Some people, I have noticed, will use a singular pronoun and verb to describe actions they did with another person. I hear it in both English and Spanish, and I dislike this habit in part because it causes confusion. “You and Sam went to the Alps? Sounds super!” you might remark to your friend Alice.
“Yes, I stayed in a great hotel on a lake.”
“Oh! How nice for you. Where’d Sam stay?”
Sam stayed with Alice, of course. Maybe that’s obvious, but why not just say so with the plural pronoun? Because for some people, their own visage fills the screen when they replay the past they are telling about, and they forget everyone else in the scene. Which is self-absorbed, or at least tactless. Certainly annoying.
But worse faults exist. So, following the advice of David Sedaris to choose one thing—just one—to be indignant about, I try not to be annoyed. Because if one thing is all I get, I’m going to let it be something really outrageous. All the other stuff—interrupting, not looking others in the eye, forgetting to say thank you, using a singular pronoun instead of including your partner with a plural one—all of that I can overlook. If you don’t, you’ll be in trouble, always finding fault, traveling with a truckload of grievances, never happy with anyone, and, naturally, no one happy with you. A long-ago boyfriend, in telling me about his previous relationship, said that after some years together—enough years, unfortunately, to have gotten married before disillusionment had thoroughly set in—he’d asked her at the end of an evening of her complaints if she liked anything about him.
At the time he told me this, I was quite certain I would always like everything about him, so I didn’t get the lesson. Which is not so much to find the person who endlessly charms you, but to let nine-tenths of your gripes go. This is a lesson Gerard, in George Saunders’s story “Thursday,” needs to learn. Gerard, a lonely though seemingly nice-enough man, goes to a memory clinic once a week, on Thursdays, to revisit happier times. This involves getting hooked up to a Perlman headpiece to become immersed in his past, reliving in each session an hour of it, as if for the first time. One Thursday, something different happens, as Gerard realizes on emerging from a memory that is not his. It had felt real, but it couldn’t be his because he grew up as an only child on a farm with strictly religious parents, whereas these memories belong to someone named David with a sister named Clara and a pair of drunkards for parents. Something is up.
Without his consent, Gerard is being fed David’s memories because the two technicians at the clinic want to know the whereabouts of Clara, the sister, who has gone missing. They can’t ask the real David because he has died. Gerard begins to lose his own strong sense of personhood as he takes over David’s memories and slowly, in a miraculous transformation, becomes David, not only when reliving the past but after he emerges from it. A mind-meld is occurring. Gerard is learning a fuller appreciation of another person’s difficulties as he assumes David’s tastes, his likes and dislikes, and his fears. He becomes David while remaining himself, and he is Clara’s brother though he does not know her. How does he deal with a new sister? He knows through his new memories that she chews with her mouth open, listens to classic rock, and makes snorting noises when she laughs. Had he, Gerard, ever met her, he would have shunned her, he says, and adds that he had never been comfortable around “such people.”
Such people or any people, it turns out. No one has ever suited him. Gerard is not the fairly nice guy he at first appeared to be but is, instead, uptight, unforgiving, and cheerless. His loneliness comes from being so fastidious. Poor guy, you had thought, but now you also think, What a jerk!
How different his life might have been had he limited himself to one black mark for one bad habit, as Sedaris suggests. Weighed against everything else, everything quaint or endearing or unusual, even unexpected, maybe another’s single shortcoming, instead of the multiple faults Gerard finds, would have seemed trivial. Then Gerard could have easily opened his arms and accepted Clara.
The lesson is clear. Be less exacting. And Gerard does learn it in time to enjoy a few happy years as Clara’s new brother. But after a lifetime of rejecting his fellows, what made him change? It was not putting himself in someone else’s shoes, which requires an act of imagination and which, moreover, is a sort of trick some people master, allowing them not to change, exactly, but to expand to include other realities. For Gerard, insight comes instead with the more unusual melding of two small hearts—the hearts of the two sorry people the single narrator has been by turns, one dead and the other living, as he switches back and forth until, with the merging achieved in the last paragraph, the narrator says we, speaking for both his psyches, and becomes one full person, a hero, who acts to save Clara from her interfering adult daughter. What does the daughter want with Clara? First to find her, then to take over her life. Gerard warns Clara because, despite snorting noises, a deplorable taste in music, and the rest, “if a person didn’t wish to be found, we felt, she should not be.” This is the thought of the melded narrators, the two men thinking as one, that compels Gerard to act. Gerard still has his criticisms, a list of pet peeves all folded up into a strong dislike of a certain people, those “entitled brats, with the mindless vigor of youth, who wanted what they wanted so strongly and with such a presumption of eternal innocence that it would never occur to them that a thing they strongly felt like doing might be better left undone.”
That’s a good line to learn and repeat to yourself when you are tempted to roll your eyes or turn your back on someone’s annoying behavior. “Brats who want what they want so strongly that it would never occur to them that a thing they felt like doing might be better left undone.” Repeat it not to skewer another but to see if it describes you. If nothing else, repeating the line will give you time to quell your judgmental, impatient tendencies. If you have trouble with knee-jerk reactions or with giving yourself too often the benefit of the doubt—repeat twice.
