The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  But none of those eyes can know about that drama. They swim smugly in little back and forth motions, contracting their corners rhythmically in order to maintain their equilibrium. I see I have gone beyond the eyes. I’ll tell them that fashions in freaks change; that, just as with sex; what was unacceptable last year is accepted this year. People always accept more as they become sophisticated, don’t they? And isn’t this equally desirable in freaks as in sex? Liberalize them, I say, and let me be one of those who struggle for this cause, this great opening out of understanding, this acceptance without censure. The presentation will make such a difference, too. We’ll do it with finesse and delicacy. To start, I will take the name Désiré. And certainly with my so unforeseen personal beauty… But the eyes won’t think so. I can see that. The two, led by the one most energetic and most opinionated, will agree with each other, and they will certainly feel that the mirror is too small a place for any arguments.

  Let me approach them, instead, from the point of view of love. I might ask them: Shouldn’t people be taught to love? People don’t realize, I will say, how hard it is to love and that it must be practiced daily with some difficult exercise. And I might provide that exercise.

  But I’m sure I won’t be that hard to love. Everyone loves a winner and I’ll be the freak of freaks. They’ll come to think of me as beautiful. The details of my body might even be, eventually, exposed on TV. My life story might be written, and surely, if I did have such a life, there would be something to write about, such as how I first decided to join the carnival and the difficulties I had, in the beginning, in doing so; how they all doubted that I would be accepted by the public, for I was, after all, a new concept in freaks. I had, it was felt, carried freakishness to its ultimate degree. I was wholly and utterly the freak, whereas people were used to half freaks. It was felt I might be too startling. I might upset people. They might be more than just disgusted, but shaken to their very bones. But, at last, in some small circus side show, someone had had the courage to take me on. At first reactions were mixed. There were letters of protest: This was going too far… an insult to the public… poor taste that I should be where others could see me at all, let alone be on public view. I was even banned in a few cities, but of course this helped in the long run. Still, it was an uphill fight. Other freaks were jealous of my purity, my authenticity. No rubber, no makeup, no mutilation necessary. Yet I had my champions, including the circus owners who had invested in me, and also some freaks who were generously able to appreciate someone who was far beyond them. Still it will have taken me, let us suppose, about ten years to achieve any real acceptance. In any field one must certainly count on at least this much time, and I am not asking for a quick and easy success. And so, by then, people would have become used to me. Some would say I had a fishlike beauty, some that my movements were graceful and well adapted to my shape and to my needs. Some would argue that my achievements in rolling and flopping about had taken at least as much practice and concentration as would be needed by a concert pianist. Films would then be made to preserve my movements for posterity. Perhaps I might have had my body, by this time, tattooed with Rowers and the faces of pretty girls. I would go on TV. The book on my life would be written, and in it, also, would be a description of how I came to be married and how I manage in my household with a little electric cart steered with my teeth, my children normal or almost normal (there is no need for my sort of mistake twice), and there would be something about my beautiful sister who helped me from the very beginning, at the first mention that I might be put on display.

  “I had thought,” I said, “that I might go on display. Yes, the carnival, the circus, no matter how small… ”

  But the fish eye had already given its answer.

  “I suppose,” said Number Two, “that you would like me to see that a proper suit is made, the beginnings of tights and a brocade… vest, shall we call it? Pink or blue? No, let’s make it gold or silver with touches of red. I can sew it up myself out of silk and satin and, if you like, with little white wings to give the feeling of lightness to it all. Would you like them on the shoulder blades or buttocks?”

  And shell do it. I know she will and it will be better than I could possibly have conceived it myself, luminous as a peacock, gay as Santa Claus. I know Miss Number Two. Somehow, instinctively, she will touch the seed of my inner dream and make it grow into something greater than itself. Such work she will put into it! A month of hours. She’ll hang it upon my wall and, with great joy, I’ll dream of myself wearing it. I will grow old, leaning at my reading stand and dreaming. I know I will.

  Then one day I will ask Mrs. Number One to put the suit on me. I will try (at least try, but she does have ways… warm water and such) to withhold all else until she does, and then I’ll know if it really fits or only seems to.

  Cavalier, October 1966

  Eohippus

  WHAT DO I write on? Why, ordinary little five-and-ten-cent-store notebooks, like anyone else. Small ones. The same little notebooks a student might have or a housewife, say for lists of things to do that day. Right now mine also has a list as follows:

  Eohippus homunculus

  peristalsis nubilous & nubile

  Watusi pistillate & pestilence

  God’s thumb philogyny

  mesomorph binary

  There are two notations:

  A. Bags under the all-seeing eyes of God (as bags under

  the sun’s eye)

  B. Check are Greek statues all uncircumcised

  and a drawing.

  I use an ordinary thirty-five-cent Scripto pencil. I prefer a red or a yellow. (I put this down for they say colors do have significance.) My writing isn’t particularly neat. Someone other than myself would say that it looks immature and also petulant, and as though I were stubborn in places where one might better be easygoing. The periods, for instance, seem unnecessarily final. But I, myself, like to think of it as artistic with a sort of inherent pattern given to it by exactly that dark quality that makes it seem petulant. And isn’t there something witty about it, too? the l’s so high-looped and sometimes carelessly crossed like t’s? the dots of the i’s exuberantly rightward? those nice little curls on final e’s and s’s?

  Certainly I’ve always felt I would be famous. From my first memories, from that first feeling that I was I and that I had these particular parents and these particular brothers and sisters, and then later as I learned that I had these particular ancestors. You see, I was Scotch on my mother’s side and German and French on my father’s and when I thought that the LeDroits, the Charpentiers, the Kafries and the McMillans had all somehow combined to make me, I felt humility, pride and awe. And even during those difficult periods when it seemed there was nothing in one’s whole world but rejection, all kinds of rejection, starting, perhaps, with the little brother in one’s mother’s arms instead of oneself, even in the very face of that brother, I knew. And even though I clung (as any ordinary person would) to faint, indefinite crumbs of praise, sometimes from years before, still I knew somewhere ahead of me was something better.

  And so I’ve decided to title my Eohippus story: “I Thought I Would Be Famous by Last May.” There is pathos in that. Of course, these things all change in the going over. They are all lost track of, so to speak, so that the original title never fits, nor any of the original first lines, but here is a beginning, I think, fraught with mystery and meaning. Something certainly to work from. To begin then: “I Thought I Would Be Famous by Last May,” and to continue:

  I thought I would be loved by last May. I thought by then someone would camp on my doorstep, someone all trim with morning exercises and yet not young, no younger than I am (someone of uncertain age, one might say), but May came and went and I got a dishwashing machine, instead it seems Time is slipping past and now even the new dishwasher has a leak, not to mention the old appliances, what they have, and the car starting off in the morning makes speckles across the TV. The children are furious. And there’s
that dishwasher already making its leak, a little winding river across the asphalt tile. It takes exactly the same path every time, first a puddle six inches long and four inches wide, then, breaking the bounds of its surface tension at the far side, it trickles thinly to the edge of the wall and there another pool. It follows a law of flow. Here is nature in the raw, nature around just as it’s always been. You don’t get away from it even here. It’s said: God is everywhere. Why, God, himself, said, or someone said it for him, “I am in the waters of the rivers…” and didn’t he mention the stars, the mountains, deserts? and here He is, too, manifested in so many ways, right in my kitchen-voltage, wattage, cycles, circulators, agitators, aerators, tumblers, water levels, heat levels (high, medium and low) and my leak. (And He also said, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”)

  But I’m looking for a lover, not the simple (complicated?) manifestations of nature in the raw, and can my hands caress white, baked-on enamel? Can one make love to electric plugs? (I’ve always known one could make love to massage machines.) However, for myself, I have always been, rather, a lover of horses.

  Consider the horse, his naked eye, his withers. Consider, even, the lack of horses, the nonexistent clippity-clop along the streets. Clippity-clop, clippity-clop for centuries, but never, ever for us even when we were young. And yet horse lovers are still inauspiciously being brought into the world, star-crossed from the beginning.

  But consider, I repeat… and especially the dappled gray, how he looks like a foggy morning in October, his a circumstantial existence defined by spots and dependent on the colors of the backgrounds against which he places himself. Consider his face, with twelve inches from eye to mouth, his nose velvety as genitals, and then consider I have always loved horses, I, one of those born loving them.

  And the evenings have been foggy lately. For a week now there has been this soft, dry drizzle. Taking the garbage out, one expects fish flies. The air clip-clops. Gazing eastward, I almost see my dappled gray. I almost feel his lips upon my cheek.

  Oh, I did think I would be loved by now, what with the nights so wet and warm (or famous).

  Pause here.

  It caught me quite by surprise, yet here is a stop like the Shakespearean couplet that brings the curtain down. I could say I did it on purpose and when I come to the next stop (surely I will come to another) I might mention, Second Act.

  But to return to I. She has already a great many of my own characteristics. I have a feeling about horses, too, though I wouldn’t say it goes as far as hers and I have had leaks in my kitchen.

  That leak…

  Hers… I’s, I mean. That leak, as I says:

  That leak, as I says… sometimes it flows across the kitchen into the corner by the clothes drier. I think I could squeeze into that corner myself if I really wanted to, hug my knees and lean against the slippery white “appliance” on one side, wall on the other, with the 220-volt cord behind, vista of sink and dishwasher before, leak flowing from it to me.

  And what would I be thinking of from there? Housewifery problems, I suppose, instead of love:

  A. Daughter menstruating at nine instead of thirteen.

  B. Four-year-old in glasses. Also his left foot turns in.

  C. Neighbor says they took down her littlest’s panties and looked. “Goodness knows,” she says, “what they’ll do next.”

  One might well take to kitchen corners as smooth and comfortable as this one.

  I see an impasse coming, Kafkaesque in its concentration on this burrowlike corner, I spending all her time ruminating in the kitchen. Where would it lead if one followed this tack? Certainly only into smaller and smaller holes. I would so much prefer to see I out in the dark of some Levittown looking for horses. Ought I to start over, I wonder, or back a ways?

  “I remember Greek vases,” I says.

  I remember Greek vases with lovers of horses. I also remember Europa and Leda and some ancient (and suggestive) sculptures (no, quite specific, actually) but surely it is the horse that has God’s phallus if ever there really is one at all. But here I am, rather than searching out horses on the streets of some Levittown, just thinking of corners in the kitchen…

  What! Has I returned then, immediately, insisting on her corner?

  … corners in the kitchen, husband off, progeny all in school except for one, unmindful of his mother.

  Now there’s a love… little body… I know all its ins and outs and I know he is perfection indefectible, sublime transscendence and most of all immaculate.

  Also my thesaurus says: Paragon, nonesuch, flower, phoenix, Elysian field, consummate, Erewhonian, inerrable. Antonyms: He is not blemished, imperfect nor impure.

  But what satisfaction can there be in him? He belongs so completely to himself, and if he loves me (he does) it’s only because I’m his mother. He’d love me better fatter. He’d love me tossed on the garbage. He’d say, in his Boschish way, coming out of someone’s bottom (his?) plunk in the toilet (but retrievable when needed).

  Now the lover I have in mind is, except for pubic hair, as pure. Between his legs, nothing as cute as progeny’s perhaps, but something to rejoice in nevertheless. (Can this be the river of “living water” flowing out from “he that believeth”? and is my faith great enough to find him?)

  The man I’m thinking of is lank as a Watusi, existentialist, of course, an imagist, a Freudian distilled in Jung, philogynist and atheist. He sleeps naked even in winter and in his ears sometimes one seems to hear the sea.

  But I love my husband, and more every year. There should be two words: love and love. Love for what I’m looking for and love for what we practice every day, he and I, inchworming toward some future where we can love each other properly and perfectly. But inches are too small. What there needs to be is some great dream-leap of love, by-passing resentments, selves and selfishnesses, demands, expectations and inordinate self-sacrifice. But leap or no, we’ll never reach that Love love, though both of us are willing. That’s why one wants a simpler love, more like fame.

  But you ask: What has this got to do with horses? I might ask the same question of myself.

  So let’s see exactly what we have so far:

  dappled gray

  atheist god

  clippity-clop

  lovers

  famousness

  leak

  I

  We also might be said to have:

  the LeDroits, Charpentiers, etc.

  rejection

  ordinary people

  praise

  Scripto pencils

  and me

  (And then there’s a third me, too. Perhaps the most important of all.)

  And now, since I’ve been thinking though not staring into space, we have:

  But here I am, crossing and recrossing the same bridges, microcosmic archways, bridging myself, actually, when I might be out forging new patterns or perfecting my style. I might sit here devastated by my own imaginary emotions, brought on by situations pinned strongly to reality, as:

  Dying of botulism from a can of tuna fish

  Babies falling out of rear car windows at seventy mph

  Crushed cats

  Negroes murdering my whole family at midnight just because we’re white. Me crying, “But I love all you black people,” in vain

  But taking myself in hand and remembering all my mottoes and such: Write, Think, Elan, Fearlessness, “Etonne-Moi,” Stay Loose, lheronimus Bosch, Kenneth Koch, Petit A Petit l’oiseau fait son nid, and:

  I continue.

  (By the way, my daughter hasn’t menstruated yet and is still as breastless as a bird, but she’s grown pubic hair, not at nine but at seven, and even the doctors can’t tell why… why this enigmatic pubic hair.)

  But to go on:

  Now the dappledness of the dappled gray, might this mean black and white together? freedom up and down the land, all entirely solved at last upon the surface of this mottled
, encompassing skin? (I’m convinced Eohippus himself must have been dappled.)

  Then again, for this story at least, he might better mean nightmare, sea of dreams, the fear of death making us sweat at night, our dying eyes dappling the world with a black concentricity before we leave it altogether.

  But that can’t be, either, for I love him too much, though I know we are all supposed, in some ways, to love death. Is it really, after all, death’s prick I’m looking for, so grand, so red? And if this is the case, what form would death come with to men? a tight constriction or a yawning hole ready to receive all of them, wetly, some Mare Imbrium, a dappled nightmare, then, of the moon, like fucking the yellow hole in the sky. It floats overhead from east to west. One could spend the whole night dying, east to west, that way.

  It’s three thousand miles or so more than what I’m looking for but I don’t care. I’m satisfied. Or rather I’ll be satisfied once I find it.

  I’m beginning to think there’s something to be said for corners after all. I must know, she must have felt by actual experience, how cool baked-on enamel can be, how smooth. Perhaps I’ll not write: I thought I would be famous by… and not continue: I thought I would be loved… nor: Time is slipping past. (Perhaps I’ll not write, either: What do I write on? Why, ordinary little five-and-ten…)

  Oh, I still think I will be famous, for what about the LeDroits and the Charpentiers? and some of them really did come over pretty soon after the Mayflower. And all that rejection, rejection must have some meaning and some purpose. And I haven’t been lazy (so very lazy).

  But what I’m thinking now is: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Oh, those untold stories!… If mine could only ring in your ears like that!

  Transatlantic Review, 1967

  Sex and/or Mr. Morrison