Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  Letting loose like that brought them down hard on her. She was still in seclusion, having been given four times the dose she had fought. Captivity stretched before her, a hall with no doors and no windows, yawning under dim bulbs. Surely she would die here. Her heart would beat more and more slowly and then stop, like a watch running down. At that thought the heart began to race in her chest. She stared at the room, empty except for the mattress and odd stains, names, dates, words scratched somehow into the wall with blood, fingernails, pencil stubs, shit: how did she come to be in this desperate place?

  Her head leaning on the wall she thought it was going to be worse this time—for last time she had judged herself sick, she had rolled in self-pity and self-hatred like a hot sulfur spring, scalding herself. All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black—social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counselors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers—all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison. She was marked with the bleeding stigmata of shame. She had wanted to cooperate, to grow well. Even when she felt so bad she lay in a corner and wept and wept, laid level by guilt, that too was part of being sick: it proved she was sick rather than evil. Say one hundred Our Fathers. Say you understand how sick you’ve been and you want to learn to cope. You want to stop acting out. Speak up in Tuesday group therapy (but not too much and never about staff or how lousy this place was) and volunteer to clean up after the other, the incontinent patients.

  “As a mother, your actions are disgraceful and uncontrolled,” the social worker menaced, at once angry and bored. Angelina was sitting in an office chair from which her little legs could not reach the floor and she was sucking a pencil from the social worker’s desk. Connie wanted to take the pencil from her. Lead poisoning: never chew pencils! But she did not dare touch her daughter in front of the bureaucrat from Child Welfare. Angelina had been given a sucker earlier and now she obviously wanted another; a sucker was a big event to her. That afternoon she was to be taken to a children’s detention center while Connie awaited “a determination of the case.” Connie’s case had been determined, all right. “Willful abuse for injuring the person or health of a minor child,” they said, but they also said she was not responsible for her actions. They kept saying what a pretty child Angelina was, and Connie guessed that partly they were expressing surprise that her child was so light. “It won’t be hard to place her, even at four,” she heard the social worker tell her probation officer. “She doesn’t look—I mean she could be anything.”

  That was what white people noticed about her baby, but Angelina’s features were obviously her own, the ample sensuous hook of Mayan nose, the small mouth, puckered now as she pouted, the delicate chin, the eyes of shiny black almonds, In fact, what Connie saw when she looked at her daughter was a small dose of herself. Herself cowering in a chair, whimpering. Herself trying to stick out that tiny chin and shouting with an enraged monkey scowl, I will I will! I will too! I will too! Herself starting all over again with no better odds on getting more or less than a series of kicks in the teeth.

  After Claud had died of hepatitis in Clinton, she had mourned him in a haggard frenzy of alcohol and downers, diving for oblivion and hoping for death. She had sat for weeks in a chair, letting Angelina scream and weep herself to sleep in fear and hunger. Connie had torn at herself with her nails, with pills, with bottles, with lack of food and all poisons short of open suicide, until she had a nightmare and awakened shivering with sweat in late afternoon on the couch right under the window on Norfolk Street with the flashing blue light of a police car outside playing on the ceiling.

  She dreamed that Claud was being born again: that her mourning hauled him out of the grave and drove his restless soul back into a baby’s body. Even now from his junkie mama, Claud was being crushed into the world with a habit, and waiting for him was the pot balanced on the edge of the stove that would blind him and seal his face ever after from the light of the world. Reform schools, the courts, zip sixes for kids picked up on federal raps, those rotten sixty-day-to-six-year indeterminate sentences, all the institutions that would punish him for being black and blind and surviving. All the scorn and meat hooks of the world were waiting to carve off chunks of his sweet flesh. As Claud was crammed into the baby’s writhing body, as he was forced into the small flesh and vast terror, he cursed her.

  She wakened cold with sweat on the couch, her back aching, and the first thing she heard was Angelina screaming. Angelina was standing about ten feet away in their one room, screaming and kicking the wall with anger, kicking the leg of the metal table. Connie dragged herself from the bed hungover and strung out, and it hit her that having a baby was a crime—that maybe those bastards who had spayed her for practice, for fun, had been right. That she had borne herself all over again, and it was a crime to be born poor as it was a crime to be born brown. She had caused a new woman to grow where she had grown, and that was a crime. Then she came staggering off the couch and saw that Angie, in kicking the table, in kicking the wall—every blow the blow of a hammer on her aching head—had kicked a hole in her lousy cheap shoes. Those were the only shoes Angie had, and where in hell was Connie going to get her another pair? Angie couldn’t go out without shoes. There rose before Connie the long maze of conversations with her caseworker, of explanations, of pleas and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate, and trips down to the welfare office to wait all day first outside in the cold and then inside in line, forever and ever for a lousy cheap pair of shoes to replace the lousy cheap pair Angie had just destroyed.

  “You fucking kid!” she screamed, and hit her. Hit too hard. Knocked her across the room into the door. Angie’s arm struck the heavy metal bolt of the police lock, and her wrist broke. The act was past in a moment. The consequence would go on as long as she breathed.

  As she slumped against the wall of the bleak seclusion cell, tears ran into her lap, soaking the yellow dress, faded from repeated laundering. Tears for Claud dead, for Angelina adopted into a suburban white family whose beautiful exotic daughter she would grow into. Remembering what?

  Why had Dolly betrayed her? Well, why had she betrayed her own daughter? She had thrown Angelina away from the pain of losing Claud. She should have loved her better; but to love you must love yourself, she knew that now, especially to love a daughter you see as yourself reborn. She slumped against the wall clutching her knees and tried to concentrate on the pain of the old burn that had never quite healed, to blot out memory.

  She felt then that sense of approach almost as if someone were standing behind her wanting to come through, that presence brushing her consciousness. The feeling was at once an irritant and a relief. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, lacking anything else, and made a grimace of disgust at the sloppiness. How she hated to be dirty. She felt ugly, bloated with the drugs, skin deadened and flaking, lips dry and split, hair lank and dirty and bleared with feverish sweat. Her throat was sore and the back of her neck ached all the time.

  Vanity before a hallucination? If she could so clearly imagine him, why couldn’t she imagine herself clean and beautiful? At least a proper hallucination would be some kind of company, so she let her eyes shut, leaned against the wall, and permitted the presence to fill her. For perhaps ten minutes she remained thus, head back and eyes tightly closed.

  “Connie, at last! Fasure it’s been three weeks!”

  “This is the first time I’ve been by myself since the first night.”

  “Are we responsible for your being here?”

  She did not immediately open her eyes. “No.”

  “Fasure? You’re not just painting the bones?”

  She briefly described the night of her commitment. When she opened her eyes she saw Luciente consulting the watch that whispered.

  “It’s running hard for me to comprend,” Luciente sai
d in his high excited voice. “Might as well be Yif. Your mem has a sweet friend who abuses per and who … sold your sister?”

  “Her pimp, Geraldo. And she’s my niece, not my sister. Geraldo is a pig! He didn’t want her to have his baby.”

  Luciente looked deeply embarrassed. Passing his hand over his mouth, he shifted from haunch to haunch, squatting before her. “Uh, I know you people ate a great deal of meat. But was it common to feed upon person? Or is this slavery, I thought wiped out by your time?”

  The urge to cry was still burning her eyes. “Sometimes we have nothing to feed on but our pain and each other … . What’s that about meat?”

  “How did this Geraldo sell per flesh then, and pigs too?”

  “She hustles!” Seeing blank incomprehension, she snorted and said harshly, “Puta. Tart. Whore.”

  Luciente began fiddling with the wrist gadget again till she reached out to stop him. Small bones he had, little heavier than hers. “Who do you talk to with that?”

  “My kenner? It ties into an encyclopedia—a knowledge computer. Also into transport and storage. Can serve as locator-speaker.” Luciente’s face changed suddenly and he smiled. “Oh. Had to do with sex. Prostitution? I’ve read of this and seen a drama too about person who sold per body to feed per family!”

  “I suppose nobody in your place sells it, huh? Like they say about Red China.”

  “We don’t buy or sell anything.”

  “But people do go to bed, I guess?” Connie sat up, holding herself across the breasts as she shook back her lank hair. “I suppose since you’re alive and got born, they must still do that little thing, when they aren’t too busy with their computers?”

  “Two statements don’t follow.” Luciente gave her a broad smile. “Fasure we couple. Not for money, not for a living. For love, for pleasure, for relief, out of habit, out of curiosity and lust. Like you, no?”

  Like sunshine in her cell, he looked so human squatting there she heard herself ask half coyly, “Do you like women?”

  “All women?” Luciente looked at her with that slight scowl of confusion. “Oh, for coupling? In truth, the most intense mating of my life was a woman named Diana—the fire that annealed me, as Jackrabbit says in a poem. But it was a binding, you know, we obsessed. Not good for growing. We clipped each other. But I love Diana still and sometimes we come together … . Mostly I’ve liked males.”

  “I thought so.” Why should that make her feel gloomy? He had shown no signs of sexual interest, except for all that patting and hand holding. But shouldn’t a figment of her mind at least satisfy her? Perhaps being crazy was always built on self-hatred and she would, of course, see a queer.

  “You’re lonely here, and I just let you down. Truly, I’m not rigid and I like you.” Luciente took her hands between his warm, dry, calloused palms. “What is this place? You seem to be locked in. I’ve seen holies about your prisons and concentration camps. Is this such a place?”

  “No. I’d rather be in prison. Unless you’re on an indeterminate, at least you know when you’re getting out. They can keep me here till I go out with my feet in the air. It’s a loony bin—a mental hospital.”

  Luciente consulted his wrist. “Oh, a madhouse! We have them.” He looked around. “But it seems … ugly. Bottoming.”

  “Are yours so fancy?”

  “Open to the air and pleasant, fasure. I never stayed in one myself—”

  “Big deal!” She pulled her hands free.

  “But Jackrabbit has—just before we fixed each other, and we’ve been sweet friends three years. Bee and I have been lovers twelve now, isn’t that strange? Not to stale in so long. And Diana goes mad every couple of years. Has visions. Per earth quakes. Goes down. Emerges and sets to work again with harnessed passion … . But I have to say this—in truth you don’t seem mad to me. I know I’ve never gone down myself, I’m too … flatfooted … earthen somehow, so it’s beyond my experience. Bee tells me that I’m the least receptive person in our base, and person has to scream in my ear to get through … . I don’t mean to pry or make accusations, but are you truly mad?”

  “Here they say if you think you aren’t sick, it’s a sign of sickness.”

  “You’re sick?”

  “Sick. Mad.”

  “We do not use these words to mean the same thing.” Luciente tilted his head to one side. “Could it be you’re bluffing? Truly, I have never gone down, but I have been close to Diana when person was far inward, and … you seem too coherent. Perhaps you’re tired, unable to cope for a while? Sometimes, among us, this happens.”

  “I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with me, aside from seeing you—that’s the best sign of being crazy I can think of.”

  “No, I’m in touch with you, really.” Luciente scowled at the room. “This place bottoms me. Would you like to take a walk?”

  “The door’s locked. Or do you have a key?”

  “Not a walk here or now. I wish to invite you home with me for a short visit Say an hour?”

  “You mean the way you come here?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see my village?”

  “I’d like seeing anything but these four filthy walls, believe me. But could I get back?” She hooted with laughter. “Why should I care? Better if I get stuck anyplace instead of rotting here!”

  “Sadly, you can’t get stuck in my time. A lapse of attent would probably break our contact.” Luciente rose gracefully and extended his hand for her to grasp. “As I’ve remarked, the appearance is not a physical presence, but is … as if it were. Now we’ll see if this trick works. To confess, I haven’t a wispy guess if I can really pull you into my time. But the worst that can happen is that we open our eyes and are still in this drab room. Only fit for a storeroom for machinery!”

  “You ought to try it twenty-four hours a day. It breaks you, finally.”

  “Then why did you come here? It seems inadequate.”

  “I didn’t walk, you can count on that. I was dragged screaming. My brother Luis committed me.”

  “Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves—to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy—getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad … . How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?”

  “Here you get put in if your family doesn’t want you around or other people don’t, and that’s about the long and short of it.” She finally stuck out her hand and let Luciente pull her to her feet.

  “The first time is supposed to be the hardest, but frankly, we’re the first contacts to try. That’s the theory anyway, for what it weighs. Here comes the practice, NINO.”

  “Nino? Niño?”

  “NINO: Nonsense In, Nonsense Out—that’s the motto on every kenner. It means your theory is no better than your practice, or your body than your nutrition. Your encyclopedia only produces the information or misinformation fed it. So on.” Luciente gently drew her against him and held her in his arms so their foreheads touched. “You’re supposed to be a top catcher and I’m supposed to be a superstrong sender … . As people say, with theory and a nail, you’ve got a nail.”

  Pressed reluctantly, nervously against Luciente, she felt the coarse fabric of his shirt and … breasts! She jumped back.

  “You’re a woman! No, one of those sex-change operations.”

  “If you hop around, we’ll never get it right … . Of course I’m female.” Luciente looked a little disgusted.

  She stared at Luciente. Now she could begin to see him/her as a woman. Smooth hairless cheeks, shoulder-length thick black hair, and the same gentle Indian face. With a touch of sarcasm she said, “You’re well muscled for a woman.” In anger she turned on her heel and stalked a few paces away. A dyke, of course. That bar in Chicago where the Chicana dykes hung out shooting pool and cursing like men, passing comm
ents on the women who walked by. Yet they had never given her that sense of menace a group of men would—after all, under the clothes they were only women too.

  “I’m not unusually strong.” Luciente’s face was screwed up with confusion. She still held out her hands to draw Connie to her. “About middling. We do more physical work than most people did in your time, I believe. It’s healthier, and of course you lugs were burning up all those fossil fuels … . You seem surprised that I am female?”

  Feeling like a fool, Connie did not choose to reply. Instead she paced to the locked door with its peephole and then to the radiator. Luciente spoke, she moved with that air of brisk unself-conscious authority Connie associated with men. Luciente sat down, taking up more space than women ever did. She squatted, she sprawled, she strolled, never thinking about how her body was displayed. It was hard to pace with dignity in the tiny space between the stained mattress and the wall. Connie no longer felt in the least afraid of Luciente.

  “Please, Connie.” Luciente came over and cautiously put an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t understand what’s wrong. Let’s give it a try. We didn’t even carry out our experiment. Do you really want to stay here all day? It doesn’t bottom you?”

  “To the bone.” She stood awkwardly and let Luciente pull her close and lean their foreheads together. Hardly ever did she embrace another woman along the full length of their bodies, and it was hard to ease her mind. She could feel Luciente concentrating, she could feel that cone of energy bearing down on her. It reminded her of the old intensity of a man wanting … something—her body, her time, her comfort—that bearing down that wanted to grab her and push her under. But she was weary and beaten and she let herself yield. What had she to lose?