by Marge Piercy
“Who do you want to call?”
The black woman shifted her feet. “My boyfriend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Duster.”
The nurse was still waiting.
Reluctantly Sylvia added, “Duster MacPhee. He’s in Yonkers.”
“You have the money?”
“Right here, I sure do.”
“Okay. The men’s attendant is on duty in the hall.” The nurse acted out permitting a great favor.
“I need a couple of aspirin. I have a terrible headache tonight.” A new patient, Mrs. Souza, held out her hand impatiently.
“Your medication is listed on your chart, and it doesn’t include aspirin,” the night nurse said.
“But I have a headache. I don’t need any … medication. Drugs. Just plain, ordinary aspirin.”
“You’re a doctor now, to prescribe for yourself, Mrs. Souza? Is that what you’re doing in the hospital—thinking you’re a doctor?”
“I’m not asking for morphine, Nurse. Just aspirin! Like we sell in the drugstore I own with my husband, by sizes up to one thousand! Aspirin!”
“Sweetie, you may or you may not own a drugstore, but you’re contused now. You aren’t the one who prescribes for the patients in here. Now go sit down! Now! Or I’ll have you sedated.”
Mrs. Souza could not believe it. She turned to Connie, next in line. “I was only asking for plain aspirin, for my headache! I’ll tell the doctor about this.”
“Better sit down,” she said softly. She could not risk saying more. She stepped past Mrs. Souza and in her best beggar’s manner pleaded, “Please, I would really appreciate it if I could call my niece Dolly Campos in New York City?”
“You have the money?”
She showed her the precious dollar, cashed into quarters and dimes from Mrs. Stein. “See? Enough to call her. Please. I would appreciate it, Nurse, ever so much.”
“I sure would like to know where you got that, Mrs. Ramos,”
“It’s mine. See? Please.” Again she held out her hand with the precious coins hot in her palm. “I would really like to talk with my niece, Dolly Campos, in Manhattan. You have her on the list of family, if you want to check it.”
“Go ahead. Though I’d like to know what you did for that money. Did you bum it in dimes?”
A man was talking on the pay phone already and four others were ahead of her, including Sylvia. They could all hear, although the man tried to hold his mouth close to the receiver and cup his other hand around it. Still, when his wife could hear him, they could hear him too.
“So how come you haven’t brought it? I’m not angry … . I can’t talk louder, baby … . So sell the goddamned house before they foreclose! Never mind what your brother said … . Now listen … . I’m not yelling! … Listen, so call a real estate man—that’s what they’re for … . Never mind what he says, the commission comes out of the price. If they don’t sell it, they don’t get anything, Margaret. Listen to me!”
“Hurry up, you,” the kid next in line said. “I got to call by eight o’clock. You been on ten minutes!”
The whole line wriggled with excitement, anxiety, the dreadful force of focusing all longing on that black object waiting to eat their precious coins. The attendant leaned smoking against the far wall, idly flirting with a woman patient giggling in short nervous bursts, her eyes fixed on his shoes. Dolly might not be home. She might be with a john. Geraldo might be with her, and he would hang up. To get Geraldo would be worse than not to get anyone, because that would alert him to Connie’s trying to reach her niece. If she could only call in the morning!
The kid was talking to his mother and father at once, presumably on different extensions. He was about fifteen, with acne run wild in the hospital, a tubby build, hands that shook on the phone. It depressed her to see a kid with hands that shook. She stared at the greasy texture of the wall opposite, like the skin of a dirty old lizard. Geraldo’s sharp lizard boots. He would be there, of course, he would answer the phone. She could try to disguise her voice. If he answered and she hung up immediately, maybe her coins would come back. No, that didn’t work; once he answered, the money was lost and the chance blown.
The kid left the phone dangling and shuffled off. “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he mumbled and slammed headfirst into the opposite wall. The attendant seized him by the scruff.
Sylvia grabbed the phone for her call. Behind them five others were waiting. Sylvia dialed her number. It was busy. Her face would not accept that. She dialed again. It was busy again. Without a word she went to the end of the line to wait another turn. Her face was wondering who her boyfriend was talking to. Her face was naming women, her face was inventing women he was about to run over to see, hop into bed with, love in total forgetfulness of her.
Connie fumbled at the coins, dropped a dime, stomped it and scooped it up in blurred haste before she could lose her place in line. She dialed deliberately, not too slow, not too fast. The number rang. Third ring. Picked up. Her heart rose like an express elevator.
“Hello, this is Dolly Campos’ residence. I am busy right now but I will call you back as soon as I am free. Please state your name and number, and I will get back to you just as soon as I can. That’s a promise! Love from Dolly. You have sixty seconds after the tone.”
She could not comprehend for a moment and then she realized it was a recording machine. She said quickly, for she had already lost seconds, “Dolly, my baby, it’s me, Connie, in the hospital. Please, come to see me! This weekend or next. Please! Bring me a little money and clothes! Write me. Please, Dolly! Don’t forget me!” It beeped again before she could get in “Don’t forget me,” and she spoke to dead air. She hung up the phone and drifted away. A machine. Across the hall the attendant was muttering in the ear of the woman patient, who fidgeted and shook her head limply.
What was Dolly doing with a machine? She must still be in the life. That way could she pick and choose? Fat chance. A machine! She had worked Skip for a dollar to speak to a rotten machine.
Friday she got a letter that had been opened and read, pawed through, inspected, and passed upon by staff, but still it was hers. From Dolly, in English. The staff took an extra week on Spanish; maybe Dolly remembered, or more likely she could not write Spanish.
Saturday her excitement strummed like a wire. She noticed every visitor. So that was Sharma’s husband, the one she was always accusing other women of sleeping with—that awkward sleepy-faced middle-aged boy who kept gaping around him but never looked into any of their faces. Introduced to him as she passed—Sharma was proud of having her husband visit—she tried to meet his gaze but he stared unwaveringly into her torso, breast high. She mistrusted him instantly. Yes, she felt he had another woman already, who cooked his breakfast and laundered his shirts and lay in his bed. She could feel that coming off him. Sharma knew too. Connie fled.
Weekends were bad unless a patient had visitors. The locked door of the ward hardly budged, not for the unpaid labor called industrial therapy, not for OT, not for group therapy, not for the doctor on his galloping visit.
The evening medication did not work on her. Her adrenaline hummed in the dark ward like a generator and it burned off the Thorazine and the Seconal like fuel. She was dreadfully alert and bored. How many, many hours must wear away before dawn could stain the high windows? How many more hours of the day must flow, a river of lard, over her before Dolly would appear? Dolly must be persuaded to start trying to get her out of here, before Luis signed whatever release the doctors were after. But don’t push Dolly; to reestablish contact was everything. Everybody outside had freedom and power by contrast. The poorest most strung out fucked up worked over brought down junkie in Harlem had more freedom, more place, richer choices, sweeter dignity than the most privileged patient in the whole bughouse.
She opened her mind to Luciente and waited. Nothing happened. Time crawled like ants over her clenched eyelids and nothing stirred. Hey, Luciente! she thought. Oye, wh
ere the hell are you? Don’t shut me out! She imagined Luciente in bed with … Bee?
A sluggish presence eventually touched her. “Mmmm, it’s me—Luciente. A moment.”
“Am I interrupting?”
“Not expecting you … silly with wine and marijuana. Wait. Will clear and return.” The contact faded.
Guiltily she turned on her cot Butting into Luciente’s pleasure. At the same time a dour envy lapped her mind. Saturday night was a big night everywhere, even in the future. Everybody was having a good time, everybody in the world, in the universe, everybody but her, alone and bored. Everybody was loving everybody else, everybody was drinking wine and smoking dope and dancing and sitting on each other’s laps and whispering in each other’s ears. Everybody was kissing their children good night and tucking them in and going back to the guests at the long table laid out with the remains of roast suckling pig, lechón asado, as at Dolly’s wedding, everybody but her.
“Here I am,” Luciente said. “Come through now. I’m coning.”
“Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. Go back to your party.”
“Why shouldn’t you come? I didn’t think of it, but … why not? Everybody here says it would be lovely to invite you.” Luciente gave what felt like an abrupt impatient brutal tug on her and she was clutching Luciente by the upper arms and standing in a warm night lit by floating bulbs a few feet over their heads, lights like big pastel fireflies, some steady, some winking on and off as fireflies do, but all with that cool light.
A rabble of kids ran by screaming and laughing, carrying streamers that clittered and clattered in the noise of their running, children in bright butterfly costumes with their faces painted. Two dogs chased them, barking, one with ribbons plaited into its high plumy tail.
“We’re entertaining Cranberry. We won a decision about the dipper routes.”
She stepped back to examine Luciente, who was wearing a backless dress of a translucent crimson chiffon that tied behind her neck. The skirt was cut diagonally, quite short on one side and medium length on the other. “I’ve never seen you in a dress.”
“It’s my flimsy for the evening—Jackrabbit designed it … . A flimsy is a once-garment for festivals. Made out of algae, natural dyes. We throw them in the compost afterward. Not like costumes. Costumes circulate—like the robe Bee wore for naming? Costumes you sign out of the library for once or for a month, then they go back for someone else. But flimsies are fancies for once only. Part of the pleasure of festivals is designing flimsies—outrageous, silly, ones that disguise you, ones in which you will be absolutely gorgeous and desired by everybody in the township!”
“That must be what yours is for.”
Luciente threw up her hands. “At a festival, why not be looked at?”
“What about me? Can you dress me up?”
“I don’t have a flimsy for you.” Luciente looked grief-stricken. Then she snapped her fingers. “All is running good. You put on Red Star’s flimsy. Red Star ordered it but that person had an accident picking cherries and is healing at Cranberry. We’ll get per flimsy from the presser for you.”
Luciente scooped her along and they dodged through groups wandering the paths of the village, people in wild and bright, in delicate and fanciful flimsies, carrying wine bottles and passing joints and eating small cakes that left a scent of spice on the air, trailing flowers in leis and in hair and beards, playing on flutes and recorders and guitars and stringed instruments strange and twangy, high and shimmery in their sound, beating on drums and sets of drums and carrying along objects that sputtered sound and light and scent.
The rooms of the children’s house glittered and footsteps echoed down the stairways, laughter and shrieking flew out of every crevice. Adults and children in their flimsies played a game of catch with floating objects that moved in slow-motion S’s. In a room full of tools and devices Luciente addressed a machine. “Produce the flimsy ordered by Red Star.”
Out of the slot a garment slowly protruded, like a paper towel feeding itself from a roll. Luciente grabbed it and shook it out. “Here! Put it on.”
“Here?” She glanced at the busy hall.
“I’ll turn my back,” Luciente said with exaggerated patience, and shrugged to the walls.
The garment was a jiggling thing made of small bubbles, weightless and loosely bound together so that they swayed and bounced and gathered the light as she moved. The garment lay lightly upon her shoulders but did not touch her body elsewhere. She felt very naked under it.
“That’s clever.” Luciente eyed the flimsy, circling her. “Marvelous the way it shivers and moves. You backed into luck.”
“It isn’t … transparent?”
“Transparent? Hardly at all. Come!”
In the fooder many of the panes had been removed so the breeze off the river could blow through the dining room, where small groups still sat picking at the remains of the meal, gossiping and smoking and drinking. One table was singing together in a foreign language, beating time on the tabletop.
“What did you have?” she asked with the passion for food of the institutionalized.
“Would you like leftovers? Of course. I’ll set up a plate.”
A cold cucumber soup flavored with mint. Slices of a dark rich meat not familiar to her in a sauce tasting of port, dollops of a root vegetable like yams but less sweet and more nutty—maybe squash? Luciente had told her they bred squashes here. A salad of greens with egg-garlic dressing. Something rubbery, pickled, hot as chili with a strange musky taste. Young chewy red wine.
“Remember, this won’t nourish you,” Luciente said mournfully, stealing a taste from her plate. “The bread is gone. We bake it fresh daily. Was a graham fruit bread and every bit was gobbled.”
“Who cooks? What is this meat?” she asked between bites.
“Roast goose. We take turns. Hawk—the person who was Innocente, remember?—and I spit-roasted the geese. By rotation every night we have a chef and four assistants.”
“Who cleans up?”
“Mechanically done. Nobody wants to wash dishes.”
“In my time neither. Does it really work?”
“Better than people, more patient. For washing dishes, we are willing to spend precious energy.”
“Couldn’t a machine cook too?”
“Fasure. But not inventively. To be a chef is like mothering: you must volunteer, you must feel called. Myself, I have no gift and only help in the kitchen. But Bee is a chef and at the next feast, person will make the menu and direct—the feast of July nineteenth, date of Seneca Equal Rights Convention, beginning women’s movement. Myself, I play Harriet Tubman. I say a great speech—Ain’t I a woman?—that I give just before I lead the slaves to revolt and sack the Pentagon, a large machine producing radiation on the Potomac—a military industrial machine?”
“Oh, is that how it happened?” she said. “In what century was that battle?”
“Grasp, that’s the essence of it. History gets telescoped a little. The kids get restless if the ritual runs too long. They like best the part where they sack the Pentagon. Everybody joins in and then at the bottom are little honey cakes with quotes from revolutionary women baked in them and stories of their lives, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Then we all go party.”
“That’s only two weeks away. Do you have a big holiday every two weeks?”
“We have around eighteen regular holidays, maybe another ten little ones, and then the feasts when we win or lose a decision and when we break production norms. We like holidays—a time to remember heroines and heros, to loose tensions, to have a good time, to praise the history that leads to us—”
“Like Harriet Tubman sacking the Pentagon?”
“Zo, that does body vital ideas in the struggle … . The history you people celebrate—all kings and presidents and Columbus discovered a conveniently empty country already discovered by a lot of people who happened to be living here—was just as legendary … . Did you enjoy the food
?”
“You eat well here anyhow.”
“Very important! Enough food, good food, nourishing food. We care a lot that all have that. Nobody born now anyplace on the whole world, Connie, is born to less in any areas we control. They still have the space platforms, the moon, and Antarctica. Myself, my favorite holiday in the whole year is Thanks-making. Then we fast for twenty-four hours and go around asking forgiveness from everyone we have offended in the year past. It comes right at the end of fall harvest, when all our crops are in except a few root crops we winter over, and the greenhouse stuff. Then we feast and go around the fooder breaking bread together, eating slowly and for hours. Wine and turkey and—oh, it takes another day to sleep it off!”
By the time Connie finished her nibbling, almost everyone had drifted out of the fooder, and they followed after. In the tall trees outside the children’s house many swings had been put up, conventional, one-person swings, trapezes, two-and three-person swings like cages, round swings, swings people lay in. From all the swings and trapezes, children and middle-aged people and an old woman with long white hair were hurtling through the air, calling to each other like a forestful of monkeys.
“That’s Tecumseh.” Luciente pointed to a girl hanging by her bare feet on a trapeze, flipping over and over as if her body had no bones. “Tecumseh won a first today in gymnastics. How graceful and fluid person is!”
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen, I think? Tecumseh waited till only a couple of years ago for naming.”
“So you do have sports. You said you taught kids not to compete, but she won a first.”
“But to try to do things well! That’s fun … . A child playing alone will still try to jump higher than that child jumped yesterday, no? We don’t keep back from saluting each other for doing well. We want each other to feel … cherished? … It’s a point of emphasis, no? Maybe always some cooperating, some competing goes on. Instead of competing for a living, for scarce resources, for food, we try to cooperate on all that. Competing is like … decoration. Something that belongs to sports, games, fighting, wrestling, running, racing, poemfests, carnival …”