Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  Small gardens ran right among the clump of buildings, vegetables and flowers intermixed, tomato plants growing with rosebushes and onions, pansies and bean plants. Some were planted in open borders and some were surrounded by a thin shimmery fence like spiderweb. Out over the bay a towering mass of gray clouds was forming as the wind rose.

  “Smells like rain,” Jackrabbit said. “The day’s turning.”

  “I hope if it’s going to rain, Innocente has time to complete a shelter.” Luciente eyed the clouds. “Hope Bee and Otter get back before the storm. Lux too, I mean,” she added guiltily.

  “When I was on my naming, it rained every damned day,” Jackrabbit said. “I should have come back Drowned Rat.”

  In one of the spiderweb gardens an old man with a bush of white hair and a gnarled face, arms like driftwood scoured by salt and wind, was picking peas into a basket and weeding into another, with two kids of nine or ten working on either side.

  “How come they aren’t in school?” she asked. “Is school out already for the summer?”

  “That is school,” Luciente said, drawing Connie nearer to them.

  “This one is lamb’s-quarters, no?” one kid was asking.

  “Can you eat it?”

  “Fasure.”

  “Look at the shape of the pea flowers. Most legumes have irregular flowers with five petals—see, the two lower ones join in a keel, like the keel on the fishing boats. The two at the sides are like spread wings. Then you have one on top. Most legumes have leaves like these.”

  “Alternate. Compound. With these twisty things that hold on?”

  “Tendrils. Some have thorns instead. After we’re done weeding, we’ll look for a tree that’s evolved in a typical legume way, that has thorns a couple of inches long.” His fingers showed the size.

  As they strolled on, she said, “But they can’t possibly learn as much that way as they would in a classroom with a book!”

  “They can read. We all read by four or so,” Jackrabbit said. “But who wants to grow up with a head full of facts in boxes? We never leave school and go to work. We’re always working, always studying. We think, what person thinks person knows has to be tried out all the time. Placed against what people need. We care a lot how things are done.”

  “Every seven years you get a sabbatical,” Luciente said. “You’re off production for a year and all you’re liable for is family stuff. Some go study in their field. Some learn a language or travel. Hermit in the wilderness. Pursue some line of private research. Or paint. Or write a book.”

  Connie had been craning her head around. “I see a lot of old people here. Is this building like an old folks’ home too?”

  Outside on the first lawn of grass she had seen here, a circle of small children sat crowding around an old woman with her hair in braids and the face of a defiant eagle. In spite of her age she still had some teeth—they were too yellowed and irregular to be dentures—and she was telling a story in a high quavering dramatic voice. “Then Green Fire came to Box Turtle and when Box Turtle saw, Box Turtle closed per box tight with a hissing of air.” Her ancient brown claw hands became the turtle closing. “Green Fire sat down quietly, tucking per feet under, and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally Box Turtle slowly opened the shell a little peek and peered out.”

  “When I was little, that was my favorite story,” Jackrabbit said. “I imagined when I was twelve I would take that name, Green Fire.”

  “Box Turtle’s little leathery head stuck out of the shell and per little red eyes stared at Green Fire. ‘What do you want, long-legged one?’ asked Box Turtle.

  “‘I want to learn to hide as you do,’ Green Fire said.

  “‘Hiding is easy when you know how,’ said Box Turtle. ‘But first you must trade me your long legs that run so fast, before you can learn to hide the way I do.’”

  “Sappho perself made that tale long ago.” Jackrabbit was watching the old woman with admiration. “Many people now tell that story, but none better. At Icebreaking I taped per telling with the latest varia for the holifile. Sappho’s tales have great strength and radiance.”

  Luciente snapped her fingers. “We never answered your question.” They passed under an archway into a room full of books on shelves, screens set into alcoves, displays and cameras and sound equipment and art supplies. A dozen kids were busy in the room. An old man—or perhaps woman—with the wiry, brittle body of spry old age was showing a small child how to work television sets that spewed reams of paper at the touch of a dial. Jackrabbit ambled off to see what some kids were doing, working on a small holi projector. Luciente stayed at her side, saying, “We believe old people and children are kin. There’s more space at both ends of life. That closeness to birth and to death makes a common concern with big questions and basic patterns. We think old people, because of their distance from the problems of their own growing up, hold more patience and can be quieter to hear what children want. Not everyone who teaches the young is old—we all teach. The kids work with us. We try to share what we have learned and what we don’t know … . I think maybe growing up is less mysterious with us since the adult world isn’t separate. What better place to learn anatomy than in a clinic? What better place to learn botany than a field of corn? What better place to study mechanics than a repair shop?”

  “How can Red Star repair a floater with a mob of kids underfoot?”

  “A mob of kids?” Luciente shook her hair back roughly. “I puzzle, I admit … . We think about kids so different it makes us crosstalk, my friend … . We ask a lot of our kids but … politely? It’s not the one-to-one bind you had with your daughter, from what you say. We have more space, more people to love us. We grow up closest to our mothers, but we swim close to all our mems—or some, at least!” Luciente grinned. “We have handfriends and pillowfriends among other children in the children’s house … . It’s hard for me to inknow what it would feel like to love only one and have only one soul to love me.”

  Wandering through the rooms, she found some low-ceilinged, some opening into fisheye windows, into greenhouses and porches. Some rooms crept into nooks and crannies, small staircases. Others led them to courts full of plants, delicate apparatus, sundials and water clocks, star maps and telescopes. A fountain gurgled. In it three naked children waded with a curly puppy. Birds hopped in the vines, carp lazed in a small stream that flowed through a room whirring with machines into a courtyard, where a construction project was going on with children of seven or eight wielding miniature hammers, planes, and saws.

  In a dark room that smelled fresh and cool, a naked girl was listening to what she said shortly was a Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute. How … fancy it was in here. Room where the walls were mosaics of old bottles. Room of stark white blocks with rude mats on the floor. Room where a thin film of gauze like those spidery fences was all that separated inside and outside. Everywhere children went about their play and their business with adults, with older and younger children, with dogs, with rabbits, children with what Luciente told her were powerful microscopes, spectroscopes, molecular scanners, gene readers, computer terminals, light pencils, lightweight sound and light holi cameras and transmitters that created an image so real she could not believe till she passed her hand through that the elephant in the center of the room was only a three-dimensional image. She walked through the elephant unable to prevent her heart from racing as it raised its huge tusked head and trumpeted.

  “You think because we do not bear live, we cannot love our children,” Luciente said in a soft, husky voice, cupping Connie’s elbow in her big calloused hand. “But we do, with whole hearts.”

  The nursery: round high room on the ground floor, room with a circle of windows and a small floating dome in the ceiling; here babies babbled, cried, spat, cooed. A young person in a long green loose gown slit up the sides to the thighs sat barefoot, playing a stringed instrument and singing in a sweet alto, and with a treadle board rocking a brace of cradles. A child was playing wit
h one of the babies, tickling and making faces. The infants lay in low cradles with slatted sides that moved on runners to and fro. Connie counted five babies, including one yelling its lungs out, and then three empty cradles, also rocking.

  Barbarossa burst in, out of breath. “I hear you, I hear you. You almost blew the kenner off my wrist, you rascal! What a pair of lungs.” He picked up the crying baby. “They can hear you ten miles out on the shelf farm, you hairy little beast!” He sat down with the baby on a soft padded bench by the windows and unbuttoned his shirt. Then she felt sick.

  He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long-nosed, thin-lipped, he began to nurse. The baby stopped wailing and begun to suck greedily. An expression of serene enjoyment spread over Barbarossa’s intellectual schoolmaster’s face. He let go of the room, of everything, and floated. Her breasts ached with remembrance. She had loved breastfeeding—that deep-down warm milky connection that seemed to start in her womb and spread up through her trunk into her full dark-nippled breasts. Her heavy breasts opened to Angelina’s flower face, the sweet sunflower cradled in her arm. She had been borne on the currents of that intimate sensual connection, calmer, gentler than making love but just as enormous and satisfying. She had nursed Angelina until Eddie had absolutely insisted that she stop; for eight months she had nursed her. Angie had been a fat healthy baby. Only after Eddie had made her stop breast-feeding had Angie turned cranky about eating and become the thin doelike child of the photographs.

  She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.

  “I suppose you do it all with hormones,” she said testily.

  “At least two of the three mothers agree to breast-feed. The way we do it, no one has enough alone, but two or three together share breast-feeding.”

  “Why bother? Don’t tell me you couldn’t make formula?”

  “But the intimacy of it! We suspect loving and sensual enjoyment are rooted in being held and sucking and cuddling.”

  “Where are the babies from the empty cradles? Are they sick?”

  “Outside with mothers or somebody! Oftentimes when we’re working, we take the baby in a backpack. They get fresh air. When breast-feeding ends, everybody who feels like it lugs them around.”

  “Suppose you took Barbarossa’s baby and he wanted it. Wouldn’t he get sore?”

  “What are kenners for? You ask.”

  She stared at the room, blue and lemon and grass green. Sunlight melted through the circle of windows and a muted vegetable light passed through the dome. The windows stood open to the breezes now. The person in green was changing a diaper and wiping the cradle. Both diaper and wipe-up went down a chute.

  “Well, at least you’re not so crazy about ecology that you wash diapers.”

  “They’re made from cornhusks and cobs, and they compost. Very soft. Feel.” The diapers tore off a large roll hung from a stand in the form of a snake dancing, with many tinkling bells attached. Over the cradles mobiles turned and twittered. No pink and blue, no Disney animals prancing, no ugly cartoon pigs decked in human clothes. The nursery was airy, soothing, full of rustling and little bells and wind chimes and the sound of the stringed instrument, the cradles rocking. On the window seat, Barbarossa cuddled his baby to his breast, all the stern importance melted from his features. She could almost hate him in the peaceful joy to which he had no natural right; she could almost like him as he opened like a daisy to the baby’s sucking mouth.

  The person in green was cuddling the baby just changed and singing a slightly mournful lullaby:

  “Nobody knows

  how it flows

  as it goes.

  Nobody goes

  where it rose

  where it flows.”

  “Where’s Jackrabbit?” Connie asked, realizing that somewhere in the maze of rooms and courtyards he had slipped away.

  “Gone to play. This house seduces you.”

  “Nobody chose

  how it grows

  how it flows.

  How it grows

  how it glows

  in the heart of the rose …”

  As they went up a broad shallow stairway, that song, plaintive and endless, followed after them.

  “Except in the nursery and among the very young, the kids don’t have toys,” she said suddenly.

  “Most of what children must learn, they learn by doing. Under five, fasure they need toys to learn coordination, dexterity; they practice tenderness on dolls … . I’m looking for Magdalena.” Casually Luciente flicked her kenner. “Magdalena? Ah, person is coming. Magdalena is unusual. Person does not switch jobs but is permanent head of this house of children. It is per calling. Sometimes a gift expresses itself so strongly, like Jackrabbit’s need to create color and form, like Magdalena’s need to work with children, that it shapes a life. Person must not do what person cannot do—you have heard us say this a hundred times; but likewise, person must do what person has to do.”

  A small figure with velvety black skin—she had to be a woman from the delicacy of her bones—a long neck, hair cut to her scalp in an austere tracery of curls, descended toward them, smiling slightly. She came drifting down, stooping to pick off dead leaves from the vine that grew over one side of the open stairs. She was no taller than a ten-or eleven-year-old.

  “Magdalena has no family. Person wants this instead. Person is chaste and solitary among adults,” Luciente said as Magdalena came slowly toward them.

  “You mean an old maid?”

  “I don’t know this term. You speak it with contempt?”

  “Yeah, it’s an insult. A woman who can’t get a man.”

  “Connie, we don’t get each other. And we respect people who don’t want to couple. It’s per way: the way for Magdalena.”

  In a high chirpy voice like a cricket, Magdalena greeted her. “Be guest, woman from the past.” She stuck out her tiny hand. Her grip was warm, sun-heated ebony. “I’m Magdalena.”

  “You’re the only woman I met here who has a real name. I mean like somebody from my block.”

  “It’s the name of a woman burned to death for witchcraft in Germany many centuries ago. A wisewoman who healed with herbs. I saw per in my naming trance.” Magdalena smiled, a blink of ivory in her quick face. Was she sixty? More? Maybe old people here retained an ongoing strength because they felt useful. When she thought of getting old it always made her feel scared and low in her mind, old age as grim as those witch masks kids bought in the candy store and wore in the streets of El Barrio at Halloween.

  “I wanted to know about the toys. You have all those gadgets here. Compared to your huts, it’s … fancy. Nice. But I don’t see many toys for the older kids. Can’t you afford to get them toys? I see nobody rich here, but I don’t see anybody poor. I think of how sad it’s been for families like mine who could never give their kids the beautiful dolls with real hair, the sleds, the bikes and racing cars they see advertised. If I had a house of children, I’d give them every toy in the world! I wouldn’t hold nothing back!”

  Magdalena touched her on the cheek. “They play farming and cooking and repair and fishing and diving and manufacture and plant breeding and baby tending. When children aren’t kept out of the real work, they don’t have the same need for imitation things. I have studied about the care of children in earlier ages, so I understand more than Luciente what you’re talking about. In that time, Luciente, they had many toys for teaching sex roles to children. Children were kept in separate buildings all day and even after puberty were not supposed to begin full lives.”

  Slowly they descended the broad stairs to the bottom and moved off along
an arcade. As they turned a corner, in a little nook that was both bower and bench, a rampant twining vine of wisteria ancient and knotted like muscles held in its protective grasp a curved wooden bench that was a lovely size for curling up and napping or reading, for sitting and feeling sorry for oneself, for daydreaming, for imagining voyages and adventures, for whispering secrets to a best friend. There two children, a boy and a girl six or seven, had hung their light summer tunics on the vine like flags and they were seriously engaged in an attempt to have sex together. It did not look like an attempt that would prove immediately successful, but it was one into which they were putting great effort.

  The girl gave them a quick indignant glare. Magdalena pulled Connie away by the arm, Luciente having withdrawn even more quickly. As Magdalena dragged her away, Connie asked, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”

  Magdalena dropped her arm and began to laugh and although Luciente tried for a moment to keep a straight face she began to laugh with her. Connie stopped, furious. “They’re babies! If they were … playing with knives you’d stop them. What’s wrong with you?”

  Magdalena shook her head in wonder. “They learn how to use knives … . Mostly they learn sex from each other. If a child has trouble, we try to heal, to help, but—”

  “They can hurt each other!”

  “How? If a child is rough, the other children deal with that. If I notice a child bullying, I try to work with that child, the mothers and family, to strengthen better ways.”

  Luciente nudged her in the ribs. “Zo, as a child you never played sex with other children? Not ever?”

  Connie paced on, frowning. She leaned on the railing of the courtyard. “Oh. Sure.” In fact, her brother Luis had taken her pants down under the porch and poked at her with his fingers, finishing with warnings not to tell Mamá. She had not liked the prodding by Luis, who had kept his own pants on, but it had given her an idea. Casually and a lot more gently, she had begun fooling around together with José, her favorite brother, one year and two months younger.