I was thirty-eight. I was forty.
Two lies about myself:
A. I have very black hair and a straight, aristocratic nose and I have the kind of long, pointed face I’ve always wanted.
B. I can dance.
A truth: I spent three years in France as a child. I peed into one of those big vats that they take out to spread urine on the fields. They called Charley “americain, tete de chien,” and threw stones at him.
I have dreamed that I was stuck headfirst down a hole and could see the sky up by my feet. I think that comes from being born upside down with the cord around your neck like all artists should be. I have dreamed I couldn’t move and I panicked and tried to scream but I still couldn’t move. I dreamed that I couldn’t find the street I lived on, that I lost my keys, that I forgot the combination to my (high school) locker, I lost my ticket, I couldn’t remember where I parked my car, I was lost in a strange city, I telephoned home over and over but no one ever answered, I caught sight of you hurrying by with a portfolio and I thought everything would be all right but I lost you in the crowds in the subway. I was glad when I woke up.
I suppose ours is a happy marriage, and there still are a lot of happy marriages: Mrs. Wallace loves George Wallace, I could see that. Mrs. Nixon loves Nixon. Mrs. Chisholm loves Chisholm. Mrs. Cassius Clay, ditto. Jean Ritchie loves George Pickow. Margaret Mead loves Mr. Bateson. Mrs. Seeger loves Pete Seeger, and with good reason. Mrs. Lester loves Julius Lester (and I would, too, if I had the chance).
Delight in me, husband, when you have time for it. Swing me up to catch hold of tree branches. Throw me over your shoulder, then let me fall gently into the grass without hurting myself. Twirl me around. Did you say I was to be your partner for life?
Happy birthday last month (April) . “It’ll do you good to be another year older,” he said. Did I mention forty-three and forty-five yet?
We were talking over our lack of religious conviction with our respective mothers-in-law if you call that talking it over. Once in a while we come to a meeting of minds, or rather, once in a while one sees that the other has human qualities that cannot be ignored. (Nick says it’s the innocents that make the best audiences, but then there’s not much sex in his dance.)
No, Mother, I won’t bite my fingernails, I won’t hunch my shoulders, I won’t walk like a horse and I’ll keep combing my hair and washing my neck, but Charley said girls were no good, anyway, no matter what they did. He kept saying it for four years, from ages nine to thirteen. You didn’t contradict him, Dad. You didn’t even say, “Well, now, they aren’t really as bad as all that.”
Back in those days I never talked to anyone on the way home from school because I wanted to dream my own daydreams. If anybody I knew came around I crossed the street and pretended I didn’t see them so I could keep on thinking. First I was a cowboy in those thoughts and then I was a famous musician, first violinist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, or a pianist playing Chopin, a cellist, oboe player, bassoonist, sometimes Ezio Pinza singing the lowest notes. But I’ve changed a lot since then. I never daydream. And being a writer is the most exciting, most romantic thing I know of to be or do now, or being a poet. I still tremble every time I think of it, though actually I seem to belong mainly to the wives-and-children category.
(I’m thinking there must be some way to keep on writing after having lost faith in plot and in any manipulation of characters. Even the slice of life begins to look contrived. I think that instead maybe I will manipulate the rhythms, the style, the organization of paragraphs or the words, or maybe sometimes just deal with little bits of fun or little bits of reality.)
Mother played Chopin, but now she has arthritis.
For a long time I was powerless to resist: my father’s opinions, marriage and having three children, the lure of music. I should mention that from the ages of twelve to twenty I practiced the violin four or five hours a day and went to orchestra every afternoon, but it was my brother Bob who got to be in the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Daddy held hands with Mommy. Once I saw him touch her breast.
I was thirteen when my breasts began to grow. Then I knew I really was a girl once and for all.
Her work (mine) represents a slow, almost unconscious break with conventional fiction. She was changing her mind one step at a time. She read Jarry.
One time that she (me) thinks was particularly successful was when she was trying to catch the little, quickly suppressed thought. “You see something,” she said, “and you might think, wow, that looks phallic and then you may suppress it before you’re aware of your own thought.” She tried to catch herself in these thoughts before they were gone. Then, of course, there’s the problem of finding a form for this sort of thing. Her story that most exemplifies this study is “The Queen of Sleep.”
At the end of that story you’ll find this paragraph:
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.
She feels this contains something of her philosophy of writing at that time. In her stories nobody will go mad or die or have a baby, but they may cut their finger off whipping the cream and who’s to say that that’s not as important in a person’s life as going mad? (Think of trying to type with it! )
She says: “What’s the hardest thing to write (confess) and what’s the most significant?” She says: “Is it more dramatic that my grandfather died trying to rescue his niece from drowning while my mother, eight years old then, stood on the banks of the river and watched, than that I’ve been in the menopause for two years already now and am wondering when it will end while my mother (that same little eight-year-old girl) went through it easily and happily and never felt better in her life? They’re different kinds of reality and menopausal adventures we know very little about.” (She says: “First I tried vitamin A, then vitamin E, then I had to resort to estrogen, but I cured myself, finally, with Paba.”)
She says her stories have become progressively “cooler” in feeling as time goes on. That is because she has done away with the emotionally building line or Row in favor of a more dronelike form.
She says her stories frequently contain within them hints and clues of the theories by which they were written and why. They are often allegories for themselves. (Not this one, though.)
She says: “A story is not an entrance into a dream world. Avoid this with a style that isn’t flowing.”
She says: “Can you write a story like your favorite Vivaldi concerto? Can you write a story like a bird sounds? Can you write what you hear when you hold a paper cup up to your ear? No. And don’t try. Stories are, if sounds at all, the sounds of words.
“Can you, on the other hand, write a story that looks like your mother, gray hair, fairly good figure, osteoporosis showing in her dowager’s hump, varicose veins and all? Can you write a story that looks like a Robert Rauschenberg painting? (I wish I could.) Can you write what looks like half a loaf of your own homemade sesame seed bread on a green plate? No, because you have to write a story that looks like words on a piece of paper.”
She says: “It’s all science fiction.”
She says: “Stories! I don’t believe in them any more than I believe in pictures on the walls.”
She says: “So far I have never, ever, written anything directly about my writing except this.”
I went to a party for Jonas’s new book about film. I got along well with his secretary, Marguerite something-or-other. Across the room Jonas made a motion to me and said something I couldn’t hear. I think he was saying that I looked nice. Later, to reciprocate, I asked him if he had published a book of his poetry (but he hadn’t except in Lithuania). He has a brown, wartish thing on the end of his nose.
I went to the opening of the women’s film festival and that was nice except I was tired and had hurt my back.
Someone should write a history of wom
en. Where were they when George Washington was at Valley Forge with their men? What was Mrs. Bach doing while Bach composed? But we know what the women were doing, and we know what I do most of the time. I keep busy.
Women, put your urine in a little jar for the doctor every six months. “Take off everything but your slip and your shoes.” (I’m glad I remembered to wear a slip.) Underwear goes in bottom drawer where they keep tissues for you to wipe off with afterward, and that’s how I spent last Tuesday morning. I keep busy.
Emery said he gets his pupils to take a pose that seems to have possibilities and then they have to make a dance based on that pose. I said, “Why, that’s just how I write a lot of times. I improvise until I find a good beginning. Then I improvise along the suggestions in the beginning. I keep what fits and throwaway the rest; nine-tenths of it, as a matter of fact. Then I improvise again along the lines of what I have so far and keep what seems to fit (and I like surprises) and throwaway most of it and so on. Not in my biographical stories, though.” I really didn’t say all this to Emery. I only thought it after what he said.
I always wanted to be the one that picked up the guitar and sang “Candy Man” at a party. I wanted to be the one dancing with abandon. I wanted to be the one in the long purple velvet dress reading her own really good poetry. I wanted to be the one with the wonderful sense of humor (but I’m not even going to go out to buy a long purple velvet dress).
Also I would have liked to be the one that married six times and had a child by each husband. I wish one husband had been a famous folk singer who played the banjo and we’d had music every night and one of his friends had come and played old-time fiddle and shown me how to do it, too. And I’d like one of them to have been the publisher of a good poetry magazine and have published some of my things, and one would have sung bass, one would have written novels, one would have been a guru and taken me to India and maybe one would be the husband I have now.
If you come in the house now, you’ll see me as I really am, unkempt. I wipe my hands on these jeans. Somebody’s old used Band-Aids are in the bathtub, unread newspapers piling up, also old mail, and I’m just sitting here on the bed talking to children, reading to them about the pygmies or some prose poems one page long, my favorites. They are scattering papers about. Their shoes are in the doorway. Their dirty socks under the couch. I keep saying it’s not my job to pick them up and besides, I’m already worn out from sitting here thinking.
My daughter wants a goat.
As a mother, I have served longer than I expected.
Once a doctor said I’d be 80 percent normal after my back operation. “Guess what, dear, I’ll be 80 percent normal!” It’s hard to know what 80 percent normal feels like, but I guess that’s what I am.
I was forty-six. I was forty-eight, etc., etc. I’ll be fifty-five, sixty-two, sixty-eight if nothing unforeseen happens and maybe still walking around in the woods if I can be near a woods sometimes.
If there’s a sunset over Brooklyn, we must take beauty where we find it.
Mother wants me to write something nice she can show her friends.
Joy In Our Cause, Harper & Row, 1974
Maybe Another Long March
Across China 80,000 Strong
WOMEN!
Take me to your leader!
You seem to be on your way to some distant mountain stronghold where you will retreat from all males except perhaps one or two. There seems to be thousands of you trudging along here, if my estimate is correct, while only a fraction of you will reach your destination. The biggest and strongest women are out in front. The grandmothers are toward the back, helped by their teen-age granddaughters. You stumble. Your knees are bleeding. Your toes are stubbed. You have scraped your elbows, sprained your ankles, yet still you keep on, gathering wild greens as you go, cooking one-pot meals over tiny fires, your smaller children piggyback or in slings, or you lean forward under huge knapsacks. Leading you, a chubby older lady of sixty-five or so who looks a little like George Washington. Look out! That rock is falling, pushed by some men, no doubt, who are up on the ridge. It almost lands on the George Washington lady, whose name is Betty though they call her Big Ma. She doesn’t flinch.
Women! Oh, Women!
I want to go where you’re going.
I want to join you even if it means leaving my son.
I want to sleep by the rushing streams where you’ll be sleeping. I want to cut saplings and cover them with leaves and camp there. I want to climb all day long in the heat or the cold, I don’t care which, and I want to dodge behind rocks when the men take pot shots. I want to see avalanches, forest fires. I want to see great rivers that have to be crossed, and mountain ranges. I want to face starvation.
Some of you are dying every day from one cause or another, but I want to go with you, anyway, singing your songs.
Big Ma is smiling. Whoever leads on to the end maybe will be president someday, maybe sit on the supreme court, maybe be governor of New York or head of General Motors, dean of Harvard Law School.
Fill out forms. Registration signed by Liz, Pat and Fran. “Brown eyes, small breasts, hair so short it won’t be any trouble, bedroll, harmonica, big, Hoppy hat, and: “What was your relationship with your mother?” I contribute a couple of thousand dollars of my husband’s money from our joint account (I hope he doesn’t notice) and I have my own bag of granola.
My group: Bea, Kate, Marge, Mavis, Billie, Sandy, Sal…
Get out of my way, all you untried and untempered young girls. It’s old Sandy, ugly Isabelle, tough little Shirl, red-faced Amy, gravel-throated Jo for me.
Just then a tall, dark man comes up asking to be made an honorary woman just for this year. He says he’ll pay his own way and more, and eat what we do, dress like us. “I’ll gather mushrooms.” (He knows how.) “I’ll give up ties and jockstraps if that’s necessary. I’ll enroll my sister if she wants to come, but my daughter belongs to one of my wives. I had three and I loved them each in turn, but unforeseen things happened every day. Now I hardly know them. Two left me and I left one. Even so, I joined the Society of Friends of Women. Our branch made a study of the effect of hormones on energy levels but we didn’t dare tell what we found out about testosterone. Also I have already apologized to my mother. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘forgive me for my diapers and all the various stages of my growing up and especially for that year I was thirteen.’’’
“Oh,” the tall, dark man says, “oh, to be establishing a whole new sense of self-worth! To be about to become! And I could wish I were small,” he says, “and finer-featured. Once I met a famous Japanese female impersonator. Compared to me, he was a very delicate man.
“But the real reason I’m here,” he says, “is that I have a new concept of leadership and I want to train women in ten lessons or less with little leadership situations that are likely to arise in everyday life. Some can even be practiced in the home on a husband and children.”
“Well, all right then. Let him come along for now.”
One hundred virgins march in his group, not one of them over eighteen.
Rivers are changing their courses where our feet have worn ruts that they find easier to take than their own riverbeds. (That’s a good sign.) A few flakes of snow come down and twilight comes earlier by a minute and a half every day.
The higher we climb the older I get.
I have wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. My frown is permanent. I squint to watch the booted, belted girls silhouetted by the sunrise. They tramp back and forth on guard duty, while the older women, still wrapped in their blankets, cook eggs on stones. Men have been seen in the hills across the way from us. Nobody knows how many. Girls cock their crossbows and let fly a few warning darts, some tipped with sleeping potions made from herbs known only to women, and Marge, handsome as a black-eyed boy, makes up a new song.
That night we eat wild goat.
Next morning I catch sight of two transvestites in mini-skirts stumbling up the banks below us on h
igh-heeled sandals. What can they be up to? (Also who knows how many blue-jeaned transvestites we already have hiding among us?) I’m not one to say what should or shouldn’t be, and I welcome diversity and eclecticism of all kinds, so I yell: “Halloo.”
Jimmy, the first one up to my ledge, has a beautiful blond Afro. I wonder if it’s real.
“Howdy, partner.”
Of course, they want to join us. Everybody does. But where do you draw the line? I tell them: “I can make you an honorary Negro, but not an honorary woman at this time,” but they don’t believe me. In spite of the leadership classes, I still haven’t the aura of authority. What’s needed is a big bass voice.
Jimmy really is quite beautiful in his own way.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I say. “I will make you an honorary woman, if you aren’t already one, and you can even be part of my group, but you’ll have to go through the ceremony.”
George, the second transvestite, finally reaches our ledge: He has a carrot-colored Afro that I’m pretty sure is real. He crosses his legs so his miniskirt won’t show too much.
“I like your shoes.”
Tall, dark man in the distance. Can it be me he’s looking at?
Women, you’re sleeping huddled together against the cold in groups of four or five. Your toes are freezing. You’re remembering your electric blankets and the warm bodies of your husbands and lovers. You’re thinking of times when you turned up thermostats. You’re remembering cats that slept on your feet. In the night your mothers die, but this was not unexpected. “Why,” you are asking, “did I tell her to come along with us? Surely I knew how hard it would be.” You’re beginning to wonder, is this the way? You’re asking yourselves, “Do you really think things will get better just because you’re doing something about it?” But lie down now, with your backs to the wind, and try not to think. One of these days it’ll be: Greetings from Woman’s Land! Like: Dear Tom. We are feasting like gods and only the men are cooks. We have banana trees. We love each other. Even the fat and the old go naked. What a relief! We do not worry about the shapes of our breasts. We plant and harvest. We swim. While our youngest daughters play in the surf, our oldest daughters photograph the sunsets. If we want to, we meditate or dance. Boys who are born here will be entirely new kinds of men. In the meantime, many of us have become great thinkers and presidents of our own organizations.
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 32
