Woman On The Edge Of Time (36 page)

Then she got oriented and began walking in the ditch. Here it was shallow and she did not feel well hidden.

“Birth! Birth! Birth!” Luciente seemed to sing in her ear. “That’s all you can dream about! Our dignity comes from work. Everyone raises the kids, haven’t you noticed? Romance, sex, birth, children—that’s what you fasten on. Yet that isn’t women’s business anymore. It’s everybody’s.”

With a heavy whoosh a diesel, unloaded and going too fast, careened down the road way out in the center. Smell of partly combusted fuel. She stumbled to her feet again.

“Take for instance Gray Fox. Last month that person was
chairing the economic planning council of Massachusetts-Connecticut-Rhode Island. What Gray Fox normally does is fish-farming out on the shelf. That’s per work, per center. But after a year on the economic council and ninemonth chairing it, Gray Fox may come to identify with that job. A job that affects the lives of many people. May come to feel that it’s part of the essence of Gray Fox to make big decisions while others look up to per. May come to feel that being Gray Fox involves being such a decider, such a big visible doer. So right now Gray Fox is on sixmonth sheepherding duty. After we’ve served in a way that seems important, we serve in a job usually done by young people waiting to begin an apprenticeship or crossers atoning a crime. When you are taking on a coordinating job, you say this pledge: ‘The need exists. I serve the need. After me the need will exist and the need will be served. Let me do well what has and will be done as well by others. Let me take on the role and then let it go.’”

A voice in her ears, good-natured, chiding: Luciente as a fraction of her mind, as a voice of an alternate self, talking to her in the night Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps she was merely close to exhaustion and strung out on Thorazine and barbiturate withdrawal. She trudged on, wishing for a clock in the sky, a wristwatch. Wishing for a visible moon to mark time by. She did not even know if the moon would be waxing or waning; Luciente always knew those things. The moon seemed to hang over Mattapoisett the way the street lamps hung over El Barrio till the kids shot them out. The night was muggy. She heard thunder to the west and feared rain, but nothing happened.

All night she walked. The blisters on her feet opened and bled, and she kept walking. Most of the time she walked barefoot, carrying the pitiful shoes. Each time her foot touched the ground, dirt rubbed into raw meat. She kept on. She walked and walked. She kept on. She could not think anymore, could not worry. False dawn thinned the sky and then the sun rose behind low clouds. The sky turned pink and then yellow. She could not tell exactly where the sun stood behind the cloud wall. She kept trudging along.

Now she came into a built-up area and she could not hide when cars passed. She put on the shoes and kept going. She passed stores and gas stations and small factories and a lumberyard,
crossed railroad tracks, passed a VW dealer and a Dairy Queen. Nothing was open yet. At every closed gas station she tried the doors of the rest rooms, but they were all locked.

Finally she saw an open gas station and she walked very slowly until a car pulled in. Then she crossed to the office as if she came from the car and asked for the key to the ladies’ room. Inside she drank water and drank water, relieved her diarrhea, washed herself all over with paper towels. If only she had a comb! With her fingers and water she tried to make her hair passable. Her clothes looked exactly as if she had slept in them. In the mirror she hung sloppy and ashen. After a summer inside her skin was not dark, but she did not look white. That mattered in these towns. She shrugged. What could she do about it? She left the key in the john and slipped away around the back of the building.

She plodded on toward what she hoped was the center of the small city, finally passing the city limits sign. More traffic now. It was Monday morning, people driving to work. Her stomach gurgled its hunger. The first breakfast place she passed had only men in it, trucks parked outside, and she felt they would notice her too carefully.

She promised herself breakfast. Then she would sit. Her bleeding feet would stop being tortured. But she must choose a breakfast spot carefully. That was her bribe to her weary, aching body, giddy with hunger, rebellious at being fed nothing but weeds and rotten vegetables and blackberries. The next spot looked too suburban, too fancy. The next diner had a police car parked outside. The traffic got heavier. The clouds separated into long clots, a pale blue showing between them. She was limping along a sidewalk now, past a shopping plaza, the huge parking lot almost empty.

Now she walked through a neighborhood of factories and again the occasional diner had only male customers. No one else walked here. She felt conspicuous, prey bleeding into her flopping shoes, the sole peeling off the upper at each step. Dizzy. She could not remember a time when she had not felt dizzy, when her head had been normal, when some drug or the absence of some drug had not been ringing its changes on her blood and nerves. Now she trudged through a district of small houses with smaller backyards, houses no farther apart than the
distance a person could reach, asbestos, wood siding, shingled, covered with aluminum. The kind of neighborhood where her sister Teresa lived in Chicago. Working class, but each of the families would say, like her own sister, struggling along with noses just above the water of taxes and debts and finance companies, that they were middle class because they were buying their own house.

The first time she had gone on welfare it had been bitter to swallow, bitter as vomit. Even after her second husband Eddie had walked out on her and Angelina and pulled his disappearing act, she had managed. She had given a neighbor twenty a week to keep Angelina shut up in her apartment all day with five other squalling kids, stuck in front of a TV set. She didn’t like it at all, but there was no public day care and the private centers cost too much.

She had worked in a box factory up in the Bronx for a while. Although she hated to ask him for help, she had gone to Luis and been treated to a lecture on what a failure she was as a woman, couldn’t hold on to her husband and only one daughter to show. But he had given her a job in his nursery business. The poisons they sprayed made her sick, but the worst part was the travel, three hours out of the days to New Jersey and back. She got home too tired to pick up Angelina and play with her.

But always she had somehow managed until she had been busted. Then had come welfare, the waiting in line, the humiliating questions, the snooping, the meager, meager dole. Rehearsal for life as an inmate, a ward of the state, a prisoner.

Dizzy, dizzy. Slowly the street swung around her. Her vision riddled with spots and then slowly cleared. The traffic was slowing again. The sky was almost clear of clouds now, a washed-out hazy blue with yellow in it. The sidewalks were dusty. The day was hot already and she felt ridiculous in her denim jacket, but it was cleaner than her dress. No trees. A street not made for people.

Little houses. In each a TV, a telephone or two, one or two cars outside, toaster, washing machine, drier, hair drier, electric shaver, electric blanket, maybe a phonograph, a movie camera, a slide projector, maybe an electric Skilsaw, a snowmobile in the garage, a spray iron, an electric coffeepot. Surely in each an appliance on legs batted to and fro with two or three
or four children, running the vacuum cleaner while the TV blared out game shows.

She had envied such women, she had strived to become one. Marrying Eddie, she had hoped to be made into such a housewife in such a house. She had hoped she was being practical at last with the steady man, the steady income. She had lied about her age to him. Then she had still been able to pass for a few years younger than she was: she had been twenty-eight, and she had pretended to be twenty-five. All her aging had come after getting busted. It had shamed her to lie, but she had done all those things she had always been told to do—the small pretenses, the little laughs. Her natural modesty subtly twisted by nervous fingers into something assumed and paraded. Anything to be safe. Anything to belong somewhere at last!

She was passing an appliance store, open now. Inside, a salesman was opening and closing the door of a stand-up freezer, his mouth going nonstop. Small café next door. The morning rush over, some latecomers were having breakfast or loitering over coffee reading a newspaper. She pushed in, feeling terribly visible. Air conditioned, with a quivering machine over the door. She took a stool at the end and reached for a menu. Ah, to sit down at last! She almost fainted with relief.

She blinked at the prices and fear took her in the belly. She had to grip the counter. This did not look like a fancy café, the people sitting at the counter looked ordinary enough, that man in worn pants and a shirt frayed at the cuffs, that woman in white plastic shoes cracking at the toes, a scuffed plastic purse, a dress puckered at the seams. Had prices risen terribly during the few months she had been hospitalized? She had not eaten breakfast in a restaurant since … since Claud. It wasn’t a thing she could do on welfare. She tried to make herself get up and walk out, but the sight of people eating made her knees dissolve. So many things! How could she choose? She hadn’t had a choice in months. If she had two eggs and coffee only (the toast came with), it would still be $1.59 and that was the special. Her ten dollars shrank in her fist to a crumpled damp ball.

Nevertheless, gripping the counter she ordered the breakfast The waitress behind the counter gave her a quick disapproving glance, a once-over of her hair and face and denim jacket.

“Where’s the bus station from here?” she asked, and the waitress mumbled an answer so quickly she could not follow and had to ask again.

“What’s the matter, you don’t speak English?”

But the woman with the white plastic purse took over. It was only ten or eleven blocks. The woman seemed shocked that she intended to walk, but patiently explained the directions.

The clock said eleven minutes after ten. The eggs arrived overcooked and the coffee bitter from sitting on the stove, but she ate everything, ate it slowly and gratefully. She ate everything one small bite at a time, down to the last crust of toast wiping up the last smear of egg on the platter, and even the little package that said it was grape jelly. Then she paid and ran out quickly, because she could not leave a tip.

She tried not to limp, nothing to call attention. She watched the street signs and counted the blocks. The bus station was obvious as soon as she saw it.

At the ticket counter she tried to figure out what to do. There were two different schedules for two different lines, and they didn’t have prices on them. Finally she had to ask questions. That was awkward, the young man behind the counter bored. She had to find out how far she could get toward New York as soon as possible on five dollars.

He was reading a book. She could not see the title. He wanted to get back to it and kept his finger stuck between pages while he talked to her. When he had to let go to get the schedules out, he was irritated. He stuck a pencil in. On the cover two naked women embraced while a man about eight feet tall dressed all in black leather cracked a whip around them. Why would anyone read a dirty book in a bus station, sitting behind the counter? Could he bring himself off back there? Would he go into the john? She felt embarrassed wondering such things as she looked into his blank young face, sallow under the fluorescent lights.

“Don’t you know where you want to go, lady?”

Finally she ended up with a ticket that would take her all the way to the Port Authority depot, on a bus leaving at twelve-thirty. She sat down to wait. It was eleven-eighteen. Someone had left a newspaper on a chair and she began to read it through, from the front page onward. Soon she would be in
New York. Running up the street. Otis, first she’d try to reach Otis, Claud’s old friend. Then Dolly. She read on. She reached an article in the women’s section describing the regimen of Countess Rataouille, a beauty from a simple banking family of Park Avenue, Seal Harbor, Palm Beach, and Monterey, for remaining gorgeous forever, which involved performing isometric exercises, never taking hot baths above the waist, and rubbing fresh strawberries into the skin daily. As her mouth was watering with the thought of fresh strawberries, a shadow fell on her page and a grip took her arm.

“Could we see your identification, you.”

The young man whose dirty book she had interrupted had turned her in. By twelve-thirty she was back in the hospital, on her ward.

“But you said I could room with Sybil!” Connie argued.

“That’s before you messed up,” Valente said firmly. “Listen, if the two of you had tried to pull that game on me, I’d have had you both in seclusion before you could yell Uncle. You wouldn’t fool me for five minutes, and don’t forget it.”

“How could you sign the permission?” Skip asked her as soon as Valente walked away. “They couldn’t make
me
sign!”

“You’re not twenty-one. They didn’t need you to sign it.”

“They didn’t need you either. Your brother signed it. Why did you give in?”

Connie shrugged. “I was scared what they’d do to me at Rockover if I didn’t. I figured they had the permission anyhow. I want them to think I’ve given in.”

“Haven’t you?” Skip flounced away, down the wide hallway.

They had all been moved to the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights, to a ward on the eighth floor specially prepared for them by turning it into a secure locked ward. It was the roomiest and most amply furnished and outfitted ward she had ever been on. They shared double rooms—like the one she and Tina Ortiz had now, with a bed for each of them that even had a bedspread and their own window, although it wouldn’t open. Sybil was next door, with Miss Green. The men were on one side of the nursing station and the women on the other. In between was a big day room with a color television, card tables, even some easy chairs and a couple of sofas, with green carpeting on the floor. At the far end of the wing that held their ward, the doctors had their conference room and computer,
their lab and offices. The patients fluttered around the first few days, exclaiming about their new quarters.