Woman On The Edge Of Time (20 page)

“Inknowing,” the child said wonderingly. “Do you call it different where you come from?”

She turned to Magdalena, who said, “In your day some of it was called yoga, some meditating, some biofeedback, and some had no name at all.”

“We aren’t mad to control,” Luciente said, “but we want to prevent overreacting—heart attacks, indigestion, panic. We want to get used to knowing exactly what we feel, so we don’t shove on other people what’s coming from inside.”

“We want to teach inknowing and outknowing.” Magdalena gestured apology and swept the women gently back into the hall, shutting the door. “To feel with other beings. To catch, where the ability exists—instance, so strongly in you. We teach sharpening of the senses. Coning, going down, how to reach nevel, how to slow at will.”

“What is all that stuff?”

“States of consciousness. Types of feeling.”

“How can you teach somebody to feel? From a book you can learn the multiplication tables. But how can you teach love?”

“But every mother always has. Or failed to.” Seeing something in Connie’s face, Magdalena went on quickly. “We educate the senses, the imagination, the social being, the muscles, the nervous system, the intuition, the sense of beauty—as well as memory and intellect. Anyhow, we try!” She laughed again, that laugh that picked immediately at Luciente and made her grin too. “People here in our bony skulls”—lightly Magdalena rapped on Connie’s forehead—“how easy to feel isolate. We want to root that forebrain back into a net of connecting.” She turned back to Luciente, smiling broadly. “Here comes Jackrabbit with Dawn. By the road, your child grows better and better at the arts of defense. You’ll be feathered when you see the next demo!”

Long-limbed rangy Jackrabbit came loping through an archway, making high neighing sounds. A brown-skinned girl with dark braids clung to his neck, laughing with a wide-open mouth that showed her small teeth. Avid teeth flashed. Arms hung on tight She clung to his neck and laughed and laughed and kicked his ribs with her bare feet. She was about seven, wearing a
lavender summer tunic, and she had a scab on her small round, her heavily tanned, her kissable knee. How she laughed, like dry bells, like bells partly muffled, how she laughed: her golden-brown eyes met Connie’s. Connie’s heart turned in her chest. Her heart sharpened into a dagger and stopped.

“Angelina!” she cried out, and her voice burst from her like a bubble of blood from her mouth. Then she was back in the isolation cell, flat against one wall as if she had been thrown there. She held both hands against her striving chest.

Angelina! Or any brown-skinned girl child of seven or so with golden-brown eyes. How did she know what Angelina would look like after three years? She wouldn’t be barefoot in Scarsdale.

Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to Angelina hidden forever one hundred fifty years into the future, even if she should never see her again. For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena. Yes, you can have my child, you can keep my child. Even with your obscenities and your talking cats. She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than I. I assent, I give you my battered body as recompense and my rotten heart. Take her, keep her! I want to believe she is mine. I give her to Luciente to mother, with gladness I give her. She will never be broken as I was. She will be strange, but she will be glad and strong and she will not be afraid. She will have enough. She will have pride. She will love her own brown skin and be loved for her strength and her good work. She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman and live in love like a garden, like that children’s house of many colors. People of the rainbow with its end fixed in earth, I give her to you!

That Monday one of Dr. Redding’s attendants, a stooped, paunchy man with burst capillaries in his nose that marked an alcoholic, came to fetch Connie. As the nurse shuffled the papers to sign her out to the attendant, she could feel the palpable envy around her. It did not matter what she was going to: she was going off ward. Nurse Wright started to grab a coat for her but the attendant said, “Don’t bother. It’s raining cats and dogs. I’ll taken ’em through the tunnel.”

Nurse Wright pursed her lips. “You’d better take a coat anyhow. Somebody else might have to bring the patient back.”

The coat was so long it hung to her midcalves and the sleeves concealed her hands, but she knew better than to complain. She plodded after the attendant, folding the sleeves back so that she could use her hands on the two surviving buttons.

All the old buildings were joined by tunnels through which equipment, supplies, and sometimes patients were shipped back and forth. Occasionally patients with grounds privileges hung out in the tunnels smoking, talking, flirting, finding a dark place to sleep. No one on staff with a rank above attendant ever seemed to use them.

“Hi, Mack, Tomo. How ya doing?” Her attendant stopped to greet two men wheeling a covered cart.

“Hokay, hokay,” the short one said briskly. “How goes with you?”

“Hi, Fats. Man, this place is creepy today,” the younger said. “If it keeps on raining like this, the whole damn place is going to grow two inches of mold.”

“I hate it when it rains every day,” Fats said. “Hey, you got something nice this week?”

“Everything, man. Red devils, yellowjackets, rainbows. Genuine Nepalese hash. The stiffest coke you ever snorted. You don’t go for ups—how about sopors? You dig on them, don’t you, Fats? Real mellow.”

The man with the accent blinked at them with faint contempt and began reading what looked like a sports magazine in Japanese, pulled from his pocket under the white coat. As they bargained, she stood in her huge coat, waiting. The mad are invisible. Neither had any fear she could damage them. Indeed, if she cared to try, she would only hurt herself. Revenge came easily to staff.

“What’s under the tablecloth?” Fats poked the bundle on the cart.

“Old geezer from chronic service.” Mack cast back the sheet. Sharp gaunt face of an old woman. Her dark flinty eyes in death stared straight up with a look of rage. Mack flipped the sheet over her again but it caught on her hooked nose. He had to free it. “Kicked off last night. Got to truck it down to the meat department.”

“Don’t know why the doctors want to cut up every crazy that checks out. When you seen one you seen them all.”

“They got to put something on the death certificate.”

“Heart stopped.” Fats punched Mack in the arm. “That’s the ticket.”

“See you around, man.” Mack started pushing the cart and Tomo hastened to take his position, although the cart was obviously light enough for one to handle.

The last time she had been summoned, they had given her the most thorough physical of her life, and as a side effect treated her old burn and sent her to the dentist for work on her battered teeth. As she was thrust in, she looked at the patients lined up on the chairs as usual: the graceful West Indian, Captain Cream; the tiny black woman, Miss Green; Orville; Alvin, who was white, forty-two, and perhaps the closest of those she had met in the hall here to being really mad; Mrs. Ortiz, a thin bouncy Puerto Rican woman, who winked at her; and Skip, who had saved her a place beside him.

“What’s coming down today?” she asked him.

“What they fondly call a battery of tests. Rorschachs, draw-a-person, sentence completion, WAIS, Wechsler Memory Scale, MMPI—”

She clutched her shoulders. “What do they do to us? Does it hurt?”

“Only when you laugh … I don’t believe it! I’ve been tested since I was eleven. You’ve never had these mothers play with you?”

She shook her head no. “What will happen?”

“Oh, like they ask you would you rather fly a plane or play with dolls. Follow the stereotypes. But why should I have to pretend I’d rather watch a football game than a ballet not to be labeled queer? The first man I ever had sex with was an attendant at Wynmont—that’s a private buzz farm they sent me to when I was thirteen.”

“So young. Why did they do that?”

“My parents thought I didn’t work right, so they sent me to be fixed. You know, you send the riding mower back to the factory to be fixed if you get a lemon. Why not a son?”

“Did you figure out yet what this whole thing is?”

“Some research project, with us as the guinea pigs. But I’m on the case. I’ll break their game soon. Fats is queer on me.”

“That Dr. Redding—I don’t like him. He feels so above us. He’s not even scared of us the way some are—scared of catching what we got. It never occurs to him he might crack.”

“Not Morgan, though. If you stare at him a long time, he starts fidgeting. You can get into staring contests with him, and he gets so he wants to win! But Redding, yeah, he’s too cool. He looks through us to something on the other side he’s aiming at.”

A woman was dumped beside her, a tall lean satin black woman with her hair in a big wild Afro.

“I guess we’re the final winners of their screening,” Connie said to her. “I saw you when they were x-raying us, but we never met. I’m Connie Ramos.”

“Alice Blue Bottom, honey. You Puerto Rican?”

“No, Chicana. I was born in Texas.”

“No lie? You don’t sound like it. Me, I got myself born in Biloxi, Mississippi. You ever been there?”

She shook her head, “I grew up in Chicago from when I was seven.”

“You know what, girl? I put in five years on the South Side of Chicago working as a cocktail waitress in the Kit-Kat Club. Left and come to Harlem with a man I stupid to cross the street with.”

“I came to New York to get away from a man I was scared of.”

“Better reason than mine, sugar, though I never been scared of a man in my whole life. I eat them for breakfast two at a time. Why you scared of him?”

“He … forced me. He took my pay check off of me and said he’d give me a little. He bribed the super to let him in my flat—or he just pulled a knife on him, who knows? When I got home from work—I was working in an office then, I had a good job as a secretary to a real estate man, Chicano—he was in my flat.”

“No man ever lay a finger on me I didn’t ask for, cause I tote a shiv, and I know how to use it. I carve up more men than you count on your both hands, didn’t treat me right. You take shit and you is shit, girl. A man good to me, then I good to him. Everybody know that about Alice Blue Bottom.”

“How come you call yourself Alice Blue Bottom?” Skip asked, smiling from under his long lashes.

“Long skinny white boy, don’t you wish you know that?” She tided back her tower of a neck and laughed, with her breasts freely jiggling against the red dress. She had her own clothing, for sure. Some attendant had made her sew up the front a couple of inches with the wrong color thread, but the dress was still shorter and fit better than anything else around. “Cause I’m so black, I’m blue—maybe. No way you gonna find out.”

“That’s Skip,” Connie said. “Do you know anything about this project they’re using us for?”

“Papermaking. That’s all. That’s all they ever doing. You know time you be sitting in that jiveassed group therapy, those doctors thinking how they going to write it all up. How they going to tell it on the mountain at they next staff session. Bullshit!”

Alice’s name was called and she strolled after the nurse,
swinging her broad, high ass across the waiting room. An attendant brought Sybil out of the office, and Connie half rose. Sybil saw her at once and their eyes exchanged messages of hope. Fats placed Sybil in a chair far down the line. As soon as Fats turned his back, Sybil hopped up and quietly slid into the seat Alice had just left.

“Sybil, it’s good to see you! I heard they were shocking you?”

Sybil raised an elegant bony hand to her forehead. “I have dreadful headaches. I have trouble remembering words, the names of objects. Yesterday I could not think what one calls the wood around a door! I nearly wept with rage … . What ward are you on?”

“G-2. Not so bad. Are you still on L-6?”

“No, D-5. I wish we were on the same ward. Do you have grounds privileges?”

“Not yet. I’m trying.”

“Hey, you.” Fats marched over to Sybil. “I put you down at the end. Don’t go sneaking away on me.”

“We know each other,” Connie pleaded. Her voice fawned. “We were just talking. Isn’t it good for us to relate?”

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” Fats said. “You’re all violent or you wouldn’t be here. You do what I say and we’ll get along. Otherwise you’ll be eating dirt.” He marched Sybil down to the chair where he had parked her.

“Are you lovers with each other?” Skip asked her softly.

“No, we’re real good friends. I know her from last time in.” She did not mind his asking, really. Better than thinking it and never asking.

“They almost didn’t include her. I think Dr. Morgan’s scared of big women. But Dr. Redding rode right over him. Said he can handle any of us like day-old kittens. That’s what he said, that dear man.”

“Ummmm.” She smiled. “I bet he’s never seen Sybil when she’s fighting mad. It takes two attendants to hold her down.”

“I’d like to fantasize about that. But all I seem to hurt is myself.”

“Me too. Except for what got me in here … Listen, Skip, if you entirely hated yourself, you’d be dead by now, right? So part of you does love you.”

He giggled wildly. “What a valentine. Part of me loves me. Signed, some love, Skip.” He unfolded to his feet as Fats came for him.

The next day rain still blew in gusts across the grounds and the porch was too wet to sit on. Sleepy with medication, she went into the day room. Sharma was standing in front of the set, frowning.

“What’s wrong?” she asked Sharma as she shuffled past.

“God damn it,” Sharma said. Something she wouldn’t have said if the attendants had been in earshot Patients were punished for unladylike behavior. “I like this soap opera, ‘Perilous Light.’ I always watch it at home. Anyhow, at one-thirty I went to ask Richard to unlock the set and turn it to channel five. I waited for half an hour while they yakked. Then they finally let Lois out to her job and they got out the mop—they even lock up the mop!—for Glenda to use. Then Mrs. Stein had a question about her meds. She said the doctor changed it They argued with her for ten minutes. Finally they looked it up. They shuffled papers for ten more minutes. Finally they agreed the doctor signed a change. Then they beat that around for a while. By the time I got Richard to put on channel five, it’s the end of the serial anyhow. There’s this other woman who’s after Maggie’s husband, I want to see what’s happening. It’s like my husband—women are always after him.”