by Marge Piercy
Car. She fell forward blindly and struck something sharp with her arm. She lay still, her arm hurting, while the car swept slowly past. Something rusty. Luckily it had not cut her but had only bruised the skin. The jacket had protected her. She crawled forward and then shakily rose. She walked and walked. The moon sank into the trees. Trucks passed. She spent as much time lying in the ditch as she did on her feet walking. She stumbled. Fell again.
At the next intersection she waited, looking in all directions before that stretch of pavement. There had been a gas station here too but it had gone out of business and the pumps hauled away. On the comer nearest her a produce stand was shuttered and padlocked for the night. She could find no easy way in. Behind it fruit and vegetables were thrown in the garbage, not good enough to sell. A rat stood its ground, then leisurely waddled into the tall grass as she approached. She was afraid to poke around. What a smell. Rotting fruit, rotting greens. Her stomach humped. She shook her head hard. She must eat. She forced herself to pick through the garbage until she had rescued some carrots, a yellow cabbage, some black but edible bananas, and a few sprouted potatoes. The denim jacket held them all except for the bananas, which she ate as she walked on.
Her hands stank. Patience. Wait. In the drainage ditch on the far side of the intersection, a small stream was running. Water in this drought. Taking off her shoes, she tried to wade in it but the water stank and the bottom was slippery with muck. She chose to walk on the side of the ditch away from the road, nervous because hiding was more difficult and the going rougher. Tall weeds tore at her legs and slowed her. She felt visible when she saw headlights or heard an engine and crouched in the tall grass beside the stream.
Her feet were raw. When she sat on a stone, she discovered her sole had worn a hole. She tried to patch the hole with a paper towel, but that created a lump that blistered her foot. She could not walk farther and the sky was beginning to lighten. She had to get off the road.
Limping now between the stream and a barbed-wire fence with some crop growing on the other side, she could see no escape but forced herself on. The air was a thin gray, watery as institutional soup. She hardly had the energy to drop flat as cars approached, and in fact in her stupor a car came from behind without her realizing until it had gone past. By luck it was not searching for her, for it never slackened its speed. She was too exhausted to march on, but she could see no place to hide. She tried to walk faster on her last strength with oozing feet, through the air that betrayed her, growing thinner at each step. She forced her sore and sweaty legs on, swollen, bruised, stumbling beside the polluted ditch with its water flowing sluggishly in the same unknown direction.
She saw a patch of woods across the road. She had to wade the foul water again and then scramble up the embankment to the road and make a run for it. But she could no longer run. She hobbled across the pavement, vast and gray in the half light. Forever she picked up her leaden hoofs and crumpled forward. Her feet were damp with blood and fluid from broken blisters. She crossed the wide pavement with skid marks etched on it. At last she flung herself down the other embankment without pausing to look, because she heard the sound of an engine. No stream ran at the bottom here. She landed on a pile of broken bottles she rolled over limply. Hunched, she began to make her way forward, falling on her belly as cars approached. Lighter still. Now she could see clearly as far as a city block—and be seen. Then she reached the first scraggly tree of the woods. A barbed-wire fence ran along this side of the highway also, but she found a spot where she could use a wad of weeds and her white smock to push the rusted wires till she could crawl over. Then she thrust blindly through the brush until she was out of sight of the road. She collapsed.
Something crawled on her leg. She picked off a tick and flung it. Got up. With the road behind her, she forced her way through the brush toward taller trees. Finally she stood in a grove of tall feathery white pine with occasional young oaks coming up beneath them. The floor was reddish brown needles, beautiful and sweet-smelling. She picked a spot under a tall tree and spread the smock. Lying down with her head on it, she slept almost immediately, collapsing into the thick sleep of exhaustion.
TWELVE
When Connie awoke she lay a moment, confused. Her brain felt swollen. Her head ached as if she had really had concussion. Her legs were stiff, sore, and itchy with bites. The sun stood well into the western sky. Yet she was free, she was still free. She felt bewildered with space and half drunk.
Sitting up, she rubbed her legs. What a mess her feet were. The shoes had begun to fall apart; the soles were parting from the uppers. Rising stiffly, she hung them on a branch to dry. If only she could manage to look neater. If she had a comb. If her dress were cleaner. Clothing made such a difference in how people saw you. Often clothing was all they saw. A clean, neat dress and she could break through and be gone. But in her dirty green dress and borrowed man’s denim jacket, with the white smock as second hope, she shook her head ruefully.
Peeling off the yellow outer leaves, she nibbled the raw cabbage from her pocket, while her stomach cringed, not having had anything tougher than stew to work on in months. She chewed and chewed the cabbage. Then she gnawed the carrots. Although this food didn’t feel like food, it was something. She dreamed of bread and café con leche—all the breads of New York. French breads in long bakery loaves. The dark Jewish pumpernickels. Then tostadas, tortillas. The spoon bread Claud had liked her to make. Big hot pretzels men peddled on the streets from carts, keeping their hands warm in the winter over the fires.
She leaned back on the trunk of her pine, trying to think what to do. The poor vegetables had eased the dryness in her throat, but she must find water and food. She could not leave her cover until darkness, and in the meantime she would rest her feet. She still had ten dollars, she had a road map, she was free. The woods smelled wonderful. The light slanted between the trunks and trickled through the pines over her: the needles were soft and fragrant under her. But she hadn’t the faintest idea how to look for food and drink. She couldn’t eat a tree. Her head against the trunk, she watched small birds flit to and fro while a bigger bird kicked up the needles, looking for insects. “Luciente!” she summoned.
“How does it fly? I finally caught the error in our experiment. I stayed up most of last night working, but I caught it. Did you escape?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Come over. Today let’s take a skimmer and visit the shelf farms.”
“You come here instead. I need help.”
Luciente came, looking about nervously. “I admit, I prefer it the other way. Your time frightens me. Also makes more sense for you to exist in the future, where at least you may be a memory, than for me to poke around in the past, where I have no right to be!”
“Never mind!” Connie said. “You train for surviving in the woods. Like the boy scouts. Well, here I am. My feet are bleeding, I have nothing to eat but raw potatoes, and I don’t know one tree from another!”
“Oh, a wilderness exercise. Haven’t done this since I took out some kids two years ago. When Dawn almost mistook water hemlock for Queen Anne’s lace.”
“It was a test she failed?”
“Test? I don’t follow. One is poisonous, one is edible.”
She giggled weakly. “I hope you passed that test.”
“I myself have not only studied but have also taught such things, I am telling you. Feel no anxiety!” Luciente glanced around with quick enthusiasm. “First of all, white pine is edible if not tasty. The cambium layer. You have a knife?”
“Luciente! I only have matches because I found them. In the institution we eat with plastic spoons. I have one of them too.” She held it out.
“Okay. First we look for tools. In this Age of Greed and Waste, surely we can find something handy that has been discarded?”
“Is nothing thrown away in your time?”
“Thrown away where? The world is round.”
Cautiously they crept back into the second gr
owth beside the roadside and poked through the weeds and bushes. Numerous aluminum beer and soda cans lay there, as did pop strips. They also found intact bottles and jars and some usable sharp pieces of glass.
“Luciente, I am thirsty. I need water soon.”
“We’ll look running hard. Oh, this reminds me of scavenging,” Luciente said cheerfully, grubbing among the weeds and occasionally pulling one with a pleased grimace. “When I was fifteen I went on work crew to the ruins of Providence, where we were demolishing old structures.”
“Like with wrecking balls? I’ve seen that in Harlem.”
“We take everything apart a board and a brick at a time for reuse. Fasure that work is tedious but somehow satisfying. We used to sing and tell stories all the time. We camped out in the old warehouses and apartment buildings. We would eat over fires or be invited to eat with nearby villages, and they would want to show us how well they cooked. But we had to improvise, we had to remain alert. Those old buildings, some of them were built well but many were built irrationally and even dangerously. We had to work with great caution, and still we got hurt. Old girders would be rusted through. Walls undermined by seepage. Structures that looked solid would prove hollow. Piling would go down only a couple of feet so that the structure had no support after a slope eroded. Sometimes we came across layers of structures under structures, bones and trinkets. Then we would summon the archaeologist who always works with scavengers and we’d work under per direction, sifting and scraping slowly. That would be a change. Sixmonth I worked on that scavenging project till I broke a leg. I was waiting to study with Rose of Ithaca, who had too many students.” Luciente was identifying various weeds as she crawled. “Chickweed. Good raw or cooked. Yes, purslane. No, that one. It’s a succulent; you can’t miss it. Don’t worry, I’ll go over everything you pick. Only very inner leaves of dandelions by now; the others will be tough and bitter. Same with chicory.”
She crawled after Luciente, barefoot through the brush. Twenty feet away trucks and cars swept past at fifty miles an hour. Occasionally a car would pass more slowly and both women froze. The brush hid them, but there was no point moving the leaves suspiciously. The day was hot and the leaves near the road were dusty and smelled of smoke.
“They doubtless have high lead content.” Luciente frowned. “Look, here’s sumac. We’ll take some bark for your feet.”
In spite of the pain, as she stumbled after Luciente she began to enjoy herself. Scrabbling around in the bushes made her feel like a child—a six-year-old playing in the fields near her home. Her legs and back ached, her arms and legs were cut in a dozen places, her wrists and ankles were ringed with mosquito bites. Yet she felt silly with happiness gathering up the weeds that Luciente pointed out. So much exercise made her cough repeatedly and spit.
“Being off the Thorazine makes me cough too much.”
“It would be better if you coughed more, not less, and brought up the bad stuff in your lungs,” Luciente said. “Now sit under your tree and rest. They’ve made you weak in that crazy hospital. I’ll scout for water. Chew on the chickweed while you wait.”
She took a cautious bite and winced. “Ugh. It tastes like grass.”
“It’s good for you and will relieve thirst. My sweet cherry, I didn’t promise you I’d find a roast goose in the bushes. Eat, get stronger, and you can go home and cook good food for yourself.”
Leaning against the white pine that had become home, she chewed the chickweed, which tasted exactly as she’d expect a mouthful of weeds to taste, and chewed and chewed and swallowed it. No worse than hospital food, really; just stranger. The sun had sunk to the height when it usually disappeared behind the administration building next to the hospital. About four. She did not even worry. She was too glad to be outside, even in this patch of woods with her feet raw, waiting to graze on the grasses of the field like a cow put out to pasture. She felt happy as a cow was supposed to feel chewing its cud. She knew some of the giddiness, some of the feeling that she could sleep and sleep, was from coming off the medication. She hoped Luciente would find water. The foul stuff in the drainage ditch would probably kill her. Well, chewing the weeds helped. Luciente had found some wild onions and they made her saliva flow and relieved the soreness in her throat. She noticed her hands had a tendency to shake. That tremor seemed to get worse as the day wore on. Thorazine and barbiturate withdrawal. It would help if she had water. But a strange tranquility filled her. She felt space around her body, the space of privacy and choice. Comparing herself with a cow, she felt more human than she had since … oh, since she’d been with Claud.
When she had talked about Claud to Luciente, Luciente had been shocked that Claud was a pickpocket. They had worked the well-dressed crowds, the businessmen, the women who shopped on Fifth Avenue. If she searched herself, she found a pride that she had learned those skills, that she had been useful to Claud. They made a living, they could eat out in the neighborhood and buy clothes and keep Angelina looking pretty the way she ought to be. Money to go to the dentist. Money for a new couch bought on time; Naugahyde it was, just like leather, and Claud liked to stretch out on it.
To feel pride. Oh, she had been allowed to feel that briefly when she had gone to the community college in Chicago to study to be a teacher. How she had studied, spreading out her books on a table in the library (too noisy at home). She did not have a typewriter, and no matter how carefully she wrote out her papers, she noticed that her grades were lower for that. She had learned to type in high school, she had taken a whole year, and now she had a job typing. She asked her boss if she could stay late to use the typewriter for her school papers, but he acted suspicious, as if she wanted to hang around to steal something. Chuck, in her American history course, said she could use his typewriter if she’d type his papers too. He had a fancy electric machine, but he couldn’t type. She thought that was funny, but she accepted the bargain. Some bargain. A baby in her belly by March and the end of her schooling, her pride, her hope.
Married to Martin a year later, she had been proud. She swatted a mosquito sitting up on skinny legs about to sink its probe in her thigh. But not proud of herself. No. She felt hollow with shame after her Anglo boyfriend Chuck had deserted her. After she had had to leave school, after her family had thrown her out, after she had spent all she had on a six-hundred-dollar abortion done without anaesthetic. Neither baby nor husband, neither diploma nor home. No name. Nobody. Woman spoiled. Chingada.
Martin’s love had given her worth. She had feared the loss of his love every day. She spent her time fearing it, walking the line of decorum like a tightrope, lowering her eyes to all other men, speaking only when spoken to. She had loved him. How she had loved him. It had been easy. He had been beautiful, his body like the molten sun, coppery and golden at once, his body in which strength and grace were balanced as in a great cat. His body had been almost girlish in its slenderness—although she would never have dared to say that in any way, for that very thought expressed would have lost him to her—and masculine in its swiftness, its muscular tight control. No wonder Parra had made her remember him. Beautiful, Martin had been, with his face of sadness and grace, his eyes like brown rivers with something moving warily in their depths. His smile that opened like a box of light. His hands nervous as the little birds that darted through the pine boughs. He used to split matches in two while he sat talking at the kitchen table. In the madhouse inmates did that, on the rare occasions they acquired a match. But he did it just because his hands had to be occupied. He had a car, yes, a Mustang the color of gold, and he stood in the street carefully washing and polishing it on Saturday. After he was killed, the company repossessed it. What would she have wanted with it, the chariot of his pride?
With Martin she had been proud with a tremor like the drug withdrawal now, proud of his love but fearful of losing what she could not deserve. He felt lent; always she had expected his loss to another woman who would not come to him stained. But she lost him to the street.
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br /> In this odd moment she recalled him peacefully, her young husband. How he would stare to see her now, used and battered. If he appeared before her, he would seem as young as Jackrabbit. Of all she had lost, he was the sweet one she could least afford to call back from the dead, from the garbage bin where the poor were cast, for she was no longer a mate for him. But once, Once she had held him supple and sinewy and hot in her arms, she had trembled under him, shy and shaken. Long ago. She had loved him well. As she should have loved her daughter.
When Luciente came back, walking lightly on the needles, she greeted her: “I wish we could have Dawn with us.”
Luciente frowned, sitting down. “Afraid to try. Afraid for per … I don’t like to disappoint you.”
“Just a little while. One hour. Half an hour. Who can bother us here in the woods?”
“Ummm. It makes me nervous.”
“We’ll be careful! I want to see her so much. Let her come through to us. Just for a little while.”
Still frowning, Luciente mumbled, “I’ll ask her.”
A few minutes later Dawn stood under the pines wearing blue overalls. Her hair had been cut shorter, her skin was toasted brown, and she wore a neat bandage that looked somehow sealed to the skin of her arm.
“What happened to your arm?” Connie asked her.
“Oh, that!” Dawn held out her arm importantly. “I did that diving.”
“Diving into the river?”
“No, in the bay. My study group went visiting the fish herds. Then we did free diving and I scraped myself.” Dawn stared all around her. “It looks just like a regular woods. I thought there’d be cities and accidents and smokestacks and beggars and pollution!”