Can't and Won't: Stories by Lydia Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

perhaps, one awkward hour with him, since our conversation was at best difficult.
    Now, to be perfectly honest—in case this is the source of the misunderstanding—it is true that a member of my family was once incarcerated in McLean’s. My great-grandfather, of the same surname, was for a time a patient of the institution, but this was in the early part of the last century, and he was not a seriously disturbed individual, as far as I can tell from what my father has said and from the letters and other documentary evidence I have in my possession. He was apparently no more than generally restless, apathetic at his place of employment, occasionally inspired with plans for irrational enterprises, dissatisfied with domestic life, and visibly oppressed by his wife’s emphatically demanding and restrictive nature. Although he did indeed escape the institution once and was then forcibly returned to it, he was several months later judged to have been rehabilitated, and he was released. He thereafter lived a tranquil, if rather solitary, life apart from his family, with a single manservant, on a farm in Harwich, Massachusetts.
    I offer this information in case it may be useful, though I can think of no reason why you would confuse me with him. However, no other explanation occurs to me for your mistaken identification, unless your buyers assumed on the basis of the contents of my book, its title, or my admittedly somewhat wild-eyed photograph that at some time in the past I was an inmate of McLean’s.
    It is always nice to have some attention paid to one’s book, but embarrassing to be misidentified in this way. Could you please throw some light on the matter?
     
    Yours sincerely.

III

The Last of the Mohicans
     
    We are sitting with our old mother in the nursing home.
    “Of course I’m lonesome for you kids. But it’s not like being in a strange place, where you don’t know anyone.”
    She smiles, trying to reassure us. “There are plenty of people here from good old Willy.”
    She adds: “Of course, a lot of them can’t talk.” She pauses, and goes on: “A lot of them can’t see.”
    She looks at us through her thick-lensed glasses. We know she can’t see anything but light and shadow.
    “I’m the last of the Mohicans—as they say.”

Grade Two Assignment
     
    Color these fish.
    Cut them out.
    Punch a hole in the top of each fish.
    Put a ribbon through all the holes.
    Tie these fish together.
    Now read what is written on these fish:
    Jesus is a friend.
    Jesus gathers friends.
    I am a friend of Jesus.

Master
     
    “You want to be a master,” he said. “Well, you’re not a master.”
    That took me down a peg.
    Seems I still have a lot to learn.

An Awkward Situation
     
    A young writer has hired an older, more experienced writer to improve upon his texts. However, he refuses to pay her. He keeps her, in fact, in a situation that amounts to imprisonment, on the grounds of his estate. Though his frail and elderly mother, while turning her back and walking away, as though unwilling to look at him, urges him, weakly, to pay this writer what he owes her, he does not. Instead, he holds his arm out straight towards her, his hand in a fist, while she holds her hand out under his fist, palm up, as though to receive something. He then opens his hand, and it is empty. He is doing this for revenge, she knows, because he and she were once involved in what might be called a love relationship, and she was not as kind to him as she should have been. She was sometimes rude to him, and belittled him, both in front of others and in private. She tries, over and over, to think whether she was as cruel to him then, so long ago, as he is being cruel to her now. Complicating the situation is the fact that another person is living here with her, and depending on her for support, and that is her ex-husband. He, unlike her, and unlike her bitter former lover, is cheerful and confident, not knowing, until at last she tells him, that