by Marge Piercy
They sat in a booth, a more real family in their assorted colors and sizes and shapes than Eddie and Angie and she had ever made up, with Claud taking one side of the booth by himself and his cane on Angie’s side for her to play with. Connie and Angie sat facing him, while Angie squirmed with pleasure and asked to go to the bathroom every five minutes. “You can’t go to our bathroom,” she kept telling Claud. Angie was fascinated by men’s and women’s bathrooms and why they used the same one at home but they couldn’t use the same one here. Lately Angie asked questions about toilets for hours. It drove Connie crazy. The more irritated she grew, the more Angie would push her with questions. Angie had a gift for sensing when her mother didn’t want to talk about a subject, and a vivid and driving urge to know why.
“You’d make a great cop,” Claud told Angie one time. “A special detective captain cop.”
Connie was serene with pleasure: pleasure that they had some money, that they were together, that they were being a good family, that Angie was behaving and eating her noodles, that Claud was sitting there vast and beaming and solid and warm. Like the sun his presence shone on her. She ate from his dish, she ate from her own, she nibbled a little of what Angie would not finish. Everything was spicy and good. It was spring, just after Easter, and Claud had given her money for a new dress. The dress was turquoise, fitted at the waist and swinging out when she walked. Claud said it felt good and sleek. She had touched up her hair just Saturday and then used the cream rinse that made it feel soft for Claud. She was bathing in a pool of sunshine. They were busted two weeks later.
She was in isolation, crying. Claud, Angie. The court-appointed lawyer told her to cop a plea and she ended up with a suspended sentence as accomplice to a pickpocket. But she spent weeks in jail before the trial and Angie had been put in the children’s shelter for the first time. Her probation officer would not permit contact with the man she thought of as her husband. The State said her husband was Eddie. She’d never had the money to divorce him for desertion. What was the point? Only sometimes she felt as if the name Ramos was a heavy load, a great dead bough she lugged on her shoulders. Its thickness was the body of a thin but bony man, the roughness of skin closed against her. Claud had been open to her and everybody—the judge, the probation officer, Luis, everybody—had tried to make her ashamed of being with him. Black and blind.
She could not stand remembering! She had felt disgusted by Luciente and Bee, but she did not care. She had to get out of here. She had to turn off her memory. She tried to open her mind, to invite. For a long, long time nothing stirred. Nothing but time sticking to her like cold grease.
Then at last she felt something. At once she begged, “Luciente, let me visit!”
The presence grew stronger. “Grasp, you could be a sender too. What a powerful and unusual mix!”
“Don’t flatter me.”
“Why not praise strengths? Speak good when you can, and critting doesn’t sting. Clear, now, clear hard.”
She felt Luciente’s firm embrace and then she stood in her hut.
“We lost you suddenly last time.” Luciente hugged her. “You weren’t injured?”
“I think if I remember something too well it breaks this—whatever you call this link.”
“Could be you stop catching when your attent shifts. I guess we’ll get used to these abrupt discorporatings and hoppings to and fro in time.” Luciente was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She reminded Connie of an athlete, of a woman tennis player; except that they were hardly ever as dark as Luciente. Bee, on the bed’s edge, wore a long red and black robe covered with fine embroidery that stiffened it, with a softly rolled hood cast back on his broad shoulders.
“Come!” Luciente urged her, huskiness catching with haste. “Hurry! Bee’s coms wait.”
Indeed, squatting carefully outside so as not to stain their costumes were two women as dressed up as Bee, women she recognized from the lunch table. One wore a long shirt and leggings of soft pale deerskin much worked with shell and quill appliqué; she had braided her long black hair with strips of dyed leather into a tower precariously fastened. The other’s chestnut hair was loose and she wore long filigree earrings and a flowing blue gown. With quick grace both women rose to greet them.
Sitting a little apart on a stone was a fair-haired girl, yes, of thirteen or so. This child was easy for Connie to distinguish because her cotton shirt was open all the way down like a jacket, and her small cups of breasts were visible as she got up and turned toward them. The skin of her chest looked tattooed. Connie stared. As they moved into a close group, she could see it was paint. The girl wore pants and that open shirt and had at her feet a basket, which now she swung up to wear like a rucksack. She also picked up a bow and slung it over her shoulder. Connie could see at her waist a knife sheath, hanging under the shirt-as-jacket.
“This is our child, Innocente. Innocente, here is Connie, from the past.” Bee turned to her, stately today in his movements. “This day is Innocente’s naming. Otter, Luxembourg, and I are about to leave together by floater to see per safely landed. We’ve been Innocente’s mothers, and this is end-of-mothering.”
“As if you won’t be tumbled to get rid of me!” Innocente stuck out her tongue at him.
“You guessed it. We plan to drop you in the bay.”
“Except that you float like a bladder.” Otter, the woman in deerskin, spoke.
“When I’m eaten by a bear, you’ll bottom!”
Otter slipped her arm around Innocente. “A skinny bit like you? And tough! Like chewing on locust wood.”
“Do you not want to go?” asked Luxembourg, in the flowing blue dress. “Say it—don’t comp yourself. If the time isn’t ripe, wait. We’re not nipping to let you escape us.”
Innocente screwed up her nose, kicking at the stone with new-looking heavy boots. “Fasure I want to go. It’s not that I’m running eager to get away from you lugs. Only, my two best friends are already youths. I think it’s time. I keep dreaming about going. Besides, what a ticky name you stuck me with. What am I supposed to be innocent of?”
“You said that twice you dreamed going,” Otter commented. “That sounds right. Nobody ever feels yin-and-yang sure.”
“Of that or anything else on earth.” Bee stroked the child’s shoulder. “You have me to blame. Innocente was a naming from the heart, partly for Luciente, who speaks Spanish. We’d been lovers only a short time. Partly I liked the sound, pretty in my mouth. Finally I’d just finished a task period working on reparations to former colonies, when I came home and put in to be a mother. I’d been traveling for a year in Latin America. It made me brood about those centuries of the rape of the earth, the riches stolen, the brutalizing and starving of generations … toward that day when all trace of that pillaging will be healed … . That’s how you got named. It’s up to you now to improve on it.” Bee stepped back. “Did you sharpen your knife?”
“Fasure. I checked everything. Canteen, stringing of my bow, arrow points.” Innocente looked at Connie. “Are you coming?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just where are you going?”
“Where it’s been decided.” Innocente gave a dry, choppy laugh.
“Innocente will be dropped into one of the wilderness areas we use,” Luciente said. “This is how we transit from childhood to full member of our community.”
“Drop her in the wilderness? Alone?” Her voice rose.
“Fasure I’ll be alone,” Innocente said with indignation. “What point would there be, at now? I’ve been in the woods plenty.”
Connie turned to Bee. “Does she stay out there overnight?” They had to be crazy.
“For a week. Then the aunts person selected—advisers for the next years—return for per. Not us.” Otter adjusted her elaborate hair.
“But they won’t be able to speak to me for threemonth when I come back.” Innocente sounded gleeful. “They aren’t allowed to.”
“Lest we forget we aren’t mothe
rs anymore and person is an equal member. Threemonth usually gives anyone a solid footing and breaks down the old habits of depending,” Otter went on.
“Suppose she breaks a leg. Suppose she’s bitten by a snake. Suppose she gets appendicitis!”
Bee smiled at her almost sadly. “We take the chance. We have found no way to break dependencies without some risk. What we can’t risk is our people remaining stuck in old patterns—quarreling through what you called adolescence.”
“A rite of passage that doesn’t involve some danger is too much a gift to create confidence,” Luxembourg said in her soft, rather deep voice.
“I’m afraid to go … but I’m willing, fasure. How come you don’t talk to me? You only talk to them,” Innocente said to Connie.
“How can you know what you’re getting into? You’re only a child!” She turned to Bee. “It’s criminal dropping her with wild animals and poison ivy and who knows what? How is she supposed to eat and clean herself and take care?”
“I know what to eat in the woods! I’m twelve and a half, not four. I can fly a floater myself, you ask if I can’t! There’s only one other twelve-year-old who flies a floater alone in this whole township. You can’t expect me to go through life with an unearned name, stuck on me when I wasn’t conscious yet! How can I go deep into myself and develop my own strength if I don’t get to find out how I am alone as well as with others? … Zo?”
Luciente took Connie’s hand. “I see it’s strange to you. But your young remained economically dependent long after they were ready to work. We set our children free.”
Bee shook out the folds of his robe. “Come see us off. It’s time. Come with us in the floater if you like, or stay with Luciente and person can show you the children’s house. We have an hour’s flight. We want Innocente to have long hours of daylight to fix camp, scout food, and take stock of the area.”
Innocente strode off and they fell in behind. Soon they were ambling together, Innocente arm in arm with Luxembourg, who murmured in her ear soft cautions and advice, while Luciente and Otter walked linked, Luciente telling a broad story about Neruda’s naming.
“You’re just going to toss her out in a parachute into the woods and run away?” Connie asked Bee.
“Parachute? We lower per to the ground and mark the spot with a radio beacon and big red marker.”
Luciente leaned close, grinning. “We haven’t misplaced a child yet. You’re right, accidents happen … . But why try to control everything? Grasp, we think control interfers with pleasure and with communing—and we care about both.”
“I won’t go along. I don’t want to see a child abandoned!”
“Connie, can’t you see Innocente wants to go?”
“Kids can be brainwashed into wanting any piece of garbage. My … own child cried for a week once for a mechanical walking man she saw on the TV that cost so much I couldn’t believe it. Should I have let us go hungry two weeks to buy it to stop her tears?”
“We’ll see them away. They’ll be happier alone. It’s tender, end-of-mothering. Comprend, we sweat out our rituals together. We change them, we’re all the time changing them! But they body our sense of good.”
Gently Bee adjusted Innocente’s jacket. “Don’t slow or trance till you build your shelter, grasp?”
As they came over a small rise, they faced a bigger hill. Cut into its side was what appeared to be a hangar, its top standing open like a box with the lid up. Three grasshoppery machines the size of police helicopters stood inside. The hangar was built much larger than needed to accommodate them, as if sometimes it might hold more of them or something else besides.
A blond woman wearing overalls came toward them from the floater in front. She was tanned, her cropped hair was shoved up in a bandanna, her nose reddened by the sun, her eyes wide and blue, and her wiry arms were daubed with grease. “Zo, a good naming, Innocente. You’re off now?”
“You got the floater ready, Red Star?”
“Alt checked. You flying today?”
“Ha! They said no. What do you think?”
“You don’t even know where you’re going, or have you guessed?”
“If I did, they’d change it”
Slowly other people came drifting toward the hangar from the cornfields, the intensively cultivated gardens, from the fooder and brooder, from huts scattered among the gardens, from the free-form buildings they called just-grews. From the river docks where she could see a variety of conventional and odd, high-in-the-water fishing boats, diving gear, nets and winches, more people strolled toward them. They embraced Bee, Otter, and Luxembourg, they waited for Innocente to leave prowling over the machine so they could greet her. Luciente remained with Connie up on the rise, a little apart. This day had the feeling of a slightly formal but familial occasion, of a great big clan saying goodbye to someone going off to the army or getting married. Of course they were far too many for a real family. Not even her own Comacho clan back in El Paso, with additional strength up on a visit from Chihuahua, could muster such numbers to see them off when they left in their old Ford for Chicago and the promise of work in the steel mills, the last time she had seen gathered in one spot so many people related by blood.
Except of course they weren’t. Nobody here knew what that meant. They just acted as if they were. They were kissing and hugging and Otter was beginning to weep. Innocente finally turned from her perhaps embarrassed fumbling with the floater to let people greet her. Even she did not seem to find the embraces or the tears upsetting. Luciente had left Connie to hug Bee, and both of them were crying. Big fat tears rolled down Bee’s broad face. Imagine Claud crying! Even when they sentenced him, he had grinned and shrugged and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Shit, could be worse. Time’s hard, but you do it, and it’s gone.” Once again they reminded her of children, even the men. Only Innocente did not weep, stubbornly eager.
Blowing her nose on a big multicolored handkerchief, Luciente clambered back to her. “Ah me, ah my,” she was sighing as she came. Bee and Jackrabbit were embracing now, that skinny rambling kid who was Luciente’s lover too.
“Luciente, sometimes a child must have to do without mothers. If someone dies? If someone goes away? What would happen to your child if suppose you went to California? Is there still a California, or did it fall in the sea? Are you allowed to go, or do you have to stay here? Anyhow, could you take your daughter, or wouldn’t your comothers let you?”
“Ay, so many questions! Fasure I can go if I want to. How would I work well, how would I contribute to my village if I didn’t want to be here? We try not to leave when we’re mothering. But if I comped I had to go, Dawn would stay. Because to leave would be a terrible uprooting. Then if the child was old enough, person would choose a third mother. If not, we’d volunteer. Every child has three. If we die, the same.” Luciente blew her nose again, emphatically, in the handkerchief of complex and gaudy pattern (a gift handkerchief, Connie thought: I bet people still give each other handkerchiefs when they can’t think of anything else).
The drifting to and fro, the greeting and well-wishing, the embracing and weeping, the patting and hugging and hand clasping, rose to a frenzied peak and Bee, Otter, and Luxembourg in their finery climbed into the floater with Innocente. Luxembourg was piloting. They all waved and shouted. Baskets of lunch were handed in and what looked like a bottle of champagne. “Come back with a strong name!” “Till when, Innocente! I’m going next week!” “Take care!” “Have a powerful dream!” “Don’t fix on lonely!” “See you in a week!”
At last the floater, painted with a swirly design in pastels, put out a bag apparatus above it and rose slowly, gracefully, and quietly. It soared to perhaps a thousand feet and then sailed off, with another device turning and twittering on it. Smoothly it paddled off through the air silent as a balloon and was soon gone. Once again Luciente blew her nose in the handkerchief of many colors and stuffed it in a pocket of her shorts as Jackrabbit strode from the eddies of leavetaking t
o hug her. Yes, they were not like Anglos; they were more like Chicanos or Puerto Ricans in the touching, the children in the middle of things, the feeling of community and fiesta. Then, after all that carrying on, everybody walked away cheerful enough, serene. Jackrabbit sauntered with his hand cupped on the nape of Luciente’s neck.
“Luciente, that handkerchief—was it a present?” Connie asked.
“This one? Fasure, from Dawn for Mothers’ Day. Dawn made it p’self!”
“Mother’s Day?” She laughed. “You still have Mother’s Day!”
“We have tens and tens of holidays,” Jackrabbit boasted. “For famous liberators. For important events, like the domes-ticking of corn and wheat. The turning of the sun north and south. Famous struggles … Didn’t your society use rituals to body what you thought good? Like your football games, parades, public executings—”
“We didn’t do that! That was the old times, way before.”
“I thought on your primitive holies—”
“TV, you mean? At least we had regular programs!”
“Didn’t you view bombings, burnings, stabbings? Shootings of people? In every group, spectaclers body ideas of good. Always people try to be good as they see it, no?” His free hand waved.
They were strolling down the hill toward the village. “I don’t know. We have a religious idea of being good—a bit like what you call good, being gentle and caring about your neighbor. But to be a good man, for instance, a man is supposed to be … strong, hold his liquor, attractive to women, able to beat out other men, lucky, hard, tough, macho we call it, muy hombre … not to be a fool … not to get too involved … to look out for number one … to make good money. Weil, to get ahead you step on people, like my brother Luis. You knuckle under to the big guys and you walk over the people underneath … .” She shrugged wearily, passing the huts crawling with grape vines and roses, the orchards hung with small green fruit, the covered tanks where fish were spawning under translucent domes. Growth seemed to swarm over the land. “Good? My mother was good. What did it get her except to bleed to death at forty-four? Looking like she was sixty.” She wished sharply for a cigarette, but she had not seen any here and she remembered Luciente’s fear. “I was never able to do good enough to feel good, never able to do bad enough to do me any good.”
