by Marge Piercy
“You have wonderful faith in other people!”
“Without that social faith, what a burden it would be to have children! The children are everyone’s heirs, everyone’s business, everyone’s future.”
A flash of dog food supper. She worried, never being able to afford to serve meat after Claud was imprisoned. The food prices higher each week. She wanted to commit murder in the supermarket and she could not afford a shoplifting charge, being on suspended sentence. The only meat she could buy was in dog food cans. Should have fed Angie from a bowl on the floor. Who knew what they put in those cans? Man’s best friend was a big police dog, not a little brown child like Angie. Dogs to defend against poor people like her. “Eat it, Angie, please! It’s good stew.” She had added chili powder, herbs.
“Why?” Angie pointed to the picture of the dog. “Why they got a picture of a dog?”
“That’s just the picture on it. Like Bugs Bunny on the cereal.”
It turned out Angie feared it was a dog they were eating. She did not want to eat a puppy dog, she explained. Ay de mi! “It’s beef! Like hamburger. I wouldn’t feed you a dog!” But wouldn’t she, if she found one for sale cheap? She had to feed Angie anything she could find to fill their bellies. What choice had she?
Luciente was holding her by the shoulders. “You’re fading out! Come. Stay. Dance with me.” Tugging her out onto the square.
“I don’t know how you dance!”
“Any way you feel like. It’s for pleasure.”
She let her eyes half close and her body began to sense the music. Still, it alarmed her, how when she moved her hips the flimsy with all its little bubbles took off and flew away from her body, naked underneath. But nobody was wearing much in the way of clothes. She had not danced since … the first time in the bughouse, a sad Christmas party, parody of cheer in old-fashioned polite ballroom dancing, waltzing and fox-trotting and an occasional meek rumba round and round under the watchful eyes of staff and the hungry gazes of the majority not dancing. Luciente was a better partner than any she had enjoyed that evening of excuse me’s and wistfulness and an occasional fumbled clutch. Ah, nothing was so sad as looking around at all the black and Latin patients and watching each other trying to boogaloo so zonked with Thorazine they could hardly do the zombie shuffle.
She opened her eyes as the band went into a faster number and saw Bolivar and Jackrabbit dancing. Jackrabbit moved wild and loose and explosive. Bolivar was a little too controlled. He did what he did well, but he was not inventive. He moved with a measured elegance. But Jackrabbit exploded around him. Luciente was dancing to/for Jackrabbit, without ever looking at him. She was performing and Jackrabbit was aware of her too, and so, with resentment, was Bolivar.
She encouraged Luciente, she egged her on. Bee stood now with White Oak, chatting and watching. Erzulia was dancing alone, gone into an absorbed passionate trance state where nothing lived but her and the music centered around the throbbing drums. Someone else watched too, a tall woman standing with two others on the steps that led to the meetinghouse. Her hair was in a white turban and one breast was bare, as were her feet. Around her neck a crescent moon was hung, against the white of her dress. She left the women on the steps and stalaed among the dancers toward them, approaching Luciente from behind. Bee moved onto the square and began to dance beside them. He smiled at Connie with an amusement she did not understand.
The tall woman paused behind Luciente, her hazel eyes crinkled with mischief. Unwinding her turban so that her auburn hair fell out loose onto her shoulders, she swung the long white scarf around and then cast it over Luciente, catching her by the waist and pulling her backward.
Off balance, Luciente stumbled back against her and remained pinned there, her face silly with surprise. “What happens?”
“You dance just as wickedly as when you were eighteen. Shameless still, shining on the dark. And that dress, it’s decadent. You’ll go down like Sappho at eighty, still greedily nibbling young lovers!”
“Diana, it’s you. Don’t tease me so.” She tried to turn her head but Diana had her pinned. “This is Connie, the person from the past.”
“I’m Diana, the person from Luciente’s past,” Diana said flamboyantly, laughing deep in her chest. “That flimsy chills me,” she crooned, sighting down her long nose. “Reeks of the same taste that dressed Achilles and Patroclus over there.”
“Diana!” Luciente twisted around in the loop of the scarf to put her hands on the taller woman’s shoulders. “You didn’t come looking for me to crit my flimsy.”
“To take it off perhaps?” Diana released the scarf. “Come walk with me … . It’s been a long time since we walkedtogether under the moon.”
Luciente gave a short joyful ringing laugh. “You fake! There’s no moon tonight. And you can’t bring off sounding forlorn with your mob of sweet friends giving me those looks from the steps!”
“Always so literal. Yet you can’t tell what looks they give from a hundred feet! I wear my moon—come!”
Bee said in her ear, “Now you’ll have to salvage with me.”
Luciente turned toward them, her face begging their pardon, blushing like a fifteen-year-old; then she gave her hand to Diana and they went off quickly among the dancers and in to the dark.
Connie looked after them, perplexed. “I’m not a goat for dancing,” Bee said at her side. “Came out to collect you when I saw Diana bearing down. When I like music, I want to let my mind sail on it.” With that easy comfort, he took her arm and ambled her off the square. His big hand felt warm and heavy on her: an affectionate acceptance of her like Luciente’s but not like Luciente’s. Because her arm swelled, grew enormous and hot with blood, with his touch on her.
“I don’t know you,” she said haltingly.
“Only through Luciente we know each other.”
“But you remind me of someone.”
“Is that so?” Amused and accepting at once. Past the range of the music—loud enough in the square but damped off by baffles beyond it—the night softened to small noises. Someone was singing to a mandolin. People went linked arm in arm, entwining shoulders and waists, to little huts where lights had begun to blink on and off again. Otter, her long hair released from pigtails and hanging straight and black as a flood of satin to her waist, stood under one of the floating lights staring at a youth who stood staring at her. Otter was touching the other’s face with her fingertips and then she laughed, breathlessly, as if she could hardly breathe. An old person, drunk, with gnarled face bent back and mouth open to the stars that could be seen now and then through the floating lights, sang with thin voice in a minor key:
“How we loved,
laid in one bed,
while night ran through us
like swift water, sped
onto the teeth of the dawn:
I must let go,
go on.
My side aches.
The bow has shot its
arrow and the twine
breaks.”
In the dark another heard and began pushing the song through the bell of a trumpet. The brassy honey and vinegar seeped through her. Her hand clasped Bee’s hand harder. He squeezed her hand back and then dropped it, and she felt ashamed until his arm came around her, pulling her closer to him as they strolled still more slowly, her hip bumping his thigh. She could not speak, her flesh heavy and sweet on her bones. She felt swollen equally with old tears and present wanting, the memory of Claud and the presence of Bee. Who was not Claud. But who made her remember. Whose big hand on her waist, the thumb just touching her breast through the flimsy that parted for his thumb hot and fat, asking her and getting an answer as her knees half buckled and her breath sucked in and swayed in instinct faster than decision against him. Thumb messenger of the member she could feel as she pressed against him for his kiss. As his lips moved onto hers in a patient, long, sensual kiss, a voice was singing in a low throaty joyous voice:
“How good to fight beside you,
people of my base.
With you I work
forehead to forehead.
With you I plant corn,
stand in the tree picking apples.
How good to fight beside you,
friend of our long table,
mother of my child.
We share the soup and the bread,
the trouble and the meetings
that last till sharp dawn.
How good to fight beside you.
An army of lovers cannot lose,
an army of lovers cannot lose.
How good to fight for each other.”
“How can anybody sing about fighting on such a night?” she asked against his chest, drawing a deep breath.
“On such a night people die at the front, like any other,” he said. “This flimsy gets in the way with its bubbles.” He gestured into the dark. “Here is my space. Will you come in?”
“You know I will.” She laughed. She was startled then to hear that old happy laugh from her chest, that sensual laugh Claud had loved to feel with his hands against her. In the last years she had laughed little and never like that.
They stumbled together along a path and up two steps to his door that opened with a tug. Slam of the screen door behind them. He groped at the wall. “I’ll get the light.”
“No. Please. Let it stay dark.” She did not want to see his space, the strangeness of another time. She wanted to be in the simple space of bed, the space of body against body, constant in any time.
“However you like. I can see you with my fingers.”
She felt frightened when he said that, as if he could read her mind, her need, her memories. How much did Luciente absorb and know of her? Yet she felt his kindness radiating toward her and she relaxed and accepted it as she accepted the breeze flowing through the open window.
“What’s that out there?” Bird in the night.
“Whippoorwill.” His arm came around her, he was leading her to a low firm bed covered with softness, silky and clinging but thick, as if there could be satin pile. Kneeling, he drew her down and she half fell onto the invisible bed. As he helped her free of the flimsy and nestled down beside her he was naked himself, vastness of his body all about. The substantial velvet shock of skin on skin. Her head fell in. She grasped his back in handfuls. He slowly began to build her body out of the dark, painting her touch by touch so that each windowpane of skin glowed from inside.
Once more night gave her a big, generous mouth in her arched throat, her breasts burning like bonfires, her belly rolling under his hands. The head was different, smooth as warm rock. Flesh where no flesh had been. Skin smooth against her thighs as his head rested there, lips and tongue into her there where only Claud had done that before, so that the pleasure came down wet and she melted into him even before he took his mouth away and moved up on her and entered her. So full she felt. The salty sticky taste of herself on his mouth. Never again had she imagined she would feel that weight, the other, heavy body everyplace upon her, the tongues joined and moving as their sex moved together. So good, so good, every last finger spread on his big firm high buttocks, every finger alive to the tip and sunk in his sleek flesh. She felt huge and swollen with pleasure, so sensitive to each slide of his shaft and head as he rode into her, she felt as if she too were sunk into him. Once again to move joined and whole, full with him, open and throbbing, once again to feel the hot flooding rush of his coming, once again to tighten around him, still big enough, and feel him begin to move for her, moving up into her to increase contact, once again to feel her pleasure deepening and spreading like a chord struck in all octaves at once, sustained, played, and then held and held till it slowly faded into its overtones.
Her hands loosened and fell from him. He slowed in her, waited, ceased. Weight collected on her. They worked loose, eased into separation side by side. When she opened her eyes, she could dimly see objects, shape of table, chair with something slung over it. Trees rippled their leaves with a wet sound outside.
“Soon I must go back. Sleep. They wake us early every day. To nothing.”
“Each time when you leave us, we regret. We sadden not to help you.”
“This helped.” She sat up on an elbow. “But … how can I still be here without Luciente?”
“Luciente is helping.”
“Helping us … ?”
His knuckles gently trailed along her cheek. “How not? How else could we be together?”
She sat up straight and clutched the cover around herself. “Aware of us … in bed?”
“Pepper and Salt, don’t be silly. We all care for you. But you’re of a society with many taboos. It’s easier for me to hold you for all of us.”
“You’ll tell me next you planned this.”
“No, no.” Bee chuckled, caressing her shoulder. “But we commune running well with each other.”
“She … you … were giving me back Claud for a night.”
“I’m not Claud. Maybe I look like Claud did. Maybe I move like per. You feel so.” His voice rumbled. “Maybe I am potentialities in per that could not flourish in your time. But I am also me, Bee, friend of Luciente, friend of yours.”
She touched his chest lightly. “For sure. However you do it, whatever it means, it was fine enough. You know.”
In the morning she felt groggy and hung over when the Muzak came over the PA system with the male voice saying that it was time for patients to get up. As she stood in line for the showers, sensual memories played over her thighs, her belly. His hands upon her, his mouth, the weight and heft of him, the sleekness of his beautiful skin. Joy cut through the scum of the morning. She felt sleepy, fatigue whined in her skull, but she did not mind. The day for once beckoned. The day had a shape full of hope, the afternoon like a hill with a fine view that she would slowly climb.
It was not impatience she felt as she stood in line for the usual breakfast slop, wan oatmeal and the rationed cup of bitter coffee more precious than dope. All the day stretched toward Dolly’s arrival, but to yearn was to be full. She kept the memory of the evening too rich yet to squander, a candy she could suck and suck during the week and not use up.
Could she tell Dolly about Bee? She could refer to him as if he were a patient she was flirting with. What would Dolly’s new man be like? She must get on a better footing with him than she had with Geraldo. Yet from the letter he was her pimp. How could she like a pimp? Parasites of women’s sweat. Body lice. Why was Dolly still on the streets? Debts, money, her daughter Nita to feed.
No reproaches! May love flow: Luciente waved her calloused hand. Connie combed and combed her wiry hair. That ugly white parting. How drab she looked, how ashen her skin seemed. Dolly, so young and plump and juicy, how could she help wanting to turn away when she saw her aunt? Madwoman with skunk hair wrapped in a faded dress sizes too big, shuffling to meet them like something that crawled out of the wall.
Mrs. Yoshiko, the weekend attendant, brought her a bright red lipstick, Mrs. Yoshiko, exactly her height, laughed and stuck some pins in her hair so that it looked different and a little better. “Good now.” She spoke little English but she smiled sometimes and sometimes she looked at them when they spoke.
After lunch she sat at a card table playing gin rummy with Mrs. Stein and losing lots of little white chips torn out of a magazine they used for money. She waited. One o’clock! Visiting hours began. No one for her.
Of course she could hardly expect Dolly to arrive at one! It took two hours to get here from New York. Longer in heavy traffic. A summer Sunday, say three hours. If there was a traffic jam, three and a half! She could not begin expecting until … let’s see: suppose Dolly got up at ten. Ten-thirty if she worked last night. Say eleven. Wouldn’t get out of the house until noon. Her boyfriend was picking her up. Say twelve-thirty. So they might not arrive until almost four. She would begin allowing herself to expect Dolly at three-thirty.
Yet every time the phone rang in the nurses’ station, every
time the door lock clacked over, she froze, the cards blurred. She hoped and waited and watched the other visitors come and go. The afternoon bled away. She could not play cards anymore. She paced as slowly as she could force herself to, through the dormitory to the day room, back and forth across the porch. Every time the phone rang or the door clacked over, she rushed back to the nursing station to stand about awkwardly, waiting, hoping.
At five it was all over. The last visitor was shooed out. Dolly had not come.
TEN
Monday arrived with a thud. Skip turned out to be right and she was carted off to a new ward, set up like a regular hospital ward in the medical building. A plywood partition divided the women from the men, with a door at the moment open. The outer doors on the ward were locked. It had fewer amenities than G-2: no porch, no separate day room with TV. Fats was still with them, but the woman attendant didn’t seem to know where anything was on the hospital grounds and complained loudly she had to get up at five-thirty to come out here. Mrs. Valente was a big woman with something wrong with her tongue or palate that gave her speech a muffled, battered quality.
Sybil was here already, her long legs drawn up cross-legged as she camped on her bed waiting to see what was going to happen. Sybil had thrown a bathrobe over the next cot to save it for her, and she grabbed it gratefully. Near the nurses’ station a bed had its sides up. In it a black woman lay with a great white helmet of bandages on her head and a gadget perched on top of the bandage like a metal beanie.
“That’s Alice Blue Bottom,” Sybil hissed. “Look what they’ve done to her!”
“What is it? Did she have an accident?”
“I don’t think so. Doesn’t that look bizarre?”
Connie peered down the ward. “Are you sure it’s her?”
“I read the name on the chart at the foot of her bed, Consuelo.”
“Is she unconscious?” She noticed a machine up on legs beside the bed.
“No. She made a face at me when I came in, which is why I read the name on her chart. I was embarrassed not to recognize her, so I said, Hello, and she said, Look what they have done to me! She did not put it exactly that way, but that was the gist of her earthy expressions.”