Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  “Eve,” I say. “Listen—”

  I tell her how it will be for Sheitha after she marries Cain, who is not as sweet-tempered as his father. I tell her how it will be for Sheitha’s daughter’s daughter. I spare her nothing: not the expansion of the garden until the home bowers are insignificant. Not the debate over whether women have souls. Not foot-binding nor clitoridectomy nor suttee nor the word “chattel.” Sheitha, I say. Sheitha and Sheitha’s daughter and Sheitha’s daughter’s daughter… I am hoarse before I’m done talking. Finally, I finish, saying for perhaps the fortieth or fiftieth time, “Knowledge is the only way to change it. Knowledge, and truth. Eve, listen—”

  She goes with me to the tree. Her baby daughter in her arms, she goes with me. She chooses a bright red apple, and she chews her mouthful so completely that when she transfers it to Sheitha’s lips, there is no chance the baby could choke on it. Together, they eat the whole thing.

  I am tired. I don’t wait around for the rest: Adam’s return, and his outrage that she has acted without him, his fear that now she knows things he does not. His arrival. I don’t wait. I am too tired, and my gut twists as if I had swallowed something foul, or bitter. That happens sometimes, without my intending it. Sometimes I eat something with a vitamin I know I need, and it lies hard in my belly like pain.

  This is not the way you heard the story.

  But consider who eventually wrote that story down. Consider, too, who wiped up the ink or scrubbed the chisel or cleaned the printing office after the writing down was done. For centuries and centuries.

  But not forever.

  So this may not be the way you heard the story, but you, centuries and centuries hence, my sisters, know better. Finally. You know, yes, about Eve’s screams on her childbed, and Sheitha’s murder at the hands of her husband, and Sheitha’s daughter’s cursing of her rebellious mother as the girl climbed willingly onto her husband’s funeral pyre, and her daughter’s harlotry, and her daughter’s forced marriage at age nine to a man who gained control of all her camels and oases. You know all that, all the things I didn’t tell poor Eve would happen anyway. But you know, too—as Eve would not have, had it not been for me— that knowledge can bring change. You sit cross-legged at your holodecks or in your pilot chairs or on your Councils, humming, and you finally know. Finally—it took you so fucking long to digest the fruit of knowledge and shit it out where it could fertilize anything. But you did. You are not stupid. More—you know that stupidity is only the soul asleep. The awakened sleeper may stumble a long time in the dark, but eventually the light comes. Even here.

  I woke Eve up.

  I, the mother.

  So that may not be the way you heard but it is the way it happened. And now— finally—you know.

  And can forgive me.

  Babbitt’s Daughter

  Phyllis Ann Karr

  In “Babbitt’s Daughter,” Phyllis Ann Karr takes a wry and loving look at two myths—one American, the other Transylvanian. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt would hardly welcome Phyllis Ann Karr’s Amarantha “whose father was a Babbitt” with open arms—or veins. After all, vampires aren’t the sort of neighbors you want on Main Street.

  Or are they?

  From Anne Rice, we have the image of the vampire as rock musician. Phyllis Ann Karr gives us musicologists and activists who never drink… wine and who leave their victims—and her readers—laughing.

  The question is: who has the last laugh?

  “My father was a Babbitt!” Amarantha flashed back at her host.

  “Well? Isn’t that in itself a rather remarkable accomplishment for a vampire?” Still smiling calmly, Mendoza slipped his fingers beneath his guest’s miniature snifter and carried it back to the table for a refill with the dark cherry cordial he called homemade. “I rest my case.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re getting ready to deliver more words of wisdom to help me cope with my bereavement.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?” He looked around at her, fireplace light crimsoning his almost completely silver hair. Though he still moved like a man in the prime of life, he was an indeterminate number of years older than her father had been.

  But then, Amarantha was no schoolgirl. Her own hair held quite a bit of silver.

  “We’re both mature enough to have read up on the recommended mental hygienics of coping with bereavement,” Mendoza complimented her, returning her glass to the arm of her chair. “I thought we were simply reminiscing. But if you’d like another argument, consider that by living his life out of the closet, your father put himself up against two antagonistic mindsets: the one that assumes all vampires are automatically evil monsters, and the one that wants them that way—that believes any vampire who may genuinely prefer saintliness is somehow betraying his or her very nature.”

  “Saintliness!” she echoed in a mocking tone. “You never saw him really pig out.”

  It must have been the Christmas vacation of her frosh year at the University of Madison… with a cozy little school of higher learning in her hometown, and both parents on its faculty, she had nevertheless insisted on going to the big education factory down-state, hopping home only on holidays.

  Anyway, she remembered the night of some party or other between Christmas and New Year’s—probably the Dean’s annual bash. They’d gotten back well after midnight, most of the family going more or less straight to bed. After half an hour or so, Amarantha gave up the struggle to fall asleep and got up for a book and some warm milk.

  She found her father at the refrigerator, filling a glass from the bottle of chicken blood.

  “Father!”

  “Amy.” Smiling at her without the least sign of shame, he reached for the small bottle of human hemoglobin from the Bloodbank. “Enjoy the party?”

  “Not as much as you did. Jesus, Father, you ate enough for the whole Coast Guard!”

  He shivered and paused, then set the Bloodbank bottle beside his glass on the table, shut the fridge door gently but firmly, and turned to her. “Amy, don’t throw His Name around carelessly.”

  “I wasn’t. I was using It to wake your conscience up. she-eesh, Father, how can you stand there raiding the refrigerator after the way you stuffed yourself silly all evening?”

  “I did?”

  “I can’t even count the number of times you kept refilling your plate. It’s a good thing they had so much on the buffet, or you wouldn’t have left anything for anybody else. Jeesh, some people get embarrassed about how much their parents drink. With me, it’s how much my father eats!”

  “I’m sorry, Amy. I never intended to embarrass you.”

  “And please don’t call me that! You don’t like to be nicknamed. Neither do I.”

  He sat down at the table, opened the Bloodbank bottle, and inserted the medicine dropper. “I don’t like my contemporaries calling me ‘Clem.” I’ve never minded ’Pop‘ or ’Daddy‘ from my own children.“

  “Well, I don’t like ‘Amy’ from anyone. My name is Amarantha.”

  To be fair, her baptismal name was Teresa, and while her mother, brother, and sister slipped back to it pretty regularly even after the formal announcement of her new chosen name, her father never did. Even though she knew how disappointed he’d been that she didn’t like “Teresa” for everyday wear.

  “Very well. Amarantha,” he said now, squeezing three drops of human into his glass of chicken blood, hesitating, and adding two more.

  She could tell he was angry. But so was she. “I don’t know why your crosses didn’t drive you crazy!”

  “Well, they didn’t.” His hand went to the tiny crucifix earring in his pierced ear. “Although this is beginning to pinch now, with the temptation to turn you over my knee.”

  “For what? Being scandalized by my own father’s gluttony?”

  He got a spoon out of the drawer and stirred his snack briskly. “I’m sorry I scandalized you. It was a Christmas party. I wasn’t aware I was filling my plate so often.”

 
“Well, you were. You dress up like a movie dracula, why don’t you act like one? Movie dracs never eat at all.”

  “No, they pig out on blood. If you’ve ever noticed, movie vampires drink more than—”

  “At least they don’t do it in public!”

  He shot her a look of real anger, and for a moment—if he had been somebody else’s father or even her own mother—she’d have been afraid he really would turn her over his knee. Instead, being the world’s most conscientiously saintly vampire, he put his spoon down and said in a voice so quiet it hurt, “I already apologized for embarrassing you, Amarantha. It happens I was hungry. Or didn’t you notice that our hostess kept ‘fooling’ me with glasses of tomato juice?”

  “And you kept adding drops from people’s thumbs.

  “Why the ‘H’ don’t you just tell people when you see they aren’t giving you real blood?”

  “It’s called being polite—”

  “Oh, affirmative! And so you go and stuff yourself silly instead, and I suppose that’s just ‘being polite,” too, seeing you don’t get any calories or nutrition or anything out of plain old human food.“ The words ”plain old human“ pushed one of his most sensitive buttons. She had done that on purpose, and by his response she knew how well she managed to hide feeling sorry about it.

  “Above all other people,” he answered slowly, “the members of my own family should know I’m as human as everybody else. If there’s nothing but water around, a hungry human will try to fill up on water and create the illusion of a full stomach.”

  “A very full stomach—a gorged-to-bursting stomach. Jeesh, Pop, can you even guess how many ordinary human beings would just love to be able to pig out on everything in sight without putting on a millimeter around the waistline? If eating like that in front of a bunch of people who’re going to have to diet their souls out after the holidays is being polite—”

  “Amarantha!”

  His hand was quivering. He set his glass down before any of its contents sloshed out. There was a tight click when the glass met the tabletop.

  “I’m sorry,” he went on stiffly. “I thought she was going to have real blood for me. I suppose that at the last minute she couldn’t get it after all. If I’d known, I would have drunk a glass here at home beforehand. Following St. Paul’s advice. Then you wouldn’t have had to suffer through watching your father make a glutton out of himself. Which I did unconsciously—”

  “Don’t make it sound like you were sleep-eating or something! You were wide-awake every minute! Your usual charming self—”

  “Daughter! You don’t know what it’s like—thank God!—being hungry in the middle of a feast, in the middle of fellow human beings enjoying mountains of food—gourmet food—and being the only one there who can’t get anything out of it at all except flavor and texture and false satis—”

  “No, I don’t know what it’s like! But I want to know! I want like Hell to know! Come on, Father, bite me!”

  “I kept asking him and asking him,” she complained, almost less to Mendoza than to herself, “and he kept telling me, ”Be sure you understand what you’re asking for.“ Lord, he was still telling me that the day I turned forty! And now… it’s too late.”

  “He knew the everydayness of it,” said Mendoza. “He knew what it was, circumventing pure-food rules in order to buy raw animal blood, combing your hair or getting an eyelash out of your eye without being able to see yourself in a mirror, keeping the conscience quiet enough not to react to holy things, facing the occasional serious danger from bigots…”

  “I’d have been willing! Do you think I couldn’t see all that, just from living in the same house? But you’d have thought I was begging for incest! Or the power to be a screen monster. Why couldn’t he ever trust me?”

  Mendoza shook his head. “Not that he didn’t trust you. It was that he didn’t fully trust himself. His professional life was music, his spiritual life was his family and his religion. He never felt he had the academic or scientific credentials to make his ideas about vampirism anything more than a hobby—an amateur’s theory that explained his own case but might not work for anybody else. That’s why he never made another vampire, not even when someone begged him for it. Not even you. Especially not the members of his own family. I’m sure your mother loved—knew him better than to ask.”

  “My mother… thanks to her, we’re only half Japanese, when we could have been Purebloods!”

  “Do you think you’d have existed if your mother had married someone else? Chances are that this consciousness calling itself Amarantha Czarny Kato would never have come into being at all… But if it had, why the mother’s child any more than the father’s?”

  “She made us halfbloods, and he gave us the name of junior vampires without the substance. Have you got any idea what it’s like growing up as a dracula’s daughter? Especially when your home isn’t even much different from your friends’ homes?”

  “Another accomplishment.” Sipping his cordial, Mendoza gazed at the fireplace. “Giving you the normal, middle class childhood he had missed out on. How old was he when it happened to him? Ten? Eleven?”

  “Eleven.” Amarantha knew this piece of family history very well. “In the Minnemagantic town hospital on a Sunday in July…”

  The first thing he remembered was the accident. A perfect swan dive—anything, he thought it should’ve been nearly perfect this time, for a dive from the boat—and then a thud to his head about the time he was ready to start surfacing.

  He didn’t feel like he was breathing, but it was a kind of comfortable feeling. He was still floating, only not in water anymore. Now he was drifting along in the air above a bed in a semidarkened room with forest murals on the walls. There was a boy in the bed, all hooked up to some kind of monitor unit. That and the rollover bedside tray-tables and stuff like that told him it was a hospital room.

  The boy in the bed looked terrible. Like some kind of Frankenstein’s Monster. Blackened eyes, puffy cheeks, mouth hanging open… It took him awhile to recognize himself. He wasn’t sure whether the himself in the bed was breathing, either. If it mattered.

  He must’ve bashed his head against something hard in the water. Too bad Wolf Lake wasn’t one of those crystal-clear lakes you heard about where people could see all the way down to count the pebbles on the bottom ten meters below. Too bad it was one of those lakes where you lost sight of your hand when you held it under at arm’s length, and just had to take it on trust that the water was clean and nontoxic and didn’t have hard stuff on the bottom waiting to getcha.

  He wondered dreamily how much of that water he’d swallowed before Uncle Buck and Ted and Omar got him out and rushed him here. He figured that was what must have happened. Too bad they’d gone to all that trouble. How come he could remember their names and not his own?

  The monitor unit seemed to be doing things, but he didn’t read Monitorese. Some kind of antigravity was tugging him up toward the ceiling. He just let himself go with the flow… too relaxed to do anything else.

  He floated through the ceiling as if it was mist, and found himself on a huge open plain. He remembered from somewhere that there should be some kind of long tunnel, but he was on an open plain, glowing with light that came from all around, even up from the “ground.” He thought his Guardian Angel should be here, too, but he couldn’t see anybody. He seemed to feel someone at his back, but whoever it was must have kept pivoting around with him when he turned.

  What there were, were a lot of cities and lake resorts and elegant buildings and mountain mini-ranges and campgrounds dotting the plain in all directions, like the galaxy clusters at the Chicago Planetarium show, and every time he turned around, they seemed to get closer. Especially one that looked like… He thought it looked a little like the Original Disneyland he’d never gotten to visit.

  And standing there at the gates, waving to him— Dad and Mom! Looking the way he could just barely remember them, kissing him good-bye the time they dr
ove off to get killed by that crazy UPS driver, only even better than they’d looked when they kissed him good-bye, even happier. Glowing… like some of the light was coming from inside them.

  He waved back. He started trying to run to them…

  Something held him back. Whoever was standing behind him? Was whoever it was giving him the old Vulcan neck pinch?

  He tried to hit it away. The pinch just tightened. Actually, it felt more like something biting him.

  Mom and Dad left the gates and floated down to him.

  “Oh, honey, you’re still so young!” said Mom. Only she didn’t exactly “say” it. The words glowed out of her, like the light, and reformed themselves in his head, tonal vibrations and all.

  “What is it?” he wanted to know. “Mom, Dad, what’s biting me?”

  “Maybe you’d better get on back, son,” Dad told him. “Or else a lot of people will be pretty unhappy about you for a while. Your Mom and I can wait.”

  Something hard came up against his mouth. He couldn’t see it, any better than he could see whatever had been biting him, but he could feel it, and there was something on it.

  It worked his lips apart and drops of sweet, warm, salty liquid started falling into his mouth. He swallowed and opened his eyes.

  Just like that, he was back in the hospital bed with somebody bending over him. Someone shadowy, holding one wrist to his mouth and using the other dark-sleeved arm for a mask.

  Just that one glimpse of the faceless somebody, and then he was in Christine Daae’s dressing room. He was Raoul de Chagny, watching Christine from the curtained inner room, and he was also the Phantom of the Opera, Erik himself, singing to her through the walls, and he may have been Christine, too. But mainly he was seeing things through Raoul’s eyes, following Christine as she walked toward her back wall, the wall that was one huge mirror. He could see her front in the mirror better than he could see her back that was right in front of him. Her eyes were huge, and there were two trickles of blood at the corners of her mouth. Her skin was as pale gray as if they were in one of the old black-and-white movies instead of the original novel. He couldn’t see himself in the mirror because he was right in back of her, and her reflection completely covered his.