I Live With You

by Carol Emshwiller

  I think about that black lacy underwear. That pink silk nightie. As soon as I have a chance, I’ll go get them. I might need them for myself.

  But how get you moving? You’re both all talk. Or you are, he’s not talking much. Perhaps one look at the nightie might get things rolling. That’ll have to be for later. Or on the other hand….

  I reach back to the shelf behind me and, when neither he nor you are looking, I bring out the sherry. You’ll both think the other one got the bottle out.

  (You do.)

  You get wine glasses. You even get out your TV dinner and say you’ll split it. It’s turkey with stuffing. You got it special for Christmas.

  Of course he says for you to eat it all, but you say you never do, anyway, so you split it.

  I’m getting hungry myself. If it was just you, I would sneak a few bites but there’s little enough food for the two of you. I’ll have to find another way.

  You both get tipsy. It doesn’t take much. You hardly ever drink and it looks like he doesn’t either. And I think you want to get drunk. You want something to happen as much as I do.

  Every now and then I take a sip of your drinks. And on an empty stomach it takes even less. With the drone of your talk, talk, talking, I almost go to sleep. But you’re heading upstairs already.

  I crawl out from under the table and climb the stairs behind you. I’m as wobbly as you are. Actually I’m wobblier. We, all three, go into your bedroom. And the cat. You push the deadbolt. He wonders why. “Aren’t you alone here?”

  You say, “Not exactly.” And then, “I’ll tell you later.”

  (You’re right, this certainly isn’t the time for a discussion about me.)

  First thing I grab our sexy nightie from the drawer. I get under the bed and put it on. That’s not easy, cramped up under there. For a few minutes I lose track of what’s happening above me. I comb my hair as you always have it, back away from your face. I have to use my fingers and I don’t have a mirror so I’m not sure how it comes out. I pinch my cheeks and bite my lips to make them redder.

  The cat purrs.

  I lean up to see what’s going on.

  Nothing much so far. Even though tipsy, he seems shy. Inexperienced. I don’t think he’s ever been anybody’s grandfather.

  (We’re, all of us, all of a piece. None of us has ever been anybody’s relative.)

  You look pretty much passed out. Or you’re pretending. Either way, it’s a good time for me to make an appearance.

  I crawl out from under the bed and check myself in the mirror behind them. My hair is a mess but I look good in the silky nightgown. Better than you do in your stipes and red pants. By far.

  I do a little sexy dance. I say, “She’s not Nora, I’m Nora. I’m the one wrote you that note.”

  You sit up. You were faking being drunk. You think: Now I see who you are. Now I’ll get you. But you won’t.

  I stroke the cat. Suggestively. He purrs. (The cat, I mean.) I purr. Suggestively.

  I see his eyes light up. (The man’s, I mean.) Now there’ll be some action.

  I say, “I don’t even know your name.”

  He says, “Willard.”

  I’m on his good side because I asked, and you’re not because you didn’t. All this talk, talk, talk, talk, and you didn’t.

  You slither away, down under the bed. You feel ashamed of yourself and yet curious. You wonder: How did you ever get yourself in this position, and what to do now? But I do know what to do. I give you a kick and hand you the cat.

  Willard. Willard is a little confused. But eager. More than before. He likes the nightgown and says so.

  I take a good long look at him. Those bushy eyebrows. Lots of white hairs in them. I help him take off his shirt. His is not my favorite kind of chest. He does have a nice flat stomach though. (I liked that about him from the start—back when I first saw him wobbling down the street.) I look into his green/gray/tan eyes.

  But what about, I love you?

  I say it, “What about I love you?”

  That stops him. I didn’t mean to do that. I wanted to give Nora a good show. Of course it’s much too soon for any sort of thing that might resemble love.

  “I take that back,” I say.

  But it’s too late. He’s putting on his shirt. (It’s a dressy white one. He’s even wearing cufflinks engraved with W.T.)

  Is it really over already?

  I pick up the cat, hurry out, slam the door, and push the deadbolt on the outside, then turn back and look through the keyhole. I can see almost the whole bed.

  Now look, his hands are… all of a sudden… on her and on all the right places. He knows. Maybe he actually is somebody’s grandfather after all. And you… you are feeling things that make your back arch.

  He tells you he loves you. Now he says it. He can’t tell us apart. He’ll love anything that comes his way.

  I have what I thought I wanted… a good view of something interesting for a change, except….

  Actually I can’t see much, just his back and then your back and then his back and then yours. (How do they do that, still attached?)

  Until we’re all, all of us, exhausted.

  I go downstairs…. (I like how this nightgown feels. I’m so slinky and slippery. I bump and grind just for myself.)

  I make myself a peanut-butter sandwich. I feel better after eating. Things are fine.

  I might leave you milk and cookies. Bring it now while you sleep so I can lock you both in again. But I don’t suppose that lock will hold against two people who really want to get out.

  I think about maybe both of you up in my crawl space. He’s taller than we are. He’d not like it. I think about your job at the ice-cream factory unfolding boxes to put the ice cream in. I wouldn’t mind that kind of job. You sit and daydream. I saw you. You hardly talk to anybody.

  I think about how you can’t prove you’re you. You’ll go to the police. You’ll say you’re you, but they’ll laugh. You’re clothes are all wrong for the you you used to be. They’ll say, the person who’s lived here all this time dresses in mouse colors. You’ve lived a claustrophobic life. If you’d had any friends it would be different. Besides, I can do as well as you do, unfolding boxes. I’ve done the same when I had jobs before I quit for this easier life. I won’t be cruel. I’d never be cruel. I’ll let you live in the crawl space as long as you want.

  Your daydream is Willard. Or most of him, though not all. For sure his eyes. For sure his elegant slim hands and the big gold ring. You’ll ask if it’s a school ring.

  Or one of us will. He and I will get to know each other.

  Then I hear banging. And not long after that, the crash. They break open the door. It splinters where the deadbolt is. If I’d put it in the middle of the door instead of at the top, it might have held better.

  By the time the door goes down I’m right outside it, watching. They run downstairs without seeing me.

  I look out the window. He’s leaving—hurries down the street with only one arm in his coat sleave and it’s the wrong sleave. Other hand holds up his pants. What did you do to send him off so upset?

  I open the window and call out, “Willard!” But he doesn’t hear or doesn’t want to. Is he trying to get away? From you or me?

  What did you do to scare him so? Everything was fine when I came down to eat. But maybe getting locked in scared him. Or maybe you told him to go and never come back and you threw his coat at him as he left. Or he thinks you’re me and is in love with me even though he told you he loved you.

  But here you go, out the door right behind him. You have your coat on properly and your clothes all straightened up. You’re wearing your red leather pants. Now you’re the one calling, “Willard.”

  You’d not have done that before. You’ve changed. You’ll take back your life. Everybody will make way for you now. You’ll have an evil look. You’ll frown. People will step off the sidewalk to let you go by.

  I want for us to live as we did but yo
u’ll set traps. I’ll trip on trip wires. Fall down the stairs in the middle of the night. There won’t be anymore quarters lying around. You’ll put a deadbolt on my door. Or better yet you’ll barricade it shut with a heavy dresser. Nobody will even know there’s a door there.

  I made you what you are today, grand and real, but you’ll lock me up up here with nothing but your mousy clothes. Your old trunks. Your dust and dark.

  I dress in the worn-out clothes I wore when I came. I pack the nightgown, the black underwear. I grab a handful of quarters. I don’t touch your secret stash of twenties. I pet the cat. I leave your credit cards and keys on the hall table. I don’t steal.

  THE PRINCE OF MULES

  WHAT DO YOU KNOW from the top of a hill but the lay of the land? I can see two little towns, one on each side, and—closer—a ranch. I see cowhides all along the fences. I see skulls over the gates. I know rattlesnake skins are there, too, and maybe a skunk pelt, but I can’t tell from here. There’s hardly any green except in thin lines coming down from the mountains, and a couple of irrigated pastures.

  And there’s the irrigation ditchdigger, Blackthorn. Today he’s working just below my hill. I know it’s him. Who else would be out in a ditch, his clothes so black and floppy, letting himself get too hot in the middle of the day?

  He has an ugly, brutal face. I don’t think he’s brutal but lots of people do. They distrust him because his eyebrows are too black and bushy and one eye is always off in the wrong direction. People think that eye is looking at something they can’t see—something they’re missing out on that might be important. Or beautiful.

  They say he looks like a scarecrow but what he looks like is the crow. Eye, one of them, the blackish blue of crow’s eyes. Nose… not hooked like an eagle’s, but reaching straight out. That nose says: Go somewhere. Get away. Do something else.

  I see his lips moving (of course not from up here, but when I pass by down there now and then). He’s always talking to his mule. I’ve heard tell you can talk softly to a horse but, when it comes to a mule, all you need to do is little more than mouth the words.

  But it isn’t as if I’m not a crow kind of person myself. And people don’t like the looks of me either.

  My house is off alone, halfway up the hill, boulders all over my, so-called, yard. Sage. Rabbit brush. (And rabbits.) A skunk lives under the shed but we get along… so far. Same goes for the rattlesnake. So far. I probably get taken for a witch, what with a snake and a skunk for familiars. If I really was one, I’d witch away my knee pains, and I’d witch myself some money. And I’d witch myself some company. (I’ve lived with nothing sweeter than the rattlesnake’s grin. I take as friend whatever looks at me at all.)

  Blackthorn and I, we should get to know each other. Would he come up here for iced tea? Or lemonade? I don’t have any beer. Come to think of it, I don’t have any lemons either.

  “Hello down there. Halloooo.”

  Can he hear me from here? I wonder if he can see me waving?

  “Hallooo. Mister Blackthorn.”

  He sees me. He shades his eyes and looks but doesn’t wave.

  He lives even farther up than I do. His hut is so much the color of everything else, you can hardly see it until you’re practically in the doorway. I climbed up there once when he was out in the fields. I looked in the one and only window but it was so dim and dusty I couldn’t see much. There was a white washbasin with a pitcher in it—both chipped. There were socks on the floor. There actually was a book—on the floor beside the socks—one of those old-fashioned, leatherbound books with gold lettering. I couldn’t read the title. I was surprised and pleased to see he actually had a real book.

  But the shed for the mule—now that was spic and span. Smelled sweet of straw and hay and mule. Smelled so good I took a chance and lay down there for a while.

  I call again. “Hallooooo.”

  Again he looks up, but just as he did before, he goes right back to digging. He’s got to be tired and thirsty. Suppose I hold up a big glass of iced tea? Suppose I had a pail of water for the mule?

  I go in, change my blouse to a cream colored one (mule nose color actually) with lace around the neck, and come back out with a pitcher and a pail. I hold them over my head.

  “Halloooow!”

  Finally!

  When the time comes to say my name, what would be unusual and romantic and make him remember it? And me?

  So he and his mule come all the way up here, two switchbacks and then a long sideways.

  He lets the mule drink first. (Of course!) He calls her sweetheart. How he does sweet talk that mule! “Come sweetheart. Come, Penny, drink.” (When has anybody ever called me sweetheart? I think and think, but I’m thinking, Never.)

  He says she came with the name Bad Penny, but he calls her Pennyroyal.

  It looks like that’s all he’s going to say. Sometimes people who don’t talk much like to have other people chatter away so they don’t have to think about talking, they don’t even have to listen; and yet others like silence around them to match their own.

  “Do these ditches need you? Every single day like this?”

  “Without me and Penny everything would be as dry as it is right here.” His good eye takes it all in: me, my tin pitcher, my boulders…. The other eye is off at its own secret spot. I can tell he’s never noticed me before, even after all those times I was walking back and forth in front of his ditch whenever he was working near my hill.

  “Did you ever think of going someplace else?”

  “I’ve been elsewhere.”

  He drinks my whole pitcherful right out of the pitcher and without stopping. I should have had as much for him as for the mule.

  I like his eyebrows. I even like his eye that roves off seeing… God knows what visions.

  By now I can tell what my name should be. I say, “I’m Molly,” so as to be more mule. Though, on second thought, perhaps I should have said Jenny so I could be Jenny to his Jack. I wonder if his first name is Jack.

  How to keep him here a little while longer? “Could you open this jar?” (He could.) “Could you move this heavy box for me?” (Of course.) “And I can’t reach this shelf.”

  He does all the things and with an old crow’s grace. An old crow’s flashing eye.

  I feel so good I want to say, Sweetheart, to something myself, except Penny’s the one getting all the caresses. Does she need so many when there’s others (not so far away) who haven’t had any? As to looks, she’s nothing special, just the general mule color, dark with a cream colored nose, but she’s sleek and shiny, which is more than I can say about him. Or myself.

  Perhaps, in that wandering eye, Penny is a beautiful woman as pale all over as the star on her forehead, her hair the same black/brown of the turkey vulture feathers he has in his hat.

  What is he seeing with that off-kilter eye? Suppose he looked at me through that? What would I turn into? But perhaps, for starters, I need to become more mulish. Mules always know what they want to do and when. They’re never wishy-washy. They know what’s best for everybody. I suppose he depends on her for his own safety. I’m afraid I don’t have that knack.

  My ravens quack, quack, quack around us. Something else is going, “Tweet, tweet, churrrrr. Tweet, tweet, churrrrr.” He lifts his head and listens—points his going-somewhere nose and listens like a poet. Who’d have thought?

  “Could I have a ditch? One connected to the arroyo just in case there’s ever a little bit of water in it?” (There hasn’t been any water in it since I came here.) “It wouldn’t have to be long or deep. I’ll pay.”

  I seem to have decided (without deciding) on too much talking though I’m not yet committed to it completely. I keep silent as I hand him more tea. I think of all the things I’m not saying, as: Take me to your shack, old crow man. Or take me even farther up, to the mountain lion’s den. I saw a place up there where the grass was matted in a cozy circle. I saw the scat.

  What I do say is: “When I die I had
always wanted to come back—if there’s going to be any coming back to it—as a raven. I had wanted to be smart and cocky, but now that I see Penny, I think, perhaps, mule is better.”

  What I don’t say is, who ever caresses a raven?

  What I do say is: “I have stones as if instead of trees. All my shade is from boulders. I’m surprised anything grows here at all but some things find a way. They get a toehold. Like I do.”

  I don’t say: My stones are warm and motherly after a day in the sun and I lean against their big round bellies every evening. They’re warm well into the night.

  He has looked at me again. One of his fleeting glances that slip sideways and down before you know you’ve been looked at.

  What I do say is, “I thought I heard a stream or maybe it’s leaves blowing. I heard another, tweet, tweet, churr from some other place entirely. And it’s cool somewhere not far from here.” I spread my arms, the better to feel the breeze. “Admit it. There’s another world somewhere, all shiny and sweet smelling. Not a bit like here.”

  He spreads his arms, too, but to show my hill and my view. “Why do you want to see more than this right here, the gray fox colors of the underbrush, and, not far, the fox herself and her kits.”

  Spoken like a poet. And what more do I want than the warm bellies of the granite? And there is a tree, one, and more up where he is.

  But I think there is a world of the other eye, and in it he would be the wiry black prince of mules. And he would have shaved in that world. His hat would smooth itself out and clean itself up and the turkey vulture feathers would become the feathers of a hawk. No, eagle.

  I say, “I saw sparkles. Diamond shapes, all different colors and all in a row. I heard swishing sounds as if a stream or of poplar leaves in the wind. I heard wind chimes. I felt how cool. I shivered. Look how I shiver. I saw…. I thought I saw Penny. She was wearing a nightgown sort of thing. Even now your other eye is glistening. I see tears on that cheek.”

  I step forward to wipe the tear but he jerks back.

  “My other eye sees nothing.”