Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  “But I haven’t been on a bike in years! I can’t!”

  “Good. We’ll take a two-seater. I’ll pedal and you’ll do what you can.”

  “I’ve seen lots of wooden buildings, Luciente! I’ve seen buildings a lot older than that in Texas.”

  “You wanted to see ‘Government.’ It’s working today.”

  “The town government? Like a mayor? A council?”

  Luciente made a face, throwing her slack-clad leg over the bike. “Look at it and then we’ll figure out what it’s like, okay?” They set out along a narrow paved way wandering a pleasant route over a high curved bridge across the river, under big and little trees, past roses drooping under the load of the rain, past willows, past boats and corn patches with pole beans and pumpkins interplanted, past the edge of another village marked by a bike rack.

  “This is Cranberry,” Luciente said hitting the brakes so they squeaked to a stop. “Everybody’s always making lists of what I ought to show you. Every lug in my base, my mems, everybody at council. Even my defense squad—I’m practicing on my belly and everybody’s giving me lists what I should show you. Harlem-Black flavor village.”

  “I see gardens. Windmills. People. Greenhouses. Where are the huts?”

  “Below.” Luciente left the bike by the big maple and helped her off. “We’ll stop by Erzulia.” She used her kenner. “Zuli! It’s Luci. I brought the woman from the past. Meet us at your space to show a Cranberry dwelling, favor?”

  “No such,” said a voice that sounded much more like a black from her own time than anybody she’d heard here. “Got a mean pelvic fracture, old person from Fall River. You drop right by my space and show it your own self.”

  “Erzulia and Bee are sweet friends,” Luciente said. “Erzulia has tens of lovers. Person never stales on anybody, just adds on. Over there!” She pointed to a two-story building. “The hospital where Zuli works—hospital for our township. That great big greenhouse is one where they breed the spinners—those single-celled creatures we use for fences and barriers.”

  “Creatures! They’re alive!”

  “Fasure. They mend themselves.”

  As they walked, she saw that courtyards were dug into the earth the level of an ample story, surrounded by dense, often thorny hedges—blackberries, raspberries. An animal or a child couldn’t push through. At ground level trees grew, gardens flourished, paths wound, swings hung from trees and people trotted and biked by. Goats and cows grazed, chickens ran pecking, a cat played with a dying baby rabbit. The solar heat collectors and the intakes for rain-water cisterns studded the surface like sculpture, some of them decorated with carved masks, others scalloped, inlaid with shell and glass mosaics.

  Luciente led her by the hand down wide steps curving into a submerged courtyard. The yard itself was paved and had in the center a big weather-beaten table with benches all around and a scattering of chairs. A chess game sat on the table half played, under a clear cover like those Connie had seen put over big cakes. The four walls around the court were of glass threaded with spidery lines almost too fine to focus on.

  “The glass can be opaqued or made one-way,” Luciente explained.

  “This whole house belongs to Erzulia?” Maybe they were richer here.

  “No! They live in families. Everybody has private space, but they have common space too, for family. For eating, playing, watching holies. The walls are plenty thick for quiet.”

  Individual rooms opened onto courts and the courts served partly as hallways and partly as common space. Halls joined rooms on other courts. Luciente guided her through the maze, occasionally consulting her kenner to ask permission to open a door. They cut through a kitchen, where Luciente begged a taste of a hot spicy seafood stew. Only two private rooms were occupied at this time of day. In one, Luciente said, somebody was meditating. On the door was hung a paper hand with the fingers held up.

  “That’s what they use when they don’t want you to enter. I say meditating—of course they may be coupling, reading, sleeping, or just pouting.”

  Erzulia’s room faced west. It was spacious, with walls entirely covered in woven and embroidered hangings, texture upon texture and color upon color. Her bed was a high platform reached by a ladder, the space underneath closed in with hangings to make a dark cave of cushions, a small altar, shelves of herbs in bottles. The furniture was of a dark knobby substance that reminded her of bamboo. On the bed a strange blue costume was laid out.

  “We should not stay here. That’s Erzulia’s raiment.” Luciente used the old formal word.

  “Is she a mother getting ready for a naming?”

  “Zuli’s never been a mother. Sappho is dying and Erzulia is her friend. They share a sense of old rites. Zuli follows voodoo as a discipline, as many do in Cranberry, while Sappho is an Indian old believer. But they share a closeness to … myths, archetypes.”

  “Sappho? That old woman who was telling stories to the kids?”

  “The same. A great shaper of tales. Now person is very old. It’s time for per to die.”

  “Oh?” She saw the sharp face of the corpse in the tunnel. “I wonder if she’s so sure it’s time.”

  “Per body has weakened since Wednesday. Time comes for any fruit to fall. It’s a good death that arrives when you’re ready for it, no?”

  They climbed another broad stair to the ground, where the rain was easing and dark clouds scudded over rapidly, going out toward the bay. The air smelled clean and cottony.

  In the old white Grange Hall with its octagonal tower, twenty-five or thirty people sat around an oblong table arguing about cement, zinc, tin, copper, platinum, steel, gravel, limestone, and things she could not identify. Many of them seemed to be women, although she often found when she heard a voice that she had guessed wrong. They ranged from sixteen to extreme old age. Few of them looked entirely white, although their being tanned by the sun made that harder to judge than it might have been in the middle of the winter. They spoke in ordinary voices and did not seem to be speechifying. Behind some seated at the table sat others listening closely and at times putting in their comments and questions.

  “We have a five-minute limit on speeches. We figure that anything person can’t say in five minutes, person is better off not saying.” Luciente and she pulled up chairs to sit behind Otter, whom she had not at first recognized with her black hair in a single braid and her body in overalls splashed with mud and salt. Otter flashed them a smile before turning back to the display set in the table between every other delegate that showed figures, allotments, graphs they were discussing.

  “This is your government?”

  “It’s the planning council for our township.”

  “Are they elected?”

  “Chosen by lot. You do it for a year: threemonth with the rep before you and three with the person replacing you and six alone.”

  “We want to clear some of the woods on Goat Hill.” A map flashed on the displays set in the table. The person speaking, with sideburns and a bristling mustache, somehow drew on the map indicating the section he referred to. “We would like to increase our buckwheat crop.”

  Luciente murmured, “Rep from Goat Hill, Cape Verde flavor village upriver.”

  “Seems to me that cuts into the catchment area for rain water. We have none too much water, people,” a person with green hair said.

  “We are only thinking of a matter of fifty, sixty acres of second-growth woods and scrub. Our region imports too much grain, we have all agreed on that,” the mustache argued.

  “Without water we can grow nothing. Our ancestors destroyed water as if there were an infinite amount of it, sucking it out of the earth and dirtying and poisoning it as it flowed,” Otter said indignantly. “Let us not be cavalier about water. What does the soil bank say?”

  “I’ll direct the question.”

  Luciente leaned close. “That’s the rep from Cranberry. That person is chair today.”

  “Who’s that with green hair?”


  “Earth Advocate—speaks for rights of the total environment. Beside per is the Animal Advocate. Those positions are not chosen strictly by lot, but by dream. Every spring some people dream they are the new Animal Advocate or Earth Advocate. Those who feel this come together and the choice among them falls by lot.”

  The computer was flashing figures and more figures on the displays. After everyone had stared at them, the Ned’s Point rep spoke. “The woods in question are fasure catchment. To take these acres from forest would cut our capacity to hold our water table.”

  “How can we up our grain output if we can’t pull land from scrubby woods to farming?” the Cranberry rep asked.

  “Then we must up the output of the land we have,” the Earth Advocate said. “We’re only starting to find ways of intensively farming, so the soil is built more fertile instead of bled to dust”

  Otter was still studying the display, her fat braid hanging over one shoulder. “These woods are birch, cherry, aspen, but with white pines growing up. Will be pine forest in ten years. Its history as we have it is: climax forest, cleared for farming, abandoned, scrub to climax again, bulldozed for housing, burned over, now returning to forest.”

  At her ear Luciente murmured, “We arrive with the needs of each village and try to divide scarce resources justly. Often we must visit the spot. Next level is regional planning. Reps chosen by lot from township level go to the regional to discuss gross decisions. The needs go up and the possibilities come down. If people are chilled by a decision, they go and argue. Or they barter directly with places needing the same resources, and compromise.”

  A vote was taken and Goat Hill was turned down. The Marion rep suggested, “Let’s ask for a graingrower from Springfield to come to Goat Hill and see if they can suggest how to grow buckwheat without clearing more land. We in Marion would be feathered to feast the guest.”

  Luciente’s kenner called. “How long?” Connie heard her say, and then, “We’ll come soon.”

  “The old bridge is beautiful,” a middle-aged man was arguing. “Three hundred years old, of real wrought iron. We have a skilled crafter to top-shape it.”

  “Nobody in your village has bled from the old bridge being out. We need ore for jizers,” an old woman said. “The bridge is pretty, but our freedom may depend on jizers. Head before tail!”

  “Weren’t you advised last year to look out for alloys that use up less ore?” the rep from Cranberry said.

  “We’re working on it. So is everybody else!”

  The Goat Hill rep suggested, “For the bridge, why not use a biological? It’d corrode less. Repair itself.”

  “We must scamp now,” Luciente said, pulling her up. “Fast. We’ll hop the dipper.”

  “What about the bike?”

  Luciente looked at her blankly. “Somebody will use it”

  The dipper turned out to be a bus-train object that rode on a cushion of air about a foot off the ground until it stopped, when it settled with a great sigh. It moved along at moderate speed, stopping at every village, and people got on and off with packages and babies and animals and once with a huge swordfish wrapped in leaves.

  They sat down in a compartment with an old man facing them, wizened up like a sultana, fiddling constantly, with a satisfied air, with the blanket wrapped around his baby.

  “Why do you have the bus cut up in little rooms this way? You’d get more people in if it was like we used to have, just one big space inside.”

  “It’s easier to talk this way,” Luciente said. “Warmer.”

  “You’re a guest?” the old man said. “From where? Or are you a drifter?”

  “From the past,” Luciente explained.

  “Ah, I heard, I heard. So …” He peered at her curiously.

  “Where do you live?” Luciente asked.

  “Ned’s Point, where I just got on, where else? We’re Ashkenazi,” he told Connie.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “We’re the flavor of Eastern European Jewry. Freud, Marx, Trotsky, Singer, Aleichem, Reich, Luxembourg, Wassermann, Vittova—all these were Ashkenazi!”

  “They build kenners,” Luciente said. “We were just visiting the planners.”

  “Look, I don’t understand,” Connie said. “If workers in a factory, say the kenner factory, want to make more kenners and the planners decide to give them less stuff, who wins?”

  “We argue,” the man said. “How else?”

  “There’s no final authority, Connie,” Luciente said.

  “There’s got to be. Who finally says yes or no?”

  “We argue till we close to agree. We just continue. Oh, it’s disgusting sometimes. It bottoms you.”

  “After a big political fight, we guest each other,” the man said. “The winners have to feed the losers and give presents. Have you been to a town meeting?”

  When Connie shook her head he clucked and shook a finger at Luciente. “You must take per. How will person learn about us?”

  “Fasure,” Luciente said sourly. “I’m trying! Grasp, political decisions—like whether to raise or lower population—go a different route. We talk locally and then choose a rep to speak our posit on area hookup. Then we all sit in holi simulcast and the rep from each group speaks their village posit. Then we go back into local meeting to fuse our final word. Then the reps argue once more before everybody. Then we vote.”

  “You must spend an awful lot of time in meetings.”

  “Shalom. I get off here,” the old man said. “Make per bring you to Ned’s Point. I’m Rebekah and I live by the east side of the shul.”

  Luciente waved goodbye. “How can people control their lives without spending a lot of time in meetings?”

  “Don’t you get sick of each other?”

  “Staling usually has a reason. But you can always leave, wander awhile, or find a new village.”

  “All right, suppose I don’t want to go to meetings.”

  “Who could force you? People would ask why you no longer care. Friends might suggest you take a retreat or talk to a healer. If your mems felt you’d cut them off, they might ask you to leave. If too many in a village cut off, the neighboring villages send for a team of involvers.”

  “Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín … He got killed. I was young and naïve and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty … . But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us … idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up right back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off.”

  “You lose until you win—that’s a saying those who changed our world left us. Poor people did get together.” Luciente rose and made ready to get out as the dipper settled into the grass. She spoke to her kenner. “Locate Sappho.”

  “Sappho is located in tent near mill,” the kenner said.

  They walked the river path to the south end of the village, where a big tent had been set up. The rain slowed to a fine drizzle and the wind came fresh down the stream. The river was eddying at the turn of the tide, not quite flowing in or out. On a cot under a low roof of canvas, the old woman Sappho lay. She wore deerskin leggings and tunic, large on her and aged, though beautifully decorated with quillwork in soft colors. Gaunter than ever, her face seemed to draw back from the beak of her Indian nose. Her lips were thinned almost away. The skull stood out through the scant hair, pressing the withered skin of her forehead and cheeks. Sappho’s black eyes were dull and Connie was not sure she could see, but still she turned her head from side to side to follow conversations, the heavy head turning wearily on the tiny neck like a seed head on a dried stalk.

  “Sappho, here I am, Luciente, come to be with you. I’ve brought the woman from the past.”

  “Luciente, child of earth
and fire like a good pot. The other I do not know. Leave it.”

  “Does she want me to leave?” Connie whispered.

  “No, no,” Luciente said in her normal loud voice. “Person only wants not to be made to remember who you are.”

  “Has Swallow come? Where is my child?” Her thin voice scratched the ear.

  Squatting near the cot, Jackrabbit spoke to his kenner. Then he answered her. “Bolivar is in a floater forty minutes distant. Person is hurrying, Sappho.”

  “I go with the tide. Swallow should hasten.”

  “Bolivar, hurry up! This is Jackrabbit. Sappho wishes to die soon. Can’t you push yourself?”

  “Ram it, my love, I’m coming faster than I can already!” The male voice sounded irritated. “You tell Sappho to wait. Person has no patience. I’m in heavy turbulence. I’m bucking the wind, and I have to keep climbing. Are you so sick of my sleek body you want me to scatter it all over the Berkshires?”

  “Swallow is always late.” Sappho smiled into the ceiling of the tent. “Swallow believes nothing will happen without per.”

  A young woman with a heart-shaped ivory face and long straight brown hair to her buttocks moved forward suddenly from her position kneeling by the cot. Laying her cheek against Sappho’s scarcely moving chest, she began to weep.

  “Louise-Michel?”

  “No, no, it’s Aspen! Can’t you recognize me?”

  “Aspen? But I remember Louise-Michel and so many I loved … . Aspen, do not weep on me. I want to go out with the waters, quietly.”

  “Don’t die! Wait. If you love me, wait!”

  A flick of temper crossed Sappho’s face. “If you love me, cut off your hair. Yes, I’ll be buried with your hair.”

  Aspen rose and said more composedly, “I’ll go at once and cut it.” She trotted off.

  “Why did you do that, you witch?” Jackrabbit said. “That was mean.”