The sisters lead me into the house and into a back room I don’t remember having been in before. From here I can smell bread baking and rabbit or perhaps pig cooking, but I know none will be for me. I’m not hungry, but still it makes me angry that none will be for me. I sit stiffly as the sisters take off the soft, light clothes I wear and give me softer, lighter ones. They give me shoes and I’m not used to shoes but they tie them on tightly with knots so I can’t take them off. They have thick, soft soles as though I walked on moss or one of our rugs, but the strings around my ankles make me furious. Before they’ve finished dressing me, I begin to tremble and I touch my shattered dagger and the other blunt one. I feel very strong.
They take me down long halls and then up the central stairway to the top to see the Queen. The Queen calls me “my dear,” “My dear,” she says and her voice is very old and ugly. “My sweet, my dear,” she says, “you’ve come to me at last, my prettiest one.” Does she think I came for compliments Has she no dignity at all? She’s too old. I can tell by her voice. I turn my head toward her. She isn’t far from me. I take my one true dagger and leap toward her and, just as I feared, my sisters don’t stand by me. Their hands hold me back just when they should be helping. One has her arm across my throat, choking me. Mara, I suppose.
“See, my sweet one, see!” screams the Queen and someone rips my mask from my face and I do see, I see the brilliant world at last. My sisters let me go but now I can’t kill the Queen because I don’t know anymore where she is. No one moves and gradually I come to understand that there’s a mirror along the back wall. I even remember that mirror though I had forgotten it, and I know it’s a mirror, and I see now that the Queen sits, or rather reclines before me twice, once in her reflection, and she’s not quite as old as her voice seems. And I stand here, and there behind the Queen, too, and I know this one in shoes and green scarves with her hair tied up behind is I. And all along I see my sisters, pale ladies, gentle warriors, some leaning toward their spears. Now I’m among strangers, for I don’t even know which one is Mara. Now I see how the world is. I still tremble, but from sight.
The Queen is smiling. “Take her,” she says and they take me, not bothering now if their fingernails dig and scratch. They take me down the long stairways, across the halls and out the wide doors, away across the meadow and then the stream, away into the forest until we come to a hill. We climb this hill and at the top one sister says, “Sit down.” She brings out mead and a little bread. “You must stay here now,” she says. “You must wait.” They all turn to leave, but one, no different from the others, turns back. “I’m Mara,” she says, “and you must stay and wait,” and then she goes.
I sit and look. I think they’ve left me to die. I’ve seen how the Queen hates me, but still to be able to look is a wonderful thing. I look and recognize and even remember the squirrel, the bird and the beetle.
Soon the sun gets low and the birds sing louder. It’s cool. A rabbit comes out to feed not far from where I sit. Then suddenly something drops from a tree not far from me, silent as a fox, but I see him. I jump to my feet. I’ve never seen a creature like this but I know what it is. I’ve not heard the word except in whispers in the hallways. I’ve hardly believe they could exist. Taller, thicker than I, than any of us. Brother to the goat spirit. It is Man. Now I know what the shoes are for. I turn and run, but away from out house and into the hills.
It grows dark as I run and then the moon comes up and I run on and on, back where the hills are steeper and there are more rocks and fewer trees. In my shoes I don’t worry about the sharp stones or the long, steep, slippery climbs, for the shoes stick like flies on the wall and I go up or down like a lizard. I’ve never run like this in my life. I’m supple as water. Nothing can stop me. My steps are like wind in summer. My eyes fly with me and they see everything.
Then there’s the steepest climb of all. He can’t be close behind me now, for even I, with my magic shoes, am winded, but I keep on to the top where the trees are twisted and small from the wind. There’s a hollow, soft with pine needles. I lie down there to hide and turn to face the moon. I’m not afraid of the forest or the night. It’s not as dark as blindness.
I lie panting and when my own breathing quiets I hear painting still. I look away from the moon and I see the creature, Man, lying as I lie, exhausted. I watch him until his eyes close, then I close my own. I’ve run a long way. I don’t think or even dream anymore now.
In the first light of dawn the brother to the goat’s ghost touches me on my breast and wakes me. My anger of yesterday has changed. I tremble. Man’s fingers are strong as the golden bed cords. His hands aren’t dry and cool like my sister’s hands. He tears away a green scarf and I feel there, at my neck, the coarse hairs by his mouth. I shut my eyes and for a moment I think that I’m being eaten, but then I feel again that I’m running like a lizard on the mountainsides, and Man breathes like a lion in my ear.
Afterward he rolls away and looks at the morning sky. Quickly, before it’s too late, I smash the other dagger open, grasp the two and stab him twice with each hand. He makes a big bird sound and curls like a caterpillar. Then I rest a little while.
I understand now. Of course the Queen hates me, but she’ll care for me, and all those like me, well. And I hate her, but I don’t feel irritable any longer. I’m happy and relaxed. I rest, and later I hear my sisters coming for me, singing in the hills. How I love my sisters. Someday they might stand by me before the Queen, so I’ll let them comb my hair. I’ll drink milk from their cups and I’ll eat strawberries out of their hands even though I’m no longer blind.
Now Mara and Netta will be the first to come to me. I’ll kiss them and they’ll feed me. We’ll stay on this hill and in this hollow all night and we’ll pray together by moonlight to the goat’s ghost for the birth of a girl.
Orbit 6, G.P. Putnam, 1970
The Institute
WHAT ARE ALL these old ladies? Why these are…why recent graduates, I would suspect, of the Old Ladies Institute of Higher Learning. See how thin and ascetic they all are!
I’m wondering about the possibilities of doing an article on the O.L.I. of H.L. For instance: It was about that time that the Old Ladies Institute of Higher Learning was founded, though not, mind you, by the old ladies themselves, for they needed help before they could take over on their own. By now, of course, the O.L.I. of H.L. is completely run by the OLs themselves, partly on Bauhaus principles, though not forgetting Caudi, partly a la Chicago U. “Angry” old ladies, one could say, conscious of themselves as a force for change in a changing society.
But run, old ladies, this is your last and only chance to do so many things, dance at the Judson, for instance (age is not factor there), your last chance to read Koch and look at Rauschenburg or get into New Campus Writing, swim the free style relay, jump the high jump, literally and figuratively. Oh, my dead Grandmother, if you were here I’d bring you up as my own dear child, feed you steak and liver and wheat germ oil, start you off on push-ups and squats, buy you a book by Freud (to begin with). “The child is father of the grandmother?”
Yes, the child is father of the grandmother, therefore, well, why not start with Camp Fire Girls?
I have twelve girls, a coven of Camp Fire Girls (including me, that is) every Friday at 3:30, and it does seem in some way significant that every afternoon on that day I boil a tongue (cow’s tongue) seasoned with rosemary, savory, and cloves (significances all of them), onions, too. Maybe the OLs do have the magic to, if they wanted to, make a high jump record (“There was an old woman” as the old rhyme goes, “tossed up in a basket seventeen times as high as the moon…”), but I think swimming would suit the OLs better.
We might draw up a schedule and general curriculum of the O.L.I. of H.L. thus:
7:00 Rising bell
7:30 Breakfast
8:00 First class, The Existentialist Woman’s Role and Simone de Beauvoir
9:00 Developments in psychology since 1945 except Tues
days and Thursdays, the Homosexual in Literature from Gide to the Present
10:00 Nudity in Art Through the Ages
11;00 Swimming
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Poetry since 1960 except Tuesdays and Thursdays, Biology with dissecting of frogs, etc., also emergency first aid for grandmothers such as how to perform a quick tracheotomy in case someone swallows a balloon
2:00 The Kama Sutra and related literature
3:00 Sports and exercises (tennis, archery…)
6:00 Cocktails
6:30 Dinner
8:00 Avant Garde movies (Vanderbeek and Brakage, Jack Smith) with occasional poetry readings to music.
(My grandmother was a shy woman, which doesn’t mean she was lacking in strength. On the contrary, I suspect she had hidden wells of power that were left forever untapped and now it is too late.)
But, as I said, I have these twelve girls with which to lay the foundations of the Old Ladies I. of H.L. “I desire to seek the trail” (all Camp Fire Girl Trail Seekers say this) “that shall become a delight to my feet…” Oh, nine year olds, I desire that you should seek the trail that would delight me when you and I reach grandmotherhood. Wohelo stands for work, health, and love. There’s certainly nothing wrong in that. Struggle, strength, and sex? Agonies? Despair and courage? Self sacrifice? Wohelo, then. Wohelo.
In those days, those difficult beginning days of the Institute, the OLs worked (tirelessly) rebuilding (with their own hands) the old resort hotel that had been chosen as the site of the School for Higher Learning.
Patching the swimming pool with cement.
Pulling the weeds out of the tennis courts.
Shoring up the outbuildings
Blocking in the projection booth
Three years later, let us say, Grandmother, a shy woman even at the age of seventy-six, entered, like a little orphan, through the high iron gates. One black bag contained all of her personal belongings: 1 pr. Reading glasses, 3 aprons, 4 dresses, 2 foundations, 1 string of jet beads, aspirin, APC pills, 6x pink rayon bloomers without lace, 1 pr. Support stockings, and so on.
But had Grandmother once been a Camp Fire Girl? “Wohelo,” Grandmother said to herself, trudging off to meet the unknown, little orphaned Grandmother walking down the long entranceway that all the other grandmothers came down in private cars or taxis or airport limousines (Grandmother was a scholarship student), noting the unkempt lawns (the OLs haven’t much time left over for gardening) and (later on) the monk-like rooms, white-walled, the surfeit of bookcases, noticing (this even later) the lack of tablecloths and that (and this was later still) they forgot about Thanksgiving altogether (though they did remember Christmas with Santa Claus and all). It wasn’t, in many ways, exactly to Grandmother’s taste. She liked flowers on her curtains.
However, Grandmother entered bravely, meeting the hatchet-faced president of the O.L.I. of H.L. (which was wearing a hand loomed gray and tan shift with handmade silver jewelry. This even though the OLs didn’t bother with such craft-sort-of-things themselves). (The president, by the way, also taught the course on Literature Related to the Kama Sutra.) But Grandmother did enter bravely and, once there, Grandmother persevered. (“Old Woman, Old Woman, Old Woman,” said I, as the old rhyme goes, “Oh whither, oh whither, or whither so high?”)
Sex, she learned in Sex 101, is symmetrical, vertical, central and (usually) ventral. (Grandmother had not realized this before.) Grandmother not only drew a picture, as follows:
but wrote her first sonnet on the symmetricality of love, which began:
When I have fears that sex may cease to be,
And dry, oh desert dry I lie like nuns…
And so forth.
Grandmother had a lot to learn, but she made good progress. Her first semester she had three Bs and one C, but after that she always had a sprinkling of As.
It was in her senior year that she discovered that her medium was really movies. Well, she talked two other old ladies into posing for her films. Grandma had close-ups of their wonderful old skin, like around the eyes and under the arms, etc. (Grandma had learned by then to see everything though she only got a C in the freshman course, Finding New Things to see. Not such an easy course, either.) And sometimes she had them pose together on a cot, but…well, that’s how Grandmother landed in jail and never quite got to graduate. She died before she served out her time.
But don’t think she didn’t know what she was doing. These days things are a lot easier for old ladies everywhere, partly because of her and now most all O.L.I. of H.L. graduates get into WHO’S WHO (of course they can’t stay there long. Some promising students even die before they get to their junior year, let alone last out an issue of WHO’S WHO). But those days it was Marguerite Belquintine, Hatty Witbaum, Emilia Juisinbalvo, and (my grandmother) Jenny Carswell…names we all know now. They had to fight and suffer for the rest of us. They were the first to forge out the way for old ladies everywhere.
So here I am with my Camp Fire Girls. Some way we have to get started on this (and my grandmother’s dead). They sing:
Wo-he-lo for aye, wo-he-lo for aye, wo-
(“Oh whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?”as the old rhyme goes.“To brush the cobwebs out of the sky.”)
I’ve always felt it was too bad. We might have had quite a few old-lady movies, if she had lived.
Alchemy and Academe, Doubleday, 1970
A Possible Episode In The Picaresque Adventures Of Mr. J.H.B. Monstrosee
THE WRITERS of the series have always been aware of the monstrous side of things. A little too much here or there. A lot too much. Even in their own individual lives. They have had negative reactions out of proportions to the situation. They have behaved badly. Laughed too loud. Burped in public. Squeaked and snickered. Farted. Forgotten the names of their friends.
Too many new cars. Too many magazines. Too much coffee, French fries, research projects, purse snatchers, lowest common denominators. Too many Friends-of-the-Library, empty jars, brinks of disaster, outpourings of the soul, kiss, kiss, kiss, etc., and the remains of half-eaten meals. Too many Chets, Bobbys, Bings, Normans, Dickeys, Marilyns, Raquels, Spiros, Noams, and Seans.
Meanwhile, in a distant (intergalactic) place, distracted (momentarily) by asteroids, comets, a spectacular view of the horsehead nebula, and one small, hot world where crystalline substances shatter every time the sun comes up, the monster (his coming having been forecast by computers with a long history of telling fortunes by the positions of the planets relative to the stars) senses in himself the need for change and has headed in our direction shouting, “Excess, excess!”
Should he have the ability to disguise himself as one of them, the writers of the series have already counted up eleven possible suspects:
One embittered young businessman.
A disaffected widow.
A man whose life is essentially meaningless.
Two sisters. One named Gladys (about whom more later).
Five wives. (One frigid.)
A negro born in England who is a slightly better man than the embittered young businessman.
They have also released a little biography of the dead man.
It happened during after dinner coffee and cordials. Brandy sipping guests, groups of sponsors and members of the board of trustees, with one or two ordinary men. The last words of the deceased were: “I want—I want—death today—or death tomorrow—certainly as soon as practicable.”
“Listen, we’ve always felt threatened, and guilty, too, though never, until now, of murder.”
In spite of the fact that they have stepped directly from the garden into the desert scene and with only one canteen, hot lights and no solutions, the writers of the series have achieved a certain objectivity. They feel no fear only a sense of risk and daring. They walk (trudge) single file and in silence, saving their energy for the confrontation. Only a few have forgotten their sunglasses.
But this was long afterwards. As a matter of fact, the mon
ster first landed in a Los Angeles backyard just at sunset disguised as a thoroughly Americanized Englishman, tall, slim, one eye half closed (it’s hereditary), outwardly composed, rocking back on his heels, flexing his fingers, taking a fairly reasonable stand on most subjects, and saying: “Have you ever waked up in a strange land some trillions of miles from home wondering where you were?”
He was, actually, the special guest of one of the members of the board of a sponsoring company. (It’s one way to have access to a large audience should the monster be thinking of taking over the world.) Three of the five wives present seem to have noticed him, including the frigid one, also Gladys, the prettier of the two sisters.
However (apropos of Gladys), there’s a young gaffer on the set of the series who’s handsomer than most, tanner, blonder, more blue eyed, and outside the door there are already long liens of men who want or who have wanted at some time to become heroes. They’ve heard about the murder and the scenes in the desert and they want to have a part in it. They’ve heard that the monster’s first words were, “World, world, world, world and everything in it.”
Meanwhile the sponsors have been calling for more action and less philosophizing. Also they have specified that Gladys should never appear entirely naked, though there is some thought of a diaphanous green gown.
And all this while they have been coming up over the rise of a dune silhouetted in the sunset, first the gaffers and grips and then the writers of the series. Last the sponsors. In a few minutes they will attempt to communicate with the monster and fail, after which he will round them all up into a valley surrounded by sheer rock cliffs on all sides but one (it’s the human condition). But this was long afterwards. Now he has just regained consciousness beside a century plant.
Beginning consciousness beside a century plant, first a view of sky, then becoming aware of the sounds of conversations, slowly adjusting his tie and smoothing his hair, he fixed himself a scotch and ice and joined the party. “I wonder if any of you have ever waked up in a strange land, not remembering who you are, having other customs, both sexual and secular, having other desires and ambitions, wearing an unfamiliar costume, standing in unfamiliar stances or seated on unfamiliar chairs, eating strange vegetables, and finding oneself the special guest of a member of the board of directors? And now, being interviewed by three wives, one noticeably frigid (that may be her special attraction) and a beautiful young girl named Gladys and saying: “Go away, I’m dreaming of (or grieving for?) my homeland!”
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 27