“I object,” I tell him. “I’d much rather have some sort of teaching position. I’m a member of the association for the advancement of cognitive thinking. I’m aware of the new studies of the sensory and perceptual processes and I speak a number of languages that not a single person on this planet can possibly know but me, not to mention that fact that I’m a fully trained astronomer. Besides, you should take me to your leader.”
He says he hasn’t had much time to learn things. I think I hurt his pride or his feelings and I’d really like to make up for it somehow. “Well,” I tell him, “I’ll have to think this out, and in the meantime, I may as well make some spaghetti.”
He tells me that would be nice and not to forget to make enough for the children, but he doesn’t say how many there are or give ages and sexes or if I can expect any of them to help me with the dishes.
He says, “Shape up.”
It turns out today is Tuesday. Never a very good day on any celestial body.
“There’s not only just one way to be a good wife, you know,” I tell him. “Besides, where I come from we usually live alone. It’s expected. We’re brought up for it. Mothers always say to daughters, When you grow up and go off alone and don’t do what I did, you’ll be single and simple and can live as you please.”
“Go ahead an’ cry. It’s OK,” he says, and he says he’s got money enough for dancing lessons if I like that sort of thing.
I tested him surreptitiously and found him wanting, though I do admire him in several ways. He wakes me with music he whistles himself. He praises my breasts. He listens when I talk even though he doesn’t understand much. He worries about me. He lets me have my way sometimes. He taught me lots of different ways for making love and he keeps asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me?” and I never know quite what to answer. I tell him that I know that the butterfly is a symbol of the female sex organs, while the caterpillar, on the other hand, is a symbol of the male. That seems to satisfy him for a little while.
I’ll be seeking my fortune behind his back if necessary. I’m going to try to win a trip for two for as far away as I can manage and then take both trips myself consecutively. I may send some bottles into space on tiny rockets with calls for help, one to each of the cardinal directions with a message saying: Remember me, I’m stuck here in this ordinary solar system, ordinary planet, ordinary backyard (though if the fifth planet goes nova it’ll be quite an interesting binary system). You may not recognize me. My uniform is torn and has spaghetti on it. I have a constant ringing in my ears. But be careful when you come. You might turn out to be somebody’s wife. He says, “Shape up.” I want to know if I should bother trying to make him proud of me. I think I’m pregnant and what about all these other children?
A long message, but to the point, and one that will, I hope elicit compassion.
He is Wabb, son of Argg, and I’m drifting into a new role in which I recognize the plight of the overeducated suburban woman being a helpmeet to her hard-working spouse.
But just suppose I really have fallen off a ladder while painting the window sills: Why then would I find their language so full of simple sounds and twangs that leave me cold? I’m exhausted with it. There’s hardly a combination of sounds that doesn’t mean something to them somewhere.
And even though I heard myself making the cry of an animal (I remember that), still, they are the ones that try to understand everything on an instinctual level and get most of it wrong at that.
“Hey, no more sittin’ around starin’ into space.” (I was looking at the sky in hope of rescue. )
“I still think you should take me to your leader.”
“Noxin? Don’t be silly.”
‘Tis the season to be jolly. Down at the South Pole the sun’s rays slant sideways all day long and night too, or most of it, coming in every window in turn. That’s one way to look on the bright side of things, and anyway, you have to trust who you can. After all, I haven’t got a cent of their kind of money. What can I do? But speaking of money, if I were choosing (and I hope someday I get the chance), I’d bring a better class of people down here who wouldn’t always charge what the market will bear.
I tell him it’s very likely we will die in an earthquake or tornado. In any case, great winds will come. They will not be man-made. Tides will be higher than ever before. The continents will shrink. Day will be like night. Scientists will scream that the world is tipping and only people with a college degree will be saved.
“Whatta you really want? Beaucoup is too much.”
“I would like to be numbered among the survivors and also be on the committee to choose the others that should survive. You might not be one of them.”
Meanwhile, I’ve already called him “darling” twice without thinking what I was saying. Oh, I would have so much preferred a Renaissance man of some sort and one a little less thick at the waist. This morning, though, I thought I saw a faint spark of understanding in his eyes. There may be some hope after all.
I am no ordinary woman. At least I don’t think so. Sometimes I’m mistaken for a boy and they say I will soon give birth to twins. Not something everyone does. (If I don’t command attention, perhaps they will soon command respect. For this reason I hope they are both male. Also I would like a couple of little penises to look at when I feel like it.) These twins will not be ordinary babies, and it’s true, they’re not. Time has gone by so fast that I have given birth to them already and they are male, faintly mongoloid, blue… but all babies have blue eyes. As soon as they are old enough to call me Muth-uh I’ll tell them my own story: That I come from a strange place in the sky, invisible to the naked eye. Something called a planet, where life goes on much as it does here except that the policy-making is left to those who can handle it.
Just then I thought I heard the archetypal man’s deep bass voice, but it was only him, Wabb son of Argg, calling the neighbors to celebrate the birth of twins.
It’s my unique past, I’ll tell them…. “It’s Muth-uh’s unique past that has made her what she is today.”
But now he’s calling me Muth-uh, too. I sputter and try to reply in kind: “Daddy… uh… duh… Da… Pop.”
“Come to muh big fat arms, ya bastid,” he says.
I wish he would enunciate more clearly. I’m not really sure that’s what he said at all, but I come anyway. It doesn’t matter how close I get because I had garlic for lunch. He puts his arms around me. “Dream girl, yup, take a break now.” I feel his big lips below my ear, then down on my neck, and I’m thinking there are a lot of different ways of being sophisticated.
But I believe I have made a tragic mistake. I should have been concentrating my efforts in entirely different areas (in spite of not having any money). I could have invented for them not only the wheel (that’s easy) but (more important) the axle and axle grease. But, I’m wondering, How could I have brought them fire so that they wouldn’t have burned themselves? But perhaps these are not the real people of this planet at all, but descendants of Neanderthalers or abominable snowmen, here in the primitive outer reaches of society, living on the slopes of mountains or at the edges of the deserts. (No wonder they’re hairy.)
Time is still passing right here and now, however, and quite rapidly (as before). The twins’ rate of growth is disappointing. (Hosay One and Hosay Two. He named them. That doesn’t mean I love them any less.) They still don’t say Muth-uh very well and sometimes I wonder if they ever will, and they are looking much more like him than like me. But the way the minds here are growing weaker every generation (not to mention the political situation), I suppose they will seem quite normal when they are sixty-five or so. Until that time, I will feign a gay insouciance (all the while awaiting either talent scouts, rescue from the skies, or archetypal man, whichever comes first.)
But quickly, before he says I’m up to my old tricks again, let me ask, Why can’t I make as much money as a good whore? “You think this is all just science fiction,” I say. “Why, you still beli
eve in the old sawing-a-woman-in-half trick and the disappearing ten of diamonds. What can I say to you?”
I don’t tell him, but I’m afraid that rather than continuing my journey through space and time, I will have to continue it only through time, and (usually) there’s something to look at out the window everyday. And one isn’t much sadder up there in the sky watching galaxies fade by. Why should I worry? Why should I talk so much and so loud? Why should I stay alert to the differences between us, them and me? And then why shouldn’t I croak and groan now and then, dizzy, having fallen down?
2076: The American Tricentennial, Pyramid Books, 1977
Thanne Longen Folk To Goen On Pilgrimages
HAVING lived in incredible harmony
In a landscape of street lights
And slopes to the sea
Gorges
Hi-rise apartments
And a good golf course only a mile upstream
Having made our way here via route 25A
Sleep felt good at last.
We lay where we had fallen.
Telephoned home afterwards
Improvised in the twilight and made do with less
Our lentil soup in paper cups.
That was the last time we crossed this river in terms of our journey. Had we but known we were never to return, maybe we would have taken one last long look longer than the last long look we took.
Up in our hills
Things are different.
People don’t go around giving out any cash and such much.
Furthermore
Much too much copulation going on now, even among members of community welfare groups.
Times change.
Returning soldiers, wanderers, traveling salesmen, all sorts of people say so. Even to others.
Our sun has spots.
Uh, our moon is gray and full of rocks.
Nobody says otherwise.
I feel fortunate
Having lived in this kind of incredible harmony
On the banks of the Sound
But it wasn’t enough.
“Not enough!” we said
And at last we’re taking action, both political and social, maybe make something viable out of life.
All this time we were busy with our various weekday workaday jobs: CPA, laboratory technician, bank teller, shoe salesman, commercial artist, piano tuner, someone writing a practical guide to horticulture, someone giving advice to small business men, someone a baker…
After the Spring thaw all our salaries, except for two of us, were to be raised.
That man!
Elegant in his green silk shirt, wine vest, copper bracelet.
“Make HIM our leader now.”
Everybody thought so.
He told us his eyes were blue and we believed him, which shows what leadership can do, but, as it turned out, they were just as brown as all the rest of ours. No harm in that, of course, unless you’re a stickler for the right word.
Listen to him sing.
Listen to him call out the names of his former employers.
Well, he was our leader for a little while, from 34th St. as far as Pittsburgh, passing a lot of hotdog stands of several different kinds all the way out there. We thought he was our biggest man to date (March fourth, 1971). We told him not to tell us how long the journey really was and he said, “O.K.” and that was that. Meanwhile we tried to reawaken his interest in the opposite sex saying, “What do you think of people who walk with wide hips and have two sets of lips?”
It’s interesting that he was supposed to vanish into anonymity when the time came for it.
There are no secrets between us that I haven’t already whispered into his ear, except for the silent, long-suffering kind and a few he didn’t hear.
We go West.
It’s impossible to go East from where we live, much as we might have preferred to do so.
It’s cold.
We haven’t had our choice of the season of the year. We took what came the same as we took with us those belongings that first came to hand when we reached into our bureau drawers.
Uh… I’m a pale and impractical man. I stutter. I have a small penis, but of incredible beauty. My body is like a boy’s and I seldom shave, but I’m six feet three and I can hold you with my eyes so that you can’t turn away from my face even when I’m naked.
You can get used to being like that
But it takes time.
Goodbye New York. Hello New Jersey.
Ornithologists are in the marshes getting wet feet and so are we.
Sometimes we wonder, do they still exist, those everyday days from Monday to Friday? We’ve forgotten their names just as we forgot to say good by to our children.
There are dead leaves in our hair.
We smell as bitter as the night air.
You’d never think to look at us that we were all once dressed like you, but tell us the news without criticism anyway. What’s been happening out there in the world of light bulbs, ironing boards, electric blankets, book reviews and millions of miles of highways? Do they still use that underground transportation system?
And meanwhile, air drop our beans, bacon and bananas six miles East of Scranton.
Saturday and going West.
Saturday and going West.
This could be a test
Which civilized life never offered us
Until now.
Tomorrow and another Saturday.
MORNING
There are birds coming up from the South already.
We mistake doves for pigeons.
As to the big, fat lady of the local hotdog stand, she has already tried to seduce three of us, one hand on her magnificent breasts, one hand on her incredible blond wig. I pose for a snapshot like that, penis twitching twice. She wonders why we don’t buy any hotdogs, but understands intuitively when we show her our own jar of mustard .
Once in a while you see a woman like that, all sex and with very black lines around the eyes. She smelled of hotdogs from the elbows down to knees but it only made her all the more harmonious to me.
She runs from us on tiny feet, giggling, thinking we’ll all catch up to her at the last moment, but by that time we’ve disappeared down some slightly less traveled throughway, leaving behind nothing but our hard boiled egg shells.
Well.
With this new way of being you have to be it all the time or not at all. We are living our parts the way somebody else might just talk about them… awkwardly at the very best. We hope we made her change her mind about something a little bit. (We give medals for that sort of thing.)
Hotdog lady doesn’t wonder much about it because that’s the way a lot of people are, misguided, not even writing Thank You notes.
You may have been wondering all this time what we’re doing out here with our blankets and funny clothes. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but this is one kind of perfection you don’t get any other way and maybe this is the longest march for peace, justice, race relations, ecology, small businesses, poverty programs, whales, and polar bears, etc., that’s ever been attempted so far. (And some of us are being paid a dollar a mile.)
We’ve set our watches by the stars.
Our days are four minutes shorter than yours
Eastern sidereal time
But that doesn’t make us any different from you essentially.
We’re tax payers.
We eat the same food.
Lord knows, we see the same old sights.
But then, when you’ve been on the road as long as we have (twelve weekends) you lose track of the fantasy land of everyday life, those cars that don’t start on rainy mornings, those knives that won’t even cut onions, those times when you join in singing with some Joe Cocker record, that WINS news, WNEW FM music, the Chinese restaurant, a medium good movie, and all the other little unrealities of those weekdays coming into focus finally somewhere between Williamsport and Altoona, because after sleeping in grocery store park
ing lots or derelict cars you begin to understand some things you’ve only wondered about a little bit before.
Yes, words take on new meanings at times like these and I might lean over and kiss another man for the first time in my life.
Henry, I didn’t mean to do that, but I have a lot of funny feelings. It’s all in how you interpret that pain in your stomach. Don’t laugh.
Our moon raced down fast past the clouds all night and he told me the story of his life in the form of a poem:
I was born / I lived in (blank) and (blank) / I studied from the age of six to the age of twenty-two / The record of my growth, in increments of a half inch to one inch is still beside my mother’s kitchen door / After I reached five eleven and three quarters, I stopped. Surely by May I will have grown a decent moustache and will understand myself a little better.
If anything happens, Henry, I’ll try to rescue (seduce) you.
Between the doing of several good things, one sometimes does something bad.
At least he didn’t get mad.
Henry looked a lot like Marilyn Monroe, maybe a little thinner, shaved twice a day in gas station restrooms while the rest of us waited, passing out leaflets to motorists from all fifty states.
NOON
Heroes are crossing (without fanfare) the grassy places between buildings and sidewalks. I was knocked down by a girl on a bicycle coming around the corner too fast. Except for frozen toes and blisters, that has been our only real misfortune. I limp but I can go on. Even so, I’m the last.
I won’t trouble you with the sequence of events that led up to the non-reappearance of several of our members one Saturday morning and to the disappearance of the rest in Cleveland, but when I greeted the people of Chicago, reading their Sunday papers in the windy city that morning, I was the only one left.
I shun publicity.
I haven’t told anyone I have (essentially) walked all the way from Sea Cliff.
What if there are moments of sadness?
Even moments of despair?
What if I had hopes of seeing, with my good companions, the opposite shore of another ocean instead of the opposite shore of a lake? What if I wanted to walk past giant redwoods? What if I saw myself lying prone in the shade of a joshua tree? What if I saw myself creeping up on wild mustang;? What if I saw myself enjoying the last hotdog at the last hotdog stand before the desert?
The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1 Page 38
