Woman On The Edge Of Time (13 page)

“And never made it?” She laughed.

“I’m persistent. Maybe I have a will to failure. Orville, here, he cut up his girlfriend. Did you do anything like that, maybe?”

Orville said flatly (probably for the sixtieth time, as she well knew), “I was overworked. I had this job as night watchman and then I was delivering pizzas weekends. I couldn’t cope with it all.”

“Sort of.” She clutched herself. “I smashed a bottle in the face of my niece’s pimp.” She grinned. “I wasn’t overworked. I just hated him.” Such a light feeling, like floating, to say that truthfully and let it hang there; at the same time the floating feeling was a cutting loose because she had been raised and had lived under a code where a woman never did anything like that, let alone speak of such actions.

“As far as I can tell, we all walk and talk,” the boy went on. “We’re functioning crazies. We all broke the law. I hope we aren’t about to get shipped to some maximum security place—not that this place isn’t pretty tight.”

“You got a record?”

“Yeah … possession. But the shrinks wrote up worse things on my record.” He poked her with his bony elbow. “That doctor’s the boss. The other’s just his lackey.”

Middling height, middling weight, brown hair, thick glasses, in his late forties, he exuded an energetic self-importance like a big Harley-Davidson gunning up 111th Street with a Savage Sheik on top. He washed his hands together with a brisk dry
happy sound as he marched by the row of bedraggled patients on green plastic chairs, and in his wake bobbed the pale man, Dr. Morgan, a nurse, a man in student clothing, a woman in a white coat whose hand brushed the student type’s hand super-casually, a male and female attendant, and a secretary, who stood holding a sheaf of records and pages and pages of other, ominous paper. Eventually Dr. Redding, as she heard him called, took various papers and cruised them, nodded and handed them all on to Dr. Morgan. “Fine, fine. Let’s get the show on the road. Morgan, Acker, and I will do the screening, and Patty and Miss Moynihan will sit in. We should zip through this batch before two, because I have to get back to the university to meet one of those foundation johnnies.”

Everyone but the attendants and the nurse bustled after him, as the patients looked at each other and the shut door. One at a time they were called in. The morning passed. No provision had been made for them to get lunch, which was brought in on trays for the staff, so they remained parked in the hall, grumbling, those screened and those not yet processed.

“It’s no different from a regular psychiatric interview,” said a woman in her forties, who also informed them she was a schoolteacher. “I teach auditorium,” she said. That sounded peculiar to Connie, like teaching garage or living room. “The doctors simply ask you the same old questions. They have your records right there, so they know the answers, or they think they do … . Perhaps I’m being reclassified, finally. They’re going to look into our cases.”

At about one, Connie was called in as Skip came out. Clearing her throat with nervousness, she sat in a chair facing them lined up behind a table. Doctors and judges, caseworkers and social workers, probation officers, police, psychiatrists. Her heart bumped, her palms dampened, her throat kept closing over. She could not guess which way to cue her answers. What were they looking for? Would it be better to fall into their net or through it? If only she knew. If only she knew what the net consisted of. She was taking a test in a subject, and she didn’t even know what course it was.

The young doctor who had picked her out of the ward did most of the questioning at first, with the type in the denim pseudo work clothes horning in from time to time. The same
old stuff about Dolly and Geraldo, her daughter, her time with Claud, her drinking, her drug use, her difficulty in getting a job. It was like saying the responses at Mass. When what she said didn’t fit their fixed ideas, they went on as if it did. Resistance, they called that, when you didn’t agree, but this bunch didn’t seem that interested in whether she had a good therapeutic attitude. What were they listening for, inasmuch as they listened at all? How that Dr. Redding stared at her, not like she’d look at a person, but the way she might look at a tree, a painting, a tiger in the zoo.

They were on her brother Joe now. The holy ghost of poor Joe, who had died of a perforated ulcer just after he got out of the pen for a drugstore holdup. Now they were questioning her about the beatings her father had given her as a child. She kept her face frozen, her voice level. Inappropriate affect, they called that—as if to have strangers pawing through the rags of her life like people going through cast-off clothes at a rummage sale was not painful enough to call forth every measure of control she could manage. Her mother, her father, her brother, her lover, her husband, her daughter, all fingered, sized up, dissected, labeled. Still, their white faces looked bored. The denim type, Acker, and Miss Moynihan in the lab coat were exchanging flirtatious glances. They could eat her for dessert and go on to six others and never belch. They were white through and through like Wonder Bread, white and full of holes.

Suddenly Dr. Redding came to life and took over. “Have you ever suffered headaches? pain anywhere in the head region?”

“Headaches?” Now what was this? “The medication does that sometimes,” she said cautiously.

“The medication?”

“The tranquilizers.”

“Other times. Outside the hospital. Haven’t you had headaches outside the hospital, Connie?”

One of those first-name doctors who reduced you to five years old. “Not often.”

“How often?”

She shrugged. What was he getting at? Were they wanting to try out drugs on them? “My back aches. My feet sometimes.
I’ve had female complaints. My eyes, my head never has troubled me much in my life. Knock on wood.”

“How about in connection with some of those incidents we’ve gone over? I notice in the incident where you used violence against your daughter there’s a mention in the record of your feeling unwell.”

“Doctor, I was hung over. Strung out. I was very bad. I’d been drinking for three months.”

“Connie, you’re diagnosing, aren’t you?” He seemed to suspect she was concealing headaches. “Dizziness? Blackouts?”

“Like fainting? No, I never fainted in my whole life.”

“Yet you say you were unconscious the night you were admitted to Bellevue.”

“Geraldo and Slick hit me in the head. Slick knocked me out.”

“Do you remember any blows to the head previously? Before the last accident when you were readmitted to Bellevue?”

“Sure, occasionally.”

“Why don’t you describe those occasions?”

“I don’t remember them all … .” She paused when she saw Dr. Redding making a satisfied note of that. “Eddie, Eddie Ramos, my husband, used to hit me in the head sometimes.”

“That’s the second husband, the one she’s still married to,” Acker, the denim type, said.

“He didn’t sign the commitment. Where is he?” Dr. Redding demanded of Acker.

“Whereabouts unknown, Doctor.”

“I suppose no one has tried too hard to find our pugilist,” Dr. Redding said with a slight smile. “Connie, do you remember your head being x-rayed after any of these incidents with your second husband?”

“No. I never got beat up that bad, to go into the hospital and get x-rays.” They had to be kidding. When she had been with Eddie she had not been on welfare and who would have paid for x-rays and doctors? The only time she had gone in was when she had been bleeding after the abortion, and that had been terrible in its consequences.

“Not that badly,
Connie? … Did he knock you down?”

“Sure.” She had noticed before that white men got off on
descriptions of brown and black women being beaten. “Hay que tratarlas mal,” Eddie would always say.

“Get a set of x-rays on her before we begin the EEG monitoring,” Dr. Redding said to Dr. Morgan. “We’ll go with this one in the initial stages. How many live ones does that give us today?”

“Seven, Doctor,” the secretary chirped.

“That’s all? Let’s get cracking. Okay, Connie. Take her out.” Dr. Redding was already rummaging through the next set of records as she was whisked out and dumped in her chair again.

At two the staff emerged, Dr. Redding looking irritated. “This won’t do. We need more. You’ve got to scan more records. We might even locate some subjects on the chronic wards.”

The first consequences of that interview came within the week, when Connie was told to get herself together for a move. “You got lucky, girl. I put in a good word on you. But I know we be seeing you up here again!” Fargo packed her off Ward L-6 to a more open ward, G-2.

Sybil gave her a sad hopeless look that reminded her of childhood partings from best friends. Connie said, “Try to get off here. Be cagey for a while.”

“I’ll be docile as a plastic cow,” Sybil said without conviction. “After all, I’ll never get out of this place if I don’t start trying, unless I learn to fly. And I have a lot to do this year.”

Ward G-2 was in G building, just as old and sad but in marginally better repair. It was a red brick barracks that stood nearer the medical building, where the doctors had interviewed her. Connie sat on her new cot and looked over the ward, trying to gauge its potentials and threats. The long room with the beds had several windows whose sills were claimed as roosting territory by cliques of women, black women on one window and whites on another. G-2 was a locked ward but a more active one. That big door by the nursing station clattered open to admit occupational therapists, an occasional volunteer, and to let out patients who worked off the ward. Group therapy sessions were held on the ward twice a week. Little cabinets stood beside each of the fifty beds, and at one end of the ward card
tables were set up. Along one side ran a long screened-in porch where patients could walk. They shared a day room with a men’s ward, a dim room with chairs in rows facing a locked TV. It was strange to see men around again.

As she stood in line for medication, she felt like singing out with joy when she saw the little white cups with the pills inside and the cups of water. No more liquid Thorazine burning her throat hoarse. She bit hard on her cheeks to keep her face immobile. This ward meant less snowing. The line moved so slowly she had time to cover her joy, to crush it into a small corner where she could preserve it intact until she had a chance to examine it in safety. Yes, here her head would be clearer. Not today. She was new on the ward and the nurse watched closely as she took the pill. Afterward she walked slowly through the new ward, slowly as inmates always do. She remembered being horrified by that the first time she had been brought here. The drugs caused it, the heavy doping; but also the lack of anyplace to go and the time, the leaden time, to use up.

Sedately she walked through the sleeping room and into the day room. Here she would get the small exercise of walking, but she must be careful not to make it obvious she was pacing. That was an offense that would go in her record: patient paces ward. Here there was more to do but also here would be informers, spies.

She walked onto the porch. It was chilly, but she did not care. She had caught a glimpse of a coat supply in a closet near the nursing station, which meant at least some patients had grounds privileges. She pressed her face to the rusty screen and stared at the trees just leafing out, the benches, the lawns. She would be real cool, real cooperative. How she wanted to walk on that grass below! Her move down to G-2 must prove to be a small step closer to getting out altogether—closer to the big free open daylight out there.

Connie sat on the porch with a towel around her shoulders for warmth. The chilly drizzly June day smelled like a basement under the low gray sky. She was so glad to be outside, even on the porch whose rusted screens gave a sepia wash to the walks and brick buildings, that she did not care if her behind hurt from the chill of the warped floorboards. She felt a keen enjoyment too of being alone for the first time since isolation. No one else had come out in the damp and the cold.

She gloried in breathing outdoor air, in seeing more than four walls, in smelling trees instead of medicine and diarrhea and disinfectant. The gray of the day soothed her. Strong colors would have burned her eyes. Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

She felt Luciente pressing on her clearly for the first time since they had let her out of seclusion: not those brushes of presence that rose and faded but the solid force of concentration bearing around her. She resisted. To sit on the porch was still new, in a convalescent pleasure like the first time out of bed after a long illness. Still, she felt Luciente pressing on her and it was like, oh, refusing to answer the door to a friend who
knew she was at home. How could she think of Luciente as a friend? But she had begun to.

“Me too, in truth,” the voice formed in her mind. “I’ve missed you.”

“Why don’t you take shape? Nobody’s out here but me.”

“Shut your eyes. Let’s go into my space. Today, in my year, the weather is better.”

“Do you control the weather?”

“The sharks did in the 1990s—pass the term. I mean before us. But the results were the usual disasters. It rained for forty days on the Gulf Coast till most of it floated out to sea. Let’s see, the jet stream was forced south from Canada. They close to brought on an ice age. There was five years’ drought in Australia. Plagues of insects … Open your eyes.”

They were standing in Luciente’s hut in sun streaming through the south window, which was open and covered with a fine-mesh screen. “You must still have mosquitoes!”

“They’re part of the food chain. We bred out the irritant … . About weather, when it gets disastrous, sometimes we adjust a little. But every region must agree. When a region is plagued by drought, grasp, we usually prefer to deliver food than to approve a weather shift. Because of the danger. We’re cautious about gross experiments. ‘In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.’ First rule we learn when we study living beings in relation … . You’re looking thin!” Luciente reproved her, leaning close.