The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

The Queen of Sleep

  THIS, THE DIARY of lost sleep. New but not elegant. 3 X 5½ Green plastic cover. 365 pages. I ignore the months. Mark it into eight sections of forty-five days each, each section representing one hour of a normal night’s eight-hour sleep. First section: August 31 to October 15. Second section: October 16 to November 29, etc. Five days left over at the end of the year.

  Each day begins at 11 P.M. with sleep. Any sleep slept before eleven must be counted in the day before. I avoid fractions of an hour. Awkward to add up and unaesthetic if left over at the end of a forty-five-day section. Sleep must be timed carefully even if it means waking up earlier.

  Every morning can be a renaissance, but why start with waking? Sleep can be a renaissance, too. Each of my days begins, then, with sleep and if only I could anticipate the exact instant when I drop off, or if I could count backward from five to one and be asleep, how much easier all this would be.

  Signs to use in this book: 0 for sex, ✗ for menstrual, ✓ for a happy day, and ✓✓ for when three hours or more ahead on sleep.

  Money: Pay myself a dollar for every hour of sleep over eight. Spend the money on those five last days of the year. Eat favorite foods. Go to favorite spots. See a movie. Dance.

  But money isn’t lost for sleeping less than eight hours because I will have lost enough already with the lost sleep. (And if I should stay good-tempered in spite of it all?)

  Keep track of disposition. Take an APC pill. Exercise a half hour a day. Take a hot bath.

  These sleep dollars will be more completely mine than any others I earn. One could say they are twice-earned dollars. They can be wasted. They can be squandered on two copies of the same thing: two Marshlands by Gide, two blue necklaces, or two presents for the same person, even three. That’s why I’m celebrating August 31. New Year’s Day for me. My little green book. But I wonder if the weather can be the cause of this sense of euphoria, or the moon, or perhaps the pituitary gland instead of the start of my year. (Do I dare to throwaway my old notebook yet?)

  Days are growing shorter. Nights are growing longer all over the top half of the world. By December even the Arabs wake up in the dark.

  Waking on a bright November morning, I needed you. I have stayed up all night for you. I have waited, tense on my bed, while you didn’t come. I have slept yesterday’s sleep tomorrow and waked with a smile in spite of it and counted up my hours. I haven’t paid myself a dollar for a week. New resolutions are useless. I write this letter:

  Dear E.

  I loved you again. I was in love with you all day. I felt it coming on yesterday. I was all warmth and dependence. Oh, why aren’t you ever here at the right times! I could have been so nice. I could have been everything you’ve always wanted, anything you’ve wished for, but by the time you came back it was over. If only I hadn’t waked up so early this morning, it all might have happened later.

  Best wishes. (Dare I write, love?)

  Love fades hour by hour. I think he has sucked at my ear lobe once too often. The sick lie down, the dead lie down. People with headaches or sore feet. People making love (usually) lie down.

  From the tightrope of sleep one can fall suddenly into wakefulness at any moment. From the table of sleep one can reach and touch the floors of reality with one finger or toe, because sleep, compared with death, is waking.

  Love increases hour by hour and what I need now is somebody to tell things to. I’ve met the first-chair flute player of the symphony orchestra. I will tie my blouse up in front so my belly button shows, but what’s his opinion of green capes and short hair? Those dresses with holes along the sides may help, but he can’t practice while I’m eating and he’ll have to keep quiet when I think about what my future course of action should be. And, thinking of that, I’ve written down the address of where you write to donate your eyes after you die (one of my possible contributions to society) but I’d rather do something entirely different. Give them a piece of my brain, the part that thinks about life in general, the core of myself as femme moyenne sensuelle if there is such a thing as a sensitive everywoman. Sometimes I doubt it, because if there is, who is she? Someone certainly untroubled by menstrual fluctuations (I allow myself an afternoon nap on my bad days of the month and this, added to the sleep hours, should put me ahead with my dollars).

  Do they stare at me in my dress with the holes along the sides? I don’t stop to wonder. It’s the sort of thing I can think over later when I’m alone on the evenings when I wonder if my stomach sticks out. I can’t hold it in more than a few minutes at a time but I’ve tried to whenever I was side view to anyone important. Do I eat too much?

  The flute player might answer all my questions. I know I could do what he wants me to (if he would only tell me what he likes). I write:

  Dear F. P.

  I could love you if you looked at me while you were playing in the orchestra and I was sitting in the second row and this was Vivaldi night. I hope you will tell me what you want me to do. I’m prepared for anything.

  Best wishes. (Dare I write, love?)

  New signs to use in this book: & for a night spent listening for footsteps. º for sleeping all my sleep before 1 P.M. ⏦ for infinity, as in infinite loveliness. Flute players have quick hands.

  Things I like about flute players: Flute player noses, flute player lips. The strength of their little fingers. Breath on my neck. Sharp elbows. Black silk socks. I find flute players blowing into holes in beer cans and into the tops of Coke bottles or with pieces of grass between their thumbs. What I like about flute players is how they can say u umlaut.

  I’m keeping all my resolutions after all. I’m coming out ahead on sleep. With my first twice-earned five dollars I will buy the flute player a present. It’s for his sake I overslept this morning.

  This euphoria has finally been identified as resulting from two cups of coffee in quick succession on an empty stomach. I suppose it’s best just to ignore it. It may not last much longer anyway and what if I should find myself feeling unhappy right in the middle of some gay song?

  I’ve met E. again and on the very shores where we first met five years ago and fell in love (sailboats in the distance, middle ground and foreground). He hasn’t changed since my last letter. I mention flute players to him only in passing. I believe I have never been more logical than I am at this moment, twelve o’clock, Eastern Standard Time, the sun bouncing off my watch crystal and into his eyes. I have nothing to regret as yet, but I am plagued by an ever-present sense of deja vu. It seems to me that we sat in a bar like this one at some other twelve o’clock with sirens down the street. Once I had a black purse just like this. Once, winding my Timex, I looked toward the reflection of the sun, wondering if I should offer to pay for my own drink. I could have heard the waves from here if I tried.

  This is more than a question of preference. One makes choices on a deeper level than that. I judge the tilt of the cherry in my glass. The stem points to the door. On the other hand, the cherry itself lies with a wrinkle on the top that seems to be looking out the window (as he is). But I feel I have made this judgment once before. I chose the window which looks out onto the sea.

  Sometimes I imagine myself with a knife in my back, chest crushed by the steering post, my hand in the blender, my foot on the third rail, drowning in a surf too strong for me. Perhaps it’s lack of sleep that brings on such thoughts, but that’s why I’m not listening to the sea now.

  I sense the high point of the afternoon coming soon after the third cocktail, after he says, “I still love you,” etc. I suppose it’s always best not to argue too much. I’m agreeable but I’m not planning on losing any sleep. If depression should, in any case,result, I have a little pill that will restore the sense of well-being.(Now I lay me down to love.) In a dream I have seen two fish fly by. Will I meet him again on some other beach? I wonder, and will I think it has all happened sometime before?

  But things go along about as well as could be expected and I will keep on with the diary of lost
sleep just so long as nobody goes mad or dies or has a baby and if I don’t cut my finger off whipping the cream.

  New Directions, Vol. 22

  New Worlds, 1970

  Peninsula

  DO YOU realize we are all connected by telephone wires? I do not mean that our voices go through the wires to each other, though, of course, that is true, but that we are physically connected by the wires we talk through. We are actually physically wired to every house with a telephone as though there were a roadway set out for wingless birds. Except for the underground wires in some cities, a bird could walk from a house in New York to one in California, so, when we speak to someone, no matter how far away, we are wired, literally, ear to ear. We are connected, we are touching through wires, across whatever distance.

  I think this is a wonderful thing to contemplate. Imagine the freedom of the tightrope walkers.

  I have just recently begun to think about this. This is such a large house to be alone in that I do like the idea of the telephone wires, even when one is not talking through them, still being connected to all the houses, for one can’t see a single building or sign of life from here (here, where there used to be so much life). From as high as the attic windows, there is only a glimpse or two of the sound, so if I should put my hand upon the wires, I would be in the only possible contact with life that I can manage, but it would be a contact actually more physically close than that of eyes or ears.

  The telephone wire leaves this house just below an attic window, about fifteen inches under it, to be exact. After leaving the house, the wire goes out to a cross-shaped pole, the lower half of which is hidden in lilac bushes that are in bloom now. There is a thin wire out of each end of the crosspiece as though out of a hand, wires that stretch away to the south toward a neck of land where they cross, along with the road, to the mainland. Lower, on the body of the pole itself, there is one thicker wire, also leading south.

  This morning I decided to make a bed up here in the attic next to this little window. I wanted to be closer to the wires, not the telephones. In fact, since the calls yesterday, I would like to get away from the telephones altogether. I like the idea that the wires are connected to everyone regardless if one is talking through them or not, but actual telephone conversations can sometimes be quite distressing.

  I feel comfortable up here looking out at where the birds sit along the wires and I have found myself a nice bed. It is narrow, white-painted and youth-sized. Though I am not very large for a grown-up person, I cannot quite straighten out in it, but this bed, I knew, would be easier for me to set up and besides, I like it. There is no reason now for me not to have what I like and I do not mind in the least not being able to stretch out completely.

  Sitting on the bed and looking out at the wires, I wonder, where have all the others gone, all those I loved so, and how have I failed them? I wonder, was I too young? Did I marry before I was ready? What made them all disappear so suddenly, so cruelly? But then perhaps it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps they had some accident that wiped them all out silently and quickly, everyone of them, before I was aware that they were gone at all, or perhaps someone came at midnight and murdered them all while they were stretched out, vulnerable, upon their beds. Or perhaps it is I, after all, that they have murdered. Yes, they have left me half dead here, all of them driving away over the gravel that sounded like ice as they left. They have murdered me with their backs turned, taking away even the little black dog that was mine, taking away the setter that was his, and the hound, and the two myna birds, and every small bit of life except these wild birds that sit so blackly upon the wires and that have never belonged to anyone.

  But this place is not an island. (I insist it is not though some called it that.) I, too, can leave. I can walk away from this fist-shaped peninsula anytime I wish and go south, for the river does not How across that whole wrist of land, but comes from some inland source. I can go south, then, by way of the road, or by the stepping stones of the river, or along the telephone wires like my wingless birds. Ah, but these birds that sit like little lady’s shoes along the wires, of course, have wings and do not really need the wires at all. It is I who am wingless. But do acrobats need wings when they step out on their wires and am I any less than they, I who used to dance balanced on my toes?

  While sitting here looking out, I have a lovely thought. I think that all the acrobats of the world come out at night upon the telephone wires (who can say they don’t?), the girls with pink parasols for balancing and the boys with white poles. The boys wear tights and colored vests and the girls have short skirts and flowery hats. They ask each other, “Going south for Carnival?” when they meet, and many of them most certainly must answer, Yes. I would like to see them when night comes. I would like to see them shining silvery in the moonlight. I would like to join them there.

  How quiet the house is when it used to be so full of chatter. Now if the telephone rings, it points out the silence with exclamations, frames it into isolated sections of nothingness. Actually there are four telephones here; some ring in unison and some independently. There’s the downstairs phone, the upstairs phone, the maid’s phone and his telephone, the one he carried with him and plugged in wherever he was. That one is still on the side porch where the sun warms it in the mornings and warms the chair beside it. I sat in that chair yesterday. The cushion was uncomfortably hot. I wonder how he could have sat there so often. Yet the sun would have been absorbed down into his bones. He would have been only pleasantly warm, as though more alive than the rest of us.

  It was then, as I sat there, that the phone first rang, his phone, and I answered it. I don’t think that it was a random call, that someone just got this number by accident as they dialed whatever fell under their fingers. This is an unlisted phone and not many people know the number. “Is this 516-555-0199?” the person asked. “Is it…?” he said and mentioned my name. Why, I wonder, did I ever say, “Yes, this is…” and that name?

  The man at the police station to whom I spoke directly afterward said that this sort of call was not infrequent. “We get complaints of this sort every day,” he said, “but a fellow like that usually gets all his kicks by telephone. He won’t come by. They never do.” “But it was awful.” I said. “I never heard such language. I couldn’t repeat to you the words he used and the things he said he wanted to be doing with me, my whole body, and speaking of love to me in those words, those awful words. I’m alone here,” I said. ‘I’m all alone here now.” That was the first I had told anyone that they all were gone… Mother, Father, little brother…

  I brought my family with me when I married. There was more than enough room. We were passionately happy. I was daughter, sister, wife and mother all in one and even to this very ornamental house I was an additional ornament. I sat in the alcove next to the bird cages dressed in silk chiffon. I strolled the living room in a black mantilla. I still do. I languished by the garden doors in green brocade. I waited up and down the hallway in a little feathered hat that, like the neck of a mallard, was one color in the shadows and another in the light. I leaned at porch screens until my forehead was cross-hatched. I pulled back the curtains at the windows and looked out at the rain or, as the case might be, the sunshine. I still do. In fact, yesterday I looked out upon the wind and sun.

  Strange how things happen. One can see a pattern forming in the events that have occurred these last days. There is an odd significance beginning to make itself felt and I must stay open to it. I must understand it when it has finished unfolding itself to me. I see that now, and that I must put together each incident to form a whole. I must not look at things separately.

  Yesterday I woke to such a white morning light and I went out for the first time in… I don’t really remember when. I don’t remember dressing. I must have still worn whatever I wore to bed. There, in the woods that surround this house, I ran for the sheer joy of moving. I ran, but I stayed away from the sound, for I did not want to hear the stones upon the beach, all those was
hed-white, bony stones sifting with a hollow rustle. The largest lie in a stripe quite a few feet from the water, a stripe, east, north and west. Imagine it, this line of larger pebbles marking out this land on three sides. One cannot know its meaning, but notice that yesterday everything started with a vast, white light.

  I ran then, as though pursued by the morning sky. I ran, ran, ran until the sun came up completely and then I turned south toward the river, to the grassy hollow where we made love once. How we did make love in all the crooks and hollows of this place he called an island. If there ever was a difference between us, that was certainly the only one, whether this was an island or not, for he could seem as young as I was.

  But if I stopped there to rest a moment, it wasn’t because of that memory of lovemaking, but because I could see across the little river and I could see the stepping stones, one before the other. I could see the evidence of the rightness of my point of view and I could see the road to my release. But something stopped me from crossing then, as though, even before the pattern became apparent, before there was such a thing as a pattern, I, somehow, wanted to stay to see it unfold itself.

  Standing there, not because we once made love there, yet remembering that lovemaking time, I wondered if my faun-brown brother could have been hiding in the weeds and wild flowers then, peering down at us from Queen Anne’s lace, seeing me with my skirts around my waist. He could well have seen us for he was always in the woods, my stealthy brother, my little animal creature who had never had a beach or a forest of his own before and yet who became a part of them so quickly. He had never grown so thin and tall. How old was that brother of mine, I wonder, twelve or sixteen? A graceful age, at least, all legs, all knuckles. Sometimes it seemed I saw him in a mirror and he was my other, my male, self, my face atop his bony body, the real me, and never had I been so lovable as in him as he walked barefoot in the woods or came inside the house bringing the smell of the woods with him.