Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  Finally she saw an open gas station and she walked very slowly until a car pulled in. Then she crossed to the office as if she came from the car and asked for the key to the ladies’ room. Inside she drank water and drank water, relieved her diarrhea, washed herself all over with paper towels. If only she had a comb! With her fingers and water she tried to make her hair passable. Her clothes looked exactly as if she had slept in them. In the mirror she hung sloppy and ashen. After a summer inside her skin was not dark, but she did not look white. That mattered in these towns. She shrugged. What could she do about it? She left the key in the john and slipped away around the back of the building.

  She plodded on toward what she hoped was the center of the small city, finally passing the city limits sign. More traffic now. It was Monday morning, people driving to work. Her stomach gurgled its hunger. The first breakfast place she passed had only men in it, trucks parked outside, and she felt they would notice her too carefully.

  She promised herself breakfast. Then she would sit. Her bleeding feet would stop being tortured. But she must choose a breakfast spot carefully. That was her bribe to her weary, aching body, giddy with hunger, rebellious at being fed nothing but weeds and rotten vegetables and blackberries. The next spot looked too suburban, too fancy. The next diner had a police car parked outside. The traffic got heavier. The clouds separated into long clots, a pale blue showing between them. She was limping along a sidewalk now, past a shopping plaza, the huge parking lot almost empty.

  Now she walked through a neighborhood of factories and again the occasional diner had only male customers. No one else walked here. She felt conspicuous, prey bleeding into her flopping shoes, the sole peeling off the upper at each step. Dizzy. She could not remember a time when she had not felt dizzy, when her head had been normal, when some drug or the absence of some drug had not been ringing its changes on her blood and nerves. Now she trudged through a district of small houses with smaller backyards, houses no farther apart than the distance a person could reach, asbestos, wood siding, shingled, covered with aluminum. The kind of neighborhood where her sister Teresa lived in Chicago. Working class, but each of the families would say, like her own sister, struggling along with noses just above the water of taxes and debts and finance companies, that they were middle class because they were buying their own house.

  The first time she had gone on welfare it had been bitter to swallow, bitter as vomit. Even after her second husband Eddie had walked out on her and Angelina and pulled his disappearing act, she had managed. She had given a neighbor twenty a week to keep Angelina shut up in her apartment all day with five other squalling kids, stuck in front of a TV set. She didn’t like it at all, but there was no public day care and the private centers cost too much.

  She had worked in a box factory up in the Bronx for a while. Although she hated to ask him for help, she had gone to Luis and been treated to a lecture on what a failure she was as a woman, couldn’t hold on to her husband and only one daughter to show. But he had given her a job in his nursery business. The poisons they sprayed made her sick, but the worst part was the travel, three hours out of the days to New Jersey and back. She got home too tired to pick up Angelina and play with her.

  But always she had somehow managed until she had been busted. Then had come welfare, the waiting in line, the humiliating questions, the snooping, the meager, meager dole. Rehearsal for life as an inmate, a ward of the state, a prisoner.

  Dizzy, dizzy. Slowly the street swung around her. Her vision riddled with spots and then slowly cleared. The traffic was slowing again. The sky was almost clear of clouds now, a washed-out hazy blue with yellow in it. The sidewalks were dusty. The day was hot already and she felt ridiculous in her denim jacket, but it was cleaner than her dress. No trees. A street not made for people.

  Little houses. In each a TV, a telephone or two, one or two cars outside, toaster, washing machine, drier, hair drier, electric shaver, electric blanket, maybe a phonograph, a movie camera, a slide projector, maybe an electric Skilsaw, a snowmobile in the garage, a spray iron, an electric coffeepot. Surely in each an appliance on legs batted to and fro with two or three or four children, running the vacuum cleaner while the TV blared out game shows.

  She had envied such women, she had strived to become one. Marrying Eddie, she had hoped to be made into such a housewife in such a house. She had hoped she was being practical at last with the steady man, the steady income. She had lied about her age to him. Then she had still been able to pass for a few years younger than she was: she had been twenty-eight, and she had pretended to be twenty-five. All her aging had come after getting busted. It had shamed her to lie, but she had done all those things she had always been told to do—the small pretenses, the little laughs. Her natural modesty subtly twisted by nervous fingers into something assumed and paraded. Anything to be safe. Anything to belong somewhere at last!

  She was passing an appliance store, open now. Inside, a salesman was opening and closing the door of a stand-up freezer, his mouth going nonstop. Small café next door. The morning rush over, some latecomers were having breakfast or loitering over coffee reading a newspaper. She pushed in, feeling terribly visible. Air conditioned, with a quivering machine over the door. She took a stool at the end and reached for a menu. Ah, to sit down at last! She almost fainted with relief.

  She blinked at the prices and fear took her in the belly. She had to grip the counter. This did not look like a fancy café, the people sitting at the counter looked ordinary enough, that man in worn pants and a shirt frayed at the cuffs, that woman in white plastic shoes cracking at the toes, a scuffed plastic purse, a dress puckered at the seams. Had prices risen terribly during the few months she had been hospitalized? She had not eaten breakfast in a restaurant since … since Claud. It wasn’t a thing she could do on welfare. She tried to make herself get up and walk out, but the sight of people eating made her knees dissolve. So many things! How could she choose? She hadn’t had a choice in months. If she had two eggs and coffee only (the toast came with), it would still be $1.59 and that was the special. Her ten dollars shrank in her fist to a crumpled damp ball.

  Nevertheless, gripping the counter she ordered the breakfast The waitress behind the counter gave her a quick disapproving glance, a once-over of her hair and face and denim jacket.

  “Where’s the bus station from here?” she asked, and the waitress mumbled an answer so quickly she could not follow and had to ask again.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t speak English?”

  But the woman with the white plastic purse took over. It was only ten or eleven blocks. The woman seemed shocked that she intended to walk, but patiently explained the directions.

  The clock said eleven minutes after ten. The eggs arrived overcooked and the coffee bitter from sitting on the stove, but she ate everything, ate it slowly and gratefully. She ate everything one small bite at a time, down to the last crust of toast wiping up the last smear of egg on the platter, and even the little package that said it was grape jelly. Then she paid and ran out quickly, because she could not leave a tip.

  She tried not to limp, nothing to call attention. She watched the street signs and counted the blocks. The bus station was obvious as soon as she saw it.

  At the ticket counter she tried to figure out what to do. There were two different schedules for two different lines, and they didn’t have prices on them. Finally she had to ask questions. That was awkward, the young man behind the counter bored. She had to find out how far she could get toward New York as soon as possible on five dollars.

  He was reading a book. She could not see the title. He wanted to get back to it and kept his finger stuck between pages while he talked to her. When he had to let go to get the schedules out, he was irritated. He stuck a pencil in. On the cover two naked women embraced while a man about eight feet tall dressed all in black leather cracked a whip around them. Why would anyone read a dirty book in a bus station, sitting behind the counter? Could he brin
g himself off back there? Would he go into the john? She felt embarrassed wondering such things as she looked into his blank young face, sallow under the fluorescent lights.

  “Don’t you know where you want to go, lady?”

  Finally she ended up with a ticket that would take her all the way to the Port Authority depot, on a bus leaving at twelve-thirty. She sat down to wait. It was eleven-eighteen. Someone had left a newspaper on a chair and she began to read it through, from the front page onward. Soon she would be in New York. Running up the street. Otis, first she’d try to reach Otis, Claud’s old friend. Then Dolly. She read on. She reached an article in the women’s section describing the regimen of Countess Rataouille, a beauty from a simple banking family of Park Avenue, Seal Harbor, Palm Beach, and Monterey, for remaining gorgeous forever, which involved performing isometric exercises, never taking hot baths above the waist, and rubbing fresh strawberries into the skin daily. As her mouth was watering with the thought of fresh strawberries, a shadow fell on her page and a grip took her arm.

  “Could we see your identification, you.”

  The young man whose dirty book she had interrupted had turned her in. By twelve-thirty she was back in the hospital, on her ward.

  THIRTEEN

  “But you said I could room with Sybil!” Connie argued.

  “That’s before you messed up,” Valente said firmly. “Listen, if the two of you had tried to pull that game on me, I’d have had you both in seclusion before you could yell Uncle. You wouldn’t fool me for five minutes, and don’t forget it.”

  “How could you sign the permission?” Skip asked her as soon as Valente walked away. “They couldn’t make me sign!”

  “You’re not twenty-one. They didn’t need you to sign it.”

  “They didn’t need you either. Your brother signed it. Why did you give in?”

  Connie shrugged. “I was scared what they’d do to me at Rockover if I didn’t. I figured they had the permission anyhow. I want them to think I’ve given in.”

  “Haven’t you?” Skip flounced away, down the wide hallway.

  They had all been moved to the New York Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights, to a ward on the eighth floor specially prepared for them by turning it into a secure locked ward. It was the roomiest and most amply furnished and outfitted ward she had ever been on. They shared double rooms—like the one she and Tina Ortiz had now, with a bed for each of them that even had a bedspread and their own window, although it wouldn’t open. Sybil was next door, with Miss Green. The men were on one side of the nursing station and the women on the other. In between was a big day room with a color television, card tables, even some easy chairs and a couple of sofas, with green carpeting on the floor. At the far end of the wing that held their ward, the doctors had their conference room and computer, their lab and offices. The patients fluttered around the first few days, exclaiming about their new quarters.

  “This isn’t no jive loony bin,” Captain Cream said. “This is a Hilton!” Captain Cream was a light-skinned numbers runner born in Trinidad, who believed he was a comic book hero. Even the doctors called him Captain. He was lean and fastidious and spoke with a lilt and grace that kept her from noticing much of the time that he was walleyed.

  Sybil sniffed. “You can be sure it’s for their convenience and not ours! They’re important gentlemen! Even the laboratory mice must have nice clean cages.” Sybil had recovered some energy.

  Captain Cream, Sybil, and Tina Ortiz stood gathered in the doorway with Connie to see what the new men’s attendant, Tony, was doing to Skip, bending over him with scissors. Skip’s fine brown ringlets were falling on white towels. “Alas, Delilah, you do me wrong!” Skip sang to Tony. Snip, snip. The hair tumbled. It looked as if he was being drafted. His big, curiously vulnerable-looking skull showed gray. This too they would do to her in time, this too.

  “And will I get a wig, Tony?”

  “Only the women, punk,” Tony grunted. “Hold still, or I’ll cut your ear off.”

  “Like Van Gogh. He was mad too. But he did it to himself. Why don’t you let me have a scissors so I can do it?” Skip made a half-playful, half-serious grab.

  Tony clouted him in the chest, and Skip fell back coughing. “Stop trying to hold the doctors up.”

  Snip, snip, past his left ear, coming around. Only one long cluster of curls clung to his cheek. Tony sliced through that and then swept up. When he returned with a razor, Skip stopped joking. He had been given no breakfast. Soon he would be taken away to a hospital near Columbia, where Redding and Morgan would drill a hole in his skull and insert their electrodes. Skip would return to them violated.

  She stood with Tina and Alvin as he was carted out. His eyes were open but without expression. After the outer door had shut on him, the patients hung around, as if by staring at the door they might read something of what was happening.

  “You like that kid, uh?” Tina asked her. Her new roommate was about her own age, with a long record of drug busts and commitments and disorderly conducts.

  “He loaned me money to call mi sobrina, and he knew I couldn’t even pay him back.”

  “He’s got it to loan. Easy to be nice if you can afford it, hey? But I guess he’s in plenty trouble now, like the rest of us.” Tina was Puerto Rican, born in the Bronx, skinny with only a little extra meat on her hips. She talked fast but her sentences often trailed away as if she did not expect to be listened to. She was scrappy and would not settle down to being a good patient. She never stopped hating the hospital. “Just one more way to get busted,” she said, glaring at their room. She was the first one on any newspaper that came into the ward, after the staff, although she would read only the first section, the news, muttering to herself, sneering as if she could not be fooled, “Crooks, big crooks!”

  They went off together to visit Alice, who lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, as she did most of the time now. She looked ten years older, she looked her full age and then some, all the sass and vinegar bled from her long body.

  “Hey, Alice, you know what them bums are trying to pull now?” Tina asked, trying to rouse her.

  But Alice only shook her head. The black pageboy wig was stuck on her head crooked, and she did not straighten it. When it fell off, she did not replace it. When the attendant found it on the floor, she scolded Alice, telling her how ungrateful she was. Alice lay and blinked.

  The only time Connie saw her look like her old self was when one of the doctors came to use her for a demonstration to an interested visitor. Then her eyes shone blood red and she sang long chains of bitter curses until the doctor pushed the button that shut her up. Now that Dr. Morgan had lost his fear of her, there was something ugly in his demonstrations. He particularly liked to stimulate the point that produced in Alice a sensual rush, until once she kissed his hand and told him he was good to her.

  “I got to fool those wiseasses,” she told them, “or they going to stick more needles in. I just stringing them along.” But she did not sound as if she believed that. When she tried to fight back, the monitor turned off her rage and left her confused. Alice seemed closer to being mad than she ever had. She made up stories to account for what she did, because she literally did not know what she would do next. Yet she felt as if she were deciding. “You wait and see,” she said, winking blearily, “who come out on top in the end.”

  “You ran away because you want to return to society,” Acker was saying to her, his square beard wagging on his chin. “But what you don’t understand is that’s exactly what we want to help you do!”

  Ever since she had run away, she had been of particular interest to Acker. She had the feeling he was an uneasy fifth wheel to the project, the psychologist added for some kind of show. He made up reasons for what the others did in terms not exclusively medical. She did not understand more, but she saw his uneasiness, his slippery footing with the doctors. Even the junior partner, Morgan, tried to patronize him. Now Acker took an interest in her. He was pr
oud he had got her to sign the permission forms, but he did not let up his pressure.

  “What you don’t see, Connie, is that if it wasn’t for us, you’d face spending the rest of your life where we found you. Now, you don’t want that. Do you? He waited for an answer. He sat with his hands flexed on his spread knees.

  As he seemed prepared to wait all day, she mumbled at last, “No, I don’t want to spend my life here. Do you?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t. So, Connie, perhaps you can see we’re working for your benefit. After all, why should society care? You’ve proved you can’t live with others. They locked you away where you can’t harm others or yourself. Isn’t that so?”

  “But I can be harmed here. Isn’t that so?” She tossed her head.

  “You’re together enough to notice what happens to old patients, how they become acclimated to life in the hospital. After a while they can no longer function outside. It’s a secure life.”

  “Maybe for you.”

  “You know where your next meal is coming from. You have a bed, a roof over your head. All right, you say you don’t want that security. You want to go back to society.”

  “I want to go back to my life!”

  “This isn’t your life? This admission isn’t the first for you. I think this is likely to be your life for some years to come if we don’t help you. Instead of just warehousing you, we’re prepared to help you. This is the first time in your life you’ve ever had quality medical attention. The affluent hire psychiatrists, but you’ve never had real treatment. We want you to function again, but without risk of committing those out-of-control acts. Without danger of your attacking some child again, or some other person near and dear to you.”