Woman On The Edge Of Time (27 page)

“This helped.” She sat up on an elbow. “But … how can I still be here without Luciente?”

“Luciente is helping.”

“Helping us … ?”

His knuckles gently trailed along her cheek. “How not? How else could we be together?”

She sat up straight and clutched the cover around herself. “Aware of us … in bed?”

“Pepper and Salt, don’t be silly. We all care for you. But you’re of a society with many taboos. It’s easier for me to hold you for all of us.”

“You’ll tell me next you planned this.”

“No, no.” Bee chuckled, caressing her shoulder. “But we commune running well with each other.”

“She … you … were giving me back Claud for a night.”

“I’m not Claud. Maybe I look like Claud did. Maybe I move
like per. You feel so.” His voice rumbled. “Maybe I am potentialities in per that could not flourish in your time. But I am also me, Bee, friend of Luciente, friend of yours.”

She touched his chest lightly. “For sure. However you do it, whatever it means, it was fine enough. You know.”

In the morning she felt groggy and hung over when the Muzak came over the PA system with the male voice saying that it was time for patients to get up. As she stood in line for the showers, sensual memories played over her thighs, her belly. His hands upon her, his mouth, the weight and heft of him, the sleekness of his beautiful skin. Joy cut through the scum of the morning. She felt sleepy, fatigue whined in her skull, but she did not mind. The day for once beckoned. The day had a shape full of hope, the afternoon like a hill with a fine view that she would slowly climb.

It was not impatience she felt as she stood in line for the usual breakfast slop, wan oatmeal and the rationed cup of bitter coffee more precious than dope. All the day stretched toward Dolly’s arrival, but to yearn was to be full. She kept the memory of the evening too rich yet to squander, a candy she could suck and suck during the week and not use up.

Could she tell Dolly about Bee? She could refer to him as if he were a patient she was flirting with. What would Dolly’s new man be like? She must get on a better footing with him than she had with Geraldo. Yet from the letter he was her pimp. How could she like a pimp? Parasites of women’s sweat. Body lice. Why was Dolly still on the streets? Debts, money, her daughter Nita to feed.

No reproaches! May love flow: Luciente waved her calloused hand. Connie combed and combed her wiry hair. That ugly white parting. How drab she looked, how ashen her skin seemed. Dolly, so young and plump and juicy, how could she help wanting to turn away when she saw her aunt? Madwoman with skunk hair wrapped in a faded dress sizes too big, shuffling to meet them like something that crawled out of the wall.

Mrs. Yoshiko, the weekend attendant, brought her a bright red lipstick, Mrs. Yoshiko, exactly her height, laughed and stuck some pins in her hair so that it looked different and a little better. “Good now.” She spoke little English but she smiled
sometimes and sometimes she looked at them when they spoke.

After lunch she sat at a card table playing gin rummy with Mrs. Stein and losing lots of little white chips torn out of a magazine they used for money. She waited. One o’clock! Visiting hours began. No one for her.

Of course she could hardly expect Dolly to arrive at one! It took two hours to get here from New York. Longer in heavy traffic. A summer Sunday, say three hours. If there was a traffic jam, three and a half! She could not begin expecting until … let’s see: suppose Dolly got up at ten. Ten-thirty if she worked last night. Say eleven. Wouldn’t get out of the house until noon. Her boyfriend was picking her up. Say twelve-thirty. So they might not arrive until almost four. She would begin allowing herself to expect Dolly at three-thirty.

Yet every time the phone rang in the nurses’ station, every time the door lock clacked over, she froze, the cards blurred. She hoped and waited and watched the other visitors come and go. The afternoon bled away. She could not play cards anymore. She paced as slowly as she could force herself to, through the dormitory to the day room, back and forth across the porch. Every time the phone rang or the door clacked over, she rushed back to the nursing station to stand about awkwardly, waiting, hoping.

At five it was all over. The last visitor was shooed out. Dolly had not come.

Monday arrived with a thud. Skip turned out to be right and she was carted off to a new ward, set up like a regular hospital ward in the medical building. A plywood partition divided the women from the men, with a door at the moment open. The outer doors on the ward were locked. It had fewer amenities than G-2: no porch, no separate day room with TV. Fats was still with them, but the woman attendant didn’t seem to know where anything was on the hospital grounds and complained loudly she had to get up at five-thirty to come out here. Mrs. Valente was a big woman with something wrong with her tongue or palate that gave her speech a muffled, battered quality.

Sybil was here already, her long legs drawn up cross-legged as she camped on her bed waiting to see what was going to happen. Sybil had thrown a bathrobe over the next cot to save it for her, and she grabbed it gratefully. Near the nurses’ station a bed had its sides up. In it a black woman lay with a great white helmet of bandages on her head and a gadget perched on top of the bandage like a metal beanie.

“That’s Alice Blue Bottom,” Sybil hissed. “Look what they’ve done to her!”

“What is it? Did she have an accident?”

“I don’t think so. Doesn’t that look bizarre?”

Connie peered down the ward. “Are you sure it’s her?”

“I read the name on the chart at the foot of her bed, Consuelo.”

“Is she unconscious?” She noticed a machine up on legs beside the bed.

“No. She made a face at me when I came in, which is why I read the name on her chart. I was embarrassed not to recognize her, so I said, Hello, and she said, Look what they have done to me! She did not put it exactly that way, but that was the gist of her earthy expressions.”

“What did she say they did?”

“Valente hustled me past before I could ask any questions.”

“It looks like they busted her head. Maybe she tried to get away.” Connie stared at the tall barred windows.

“Is Valente so crude she’d leave visible damage? A sock with a soap in it, that’s what the attendant used to use on me.”

Skip came to the doorway. “Hsssst! Connie!”

“Skip, I can’t pay you back yet. My niece didn’t come Sunday. But she’s coming next weekend,” she said quickly.

“They brought me down Friday. Alice was already in bed, bandaged up. She told me they took her by ambulance to the city, where they operated on her, and then they brought her back!”

“Hey, did they beat up on her?”

Skip shook his head. “They did a kind of operation. They stuck needles in her brain.”

“Are you kidding?” Maybe Skip was crazy. Nevertheless she felt weak with fear. “What kind of needles? She could talk to Sybil.”

“She certainly did,” Sybil said haughtily. “She was in better shape than if she’d had shock.”

“You don’t believe me, but you’ll see!” With broken-winged dignity, Skip shambled back to the men’s side.

“Needles in the brain …” It sounded like a crazy fantasy—like Sybil’s microwave ovens that burned out magic. Glenda insisted that electroshock was a dentist’s drill. Maybe they had given Alice a shot in the head, a new drug injected directly in the brain? That too was crazy. Those new drugs they tried out made your kidneys turn to rock or caused your tongue to swell black in your mouth or your skin to crust in patches or your hair to fall in loose handfuls, like stuffing from an old couch. Perhaps a drug injected right in the brain could turn you into a zombie as quick as too much shock.

This ward was peculiar, because it was like a hospital ward. The mental hospital had always seemed like a bad joke;
nothing got healed here. The first time in she had longed for what they called health. She had kept hoping that someone was going to help her. She had remained sure that somewhere in what they called a hospital was someone who cared, someone with answers, someone who would tell her what was wrong with her and mold her a better life. But the pressure was to say please and put on lipstick and sit at a table playing cards, to obey and work for nothing, cleaning the houses of the staff. To look away from graft and abuse. To keep quiet as you watched them beat other patients. To pretend that the rape in the linen room was a patient’s fantasy.

But this was a real hospital, even if an ancient one. There were fifteen women on her side of the ward. Her bed was a hospital bed that went up and down, more comfortable than anything she had slept in for years, since she had been the mistress-secretary-errand girl-servant-housekeeper to Professor Silvester. Feeling like an old hand, she smiled at Sybil as they began figuring how they would make do here, the space that might exist, the fringe benefits that could be squeezed.

Tuesday morning she was confined to her bed, as if she were sick. The doctors were to come in the morning. Monday afternoon they had been sent through a whole battery of tests—blood, urine, reflexes, all fussed over by Dr. Morgan. Redding had not been there. He taught someplace. He was connected with something called NYNPI. He was an important man. She was beginning to feel that his actual appearance was ominous. Better when he was being busy elsewhere. On others. There were others. Patients in the hospital in the city. Unsatisfactory in some way. Outpatients slipped away. They could not be depended upon. Their families butted in. They, tucked now in beds in their rows, were to be in some way more satisfactory.

She dozed in her bed, groggy on drugs. Casually in the early morning ward she cast an invitation to Luciente. She felt shy, embarrassed. Tentatively she opened her mind and sensed Luciente’s response. How easy it had become to slip over to Mattapoisett. She did not return exhausted. As if her mind had developed muscles, she could easily draw Luciente, she could leap in and out of Luciente’s time.

Luciente’s family—Bee with his head tilted back beaming at her, the old woman Sojourner on his left, Barbarossa, Otter in long braids looking Chinese, the slight blond man Morningstar bent over Dawn, Jackrabbit staring at one of the decorated panels with a dreamy frown, Hawk thoughtfully picking her nose, Luxembourg about to say something and visibly remembering she was no longer Hawk’s mother and still on the silence taboo—were seated around a table in the fooder, breakfasting on whole grains, nuts, sunflower seeds, blueberries, yogurt. The milk tasted full of flavor, like milk from her grandmother’s. The teacher said raw milk made you sick; grandmother said it made you strong. Herb tea in large pots steamed.

“You don’t have coffee?”

“To start meetings. In the middle if they run long. Same with tea.” Luciente yawned. “When we get up running early, to harvest.”

“But you don’t drink it every day?”

Bee shifted as if he might respond, but Barbarossa was ready with an answer. “Coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, they all took land needed to feed local people who were starving. Now some land is used for world luxuries, but most for necessary crops. Imagine the plantation system, people starving while big fincas owned by foreigners grew for wealthy countries as cash crops a liquid without food value, bad for kidneys, hearts, if drunk in excess.”

“I couldn’t face the day without coffee! That’s the worst thing I’ve heard about your way of living.”

Everyone looked glum and even Jackrabbit stopped staring at the offending panel. Five people started at once talking about protein and underdevelopment and the creation of hunger, when Dawn piped up, “People, listen! I have a dream this morning.”

Other conversation stopped. She preened in the attention, making her face serious. Morningstar’s head bobbed over her like a pale sun. “I dreamed I flew into the past. I flew to that river and kept that nuclear power plant from killing everybody in Philadelphia.”

“This was a waking dream or a sleeping dream?” Otter gave her a skeptical smile, arching her brows.

“Well, I was kind of asleep.”

“There’s nothing wrong with waking dreams,” Sojourner said in a reedy voice. “To want to save lives is a good desire.”

“Everyone has been making too much fuss about connecting with the past.” Luciente exchanged a wry look with Otter. “I myself am guilty.” They both smiled.

“Magdalena says it’s important,” Dawn insisted. “Says we may wink out!”

Bee—whose gaze Connie had carefully not met—rumbled from deep in his chest, “To plant beans correctly is important. To smoke fish so it doesn’t rot. To store food in vacuum. To fight well, as you did Saturday. To make good decisions in meeting. To be kind to each other.”

“But some things are more important!” Dawn stuck out her soft chin. “I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past to make it come out right.”

“Nobody can
make
things come out right,” Hawk said, her straight nose wrinkled in disgust. “Pass the honey.”

“No one is helpless. No one controls.” Sojourner had a flattened leathery face and eyes that twinkled with a lively pleasure.
“We
can’t make things come out in the past. We can only speak to those who listen.” She winked at Connie.

“Are there many of us?” Connie asked. “Many who come here?”

“Mmmm … what?” Luciente was yawning again. “Who come? Only five so far. It’s odd.” Luciente’s hand made boxes in the air. “Most we’ve reached are females, and many of those in mental hospitals and prisons. We find people whose minds open for an instant, but at the first real contact, they shrink in terror.”

“Why are you contacting us? You said I’d understand but I forgot to think about it. It’s kind of a vacation from the hospital.”

A surge of discomfort passed around the table. “It’s hard to explain,” Bee said, frowning. “Nobody’s supposed to discuss advances in science with you. It might be dangerous—for you, for us. Your scientists were so … childish? Carefully brought up through a course of study entered on early never to ask consequences, never to consider a broad range of effects, never to ask on whose behalf …”