Can't and Won't: Stories by Davis Lydia

Author:Davis, Lydia [Davis, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-04-07T20:00:00+00:00

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.

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