by Marge Piercy
“If you mean have I had a baby, yes.” She stuck out her chin.
“Was there a lot of blood?”
“I was knocked out, so how do I know?”
“Was it exciting? Did it feel sexual?”
“It hurt like hell,” Connie snapped, turning back to the wall of babies. “Were you all born from this crazy machine?”
“Almost everybody is now,” the kid said. “I have to go down to threemonth to check the solutions. I’ll be in touch. If you remember more about live bearing, I’d be feathered to hear about it.” The kid went out.
Bee closed the viewing port. “Wamponaug Indians are the source of our culture. Our past. Every village has a culture.”
The way he picked up on that question as if it had just been asked, the way a question floated in him patiently until he was ready to answer it: a memory of sweet and of jagged pain. Maybe she just had a weakness for big black men soft in the belly who moved with that massive grace, although Claud had moved differently. Because of his blindness Claud had held his head a little to the side. She had always thought of a bird. Birds turned the side of the head toward you because their eyes were on the sides, and Claud saw with his ears. “I suppose because you’re black. In my time black people just discovered a pride in being black. My people, Chicanos, were beginning to feel that too. Now it seems like it got lost again.”
Luciente started to say something but visibly checked herself.
Bee beamed, ambling toward another tank where he opened the viewing port. “I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won’t find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they’re all tall or all got big feet.” He paused, looking intently at a small embryo, fully formed and floating just at his shoulder level. “At grandcil—grand council—decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness.”
“It’s so … invented. Artificial. Are there black Irishmen and black Jews and black Italians and black Chinese?”
“Fasure, how not? When you grow up, you can stick to the culture you were raised with or you can fuse into another. But the one we were raised in usually has a … sweet meaning to us.”
“We say ‘we,’” Luciente began, “about things that happened before we were born, cause we identify with those decisions. I used to think our history was exaggerated, but I’m less sure since I time-traveled.” Luciente drew them toward the next port.
“I don’t think I want to look at any younger … babies.” The little third-month child the doctor had shown her in the basin. Her stomach lurched. “I don’t feel too good.”
“We’ll leave.” Bee took her arm. “Maybe it’s the filtered air? Grasp, the plasm is precious. Life flows through here for sixteen villages in all, the whole township.”
Outside she took a deep breath of salty air and detached herself from Bee. Claud’s sore delicate pride, like an orchid with teeth. What could a man of this ridiculous Podunk future, when babies were born from machines and people negotiated diplomatically with cows, know about how it had been to grow up in America black or brown? Pain had honed Claud keen. This man was a child by comparison. “You saying there’s no racism left? Paradise on earth, all God’s children are equal?”
“Different tribes have different rites, but god is a patriarchal concept.” Luciente took Bee’s arm and hers. “Our mems, our children, our friends include people of differing gene mixes. Our mothers also.”
“But Bee’s kids would be black. Yours would be brown.”
“My child Innocente has lighter skin than you do.” Bee stopped to admire a walk lined with rosebushes blooming in yellows and oranges and creamy whites. “There’s no genetic bond—or if there is, we don’t keep track of it.”
“Then this kid isn’t really your child?”
“I am Innocente’s mother.”
“How can men be mothers! How can some kid who isn’t related to you be your child?” She broke free and twisted away in irritation. The pastoral clutter of the place began to infuriate her, the gardens everyplace, the flowers, the damned sprightly looking chickens underfoot.
Luciente urged her along. “We’re walking Bee back to the lab. Where I’d be with the rest of our plant genetics base except for you. Bee and I work together. Maybe that’s why we’ve been sweet friends so long, twelve years already.”
“I thought it’s cause I’m too lazy to run from you the way any sane lug would. I never noticed other cores who worked in the same base stuck so long.”
“We’re so ill suited we can’t give up. Connie, apple blossom, listen to me—”
“Be on guard when Luci calls you soft names.” Bee managed to saunter more slowly than they walked and yet keep up.
“It was part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding.”
“Three! That makes no sense! Three mothers!” She thought suddenly of Three Kings Day and the Anglo Christmas carol that Angelina had learned off the TV. She could hear Angie’s fluty voice singing monotonously but with a limpid joy in monotony (the security):
We three kings of Oregon are
bearing gifts we travels a far.
Tears burned her lids. Angelina, Angelina, if you had three mothers like me, you’d be dead instead of sold off to some clean-living couple in Larchmont. They said you were lucky to be taken at four. I didn’t understand till I got out what they’d done! Lucky to be taken from me.
Angelina, child of my sore and bleeding body, child of my sad marriage that never fit right, like a pair of cheap shoes that sprouts a nail in the sole. But you fit right. The nurse said I would have to show you, but you reached right for my breast. You suckled right away. I remember how you grabbed with your small pursed mouth at my breast and started drawing milk from me, how sweet it felt. How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child. Who got that child out of a machine the way that couple, white and rich, got my flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money. What do they know of motherhood?
She was sitting against the wall on the porch, tears trickling from her eyes. Had pain broken the hallucination? She did not care. She hated them, the bland bottleborn monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a litter of puppies without the stigmata of race and sex.
SIX
“Now listen, ladies,” Mrs. Richard said, wagging her fat forefinger. “None of you are getting off this ward till you tell me who stuck that dope behind the radiator. And I mean it!”
It was an aspirin box of dope that Glenda had got from her boyfriend on the men’s side. Glenda was married and so was her boyfriend, but nobody counted that against them. Outside, it would end; they would be stuck back in the frame they had fallen from, with a new glue of fear to hold them there. Romances between patients reminded Connie of grade school affairs, a matter of catching a glimpse at a high window, sending a note on a cart, holding hands briefly in the common day room, touching for an instant at group therapy, dancing together at a Christmas party. Sometimes patients with grounds privileges were rumored to fuck in a storage room or behind a hedge, but that was mostly fantasy.
For staff, it was different.
Mrs. Richard and Nurse Wright reminded her of grade school teachers anyhow. Her first school hadn’t been that bad. She had gone with Luis hand in hand. All the children had been Mexican and the school within walking distance. No, the grade school she remembered with a shudder was her Chicago grade school.
“Say sit down.”
“Seet down.”
“Sit down. Now say it correctly, Consoola.”
“Seet down.”
Luis had mastered that Anglo sound and taught it to the rest of them, hitting them with his fists until they said it as he did. Luis punching her in the arm was better than the white teacher looking at her with that bored knowledge that she would fail and fail again to say the sound that seemed to have been invented to shame her. Luis did not teach them to say “sit.” Luis’s word of choice for his finally successful lesson was “shit.”
“Can I go to the bathroom? Teacher, I got to go.” Here she approached the nursing station and begged for a scrap of paper, a pencil, a cigarette, a light, a chance for one word with the doctor, permission to make a phone call. Everything but being tied down drugged blind or wheeled off to electroshock was a privilege. A job off the ward, a chance to take a walk, a candy bar.
One of the privileges was a trip to the beauty shop, where they made up women her age to look exactly like women her age made up. She wouldn’t come out of there looking like Mrs. Polcari. Last time she had been released, the beauty shop had done a job on her like Dolly’s mother, Carmel, did on the Puerto Rican women who came to her to be stuffed and cooked for weddings, important parties. She had looked ten years out of style, covered with funny wry curls and with a quarter inch of mask emphasizing every line, with green eyelids and a bright orange mouth and thickened lashes caked with mascara on the front of her like new awnings on a pawnshop window.
When she had arrived at the welfare hotel where they had her for the first months—junkies in the halls and ten kids to a room with a stopped-up sink—she was greeted by that garish face of an elderly doll lurid with the grime of traveling. Stretched out on the bed, she imagined Claud’s ghost touching her skin with his knowing fingers, those fingers faster than the rest of him and ending in sensitive bulbs. How he would have complained about what was smeared over her cheeks.
“You feel like satin pillows. Like the satin sheets the king of the pimps sleep on. Gonna spend this whole Sunday just lollin around, just rootin around grabbin myself handfuls of that good stuff.”
Claud made love as if he had all the time in the world. He might not feel like it for a week, he might disappear, he might feel too low and mean. But when he came to it, he took his sweet time. He loved up every bit of her. He would stroke the silky skin on the underside of her arms until her breasts would begin to burn, he would play with her breasts with light teasing and then he would take great handfuls and nuzzle and suck, until her belly ached with wanting. He would rub his thing against her languidly, slowly, slowly he would slip in and then ease out, slip in and ease out until she was thrusting him in herself with her hand. After he came, he would pause a little but he would stay hard. Then he would go on and go on. He would be so patient and so deliberate with her, so slow and easy, that she could give herself up to loving him back, to enjoying his coming, to the feeling of their skins touching, knowing that she would have her pleasure opening out full and slow in her.
She had gone into a bar on Second Avenue—one of the few bars with a mixed black and Puerto Rican clientele—looking for Eddie, who’d stopped paying child support. She was sitting at a table alone, low in mind, feeling she must look as if she wanted to be picked up. She had noticed Claud at the back having a drink with some friends, just as she warily noticed every man who came and went. She held a newspaper propped in front of her and nursed a warm beer, hoping that Eddie or one of his compadres would walk through the door.
After some banter with the bartender, Claud started to play his saxophone: blues, spirituals, some popular songs. She was glad. He played all right, but she was glad because she had something to be doing sitting there: she could watch the big black man with the opaque glasses playing saxophone and she could be beating time to music, and only from the corner of her eye keep a watch on the door. Not till Claud finished and passed the hat did she realize he was blind. That took her off guard, so that when he came back to her table, returned the quarter she had dropped in the hat and asked if he could sit down and buy her a beer, she had agreed—not to be rude, because his blindness took her off guard.
This rotten place, it gave her nothing to do and too much time to do it in. Here she was brooding on Claud again. She couldn’t take it. Remembering him just cut her to bleeding hunks. Dead.
Ten-thirty. She had been up for four hours and the big event had been waiting in line for breakfast for half an hour. On the ward it was a bad day. Mrs. Richard found the sixteen-year-old black girl, Sylvia, leaning against the radiator with the side of her face burned. She was dragged off to seclusion, numb with drugs, and whatever they did to her would not include treating the burn.
Then old Mrs. Stein came out of the toilet with shit rubbed in her hair, and while one of the attendants was dragging her back in, Sharma suddenly began to punch Glenda. “You goddamn whore! I know you’re carrying on with my husband. You both think I’m stupid! Whore of Babylon! You’re doing it with all the doctors. Everybody’s talking about you, whore! You do it with all of them!”
By eleven-thirty half the seclusion rooms on the ward were full and the patients lined up for an extra-heavy dose of tranks, given in liquid form that burned the throat raw and made her hoarse. She could feel minds stirring like poplars in a storm all through the ward, and occasionally a brittle branch would break off and crash to the floor. They were angry about being kept in, with none of the minute breaks in routine to look forward to that made a life on G-2. She sat on the floor in a place where she could catch a glimpse of a whole window full of nothing but leaves if she held her head just right. If she sat at the right angle, she couldn’t see the other buildings and the green could fill her eyes.
The medication was dragging her down, filling her mind with cotton fluff and odd hot pieces of hallucination and memory. Her head felt swollen: the heads of those embryos floating in the brooder, those oversized knowing heads floating upside down behind glass. She wanted to sleep, but patients were not allowed to lie down during the daytime.
Finally an event: time to line up for lunch. They shuffled into line, they wandered about as the attendants made them stand straight. They waited and waited for the door to unlock. All the wards in G building went to lunch downstairs, but on a staggered schedule. Glenda, with a face swollen from Sharma’s attack, came and stood next to her. Waited to see if she would speak.
Connie asked, “Does your face hurt?”
“She never does. All the best plastic.”
“I know Sharma didn’t really mean what she said.”
“Something to tell you. She went along the hall—the attendants took her.”
She waited. She knew Glenda was talking about herself and had something pressing to say.
“Come on now,” Mrs. Richard was braying. She was afraid of the patients and they all sensed it. “Close up that line. Come on now! A straight line!”
“She saw your friend with her feet sticking out.”
“Sybil?” She immediately flashed on her body under a sheet, the long auburn hair flying out. “What were they doing with Sybil?”
“Taking her to be burned. Saint Joan. She told me to tell you she was sorry about your friend.”
“Shock? They were taking Sybil for shock?”
“They burn it out. Then they fill it with cement.” Glenda peered into her face, then fled away farther back into the line.
She wanted to lie down. She wanted to crawl under a table. Would Sybil know her afterward? Sometimes after shock inmates didn’t remember friends or lovers. She felt low and mean. Sybil had had shock before. “
They’ve done everything but hang me,” Sybil said. Sybil would fight them; but they were knocking her out, they were running the savage bolts through her soul. Sybil unconscious was merely another helpless woman.
Deliberately, quietly she got out of line and sat down on her cot. Mrs. Richard trotted after her, her small mouth pursing up in a pout of alarm. “Mrs. Ramos, get back in line. It’s time for your lunch.”
“Why should I stand there for twenty minutes waiting?” She tried to speak with quiet dignity but the medication slurred her tongue. “The medication makes me dizzy. I’ll wait here.”
She read fear in the eyes of Mrs. Richard, who hated the patients, whose hands shook slightly whenever she had to touch one of them, who gave out a sour stench of fear that roused Connie like the smell of gas escaping from the open cocks of a stove. “Mrs. Ramos, you’re confused. You’re very confused. It’s time to line up for your lunch.”
“Why do we have to stand around? It’s just garbage when we get it. Who wants to stand in line for garbage like that?” She tried to speak distinctly but was disgusted to hear her thick tongue slurring the words as if she were drunk.
“Come along now! Get back in line. You’re not cooperating! All the others are waiting in line for their lunch.”
Actually Glenda had stepped out and was wandering among the cots. Connie waited to see what Mrs. Richard would do, expecting her to call the nurse and bundle her back in line. But her little rebellion had to be punished. They threw her into seclusion. Lying on the floor, she felt like a fool. But how could she go down to lunch like a sheep while Sybil burned?
She slept awhile, hot fitful sleep. The room stank of old shit. She did not look around for fear of finding it. She banged on the door, hoping they would come and let her use the bathroom, but no one appeared.
She was sitting in the Boca de Oro, Comidas Chinas y Criollas, a small Cuban-Chinese restaurant with family-sized booths on 116th Street. She and Claud liked to go there. Angie was never much of an eater and in restaurants she inclined more to whining than to eating. But Angie liked the Boca de Oro, partly for the plain buttered noodles the waiter would serve her without making a big scene, and partly for a mural she liked. Connie told Claud he was lucky he didn’t have to look at it: prancing señoritas in towering mantillas, with a bull that resembled a fat dog about to sneeze.