#571 The Seals- Lydia Davis
This is a touching story. I found a lot more depth in this piece than I have in the others from her collection. It's not only because of the uncharacteristic length, but here gives us something more than idle observations, or clever concepts. This is something real.
A girl/woman(?) is riding a train thinking about the sister that has just died. Siblings can be very close, but when there is a fourteen-year age gap and a different father involved, there will always be a search for definition. What does that relationship mean and what did I mean to that person?
As the train ride goes on, the narrator is having some kind of internal eulogy for those she has lost, not only for her sister but for her parents as well. She is taking stock of her own life by remembering her sister and remembering things of their lives.
“The first New Year after they died felt like another betrayal—we were leaving behind the last year in which they had lived, a year they had known, and starting a year that they would never experience.”
This is my favorite of this collection (can’t and won’t) thus far.
Notable Passage: “Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the bad ones, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated.”
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