LYDIA DAVIS
Old Mother and the Grouch
UMeet the sourpuss," says the Grouch to their friends.
"Oh, shut up," says Old Mother.
The Grouch and Old Mother are playing Scrabble. The Grouch
makes a play.
"Ten points," he says. He is disgusted.
He is angry becuase Old Mother is winning early in the game and
because she has drawn all the 5's and blanks. He says it is easy to win if
you get all the 5's and blanks. "I think you marked the backs," he says.
She says a blank tile doesn't have a back.
Now he is angry because she has made the word
qua.
He says
qua
is
not English. He says they should both make good, familiar words like
the words he has made -
bonnet, realm
and
weave
-
but instead she sits in
her nasty corner making
aw, eh,fa, ess,
and
ax.
She says these are words,
too. He says even if they are, there is something mean and petty about
using them.
Now the Grouch is angry because Old Mother keeps freezing all the
food he likes. He brings home a nice smoked ham and wants a couple of
slices for lunch but it is too late - she has already frozen it.
"It's hard as a rock," he says. "And you don't have to freeze it any–
way. It's already smoked."
Then, since everything else he wants to eat is also frozen, he thinks
he will at least have some of the chocolate ice cream he bought for her
the day before. But it's gone. She has eaten it all.
"Is that what you did last night?" he asks. "You stayed up late eat–
ing ice cream?"
He is close to the truth, but not entirely correct.
Old Mother cooks dinner for friends of theirs. After the friends have
gone home, she tells the Grouch the meal was a failure: the salad dressing
had too much salt in it, the chicken was overdone and tasteless, the
cherries hard, etc.
She expects him to contradict her, but instead he listens carefully and
adds that the noodles, also, were "somehow wrong."
