A Day in the Life (of Lydia Davis

FICTION

By Erica Bittner

The woman is a writer. A good one, though of course she does not always think so. She spends seventy-four percent of her time in one of three places: 1) her apartment, 2) the bus, 3) the café downtown. The other twenty-six percent is spent in many different and odd places—the lobby of the art museum, the park bench across the street from her ex-husband’s current apartment building, by the vodka in the liquor aisle of the grocery. (In middle age, she has decided that she is too old for vodka. She now prefers a red blend. However, she has discovered that the type of people who purchase vodka seem to have endless permutations. Whenever she gets stuck, she can always get relatively unstuck in the liquor aisle by the vodka.)

In all of these places, she observes. And she writes.

At times, she fields nervous calls from her agent, who wants to confirm that another collection of stories is in fact on the way. She tells him yes, but of course it’s not. All she has are notes. Fragments. Scribbles. Four different notebooks, and no idea what they actually contain. Every time she thinks of the notebooks, she becomes desperate for Paris. She is sure that if she had never moved back across the Atlantic, she would be able to keep better notes. Cleaner notebooks. At least more

organized thoughts. She would certainly have less awkward attempts at rekindling friendships that died more than a decade ago. She is a writer, but she is not a letter writer.

Dreaming in French doesn’t help any of this. (She is, after all, a little pretentious at heart.)

As it stands, her notebooks are chaotic. She knows that they must become not-chaos. They must become more than notes in books, but an actual book. And she can’t seem to remember how she put the last four books together. So here she is, “working” on a fifth, with nothing more than scribbles under her jurisdiction.

Scribbles. What a word. She writes it in the notebook she happened to throw in her purse that morning, the one she chose from the pile on the coffee table simply because her transit card was lodged between its pages. As if to underscore the meaning, the bus jolts in that very moment, turning her note about the word “scribbles” into an actual, bona fide scribble.

She thanks the pothole for the inspired moment, rather than the bus.

It is now her stop. She exits the bus through the door in the back rather than the door in the front, but not before a man in a suit protected from the rain by a clear plastic poncho pushes his way past her to avoid paying the fare. He smells very nice, and he mutters “’scuse” as he brushes by. She appreciates his manners. She also appreciates her wool sweater that repels the water he brushes onto her left shoulder.

Once she has disembarked, she stops abruptly to sit on the bus stop bench to open both her umbrella and her notebook. She writes: a man, forties, not destitute, simply unable to touch the farecard machine for fear of germs, ruminates on this to no end, writes his sister of it, she ignores him, he remembers she bought him cologne for Christmas last year, the one time of year they see each other, he sprays it on, he traps most

of the aroma under his plastic poncho to keep the scent for himself, leaves his apartment to finally put money on his fare card, the time has finally come to touch the buttons on the machine, finds he cannot do it after all, decides to sneak onto the bus through the back door reserved only for exiting passengers as he does every other morning, wonders if the bus driver knows him by now and just doesn’t care, what does this mean, that he is someone no one cares about?...

And on. The spokes of her battered umbrella drip steady drops that saturate the corner of her notebook.

This is why she scribbles with permanent ink.