Woman On The Edge Of Time (12 page)

“How long you been in this time? Do you know?” she asked.

“I just arrived. I was hexing a judge.” Sybil held up her bony elegant hands with white marks for the rings she wore, which they always took from her over her roaring protests. “They take them because they sense how potent my rings are. They’re in a microwave oven, being bombarded with rays to destroy the power in them. When I recover them, it takes me weeks to
restore their strength.” Gently Sybil touched a lock of Connie’s hair. “Did you just get here?”

She smiled at Sybil and began to tell her the story. “This time I did nothing I’m ashamed for—though like you hexing judges, maybe it wasn’t so smart for me to fight.” Her telling took them through the supper lines and the supper of what Sybil pronounced Toad Stew, through the evening medication line and the blank space of time until lights out.

“Tomorrow is your turn to bring me up to date.”

“Oh, that will take at least a week,” Sybil promised.

Sybil was her best woman friend except for Dolly, who was blood, but because she lived in Albany they never managed to see each other outside the hospital. Oh, Sybil was crazy, but Connie had no trouble talking to her. Sybil
was
persecuted for being a practicing witch, for telling women how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands, for being lean and crazily elegant and five feet ten in her bare long high-arched feet, for having a loud, penetrating voice and a back that would not stoop and a temper that stood up in her, lashing the tail of a lioness. Sybil did not hesitate to take to her fists against anyone, so she had a scar across her high-domed forehead coming down to take a white bite of her left eyebrow. Sybil had lost a front tooth and she had a little bald spot she could find when she wanted to show Connie where her hair had been pulled out by an attendant, the time before the time before last when she had been forcibly committed.

Why did she like Sybil so much? Her heart warmed when she saw Sybil’s long body writhing in fury. Sybil had high carved cheekbones and a square jaw, a haughty nose and eyes of a smoky umber. On the outside she wore outrageous makeup and ringed her eyes with black, but inside they would not let her near her precious kohl. Mainly, Sybil was a fighter and she fought those who threatened her, instead of hating her own self. She didn’t deny herself, she had not sold herself to any man. Connie adored the way she fought and wouldn’t give up or go under and wouldn’t be broken—not yet. All she could give anyone in here was to have survived this far, this long.

They talked passionately, sitting side by side against a wall, sometimes interrupting the flow by half an hour or an hour, sometimes muttering out of the sides of their mouths as if they
were kids talking in school. Too much animation, too obvious a pleasure in each other’s company would bring down punishment. The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.

“Who wants to be a hole?” Sybil asked her. “Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against? As for sex, it reminded me of going to the dentist the only time I indulged. Now, when you look at it clearly from the outside, Consuelo, with some measure of detachment, you see how perfectly futile”—few-tile, she pronounced it, loving vowel sounds—“futile it all appears, and how sordid besides.”

“But people do it ail the time, Sybil.” She was grinning. “Must be something in it, no?”

“Consuelo!” Sybil pronounced her name carefully and with a reasonable effort at the Spanish. “People play rummy and hearts and we both know how tedious those pastimes are. People put together jigsaw puzzles too. The attendants like it if you work jigsaw puzzles; they think that’s relating to reality, the poor boobs. Everybody who is presently touching”—their word for the state when inmates were responsive to things outside them—“has read every word of that newspaper under you. I know you have too, even the sports pages, although you can’t tell tennis from football!”

“It’s true, when a person is bored they … want to go to bed more. It’s like the jokes about the long winter night of the Eskimo. When you have nothing to do, you, yourself, are your own plaything. Look at all the … fooling around that goes on here.”

“I think we’re taught we want sex when we feel unhappy or lacking something. But often what we want is something higher.”

“For me, sex has more power than that,” Connie said a little sadly. “But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.”

“People talk too much about sex,” Mrs. Perlmutter said, her hand inside her hospital-issue dress, feeling her own breast.

At odd moments, the better days, the mental hospital reminded her of being in college those almost two years she had had before she got knocked up. The similarity lay in the
serious conversations, the leisure to argue about God and Sex and the State and the Good. Except for college students, who else in the world was sitting around talking philosophy? Outside, whole days of her life would leak by and she wouldn’t have one good thoughtful conversation. Sybil was a smart person, not street smart like Claud but thoughtful about the way things were and the way they might be. Outside, who talked to her?

On Ward L-6 every day smelled the same, looked the same, sounded the same. Patients rotated through their private cycles of night and day, touching and withdrawing, snowed by the heavy drugs. She was no longer Fargo’s favorite, because she spent too much time with Sybil. Today was Friday, a dangerous day, a day of doors opening and shutting.

A doctor came onto Ward L-6, a youngish doctor with pale hair and bloodshot pale blue eyes. He arrived two hours after the time when the doctor raced through, speaking only to the nurse and attendants, while patients touching that day chased after him pleading for attention, changes in medication, furloughs, privileges, a change of ward. Calling them bird dogs, the attendants ran interference. This pale doctor was showing Fargo some papers and Fargo and the nurse were going over the patient’s ward records with him, all those comments written on each of them that could get her sent to shock or raised a niche or two nearer the gates.

Even the patients not talking, not supposed to be in touch, knew something was up. Excitement rose like a hot dry wind and the women began chirping. Mrs. Martínez crawled into a corner and pushed her face against the wall. Joan began talking in what the staff called a word salad about her mother and God and the FBI. “They come and come and come again. Scrape it off the ceiling. Bad girl. Bad! Eat it for breakfast. Knock, knock, who’s there. Across it up and cross it off. A double cross. Come in and come out. All over, ugh, dirty. Dirty girl. Knock, knock. It’s a dirty bird. The pigeon did it. Bad, bad, ate it again! All comes out. Knock knock knock. Hot cross buns. Bang you again. Bang on the bum. Hot, hurt. Bad again!
Bad!”
Her voice rose high in a shriek of fury but her expression did not change.

From the side of her mouth Sybil asked, “What do you suppose the young inquisitor searches for? Are they hunting witches with needles today?”

Indeed, both the doctor and Fargo looked straight at them and they shut up. Connie turned away, but when she cautiously glanced at the station again, the two of them were still under surveillance. Had they been acting too intimate? Fargo jogged over and hoisted Sybil by an arm. Sybil tried to whip her arm free, but Fargo expertly pinned her. When Sybil got mad she could hold her off easily till she was hypoed, but she was more curious than angry. She drew herself up to eye the doctor along her narrow nose, making him instantly aware that she had two inches on him. “Do you enjoy visiting the zoo? Do you want to be a veterinarian when you grow up?” she cooed.

“She’s on the large side,” the doctor said. “I don’t think she’ll do.”

Fargo dropped Sybil neatly, knocking her legs out from under her, and hauled up Connie instead. “This one been acting okay. She help some. She trying to cope. But she hang out with that big-mouth.”

“Any outbreaks lately?”

“Not since she got on my ward. She was pretty wild when she arrive, but we straighten her out.”

The doctor turned away and Fargo let go of Connie. Weak through and through, she felt as if her bones had turned to wet rope. Her knees crumpled and she sat abruptly beside Sybil. She started to speak to Sybil, but Sybil shushed her and crept closer to the glassed-in station where the doctor and Fargo were once again looking over the ward book. Sybil was trying to lip-read through the glass. Finally they emerged and the outer door was unlocked with the usual clatter.

“All right, clean that one up Monday morning and bring her down for Dr. Redding … . Oh, she speaks English? I mean reasonably?”

“Sure, no problem, Dr. Morgan. Wouldn’t I tell you right off if she couldn’t talk?”

“Righto. Clean her up and trot her down early Monday.”

Sybil and she looked at each other in the ward boiling with tension. Sybil whispered, “All I could make out was that doctor
he mentioned—I never heard of him before—Dr. Redding this, Dr. Redding that. And the phrase ‘possible subject.’”

“Oh! Oh!” Joan muttered. She got off her bed and darted over to peer into Connie’s face. “Knock, knock! Watch out!” Joan fled back to her bed and pantomimed the locking routine she seemed to hope would protect her.

“What do you think they’re going to do to me Monday?”

Sybil shook her head, frowning. “They like you because you’re small. They expect to push you around easily.”

She was scared but alert. Maybe it was a new kind of therapy? Usually they didn’t pull patients out of L-6 for group therapy, the only kind in the hospital. If it was shock, they wouldn’t make such a fuss. Maybe they were testing drugs, as they had on Claud. Claud’s friend Otis said they had given hepatitis, the dirty disease that had killed Claud, to a whole lot of little kids in Willowbrook, a state institution. Some doctor had injected little kids who hadn’t done anything wrong except to be born dim witted, and got a big reward for it. What would they do to her?

Monday morning she was taken from Ward L-6 halfway across the grounds to the hospital building itself—the real hospital in the mental hospital. Normally it was a sleepy, understaffed building, but one floor seemed to have undergone changes. She got only a glimpse of maybe twenty other patients, men and women, waiting on chairs in the hall, before Fargo dragged her off. “Behave yourself now. I want to use the staff john. Now you keep quiet and don’t mess around.” Fargo installed her by the clean white sinks with liquid soap in a container that worked. Enviously she approached. Fargo was pissing. Over the liquid soap container with its yellow-green ooze, she saw a drab, funny-looking woman in the mirror. Quickly she looked away. Outside, no day passed without her seeing herself in mirrors, in shopwindows, everywhere reflected. The battered tin mirror in the bathroom on L-6 gave up only ripples of distortion.

Her hair looked disgusting: not only uncombed, straggly, dirty, but with white roots grown out along her part. Her hair had turned white down the center like a skunk as soon as she had passed thirty. Dolly gave her money for hair dye, which
she hid as carefully from her caseworker as a stash of dope. It was her secret vice, dyeing her hair, but also it was a small act of self-affirmation. As long as her will kept her hair black as it had always been, as it should be, she was some part Consuelo who had won the scholarship to junior college, who had had the guts to depart Chicago for a strange city to get away from a rapist, who had broken Geraldo’s nose—yes, she was proud of that. Her definition of Connie included black hair.

Well, at least she was no longer overweight, but she was flabby. At home she had the exercise of running up and down four flights of stairs ten times a day, every time she needed something from the superette or the candy store, every time she checked the mail, took out garbage, got a pack of cigarettes, mailed a letter, went down to welfare, went out to those scrubwoman jobs welfare made her do. She carried her groceries, her laundry, her garbage. She walked many blocks. Here her only exercise was being herded to and from the showers.

Small particles of dead skin gave her flesh an ashy look. If only she had a brush, she could disentangle her hair, brush out the mats and clumps. Ah, she looked like a bundle of institutional laundry!

Fargo hauled her along. The young doctor was bustling around the hall, followed by a secretary and more attendants. Fargo turned her over to one of the new attendants, a fat red-faced man, who inserted her into a row of green plastic chairs where the men and women had been placed to wait. As each new arrival was checked in, all the waiting patients stared in hope that something about the newcomer would make clear their mutual situation.

“Do you know what we’re in for? What they’re going to do to us?” she whispered to a young man in the next chair.

“I don’t know.” He was white, skinny, long-legged and tall, with abundant kinky brown hair. “They came on my ward last week and they looked over five of us. That blond doctor and attendant. They only took him and me.” He pointed to a short black man beside him.

“They didn’t say what for?”

“Some kind of testing, we heard … . It looks to me like that room at the end of the hall is fixed up as a lab. Past the offices.”

“A lab? What kind of experiments could they do on us?”

He shrugged, “Man, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you bet it will hurt.” He sighed, combing back his nervous hands through his long, tangled hair. “My name’s Skip. This is Orville … . You don’t have any weed, do you? By some miracle? I can buy.”

“I’m Connie. I wish I did. Last time I was in, it was all over the place.”

“Some buildings it’s around, some it isn’t. In some you can get anything … . Not ours. God, can you imagine the incredible acts of brutality we might commit if we had a little dope? Monsters like us. You been in before, huh?” He waited for her nod. “Me too. Seven times in various spitals. One for each consecutive time I tried to off myself. Actually that was only five times.”