The Best of Sci-Fi-5

Carol Emshwiller had then published two or three stories; but she didn’t know she was a writer, and the bated-breath humility with which she asked if she possibly might be allowed to sit in on workshop meetings has come back to haunt us Older Hands each summer since. Each summer, I mean, when Carol pops out of the playpen-and-baby-bottle laden car, an infant (at least figuratively) under one arm, and her newest manuscript under the other. (Ed carries two kids and his brushes in his teeth—nothing to it when you get the knack.)

The first time I read Day at the Beach was in one of these workshop sessions. After that, I just waited for someone to print it first, so I could next….

“It’s Saturday,” the absolutely hairless woman said, and she pulled at her frayed, green kerchief to make sure it covered her head. “I sometimes forget to keep track of the days, but I marked three more off on the calender because I think that’s how many I forgot, so this must be Saturday.”

Her name was Myra and she had neither eyebrows nor lashes nor even a faint, transparent down along her cheeks. Once she had had long, black hair, but now, looking at her pink, bare face, one would guess she had been a redhead.

Her equally hairless husband, Ben, sprawled at the kitchen table waiting for breakfast. He wore red plaid Bermuda shorts, rather faded, and a tee shirt with a large hole under the arm. His skull curved above his staring eyes more naked-seeming than hers because he wore no kerchief or hat.

“We used to always go out on Saturdays,” she said, and she put a bowl of oatmeal at the side of the table in front of a youth chair.

Then she put the biggest bowl between her husband’s elbows.

“I have to mow the lawn this morning,” he said. “All the more so if it’s Saturday.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “A day like today we’d go to the beach. I forget a lot of things, but I remember that.”

“If I were you, I just wouldn’t think about it.” Ben’s empty eyes finally focused on the youth chair and he turned then to the open window behind him and yelled, “Littleboy, Littleboy,” making the sound run together all L’s and Y. “Hey, it’s breakfast, Boy,” and under his breath he said, “He won’t come.”

“But I do think about it. I remember hot dogs and clam chowder and how cool it was days like this. I don’t suppose I even have a bathing suit around any more.”

“It wouldn’t be like it used to be.”

“Oh, the sea’s the same. That’s one thing sure. I wonder if the boardwalk’s still there.”

“Hah,” he said. “I don’t have to see it to know it’s all gone for firewood. It’s been four winters now.”

She sat down, put her elbows on the table and stared at her bowl. “Oatmeal,” she said, putting in that one word everything she felt about the beach and wanting to go there.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do better for you,” Ben said. He touched her arm with the tips of his fingers for just a moment. “I wish I could. And I wish I could have hung on to that corned beef hash last time, but it was heavy and I had to run and there was a fight on the train and I lost the sugar too. I wonder which bastard has it now.”

“I know how hard you try, Ben. I do. It’s just sometimes everything comes on you at once, especially when it’s a Saturday like this. Having to get water way down the block and that only when there’s electricity to run the pump, and this oatmeal; sometimes it’s just once too often, and then, most of all, you commuting in all that danger to get food.”

“I make out. I’m not the smallest one on that train.”

“God, I think that everyday. Thank God, I say to myself, or where would we be now. Dead of starvation that’s where.”

She watched him leaning low over his bowl, pushing his lips out and making a sucking sound. Even now she was still surprised to see how long and naked his skull arched, and she had an impulse, seeing it there so bare and ugly and thinking of the commuting, to cover it gently with her two hands, to cup it and make her hands do for his hair; but she only smoothed at her kerchief again to make sure it covered her own baldness.

“Is it living, though? Is it living, staying home all the time, hiding like, in this house? Maybe it’s the rest of them, the dead ones, that are lucky. It’s pretty sad when a person can’t even go to the beach on a Saturday.”

She was thinking the one thing she didn’t want to do most of all was to hurt him. No, she told herself inside, sternly. Stop it right now. Be silent for once and eat, and, like Ben says, don’t think; but she was caught up in it somehow and she said, “You know, Littleboy never did go to the beach yet, not even once, and it’s only nine miles down,” and she knew it would hurt him.

“Where is Littleboy?” he said and yelled again out the window. “He just roams.”

“It isn’t as if there were cars to worry about any more, and have you seen how fast he is and how he climbs so good for three and a half? Besides, what can you do when he gets up so early.”

He was finished eating now and he got up and dipped a cup of water from the large pan on the stove and drank it. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “He won’t come when you call.”

She began to eat finally, watching him out the kitchen window and listening to him calling. Seeing him hunched forward and squinting because he had worn glasses before and his last pair had been broken a year ago. Not in a fight, because he was careful not to wear them commuting even then, when it wasn’t quite so bad. It was Littleboy who had done it, climbed up and got them himself from the very top drawer, and he was a whole year younger. Next thing she knew they were on the floor, broken.

Ben disappeared out of range of the window and Little-boy came darting in as though he had been huddling by the door behind the arbor vitae all the time.

He was the opposite of his big, pink and hairless parents, with thick and fine black hair growing low over his forehead and extending down the back of his neck so far that she always wondered if it ended where hair used to end before, or whether it grew too far down. He was thin and small for his age, but strong-looking and wiry with long arms and legs. He had a pale, olive skin, wide, blunt features and a wary stare, and he looked at her now, waiting to see what she would do.

She only sighed, lifted him and put him in his youth chair and kissed his firm, warm cheek, thinking, what beautiful hair, and wishing she knew how to cut it better so he would look neat.

“We don’t have any more sugar,” she said, “but I saved you some raisins,” and she took down a box and sprinkled some on his cereal.

Then she went to the door and called, “He’s here, Ben. He’s here.” And in a softer voice she said, “The pixy.” She heard Ben answer with a whistle and she turned back to the kitchen to find Littleboy’s oatmeal on the floor in a lopsided oval lump, and him, still looking at her with wise and wary brown eyes.

She knelt down first, and spooned most of it back into the bowl. Then she picked him up rather roughly, but there was gentleness to the roughness, too. She pulled at the elastic topped jeans and gave him two hard, satisfying slaps on bare buttocks. “It isn’t as if we had food to waste,” she said, noticing the down that grew along his backbone and wondering if that was the way the three year olds had been before.

He made an Aaa, Aaa , sound, but didn’t cry, and after that she picked him up and held him so that he nuzzled into her neck in the way she liked. “Aaa,” he said again, more softly, and bit her just above the collar bone.