what he said. This was actually the second time, now at the urging of our waiter, who thought my idea was a good one, that I had called the manager over to our table. The first time I waved to him it was not to speak to him about the baked beans or the spelling of scrod but about another guest in the nearly empty dining room, a very poised little old woman, her hair in a pearl-gray bun at the nape of her neck, who sat surprisingly low down on the banquette, by the side of her much younger hired companion, so that she had to reach quite far up and out to find her food. I had noticed her during my dinner the night before, since we were near each other and there were even fewer guests, and the companion and I had at last struck up a conversation, during which I learned that the old woman lived a short walk away and had been having her dinner at the hotel every night for many years, and that in fact I was inadvertently occupying her usual spot in the dining room, under the brightest light. The companion, after consulting the old woman, had specified that she had been coming here for thirty years, which astounded me, but now, on the second night, the restaurant manager corrected this to a mere five or six years. I wanted to suggest, perhaps because I had drunk my glass of Côtes du Rhône by then and was feeling inspired, that the hotel should make a photographic portrait of her and hang it on the wall in one of the rooms, since she was now part of the history of the hotel. I still think that would be a good idea, and that you might consider it. In fact, later I got up from my chair, perhaps indiscreetly, and went over to the old woman and her companion as they were leaving and suggested the same thing, to their obvious pleasure. I did not think it would be tactful, however, to bring up the spelling of “scrod” so directly with the manager, and that is why I am instead now mentioning it in a letter to you. My stay in your grand hotel was delightful, and apart from, perhaps, the coolness of the restaurant manager, every aspect of the service and presentation was flawless except for this one spelling mistake. I do believe the purported home of the scrod should be a place where it is spelled correctly. Thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely.

Her Birthday

105 years old:

she wouldn’t be alive today

even if she hadn’t died.