Break It Down by Lydia Davis Page A

window and back and from one room into the next room.
    Sometimes, for a moment, I thought I would be able to do something. Then that moment would pass and I would want to move and not be able to move.
    In the country, one day, I had not been able to move. First I had dragged myself around the house and then from the porch to the yard, and then into the garage, where finally my brain spun like a fly. There I stood, over an oil slick. I offered myself reasons for leaving the garage, but no reason was good enough.
    Night came, the birds quieted down, the cars stopped going by, everything withdrew into the darkness, and then I moved.
    All I retrieved from this day was the decision not to tell certain people what had happened to me. I did tell someone, of course, and right away. But he was not interested. He was not very interested in anything about me by then, and certainly not my troubles.
    In the city, I thought I might begin to read again. I was tired of embarrassing myself. Then, when I began to read, it was not just one book but many at once—a life of Mozart, a study of the changing sea, and others I can’t remember now.
    My husband was encouraged by these signs of activity,
and he would sit down and talk to me, breathing into my face until I was exhausted. I wanted to hide from him how difficult my life was.
    Because I did not immediately forget what I read, I thought my mind was getting stronger. I wrote down facts that struck me as facts I should not forget. I read for six weeks and then I stopped reading.
    In the middle of the summer, I lost my courage again. I began to see a doctor. Right away I was not happy with him and I made an appointment with a different doctor, a woman, though I didn’t give up the first doctor.
    The woman’s office was in an expensive street near Gramercy Park. I rang her doorbell. To my surprise, the door was opened not by her but by a man in a bow tie. The man was very angry because I had rung his doorbell.
    Now the woman came out of her office and the two doctors began to argue. The man was angry because the woman’s patients were always ringing his doorbell. I stood there between them. After that visit I did not go back.
    For weeks I did not tell my doctor that I had tried someone else. I thought this might hurt his feelings. I was wrong. In those days it bothered me that he allowed himself to be endlessly abused and insulted as long as I continued to pay his fee. He protested: “I only allow myself to be insulted up to a certain point.”

    After every session with him, I thought I would not go back. There were several reasons for this. His office was in an old house hidden from the street by other buildings and set in a garden full of little paths and gates and flower beds. Now and then, as I entered or left the house, I glimpsed a strange figure descending the stairs or disappearing through a doorway. He was a short, stout man with a shock of dark hair on his head, tightly buttoned up to the neck in a white shirt. As he passed me he would look at me, but his face revealed nothing, even though I was certainly there, coming up the stairs. This man disturbed me all the more because I did not understand what his relationship with my doctor might be. Halfway through every session I would hear a male voice call one word down the stairway: “Gordon.”
    Another reason I did not want to continue seeing my doctor was that he did not take notes. I thought he should take notes and remember the facts about my family: that my brother lived by himself in one room in the city, that my sister was a widow with two daughters, that my father was high-strung, demanding, and easily offended, and that my mother criticized me even more than my father. I thought my doctor should study his notes after each session. Instead, he came running down the stairs behind me to make a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I thought this behavior showed a lack of seriousness on his part.
    He