We made love there, he (not my brother) and I, and he said to me then that he could not read my smile, could not fathom what it meant, and yet, he said, “I can see that there is some meaning to it. But, anyway, I’m glad you smile,” he said. And why was I smiling? Was I thinking that if this place was really an island, we could have monkeys and let them swing, wild, in the trees and if it was not an island, they would get away, but if it was, then they would stay? Or could I have been remembering all the scarfs he had bought me and my shelf of hats?
But I can’t really remember that smile of mine at all. I can remember yesterday when I came back hungry for breakfast after all that running and found a little dead mouse on the kitchen floor, just an ordinary little brown mouse in the middle of the bright tan tiles, looking more incongruous than it might have looked because the kitchen was all done over so recently in whites and browns.
I picked the mouse up on the edge of a newspaper, using a stick to push it for I could not bear to touch it with my hands, and I put it in the garbage. Of what significance can a little dead mouse be? I must have asked myself then, or rather, I could not have even thought about it at all, since I was not yet aware of any of these patterns. Then I was only conscious of being alone and of having been alone for some specified length of time but I could not remember how long.
After getting rid of the mouse, I took a cold chicken leg and a hard-boiled egg from the refrigerator for my breakfast. It was already late morning and when I finished I went out on the side porch and sat down. Soon after that there came that first phone call, of which I’ve already spoken.
He would always answer his phone briskly, not with Hello, but Yes. He never said his name. He never said, This is so-and-so, but, staring at one of us, at me or my brother or one or the other of our twin baby girls sitting up in their twin chairs, staring, it seemed, into our skulls, he said, Buy, or Sell. That was always all there was to it. I had never answered this phone before but I answered it with Hello.
The voice was the same the second time as the first time, but the second call came after my second meal for the day, which was my supper and for which I had exactly what I had had for breakfast. (Notice all these seconds: a second meal, a second call, another egg, a bit of chicken.)
The voice was the same the second time as the first, the same man’s voice and the same words, the same obscene talk of love of me. I think only a very fat person could have such a low voice or could speak so thick-tongued and say the words so slowly. He almost had a tune to his talk and a rhythm, as though those awful words were poetry.
I suppose .one might ask why I didn’t just hang up right away. That’s what I ask myself, too. Why did I listen all the way to the end? Even if he rang again after I hung up, I need not have answered, knowing it was he. I certainly would not have thought that it might be one of the family calling me right after his call, regretfully asking my forgiveness or even asking me to come with them, perhaps saying they were all driving back to pick me up. “We wouldn’t leave you as though you had died here. We wouldn’t leave you isolated. You are too young to be so lonely,” they might have said, but it wouldn’t have been any of them then and so I really need not have heard any of that fat person’s call and I certainly need not have heard the second one, knowing what was coming, and yet, as though hypnotized by the slow rhythms of the words and the whispering quality of the voice, I listened to the end.
After that I called the police again and they were sympathetic but they didn’t see what they could do. I talked to the same man as before and his voice was such that I wondered if he, too, hadn’t recently lost some loved ones. I, with my own great losses, could understand it in him. I could hear it. Death was in his voice, sad, loving death. He had once been happy, deliriously so, as I had been. “I’ll tell the prowl car to drive over there and check around a couple of times tonight if it would make you feel better, but, like I said before, those fellows stick to the phone.” “It would make me feel better,” I said, not realizing what it would be like to be hearing them drive over the gravel like some of them coming home, not realizing how their red light would flash and how their spot would play upon the house.
At first, last evening, I had lit all the lights, but that made the windows into mirrors and we have too many mirrors as it is, although I did used to like to see myself for I fit in so beautifully with each room no matter how different. Chameleon-like, I seemed biologically adaptable to every decor. Mirrors and reflecting windows seemed to provide me with a black edge as though I were in a picture and the artist had drawn me with more vigor than anything or anyone else in it. My brother was like that, too. We both had an outline that was more than just our black hair and eyes. But last night I went about shutting curtains and avoiding mirrors, for these days I see such an isolated me, a me who wears a strange smile that even I cannot fathom. Did he know? Had he guessed something then, and if he were here now could he tell me what he really thought of that smile so that I, too, might get some idea of what it was about? Yet it does seem to me that I used to know what was in my head at those times.
Shutting all the curtains did not help, so I turned off all the lights and opened the curtains again. The moon made enough light for me. Then the mirrors reflected almost blackness except for my moon-colored face, and the windows all looked out again instead of in. I went up to my old bedroom, not up here to the little bed I have set up for myself by the wires, but to my regular room next to his and across from the twins, and there I sat staring at my doorway because I had left my door open into the dark hall and there was such a deep black oblong shape there, as though it came from all the way down two stairways into the cellar. I don’t know how long I sat staring, but I heard the police car come. I heard their wheels along the gravel coming slowly and soon I could see the rhythmic reflections of their red light upon my ceiling. I suppose they had turned it on to let me know who they were. At first it made me think of blood and I felt a strange dizziness, but then I realized how gay it really was, like the lights on a Ferris wheel or on top of a carnival booth for shooting little metal foxes that go by one by one.
With these thoughts, the dizziness passed and I went to the window. They were playing their spotlight over the front of the house as though to catch some monkey-man clinging to the walls where there was no place to cling, and then they lit the surfaces of all the bushes along the turnaround. After a few moments they drove away over spitting gravel. I looked out again, farther out into the moonlight, and there were no monkey creatures upon the walls at all and the bushes still hid whatever they had hid before, under the spotlight’s eye.
I did not sleep at all that night and I heard them when they came again, flashing their lights in the same way. I knew they would not come after that. I knew this second visit would be the last.
It was in the early morning that I came up here in the attic and got this little bed out, setting it up with the dawn coming through the window, and because there were birds sitting, singing, on the wires, I found I could, at last, go to sleep.
When I awoke much later, there were only two birds left, two gray little things sitting silent and motionless. I saw at once that they were omens. I saw those two birds like a warning of all the duplicates of the day before. I remembered the little brown mouse on the kitchen floor and I was ready as I came downstairs, though not exactly ready for what was there.
How do you suppose that pale and perfect hand, cut off just above the wrist, got upon the Persian rug just inside the living room door? I almost didn’t see it except for the warning of the birds. Yet it may have been there all this time and I only just noticed it as I came downstairs, or perhaps it somehow flew in in the night. It lay palm down, poised, like a five-legged spider, a left hand, facing me with the mouth of its wound. It lay very still but it looked as though it were capable of action, the fingers stretched out behind it, relaxed, each one curving so that the tips touched the rug. If this hand were nothing but a finger or perhaps a thumb, it would have lain
there utterly inert, or if it were an arm, it would seem unwieldy, incapable of any but dragging movements, but a hand is quite a different thing. This one seemed, resting there five-legged, a study of the principles of motion.
It was familiar to me, a friendly, perhaps beloved hand, but I could not think where I had seen it before or whose it could be. It was like a person whom one cannot remember the name of or exactly where one is used to seeing them, a person met completely out of the usual context. I knew this hand and yet it was certainly not his and I could not even tell for sure which sex it had belonged to.
It has grown late as I sit again upon my little bed thinking: Should I have left it lying there? Haven’t I some sort of obligation to it? Some duty I should perform? Certainly I can’t put it into the garbage with the mouse. But I have done nothing about it. That hand tells a wordless story, answers all questions if one wished to consider it, to face it. If one could bring oneself to clasp it, perhaps, in order to recognize its touch and thereby the person it once belonged to, one would have the answer to these last days. But I have decided I will not face that hand, for its mouth is too wide. I am sure it tells too much.
Here in this attic it isn’t hard to find a pole. I use a long piece of white wood, molding, no doubt, for it is rounded along one edge and square on the other. I lean my head out of the window and listen to the ticking night sounds. I have put on my dancing shoes. I do realize how we are all connected physically by those wires we talk through-a road for wingless birds. Downstairs I hear the faint ringing of some phone or other.
I have decided that I will not think about that hand anymore or about whatever obligations I may have toward it. It is much more interesting to try to understand this slowly revealed pattern of whiteness and twoness, of strange phone calls, lights upon police cars and white, hard-boiled eggs. These are what I will concern myself with, but as a whole, not as isolated incidents. The hand belongs distinctly with the mouse. I must not let myself think of it alone.
In the moonlight outside I see… I seem to see a flock of flying fish all silver in the sky, silent as bats, with stiff, serrated wings, double wings like dragonflies, two on each side. Tomorrow they might have had three, but tonight they have two.
I think I am beginning to see the pattern and I am a part of it.
I will step out upon the wire.
No, they have not murdered me, nor I them. I have not, by any chance, cut them up (even to the last myna bird) and hid them in the cellar, nor they me, for I am wholly here and with both my hands upon my long, pale arms.
Carefully I will walk out to the first cross-shaped pole, where the smell of lilac will rise up to me like mist. I can think of myself as miraculously stepping over the crucifixion, Christ hanging there below me, each upper wire at the ends of the crosspiece coming from a palm of his hand and the lower wire piercing his side. He is a lovely, pale and waxy boy, naked in the moonlight, as luminous as one of those fish that passed so silently by. He is quite dead, his head hanging sideways and down, almost as though his neck were broken. He is beardless and his short, black Jewish hair all comes forward, soft as a little cat-skin cap. He looks like one of those acrobat boys that walk the wires at night. All he needs are white tights and a little blue or orange vest. He is smiling. I will step over him on one of the topmost and thinnest wires, lightly as though I needed no wires at all. My pole will balance gently from side to side. I feel young. I am young and I am beautiful. I will go south along the treetops.
I step out upon the wire.
The Richmond Review, 1970
Debut
THERE are always the helping hands of my sisters and everywhere the rustle of soft silk and the tinkle of iced drinks, so being blind is no hardship. All is dark and calm and cool with the flutter of fans. Hands touch me, guide me. My sisters talk in soft voices and sometimes they sing. Their hands are thin and dry. Their long fingernails seldom scratch, only now and then when they can’t help it.
Sometimes I say, “I wish I could see,” yet never really wanting to, for I have all I could wish for now. I don’t need to see with their hands always about me and their fans fanning me. “Better not to see,” they answer. “The world is a black place. The days are sharp with thorns. Better not to see the world,” and they sing me a slow song.
Mara says the world is blacker even than anything I see now, but I don’t believe it. Also I don’t see black always, but red sometimes and sometimes purple stripes, sometimes white pricks of light.
Mara and Netta take me to the banks of the stream to listen to the water. “IT’s nice to hear water over stones,” they say, and, “sound is better than sight.” Mara combs my hair and Netta washes my feet. I lie on my side with my knees drawn up and play with my blunted daggers, thick as fingers on the string of my belt. I put my hands down sometimes to rub my knees or across to feel how my breasts have grown. I think: There’s a change coming. I’m nervous. I’m not sure, today, if I like my hair combed or not or my feet washed. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I don’t. (One of these days the daggers won’t be so blunt. I wonder if, under their thick shells, there might not be needle points, with poison perhaps, to kill or put asleep. I hope so, but what a strange hope and what a strange thought that comes from nowhere unless from the sound of the pines which also have needles.) This time I won’t tell Mara my thoughts, but shell I tell her to stop combing? I don’t believe I can ask it gently. I don’t feel gentle. I turn onto my other side. By mistake I kick Netta.
“Dear Princess,” Mara says, “listen to the music of the stream. It sings just for you.” She combs my hair faster and puts her hand on my forehead. Now I know that I don’t like the combing. “Stop,” I shout. “Don’t you ever get enough hair combing? This is the last of it…ever.” I bang down one fat dagger and it does break open. I hear it shatter and I feel with my finger that it’s now a needle shape just as I guessed and almost as long as my hand. I don’t yet know if it’s poison.
My sisters are quiet and I don’t feel their touch. I wonder have they gone off quietly on their bare tiptoes and left me, poor blind thing, alone in the forest? But I don’t call out or make any move. I sit with my head up and listen. There’s the sound of leaves and of water flowing. I’ve never been without the rustle of my sisters’ sounds or their touch before. Their hands that hold my cup of milk and feed me my bread and honey, my strawberries, my plums, would they now, silently, suddenly, desert me? But have I ever spoken so harshly to them before?
Then some other sister comes. I hear her humming from somewhere across the stream, and then I hear Mara, still quiet near me, say to the one coming, “Thus the Princess,” and I turn my face toward her sound. The other comes. It’s Mona. “Ah,” she says, “I’ll go on ahead and tell the Queen.” What she says frightens me, but the tone of her voice makes me angry. If she’s talking about the Queen, I think, why doesn’t she sound grander, or if not grander than more servile. But I was never angry at Mona’s voice before. She is one, with Lula and others, too, who comes to sing me to sleep.
Now that I know my sisters haven’t left me alone, I get to my knees by myself and put my arms above my head and feel how strong I seem today. I stretch and then gather my hair behind my shoulders. I loop it in my necklace like my sisters do when they go hunting. I think how my sisters say I’m beautiful. How they say the Queen doesn’t like beauty or strength like mine and I wonder will the sisters stand by me with the Queen. They’ve been sweet and loving, all with their hands coming to feed me and wash me and cover me with my silk, but will they stand by me as I come, so blind and helpless, to see the Queen? I’m not sure that they will. The world is black, they say. Mara sometimes would hold me in her arms. “Never see it,” she would say. “I hope you never see the black world.” “Woman child,” she called me. Mara is my closest sister, but even so I’m not sure she’ll stand by me. Perhaps, after all, the world is as black as what I can see now, perhaps with purple stripes and frightening pricks of light.
I feel the sisters�
� hands help me to my feet. This time they don’t ask me if I’d like to swim before going back. This irritates me, for at least they could ask even though I would say no. Haven’t they any respect for my feelings? Can’t they let me refuse for myself? Do they, perhaps, think me so stupid, so ignorant, that I might say yes? I don’t think I want them on my side before the Queen if that’s how they feel about me. I, helpless as I am, will stand up to the Queen alone. But why am I so angry?
Though I’m blind, I know our house well. I’ve walked along its wide verandas and, when I was younger, played on its steps. I know its many open doors, it s porches. I know its stone, its wood, its cushions, curtains, tassels, tapestries. I’ve heard sounds echo through high-ceilinged rooms. I’ve put my arms around fat pillars and could not touch my fingertips at the other side, and always I’ve heard the steps of sister, upstairs and down, night and day, their rustlings and tinklings, their songs, their humming and sometimes the sound of their spears.
Yet, though the house is big the doors and porches wide, my own world is always close about me. Sometimes I seem to walk in a ball of dark hardly wider than my fingertips can reach. The world comes to me as I feel it and mostly from the hands of my sisters.
I don’t think I was born blind. I have dim memories of once having seen. I remember it best in dreams. Faces come to me, all of them pale, all with long hair. I think I know what lace looks like, and white and pink coverlets, beds that hang from the ceiling on thin golden cords. In my dreams I can see tall, narrow windows with misty light coming in. I see lamps on the walls with fringe hiding their brilliance, but only in the dreams have these things any meaning for me now.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 26
