by Marge Piercy
“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.”
“Who are the ‘they’ you believ
e knocked you down? Is that your niece, Dolores Campos?”
“No! He came in with a—” She realized she didn’t want to say “doctor.” How careful she had to be with them. “—with a couple of pals—hoodlums. When I hit him, they knocked me down.”
“You do admit, you remember that you struck him.”
“Yes! He was beating Dolly.”
“Your niece says you attacked her.”
“She told me he made her say that. Ask her in a room alone. I beg you, ask her alone. She’s scared to go against Geraldo.” Her hands clasped in the gesture of praying and she heard her own voice whining. “Please, Miss Ferguson, have a doctor look at me. I hurt so much. Please, I beg you. Look at my mouth.”
“You say it hurts you. Where do you believe you feel pain?”
“In my side. My ribs. Also my mouth. And my back is burned. Those are the worse places. The rest is just bruises.”
“In your side?”
“It hurts every breath I take. Please?”
“Well, you do have bruises. All right, I’ll speak to the nurse.” Miss Ferguson caressed her pimple, pretending to adjust her glasses. With a nod she dismissed Connie.
Finally on Tuesday Connie was x-rayed and her cracked rib was taped and her mouth looked at. They sent her with an attendant to the dentist. She missed visiting hour, so she did not find out whether Dolly was out of the hospital yet. But tomorrow, surely, Dolly must come and talk to them about releasing her. If she could get Dolly to tell the truth to the doctor, the nurse, even to the social worker, then they would let her go … . Even figuring the whole process of release would take a day or two, she could be out by Friday night.
She sat in a lopsided chair in the hall outside the dentist’s office, with the attendant beside her poring over an astrology magazine. How she would celebrate her release! Her dingy two rooms with the toilet in the hall shone in her mind, vast and luxurious after the hospital. Doors she could shut! A toilet with a door! Chairs to sit in, a table of her own to eat on, a TV set that she could turn on and off and tune to whatever program she wanted to watch, her own bed with clean sheets and no stink of old piss. Her precious freedom and privacy!
Yes, she would rise in the morning when she wanted to instead of when the attendant came yelling. No more Thorazine and sleeping pills, the brief high and the endless sluggish depths. Nights of sleep with real dreams. She would go hungry for a week for the pleasure of eating a real orange, an avocado. All day long nobody would tell her what to do. Miraculously she would walk through the streets without an attendant. She would breathe the beautiful living filthy air. She would walk until she felt like sitting down.
Around her kitchen she would sing and dance, she would sing love songs to the cucarachas and the chinces, her chinces! Her life that had felt so threadbare now spread out like a full red velvet rose—the rose that Claud had once brought her, loving it for its silkiness, its fragrance, and not knowing it was dark red Her ordinary penny-pinching life appeared to her full beyond the possibility of savoring every moment. A life crammed overflowing with aromas of coffee, of dope smoke in hallways, of refried cooking oil as she climbed the stairs of her tenement, of the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and new buds in Central Park. Sidewalk vendors. Cuchifritos. The spring rhythm of conga drums through the streets.
Waiting in the rickety chair for the dentist, her mouth filled with saliva and she glanced with envy at the coffee the attendant was sipping. White coffee, probably sweet too. To make conversation she asked, “What sign are you?”
The woman gave her a sideways glance. “Sagittarius.”
She had no idea when that was. “I’m Aries.”
“Your sign is cuckoo, girl.” The attendant went back to her magazine, turning slightly away.
She would be out soon. Soon! Swallow all insults. Keep quiet. She would have better things than coffee from a coffee machine! She would make herself the pot of Dominican coffee she had started that night for Dolly. She had such a hunger for Mexican cooking! Puerto Rican food was different. She had learned to eat it, to like it. In fact, she had cooked salcocho, mondongo, asopão, and many plátanos dishes for Eddie, for Dolly too, whose mother, Carmel, was Puerto Rican. But even the staples were not the same, all those root vegetables—yucca, yaulin, taro—the salt codfish, bacalao, instead of the base of corn and beans. She had grown up on pintos and the Puerto Ricans ate more black beans. She had noticed a few Mexican restaurants around New York, but they were too expensive for her. Ridiculous to live in a place where the taste of your own soul food was priced beyond you. She got to eat Chinese oftener than Mexican.
To breathe the air of freedom would be enough. She had not handled the interview well with Ferguson. She would talk about getting a job. She could even try again. Trekking from office to office. Maybe she had given up too easily. Maybe she could get temporary office work. Maybe at least she could persuade the social worker that she would. They liked that, if you could persuade them you were going to get a job. She thought of Ferguson and shrugged. Chances were it would be a different one next time anyhow.
She hadn’t typed in … four years? five years? Last time in, she had applied for a typing job, but they liked to use the younger women. Maybe they had a machine here she could practice on. She had to figure the angles. Best if she could manage to believe it herself, that she could get a job. Herself with a police record and a psychiatric record, a fat Chicana aged thirty-seven without a man, without her own child, without the right clothes, with her plastic pocketbook cracked on the side and held together with tape. The dental assistant pitter-pattered out to summon them, and the attendant hauled her up like a rag doll and marched her in for treatment.
Wednesday and Thursday went by like long, long freight trains and finally Friday came. On her ward two patients had weekend passes to go home. Three other women were being discharged. Their effects came up in bags and their relatives took them away. More women were brought up. Dolly did not come for her. Then the nurse, whistling a song with a Latin beat that had been on all the stations lately, even the white stations, stopped and spoke to her. “All right, Mrs. Ramos, get yourself together.”
“I’m getting out! I knew it. I’m getting out, right?”
“You’re going to the country. Trees and green grass, for a rest like you need.”
“Don’t hand me that!” She clutched herself. “You can’t send me up. I’m only in for observation.”
“Your family wants you to get well, just as the doctor does—”
“The doctor only spoke to me for five minutes!”
“You’re a sick woman. Everybody wants you to get well again,” the nurse said with that false sweetness. “Don’t you want to get well?”
“Who’s signing me in? Did my niece do this?”
“Your brother Lewis. So you won’t hurt yourself or anyone else. You’ve been a bad girl again, Mrs. Ramos.”
“Where are you sending me?”
“You just get your things together. You’ll find out.” The nurse strolled off whistling that catchy song by War that had been echoing in El Barrio for weeks.
The rain came down hard. The day was clammy and gusts of wind splashed the water in breaking waves against the closed sides of the ambulance-bus. She sat so that she could see out through the slit, wearing her own clothes that Dolly had brought her. Rain drummed on the metal roof, assaulting it. Under water. She was drowning.
Here she was with her life half spent, midway through her dark journey that had pushed her into the hands of the midwife in El Paso and carried her through the near West Side of Chicago, through the Bronx and the Lower East Side and El Barrio. The iron maiden was carrying her to Rockover again. Luis had signed her in. A bargain had been struck. Some truce had been negotiated between the two men over the bodies of their women. Luis, who never admitted his oldest daughter was a whore, but made her feel like one whenever he got her in his house. The iron maiden jounced roughly on, battering her. Halfway through the hard years allotted
women she found herself stymied, trapped, drugged with the Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.
She had lost some weight and the old yellow dress hung loosely. Her lips and her nails were split from the drug and lack of protein. The dentist had yanked a tooth and filled two others in quick repair. Her rib ached. The tape was tight around her like a corset under the loose dress. Into the unnatural darkness of the April storm she was carried blind in the belly of the iron beast.
The ambulance-bus slowed abruptly. Making sharp turns. Slowing down again. She pressed her eye to the slit and stared at the budding trees, the hedges. At length she saw through the blowing veil of the rain the walls she knew too well, that place of punishment, of sorrow, of the slow or fast murder of the self called Rockover State.
Perhaps she deserved punishment for the craziness none had guessed, the questions no one had asked, the story no one had pried from her: that all of the month before she had been hallucinating with increasing sharpness a strange man. That she had dreamed and then waking-dreamed and finally seen on the streets that same smooth Indio face.
Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror. Into the asylum that offered none, the broken-springed bus roughly galloped. Over the old buildings the rain blew in long gray ropy strands cascading down the brick walls. As she was beckoned out with rough speed, she was surprised to see gulls wheeling above, far inland, as over other refuse grounds. Little was recycled here. She was human garbage carried to the dump.
TWO
The first time. Was there a once? The dreams surely began with an original; yet she had the sense, the first morning she awakened remembering, that there were more she had not remembered, a sensation of return, blurred but convincing. She lay on her back in the rutted center of the bed, the valley that made her doubly conscious of being alone. One of her braids had come unpinned and lay coiled across her throat like a warm black snake.