Woman On The Edge Of Time (3 page)

“Those OT’s have it easy.” The other woman was six feet tall, hefty and black. “You better believe it. We just don’t live right, Annette. We just the muscle around here.”

“But Byrd gives me a pain. She’s no better than she ought to be. You know, she lives with a man she’s not married to. Lives with him openly in an apartment in Chelsea.”

“Mmmmm.” The black woman wore a bland, noncommittal look. “Here, into the bath with you, snooks,” she said to Connie from over her head. They began pulling her clothes off.

“I can undress myself.”

“Whew! Me-oh-my, is this one a mess? Did she jump out the window or something?”

“I was beaten up. By a pimp. Not
mine,”
she added quickly. “He was beating my niece. It’s him who brought me here.”

“Now what have you been into?” the black attendant wondered, shoving her into the shower like a dog to be bathed. “Some gorgeous bruises you got yourself!”

“She’ll smell better when she gets out. You wonder how they can live with themselves, never washing. But that’s part of being sick,” the blond said loftily. “Probably she’s been sleeping in the street, in doorways. I see them around.”

She wanted to scream that she washed as often as they did, that they had made her smell, made her dirty herself. But she did not dare. First, they would not listen, and second, they might hurt her. Who would care?

Because her clothes were filthy, they gave her a pair of blue pajamas three sizes too big and a robe of no particular color. Rotten luck to have been shoved into restraint on arrival. If she had simply walked up to the ward, she would have been able to keep her street clothes and more things. Here a scrap of paper, a book, a handkerchief, a nubbin of pencil, a bobby-pin were precious beyond imagining outside, irreplaceable treasures.

She found herself walking strangely, not only from the bruises: ah, the old Thorazine shuffle. She could no longer move quickly, gracefully, in spite of her plumpness. The black
attendant walked her into the day room, a big bleak room between the men’s and the women’s sides of the ward, right by the locked door to the hall and the elevators. She looked around slowly. She caught sight of a clock on the way in and she knew it was eleven in the morning. She was not hungry although she had not eaten for a long time. The drug killed her appetite so that she felt hollow, weak, but not hungry. The rib stabbed her. She felt feverish and might be. Nothing she could do. Her only hope was to catch a doctor as he made his flight through the ward or to persuade one of the attendants that she really needed medical help. Then the attendant would tell the doctor. It would take days to reach that kind of relationship with an attendant, and in the meantime she could die.

How hot the ward was. Steam heat from the old radiators turned on full blast. She fingered the plastic identification bracelet sealed on her wrist. Women in street clothes or the hospital clothes issued to them were sitting vacantly along the walls or staring at the television set placed up on a shelf where no one could reach it to change the station or alter the volume level. It was less crowded than when she had been in last, markedly so. Just opposite her, two old women were chatting animatedly in strong Brooklyn Jewish accents, like two gossips on a park bench instead of two madwomen on a plastic bench in a mental hospital. But they might only be elderly and not mad. At their feet a young girl lay motionless with her hands over her face, like a pet dog snoozing. There were many less old women this time. Was there a new waste-basket for the old?

Four Puerto Rican men were playing dominoes with bits of paper at a card table in a slow motion brought on by all of them being heavily drugged, like everybody else. The game seemed to occur under water. A child, a boy of eight or nine, sat near them picking his nose in the same kind of slow motion with such a look of blank despair on his small face she had to turn away. Most of the women were sitting on the plastic chairs that came in ranks of four against the wall, but there were more women than chairs. Though some were old, some children, some black, some brown, some white, they all looked more or less alike and seemed to wear a common expression. She knew that in a short while this ward, like every other she had been on,
would be peopled by strong personalities, a web of romances and feuds and strategies for survival. She felt weary in advance. Who needed to be set down in this desolate limbo to survive somehow in the teeth of the odds? She had had enough troubles already, enough!

“Lunch, ladies. Lunch. Line up now! Come on, get your asses moving, ladies!” The dining room was around a bend in the corridor in the same ward. Back and forth they went, back and forth in the confined space from doorless bathroom to dining room to seclusion (called treatment rooms here) to the dormitories to the day room.

Lunch was a gray stew and an institutional salad of celery and raisins in orange Jell-O. The food had no flavor except the sweet of the Jell-O and she had to eat it all with a plastic spoon. At least the food did not need chewing in her bloody mouth. The objects in the stew were mushy, bits of soft flotsam and jetsam in lukewarm glue. She tried to think about how to get out of here, but her mind was mud.

Lunch was over in fifteen minutes and then they were back in the day room, milling around to line up for medication. She needed her wits to plot how she would get out of here. The effects of the shot had not worn off. Then she held her face rigid when she saw the paper cup with the pills. Gracias, gracias. A pill was easily dealt with, unlike the liquid you had to swallow at once. She slipped it under her tongue, swallowed the water, and sat down on an orange chair. It did not do to head too quickly for the bathroom to spit out the pill. She kept it under her tongue till the coating wore off and she began to taste the bitter drug.

Visiting hour came in midafternoon. Hope stabbed her when the attendant came to say she had a visitor. Dolly!

Dolly was heavily made up. She was not wearing her fur-collared coat but her old red belted coat Connie remembered from the year when Dolly was married and carrying Nita.

“Dolly, get me out of here!”

“Honey, I can’t just yet. Be a little patient. By the middle of next week.”

“Dolly, por favor! No puedo vivir in esto hoyo. Hija mía, ayúdame!”

Dolly chose to reply in English. “It’s just for a couple of
days, Connie. Not like last time.” Politely reminding her that to be locked up in a mental institution was something she should be accustomed to.

“Dolly, how could you say I hit you?
Me?”

“Geraldo—he made me.”

She lowered her voice. “Did you have the operation?”

“I’m going into the hospital Monday.” Dolly fluffed her hair. “I persuaded him not to use that butcher on me. It costs a lot, but it will be a real hospital operation. Not with that butcher who does it on all the whores cheap.” Dolly spoke with pride.

Connie shrugged, her mouth sagging. “You could leave town.”

“Daddy won’t let me have the baby either, that old …” Doily picked at her cuticle, ruining the smooth line of the crimson polish. “I did ask him. He says he washes his hands of me. Listen, Connie—if I have the operation, Geraldo promises I can quit. He’ll marry me. We’ll have a real wedding next month, soon as I’m better from the operation. So you see, things are working out okay. And just as soon as I come out of the hospital, I’ll get you out. It’s only for a week.”

“Please, Dolly, take me out before you go in for the operation. Please! I can’t stand it here.”

“I can’t.” Dolly shook her head. “You really busted his nose. He’s going to have to have an operation himself! It’s going to cost a bundle, Consuelo. He looks awful with a bandage all over his nose—he looks like a bird! Like a crazy eagle with that big beak in the middle of his face!” Dolly began to giggle, covering her mouth with her hand.

Connie smiled painfully. “I’m glad I hit him!”

“Well …” Dolly turned her eyes up. “I guess they can fix him with plastic surgery. You really lit into him! Mamá, how you slammed him with that wine bottle! I thought he’d kill you.”

“I wish I had killed him,” Connie said very, very softly. “How can you care about him with your face still swollen from his beating?”

“He is my man,” Dolly said, shrugging. “What can I do?”

“Listen, can you bring me some clothes and stuff here before you go in the hospital?” When blocked, maneuver to survive. The first rule of life inside.

“Sure. What you want? Tomorrow I’ll bring it to you, around this time.”

She went into the bathroom after Dolly left and stayed there as long as she dared. Stalls without doors. In spite of the stink, it was a place to be almost alone, precious in the hospital. How could she scream at Dolly? What use? Dolly chose to believe Geraldo, and if she tried to shake that belief, Dolly would only turn from her. Then Dolly would not help her to get out, would not bring her clothing and the small necessities that could make the passing hollow days a little more bearable. She judged her niece for choosing Geraldo over her unborn baby and over herself; but hadn’t she chosen to mourn for Claud almost to death?

Outside, did rain slick First Avenue? Was the sun bleeding through a murky overcast? Was it a rare blue day when the buildings stood crisp against the sky? Here it was time for meds. Here it was time to line up for a paper cup of mouthwash. Here it was time to line up for all starch meals. Here it was time to line up for more meds. Here it was time to sit and sit and sit. Here it was time to greet a familiar black face from the last time.

“Yeah, I was brought in three, four days ago,” Connie told her. “Been here long?”

“My caseworker brought me in Monday. Same as last time. You too?”

Connie bowed her head. “Yeah, it was my caseworker.”

Here it was time to sit facing a social worker, Miss Ferguson, who looked at the records spread out on her desk rather than at her. Miss Ferguson sat tightly and occasionally she glanced toward the door.

“You don’t have to be nervous about me,” Connie said. “I didn’t do what Geraldo the pimp said. I didn’t hit my niece. I wouldn’t hurt one hair on her head. Him, I hit, that’s the truth. I only hit him because he was beating her up.”

“Was that how it was with your daughter?” Miss Ferguson had light brown hair curled at the ends. She wore granny glasses and a pale blue pants suit. A pimple had broken out on the end of her nose that her right hand kept stealing up to touch.

“It isn’t the same this time! It isn’t!”

“How can we help you if you won’t let us?” Miss Ferguson glanced at her wristwatch, shuffling the papers in the folder.
Her folder. “Three years ago you were admitted to Bellevue on the joint recommendation of a social worker from the Bureau of Child Welfare, your caseworker from welfare, and your parole officer. You were then hospitalized at Rockover State for eight months.”

“They said I was sick and I agreed. Someone close to me had died, and I didn’t want to live.”

“You have a history of child abuse—”

“Once! I was sick!”

“Your parental rights were terminated. Your daughter Angelina Ramos was put out for adoption.”

“I should never have agreed to that! I didn’t understand what was happening! I thought they were just going to take care of her.”

“It was the clinical judgment of the court psychiatrist that your daughter would be better off with foster parents.” The pimple was growing as she watched. Miss Ferguson kept feeling it gingerly, poking it while pretending not to.

“They were wrong to take my daughter!” She saw Miss Ferguson frown. “Imagine—your daughter. I hurt her once. That was a terrible thing to do, I know it. But to punish me for it the rest of my life!”

The social worker was giving her that human-to-cockroach look. Most people hit kids. But if you were on welfare and on probation and the whole social-pigeonholing establishment had the right to trek regularly through your kitchen looking in the closets and under the bed, counting the bedbugs and your shoes, you had better not hit your kid once. The abused and neglected child, they had called Angelina officially. She had been mean to Angie, she had spent those months after she got the news about Claud’s death gulping downs, drinking bad red wine. A couple of times she had shot speed. She had thought nothing could hurt her anymore—until she lost Angelina. Maybe you always have more to lose until, like Claud, they took your life too.

“The acquaintance who died—that would be your … The black handicapped pickpocket whose assistant you were.”

Her face slammed shut. They trapped you into saying something and then they’d bring out their interpretations that made
your life over. To make your life into a pattern of disease. Couldn’t even say blind. “Handicapped.” He wasn’t. He was a fine saxophone player. He was a talented pickpocket and he brought home good things for her and her baby. He had been as good to Angie as if she had been his own baby daughter. He had been good to her too, a loving man. The sweetest man she had ever had. As if Claud could be summed up in their rotten records, either the sweetness or the pain of him, his badass fury. They had killed him too. In prison he had taken part in a medical experiment for the money and hoping to shorten his time. They had injected him with hepatitis and the disease had run its course and he had died. Her probation officer, Briggs, would not let her go to the funeral. That bastard—did he think they would plot together, him from his closed coffin?

“The Puerto Rican man you describe as your niece’s ‘pimp’—is that the same man as her fiancé?”

“He
is
her pimp. That’s how he makes a living. He has three other girls.” Connie sat forward, giving up. Don’t try to win now, just survive. “Look, please, Miss Ferguson, look at my mouth, where he hit me. Would you look at me, please, just for one moment? My side. Here. It hurts awful. After they knocked me down, he kicked me while I was lying on the floor. When I breathe, each time, all the time, it hurts. I think—” She was about to say that her rib was broken or cracked, but they got nasty if you said anything medical. “I think something’s wrong inside me. Where he kicked me on the floor.”