The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Their mansion is unfinished still. Only the vestibule built (but it’s a big one, even as mansion vestibules go) and one tower (small) from which to view the mountains above the tops of trees. Both vestibule and tower are made out of the local rocks, so on the walls are the faint etchings of trilobites and prints of the leaves of ancient, ginkgo-like trees. In the fireplace they stand out clear, outline by the smoke. Once upon a time it was warm here, and covered with water. The land has shifted, quake by quake, away from some southern latitude and it’s still going. North by northwest. Also rising straight up. On land such as this, it’s easy to go astray.

  And now she’s going just a little big crazy. She wants and wants. Stands at window as if caged. Plastic that’s in front of the glass to keep the heat in, makes things fuzzy. Snow outside begins to look soft and warm. Just right. So she leaves. She’s not so crazy she doesn’t take cheese sandwiches, peanuts, raisins, carrots…. Also takes his big fur boots and hat and now she’s out in those nice adolescent-looking spruce trees that are older… much, much older than they look. She hugs some (though not much to hug). Touches them as she goes by. Wants to soak up the stolid way they are and also wants them to know how she feels: that even though they’re stunted because of their hardships, she loves them all the more for it. She stops to drink glacier milk along the way. She’s following, at first, browse trails that go no special place. It’s cold. She just goes on. Easy to go astray. Thinks: years of going astray… was always astray, so if now astray, it’s no different from before.

  Meanwhile he’s home—just woke up and sitting by the fire she’d laid before she left, asking himself ultimate questions, or, rather, penultimate questions as, What about the influence of theory on action? What about negative ends versus positive means and vice versa? He doesn’t notice she’s gone, slipping around out there in his too-big-for-her boots. She had not meant to be going in a northerly direction. She had not meant to be climbing on up higher into the cold. She thought for a while she’d maybe creep back after he’d gone to sleep with no supper, but she’s too far now for that. (He’ll miss his boots before he’ll miss her.) She was thinking: South and warm and down, down, into the lower valleys, but she’s been going up because it’s the hardest and she’s always done whatever was the hardest. The spruce get older and smaller the higher she goes until there’s—all at once—no more of them. Meanwhile he keeps putting on another log until the whole vestibule dances with the fire and he pulls off sweater after sweater, watches his giant shadow writhe along the walls, falls asleep in his chair.

  If there had been flowers blooming up there on the mountains, she would have known the names of every single one. If birds had called out, she’d have known which birds and would have whistled back.

  Since she’d started in the morning after a sleepless night (though all her nights have been sleepless for a long time. She can hardly remember the times when she used to sleep well…. Since she’d started early she gets almost all the way to the top before it’s too dark to go on. She finds a kind of cairn built by summer climbers. There’s a slit at the bottom big enough to slither into. She does. Sleeps, not well, but better than she’s slept in a long time, dreaming: Loves me? Loves me not? And: Who (or what!) is number one in his heart? It’s his boots, and his hat keeps her warm enough (or almost warm enough) all night, so in the morning she’s (as usual) full of grateful love for him and wondering: Why hasn’t he followed no matter how hard? Why hasn’t he come for her by now with something nice and warm to drink? He’s never done anything remotely like that, but still she wonders why he’s not already there, maybe having climbed all night just for her.

  She squirms out and, first thing, she sees she’s almost to the top so goes on up. What she thought was five minutes’ worth of climbing turns out to take a half an hour. At top she sits on fossils and looks out—little shivers of pleasure or of cold—eating raisins and soaking up comfort and courage from the view, this side, too: Englemann, Englemann, everywhere Englemann below her, first in the sheltered hollows and then, lower down, nothing but. Thinks: Nothing like them, and nothing like being up this high, and nothing like what it took to get this far, nothing like the cold, clear air. She even forgets she’s pregnant.

  Now, down in the big stone vestibule, he is shouting, “Bacon, bacon!” Searches what few crooks and crannies there are to search, groans and spits, hisses into the corner under the king-sized bed, makes his own black coffee, spends the morning writing out new rules while she walks the col, too exhilarated to feel fear of heights. One last bit of glacier still sits in the steep pocket below her. She can tell by the old blue ice showing where the pure white snow’s been blown off. She follows the ridge above and then past, and then starts down, but she’s being too courageous… too sure of-herself now, falls, slides the whole bare slope till stopped… saved by one thin old Englemann, her knee twisted back behind. Hurts. Probably nothing broken though she’s not sure. Waits, lying there clutching tree because of pain. She’s looking straight up through the narrow, scraggly circle of branches to the sky that’s clouding over, thinking: Tree, tree, this tree and sky. Ties her scarf tight around her leg. That helps. It’s getting windier. Big black clouds off over next mountain. She must get lower and to some sheltered spot. Can’t stop now. Gets up. Goes from tree to tree to tree (she’s depending on them) steeply down. Thinks: If not for Englemann spruce to hang on to!….

  By late afternoon finds bear’s cave still warm from that big body. She knows it’s a bear’s cave. She can smell it. She can see the footprints in the snow, people-like prints but wider, leading out. She needs the shelter now and the warmth of it. Can’t go on. And she’s more cold than scared. Also it’s beginning to snow. She creeps in. Wedges herself among the tree roots along the left-hand side away from the more open part of the cave. She knows the bear will come back, but she thinks she already knows how to keep away from something big (or small) and dangerous. She falls asleep, a dreamless sleep, not so full of unanswered questions about love or the lack of it.

  The bear comes back at three AM. She hears him sniffing around outside and giving little warning growls. Also he’s got the hiccups. Nothing here she hasn’t heard already, and many times. She’s only half awake. Before she realizes it, she’s told him she loves him. She’s talking soft and low. He grunts, then hunkers on in, rolls to far side, back turned. (She thinks: As usual.) He lets her be. Snores. Storm goes on outside. Later (as usual) she moves close, snug against his back.

  They sleep two days and nights, or so she guesses. When she wakes up later, as he’s leaving, she finds he’s eaten all her cheese sandwiches, carrots, peanuts and raisins, and she thinks: As usual.

  She hurries to the entrance of the cave and calls out to him before he goes. Her knee hurts and maybe she’s a little feverish. She speaks without thinking. That’s not her usual way, but he seems a little bit safer than her own male, even though he’s the biggest and most masculine thing she’s ever been this close to (dangerous, too). No doubt about it. She does like his looks, though: his hump, his shoulders, his yellow-brown fur…. Now he hangs his head low, almost to the snow, and looks back at her suspiciously, and it isn’t as if she hasn’t seen that same look a thousand times before. But what is there to lose? She talks to him of things she’d never dared to talk about before. “How can love last,” she says, “if this goes on? How can love even begin? How can it go on and on, and we all,” she says, “want undying love. Even you, though you may not think so. It’s normal. And, by the way,” she says, “food is love, you know. Love is food. It’s how we live. It’s what we live by, and you’ve eaten it all up.”

  Needless to say she’d never said any such thing to her own overbearing, legal, lord and master, though she’d wanted to for a long time.

  The bear watches her as she speaks, as though too polite to interrupt or move even. His little beady black eyes take everything in, that’s clear. There’s a dull, sleepy, intelligent look about him. He waits patiently until she
’s finished, then humps off in powdery snow.

  She sucks ice from the cave entrance. Finds a piece of root to make a splint for her knee. After that makes a broom from root ends and tidies up, all the while chewing root hairs from the cave ceiling. When everything is spic-and-span she sleeps again. At three AM or thereabouts he comes back with a small black bass for her. It seems as if he’s taken what she said to heart. She lets him have half though she knows he’s already eaten (not only all her food, but lots more, too). He licks up the fish scales she leaves. He eats the head (she gets the cheeks and also swallows down the eyes, though that’s not easy to do). While they eat she talks and talks like she never talked before. She tells him all she knows about bears and that she hopes to learn lots more. Later she rubs the back of his neck and behind his ears. Top of his head. She likes the feel of him, and he’s so warm. It’s like the fireplace is lit when he comes in. She sings and he hums back a tune of his own she learns by heart. (She loves the sound of his voice.) They sleep again, she can’t tell how long. Next time he leaves, they kiss, and not just cheeks. When he comes back, he brings another fish. And it goes on like this except they’re kissing more and sleeping longer and longer periods, breathing slowly into each other’s faces and not even getting up to pee, he, not turning his back to her except now and then and, when he does, giving her a bear hug first. It’s a whole other rhythm she’d never known about before. And not bad, she thinks, to let the storms go on by themselves and forget about everything and just be warm and cuddled and cuddling all the time. It’s what she’s always wanted: arms around her that hardly ever let go. It’s what she didn’t get when she was little.

  They don’t even feel the earthquake, though it shakes a little dirt and pebbles down on them. She dreams it, though, and in the dream the quake is her husband’s big feet shaking the mountain as he comes to get her to tear her away from her embrace. Before that she’d sometimes dreamt that the storms are him, too, tearing at the cave to pull her out. When those dreams come, she hugs tighter to her bear and he embraces her yet more snugly. Then she knows she’s safe and thinks she finally has all one needs of real love and that it will last forever though maybe that’s too much to hope for.

  Meanwhile, back at the vestibule, the earthquake has caused quite a bit of damage. Some walls have crumbled and part of the roof come down. The fireplace is still OK though. He can squat in front of it mooing for his woman, and he still has most of his tower from which to growl out at the moon or stars or sun. Now he’ll have to clean up the debris by himself as well as cook, cut his own firewood, skin his own marmots. If she knew this she could feel some sweet revenge, or maybe, I-told-you-so, except she never had.

  One starry winter night when her knee is better, though not completely, she limps out with her bear and it’s so nice the bear stands up and does a little soft-shoe while she throws snowballs at the sky. She limps, but she can shuffle and wobble from tree to tree, kissing them and him. They’re singing all the songs they know, but by now she’s forgotten most of the words. Knows only rhyme and alliteration though she remembers the oxymorons, especially since “the brightness of midnight” is all around them right now. It’s sharply cold, but even so they both know spring is in the air. After this night, they begin to sleep less and then she has the baby. He’s so small and thin she hardly knows she’s birthed him except she hears the peeping. The bear helps by licking it clean and then eats the placenta. By then it’s not a question of naming it. She can’t even remember what names are for.

  It gets warmer and the bear’s gone more and more and brings back less and less. The baby might as well be a little bird. Besides her own milk, she feeds it worms and grubs. She tweets at it and it tweets back. When the bear stays out six days in a row, she suspects she’s made the same old mistake… same kind of destructive relationship she’s always had before. He’ll go for good. He’ll forget about her. Or if he comes back, turn savage on her. Maybe push her out along with her robin, sparrow, little tufted titmouse.

  Then, when he doesn’t come back at all anymore, thinks: Yes, yes, she knew it would happen and now she’ll have to go, too. Be out On her own. Find the next meal herself. It’s a bright spring day, wild flowers coming out, but she no sooner starts down, baby perched on her shoulder, pecking at her ear, than it flies away and she has no name to call it back by. She tries to caw him down. She whistles all the bird calls she knows, but none work. He circles for a few minutes while she finds the words to tell him he can’t fly, or anyway, not yet. It only wobbles him a little. He utters one harsh quack she’d never heard him make before, then soars away, out over the valley. She thinks she hears soft coos and cuckoos even after he disappears into the trees below.

  Well, she’ll just go down by herself. And south. But this other valley, not towards home. This time maybe not take the hard way, though she’s wondering, as usual, Where is the creature with which she can live happily ever after?

  Then she sees a figure climbing up. First it’s just a greenish-brown slowly moving spot, but then it becomes green and brown… tweeds and corduroys. Thin, small, wiry. Has a greenish-gray beard. Alpine hat with little red feathers in it. Black-button bearish eyes. She sees them as he comes closer. Though she’s never seen him before, she knows who it is. Knickers, hiking boots-the old-fashioned kind. “Englemann,” she says, “Englemann, Englemann.” It’s one of the few words she’s not forgotten… never would forget though she is, by then, almost free of words. She will have to start over now from the beginning with wah, bah, and boo.

  He comes up the last switchback. They look at each other and smile. He has a little tuft of fragrant mountain misery in his buttonhole. He takes it out, sniffs it once, then gives it to her.

  “Oh, Englemann,” she says and, “wah” and “bah” and “boo.”

  Verging on the Pertinent, Coffee House Press, 1989

  As If

  WE WERE singled out, rounded up, subjected to scrutiny, confined to such spaces as seemed (to them) suitable for us. We were accused of being mere imitations, but how tell a good imitation from the real thing? We ourselves don’t know, or hardly know, or didn’t know then, but do now, though we’re still not sure. They said they had been suspicious all along, and actually, we also have always had suspicions about ourselves. However, we revealed to them the selves we have, for some time now, tried to be. We didn’t tell them that we hardly knew what they were talking about—that we only dimly sensed (then) the rightness of what they said. We had by that time forgotten what was true and what was false, even though we have always known that we are false in many ways in spite of our strivings—or perhaps because of our strivings—to be ourselves: as why should we have to work so hard to be who we “really” are if we really are it? And yet our smiles have always seemed to genuine, even (or especially) to ourselves.

  We believe that no beings of our caliber have ever been taken before none quite so “equal-to,” so rosy and lucent, so (at times) outwardly serene—our capacity for suffering only equal to our capacity for joy. (But this last is such a truism as to be hardly worth the words to say it.)

  They used dogs to sniff us out, not trusting themselves to be sure of our differences. Even our own pets sensed that we didn’t belong.

  The day of our capture, it was perfect weather for intellectuals.

  Only that once we appeared before them topless (we are pleased with our appearance), but this didn’t change their attitude though we hoped it might. (We had, by that time, been unjustly accused of having come from other planets.)

  We kept our answers to a minimum because we didn’t understand their questions. Usually we talk a lot because we are also pleased with our language and proud of it. It’s the one with the most words, and good ones too, such as aquatint,fudge, and quilt; and phrases such as hitch it to, and Ed edited it and Bob’ll be back. Then there’s endings like fists, ghosts, risks, and so on. What could be more fun! So we talk.

  We have been captured along with many of our artifac
ts: parasols, chiffonniers, love seats, lap desks, shuttlecocks… a miscellany of what we consider poetry but they do not, also art that we consider art and they, etc. They say none of our arts make any sense at all.

  “Why other planets?” we ask.

  They’re acting as if it’s our own fault that we have been accused of this. We look so much like them, too. One of us looks like a well-known movie star and one looks like along-dead author (and dresses the part in purple velvet), and one looks like Wanda Landowska, and two look like versions of the young Frank Sinatra, while another looks like the elderly version. Four look like Joyce Carol Oates.

  It seems we have done such a good job at pretending, that we have kept ourselves secret even from ourselves. I was unaware that all these others (and I was even unaware that I myself) were “us” until we were confined here in this unsuitable place. We have kept up this masquerade for so long that we wonder if there’s any hope of recovering even small bits of who we really are under the debris accumulated while pretending to be “them.” If we fail to find ourselves, we will be condemned to being “them” even if they continue to accuse us of being alien, saying our eyes are too this or that; our hair, our noses, too much or not enough; and so forth.

  It was only after I was rounded up as one of “us” (picked out by my own Pomeranian) that I began to remember that I had once asked myself all the same questions they are asking us: Who was I? Where had I come from? Where had I come from! The explanations I had received—we all had received—were too ridiculous to be taken seriously. First there were those stories of being found under a mushroom, but then our mothers took us aside for a serious talk and told us the outrageous business with two sexes—a tale more outlandish than the one about the storks. This only made us wonder all the more what the real story could be. (That we come from other planets doesn’t seem unreasonable by comparison.) None of us felt that any of this had much to do with us. Certainly I knew it had nothing to do with me—even (or especially) the fact that I was one sex and not the other, and had had no choice in the matter. And why two sexes anyway? And why did I have to be one of them?