The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  And now it turns out that Isabel is coming to stay with us for a whole month while her parents have a big second honeymoon down in Brazil—Ipanema. They have been fighting so much (they confessed it to Margaret; needless to say no one confesses anything to me) that they thought they needed a long, private time on some beach to clear things up.

  Isabel comes on a Sunday morning, all dressed in blue, which makes her green eyes look blue, too. And she comes with a long list of things not to do and things to do and when to do them: not stay up after eight, not watch TV, not too many movies, not be out after dark, and, most especially, NO CHOCOLATE! Can go to ballet and concerts. Must go to piano lessons and dance lessons and tennis…

  As it turns out, I get to be the one to take her to all these last things. As it turns out, I get to take her everywhere. Also it turns out she’s only six, going on seven.

  I don’t know where Isabel comes from. She looks like none of us. You’d think she walked right out of the sea on a foggy day: pale skin, circles under her eyes (she always has them, sick or well), hair almost white, though I suppose it will darken with age. You’d think, with those looks, she’d be quiet once in a while, but she talks—and quite precociously, I think—talks and talks. After half an hour of it, Margaret says to me, “For God’s sake, do something. Get her out of here. Take her for a walk in the park for a few hours. Go to the movies.” But on the list it said not too many movies, so I thought we’d not do that so soon.

  For my kind of person, who never knows what to say next, somebody like Isabel, even if only six years old, is a great relief—somebody who always knows just what to say and isn’t a bit worried about changing the subject right in the middle of some other topic of conversation.

  So Isabel and I go out to the park and she skips along holding my hand. We do the zoo. We pet dogs. We return other people’s balls. We look at the babies going by in strollers. We have popsicles with only a little bit of chocolate around the outside. Isabel thinks it’s not too much. She thinks we could each have a popsicle a day and it wouldn’t be too much chocolate. She thinks popsicles are perfect for weather like this. She says you can get popsicles that don’t have chocolate on them put that she likes these better. She says chocolate isn’t good for children and it isn’t good for old people like I am either because it does something bad, she says, to the calcium, which is why her mother doesn’t want her to have it and why I shouldn’t have too much either. And I say I won’t have any at all after she’s gone, and she says, good, because she won’t either, so then we’ll be even. “Mother can smell it on you,” she says. “I wonder if Grandma can smell it on you, too?”

  We have so much fun that, on the way home, Isabel cuts a kind of caper: kicks both feet up in front of her and falls down on her bottom, quite hard. She almost cries, but she holds it back. Mainly she worries because she tore some lace on her panties. I tell her we’ll get some new ones. (Margaret would say I’m spoiling her as much as I spoil myself) I say we’ll go right away and get another pair, but of course it’s Sunday, which we both forgot. The children’s stores are shut. But then we do find a store, except it only has things for grown-up women. Isabel says she wants to look there anyway.

  She chooses a blue bikini-style panty with tan lace around the legs and along the top, more lace, actually, than blue. I know Margaret would disapprove. I even disapprove myself. It’s too much. It looks like Forty-Second Street, but I also think the panties extraordinarily beautiful. Baroque. No, rococo. I’m not going to say anything to Isabel that might make her feel bad about her choice. We get the smallest size they have, and I think, well, it doesn’t matter because they’re much too big and Isabel will never be able to wear them. I tell her to put them in her shiny little blue purse that she’s been carrying all this time and didn’t even forget when we stopped for hotdogs. I tell Isabel not to bother Grandma with any of this. “It’s our secret,” I say. I know how much Isabel loves secrets, so I know she’ll not tell on purpose, though I also know it may pop out by mistake.

  By Monday, it’s clear that Margaret can’t abide Isabel for more than fifteen minutes at a time, so I’m the one to take her off to tennis that afternoon, and afterward we go to the Plaza for strawberries and ice cream, and Isabel tells me she hates tennis and piano. She doesn’t mind dance so much, but she wishes the piano were an oboe instead.

  “How in the world do you know about the oboe?” I ask.

  “I go to concerts all the time, you know. It’s good for you. And there’s nothing to do there but think or, if you’re sitting in the first row of the balcony, which I like the best, you can see who’s playing by who’s getting the reddest face, so I found out what the oboe is and the sound of it and I like it so much I wouldn’t even care if I got red and my cheeks puffed out while I played it.” What she likes about the sound is that it’s piercing and nose-ish and, she says, kind of like it comes from some other country… from the Arabs or some place that has tents and red and orange stripes on things. And she likes it because you don’t have to have a piano around all the time. You could even take it outside and practice walking around. You could practice in the woods or on the top of a mountain, which would be the best of all. She has read up about it, too, and she knows all about shaping your own reeds and wetting them.

  So then I wonder out loud, how can we work it so that she can take some oboe lessons while she’s here. “Well, why not?”

  And she says, “Well, why not?” too, so we decide that we won’t do the piano anymore—that I’ll call up and say she did something to her thumb. And she can do something to her thumb so we won’t be lying because neither of us, Isabel says, ever wants to lie, and she’s right. “And why not, while we’re at it,” Isabel says, “change tennis to karate?”

  All through this I can’t believe she’s six going on seven. On the list she came with, it said she should behave like a lady and she does behave like a lady. How could anyone doubt it? The waiters at the Plaza don’t doubt it. The head waiter doesn’t doubt it. The man who brings the water doesn’t, the bellhops in the lobby don’t, nor does the doorman as we leave. And I don’t doubt it as I give Isabel my elbow and we go out and down the steps.

  I find a teacher, same time as piano. I find two oboes. We take them out and practice in the park so Margaret won’t suspect. Even in the rain, we always find some secluded place to get under, such as the bridges where the traffic goes over. Nobody bothers us there.

  The next time we’re at the Plaza, Isabel had just had karate and is quite flushed from all the exercise and, I suppose, happiness, for she really loves karate and she loves wearing the white suit. Oboe was harder than she expected. She’s glad to do the work, but karate is just pure joy and I can see it in her face. Isabel, I swear, looks thirteen and talks twenty-five.

  “I really think, Grandpa, I should get you a new tie. I think you ought to have one with more color in it. Red, pink, and orange,” she said, “to go with your oboe.” And she begins to count out her change and her carefully folded bills. All of a sudden that little blue purse just seems out of the question for such a big girl as Isabel appears to be. “I only have eleven dollars and forty-two cents,” she says, “but I want to get you a really nice tie and I don’t think that will do it, do you?”

  “We’ll see if we can find one on sale,” I say. “You’ll get me a tie and I’ll get you a new purse.”

  I catch sight of myself in Lord & Taylor’s windows later, as we’re on our way in, and I have my hat at quite a rakish angle and Isabel, on my arm, looks like a teenager. I wonder how I could have come to put on my hat like that.

  In more ways than one, time seems to fly. Isabel is growing practically before my eyes. Last week she was thirteen, this week I turn around and she’s wearing lipstick and a wide-brimmed—very dashing, in fact—black hat and is, I swear, twenty… eighteen, at the least. And look at me. My clothes hang. My belt buckles two notches thinner. We stop and look at ourselves in the mirror wall at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-
Sixth Street. I’m wearing my new “Arab” striped tie, my hat over one eye. I’m smiling. Isabel is smiling. Then she cuts another caper in sheer joy. This time she lifts a good five feet, kicking out in front of her and leaning forward into it, and then she comes drifting down as if my arm is the only thing keeping her from sailing right up to the top of the Empire State Building. We turn, then, and she’s so tall she’s looking at me, eye to eye and then we kiss. Not exactly a lover’s kiss, but not exactly not a lover’s kiss. A fun kiss. A happy kiss. “Marry me, Grandpa,” she says. “Get a divorce and marry me.” Then she goes along into a long tale about how it’s all right because she’s adopted and not my real grandchild at all, and I’m not believing a word she says because I remember when she was born and when she was one and two and three… I may walk around in a daze, as Margaret says, I may not see anything that’s going on, but I do notice a few things.

  “I’ll never find anyone like you,” Isabel says. “I’ll never have this much fun with anybody. I’ll never, never, never.”

  And I think that’s true. I’ve lived a long time, and I certainly never had so much fun as I’ve had with Isabel. But I remember I was too young to have fun with Margaret. I was even more cautious than I am now and frightened. I still am. I wasn’t afraid of Isabel because I’d, in a way; grown up with her. “That’s not the point,” I say.

  “Let’s run away before they come to take me back. Look,” she says (we’re still looking at each other in the mirror), “we make a great couple.” (There’s no doubt about that. I’m standing up straight for once and my pot belly’s gone.) “I have to go home next week!”

  But it turns out that doesn’t happen quite so soon. It turns out (Margaret tells me) Isabel’s mother and our son are fighting so much down there in Ipanema that things are worse than ever, so they will come home, but they don’t feel they can cope with Isabel until things settle down a bit and, since they never fight in front of her and don’t ever want to, could we keep her for another two weeks until they can get their lives straightened out. So, for one more of those two weeks, things are as they were before, and there is, I can see it, no doubt in the eyes of the Plaza doorman, nor in the eyes of the head waiter, nor in the eyes of the waiters, nor in the eyes of the man who brings the water, no doubt at all that Isabel is a desirable and nubile young lady.

  And every day Isabel begs me to marry her, and every day I say; “No. Absolutely not. It’s not for us.” And I tell her that Margaret and I probably love each other more than we think we do, or might. I’m not sure. “And I made promises,” I say. “And I haven’t been the best husband. And every now and then I ought to have some courage to do or not do, and I’m your grandfather, for heaven’s sake!”

  But then Margaret, finds the panties, and then all the rest of it. “Where did these come from?” she says, and then, “What are you doing to this child? Old lecher. Filthy man. Lipstick and nail polish. Red nail polish. Perfumes. What will her mother and father think? And that purse. Did you think I’d never notice? Did you think I was blind? A two-hundred-dollar lizard purse! How could you? And what about those clarinets? From now on,” she says, “I’m taking her to her lessons. And you,” she says to Isabel, “are not allowed to say a word… not one word from now on. Thank God there’s only four more days of it. I’ve a good mind to lock you both up in your rooms.”

  But she doesn’t do that. She just locks me up… for a few afternoons. (She knows I like to get out and walk.) And Isabel goes home and I don’t even have a chance to say good-bye. In fact I’m forbidden to see her. I don’t know what happens to the karate suit and the oboes and the purse and panties.

  Later on in mid-October, when Margaret and I have fallen back, more or less, into our old routine, we rent a car and go out on Long Island to see the fall leaves. I wear my tie. I still have that. It’s exactly the colors—I realize it on the trip—exactly the colors of the leaves. Margaret says it’s too bright, but I know that when I wore brown ties she didn’t like those either. I tell her I want to wear it anyway, and she doesn’t pursue it. It’s as if she thinks to let me have this one small pleasure, and I’m grateful.

  After we do the trees, we go down to take a walk on the beach. Several people are out all bundled up in sweaters. There’s a man sitting on a piece of driftwood playing the flute. There’s a dog fetching sticks. There are kids throwing things into the surf to watch them bob there and get washed back in. It all makes me think of Isabel even more than I already do think of her. I know I did the right thing. Everything right for a change, from popsicles, to oboes, to the Plaza… even those crazy panties, and to saying no. For once I did a whole series of right things. I feel sad, but I feel happy. Just thinking about those five and a half weeks, I feel my left shoulder hunch forward, hand back, then right hand up and out to steady me. I lift. About two inches so my toes still touch the sand. Nobody notices at first, least of all Margaret. Then I go up four…maybe five inches. It feels good even though I haven’t practiced. I don’t think I’ve even tried it for three or four years. Then I lift about a foot without any effort at all, and I begin to drift lazily toward the water. I feel the spray, cold on my ankles. Suddenly Margaret does notice. “What are you up to now?” she says. “What will I do with you?” And she reaches out to grab me, but I’m picking up speed. Then I think I hear another voice, “Look, look. He’s walking on the water!” I don’t turn back to see who said it. Besides, I’m already much too high to seem to walk in the waves. I hear shouting. Dogs bark. Then I do look back, but the fog is drifting in. I can hardly see the beach anymore at all. Margaret is just a gesticulating dark smudge against the luminous white.

  Strange Plasma #3 1990

  If The Word Was To The Wise

  IT IS WRITTEN that what is written shall be done as it is written, and that the sacred books and secret words shall remain sacred and secret. It is written that what is written shall be the law of the land and that those who rule the words shall be the leaders of the land. It is written that the leaders shall live in the towers and turrets of the library, and that they shall heed the words of the books therein, and shall take an oath to do so. Because the library opens on Monday, Monday is the first day of a possible five-day communion with books, so Monday will be a sacred and a joyful day, and on that day the flags of the library will fly.

  The word for word will be word, and the word for library will be library, and the word for law will be law and it will be obeyed.

  The library is the tallest building in the city. No other building is ever to be as tall or as magnificent. It has nine white towers where eighty pale blue flags fly. Inside, silks hang along the walls. Alabaster lamps in niches give the interior a soft, mysterious glow in keeping with the mysteries of the words. In summer, the bronze doors that face east are opened at dawn in order that the first light should penetrate deep into the malachite lobby. Anyone can enter, but over the door there is a warning: BEWARE ALL YE WHO ENTER FOR HERE IS UNDERSTANDING BEYOND ALL UNDERSTANDING.

  In the several subbasements of the library there are two safes. One contains the secret, sacred writings of the laws of the written word, which are the laws of the library and the laws of the land. This safe is opened frequently in order for the members of the central book committee to refer to the written word. The other safe is larger and more secure. This one contains the banned books. Someone did, they said, enter this safe many years ago and read, they said, several pages of lewd and antilibrary writings. They said he even wrote down what he had read, but that was found and burned, and the person was not killed, not confined, but deprived of communication. His tongue was split and his upper teeth pulled out, the tendons of the thumb and fingers of both hands were cut so that writing was out of the question also. This was so long ago that no one today, they said, remembers exactly what that safe contains, and we thank God for that. We had, they said, wiped out, once and for all, all the evil books by appropriating them and locking them up. We lived, therefore, in harmony and with only go
od words.

  The princes of the library are housed in the subbasements also, for they are the ones who guard the safes. I was one of them. (It’s an honor and a privilege and I took pride in walking about the library and being called prince.) We were the ones who saw to it that those who visited the safe that contained the words of the laws were qualified to do so and had permission from the chairman of the central book committee. Of course there was no permission, ever, for visiting the banned books, even for the members of the book committee. They said the only possible reason for entering that room would be in order to bring more books in, and this hadn’t happened in all the time since I had become a prince of the library.

  None of us princes has ever entered either of these rooms, though we know the combination, but we guard each other as much as we guard anyone, and we’ve made vows. I had never been tempted to enter the safes, nor had I allowed myself to wonder what could be in those rooms in all my eighteen years of service. (I came here as a boy of fifteen, having sworn the oaths, and being, already, six foot tall, and having, already, learned to take words seriously. )

  But then there was Josephine. She was older than she looked, but I liked it that she was my age. I wouldn’t have known what to do with her if she had been a teenager, which is the age she looked. I had lived so much of my life among the princes that I’d lost the “family” touch. I’d forgotten what it was like to have people of your own. Josephine took the lead. She went after what she wanted. She offered me a captaincy and a space of my own on the eighteenth floor and she had the power to get it for me. At least she said she did, and I believed her because she was the daughter of the head librarian. It was not as powerful a position as if she were the daughter of the chairman of the central book committee, but still her mother was a person to be reckoned with and I thought might actually have the power to do as Josephine said she could. Josephine said the room would have to be small, pieced out of someone else’s apartment, and it might not look toward the river, but inward toward the towers (which I would find—I would still find—as beautiful as any outside view could be, for the white, glazed tiles of the towers reflect the colors of the sky and so are endlessly changing and, on sunny Mondays when the flags fly, I can’t think of anything I’d rather look out at. Eighty! Imagine that. Eighty blue flags.).