Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  “Person was bothering me. It’s my dying.” Sappho lay breathing hoarsely. “Besides, will make per feel better. You’ll see.”

  “Who was Louise-Michel?” Jackrabbit asked.

  “Second lover. Good friend. Person had long hair too, but person was strong … . Died diving accident … . I should not have taken a pillowfriend so late. It was vanity. Had little to give … . Same with Swallow. Too late to put in for another child … . Vanity.”

  “Not true,” Jackrabbit said. “The power in you has stayed strong. Bolivar has much of you inside that I love.”

  “I have made some good tales, no?”

  “They will outlive you many generations,” White Oak said from the foot of the cot.

  “Luciente!” Connie tugged at her elbow. “If she’s dying, why is she out in the rain?”

  “But Sappho is under a tent. Person wants to die beside the river.”

  “But why isn’t there a doctor? If she was in a hospital, she might not die, Luciente. She might live longer.”

  “But why not die?” Luciente stared at her, with incomprehension on her broad peasant face. “Sappho is eighty-two. A good time to give back.”

  “You’re just going to let her lie here in the chilly air until she dies?”

  “But why not?” Luciente scowled with confusion. “Everybody gives back. We all carry our death at the core—if you don’t know that, your life is hollow, no? This is a good death. I hope Swallow gets—Now Sappho’s got me doing that. Person’s so wicked and mischievous; Sappho insists today on using Bolivar’s childhood name.”

  “Auntie Sappho!” A little kid was tugging at her slack hand. “I come to say goodbye.”

  “Who is it?” Sappho’s eyes were shut and she did not open them. “What chipmunk nibbles at my hand?”

  “It’s me—Luna. Won’t you tell us stories anymore?”

  “Never! Somebody else. But not like me!” A light spasm shook her and left her with her mouth slightly opened.

  “In hundreds, in thousands of children your stories have made strong patterns,” White Oak said. “Your stories have altered our dreams.”

  Sappho did not speak for a long time. Then she said, “Take me nearer the river. I can’t hear it.”

  Jackrabbit and White Oak carried her cot between them. White Oak asked, “Sappho, old darling, is this near enough?”

  Sappho did not answer directly but twisted her head. “Take me nearer. I can’t hear it.”

  They carried her cot as near as they dared, but still she complained. “Per hearing is gone,” White Oak said. “Lift Sappho carefully and we’ll dip per fingers in. Person will understand.”

  Jackrabbit picked her up gently, with grave care, and then slowly knelt, still holding her, while White Oak brought Sappho’s hand down to the water and held it in the current. The fingers unclenched, the hand slowly opened. “Ah,” she muttered. “The tide is going out.”

  “Bolivar’s not going to make it,” White Oak said softly, although Sappho could no longer hear.

  Jackrabbit sputtered into his kenner, “Bolivar! Sappho is dying now!”

  “Ten minutes, comrade, ten lousy minutes!”

  Aspen returned with her hair cut off. She knelt beside the cot, where Jackrabbit had stretched Sappho’s husk of body. Understanding after a moment that Sappho could no longer hear her, she pressed her shorn hair into the old woman’s lax hand. Sappho’s hand clasped about the hair and again her mouth twitched in a faint grimace of smile. “Aspen, child … plant a mulberry tree for the birds that love fruit.”

  “Sappho’s not gonna last till Bolivar comes.” A woman’s low voice with the penetration of something worked to a lethal point. “Aspen, sit by that pole. Hush your crying—you cloud my cone.”

  “Erzulia, you should have come sooner!” Luciente spoke with reproach. “You’re not in regalia?”

  “Person did not send for me. I come only for the death. In respect. Sappho’s far, far into the past, the old loving.”

  White Oak said, “Erzulia, can you hold Sappho till Bolivar comes?”

  “Scamp to the floater pad. Put out a speed warning and bring Bolivar by zoomer. I gonna cone hard and try.” Erzulia did not watch to see if she was obeyed but sat on the cot’s edge and took Sappho’s fragile head in her long-fingered black hands. Erzulia’s hair was put up in dozens of narrow braids woven into a beehive on her high-domed head. She dressed in a long folded-over skirt of a blue cloth batiked into a pattern of snakes and flowers, leaving her breasts and lithe powerful shoulders bare. Her large eyes glazed over as she grasped Sappho and sweat started out on her broad forehead. Still, rigid, she sat with Sappho’s head clasped in her fingers. Sweat broke out and trickled past her cheeks and sweat ran over her conical outpointing breasts, sweat rose from her in a heat shimmer as if from the body of a long-distance runner.

  Luciente spoke softly to her kenner. “Bee, you should come to the tent. Erzulia holds Sappho by mind lock till Bolivar comes.”

  Bee’s voice said, “Can’t come now. In the middle of a test run. I’ll set my kenner for alert when Bolivar lands and run all the way.”

  “Watch out, then! Bolivar always overschedules. To do too much oneself all the time is a kind of arrogance. That’s why person is late again.”

  “Luciente! If person were early, you’d read arrogance into that, Bolivar thinking Sappho could not die without per. Till when.”

  “It all seems … funny to me,” Connie said. “A bunch of amateurs.”

  “Who’s professional at dying? We each get only one turn, no practice.” Luciente put an arm around her waist.

  “In my family in Mexico, people died this way. But in the city poor people die in hospitals. The attendants put up a screen. The nurse keeps an eye on you if she isn’t too hassled … . My mother died in the hospital in Chicago … so scared. Before when she was in the hospital, they took out her womb.”

  “We don’t do much taking out. When we do, we regrow. We program the local cells. Slow healing but better after.”

  “I haven’t met any doctors. How come there’s no doctor?”

  Luciente pointed. “Look! Erzulia is a healer.”

  “A witch doctor!”

  “You mean that as an insult? Erzulia works in the hospital in Cranberry. They have the hospital for this township.”

  “What does she do in the hospital?”

  “Oh, person teaches people to heal themselves. Does surgery. Manipulating, pain easing, bone knitting. Erzulia’s skilled! Person has trained hundreds of healers and pioneered new methods of bone knitting and pain easing. There’s a way of setting pelvic fractures in the aged named after per.”

  She looked at the tall black woman sitting cross-legged on the cot with sweat pouring down her muscular arms and big breasts and she could not see her as a doctor in a white coat in a big hospital. “How can anybody be into voodoo and medicine? It doesn’t make sense!”

  “Each makes a different kind of sense, no? How not?”

  She was lying in bed with the doctor going rounds and cracking jokes for the amusement of his residents over the bodies of the women patients, mostly black and Puerto Rican, whom some female troubles had cast up on this hard white beach, this glaring sterile reef. They were handed releases to sign, carefully vague so that the residents could get practice in the operations they needed. In the bed next to her was a nineteen-year-old black woman on welfare who had been admitted for an abortion in the fourteenth week and been given a hysterectomy instead of a saline abortion. The woman had gone into withdrawal shock, which made her a quiet patient. Nobody bothered about her as she stared at the ceiling. The women with syphilis were treated to obscene jokes. All the doctors ever said to any complaint was, “We’re giving you some medicine that will take care of that.” They did pelvics and rectals seven or eight times in a row on interesting cases, so all the doctors and residents could get a look, all the time explaining nothing. “You’re a very sick little girl,” the doctor said to a for
ty-year-old woman whose intestines they had accidentally perforated in removing an embedded IUD.

  Anger began to blur the scene and she moved closer to Luciente for support, feeling the ground solidify again beneath her. Suddenly excitement blew like a wind through the tent. “Bolivar is down,” Jackrabbit cried out. A bell began to toll.

  “What’s the bell?” she asked.

  “For death,” Luciente said.

  “But she isn’t dead yet!”

  “But person soon will be.” Jackrabbit frowned. “Pepper and Salt, it’s not always bad to die, is it? Who’d want to be built of steel and go on living after all the people born in your brooder in your time, all your mems and mates and mothers, all your sweet friends, had long gone down?”

  Connie snorted and turned away. The bell tolled through the damp air in waves of heavy sound. Slowly more people began to drift into the tent, keeping away from the side toward the floater pad. Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak hopped out and a person—the voice had been male, she thought—about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia’s, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He wore a knee-length … she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias.

  Luciente nodded curtly as he swept by. “Erzulia has been holding Sappho for you.”

  “Why not you? You could have!” he rapped out.

  “Not with the person from the past in tow.”

  “Ummmm.” Briefly he glanced at Connie, his skeptical eyes pale gray and cold as rock. Then he rushed to the cot, embraced Jackrabbit briefly and then put his hands on Sappho’s head beside Erzulia’s hands. After a moment Erzulia seemed to come to and slowly her grip loosened. She rolled off the cot onto the ground. As Aspen supported her, Bee came forward.

  “I’ll take Zuli now. Person’s weary and must sleep.” Gently Bee rose with her slung over his shoulder and carried her off along the river path toward the bridge downstream, whistling softly as he padded off.

  Everyone had drawn back to leave Bolivar with Sappho. He held her head with his fingers flexing, moving, and for the first time in a quarter of an hour, her lips groped to form words. “Good … Here! Good,” was all she said and then in a hoarse shudder she expelled her breath and was still.

  Bolivar rose. “The person who was Sappho is dead.”

  Jackrabbit spoke to his kenner, cermoniously repeating, “The person who was Sappho is dead.”

  The bell tolled more slowly. Barbarossa dodged through the gathering people, carrying a plank. He laid it on the ground and Luciente moved forward to help Jackrabbit and Bolivar lift Sappho from the cot and place her on the plank. White Oak and Aspen, shaken with weeping, turned to each other to embrace. Bolivar’s knuckles were clenched white on Jackrabbit’s arm. The freckles on his hand stood out like the blotches on aged skin. White Oak steadily stroked Aspen’s cropped head.

  Jackrabbit was one of the four people who lifted a corner of the plank and began to carry Sappho into the filmy strands of rain. Aspen’s thick grown hair lay like a bouquet of shiny grasses wedged under the small claw hands folded on Sappho’s narrow chest. Aspen, White Oak, and Bolivar stumbled along behind the body, White Oak walking with her arm around Aspen, Bolivar going along ahead of them in stiff dignity, as if the only joints in his body were in his bare knees. Luciente fell in behind them with Connie. “Where are we going? To the undertaker?”

  “The family, the lovers, the closest friends sit with the body to loosen their grief. After supper everybody in the village will gather for a wake in the big meeting hall where we politic, watch holies, hold indoor rituals.”

  “When is the funeral?”

  “Funeral?” Luciente consulted the kenner. “We have no such. All night we stay up together speaking of Sappho. Then at dawn we dig a grave and lay the body in. Then we plant the mulberry tree Sappho wanted. Someone will go to the tree nursery in Marion for one. Then before we go to bed, we visit the brooder and signal the intent to begin a baby.”

  “Right away? That’s heartless. One in, one out!”

  “Why heartless? In a week traditionally, when we are caught up on work and sleep, we discuss into which family the child should be born and who are to be mothers. We begin by meditating on the dead.”

  “It just seems … cheap somehow. No funeral, no undertaker. Just shovel them in.”

  “Connie, your old way appears barbaric to us, trying to keep the rotting body. To pretend we are not made of elements ancient as the earth, that we do not owe those elements back to the web of all living … For us a good death is one come in the fullness of age, without much pain and in clear mind. A full life is a used life! Person should be tired … . You should sit in on the wake with us! You’ll see. It feels beautiful, it feels good. You’ll see what beauty Jackrabbit makes—person and Bolivar spectacle together. Bolivar is a ritual maker. I myself will perform tonight with my drums—which we should scamp over and get after we set up at the meetinghouse.”

  “Something is wrong!” She felt a threat shaking her. “Let go, Luciente. Let me go!”

  “With haste, Connie!” Luciente stepped back and Connie faded through into the chair in the dim day room. Nurse Wright was slapping her to and fro till her jaw ached.

  “Please … don’t!”

  “Thought you’d … withdrawn.”

  “I feel real funny today. I think I slept or passed out. The medication … I felt real funny after I took it today.”

  Nurse Wright was a motherly woman in her fifties, but overworked. She had given up and just drifted along in the ward, leaning heavily on her attendants. Connie liked her but felt she couldn’t be relied on. Nurse Wright peered into her eyes. “Ummm. I’ll mention it to the doctor. Maybe you’re on the wrong dosage.”

  “I think I’m kind of sensitive to drugs, maybe,” she said meekly. She was still shuddering with the force of the transition. Her heart pounded wildly and Nurse Wright, taking her by the wrist, pursed her lips at the pulse.

  “I’ll mention it to the doctor. You may be on too high a dosage, or maybe not. He’ll say in the end. Now, on your feet.”

  She rose shakily. “I feel funny.”

  “Come along now. It’s time to get in line for your supper.”

  NINE

  “They’re moving us all on a special ward,” Skip said. “Here in the medical building.”

  “Who says?” Connie asked. Rumors had galloped back and forth through their little group for two weeks.

  “Fats, the friendly attendant. He says pretty soon we’ll all be moved onto a ward fixed up for us.”

  “Men and women both? A locked ward?” Even if it was locked, at least she could get to be on the same ward as Sybil again.

  “I think locked.” Skip pulled a long face. “They don’t act like they’re fixing to turn us loose. I got a funny letter from my father, saying they’re real proud I’ve been picked to be in a pilot project for special attention, and they hope I’ll cooperate and get well. That we’re lucky to have such a famous doctor, written up in Time magazine.”

  “Redding?”

  “The same. But they’re even more bowled over by a Dr. Argent, who’s head of some institute.”

  “Dr. Argent? There’s nobody around here like that.”

  “Beats me. What bothers me is that the hospital’s been after them to sign a permission for something.”

  She hugged herself, trying to summon up the nerve. Skip had his own clothes, he always seemed to have a little cash, even cigarettes. “Skip … could you loan me a little to call my niece in New York City? I haven’t had a visit since I got here. I know if I talk to her, I can get her to bring me some money and some of my clothes. They’
re ashamed, and they’re pretending I don’t exist since they sent me up.”

  “My folks guilt-trip over sending me to the state hospital. They don’t come either, but they deposit an allowance.” Skip fished out a pouch he wore under his shirt. He had made it in Occupational Therapy. She longed for OT privileges but couldn’t get them because Mrs. Richard had put down bad things in her record. OT was just an hour every other week (the men went one week and the women the next) playing with clay or cutting out leather, but it was something to do. Of course you couldn’t really relax because the OT had to justify her job by writing a report too (“patient withdrawn, made woman with overdeveloped sexual features”), but it was some kind of change. Skip stuck the pouch back under his shirt and slid a dollar into her hand. “Hope it does you something.”

  She hid the dollar in the secret compartment under the bottom flap of her shopping-bag-within-a-shopping-bag—both wearing dangerously thin and mended twice on the handles. “Thanks, Skip. Listen, if I can get her, she’ll come through. She has to.”

  “They don’t like us, you know, We’re lepers … . You know what the last experiment was they pulled on me? They stuck electrodes on my prick and showed me dirty pictures, and when I got a hard-on about men, they shocked me. Whatever they’re into here, it can’t be that painful, right?”

  As they sat on the bench waiting for Acker, the denim psychologist, to give them some new test, she felt better. She had a secret key to the world, if only she got permission to use the phone that night.

  The time they could make phone calls was fixed: after supper, before roll call. She waited in line to ask permission.

  Sharma asked, “Please can I have some toilet paper?”

  “Again? What are you doing in the bathroom, Sharma?”

  “It’s the medication. It makes me have to pee all the time, Nurse, honest.”

  “It doesn’t do that to any other patient. Why would it do that to you? If you didn’t play with yourself, you wouldn’t have to pass urine every five minutes.” Two sheets of toilet paper doled out.

  “Please can I make a phone call?” Sylvia asked.