The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Edna

  All right now, I want an answer. All my life since I was fourteen I have been making my soul. I don’t know what else to call it, that’s what I called it then, when I was fourteen and came into the possession of my life and the knowledge of my responsibility. Since then I have not had time to find a better name for it. The word responsible means that you have to answer. You can’t not answer. You’d might rather not answer, but you have to. When you answer you are making your soul, so that it has a shape to it, and size, and some staying power. I understood that, I came into that knowledge, when I was thirteen and early fourteen, that long winter in the Siskiyous. All right, so ever since then, more or less, I have worked according to that understanding. And I have worked. I have done what came into my hands to do, and I’ve done it the best I could and with all the mind and strength I had to give to it. There have been jobs, waitressing and clerking, but first of all and always the ordinary work of raising the children and keeping the house so that people can live decently and in health and some degree of peace of mind. Then there is responding to the needs of men. That seems like it should come first. People might say I never thought of anything but answering what men asked, pleasing men and pleasing myself, and goodness knows such questions are a joy to answer if asked by a pleasant man. But in the order of my mind, the children come before the fathers of the children. Maybe I see it that way because I was the eldest daughter and there were four younger than me and my father had gone off. Well, all right then, those are my responsibilities as I see them, those are the questions I have tried always to answer: can people live in this house, and how does a child grow up rightly, and how to be trustworthy.

  But now I have my own question. I never asked questions, I was so busy answering them, but am sixty years old this winter and think I should have time for a question. But it’s hard to ask. Here it is. It’s like all the time I was working keeping house and raising the kids and making love and earning our keep I thought there was going to come a time or there would be some place where all of it all came together. Like it was words I was saying, all my life, all the kinds of work, just a word here and a word there, but finally all the words would make a sentence, and I could read the sentence. I would have made my soul and know what it was for.

  But I have made my soul and I don’t know what to do with it. Who wants it? I have lived sixty years. All I’ll do from now on is the same as what I have done only less of it, while I get weaker and sicker and smaller all the time, shrinking and shrinking around myself, and die. No matter what I did, or made, or know. The words don’t mean anything. I ought to talk with Emma about this. She’s the only one who doesn’t say stuff like, “You’re only as old as you think you are,” “Oh Edna you’ll never be old,” rubbish like that. Toby Walker wouldn’t talk that way either, but he doesn’t say much at all any more. Keeps his sentence to himself. My kids that still live here, Archie and Sook, they don’t want to hear anything about it. Nobody young can afford to believe in getting old.

  So is all the responsibility you take only useful then, but no use later—disposable? What’s the use, then? All the work you did is just gone. It doesn’t make anything. But I may be wrong. I hope so, I would like to have more trust in dying. Maybe it’s worth while, like some kind of answering, coming into another place. Like I felt that winter in the Siskiyous, walking on the snow road between black firs under all the stars, that I was the same size as the universe, the same thing as the universe. And if I kept on walking ahead there was this glory waiting for me. In time I would come into glory. I knew that. So that’s what I made my soul for. I made it for glory.

  And I have known a good deal of glory. I’m not ungrateful. But it doesn’t last. It doesn’t come together to make a place where you can live, a house. It’s gone and the years go. What’s left? Shrinking and forgetting and thinking about aches and acid indigestion and cancers and pulse rates and bunions until the whole world is a room that smells like urine, is that what all the work comes to, is that the end of the babies’ kicking legs, the children’s eyes, the loving hands, the wild rides, the light on water, the stars over the snow? Somewhere inside it all there has to still be the glory.

  Ervin Muth

  I have been watching Mr. “Toby” Walker for a good while, checking up on things, and if I happened to be called upon to I could state with fair certainty that this “Mr. Walker” is not an American. My research has taken me considerably farther afield than that. But there are these “gray areas” or some things which many people as a rule are unprepared to accept. It takes training.

  My attention was drawn to these kind of matters in the first place by scrutinizing the town records on an entirely different subject of research. Suffice it to say that I was checking the title on the Fane place at the point in time when Mrs. Osey Jean Fane put the property into the hands of Ervin Muth Relaty, of which I am proprietor. There had been a dispute concerning the property line on the east side of the Fane property in 1939 into which, due to being meticulous concerning these kind of detailed responsibilities, I checked. To my surprise I was amazed to discover that the adjoining lot, which had been developed in 1906, had been in the name of Tobinye Walker since that date, 1906! I naturally assumed at that point in time that this “Tobinye Walker” was “Mr. Toby Walker’s” father and thought little more about the issue until my researches into another matter, concerning the Essel/Emmer lots, in the town records indicated that the name “Tobinye Walker” was shown as purchaser of a livery stable on that site (on Main St. between Rash St. and Goreman Ave.) in 1880.

  While purchasing certain necessaries in the Needless Grocery Store soon after, I encountered Mr. Walker in person. I remarked in a jocular vein that I had been meeting his father and grandfather. This was of course a mere pleasantry. Mr. “Toby” Walker responded in what struck me as a suspicious fashion. There was some taking aback going on. Although with laughter. His exact words, to which I can attest, were the following: “I had no idea that you were capable of travelling in time!”

  This was followed by my best efforts to seriously inquire concerning the persons of his same name which my researches in connection with my work as a realtor had turned up. These were only met with facetious remarks such as, “I’ve lived here quite a while, you see,” and, “Oh, I remember when Lewis and Clark came through,” a statement in reference to the celebrated explorers of the Oregon Trail, who I ascertained later to have been in Oregon in 1806.

  Soon after, Mr. Toby Walker “walked” away, thus ending the conversation.

  I am convinced by evidence that “Mr. Walker” is an illegal immigrant from a foreign country who has assumed the name of a Founding Father of this fine community, that is to wit the Tobinye Walker who purchased the livery stable in 1880. I have my reasons.

  My research shows conclusively that the Lewis and Clark Expedition sent by President Thos. Jefferson did not pass through any of the localities which our fine community of Ether has occupied over the course of its history. Ether never got that far north.

  If Ether is to progress to fulfill its destiny as a Destination Resort on the beautiful Oregon Coast and Desert as I visualize it with a complete downtown entertainment center and entrepreneurial business community, including hub motels, RV facilities, and a Theme Park, the kind of thing that is represented by “Mr.” Walker will have to go. It is the American way to buy and sell houses and properties continually in the course of moving for the sake of upward mobility and self-improvement. Stagnation is the enemy of the American way. The same person owning the same property since 1906 is unnatural and Unamerican. Ether is an American town and moves all the time. That is its destiny. I can call myself an expert.

  Starra Walinow Amethyst

  I keep practicing love. I was in love with that French actor Gerard but it’s really hard to say his last name. Frenchmen attract me. When I watch Star Trek The Next Generation reruns I’m in love with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, but I can’t stand Commander Riker. I us
ed to be in love with Heathcliff when I was twelve and Miss Freff gave me Wuthering Heights to read. And I was in love with Sting for a while before he got weirder. Sometimes I think I am in love with Lieutenant Worf but that is pretty weird, with all those sort of wrinkles and horns on his forehead, since he’s a Klingon, but that’s not really what’s weird. I mean it’s just in the TV that he’s an alien. Really he is a human named Michael Dorn. That is so weird to me. I mean I never have seen a real black person except in movies and TV. Everybody in Ether is white. So a black person would actually be an alien here. I thought what it would be like if somebody like that came into like the drug store, really tall, with that dark brown skin and dark eyes and those very soft lips that look like they could get hurt so easily, and asked for something in that really, really deep voice. Like, “Where would I find the aspirin?” And I would show him where the aspirin kind of stuff is. He would be standing beside me in front of the shelf, really big and tall and dark, and I’d feel warmth coming out of him like out of an iron woodstove. He’d say to me in a very low voice, “I don’t belong in this town,” and I’d say back, “I don’t either,” and he’d say, “Do you want to come with me?” only really really nicely, not like a come-on but like two prisoners whispering how to get out of prison together. I’d nod, and he’d say, “Back of the gas station, at dusk.”

  At dusk.

  I love that word. Dusk. It sounds like his voice.

  Sometimes I feel weird thinking about him like this. I mean because he is actually real. If it was just Worf, that’s OK, because Worf is just this alien in some old reruns of a show. But there is actually Michael Dorn. So thinking about him in a sort of story that way makes me uncomfortable sometimes, because it’s like I was making him a toy, something I can do anything with, like a doll. That seems like it was unfair to him. And it makes me sort of embarrassed when I think about how he actually has his own life with nothing to do with this dumb girl in some hick town he never heard of. So I try to make up somebody else to make that kind of stories about. But it doesn’t work.

  I really tried this spring to be in love with Morrie Stromberg, but it didn’t work. He’s really beautiful-looking. It was when I saw him shooting baskets that I thought maybe I could be in love with him. His legs and arms are long and smooth and he moves smooth and looks kind of like a mountain lion, with a low forehead and short dark blond hair, tawny colored. But all he ever does is hang out with Joe’s crowd and talk about sport scores and cars, and once in class he was talking with Joe about me so I could hear, like, “Oh yeah Starra, wow, she reads books,” not really mean, but kind of like I was like an alien from another planet, just totally absolutely strange. Like Worf or Michael Dorn would feel here. Like he meant OK, it’s OK to be like that only not here. Somewhere else, OK? As if Ether wasn’t already somewhere else. I mean, didn’t it use to be the Indians that lived here, and now there aren’t any of them either? So who belongs here and where does it belong?

  About a month ago Mom told me the reason she left my father. I don’t remember anything like that. I don’t remember any father. I don’t remember anything before Ether. She says we were living in Seattle and they had a store where they sold crystals and oils and New Age stuff, and when she got up one night to go to the bathroom he was in my room holding me. She wanted to tell me everything about how he was holding me and stuff, but I just went, “So, like, he was molesting me.” And she went, “Yeah,” and I said, “So what did you do?” I thought they would have had a big fight. But she said she didn’t say anything, because she was afraid of him. She said, “See, to him it was like he owned me and you. And when I didn’t go along with that, he would get real crazy.” I think they were into a lot of pot and heavy stuff, she talks about that sometimes. So anyway next day when he went to the store she just took some of the crystals and stuff they kept at home, we still have them, and got some money they kept in a can in the kitchen just like she does here, and got on the bus to Portland with me. Somebody she met there gave us a ride here. I don’t remember any of that. It’s like I was born here. I asked did he ever try to look for her, and she said she didn’t know but if he did he’d have a hard time finding her here. She changed her last name to Amethyst, which is her favorite stone. Walinow was her real name. She says it’s Polish.

  I don’t know what his name was. I don’t know what he did. I don’t care. It’s like nothing happened. I’m never going to belong to anybody.

  What I know is this, I am going to love people. They will never know it. But I am going to be a great lover. I know how. I have practiced. It isn’t when you belong to somebody or they belong to you or stuff. That’s like Chelsey getting married to Tim because she wanted to have the wedding and the husband and a no-wax kitchen floor. She wanted stuff to belong to.

  I don’t want stuff, but I want practice. Like we live in this shack with no kitchen let alone a no-wax floor, and we cook on a trashburner, with a lot of crystals around, and cat pee from the strays Mom takes in, and Mom does stuff like sweeping out for Myrella’s beauty parlor, and gets zits because she eats Hostess Twinkies instead of food. Mom needs to get it together. But I need to give it away.

  I thought maybe the way to practice love was to have sex so I had sex with Danny last summer. Mom bought us condoms and made me hold hands with her around a bayberry candle and talk about the Passage Into Womanhood. She wanted Danny to be there too but I talked her out of it. The sex was OK but what I was really trying to do was be in love. It didn’t work. Maybe it was the wrong way. He just got used to getting sex and so he kept coming around all fall, going “Hey Starra baby you know you need it.” He wouldn’t even say that it was him that needed it. If I need it, I can do it a lot better myself than he can. I didn’t tell him that. Although I nearly did when he kept not letting me alone after I told him to stop. If he hadn’t finally started going with Dana I might would have told him.

  I don’t know anybody else here I can be in love with. I wish I could practice on Archie but what’s the use while there’s Gracie Fane? It would just be dumb. I thought about asking Archie’s father Mr. Hiddenstone if I could work on his ranch, next time we get near it. I could still come see Mom, and maybe there would be like ranch hands or cowboys. Or Archie would come out sometimes and there wouldn’t be Gracie. Or actually there’s Mr. Hiddenstone. He looks like Archie. Actually handsomer. But I guess is too old. He has a face like the desert. I noticed his eyes are the same color as Mom’s turquoise ring. But I don’t know if he needs a cook or anything and I suppose fifteen is too young.

  J. Needless

  Never have figured out where the Hohovars come from. Somebody said White Russia. That figures. They’re all big and tall and heavy with hair so blond it’s white and those little blue eyes. They don’t look at you. Noses like new potatoes. Women don’t talk. Kids don’t talk. Men talk like, “Vun case yeast peggets, tree case piggle beet.” Never say hello, never say good-bye, never say thanks. But honest. Pay right up in cash. When they come in town they’re all dressed head to foot, the women in these long dresses with a lot of fancy stuff around the bottom and sleeves, the little girls just the same as the women, even the babies in the same long stiff skirts, all of them with bonnet things that hide their hair. Even the babies don’t look up. Men and boys in long pants and shirt and coat even when it’s desert here and a hundred and five in July. Something like those ammish folk on the east coast, I guess. Only the Hohovars have buttons. A lot of buttons. The vest things the women wear have about a thousand buttons. Men’s flies the same. Must slow ’em down getting to the action. But everybody says buttons are no problem when they get back to their community. Everything off. Strip naked to go to their church. Tom Sunn swears to it, and Corrie says she used to sneak out there more than once on Sunday with a bunch of other kids to see the Hohovars all going over the hill buck naked, singing in their language. That would be some sight, all those tall, heavy-fleshed, white-skinned, big-ass, big-tit women parading over the hill. Barefoot, too. W
hat the hell they do in church I don’t know. Tom says they commit fornication but Tom Sunn don’t know shit from a hole in the ground. All talk. Nobody I know has ever been over that hill.

  Some Sundays you can hear them singing.

  Now religion is a curious thing in America. According to the Christians there is only one of anything. On the contrary there seems to me to be one or more of everything. Even here in Ether we have, that I know of, Baptists of course, Methodists, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic though no church in town, a Quaker, a lapsed Jew, a witch, the Hohovars, and the gurus or whatever that lot in the grange are. This is not counting most people, who have no religious affiliation except on impulse.

  That is a considerable variety for a town this size. What’s more, they try out each other’s churches, switch around. Maybe the nature of the town makes us restless. Anyhow people in Ether generally live a long time, though not as long as Toby Walker. We have time to try out different things. My daughter Corrie has been a Baptist as a teen-ager, a Methodist while in love with Jim Fry, then had a go at the Lutherans. She was married Methodist but is now the Quaker, having read a book. This may change, as lately she has been talking to the witch, Pearl W. Amethyst, and reading another book, called Crystals and You.