Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  An older woman came up beside them, holding out her hand to Connie. “I’m White Oak. I work in the same base as Bee and Luciente. You’ve been pointed out to me and, grasp, we gossip about you. But we’ve never met. My child named perself this month too—I mean the one who was my child. That one is Thunderbolt now, and we can’t talk for another seven weeks.”

  “Thunderbolt!” Luciente savored it. “I hope we’re not in for a summer of titanic names. Leaping Lightning. Stupendous Fireball. The Earth Dances, The Stars Stand Still. Heroic Revolutionary Fervor. Mao Susan B. Ferenzi. Freedom Through Constant Struggle.”

  “I suppose you selected Luciente right off,” Jackrabbit crooned, giving her hair a tug. “I suppose you were too sensible, even at thirteen, ever to pick a silly name.”

  “Actually I called myself White Light when I came from my naming, so you see I haven’t drifted far. But to confess, I went through the usual oddities. When I was first with Diana, I called myself Artemis.”

  “Actually the twin of Artemis was Apollo. Or did you want to be Diana?” Jackrabbit moved beside them, loose-jointed, shambling. “You wanted the moon, Luci, instead of recognizing yourself a creature of the broad pragmatic day.”

  “I was Panther for a while myself,” White Oak said. “As if I’d ever see one, except on the holi. And Liriope—that’s a plant we were breeding for erosion control on the old blast sites when I was first in our base.”

  “I fancy that one,” Jackrabbit said. “Liriope …” He leaped ahead to assume a position as flowering plant, head hung back, mouth open, arms arched above his head.

  “Venus flytrap,” White Oak said. “Don’t tease me. I remember too well when you moved here, you were going through a name a week.”

  “Lord Byron, One Who Crests the Wave, Dark Moon, Wild Goose …” Luciente crooned.

  “And I walked into the fooder one day and you told me you were going to give me my name of the week, Wild Porkchop. That was the first time I noticed you. Now you’d better forget—I’m meaner than you are!” He hopped to Connie’s side. “Did you never have another name? Or do you just keep changing that second name?”

  They were walking a broad path beside the tidal river. Every twenty feet wooden benches stood. White Oak took a seat at a table, inviting them to stare at the flow of the currents, the tide washing slowly in. A high in the water Goat skimmed past them, going downriver against the tide.

  “It’s funny, but the way you talk reminds me of people in … in the institution where I’m locked up … . A lot of the time we don’t talk to each other there, but there are … fewer fences than outside. Anyhow, in a way I’ve always had three names inside me. Consuelo, my given name. Consuelo’s a Mexican woman, a servant of servants, silent as clay. The woman who suffers. Who bears and endures. Then I’m Connie, who man aged to get two years of college—till Consuelo got pregnant. Connie got decent jobs from time to time and fought welfare for a little extra money for Angie. She got me on a bus when I had to leave Chicago. But it was her who married Eddie, she thought it was smart. Then I’m Conchita, the low-down drunken mean part of me who gets by in jail, in the bughouse, who loves no good men, who hurt my daughter … .”

  When she stopped short, the others were silent but did not seem scared or judgmental. As usual, Luciente spoke first. “Maybe Diana could help you to meld the three women into one.”

  “I had a waning self in me when I was thirteen. The things I wanted, I didn’t think I should want, so I put them out of myself to plague and threaten me.” Jackrabbit spoke with an ironic lilt, but not an irony aimed at her. “I tore so, I saddened I’d gone through my naming. I wanted to return to the children’s house, with my mothers ready to fuss when I called them. I had begun to train as a shelf diver, but I didn’t want to do that; at the same time I couldn’t feel what I did want … . You don’t at core believe you’re three women—that’s a useful way to talk about your life. But I did believe the ocean was trying to drown me, cause I felt swallowed by the training … .”

  “What happened to you?” she asked him.

  “I went mad with fear. In the madhouse I met Bolivar and he was good for me in learning to say that initial ‘I want, I want.’ I had played a lot as a child with paints and with holies and I felt … most alive then. I had to do that in the center of my life. I had to follow my comp through and even push it. So Bolivar and I went to study with Marika of Amherst. Then I studied in Provincetown with Blackfish. You see, I’m a needy type and every time I lack, I add on. The next time I jagged, I grabbed Luciente.”

  “You came from Fall River?” White Oak asked him.

  He nodded. “I moved here to be with Bolivar.”

  “Our gain.” White Oak grinned. “Not for your winning disposition always, but you make pretty things and strong holies. In the shop yesterday I was screen-batching the new tintos of Luciente turning her belly up to the sun.”

  “White Oak, you graze me,” Luciente said. “How can you say it’s my belly?”

  “Person has a good belly,” Jackrabbit said. “I like good round bellies. Like yours, White Oak.”

  They were flirting right in front of Luciente and nobody seemed to care. White Oak must have been twenty-five years older than Jackrabbit, although they were so athletic it was hard to tell for sure. White Oak’s hair was abundant and worn loose, but she had a network of deep laugh lines around her eyes and mouth.

  White Oak’s kenner made a noise. “Here I am, White Oak,” she said to it.

  “Zo, are we running to crack the new test today or not?” A sharp voice rose from her wrist. “We’re limping with Bee off till three and Luciente off till who knows when.”

  “Flying.” White Oak sighed. “Since coordinating this six, Corydora watches the clock as if it could couple with per!”

  “No slinging mates. Corydora’s doing a good job,” Luciente said. “Even if person does try to hand me guilt on a plate about being called up for the time proj. Too bad you lugs have to stiff it twice as hard.” She made a mock-pious face.

  “Corydora’s your boss?”

  “We coordinate by lot,” Luciente explained as White Oak jogged off. “For sixmonth at a time.”

  “Why do it that way?” Connie asked. “Some people know how to run a lab, and some people don’t, right?”

  “Whenever we decide we’re ripe to join a work base, we fuse as full members. We share the exciting jobs and the dull jobs. We don’t think telling people what to do is a real world skill. Now, joining a base … Some people stay on where they study. Others go away to study and then come home—”

  “Place matters to us,” Jackrabbit said. “A sense of land, of village and base and family. We’re strongly rooted. People of your time weren’t? So I’ve been told—lacking Luciente’s time traveling. On per it’s wasted, too. I bet that one talks a blue streak in your century and looks at nothing.”

  Connie laughed. “Where I am now, there’s not much to see … . You … went mad a second time?”

  “Jackrabbit’s jealous of my assignment. Jackrabbit catches like you, but person transmutes everything! … I always choose catchers!” Luciente frowned at her big strong hands.

  “I’m jealous of everybody’s gifts. I want to be everybody and feel everything and do everything. Wherever I am, where I’m not plagues me. As long as I don’t have to get up too early in the morning to do it all.” He stretched languidly. “The second time I was mad, Diana helped me. I’m sure Luci has talked about Diana. At great length.”

  “We’re jealous of each other’s past,” Luciente said with sudden gloom. “We’ll have to have a worming someday.”

  “I don’t dread a worming, all that attent … . Diana was just emerging from per own journey down, and was more helpful than I can easily say. I only needed twomonth and I came out with a stronger healing than the first.”

  “Do you tell everyone you meet that you’ve been mad twice?” She resented his casual, almost boastful air. She lugged that radioactive fact a
round New York like a hidden sore. To find out she had been in an institution scared people—how it scared them. Not a good risk for a job. They feared madness might prove contagious.

  Jackrabbit looked into her eyes with piercing curiosity. “Why not? Why keep that from you any more than studying with Marika?”

  “In my time you’d be ashamed … . When people find out, they pull away so fast I can see it. Jerky. Afterward, if they have to deal with me, they’re thinking all the time that I might suddenly go berserk and start climbing the walls or jumping out the window. Or they don’t believe anything I say.”

  “People of your time confuse me, for they seem neither strongly inknowing nor strongly outgoing. Except in couples. Unstable dyads, fierce and greedy, trying to body the original mother-child bonding. It looks tragic and blind!”

  Luciente said quickly, “I’ve known Connie for some time, and I wouldn’t call per blind. Connie has a high capacity to respond to others. We should not sound arrogant because we have a more evolved society—we came from them, after all!”

  “More evolved!” Connie snorted. “I’d say things have gone backward!”

  “Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours,” Luciente said seriously, looking with shining black gaze, merry, alert in a way that cast grace notes around her words. “We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste … nothing. You might say our—you’d say religion?—ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees.”

  “We learned a lot from societies that people used to call primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated.” Jackrabbit paced, frowning. “We tried to learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying—”

  “Yeah, and you still go crazy. You still get sick. You grow old. You die. I thought in a hundred and fifty years some of these problems would be solved, anyhow!”

  “But Connie, some problems you solve only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a problem!” Luciente got up to cast a last, lingering glance at the river. “Come. Bee prompted I show you the children’s house.”

  “I can’t resist that! A house for kids?” Her legs felt heavy. Suddenly she was slipping back into her drugged real body in real time. A surge of sadness flowed through her hips and belly. Worse, finally, than never to be loved again was never to hold a child next to her body. Her child. Her flesh. She felt a slackening through her, that beginning to slip out of her connection with Luciente, back to the asylum. For an instant she breathed the stifling heat of the closed isolation room, she smelled its stale fecal smell, its smell of caged and fearful bodies. She fought like a swimmer going down. She cast a soundless appeal toward Luciente: Help me! For a long nauseated moment she blurred over and she was no place, lost, terrified.

  SEVEN

  Jackrabbit was towering over her, lifting her to her feet. His thin face furrowed with serious intent. He held her against him, supporting her in a close hug with one long bony arm while the other hand gently stroked her hair back from her forehead. “Don’t sadden. Little Pepper and Salt, don’t fade on us.” Her face was level with his unbuttoned work shirt, his tanned chest prickly with brass hairs, and his voice burred through the skin into her. “We’d be stupid not to sense you’re confined wrongly. That you hurt and sadden there and no one seems to want to help you heal. That you’re fed drugs that wound your body. Enjoy us. Don’t fade from old pain and return to present pain. Guest here awhile.”

  Unmistakably, as his voice burred against her and his hand kneaded her neck, urging her to relax, she felt the rise of his erection, his hardening against her. She tried to wriggle free, and he at once released her.

  “I catch sexually.” He shrugged. “Don’t upset more. Truly I meant to calm you.”

  “Doesn’t he drive you crazy with jealousy? Why do you let him act this way?” she asked Luciente, who was trying to control a giggling fit.

  “Jackrabbit means it—person was trying to comfort you. But person wants to couple with everybody.”

  “Aw, not everybody. Not all of the time.”

  “Just most of the people most of the time.” Luciente put one arm through hers and one through Jackrabbit’s. “To the children’s house.”

  When was a pass not a pass? When did nineteen-year-old artists throw their arms around women twice their age from the loony bin? Little Pepper and Salt: what a thing to call her, meaning her hair with the white streak along the part growing out raggedy. That reminded her too of her Texas family, for they would give each other blunt nicknames like One Arm and Old Dimwit. Anglos thought that cruel, and she had come to accept the judgment and to expect a veneer of polite refusal to admit seeing.

  “Don’t you people ever have to work?” she asked irritably. They were passing greenhouses set into the earth, the sound of falling water. “All those adults taking off to watch a twelve-year-old go for a ride. You all have a mañana attitude for real.”

  “We have high production!” Luciente’s black eyes glinted indignation. “Mouth-of-Mattapoisett exports protein in flounder, herring, alewives, turtles, geese, ducks, our own blue cheese. We manufacture goose-down jackets, comforters and pillows. We’re the plant-breeding center for this whole sector in squash, cucumbers, beans, and corn. We build jizers, diving equipment, and the best nets this side of Orleans, on the Cape. On top we export beautiful poems, artwork, holies, rituals, and a new style of cooking turtle soups and stews!”

  “Why isn’t anybody in a hurry? Why are the kids always underfoot? How can you waste so much time talking?”

  Jackrabbit waved his arms windmill fashion. “How many hours does it take to grow food and make useful objects? Beyond that we care for our brooder, cook in our fooder, care for animals, do basic routines like cleaning, politic and meet That leaves hours to talk, to study, to play, to love, to enjoy the river.”

  “At spring planting, at harvest, when storms come, when some crisis strikes, Connie, we work, we stiff it till we drop … . The old folks story about how they used to have to stiff it all the time. How long the struggle was to turn things over and change them. After, what a mess the whole ying-and-yan of it was from peak to sea.” Luciente waved off into the distance. “Now we don’t have to comp ourselves that hard in ordintime … . Grasp, after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do, counting money and moving it about, making people do what they don’t want or bashing them for doing what they want, we have lots of people to work. Kids work, old folks work, women and men work. We put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the soil, keeping up its health and fertility. With most everybody at it part time, nobody breaks their back and grubs dawn to dust like old-time farmers … . Instance, in March I might work sixteen hours. In December, four …”

  “You said you made jizers, comforters. Where are the factories?”

  “We just passed the pillow and comforter factory.”

  “Can I see it?” When she met Eddie, she had been working in a loft where many Spanish-speaking women sewed children’s clothes.

  Jackrabbit bounded ahead and the door opened. Inside the opaque peach cube, she saw no one. The machinery made the most noise she had heard in the village. “Is this all automated?” she shouted.

  “Fasure,” Jackrabbit shouted back. “Who wants to stuff pillows? I tore one open once hitting Bolivar over the head. What a mess! Gets up your nose. And the padded jackets with down—they’re very warm but who would want to stuff every patch?”

  “They’re stuffed first, then sewn,” she said. “So nobody works in this factory? Not even a supervisor?”

  “It’s mechanical,” Luciente said. “The analyzer oversees it, with constant monitoring and feedback. In operations like the brooder, most everything is automated, but we need human presence because mistakes are too serious.”

  “This runs off solar en
ergy?”

  “No, methane gas from composting wastes.”

  “Okay, you can automate a whole factory,” she said as they walked back into the sunshine. “So why do I see people grubbing around broccoli plants picking off caterpillars? Why is everybody running around on foot or bicycles?”

  “We have so much energy from the sun, so much from wind, so much from decomposing wastes, so much from the waves, so much from the river, so much from alcohol from wood, so much from wood gas.” Luciente checked them off on her fingers. “That’s a fixed amount. Manufacturing and mining are better done by machines. Who wants to go deep into the earth and crawl through tunnels breathing rock dust and never seeing the sun? Who wants to sit in a factory sewing the same four or five comforter patterns?”

  “There are ten, in fact,” Jackrabbit said. “I counted them.”

  “Only you have been in enough beds to be sure,” Luciente said with a tucked-in smile. They walked on toward a joined group of free-form buildings of sinuous curves suggesting a mass of eggs, but with long loops thrown off and high arches and arcades. This just-grew was the color of terra cotta. A vine ran all over the south side, with big velvet flowers that gave off a fragrance of cloves. Bird feeders hung from every protrusion, out of windows, on posts. The roof was studded with bird-houses and a pigeon coop built in, as if the masonry broke into lace through which pigeons went fluttering and cooing.