The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  All this…all these shoes bought and he doesn’t even wave to me when I pass by. I don’t wave either. I think if he pretends not to see me then I should pretend not to see him, too. How we do gaze over each other’s heads! I stop to look in the shoe store window Wednesdays and Fridays. I allow myself no more than that and, as mentioned, I don’t wave. I study shoes passionately. I blush for them that I might be raped by shoes one day, overcome by foot containers. In plain view of Mr. Pappadakos of course. “But you are responsible, Sir, for all these shoes. I hold you responsible.”

  How can I go around wearing IN on my belly like this if everything responds except Mr. Pappadakos?

  I keep wondering, though, if he could be bothered by that little pink corn pad I wear on my toe.

  (Did I say yet that he has two erudite wrinkles just above his nose? He’s ectomorph, of course.)

  Well, another try. Cut hair, EXACTLY like the old man’s. Mr. Pappdakos sells women’s shoes. I will wear a pair of little-boy shoes that he does not sell.

  In the Kama Sutra, by the way, there is a recipe for losing love…buffalo milk, amaranth, gopalika…rub it on (the proper spot) then love and there will be no more desire. It’s only that making love that stumps me. Buffalo milk I can get at the zoo.

  The old man stands at the shoe store window, on the other days, on Mondays and Thursdays. He crinkles up his Santa Claus face. All the wrinkles go sideways across it, East and West, everything latitude…. Anyway, even his nose widens with desire. Itches. Twitches. You can’t say he’s not well dressed, but underneath, his body is like a laid-off dock worker’s, a lazy Indian’s, civilization surround him.

  THEY don’t wave to each other either. That’s encouraging.

  Well, I’ll tell you why I’m going to cut my hair off. It’s because I saw them on Saturday night….

  The old man cannot be without love. He blossoms in his desire to protect something beautiful and similar…self-similar. Mr. Pappadakos, a work of art. (But I must say the statue does look old-fashioned. We don’t do things like that anymore. I mean even just putting him in a suit would make him more modern and, if you wanted to be earthy and maybe different, you could make him in his suit with his penis sticking out. Then you’d still have that “basic man” quality, the Universal…clothed in the every?

  If I had been a little gray mouse that Saturday how I would have crept from my window, down across the garden to some crack or other in the old man’s house! I would have watched and learned a thing or two…observed the man-kiss, whisker to whisker.

  But I understand so well, that’s the thing. I, too, can’t see the slightest reason for loving women. Breasts, 24-inch waists, leave me cold. I like that straightness from collar bone to crotch. The old man knows what I mean. On Mr. Pappadakos the line snakes gently, subtly, the shirt follows and gathers a little where it snuggles into the pants, a line one could smooth with the hand. Mr. Pappadakos sometimes pushes his olive-colored jacket aside, hand on waist, and reveals his line, all his lines, smoothing down across his stomach. The old man puts his hand there, we can know that for sure, there and lower, the old man’s hand nestling in where the shirt goes. The shirt tails show the way, down into darkness and strange angles not found on women. Oh, I understand the old man perfectly. Perhaps it’s much nicer to be a thing and love it too. Ego building. So the old ones love themselves all young and smooth and Mr. Pappadakos lies like death watching himself be loved, his virgin mouth, the lips gone blue.

  How pale their faces have become. All the blood has rushed to the other end. Mr. Pappadakos, seduced at last, sobs like a woman. I mean he sobs in his manly fashion but at a time when a woman might do it and perhaps for the same reason.

  (I wonder does his mother know he’s out with older men?)

  The old man is not unhandsome. He had leaned, wide-chested, over seated Pappadakos and poured…some sort of wine or other, his face, all the wide lines gone motherly, loverly.

  Mr. Pappadakos lies naked as Cinderella (on her marriage bed). Can you imagine how beautiful he is thus! I don’t blame the old man. I understand that motherly line at the sides of his mouth and all.

  Have I mentioned that Mr. Pappadakos has eyebrows thick and black as the caterpillar…two caterpillars of the kind that turn in to speckled fritillaries?

  I might become, not a mouse, but a butterfly from one of those eyebrows. Or better yet exactly such a worm, observing, poised in caterpillar fashion above the brown, Greek eye that sees the face of the old man leaning where his (Mr. Pappadakos’) white dove files up to meet it.

  Actually what I ACTUALLY saw that Saturday night was the two of them for a moment at the back window before the Old Man pulled the blinds.

  So now, this other moonlit night, this one of the first day that the statue has appeared in the Old Man’s back yard, I can go out as a boy (my breasts are small, thank goodness, rose buttons, hardly a decent mouthful for any man) or I can look out my window and see a lady with a hammer and chisel creeping out to Mr. Pappadakos upon his pedestal. “What,” I say to myself, “in the world is she going to do to that statue?” But of course I would know. I would guess immediately. For what other reason could she have that little brown paper bag and those particular tools! “Is she responsible, then, or someone like her…hat, I mean, blue flowered dress, little silver pin on her left shoulder…responsible for the present state of all the Herculeses?) (I could tell her about another (not a Hercules) available at the Guggenheim.) What does she do with them afterwards? That’s the question.

  But wait a moment. What if the statue really were Mr. Pappadakos dipped in plaster by the Old Man whose love went, one night, a little too far? No wonder the statue is so old fashioned. And how nice if that stolen “white dove” is the real one. Imagine it sitting in that hated lady’s top left hand bureau drawer with the stockings and perfume and an emergency ten dollar bill. Imagine it wrapped in saran or more likely foil and I…imagine me as I creep up the stairs with my Dick Tracy skeleton key wondering where IT could be hidden, and the statue, just like in the nursery story, saying, while the “Teeny, tiny lady” covers up her head with blankets and trembles:

  “GIVE ME MY BONE.”

  But the problem is simply solved. Make Mr. Pappadakos the victim of a maniacal sculptor and the Old Man simply buys the, so called, statue (it’s already established by the Spanish coffee table, etc., that he likes objets d’art) the so called statue because it seems to remind him of someone. (You know, what probably made the hair seem so long were the plaster drips.) The pathos, then, of the fact that he sets up his love in his back yard and then goes out, all unknowing to meet him at the corner café, and I, having not looked out the window but gone out as a boy, am there instead, both of us waiting for he who can never come.

  I’m afraid I don’t make a very attractive boy and the reason, I supposed, is that I don’t make a very attractive girl. Now, I’ve seen girls who would be grand at either one. One would suppose they could easily be loved by any sort of man, but, I suppose, they are lacking the one essential ingredient. It’s enough to drive a woman with penis envy crazy. She loses both ways, neither having nor ever getting. (I wonder could one call the Old Man’s problem by the same name? or would it be the opposite? Envy, that is, of what the mother has? On the other hand, perhaps it’s the married men who envy that and then the married women that get theirs…their white doves at last.) And yet the Old Man does notice me. Of course he can’t love met YET, being so full of that other love, but I see I interest him even though I think he suspects I’m not a boy at all. Now isn’t that strange?

  But imagine me. Here I am returning down the stairs (after having watched out the window). By hook or crook I have obtained IT (to go with my IN). You see, I know the lady will be relieved to be rid of IT. (At least I suppose so.) Think how she must have been wondering what to do with it all this time, not quite able to bring herself to crush it into powder with the hammer.

  Did I mention I already have the amaranth and gopali
ka? Now all I need is that trip to the zoo and I can be cured of my love….

  New Worlds, No. 188, March 1969

  I Love You

  IN A DREAM I follow him to a cocktail party full of his admirers. I am three steps behind like a Japanese wife, my skirt too tight so I have to trot, my bra strap coming down. Perhaps the whole thing is undone. It really happened like this, or almost, and I was left in a dirty hallway. The door slammed shut before I could get my toe in and he had forgotten about me already. I sat on the steps in my new coat, my new dress, and I only dreamed it after it had already come true.

  In another dream I have slipped on the ice and chipped my knee. I feel like a violinist who has lost his bow but I really don’t have a violin anymore now. We sold it to buy a motorcycle the week after we were married, BSA, 500 cc, eighty miles per gallon. The violin was a Kloz, 1767.

  Yesterday I almost walked into the side of a speeding Karmann Ghia, a red one on Fourteenth Street, and I knew then I would have a bad dream. I didn’t tell him about it when I got home. I was thinking that if my name were Maya or Miranda or Dido or Sonja, and if I had long hair and an ability to tell fortunes, I would pick the queen of swords for myself and layout seven cards, but instead I opened the Bible at random. I shut my eyes and let some force take over my finger. Ruth, of course, chapter 4, verse 4. It says: “And I thought to advertise thee, saying, Buy it before the inhabitants, and before the elders of my people.” I had expected something poetic and full of ancient wisdom. “Buy it” isn’t “Love it.” I keep wondering, what can this mean?

  My grandmother worshiped a god’s naked son and when her finger moved it touched the right word every time. (If I had been fighting with my brothers she found: “Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood.” Proverbs, chapter 30, verse 33.)

  How dirty my coat is getting on these stairs. They aren’t keeping their hallways clean here. Cats are at the window. Gray cats at gray windows are invisible. Background gray. Air gray. I might stage this and dance it someday. Memories of Husbands Waited For. Gray masks. Gray leotards and tights. Graying hair. My stockings down around my ankles. A red X marks the spot where I am supposed to be and where I am. Gray ocean. Gray sky. Gray beach. Red X. My new coat is gray, too. (How could I have bought a coat the color of this hall!) If he has really forgotten about me he will go home some back way, thinking I will be there to unlock the door. He will remember being admired and tell me about it while I heat up clam juice and answer, Yes, yes.

  Once I waited for you in a Spanish desert beside a road measured out by rulers to the horizon line while you walked away. Dry Kansas-large fields, no place to get out of the sun, only a shallow roadside ditch I dared to pee in after the first hour of waiting while you went to get something to patch a tire. It’s good no one passed by that day because I’ve heard since that people sometimes disappear in Spain, gone without a trace (motorcycle and all probably), and no one ever hears of them again.

  I’m trying to have a good attitude. I shut my eyes and think: This is a sad-looking beach. Only the sound of a cat, no surf, no shells, no driftwood, a few cigarette butts. I open my eyes and take off my shoes. The heels will make good hammers or good weapons. I think I hear dancing in there and I know Maya is in the apartment. She was once a very beautiful woman. He and I and Maya (and almost everyone else we know) are at the age when men become more desirable and women less so. I used to have a violin teacher at the desirable age for men and once he chased me around the Ping-Pong table of the recreation room at music camp. Lessons were never the same after that. I didn’t even want him to push on my elbow (whole bow), flatten my wrist or bend the first joint of my little finger to the proper curve, but I was in love with him. He was very intense, very Viennese and had a Russian accent.

  But this isn’t dirt from sitting on the steps, not all of it. More likely the menstrual five days early. Unprepared. Improvise. Sit on it. Silk is not absorbent. My mother was prepared. I think she must have watched my underpants every day for half a year when my breasts began to grow, waiting till she had to tell me what she didn’t want to talk about at all. How else could she have caught it so cleverly at just the right time? I thought she was going to punish me for soiling my pajamas, but she showed me how to put on the waistband and pads. She looked sullen but I suppose she was just embarrassed.

  This happened before I entered the conservatory and fractured my kneecap falling on the stairs the time my violin teacher almost caught me. It is incredible to me to think of any woman not being in love with my violin teacher. (Probably my mother was in love with him, too.) He was quite well known in music circles and played with a major orchestra. My mother was paying a lot for those lessons. I didn’t dare not go, but I tried to keep the music stand between us and I blushed a lot. He was sympathetic about the chipped kneecap and sent me a box of fudge his wife had made.

  Agnes, Alice, Anita, Candida, Cleo… on to Yvonne, Zenia, Zoe. Come out now. I know you’re in there. I don’t care if the young men crowd up. And who helped you? the famous advice-giver to the younger men? Sometimes I did. I still do. You remind me of my violin teacher, quite well known in your own circles, except there’s one difference. Is it because I’m no longer sixteen? But I have married you before I knew enough to ask some token, something as precious as blood.

  There you are, Antonin Artaud haircuts for men your age who are balding in front, coats, pants, socks, underwear to match the haircut. You’re neither Viennese nor intense, rather a dirty Parisian gray as though the baths were still even here sixty cents apiece, but, looking again, I see this is an oily beach. One can’t help the dirt. Once we swam here and came out with orange peels in our hair, coffee grounds between our toes. I waited for you to get tired of martinis that day, too, and before then tired of the waves and grapefruit rinds, and I worried that the tide had taken you beyond the swimming area and that you were much too far out.

  The longer I sit the more it flows. I have been here since twilight or dawn. I should have brought a beach basket of supplies, lipstick, eye shadow, nail files, potato chips. By now I will have to stay here until the wind dries me off. Silk is sticky and slippery. Green mixed with red becomes black.

  At a party in honor of him at a castle once, the steps had thick carpeting. I went to sleep on them descending to the dining room. They were wide as a bed, red quilted. The face of a great man (or a rich man) hung at the landing, swords, kings’ crowns, flags, men’s things for decorations all around. I could have been raped on that stairway but he was in the lecture hall, everyone listening to him. They didn’t hear me cry out. But this isn’t that kind of party at all. The talk is the same, but the cookies are full of pot. Maya baked them. She knows where I am. I sit here still trying to have a good attitude. Be mature, I tell myself. Smoke a cigarette butt swept out from the apartment next door. Count roaches. Come to realize that my dress is no longer new.

  Sit in the menstrual hut until it’s over while he’s out hunting with the other men. Spear and arrow club by special invitation only. Tie, jacket, but any haircut. Beards. I live in this hall. I’m beginning to recognize it from before. I’ve seen it in my mother’s eyes. (I will tell my daughter a different story. I’ll say, Ask your husband for something as precious as blood.)

  Perhaps five old men live across from Maya’s place and take turns looking out the keyhole at me. They may also spy through holes in the bathroom wall they have chinked out with screwdrivers. (Mother thought gas station rest rooms were full of eye holes like that.)

  Get up. Give them a show, stockings falling down or not. There’s plenty of music. Always plenty of music, rum-de-dum, or make up your own. Husband’s Waiting Dance will be too slow for them.

  I dared him to enter the menstrual hut and face the demons, but even the younger men won’t go near it. My husband and all my brothers are six feet tall and have other places they dare go. Imagine in the summer cottage no bigger than menstrual hut, the four people six
feet tall and then me, as though the female were another race entirely. Everyone of them had a plaid wool shirt that year. I did, too. In those days I wasn’t any particular sex at all, except they never minded the cold as I did. This time of year the beach is icy. Empty) Yellow sand with black ridges. No shells. Nothing to pick up here. Cats that sound like sea gulls.

  “Buy it,” the Bible said, and “I had thought to advertise thee,” but now must I advertise myself? Oh, I do advertise him. I always have. (My violin teacher was advertised already.) What if I advertise myself and if I go in with beach things? Clams, cold French fries, cigarette butts. What they will think is salt is really sand and the lox is mackerel. The cats won’t eat it. You have already stuffed them with chopped liver.

  I get up and hop a bit to warm myself. If you come for me, I’ll be dancing. I’ll have you sit on the stairs in your good suit and wait till you shit in your pants. Only then can we go home together in some kind of mutual understanding.

  But Maya’s door opens and here he comes now, a little drunk, with Shirley, Helena, Miranda, Sonja. As usual, he is looking at the ceiling and doesn’t see me. Shirley, Helena, Miranda and Sonja look at me as though they remember having seen me somewhere before but they don’t remember that I’m his wife. They never do, but then he often forgets to introduce me. There he goes, followed by the shorter men. If I hurry home I can be there before he is and I can unlock the door for him just as he expects me to. I know I can beat him back, because he will be taking them out for coffee.

  All that about the menstrual was just anxiety, so if I can keep a good attitude and smile when he comes in maybe he’ll make love to me tonight.

  Epoch, vol. xix, no. 1, 1969