In the lobby, they were sitting across from each other in two armchairs, these two small women, both beautiful in different ways, both wearing heavy lipstick, different shades, both frail, I thought later, in different ways.
“The Sock,” by Lydia Davis from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
I love sentences and how they can create so much in a tiny space. In one sentence, Davis makes a world with the familiar and unfamiliar, with certainty and uncertainty. I see these two small women in their heavy lipstick, and at the same time, they are blurry. They are frail but in different ways. What ways? They are both beautiful but in different ways. What ways? And who is the observer, and what made the narrator think about these two women?
The use of imagery is a style technique. There are writers who emphasize other things, such as dialogue (i.e., Grace Paley comes to mind). But many writers love images as much as poets do because they are so hardworking and magical and contain a paradox. First, they elicit an emotional response from the reader. Second, an image is specific and at the same time causes associations to proliferate, radiating meaning in many different directions. (When I hear “frail,” I think old, undernourished, delicate-boned, sickly, weak). After that, the reader begins a tentative and explorative questioning of the qualities conferred by the writer’s choice of imagery. Why this image? How is it working thematically?
In Davis’ sentence, she beautifully balances specificity and generality. For instance, the women are frail, but in different ways and we don’t know what the difference is. The unanswered questions create propulsion, which keeps the reader reading.
This is a cumulative sentence, with the sentence, for the most part, spiraling back to the base clause: “They were sitting across from each other in two armchairs.”
Davis wants you to see more, experience more, so she adds free modifying phrases that refer back to the base clause, elaborating on the subject, “they.”
1) these two small women
2) both beautiful in different ways
3) both wearing heavy lipstick
a. different shades
4) both frail in different ways
a. I thought later
There is one subordinate modifying phrase: “different shades.” This little phrase refers not to the base clause, but to the previous phrase, “heavy lipstick.” It doesn’t have the freedom of a free modifying phrase to fly around. It has to stay pinned to “heavy lipstick.”
To create more rhythm so the body feels this sentence, Davis uses anaphora, the repetition of a word(s) at the beginning of phrases, clauses or sentences, repeating the word “both.”
She also uses epistrophe, the repetition of word(s) at the end of phrases, clauses or sentences, repeating “different ways.” To break the rhythm and jar the reader out of a melodic lull, she changes it slightly to “different shades,” dropping “in” and “ways.” But it’s not entirely jarring because of the assonance of the long “a” sound of “shades,” which echoes “ways.”
She also interrupts the rhythm with the parenthetical, “I thought later,” and builds to the final repetition.
Your Turn
Start with a base clause, which includes the subject and verb predicate. You can use a pronoun for your subject so it almost cries out for elaboration. Davis’s base clause is: “They were sitting across from each other in two armchairs.”
Now add four free modifying phrases that refer back to the base clause and add specificity to your subject.
Add anaphora to three of these phrases, repeating a word at the beginning of the phrases.
Add epistrophe to these phrases. Can you change one of the repeated words and use assonance to make the word similar and dissimilar?
Now go back and see if you can add a subordinate modifier to one of your modifying phrases, as Davis did with “different shades.”
Try it!
Tell me how it goes.
What else do you see in this sentence?
Thank you for picking the meat off the bones of this wonderful sentence.
This sentence feels like a poem, or song, or chant, that immediately piques my curiosity and draws me in. Propulsive indeed. Thank you for another must read!