The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  I must try harder. I will tell Klimp that he can rub my back later. I’ll apologize for being angry and I’ll try to do it in a nice way. Then I’ll go into the bedroom, shut the door, brace it with a chair and be really alone for a while. Lie down and relax. I know I’ll miss cooking up some important concoctions, but I’ve missed a lot of things lately.

  Next thing I know I wake up and it’s dark outside. I have a terrible stomach ache as if a lot of gas is rolling around inside. I feel strange. I have to get out of here.

  I can hear one of them moving outside my door. I hear him brush against it… a chitinous scraping. “Let me in. I loofe you.” Then there’s that kind of giggle. He can’t help it, I know, but it’s getting on my nerves. “Is as does,” he says. “Now you see that.” I put on my sneakers and grab my old sweatshirt.

  “Just a minute, dear”—I try to say it sweetly— “I just woke up. I’ll let you in in a minute. I need a cup of tea. I’d love it if you’d get one for me.” (I really do need one, but I’m not going to wait around for it.) I open the window and step out on the garage roof cross to the tree, and climb down. Not hard. I’m a chubby old woman, but I’m in pretty good shape. The cats follow me. All three.

  As I trot by, I see all the ewes in the backyard lying down and panting. God! I have to get out of here. I run, holding my stomach. I know of an empty lot with an old Norway spruce tree that comes down to the ground all around. I think I can make that. I see cats all around me, more than just my own. Maybe six or eight. Maybe more. Hard to see because, and thank God, Klimp has broken all the streetlights. I cross vacant lots, tear through brambles, finally crawl under the spruce branches and lie down panting… panting. It feels right to pant. I saw my cat do that under similar circumstances.

  I have them. I give birth to them, the little silvery ones squeaking…sparkling. I’ll surprise Klimp with eighty-four… ninety-six… one hundred and eight? Look what we did together! But it wasn’t Klimp and I. Suddenly I realize it. It was Klimp and that other. Through me. And all those ewes… fourteen ewes and one bitch dog times eighty-four or one hundred and eight. That’s well over a thousand of them that I know about already.

  My little ones cough and flutter, try to swim into the air, but only raise themselves an inch or so… hardly that. They smell of fish. They slither over one another as though looking for a stream. They are covered with a shiny, clear kind of slime. Do I love them or hate them?

  So that’s the way it is. As with us humans, it takes two, only I wasn’t one of them. I might just as well have been a bitch or a ewe ... better, in fact, to have been some dumb animal. “Lots of little warm, wet places!” It must have been a big night, that night. Some sacred sort of higher beings they turned out to be. That’s not love ... nor luff, nor loove. Whatever they mean by those words, this can’t be it.

  But look what all those hungry cats are doing. Eating up my minnows. I try to gather the little things up, but they’re too slippery. I can’t even get one. I try to push the cats away, but there are too many of them and they all seem very hungry. And then, suddenly, Klimp is there helping me, kicking out at the cats in a fury and gathering up minnows at the same time. For him it’s easy. They stick to him wherever he touches them. He’s up to his elbows in them. They cluster on his ankles like barnacles, but I’m afraid lots are eaten up already. And now he’s kicking out at me. Hits me hard on the cheek and shoulder. Stamps on my hand.

  “I’m confused,” I say, getting up, thinking he can explain all this in a fatherly way, but now he stamps on my foot and knocks me down with his elbow. Then I see him give a kind of hop step, the standard dance way of getting from one foot to the other. He’s going to lift. I don’t know how I know, but I do. He has that look on his face, too, eyes half closed… ecstasy. I see it now—flying, or almost flying, is their ultimate orgasm…their true love (or loofe)… if this is flying. Yes, he’s up, but only inches, and struggling… pulling at my fingers. This is not flying.

  ‘’You call this flying!” I yell. “And you call this whole thing being a pure aerial being! I say, cloaca… cloaca, I say, is your only orifice.” I have, by now, one leg hooked around his neck and both hands grabbing his elbow, and he’s not really more than one foot off the ground at the very highest, if that, and struggling for every inch. “Cloaca! You and your ‘luff!” The slime and minnows are all over him. He seems dressed in them… sparkling like sequins. He’s too slippery with them. I can’t hang on. I slip off and drop lightly into the brambles. Klimp slides away at a diagonal, right shoulder leading, and glides, luminous with slime, just off the ground. Disappears in a few seconds behind the trees. “Cloaca!” I shout after him. It’s the worst I’ve ever said to anyone. “Filthy fish thing! Call that flying!”

  Everything is going wrong. It always does, I should know that by now. I’m thinking that my former husband slipped away in almost exactly the same way. He was slippery too, sneaked out first with younger women and then left me for one of them later on. I tried to grab at him the same way I grabbed at Klimp. Tried to hold him back. I even tried to change my ways to suit him. I know I’ve got faults. I talk too much. I worry about things that never happen (though they did finally happen, almost all of them, and now look).

  I hobble back (with cats), too angry to feel the pain of my bruises. No sign of the ewes or the dog, but the backyard looks all silvery. No minnows left there, though, just slime. I have to admit it’s lovely. Makes me feel romantic feelings for Klimp in spite of myself I wonder if he saw it. They’re so sensitive to beautiful things and they love glitter. I can see why.

  The house is dark. I open the door cautiously. I let in all eight… no, nine… maybe ten cats. I call. No answer. I lock all the windows and the doors. I check under the beds and in the closets. Nobody. I go into the bathroom and lock that door too. Fill tub. Take off my clothes. Find two minnows stuck inside my sweatshirt. One is dead. The other very weak. I put him in the tub and he seems to revive a little. He has big eyes, four fins where legs and arms would be, a minnow’s tail… actually big blue eyes… pale blue, like Klimp’s. He looks at me with such pleading. He comes to the surface to breathe and squeaks now and then. I keep making reassuring sounds as if I were talking to the cats. Then I decide to get in the tub with him myself Carefully, though. With me in the tub, the creature seems happier. Swims around making a kind of humming sound and blowing bubbles. Follows my hand. Lets me pick it up. I’m thinking it’s a clear case of bonding, perhaps for both of us.

  Now that I’m relaxing in the water, I’m feeling a lot better. And nothing like a helpless little blue-eyed creature of some sort to care for to bring brightness into life. The thing needs me. And so do all those cats.

  I lie quietly, cats miaowing outside the door, but I just lie here and Charles (Charles was my father’s name)… Charles? Howard? Henry? He falls asleep in the shallows between my breasts. I don’t dare move. The phone rings and there’s the thunk of something knocked over by the cats. I don’t move. I don’t care.

  So what about ecology? “What about our favorite planet, Klimp’s and mine? How best save it? And who for? Make it safe for this thing on my chest? (Charles Bird? Henry Fishman?) Quietly breathing. Blue eyes shut. And what about all those thousands of others? Department of fisheries? Department of lakes and streams? Gelatin factory? Or the damp ‘ basements of those housing developments built in former swamps?

  I blame myself I really do. Perhaps if I’d been more understanding of their problems… accepted them as they are. Not criticized all that sand tracked in. And so what if they did step on the tails of cats? I’ve been so irritable these last few days. No wonder Klimp kicked out at me. If only I had controlled myself and thought about what they were going through. It was a crucial time for them too. But all I thought about was myself and my blowing-up stomach. Me, me, me! No wonder my former husband walked out. And now the same old pattern. Another breakup, another identity crisis. It shows I haven’t learned a thing.

  I almost fa
ll asleep lying here, but when the water begins to get cold we both wake up, Charles and I. I rig up a system, then, with the electric frying pan on the lowest setting and two inches of water on top of a piece of flannel. Put Charles… Henry?… inside, sprinkle in crumbs of wafer. Lid on. Vent open. Lock the whole business in my bedroom on top of the knick-knack shelves. Then I check out their room, Klimp’s and the others’. It’s a mess, wafers scattered around… several pink ones, bed not made. If they were, all three, men, I’d understand it, but that can’t be. I wonder if they used servants where they come from… or slaves? Well, Charles will be brought up differently. Learn to pick up his underwear and help out around the house, cook something besides telephone books and such. I find a talisman under the bed. I shut my eyes, squeeze hard, wondering can I lift with it? Maybe, on the other hand, it’s some sort of anchor to stop with or to be let down by. Something thrown out to keep from flying. I’ll save it for Charles.

  I sit down to rest with a cup of tea, two cats on my lap and one across my shoulders. All the cats seem fat and happy, and I really feel pretty happy too… considering.

  The telephone rings again and this time I answer it. It’s a love call. I think I recognize Klimp’s voice, but he won’t say if it’s him and they do all sound a lot alike, sort of muffled and slurred. Anyway, he says he wants to do all those things with me, things, actually, he already did. I suppose this call is part of a new campaign. I don’t think much of it and I tell him so. “How about breaking school windows and stealing library books?” I say. But whose side am I on now? “Listen,” I say, “I know of a nice wet place devoid of cats. It’s called the Love Canal and you’ll love it. Lots of empty houses. And there’s another place in New Jersey that I know of Call me back and I’ll have the exact address for you.” I think he believes me. (Evidently they haven’t read all the books about women.)

  Political appointees. I’ll bet that’s what they are. Makes a lot of sense. I could do as well myself And did, actually. Who was it sent them out with spray-paint cans? Who told them how to cause static on TV? Who had thousands of stickers made up reading: NO DANGER, NONTOXIC, and GENERALLY REGARDED AS SAFE?

  We can do all this by ourselves. Let’s see: number 1, day-care-aquarium centers; number 2, separate cat-breeding facilities; number 3, the takeover proper; number 4, the lying fallow period. And we have time… plenty of time. Our numbers keep increasing, too, though slowly… the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out… Maybe they’ve already started it. I can’t be the only one thinking this way. Maybe they’re out there just waiting for my call, kitchens all warmed up. I’ll dial my old friend. “Include me in,” I’ll say.

  Everything will be perfect, and I even have Charles. We don’t need them. Bunch of bureaucrats. That wasn’t flying.

  Universe 11, Doubleday, 1981

  Slowly Bumbling in the Void

  THERE IS A NEED in all of us to build a little house, log by log or stone by stone. There is a need to sew up a little mattress for the floor, to stash away dried food in leather pouches (rice and figs); a need to make a little set of shelves and to put up a hook for our coat and another hook for our pan. There is a need to make soup out of old bones, to gather dandelion greens and prepare them according to a grandmother’s recipe. Then there is a need that a storm should rage outside and that we should sleep through it. Afterwards—after, that is, the need to make a map of the territory—there is a need in all of us to move in time to some kind of tapping, to move (decorated and with hat) to tunes or to playa game with small stones, and all the while, to be on the lookout for something mysterious.

  There is a need in me to knit a scarf for you, to make (for you) an overcoat out of a blanket. There is a need to string a wire from the telephone to the pole in order to call you up. There is a need for a calendar of the coming year in order to write down what will happen in the future and in order to mark an X on the days when you will be here. There is a need for a little alarm clock and perhaps a little wind-up toy that hops and turns in circles with a clicking sound. (These are for you.)

  I also want to prepare for you a fish that you caught with your bare hands in my stream. I need to prepare your fish. I need to hear you call me by my name holding out your fish.

  “I said I want to cook your fish! Were you listening to me then? Are you listening to me now?”

  He isn’t listening.

  He has a funny shape for a hero, but then I have never been known as a full-breasted woman.

  It’s still the simple life—except now, to go anywhere, one always needs keys and a watch. Speak of the hero before he appears (under the black, ceremonial umbrella) saying: These are the beloved’s dark brown socks. (Your socks.) Here, his dirty shirt. It is his hairs that !ire stuck in the comb. This is where he spilled his drink. This is where he put his fist through the wall saying, “We must find a peaceful solution to our marriage.” But he has put his cheek against my birthmark. He has licked lint from my navel. He has washed my feet.

  But already it’s several years later and we have moved on now into a whole other category. You’ve turned the cottage into a TV station or it might as well be. I’m not the star here even though I’m blinded by lights that are reflected in the surfaces of utensils and mirrors that belong to both of us. My blemishes are revealed and catalogued and held against me. “Oh.” I say it for the camera. “Oh wind, sand, and dim (suburban) stars… vast plain with here and there a ridiculous promontory…” (It’s Long Island. New York is on the horizon. Perhaps life would be better here if it were the other way around.)

  So how do I look on my way to the waterfall, especially now that it’s several years later? Still shrouded in mystery? Still seen as though from behind a scrim of desire? Though how long can a scrim like that last? Look. This is me leaning over to drink from the water. This is me taking off one shoe and putting my foot in even though it’s ice-cold. This is you, happening to notice my foot. I believe I have revealed another blemish.

  But how begin to describe myself even to myself? How do it when caught suddenly between short hair and long? Between the big middle period of life and old age? Between one kind of love and the next higher form? Another day, in other words, and a whole other category of existence in which I may even make a move in the direction of freedom… freedom, that is, around a fixed point. (You.)

  But he has turned away already, crying out, “Direct access,” (a not unfamiliar cry where the media is concerned) or is it, “Direct success”?

  How make love grow? (There is a need.) (There is a responsibility.) Proceed along given lines set forth in certain books. (It’s already an exact science.) Don’t wait to be asked! Keep both hands busy at the same time. Mouth. He may be grateful. (I kissed his instep.)

  In your dream you were proud of your enormous penis. You showed it off to me, suspecting I wouldn’t like it, and you were right, I didn’t, even in your dream. In my dream the vagina stuck out like a duck’s beak and snapped up everything it could reach. In your dream you puffed yourself up still further until it would have taken some giantess to engulf you. In my dream it wasn’t a question of size, but that the vicious vagina could snap off your hand if you reached for me. In answer to my dream you dreamt your giant penis tore me in two. In my next dream you went limp all of a sudden (probably from some remark of mine) and had to stuff your long, weak self down your left pant leg and on into your shoe.

  He wants to take good care of his penis.

  He wants to make good use of it.

  There is a need in me to make a gesture in the direction of freedom, outwards from a fixed point which is you. There is a need to project an upward climb and to make promises (if only to myself) and to make, also, a little chart for the wall in order to keep track of the progress. Freedom is up the left side. Love is marked along the bottom line. No, I mean time, in increments of half a day, along the bottom. Progress is inevitably outwards, therefore, from the fixed point of what we used to be to each other. There may b
e happy accidents. One can look forward to them. A complete new repertoire of behavior may be possible for both of us, including reversal of roles, dancing, rage, and even mediocrity. (I have sometimes, here on this featureless plain, made myself bland out of the fear of being bland.)

  Up to now, we have been leading a kind of once-over-lightly life.

  Here on this plain, New York on the horizon, futile rustic gestures in the form of tree-lined streets, you have offered me cookies. These are the cookies of love. (This is in a dream.) I laugh behind my hand and only pretend to be delighted. I don’t dare take any and I act out an enthusiasm for them that I do not feel. Why, in this dream, do I not allow myself to take them? Why, in this dream, do I want to laugh at you?

  Even so, I give you the run of my little house, but you want more headroom.

  Reality appears in the form of a long journey. You have gone to the mountainous region in search of direct access and a hands-on experience though you have professed to be in search of semiprecious stones.

  You yourself become the missing element.

  You are no longer under the ceremonial black umbrella.

  I wear a monkey’s skull on the other end of my tether. (It’s for show. I have tied it there myself.)

  A hundred years ago this land was marshlands. It’s no wonder, then, that all roads become impassable, and that I can’t even make my way to my own kitchen where I had hoped to conduct experiments (culinary) on your fist. I mean, fish. (It has crawled away gasping. I heard it in the middle of the night) I will call you up. (Assuming, that is, that I can make it to the phone.) I want to tell you something that’s not a defense or a pretense or an explanation.