Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

Dizzy, she stuck out her hand, and Dolly again gave her a five. Oh, well, she could use it. She stared into Dolly’s intense eyes, the pupils too big, too shiny. “What are you on?”

  “Me? Like always—a little of this, a little of that.”

  “You’re on more than a little of something.”

  “I got to stay skinny, carita. The money is with the Anglos and they like you skinny and American-looking. It pays more if you look Anglo, you know. Sometimes I say I’m of Spanish mother and an Irish father, and that’s why I have the beautiful red hair. Even the hair on my thing, I dyed it red—Connie, you wouldn’t believe it.” She giggled.

  “Is it speed?”

  “A little, once in a while, to keep my weight down. Who can stand those assholes? They drive me crazy. They’re all pigs. But I’m much better off without that prick Geraldo, you know? This one, Vic, he was a real ballplayer—no joke.” She giggled again. “He played a season with die Cleveland Indians, except he was born in the Bronx like me. He’s okay, Connie, it’s purely business. He’s a good businessman. I’m not crazy about him, but so much the better, you know? I was crazy for Geraldo, and what did I get besides a lot of trouble?”

  “Is it Vic’s idea you take that poison? It’ll burn you out.”

  “Listen, Connie, I’m in terrific shape! Look at me. I weigh one hundred seventeen—you believe it? And last week, you know what I earned on my behind?”

  “Four hundred dollars,” she said wryly.

  “How did you guess? Not bad, hey? Nice clothes, pretty things for my baby. Mamá keeps Nita Tuesday through Saturday and then Sunday I get her and I have her till Tuesday morning.”

  “Carmel’s got her all week?”

  “What other mother do I have? Sure, Carmel’s got her. It works out better.”

  “Dolly, this is not good. You don’t have your baby inside, your daughter you only see weekends like an aunt, and you’re taking poison that burns out your soul.”

  “Don’t be silly, Tía. You forget what the world’s like, shut up here. I’m on top now. I know what I’m doing. And last week I made four hundred dollars!”

  “Dolly, please. Get me out of here! I beg you. Get me released. Talk to them!”

  “Hermana, how can I do that? Luis signed the papers. I didn’t have a thing to do with it. You have to talk to Daddy about getting out.”

  “Please, Dolly, do something. I beg you. Look around this ward. They’re operating on us. They’re sticking needles in our heads!”

  “Yeah?” Dolly looked around vaguely. “Daddy says they’re famous doctors from a university. That they’re for real helping you so you won’t have to go in again. He says you’re going to be in a hospital in Washington Heights. I could get to see you all the time. It’s real hard to get up here, you know?”

  “Dolly, you think I need an operation? Look at me.”

  “Connie, am I a doctor? What do I know? At least it’s clean in here, not so depressing like last time.”

  “I don’t want their help, Dolly. I want to go home! Listen—I’ll work. Tell Luis I’ll do anything! I’ll work in his sweatshop nursery. I can get temporary office jobs. Tell Luis that!”

  “You shouldn’t go on feeling sorry for yourself, Connie—that’s your problem. We can rise above what we are if we have the will. Look at me! After Geraldo, that prick, left me flat, with no money and lots of debts, I didn’t cry long. I cried, sure, but then I went out and got myself a white pimp. I lost twenty-two pounds, you know? I took myself in hand and I haven’t gained a pound in weeks! I dyed my hair on my head and”—lowering her voice coquettishly—“even the hair on my thing. I say I’m of a Spanish mother and an Irish father. Sometimes I say my mother was a contessa.”

  “I think that’s Italian.”

  “No, it’s Spanish. Anyhow, they’re johns—what do they know? I make money hand over fist. Just last week—”

  “Dolly, please, listen to me!” Connie interrupted, near despair. “They’re going to do an operation on me. You go look at that woman in the corner, the black woman, Alice. That’s what they want to do to me. At least let me come home for a weekend. To eat real food. To see you and Nita. Please, Dolly, talk to them.”

  “Sure, honey. Once you’re in New York, why shouldn’t you come visit me? A weekend wouldn’t be so good, but maybe a Sunday together? It’s nice of Vic to bring me up here, but how many times can I get him to do it? He knows the value of money. He used to be a real pro ballplayer with the Cleveland Indians. A white pimp is better than a brother, Connie. It’s strictly business, but he brings good customers. Businessmen, buyers, salesmen. When you get out, I’ll get you some money and help you set up in a nice apartment. Daddy took your stuff into storage, he threw a lot of it out. But I kept some for you, pictures and stuff I know you want.”

  She stood at the window watching Dolly emerge from the building and Nita break free of Vic and race toward her, hugging her around the thighs. Dolly pointed up at the window and Nita, looking puzzled, waved obediently at the building. They went off, Vic and Dolly talking at once. She stood at the window, staring long after they had disappeared.

  She remembered something she had heard Dr. Redding say to Superintendent Hodges: that they had used up five thousand monkeys before they began doing these operations on patients. Used up. She had heard him say he had wanted to work with prisoners—he thought the results would be more impressive—but there had been such an uproar about three little psycho-surgical procedures at Vacaville in California that his team decided to work with mental patients. “After all,” he had said, smiling his best ironic smile, “they made a court case and a bleeding heart publicity brouhaha about three procedures, while San Francisco Children’s Hospital does hundreds with sound and thermal probes—mostly on neurotic women and intractable children—and no one says boo.”

  Thus, after the five thousand monkeys, they were being used up one at a time. She marched over to Sybil. “Sybil, they’re going to finish us. It’s death, no matter what they call it.”

  Sybil sat cross-legged, facing her. Her eyes questioned.

  “It’s true this is a locked ward. But the hospital here has lousy security compared to our old wards. I know I could get out of here, if I could get off this ward.”

  “How? We eat here, we lie here. There’s not even a porch.”

  “If I made them think something’s wrong with me.”

  Sybil’s hands rose and floated in the air, graceful and helpless as doves. “You could die of smallpox before they’d do anything.”

  “Would you try if I did?”

  Sybil looked down. She flexed her fingers, sighing. “Without money?”

  “I have ten dollars. With that we could take a bus for a ways. Then we could hitchhike. Skip says women can always get a ride. Just so we get away from the hospital. People are too suspicious here.”

  “We’d get picked up before we could reach a bus station.”

  “It’s summer. Suppose we sleep in the woods and we walk as far as we can. They can’t watch all the bus stations in every town. Please, Sybil, if I think up a good plan?”

  “Since the last series of shocks, I don’t have energy.”

  Indeed, as she looked into Sybil’s face she realized how thin and how drawn Sybil was, with that inmate pallor they all shared.

  “But we could help each other. We could keep each other’s courage up … . My niece won’t help; she’s too spaced out. But if we got to New York, she’d give us money, I know she would. She’d be real impressed by you, Sybil. She’s into astrology and she’d be excited about witchcraft.”

  “If we’d done it sooner … when we were on L-6. I’m tired, Connie, I’m weak. They’ve drained my power. It consumes all my power just to keep out the evil vibrations on this ward.”

  “If we got away we’d be safe!”

  “Ten dollars! That wouldn’t get us far. We have to eat. When they caught us, we’d be ruthlessly punished!”

  “Sybil, what are they going to d
o to us anyhow?” She gestured toward Alice’s bed.

  “At least they only do it to you once.” Sybil looked down. “Is it really worse than electroshock? I still can’t remember all kinds of things I know I knew before!”

  “Sybil, you’re getting to be an … old patient.” Before her she could see the chronic wards, row on row of metal beds full of drugged hopeless women. A terrible silence. “Don’t let them wear you down!”

  Sybil smiled, cold as a moonbeam. “I can’t do it. I haven’t healed. My pride is hollow … . But I’ll help you.”

  “They’ll punish you if you help me and I get loose.”

  Sybil shrugged. “Not like they’ll punish you when they bring you back.”

  “I’ll ask someone else.”

  “Don’t you dare! Haven’t we been friends? Don’t you think my loyalty has some value?” Sybil drew herself up. “Perhaps if you do escape, I’ll consider it in a new light. It’s by far the most intelligent plan for you to escape first with my assistance. Then when you’re safe, you can assist me.”

  That evening after lights out, she lay quietly weeping.

  Maybe Luciente could help. When she reached her, Luciente was swimming in the river with Jackrabbit, both of them diving and rising and splashing. Luciente hauled herself onto the bank, her hair plastered to her head and her body naked and dripping. Connie turned quickly away as Jackrabbit too clambered up on the grass. “We’ll get dressed, Connie. Don’t hide away!” Luciente obviously thought it was funny. Jackrabbit and she dried themselves on big towels and trotted off to Luciente’s space, with herself following very slowly behind. They were laughing ahead, and she felt left out and awkward. How could they help?

  She loitered up the path. When she opened Luciente’s door, they were both roughly dressed and between them they were making the bed. “Our family met last night,” Jackrabbit told her. “I put in as ready for mothering and military service. But everybody decided I ought to take care of going on defense before starting to mother. I know it’s logical, but I feel a little parted. I want to mother a lot more than I feel like marching off for six months to wherever the enemy’s pestering us now.”

  Luciente was eyeing her with a gather of skin between her eyes. “What’s wrong, Connie?”

  When she described the ward and the project, Luciente grew still. She sat on the not quite made bed with her hands crouching on her spread knees. “So soon. It promises ill.”

  “It’s bad, real bad? That’s what I thought. I’m scared.”

  Jackrabbit, puzzled but interested, curled up with a pillow behind his back. Luciente frowned. “It’s that race between technology, in the service of those who control, and insurgency—those who want to change the society in our direction. In your time the physical sciences had delivered the weapons technology. But the crux, we think, is in the biological sciences. Control of genetics. Technology of brain control. Birth-to-death surveillance. Chemical control through psychoactive drugs and neurotransmitters.”

  “Luciente, help me escape!” Her hand trembling, she touched Luciente’s sinewy arm. “Before they do that to me.”

  Luciente shuddered. “Sticking a log in somebody’s eye to dig out an eyelash! They had not even a theory of memory! Their arrogance … amazes me.” She snorted.

  “Can you help me? Please.”

  “Of course we can!” Jackrabbit said, stroking her shoulder, but Luciente paced with her face screwed up.

  “I can’t interfere in the past, Connie,” she said slowly. “But I can give you advice. That’s free as the wind. As we say, nobody asks for it and everybody gets it.”

  “I thought I might fake a sickness scary enough to make them take me off the ward and then I could escape.”

  “You’d have to be able to create and sustain a high temperature. I could teach you, but it’d take time. I must discuss these problems with my time-travel proj.” Luciente marched over to her television set, fiddled with some dials and spoke into her kenner. In a short while she was meeting with several people. Most of them appeared on the screen as they spoke, but a couple were apparently too far from a set and spoke only through the kenner. Connie strained her ears to hear, but most of the argument was in a weird jargon, about gliding, and fast and slow marcon, flebbing, achieving nevel.

  “I’m sorry I bothered the two of you. I guess you were planning to be alone,” Connie said to Jackrabbit, his long body curled up.

  “It’s like my naming. Every time I take a step, I start jagging. I want to go back where I was. Not really. But I need Luci today, I need a clear interseeing of who I am and what I was wanting. I feel lost, a little bottomed.”

  “You don’t want to go on defense?”

  “Fasure I do. I put in for it. Only, after I make a decision, I feel thinned. As if I just lost eight other selves.” He sighed, writhing restlessly on the bed and casting a baleful glance at Luciente in tense discussion at the TV set.

  When Luciente turned to them, she was frowning lightly. “Everybody agrees your pass is urgent. But no one is confident you can learn to control body temperature in a week. Marat recommends acute appendicitis, a common health problem in your time. It wasn’t always accompanied by fever and could be easily faked.”

  “No good!” Connie said. “They wouldn’t think it was such a big emergency. Why take me off ward? They’d wait till the doctor came in. Weekend is the time to get out, because they’re understaffed. And, Luciente, appendicitis, it’s not contagious. They never believe us anyhow when we say we’re in pain.”

  “Zo, what about a head injury? Faking unconsciousness is easy. I could teach you to go into delta in a few lessons.”

  “Let me think.” Connie turned and almost tripped over an object leaning on the wall. “What’s that?”

  “Careful! It’s a weapon. I didn’t get a chance to turn it in today. We had practice at noon.”

  Connie detoured it carefully. “I’m trying to think. Maybe.”

  Luciente’s kenner spoke in a loud, demanding voice. “Corydora here. Thought you were planning to test those results from Tennessee.”

  “Tonight. I’ll do it tonight after supper.”

  “Thought we were having a town meeting about the Shaping controversy.”

  “Fasure. Will do it between supper and the meeting. I set everything up.” Luciente spoke calmly. Connie could sense she was feeling great pressure. As she spoke into her kenner she stood there flatfooted, with her legs as if braced, and looked from Jackrabbit to her with level measuring gaze. Immediately she flicked her kenner and spoke. “Morningstar, can you take Dawn to have her teeth checked? I’m caught to my neck.” Then she spoke to Dawn. “My appleblossom, Morningstar is taking you to Goat Hill. I will see you at supper and tomorrow we’ll work together in the upper fields.”

  Suddenly Connie saw her mother’s mother: a peasant woman dressed in black with her hair pulled back tight as if to punish it. With eight children, with close to forty grandchildren, with cows and pigs and chickens, she stood with that calm weighing expression as crisis after crisis broke over her. Everyone would be fed, everybody would be comforted, everyone would be healed, to each would be given a piece of herself. Luciente had some of that in her, Connie thought, but with more control and less ultimate despair.

  “I think I want to learn how to play dead … or knocked out anyhow. I’ll let you know for sure tomorrow.”

  “I’ll ask Magdalena how best to teach you,” Luciente said, and smiled at Jackrabbit. “In about an hour I’ll ask her. Tomorrow morning, Connie sweetness, graze me and we’ll start.”

  Embarrassed, Connie immediately broke contact.

  “Tina, please. Watch for us. I want to talk to Sybil for a minute only. Momentito?”

  Tina nodded, looking them over curiously. Perhaps she thought they were lovers. Anyhow, she stood near the door watching for attendants, while Connie whispered to Sybil, “Would you stage a fight with me?”

  Sybil touched Connie’s cheek lightly. “Why not?”<
br />
  “They’ll give it to you afterward. They’ll come down on you.”

  “Maybe they’ll send me off this ward. Outside I know the rules. I’m an old hand.”

  “Maybe they’ll just do you sooner.”

  “Maybe the saddest person will be the last to be ‘done.’ Like death row.”

  She began spending all the time she could safely steal with Luciente, studying control of her own nervous system. In the morning Luciente was walking with Bee and White Oak, pausing at the big board in the square in front of the meetinghouse to read the newest notices, poems, proposals, and complaints.

  With you

  Well coupled: I could wade

  in warm water

  and melt like a sugar cube.

  ANYONE WHO DOESN’T CLEAN DIVING GEAR DESERVES TO DROWN!

  Do you value yourself lower than zucchini? Vote the SHAPERS!

  Class starting in bacterial fertilizers, Tuesday 8 P.M., Amilcar Cabral greenhouse.

  Cellist wanted, antique music quartet. See Puccini, Goat Hill.

  WANDERING PLAYERS: Goose Creek players visiting this week. Thursday: THE ROBBER BARONS (historical satire); Friday: WHO KNOWS HOW IT GROWS (Shaping drama); Saturday: WHEN TIME FRAYED (drama of battle at Space Station Beta).

  “What’s all this business about Shaping?” Connie asked as they read the notices.

  “The Shapers want to intervene genetically,” Bee rumbled. “Now we only spot problems, watch for birth defects, genes linked with disease susceptibility.”

  “The Shapers want to breed for selected traits,” Luciente said. “It’s a grandcil-level fight.”

  “What do you think?” she asked curiously.

  White Oak said, “Oh, we three are all Mixers. That’s the other side. We don’t think people can know objectively how people should become. We think it’s a power surge.”

  Luciente pointed. “Look, there’s my notice. Two people signed up last night. But we need at least five.”

  Connie read the notice. “Why do you want to learn Chinese?”