The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Even after Cora brings Janice a strong cup of coffee, Janice won’t say a single word about anything. Cora says she’ll feel better if she talks about it, but she won’t. She looks tired and sullen. “You’d like to know everything, wouldn’t you just,” she says. (What other way to stay one up than not to tell?… than to have secrets?)

  Cora almost says, “Not really,” but she doesn’t want to be, anymore, what she used to be. Janice hasn’t had the experience of being in the house all alone for several days. There’s a different secret now that Janice doesn’t know about yet. Maybe never will unless Cora goes off someplace. But why would she go anyplace? And where? Besides, being one up or being even doesn’t matter to Cora anymore. She doesn’t care if Janice understands or not. She just wants to take care of her and have her stay. Maybe, after a while, Janice will come to see that things have changed.

  Cora goes to the kitchen to make a salad that she thinks Janice will like. She sets the dining room table the way she thinks Janice would approve of, with Mother’s best dishes, and with the knives and forks in all the right places, and both water glasses and wine glasses, but Janice says she’ll eat later in the kitchen and alone and on paper plates. Meanwhile she’ll take a bath.

  After Cora eats and is cleaning up the last of her dishes, Janice comes in, wearing her nightgown and Mother’s bathrobe. As she leans to get a pan from a lower shelf, the bathrobe falls away. When she straightens up again, she sees Cora staring at her. “What are you ogling!” she says, holding the frying pan like a weapon.

  “Nothing,” Cora says, knowing better than to make a comment. She’s seen more than she wants to see. There are big red choke collar marks all around Janice’s neck.

  But something must be done or said. Cora wonders what Father would have done? She usually knows exactly what he’d do and does it without even thinking about it. Now she can’t imagine Father ever having to deal with something like this. She can’t say anything. She can’t move. Finally she thinks: No secrets. She says, “Sister.” And then… but it’s too hard. (Father never would have said it.) She starts. She almost says it. “Sister, I love….”

  At first it looks as if Janice will hit her with the frying pan, but then she drops it and just stares.

  Omni, August 1993

  Venus Rising

  Based on The Aquatic Ape and The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

  YOU ARE of us and you remember it in your dreams. Your nightmares are of sharks (our sharks—the ones we also fear), sharks that look up at you from below with cruel little eyes, or you dream great waves (the waves we also fear) coming closer. At first it seems so slowly that you think you might have time to run up the beach to higher ground, but that’s not true and you wake up screaming (like we used to scream), not knowing what it is you are afraid of, just knowing this nameless thing that keeps coming and coming, having turned into a wave of fear rather than fear of a wave, and so it is with us, also, a wordless fear, for we have no word for it, only cries and whistles that mean danger. But you have your good dreams, too, as we do, of floating as though you fly. Also you like to make love in the water.

  When your children, as our children, have water, they need no other plaything. Your lakes are ringed with houses, your beaches are always full at the seasons for it. Ask yourself could any ape dive like you do and like our People do? There are places where we, and you, dive down naked, down and down, and not a single lesson except from our big brothers and sisters. We do it sometimes just for the fun of it.

  I say that if those others are your ancestors then you would go on vacation to the tree houses because those others never cared about the water. And then your children would be hanging in the highest branches by one arm and swinging around, and even the old people would get a kick out of getting up on some high limb instead of standing in the shallows or sitting on the beach. When it was smart and cool enough to hang around in the trees, we did do that, and when the future was on the beach, we found out about it and we went there and did that and all that went with it. Those others that stayed in the trees (what trees were left), the trees made them what they have become, just as the beaches changed us and made us and made you as you are, crying seal tears as we do, but as those others never do.

  So (and including That One, then) we are the ones that are your ancestors and (except for That One, then) we are as hairless as you are, no more, no less. You might be surprised. Sisters and brothers to the hippopotamus and not ashamed of it.

  In those days before That One came, we would never tease a manatee. We called them friends and swam with them as well as with seals and walruses.

  Those were good days. Every family had its bay and some People slept where the rocks hung over. They had a good spot. It was so cool there sometimes they even came out of the water to play on the beach before the sun went down.

  But usually our children come into the water with us in the morning and don’t leave again until dusk. The little ones float around grasping our long, long hair and if the older ones come out of the sea in the day time, it’s most often so as to jump into it again from some high rock. So everybody has a lot of fun and stays cool. If one of us waits long enough to snatch at a fish, it’s only because we are tired of easier things to eat, like clams and muscles and periwinkles.

  Some of you may think we have no names, but we do, though for a while I didn’t have one, but everybody knew who I was even so and I knew who they were whether they had a name or not. And when we saw That One, we knew who he was, though at first we didn’t. Some of us have swum far and been told tales of others not like we are and wondered how such people could be and laughed about them that they had hair on their bodies as, at first, we laughed at That One for the same reason and for other reasons, too.

  There’s a place where we go and steal berries from the Berry People. They have one over there with big feet with six toes and big hands with six fingers. (Those people are always the fastest swimmers. We have People like that over on our shore and we always call them Toes.) The one over there is called Deep Diver for two reasons. Sometimes he’s just called with a gesture that means sex so his name is also Middle Finger even though he doesn’t have a middle finger. That’s another good funny thing. They say he wanted to mate with me, but this was before That One came and changed everything.

  I was thinking maybe Deep Diver will be glad to see me this year because I’m much, much fatter than I was at berry time last year. I have come, now, into my good fat and I will… but this is what I think before That One comes. Yes, I will go into the water with him. His eyes are as blue as the many eyes of the blue-eyed clam and as beautiful. We’ll be like two big fish together, and I think about a child hanging on to my hair.

  Ma says: In the beginning this is how it always was, ma and child, ma and child, and this is how it always will be, though if a storm lasts a long time, then let the child be swept off the beach and back into the sea that gave it, for children come from water. They creep inside while you’re making love, so, if a big storm, that’s the sign that you should let the child be taken back.

  The land away from the beach is not good. Nothing to eat there but a few small things. Here the sea takes care of us and washes up to us all that we ask for. He was a land man, That One, but even he didn’t like the land. He was glad to get where we are and chew on our conchs.

  There are a lot more places and times in the world than this one, Old Man Lost Egg says it, and not just once or twice. He says that once we were the very best of the best of the tree people, and, in that other time, we came to the water because our trees died. Once, he says, we liked the sun. That was a strange season, nodding to her, then, instead of towards the water, but the sun changed and then the sea took us in and made us happy and gave us all our friends and relatives and all the little soft things to eat and shells to put things in and to blow into. It’s the sea, Old Man Lost Egg says, that goes on almost forever. This is also true of the land, so there will be many more times and places and
a time also for you. Old Man Lost Egg has heard all this by listening into conch shells.

  He got his name from first being Old Man Lost Leg, but Lost Egg is a lot funnier so we call him that. He only lost a little bit of his leg. On land he moves like a seal, but in the water he’s just like everybody else.

  Other men do not grow old except for Old Man Lost Egg and Old Oyster. We used to call Old Oyster The-Man-With-Seal-Lady because he had a seal for a friend, but That One killed Seal Lady so we call Old Oyster Old Oyster now. It’s a good joke, as though he had an oyster for a friend.

  Those days lots of us had seals for brothers and sisters and swam with them or lay with them out on the rocks on cooler days.

  That One killed Seal Lady. Old Man Lost Egg says it comes from living too much on the land, which is full of emptiness. That One kills us, too, but before that he killed Seal Lady and ate her.

  We had not seen anything like That One so we watched and thought how thin and hairy, and how hot he must be, out on the land. We were not surprised that such a creature would do strange things. It was hard to keep from laughing because he moved so much like People do, yet not, and because he had so many things hanging about him and his penis was almost as small as one of the tree people’s, though we’ve not seen that, only heard tell of it. That made us laugh, and his feet, so much like hands.

  He’s not happy in his fur, shaking himself and dripping and even sitting in the sun to dry himself after he washed. His hands are almost just like ours, only a little hair on the back, but smooth in front though ours have more skin between the fingers.

  He calls that hot stuff he has, fie. I was the one he told first. He calls everything by its wrong name and anyway we don’t need that stuff because we already have water. By the time he told me fie, he had a few of the right words for things.

  He killed Uncle in just one second, so fast nobody was sure how he did it.

  That One would rather stay over there with the Rocks-Hanging-Over People because of the shade, but they throw stones at him every time he comes near so he has to stay with us. Those Rock People know something about him we don’t know, but they won’t tell us because what he did was too bad to talk about.

  We were wondering how he has any fun if he kills Seal People or Uncle, but maybe he didn’t mean to do it, maybe something strange happened, but, to come upon him then made us feel like watching from a distance and we wondered what would happen to him after he had eaten Seal Lady, but he only went down to the damp, cool sand and dug a little sleeping pit and went to sleep almost the same way we always do. It was in the morning Uncle was dead and those who saw it said it was a flash from the eye. They said That One has an eye to watch out for… that no one should look straight at him, but others said it was a rock, like we throw sometimes though we always miss.

  “I come from the only place there really is,” he said. (This was after he began to talk with me.) But I could see that the place now was this place because he and I were both here in it and the other place could only be told about, and I said so and I asked him which of the four corners of the world it was and which of the twelve times that have been and are to be, but he only laughed. I was glad I had made him laugh. That’s a hard thing to do.

  Sometimes he says he comes from beyond the sun, but Old Man Lost Egg says that nothing is beyond the sun except that one woman, Sun Ma, who hides behind it peeking out at us. Old Man Lost Egg has seen her.

  Like a baby, That One learns to speak and to swim at the same time.

  I keep thinking that I’ll go out and see if Deep Diver will be with me, except I’m busy teaching That One. I’m the one to do it because the other women won’t go near him. They say he has walked on the land too much and the sun has looked at him in a bad way. I know they’re right about that, but I feel for him as if he’s my little brother. I have no little brother, so who else do I have to be it? But perhaps I feel this because I’m the only one who heard him cry.

  We cried. We cried like young seals, first for Seal Lady and then when the other uncles took Uncle out to where the rip-tide runs between the islands so he could be carried away to another time and place. Everybody had a turn holding Uncle in their arms to take him out there. Everybody had a chance to swim with him one last time. And later, That One cried to himself in the night. Perhaps about Uncle. I heard the crying in spite of the waves. We didn’t let That One sleep near us, but I was on the edge and heard and I came and put my hand on him like we do to a young seal that’s lost its mother. No one, whether of the land or not, should have to cry in the night without a touch from some other creature. Strange, though, he didn’t have any tears. I thought to lick them away but there were none.

  That One says he has a name and that the name says he’s coming and to move out of his sky. And he says that he is the head man’s son of the head man’s son of the head man’s son, as if Old Man Lost Egg had many sons of sons, which isn’t possible because Old Man Lost Egg’s son was taken away by a shark and his other son also, something of the sort. Besides we are not so sure of sons except for the six-toed ones who swim so fast. Our sons, anyway, belong to the brothers of their mothers. After he heard that he said he was the head uncle’s son of the head uncle’s son and so on and on, but I said I wouldn’t call him by any such name and I have already forgotten it.

  It was that same day one of my big brothers began to walk crabwise along the beach and we began to laugh and do it, too. And then the men began to shout and to dare the land and they ran into it until you couldn’t see them anymore even from the highest place. And we women worried, but we laughed anyway, because what else was there to do? And we tried to guess who would come home last and pretty soon everybody came back. Nobody got lost out there that time. And they jumped into the water from the highest place like they were children and then we all did that. That was also the day that That One said he had dared the land and the sea both, but he didn’t even dare to jump into deep water from the high place. We hid our smiles behind our hands like we do so as not to hurt the feelings of young seals or children. I have come to know him as if he were my own child, I, holding his chin up as he learns to swim. He holds my hair and I swim him out and in, up and down. I run my hand over the coarse fur of his back. It feels funny. He’s such a strange“child,”keeps his strings and stones and things in a hole in the rocks while he learns to swim. He’s always frightened. I see it in his eyes—eyes the color of the sky at night, while ours are the color of the sky in the daytime. Always frightened, as though every night was a waiting for the big wave that comes with no warning. I laugh to myself to think he said he had dared the land and the sea both.

  Then one of those biggest things of all alive things comes out to die on the beach like they always do—out on Berry Island. Deep Diver came over and told us and said that we could go there and have some of that fat. The People of the Overhanging Rock Place come, too, and so does That One. By that time he can swim well enough to go. I said there was no need, but he said there was a need, and he puts on all his strings and things, and comes.

  It’s just as Deep Diver said, a dead largest-one-of-all is on their beach. We were sad. What a lot of playfulness all gone now. Such a big thing needs a lot of crying, even though it wasn’t a special friend, so we do that first.

  The Berry People use some sharpened shells and some of that shiny black rock and begin to make holes so as to give each of us our share, but That One stops them. He tells them he wants to do this his way, that he has a special reason and, since he is the son of the son of the son of many head uncles, we should let him and, even though here is someone who can just barely swim and can’t catch a fish at all no matter how hard he tries and who still doesn’t know all the words for things, they let him because he has a blade almost as sharp as the black stone ones and larger and stronger. That’s the stick he keeps tied to him. It’s usually covered up and we thought he had it (before we knew it opened to a blade) because his penis was too small. “Let him do the work, then.” E
verybody says it, and most of us go out to pick berries which are beginning to get ripe. But the Berry People sit on the beach and watch him cut into the big happy thing to make sure everybody gets a nice share.

  I go with Deep Diver. (We usually mate with the people of the beach of the big stone, but there isn’t anybody over there for me and anyway I like Deep Diver best of all.) He says how nice and fat I’ve grown. He wants to be with me in the water. I say that’s what I want to do, too, though I say it isn’t the time yet.

  When the tide creeps into me as we mate, I know that if I do it with Deep Diver I might have one like him with six toes, because the tides come into the ma by way of the da so that something of the da is let into a ma along with the tide that washes the child in. (Sometimes you can see the babies waiting in the bubbles of the foam.) I want big children like he is so that my sons can be big uncles and the sons of my daughters also. I tell Deep Diver I will keep a little-finger shell near me the whole time, but of course none of this will happen and instead my child will be almost as thin as That One, though not as hairy.

  This is the time when That One made the thing he called his bowawa. We don’t need things like that. He made it out of that big skin. He stays out there in the berry place and cuts and cuts for many days and gives away all the good parts. What he eats himself he won’t eat unless it’s been changed by that stuff he calls “fie.” We make a song and dance about it. The “fie, fie, fie, fee, fup, fup, fup” dance, and we sing it almost every night out there. The Berry People have six good conchs to blow into, so they do that while we sing and bang stones.

  Out there visitors have to sleep in the pools on the rocks. They only have one small beach, and they keep that for themselves. That One doesn’t like it because he wakes up choking in the water sometimes. I have to sleep in the same pool with him and help him up in the middle of the night as though he was still tiny. In some ways he hasn’t grown up at all from the very beginning and yet he always wants to tell everybody what to do. The others wonder why I stay near him and help him. They say he should be let die by his own clumsiness but I like his strangeness and the funny things he tells about. I like to wonder about him and where he comes from. I know it’s not from beyond the sun, but I know it’s not from around here either.