Break It Down (13 page)

Authors: Lydia Davis

BOOK: Break It Down

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She hopes this is all just the effect of exhaustion. She thinks it will end when she finds a place to live. She will not care very much what sort of place it is, not at first, anyway. Now there are two choices: a light and roomy apartment in a neighborhood she thinks is dangerous, or a cramped and noisy railroad flat in a part of town she likes.

What happened was that coming up to a line of toll booths on the highway, she had three quarters in her hand. The toll was fifty cents so she had to keep two quarters in her hand and put one back. The problem was that she couldn't decide which one to put back. She kept looking down at the quarters and then up again, trying to drive at the same time, coming closer and closer to the toll booths, veering left toward the center as though she knew that she might have to stop. Each time she looked down at them, the three quarters separated into groups of one quarter and two quarters, but each time she was prepared to put one back it appeared
to her as one of a pair, so that she couldn't put it back. This happened over and over again as she rolled closer to the booths, until finally, against her will, she put one quarter back. She told herself the choice was arbitrary, but she felt strongly that it was not. She felt that it was in fact governed by an important rule, though she did not know what the rule was.

She was frightened, not only because she had violated something but because this was not the first time she had for some minutes lost the capacity to act. And because although she had managed, in the end, to put one quarter back, drive up to the toll booth, pay the toll, and go on where she was going, she might just as well not have been able to make any move and might have stopped the car in the center of the highway and remained there indefinitely.

And further, if she had not been able to make a decision about this one small thing, as she might not have, then she might not be able to make a decision about anything else either, because all day long there were such decisions to make, as whether to go into this room or that room, to walk down the street in this direction or the other, to leave the subway by this exit or that one. There were many ways of reasoning through every decision, and often she could not even decide which way to reason, let alone make the decision itself. And so, in this way, she might become entirely paralyzed and unable to go on with her life.

But later that day, as she stands waist high in the water, she thinks that she is right: all this is probably nothing but exhaustion. She is standing without her glasses waist high in the water on a rocky beach. She is waiting for some sort of revelation, because she feels a revelation coming, but although various other thoughts have come, not one of them seems much like a revelation to her.

She stands looking full into the gray waves that come at her crossed by a strong breeze so that they have hard facets like rocks, and she feels her eyes washed by the grayness of the water. She knows it is the greater disruption of her life that is disturbing her, not just the homelessness, but finding a home will help. She thinks that all this will probably come out all right, that it won't end badly. Then she looks out at the smokestacks far away and nearly invisible across the sound and thinks, though, that this was not the revelation she was waiting for either.

Also by Lydia Davis

STORIES

Varieties of Disturbance

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Almost No Memory

Story and Other Stories

Sketches for a Life of Wassilly

The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories

NOVEL

The End of the Story

SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

Swann's Way
by Marcel Proust

HÃ©lÃ¨ne
by Pierre Jean Jouve

Rules of the Game, I: Scratches
by Michel Leiris

The Spirit of Mediterranean Places
by Michel Butor

The Madness of the Day
by Maurice Blanchot

Death Sentence
by Maurice Blanchot

Published in 1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781429996174

First eBook Edition : May 2011

This paperback edition, 2008

Many of the stories in this book were previously published in the following collections by Lydia Davis:
The Thirteenth Woman (
Living Hand, 1976
); Story and Other Stories (
The Figures, 1983). “Sketches for a Life of Wassilly” was first published by Station Hill Press in 1981. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to
Fiction International, Luna Tack, Oink!,
and
The Paris
Review, where some of these stories first appeared. “The Sock” originally ran in several newspapers, in slightly different form, under the sponsorship of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project. “Extracts from a Life” is adapted from
Nurtured by Love
by Shinichi Suzuki, and is used by permission of Exposition Press. The tale in “Once a Very Stupid Man” is adapted from the traditional Hasidic story recounted in Martin Buber's
The Way of
Man, and is used by permission of Citadel Press.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Davis, Lydia, 1947-

Break it down : stories l by Lydia Davis

p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-374-11653-9

I. Title.

PS3554.A9356 B74 1986

813'.54âdc19

86007687

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-53144-7

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-53144-7