The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Marge lays out the tarot. “There’s a king of cups in your past and a knight of wands in your future,” she says, but I don’t believe in cards.

  I take George and Jimmy aside to explain to them about being a woman. “Taking a shower during those days of the month is even more necessary than at other times,” I say, and, “Being a woman is a commitment of your whole being, not an off and on thing to be taken lightly. Burn your bras if you like,” I say, “but there’s a lot more to it than that, and where are the women doctors, lawyers, biochemists, philologists coming from, if not from you?” I ask. “But I’m not the high priestess. I only said that to make an impression. You’ll have to go to Big Ma for the last and the best. I hope you make it.”

  My health is failing. If anyone falls in love with me now I’ll be too tired for any sexual reciprocation. My nose runs. That will detract from my kisses. At night, after a long climb, my legs twitch. I have pimples on my eyelids. As of this morning, my voice is hoarse. And still, one falls in love in any condition and any situation. I watch those two young men and sense, from behind a bush, eyes on me. I can’t see him but I know he’s there.

  “Pardon me, madam, but you seem to have dropped your cowboy hat.”

  Close up, I see Tall and Dark is almost as old as I am, but perhaps he’s a man of no background in spite of his good looks.

  “Sir, the baby on my back is not my own. I’m just doing this for a friend who needs help. Its name is Jane but I suspect it’s a boy. Life is like this march, don’t you think? On and on and ever upward. Cold these last few days. But sometimes the ontology of this whole thing escapes me. Oh, carry me off to some warm climate. Kiss away my tears. Am I giving up when I say that?”

  But I have heard the dark man speaking Spanish in a whisper and I wonder if we are to be betrayed. His love may be one more attack. Pick out the old and sick, the stragglers, his penis as his weapon. In a way, he loves what he hates. I wonder what the psychology of that is. Once I overheard a group of young men say they’d like to get some hostile old lady they knew and rape her two or three times apiece. That would teach her a lesson. What did they mean by that? Would she be wise and gentle in the morning or dead from it, a final realization in her rolled-back eyes?

  This night is darker than all the rest. My chastity is astonishing at a time like this. Whatever Tall and Dark wants to teach me now, I won’t learn it. He said, “I like to see some spirit in my women. I like spunk and the fire in the eye. A woman like that is worth having,” but that was before I kicked him in the groin. Well, I do know men have feelings, too, sometimes; longings, hopes and fears. They have their sad and pensive times of wonderment and awe, passions, moments of quiet withdrawal, sometimes covering up their mistakes with savoir-faire or a certain finesse.

  “I love you,” he said, but I knew he hardly knew me.

  “Nowadays we don’t want that kind of love.”

  “I’ve watched you from afar. I carved your name on the side of the cliff. Blow your nose. Take off your glasses and let me kiss you just once.” But I wasn’t sure how I felt so I gave him another kick.

  As I said, this was our darkest night and I caught myself with a tear in my eye in spite of myself, but it was really not a feasible time for passions of any sort. Also I wanted to test him, so I said I would go down into the valley and get my first man so I could wear a little gold mark like some of the younger ones do. (Those men were only sheep ranchers, anyway.) Drying my tears, I said, “Give me five or six stout-hearted women and I’ll find out what’s going on over there on the opposite ridge.” Pat, Kim, Liz, Lib, Fran, Bea, Barb, then, led by me, sneaking down, one behind the other, and maybe never coming back, and perhaps secretly followed by Tall and Dark, if he really loves me.

  All I’ve got with me now is five feet of clothesline, a sandwich and an apple. All I’ve got with me is a lead dildo on a leather thong, one or two tricks I learned from my mother, my sharp eyes and the memory of past slights. I hope they stand me in good stead.

  Women! (I say, Women! Like men say, Men!) Women! You are wild and free, shaking your shaggy manes, eyes like stormy skies, bouncing your breasts, sure-footed, savage, silent on the mountains, your whispered battle cries tentatively spoken in the dark, but about to ring out the sunlight. I want to be like you, thumbs in my belt loops, the baby girl on my back, one from those that were left out in the cold to die, for we have taken all the unwanted girls along with us to grow up wild and free, riding their ponies along the beaches of Woman’s Land in the lee of what used to be known as Sleeping Woman mountain but now we call Sleeping Man. Still, it’s true. All mountains look like women, all women look like mountains. They can’t help it. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but oh, I hope that that baby Jane is really one of those unwanted little girls, born into some family with seven or eight football-playing brothers. But I looked before I left and she’s a boy after all. Somebody’s unwanted little boy all dressed in pink. I think I understand him. I know I do. He must have had six older sisters, poor thing. I’ll keep him and name him John.

  Women! You’ve always tried to avoid all-out war (it’s to your credit), though you’ve never avoided skirmishes and have even hoped for moral confrontations and tests of skills, but you will not put up with any more discussions. You are quoting, now, from outstanding women of bygone times. You are reading books by women. But I say be wary. Things are sometimes reversed when you least expect it and I find myself, even now, in an awkward situation not unlike that of many women in old novels of chase and rescue.

  Let me say first that the men in the valley and on the ridge across the way are not sheep ranchers at all, but cowboys and Spaniards in black hats, and they have tied me up in my own rope and taken my boots, though it’s not as if I were some gorgeous blonde.

  One of these independence days it’ll be: Dear Tom: In Woman’s Land the streets are paved with men: cowboys and motorcyclists, sailors and astronauts. Wait till you get here to make judgments. You’ll see. It’s really for the best.

  But I forgot to mention that Jimmy came along, too, and on the long climb down he told me his life story, which was, I was surprised to hear, a lot like mine. His father had wanted baseball players while mine wanted champion swimmers. Jimmy was terrible. I was good, but not that good, and champion girls are not as fast as champion boys. Poor Daddy.

  So we had crawled down the cliffs whispering together, we women bruising our breasts on outcroppings of rock, Jimmy thumping down on his balls. So we surprised them, but they outnumbered us twenty to one and they had guns, mountain tents, catalytic heaters, steaks and fried chicken, and I saw Tall and Dark walking among them as if he belonged there, not even winking at me. I think he knows both sides too well and can empathize with either one. I see that everybody’s songs bring tears to his eyes. Still, he did follow me here, but what does that mean? And why did he let them tie me up when he knows I’d rather have fought to the death? I might have gotten my man even if they killed me.

  John, John, will I ever again have your little arms around my neck? Your urine warm on my back that makes me feel like your real true-life mother? Will I hear you gurgle in my ear when I ( trip and catch myself in time? And will we ever walk hand in hand in Woman’s Land? I think perhaps so, because my wrists are smaller than they expected or my clothesline stretches. I finally slip out of my bonds and step, in my socks, on the sharp, cold rocks, slipping away, melting into the darkness, I hope. But I don’t go far before I bump into a silent, brooding man sitting apart from the others thinking about his life up to this time. Before I can hit him on the head with my dildo, he says, “I’ve been cheating on my wife and I’ve been cheating on my girl friend.”

  “First of all,” I tell him, “that’s not the way to put it. The very words you use imply a one-way view of things, but that you’re thinking of it at all is a good sign in itself.”

  “It’s so dark I can only see the gleam of his teeth.

  “Are you Spanish?”

  Just
then the moon comes up and I see the handsome cowboy face. “Whoop ti eye are eye aye,” repeated three times and “Git along, little dogie.” (All this internal.)

  “Once I meant to grow up to be a cowboy myself,” I say (I loved horses and horse-faced men), “but, somehow, I forgot it or realized the utter futility, something of the sort. Anyway, I let my big dream die and hardly noticed that it had. Years have gone by since then.”

  “We all have our secret sorrows, but it’s no life for a woman.”

  “There you go again.” There he goes again.

  It’s always that way.

  “I’ll be your cowboy,” he says. “Then you won’t have to be one yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I say, “but I have a lot of mixed feelings about things like that.” Then, just when he least expects it, I do hit him on the head with the dildo. I think I got my man, though, in a way, I’m a little sorry.

  He did look Spanish.

  There’s just one trouble with trying to get away now. Already my feet hurt and there’s blood on my socks. Where, oh, where is Tall and Dark to carry me back to the woman’s camp in his arms?

  And then I bump into another man, but it’s really Jimmy trying to escape disguised as one of them. We’re so glad to see each other we kiss and he lets out a squeal of delight and then we have to run for it. My feet are killing me, but after a few minutes of scrambling around, I see Tall and Dark in front of me and I jump into his arms.

  Women! I got my man and I rode another one all the way back to our side of the cliffs, one noted for his leadership qualities, too. I could say that I, alone, am escaped to tell thee, except for Jimmy, Tall and Dark, Lil, Liz and Pat. Your darts have put a thousand men to sleep and it’s dawn already, with the moon still up. Mother moon, we always say, or Big Ma in the sky. Gather up your bundles, Women. Spring is coming. Step out, and by tomorrow everything will be downhill.

  Whistling, baby Johnny on my back (I hope he grows up to be six feet four and on our side), I cross the peak. Tomorrow we start down, but I don’t expect it will be easy. That uses a whole new set of muscles.

  Joy In Our Cause, Harper & Row, 1974

  Joy in Our Cause

  THE PERSON you care about the most has just told you you’re no good.

  It rings true, but there’s an element of surprise in it.

  He has wonderful hands and always gives free advice even if he is, basically, a nonverbal person.

  (These tears are just from yawning.)

  “In Canada there’s an island named Good Cheer.”

  Now he’s laughing.

  “Well, it’s true and I can prove it because once a seaplane landed at the dock of our summer place and people got out and asked us where Good Cheer was and I didn’t know what they meant. I thought they were asking for some whiskey. I never went there, but if I ever do go I’ll say, ‘I like the way you live, in the woods with your garden and your goats, and I’m quite dissatisfied with life as it is here on the mainland.”

  He’s still laughing.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten Good Cheer. Sometimes I think about it or someplace similar and take three or four deep breaths, noticing that I’m doing it because Ananta Marga said: ‘Observe thyself,’ and I’m trying to learn to do that.”

  Tomorrow we’re going to a party at the museum. He won’t say anything significant, “You won’t say anything significant,” I say. “You never do.” We go and he doesn’t say anything significant and drinks a great deal. I’m unhappy about that because it will make him snore even more than usual. On the way home I tell him exactly what I think of him, mentioning a number of things I had promised myself I wouldn’t, reassured as I was by his hand on my knee.

  I relax myself finger by finger, joint by joint, starting with the right thumb. Ananta Marga had said to become a white kite on a golden thread and fly up to someplace of infinite beauty, peace and order. After some initial moments hovering, earthbound, in thunderheads, I suddenly found myself in a white place in space where all the stars were named by men and labeled A, B and C, etc., with dotted lines drawn between them and all the distances figured out and written down, everything mapped and the paths of planets and constellations drawn in circles and arcs, the giant protractors still in a corner of the sky. The gentle breeze of the universe blew through the stars and I was as white as space myself, naked and cool. This is the known universe, I was thinking, the place where the harmonies of the spheres are heard, octave, perfect fifth and third vibrating according to the laws of physics. And Ananta Marga said, “Return to your bodies but bring something of that place with you.” It’s the speed of time, I thought, and not the speed of light. Einstein was wrong, though he was a very nice man. It’s the speed of time. How could he not have seen that? And we are here, set against a white background. It is meaningful to us. We have measured it. We are not confused. Just then he turned toward me, his penis hard against my thigh (I don’t mean Einstein), and even though I had just thought: We are not confused, I had the feeling of panic that you get sometimes when you’re out on a dark hill looking up at the stars and there are so many of them they make you dizzy and you’re afraid you’re going to slip and fall off the world. Don’t worry, I tell myself, you won’t be called upon to do anything that any other living thing hasn’t had to do at one time or another over the ages-lose a baby, lose a mother, drown or burn to death, divorce, rape….

  Yesterday I rescued a bird from the cat but it was too late. I saw it die, its tiny, pointed tongue sticking out, gasping or gagging. I said, “Do you know a bird has a tongue shaped just like its beak?” But Mother said my goal should always be compassion so I tell him, “All right. You can make love to me but sometimes the heart stops quite suddenly when you least expect it. Often, it is said, during lovemaking which is why, I suppose, we so often die in bed. It takes a certain amount of courage to begin. A measuring of priorities. Sometimes things work out pretty well when you least expect them to, but you never know until afterward if it was worth the risk.”

  (I’m glad I had compassion.)

  I’ll bet he’s wondering why I went to bed and didn’t get up for three days. (What was there to get up for?) Actually, I really don’t know why I did it, but I think I was waiting for something to happen, something exciting or even just a little bit out of the ordinary. Not just any old thing. I wanted to be surprised! But on the third day I got up in time to make macaroni and cheese for supper, watched four hours of TV, made fairly satisfying love that night (I pretended it was Einstein), and I’ve been getting up regularly ever since though not very early.

  But all I ever really wanted was a little privacy. (He says he’s trying to think of ways for me to get it.)

  “If movies are an art form,” I tell him, “and I’m not saying that they’re not, but then surely D. W. Griffith does not belong to their past.”

  “Does anybody ever really read those modern, experimental novels all the way to the end? Even Ronald Firbank?” (He’s thinking he could give me a little corner of his studio, but I’m not interested in listening to that plan. )

  I think we ought to read some books on love. Maybe one on touching and the best places to be kissed. One on little gestures of affection and when to make them. One on sex after forty. Books could change our lives. Let me read you where it says how often you should tell me that you care and the part about dinner out once a week.

  I thought by now you’d have dedicated something to me, your companion of twenty years, but, of course, it’s too late, now that I’ve mentioned it.

  THAT AFTERNOON

  Trying to work together on a common project, he calls me destructive to his creative instincts.

  “My growing individualism is bothering you.”

  “You’re so sincere when you’re angry.”

  “I have what I think of you on the tip of my tongue, but I wouldn’t say it.”

  I bend his middle finger back as hard as I can and he kicks me in the crotch before I can get away, but women don’t hurt
there as much as men do.

  Standing with my back to the person I care about the most, I hide my face and think that maybe it’s all just the usual isolation of the artist. We are making attempts, that is, at an alienation common to our era and to our generation.

  “Sorry,” he says, “but I’m breaking with society in order to get an unbiased view of it.”

  “I already did that.”

  The person you care about the most has just walked out the door and said a dirty word. Be of Good Cheer, I tell myself. Be of Good Cheer. Worship the sun a few times in a series of gestures stretching the spine and end with a little rest in the swan position. Think of Einstein, that gentle little man. It’s calming.

  Good Cheer is an animal, a small brown dog belonging to a friend, or perhaps it’s a hot toddy. It’s a pollution-free detergent in a green box with leaves printed on it, a postcoital sensation, an attitude that can be cultivated, a breakfast cereal.

  They live like Indians out on that island, wild blueberries, wild rice, no telephone, no clocks but the sun, no calendar but the moon and the stars.

  Here clocks are ticking all day long and even astronomers tell the time by their watches. Here people are dying as they breathe in and one of these days they’ll all be sorry for the way they’ve been acting. (I’ve been trying to be mature, but I don’t want to be the only mature person around here.)

  Criticism? laziness? sloth? lassitude? madness? empty threats of divorce? imagined lovers? Shall I use all my woman-weapons if he’s thinking of exerting his greater physical strength or economic independence? (I’m not in the mood for suicide, though that may be the biggest weapon I’ve got.)