Can't and Won't: Stories (5 page)

I have asked her:
Please, collect the trash and take it to the incinerator immediately.

Today I told Adela that I needed her there in the kitchen, but she went to her mother’s room and came back with her sweater on and went out anyway. She was buying some lettuce—for them, it turned out, not for us.

At each meal, she makes an effort to escape.

As I was passing through the dining room this morning, I tried, as usual, to chat pleasantly with Adela. Before I could say two words, however, she retorted sharply that she could not do anything else while she was setting the table.

Adela rushes out of the kitchen into the living room even when guests are present and shouts:
Telephone for you in your room!

Although I have asked her to speak gently, she never does. Today she came rushing out of the kitchen into the dining room saying:
Telephone, for you!
and pointed at me. Later she did the same with our luncheon guest, a professor.

I say to Luisa:
I would like to discuss the program for the days to come. Today I do not need more than a sandwich at noon, and fruit. But el señor would like a nutritious tea.

Tomorrow we would like a rather nourishing tea with hard-boiled eggs and sardines at six, and we will not want any other meal at home.

At least once a day, we want to eat cooked vegetables. We like salads, but we also like cooked vegetables. Sometimes we could eat both salad and cooked vegetables at the same meal.

We do not have to eat meat at lunchtime, except on special occasions. We are very fond of omelets, perhaps with cheese or tomato.

Please serve our baked potatoes immediately after taking them from the oven.

We had had nothing but fruit at the end of the meal for two weeks. I asked Luisa for a dessert. She brought me some little crepes filled with applesauce. They were nice, though quite cold. Today she gave us fruit again.

I said to her:
Luisa, you cannot refer to my instructions as “capricious and illogical.”

Luisa is emotional and primitive. Her moods change rapidly. She readily feels insulted and can be violent. She has such pride.

Adela is simply wild and rough, a harebrained savage.

I say to Luisa:
Our guest, Señor Flanders, has never visited the park. He would like to spend several hours there. Can you make sandwiches of cold meat for him to take with him? It is his last Sunday here.

For once, she does not protest.

When setting the dining table, Adela puts each thing down with a bang.

I say to Luisa:
Please, I would like Adela to polish the candlesticks. We are going to have them on the table at night.

I ring the bell at the dining table, and a loud crash follows instantly in the kitchen.

I have told them:
There should not be these kitchen noises during our cocktail and dinner hour.
But they are hitting each other again and yelling.

If we ask for something during a meal, Adela comes out of the kitchen and says:
There isn’t any.

It is all so very nerve-racking. I often feel worn out after just one attempt to speak to her.

Luisa,
I say,
I want to make sure we understand each other. You cannot play the radio in the kitchen during our dinnertime. There is also a lot of shouting in the kitchen. We are asking for some peace in the house.

We do not believe they are sincerely trying to please us.

Adela sometimes takes the bell off the dining table and does not put it back on. Then I cannot ring for her during the meal but have to call loudly from the dining room to the kitchen, or go without what I need, or get the bell myself so that I can ring it. My question is: Does she leave the bell off the table on purpose?

I instruct them ahead of time:
For the party we will need tomato juice, orange juice, and Coca-Cola.

I tell her:
Adela, you will be the one in charge of answering the door and taking the coats. You will show the ladies where the toilet is, if they ask you.

I ask Luisa:
Do you know how to prepare empanadas in the Bolivian style?

We would like them both to wear uniforms
all
the time.

I say to Adela:
Please, I would like you to pass among the guests frequently with plates of hors d’oeuvres that have been recently prepared.

When the plates no longer look attractive, please take them back out to the kitchen and prepare fresh ones.

I say to her:
Please, Adela, I would like there always to be clean glasses on the table, and also ice and soda.

I have told her:
Always leave a towel on the rack above the bidet.

I say to her:
Are there enough vases? Can you show them to me? I would like to buy some flowers.

Here are more of the details of the silent warfare: I see that Adela has left a long string lying on the floor next to the bed. She has gone away with the wastebasket. I don’t know if she is testing me. Does she think I am too meek or ignorant to require her to pick it up? But she has a cold, and she isn’t very bright, and if she really did not notice the string, I don’t want to make too much of it. I finally decide to pick up the string myself.

We suffer from their rude and ruthless vengeance.

A button was missing from my husband’s shirt collar. I took the shirt to Adela. She shook her finger and said no. She said that la Señora Brodie always took everything to the dressmaker to be mended.

Even a button?
I asked. Were there no buttons in the house?

She said there were no buttons in the house.

I told Luisa they could go out on Sundays, even before breakfast. She yelled at me that they did not want to go out, and asked me, Where would they go?

I said that they were welcome to go out, but that if they did not go out, we would expect them to serve us something, even if it was something simple. She said she would, in the morning, but not in the afternoon. She said that her two older daughters always came to see her on Sundays.

I spent the morning writing Luisa a long letter, but I decided not to give it to her.

In the letter I told her:
I have employed many maids in my life.

I told her that I believe I am a considerate, generous, and fair employer.

I told her that when she accepts the realities of the situation, I’m sure everything will go well.

If only they would make a real change in their attitude, we would like to help them. We would pay to have Adela’s teeth repaired, for instance. She is so ashamed of her teeth.

But up to now there has been no real change in their attitude.

We also think they may have relatives living secretly with them behind the kitchen.

I am learning and practicing a sentence that I will try on Luisa, though it may sound more hopeful than I feel:
Con el correr del tiempo, todo se solucionará.

But they give us such dark, Indian looks!

Reversible Story

NECESSARY EXPENDITURE

A concrete mixer has come and gone from the house next door. Mr. and Mrs. Charray are renovating their wine cellar. If they improve their cellar, they will pay less for fire insurance. At the moment, their fire insurance is very expensive. The reason for this is that they own thousands of bottles of very good wine. They have very good wine and some fine paintings, but their taste in clothes and furniture is strictly lower middle class.

EXPENDITURE NECESSARY

The Charrays’ taste in clothes and furniture is dull and strictly lower middle class. However, they do own some fine paintings, many by contemporary Canadian and American painters. They also have some good wine. In fact, they own thousands of bottles of very good wine. Because of this, their fire insurance is very expensive. But if they enlarge and otherwise improve their wine cellar, the fire insurance will be less expensive. They are doing this: a concrete mixer has just come and gone from their house, next door.

A Woman, Thirty

A woman, thirty, does not want to leave her childhood home.

Why should I leave home? These are my parents. They love me. Why should I go marry some man who will argue and shout at me?

Still, the woman likes to undress in front of the window. She wishes some man would at least look at her.

How I Know What I Like (Six Versions)

She likes it. She is like me. Therefore, I might like it.

She is like me. She likes the things I like. She likes this. So I might like it.

I like it. I show it to her. She likes it. She is like me. Therefore, I might really like it.

I think I like it. I show it to her. She likes it. She is like me. Therefore, I might really like it.

I think I like it. I show it to her. (She is like me. She likes the things I like.) She likes it. So I might really like it.

I like it. I show it to her. She likes it. (She says the other one is “just plain awful.”) She is like me. She likes the things I like. So I might really like it.

Handel

I have a problem in my marriage, which is that I simply do not like George Frideric Handel as much as my husband does. It is a real barrier between us. I am envious of one couple we know, for example, who both love Handel so much they will sometimes fly all the way to Texas just to hear a particular tenor sing a part in one of his operas. By now, they have also converted another friend of ours into a lover of Handel. I am surprised, because the last time she and I talked about music, what she loved was Hank Williams. All three of them went by train to Washington, D.C., this year to hear
Giulio Cesare in Egitto.
I prefer the composers of the nineteenth century and particularly Dvo
ř
ák. But I’m pretty open to all sorts of music, and usually if I’m exposed to something long enough, I come to like it. But even though my husband puts on some sort of Handel vocal music almost every night if I don’t say anything to stop him, I have not come to love Handel. Fortunately, I have just found out that there is a therapist not too far from here, in Lenox, Massachusetts, who specializes in Handel-therapy, and I’m going to give her a try. (My husband does not believe in therapy and I know he would not go to a Dvo
ř
ák-therapist with me even if there was one.)

The Force of the Subliminal

Rhea was here for an overnight visit and we were talking about birthdays. I had asked her when her birthday was. She told me it was April 13, but that she never received any cards or gifts on her birthday, which was just as well because she did not want to be reminded of it. I remarked that one person who never let anyone forget her birthday was our mutual friend Ellie.

Ellie was far away, in another country, where it was harder for her to remind people of her birthday. Then I thought, Why, it’s October: this is the month of Ellie’s birthday! I could not remember which day in October it was, so I went and looked it up where I had written it down in my address book. I discovered it was this very day, October 23. I told Rhea and we exclaimed over the fact that I had started talking about birthdays on Ellie’s birthday. Rhea said I must have known it all along, subliminally.

I did not tell Rhea how I had come to think of birthdays: that as I was putting napkins on the table for dinner I remembered a story she had told me, how she was once, long ago, giving dinner to a group of our friends who were rather difficult to entertain since their standards were very high where food and wine and table service were concerned; how Rhea, who in those days did not usually care much about such things as table settings, but was capable of embarrassment in the presence of certain people such as these friends, discovered first that she had no napkins of any kind in the house, then no paper towels either, then no Kleenex tissues either; and how, a few minutes into the meal, one of the guests politely asked for a napkin; how Rhea explained the problem and another guest suggested using toilet paper; and Rhea’s embarrassment as the guests did continue the meal using toilet paper; so that I was moved to want to send Rhea a set of cloth napkins for her next birthday so that she would never find herself in that situation again. But it was true that I might not have thought of Rhea’s story if I had not remembered, subliminally, that today was Ellie’s birthday.

Later, after Rhea had gone to bed, while I was washing the last of the dinner dishes, I thought about the conversation and said to myself, with a feeling of mild satisfaction, Well, this is one year that Ellie has not been able to remind me of her birthday, because she is too far away. But then I thought, Wait a minute, the fact is that I have somehow remembered Ellie’s birthday. And then I realized that because she never lets anyone forget her birthday, and because I know this so well, it was not I who had subliminally known it all along, as Rhea and I had decided, but in fact Ellie who had managed, in the end, to remind me, though not as directly as usual, and also, with her characteristic efficiency, to remind Rhea at the same time.

Her Geography: Alabama

She thinks, for a moment, that Alabama is a city in Georgia:

it is called Alabama, Georgia.

The Funeral