Can't and Won't: Stories (17 page)

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.