Woman On The Edge Of Time (51 page)

Friday was a big workday and also her last full day outside the hospital. Saturday she was to clean in the morning and then be carried back to Manhattan well before the party. Friday morning she spent cooking dishes for Saturday’s buffet—three large cakes and two mousses for dessert. At two o’clock Luis came home to fetch her, taking her off to his nursery and greenhouses. The other places were just retail outlets. Here she had worked three months for Luis, transplanting, spraying.

Luis drove her over in his white Eldorado, which felt as big as the patient lounge. He had the radio on but after a while he shut it off to launch at her. She sighed and tried to dampen herself to endure.

“You seem pretty quiet this time. Not like the old Connie. Did they finally teach you a lesson in keeping your mouth shut?”

“I been helpful to Adele. Haven’t I been working hard?”

“A lot harder than you’re used to working. If you can call that work. You liked the food yesterday, didn’t you?” He chuckled.

“I cooked it. Didn’t I do a good job?”

“With Adele standing over you, sure. And careful to hide the chili powder. Yeah, you’ve been toned down a bit, taken down a peg or two. I bet you’d be glad for a job in the greenhouse now.”

“Sure I would, Lewis. If you’d sign me out, I’d go to work tomorrow.” She was craning her neck, trying to figure out where they were and how near public transportation. Maybe at the nursery she could get away. She knew exactly how to get back to Manhattan from there; she’d done it every day for three months. She had slipped the money out of her purse, in case he took that from her, and secreted it in her bra, feeling like a spy, a secret agent. It wasn’t too comfortable. The stiff paper
rubbed her breast. The nursery looked as it had when she’d worked there, except it was winter now and much less stock stood outside in rows, only what they grew themselves. Most of the stock was shipped to them in spring from the South, from Ohio, even from Texas, brought in by truck.

The greenhouses were full. Luis’s top man, Richie, and his secretary came running after him as soon as he stepped through the door. Luis turned her over to Gino, the sixty-year-old grizzled Italian who ran the greenhouses, saying, “Keep an eye on her. She’s crazy as a bedbug and she’s likely to try to bolt. I don’t want to be responsible to that hospital for her escape. So keep one eye on the door. I’m taking her coat to lock up, so she wouldn’t get far … . Now, I want you both to pick out good plants for my house, for the party. We’re having a tropical motif. No gardenias. And I want perfect specimens. No curled leaves, no bug damage, nothing. You go over them and you look and look hard. I want about thirty good ones. No rubber plants. Take a big Norfolk pine. No coleus, no begonias. Take some Dutch amaryllis. Everything’s labeled on the end, Connie, if you don’t remember. Take a big pineapple and a few of the other fancy bromeliads. Take a careful look at the flowering maples and see if any are good enough. No cactus! Some jackass always backs into them. Gino, you pick out orchids yourself. Collect everything by the loading dock and I’ll have the truck deliver it. One of the larger figs might be good. You look at them and pick out whatever’s blooming best or got fruit on. There’s some miniature citrus. Take a look, see if the butterfly lilies are out. Maybe a coffee tree. No Venus flytraps, none of the gruesome ones. Some fool always sticks a cigarette in. Now get moving. And use your eyes. You may be doped up, Connie, so you move like you’ve got lead in your britches, but I want you to use your eyes. Nothing but the best, you hear me?”

Gino helped himself to a cough drop and said nothing. After Luis left, he squinted at her, asking in his hoarse voice, “You work here one time?”

“Yeah, five years ago. For a while.”

“You remember where things are? Okay. You take what he said to the loading dock. I’ll look it over good for him. Listen, we got
no
white flies in here. We got the cleanest greenhouse
in New Jersey.” He spat into a bright handkerchief that reminded her of Luciente. “I got two thousand things to do besides worry about the boss’s party. So you pick out the plants and I look them over when you finish. Okay. If you want to run away with no coat, it’s sixteen degrees out there and you’re crazy for sure. So you better just go to work. You’ll never get past the gate anyhow unless you can fly.”

She picked out smart-looking plants, the ones with the shiniest leaves, the most graceful drooping foliage, the showiest flowers, the most exotic fruit. As best she could, she hauled them to the locked doors of the loading dock. A couple of times she had to yell for help, till Gino reluctantly assigned her five minutes from one of the other overworked, underpaid greenhouse employees. The pesticides had used to make her sick. She had worked long hours till her back ached and never stopped aching day and night, and it had taken her so long to come and go on public transportation she had had no time to spend with her own child. All for two dollars an hour and bad headaches. The poisons could kill if she breathed them, if they only touched her skin. Even when she wore a face mask, they got to her.

Snow was beginning, swirls of small flakes idling in the air and sticking in the crotches of bare trees in their rows outside. The only thing she could find was a smock of thin cotton, but she put that on. So she’d catch a cold! Her coat was locked up in Luis’s office, but she’d go as she was. She moved slowly, ever so casually toward the door. But as she stepped outside, Richie called to her, “Where do you think you’re going?” Again and again she waited and made a move, but always Gino or Luis or Richie was watching.

On impulse she walked back into the shed where poisons were stored. The cabinet was locked, but she looked behind the door and the key was still on its hook there. Like a joke, she had always thought, like having a safe and writing the combination on the wall. She unlocked the cabinet A few of the poisons were new to her. There were the fungicides they used: zineb, Captan, sulfur. The pesticides: Sevin, malathion, Kelthane. Some came ready-mixed and some were powder or oil. Parathion: that was the most deadly in the nursery in the old days. Gino had warned her about wearing the gloves with all of
them, but the girls told stories about people dying just from touching parathion. She had never used it She was not allowed to. But she had seen Gino using that oil.

She grabbed up a small bottle and filled it with the brown oil, her hand trembling. Slowly she poured it holding her breath. Perhaps even coming this close might kill her, but then they were going to kill her anyhow. But this was a weapon, a powerful weapon that came from the same place as the electrodes and the Thorazine and the dialytrode. One of the weapons of the powerful, of those who controlled. Nobody was allowed to possess this poison without a license. She was stealing some of their power in this little bottle. She put the big container back where it had been, locked the cabinet; then she thought better and opened it again and wiped everything with the hem of her dress. Fingerprints. Then she backed out, putting the bottle in the pocket of the smock, until she should get a chance to put it in her old plastic purse.

Quickly she went back to work, choosing plants. Her hands kept trembling. She wondered if she was dying of poison. Perhaps the shaking of her hands was the first stage of poisoning. Perhaps handling the bottle could kill her. She felt the brown oil radiating a sinister influence all around it.

Never had she done such a thing, grabbed at power, at a weapon. She did not intend to go Skip’s way. Yes, she had stolen a weapon. War, she thought again. She would fight back. But her hands trembled and trembled and she found her knees buckling till she could hardly focus on the plant before her, large and leathery, almost as big as herself, whose name she had forgotten.

Supper consisted of leftovers. Adele toyed with her food, smiling again. “Did you have a good day? Oh, too bad. Yes. Um. Of course, yes, he’s getting old. Mummm.”

Connie looked hard at Luis. When she went to the kitchen to fetch the coffee and dessert, she could pour some of the poison into the coffee. It was brown and oily. It would work well in coffee. For all the meanness he had laid on her all the years of her life, for Dolly, for Carmel. Her purse lay within reach. She could do it.

Luis was laughing at his own joke, his head tilting way back.
As he laughed, for a moment out of control, almost boyish, she saw in him that older brother she hated to remember she had adored. Up to the age of ten, she had adored Luis with her whole heart. He had seemed to her that prince, that peacock wonder he always remained to their mother. He could fight, he could talk his way in and out of trouble, he could speak English better than any of them, he could stand up for her if he wanted. Yes, Luis the street kid she had adored. Luis the young hoodlum had touched her heart and set a mold on it. Something of what she had loved in Martin, something of what she had loved in Claud: the grace, the anger, the sore pride, the refusal to swallow insult. The army had changed Luis. When he had come back, he had contempt for the rest of them. His anger and unruly pride had been channeled into a desire to get ahead, to grab money, to succeed like an Anglo.

Who knew what being poor and being brown would have done to Martin if he had lived? Perhaps he would have hardened like Luis. She could not believe that of his tenderness, yet she could remember Luis at fourteen stealing a bright scarf from the dime store for her to wear Easter Sunday, laughing as he pulled it from the leather jacket no one knew how he had come by. How beautiful he had seemed, the glint of teeth in his brown face, his eyes burning with anger or joy, the arrogant overacted thrust of his shoulders. Jesús had been scared he would go bad, they would lose him to the streets. None of them had guessed they would lose him to the Anglos, entirely.

After supper she steamed a label off a fancy herbal shampoo in the bathroom and pasted it on her bottle. When the bottle dried, the label stuck. She would take it back to the hospital with her alongside a shoebox of old cosmetics Adele gave her—lipsticks in frosted colors no longer fashionable, the wrong shade of eye shadow, a half-finished jar of cold cream containing oil of the palm. Adele also gave her a beige cardigan with embroidered flowers, shrunk in the wash, a pair of panty hose, and a pile of old
Vogue
s and
New Yorker
s. It reminded her of the sort of things people gave you when you cleaned for them. She did not get to taste the dishes she had cooked for the party, but she discovered from the scale in the bathroom off the master bedroom that she had managed to gain
four pounds from Wednesday night to Saturday noon. She did not mind. How I spent my vacation: I ate.

As she sat in Luis’s big white Eldorado idling sluggishly through heavy traffic, she realized several weeks had passed since she’d gone over. Was Luciente dead? She could not bear to think so. She was the one who was dead. She could not catch anymore. She was hardening herself as Luis had done to himself, but not for money. To succeed in her war. To fight back. She closed her eyes and saw her weapon, disguised as shampoo.

That Monday Acker announced that Alice and Captain Cream were to be released Friday to welfare hotels. Alvin was taken away to be operated on, along with Orville. Sybil, Miss Green, and Connie were given yet another battery of physical and psychological tests and scheduled for meetings with the doctors on Wednesday.

“It means we’ll be done next,” Sybil said out of the side of her mouth as they stood in line for the meds.

“It means that’s what
they
want,” Connie said.

She and Sybil waited for an opportunity to do their laundry at the same time. Then she asked Sybil, “If you had a chance, would you be ready to try?”

Sybil nodded. “Tina tried in a laundry cart. I’ve been thinking—is there any way to start a fire?”

“You think you could make it outside?”

“I’m ready to try, Consuelo. I cannot permit them to operate on me if I have any way to stop them. It’s a kind of death.”

“Don’t go back home. I know you never lived anyplace else, but you’re in a … circle there where they keep getting rid of you.”

“The volunteer Mary Ellen I mentioned to you? Her friend gave her a newspaper, a newspaper just for women, that had an article about witches. Real covens that worship Wica! Imagine that, Consuelo. With an address. If I got … out, I thought I might seek their aid.”

“That sounds better than going back to Albany for sure.”

The next morning when Miss Green was in the bathroom
and Sybil was making her bed, Connie darted in. “Here. Take this!” She pressed into Sybil’s palm the wadded-up money she had got from Dolly, less what she’d spent on phone calls, It came to thirty-one dollars and sixty-two cents.

Sybil sat down on the bed’s edge to stare. “What are you going to do? Why give me this?”

“Shhh. Hide it.”

“Don’t give up, Consuelo. Just because you couldn’t escape from your brother’s house!”

“Don’t ask what I’m going to do. Only, Wednesday, tomorrow, be ready to run. There’ll be a lot of confusion in the afternoon, when the doctors see me. Run then. Run and never let them get you again!”

Valente paused, stood in the hallway looking in. Connie left at once and went to make her own bed. At breakfast Sybil mouthed to her, “Consuelo, you frighten me. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up!”

“I’m not. For me this is war. I got to fight it the only way I see. To stop them. Don’t ask me more.” Her voice stuck in her throat. “I wish you a good life, Sybil. Hate them more than you hate yourself, and you’ll stay free!”

Tuesday night, in spite of the sleeping pills she lay awake, her eyes wearing themselves raw on dim shapes. She tossed, she thrust her head into the pillow, she counted and tried to blank her mind. Her thoughts ran round and round like dogs trapped behind a fence, to and fro until they had worn a bald track in her head.

She tried to open her mind to Luciente. In weary boredom, in fear of the next day, wanting a little something nice, she tried. Her mind was rusted shut. It would not open. She pushed on herself, she tried and tried. Sweat stood out on her forehead, sweat gathered under her arms and under her breasts. Once she almost felt something, a presence. That made her go on battering her mind. She lay panting as if she had run up a flight of steps. Please, she begged, please! What had been so easy was hard and painful, hard as dying. Dying into distance. Where there had been only air, something solid stood, solid as bone, as prison walls. But she went on. What else did she have to do this night? What else but touch her fears like the beads of a cold, oily rosary, again and again. She went on trying.