Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  “But it was you, your people, who taught me I’m fighting a war.”

  “Then fight well, Connie!” They walked out into the cold clean brisk air. Luciente paused to grab a jacket and drape it over Connie’s shoulders. Big disks of snow came tilting and turning down where already several inches lay thick, rounding all corners and softening straight lines, an expanse of white across the square marked only by the tracks of children playing.

  Luciente touched her shoulder. “You want to ask if I still mourn … .”

  “I wouldn’t ask!”

  “I know. But you want to feel how I am. Yes, I mourn. But I work too. It hurts, but I can’t let the pain bind me … . Diana has helped. Otter has helped. Bee has carried me! … I want no new lover and I dread spring … . But look!” Luciente waved her hand at a snowball battle swirling around the statue of a funny bird dancing on one foot and a barricade of benches. Briefly Dawn ran through a pool of light, whooping and waving.

  Lazy flakes drifted onto the arm of the borrowed jacket. “Luciente, do you think it’s always wrong to kill?”

  “We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice.” Luciente caught flakes on her outstretched palm.

  “I mean to kill a person.”

  “How can I face something so abstract?”

  “To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in.”

  “Power is violence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we’re back to the wall—or to tear down a wall. You know we kill people who choose twice to hurt others. We don’t think it’s right to kill them. Only convenient. Nobody wants to stand guard over another.”

  “In my time people are willing to stand guard. It’s a living. I guess maybe it’s power, too.”

  “You brood on killing someone, my friend?”

  She nodded, disentangling herself from Luciente to clutch her hands together before her breasts. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world. Luciente was speaking, but under the rush of her blood, the words mumbled like stones in the bed of a river. Slowly people drifted from the meetinghouse and began taking shovels, brooms from sheds along the square and the paths. The shovels clanged against the stone, the wood scraped. The night began to fill with laughter and the sounds of shoveling. The children stopped their fight and began to clear the snow. In red pants and a dark blue parka, Dawn was wielding a broom, coming along behind Otter, whose broad single braid bounced rhythmically on her back. Bee was clearing snow from the path toward the fooder, as Hawk came running and sliding to work beside him. Her breath came out in white plumes as she talked and talked full speed to him.

  She could hear Luciente speaking but she could no longer distinguish the words in the roar of her blood. Only dimly she could hear the scrape of metal on stone. Lips moved as if people were singing. Dawn looked over her padded shoulder at them. Dawn smiled and waved and began to sweep very hard with the broom, showing off, casting up a fine white dust. Flakes rested lightly on her black dome of hair, the hood of the parka cast back. One flake sat for a moment on the end of her delicate, sensuously curved nose, snow on her beautiful Mayan nose where Connie imagined that she pressed a quick kiss.

  She lay flat on her bed, out of breath as if she had been dropped from a height.

  “What is it?” Tina sat up, awake. “You okay?”

  “Yes …”

  “You cried out. What happened—you have a bad dream?”

  “A good one. Tina, I dreamed of my daughter, safe, happy, in another place.” She could still see Angelina’s face ruddy with playing, her small arms fat in the parka feverishly wielding the broom, while the snowflake melted on her nose. “If only they had left me something!” she whispered. Still trembling, she thought, If only they had left me Martin, or Claud, or Angelina, if they had even left me Dolly and Nita, I would have minded my own business. I’d have bowed my head and kept down. I was not born and raised to fight battles, but to be modest and gentle and still. Only one person to love. Just one little corner of loving of my own. For that love I’d have borne it all and I’d never have fought back. I would have obeyed. I would have agreed that I’m sick, that I’m sick to be poor and sick to be sick and sick to be hungry and sick to be lonely and sick to be robbed and used. But you were so greedy, so cruel! One of them, just one, you could have left me! But I have nothing. Why shouldn’t I strike back?

  Yet her hands shook with fear. She lay cold and trembling, all the night.

  “This operation is designed to help you,” Dr. Morgan said. “To enable us to return you to society. You’ll be able to hold a job.”

  “I feel a lot better. Why do I need this operation now? I went home to my brother’s Thanksgiving. I worked real hard there. I’ve been good and cooperative on the ward.”

  “You’ve been better before, Connie,” Acker said. Today Miss Moynihan was not sitting at his side but across the room next to her boss, Dr. Morgan. She and Acker did not catch each other’s gaze. Her gray eyes were bloodshot and underscored by dark tissue. She had been crying; she had not been sleeping. Patty passed her a note and she shook her head bitterly, drawing herself tighter. Acker seemed more nervous than usual. He had a dark area on his left cheek, like a bruise. Who had hit him? Miss Moynihan or one of her brothers? “We know that you can’t help what you do. It’s as though you experienced a shorting out of circuits that causes you to move into an episode of uncontrollable rage.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong in months. I’m much better. Why do I need this operation right now, when I’m doing fine?”

  “You’ve had periods of calm before,” Dr. Redding pointed out. His fingers were propped together like steeples over his empty cup. “Long periods. But they always end the same way. Don’t they, Connie?”

  “It isn’t the same. Really, please, it isn’t! Look, I did something I’m ashamed for, my daughter. But I’ve paid for that again and again! Forever. How can I be uncontrollable? You been controlling me.”

  “You don’t want to hurt someone close to you again, do you, Connie? You have a recurrent disease, like someone who has a recurrent malaria,” Acker said, looking pleased with himself. He glanced at Dr. Redding for approval, but Redding was talking in Dr. Argent’s ear. Both of diem had been turning over the pages of a proposal of some sort, and Argent was going down the budget line by line, making little notes to the side.

  “But maybe the other thing worked. Maybe I don’t need an operation!”

  “We have a permission from the brother, don’t we?” Redding asked Patty.

  She made a little sitting curtsy toward a file on the table. “Yes, Doctor.”

  Dr. Argent put down the proposal, took the pipe from his mouth, and fixed Connie with a twinkly smile. “Mrs. Ramos, you’re frightened by the idea of an operation. Isn’t that right?”

  “Sure, I’m afraid! I’m okay now, Doctor. Look at the ward notes.”

  “Your mother died after an operation. Didn’t she, Mrs. Ramos?”

  Ay de mí, he was playing a psychiatrist game. She would have to say yes. “Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee, please? I feel a little confused, a little sleepy. I didn’t sleep so well last night on account of worrying about this.” She stood up, but remained balanced over her chair. “Please, Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee?”

  Argent raised a silvery eyebrow, his interest fading. “You’ve often been a little confused, haven’t you, Mrs. Ramos?” He picked up the proposal again, reaching for his pen.

  “You can have your coffee as you leave. We’re almost done with you,” Dr. Redding said, stretching his long legs under the table. “We can all use a coffee break. This is the last of them, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Patty said, consulting her calendar.

  “Connie, we understand that you’re frightened. Society is also afraid of you—with more reason, wouldn’t you say? This operation i
s less complicated than the one you underwent in October. Now, you agreed you’re better for that operation.” Redding spoke fast, the words speeding into her. “You’ll be the better for this surgical procedure also. Then, like Alice, you’ll be released. Surely you don’t want to spend your life in a mental institution?”

  “But last time I got better and they let me out without any operation!”

  “And here you are again. Aren’t you? Your brother … what’s his name?”

  “Lewis Camacho,” Patty read. “From Bound Brook, New Jersey.”

  “Your brother … er … in New Jersey … Mr. Coman-chee? … has signed the permission. The procedure will be carried out Monday. In a month you’ll be released. Consider that, Connie, and you’ll realize your fears are as irrational and as much a part of the pattern of your illness behavior as your hostile episodes. Okay, let’s break!”

  The staff leaned back in their chairs and turned to each other as Connie got up, all except Miss Moynihan, who brushed past her in a hurry. Her face was twisted and she raced toward the staff ladies’ bathroom. Tony had been standing outside, sneaking a smoke, wrapped in a plastic bag of music from his transistor radio. “They done with you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know!” She held up her hands. “I don’t understand what they’re doing. You ask them. They keep talking about my brother Luis. I don’t understand what they want me to do.”

  “Wait here. Just hold on.” Tony stuck his head into the room, where she saw past him the doctors pushing back their chairs and beginning to rise, small knots of conversation forming. Argent and Redding had their heads together over the proposal, plotting. Morgan hovered, ignored and nervous. Redding nodded briskly at the little notes. Five thousand more chimpanzees? Prisoners? Women on welfare? They had disposed of her. “They said I could have some coffee,” she said out loud, and moved at once into the alcove where the doctors’ big shiny coffee machine stood. Quickly she dumped the contents of the old pot, emptied a premeasured packet into the filter, and pressed the Brew button. Then she fished the bottle from her purse and dripped the oily liquid into the glass pot as the coffee began to fill it. She hoped they would realize this was fresh coffee, and not discard it to make more.

  When Tony came out the water was still pouring down. “Come on, Ramos. They’re done with you. Leave the doctors’ coffee alone, don’t mess up now. You can get a cup on the patients’ side.”

  “They don’t want me anymore?” She blinked confusion.

  “What do you think, they need all day to make up their minds about you? They’re big-shot doctors. That Redding, he had his picture in Time. Patty showed me, she keeps a scrap-book on him. Dr. Argent, he goes up to Washington to testify before Congress to set them straight on things. You don’t think they got all day to waste making up their minds about what to do with you!”

  She washed her hands in the bathroom, she washed them again and again. “I just killed six people,” she said to the mirror, but she washed her hands because she was terrified of the poison. “I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death. I killed them. Because it is war.” Her hands shook like a willow branch used by dowsers in Texas, a willow branch pulled by water deep in the ground. “I’m a dead woman now too. I know it. But I did fight them. I’m not ashamed. I tried.”

  She broke the bottle under running water without touching it and washed the pieces down the shower. They’d most likely find them, but it was the best she could think up. Then she washed her hands a last time and went in search of Sybil. When she found her in the lounge she said to her only, “Soon!” Sybil looked into her face. A tear formed and hung in her eye. Then she looked down and said nothing, alert, ingathered, ready. Connie went to her room. As she passed Valente, knitting, the attendant nodded to her.

  She thought of Luciente, but she could no longer reach over. She could no longer catch. She had annealed her mind and she was not a receptive woman. She had hardened. But she thought of Mattapoisett.

  For Skip, for Alice, for Tina, for Captain Cream and Orville, for Claud, for you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won.

  After a while she heard the commotion and they came with stretchers—four. Dr. Morgan was trying to cut down on coffee, and Miss Moynihan was being sick in the staff bathroom. I am not sorry, she thought, her heard pounding terribly, and she sat on her bed, waiting.

  TWENTY

  Excerpts from the Official History of

  Consuelo Camacho Ramos

  * * *

  State of New York—Department of Mental Hygiene

  Bellevue Hospital

  CLINICAL SUMMARY

  IDENTIFICATION: This 35-year-old Mexican-American Catholic woman separated from her husband Edward for the past three years has one child, Angelina, aged 4. The patient has been on Aid to Dependent Children since last May.

  PRESENTING PROBLEM: This patient brought her child into emergency at N.Y.U., stating that she had accidentally broken her wrist. The child was bruised. When questioned by caseworker, the patient readily admitted beating her daughter, while drunk or drugged. The patient was incoherent, weeping, and exhibited bizarre behavior.

  PAST HISTORY: This socially disorganized individual has been in an increasingly deteriorating state since the breakup of her marriage. Whereabouts of husband unknown. This patient has been in conflict with the law for two years. Convicted of aiding and abetting a pickpocket and given a suspended sentence and a year’s probation last April. The patient refers to an illegal abortion, followed by severe hemorrhaging and complications, for which a hysterectomy was performed at Metropolitan. The patient has recent alcohol and barbiturate problems. Seems hostile and suspicious toward authority. Lack of control and frustration tolerance. The patient has a tendency to act out problems with violent expression and hostile and extrapunitive tendencies.

  MENTAL STATUS: This patient is disheveled and appears to be older than her stated age. She readily admits needing help. She is cooperative but confused and occasionally suspicious. Has not demonstrated assaultive behavior on the ward.

  STREAM OF MENTAL ACTIVITY: The patient is incoherent. The patient’s thinking is extremely concrete.

  EMOTIONAL REACTIONS: The patient’s general mood is anxious and exhibits extreme guilt. The patient’s affect is inappropriate, marked by crying without cause.

  CONTENT OF THOUGHTS: Denies suicidal ideation. Denies delusions or hallucinations.

  SENSORIUM, MENTAL GRASP AND CAPACITY: Sensorium clear. Oriented times three. Recent and remote memory appear weak. The patient has somewhat slow intelligence and answers questions poorly.

  DIAGNOSIS: Schizophrenia, undiff. type 295.90.

  * * *

  State of New York—Department of Mental Hygiene

  Rockover State Psychiatric Hospital

  DISCHARGE NOTE

  Dr. Messinger

  HISTORY: This 35-year-old Mexican-American woman, Catholic mother of one daughter, was hospitalized at Bellevue because of child abuse, alcohol problems, confusion, and bizarre behavior, and admitted here February 8.

  HOSPITAL COURSE: The pt. responded well to medication, although with pronounced side effects, swollen tongue, etc. Her behavior slowly normalized and the pt. exhibited decreased psychiatric signs and symptoms.

  PRESENT MENTAL STATUS: Alert, cooperative, coherent, relevant, with no abnormalities of stream of thought or content of thought. Acceptable insight. Oriented times three.

  PHYSICAL CONDITION: Ambulatory—no physical abnormalities. Can care for self.

  TREATMENT PLAN: Pt. discharged to welfare hotel until welfare finds her an apartment. She will report to Aftercare Clinic at Bellevue weekly.

  MEDICATION: 1. Thorazine 200 mg. o.d. at 5 P.M.

  2. Prolixin 1 cc IM every 2 weeks.

  3. Artane 2 mg t.i.d.

  CONDITI
ON: Improved

  DIAGNOSIS: Paranoid Schizophrenia, type 295.3.

  From Bellevue Admission Notes: This evening this 37-year-old obese Puerto Rican woman allegedly attacked a relative and a relative’s fiancé with a bottle. Upon examination she was found lying on the floor, groaning incoherently, and proved disoriented as to time and place. She was hostile, uncooperative, and threatening. She was abusive to relative and relative’s fiancé. Admit. Thorazine 1000 mg by injection. Restraint.

  From Rockover State Admission Notes: This patient is a 37-year-old Mexican-American Catholic mother, separated from her husband Edward, whose child has been put out for adoption through the state agency. Has a history of violent psychotic episodes, including robbery, assault, and child abuse. Eleven days ago this patient attacked her niece Dolores Campos and her niece’s fiancé. This patient is known to us and has been previously hospitalized in Rockover. After ten days at Bellevue, transferred here. Remained acutely psychotic. During hospitalization, she has been mute and withdrawn with occasional violent outbursts. She has been uncooperative, attempting to refuse medication, and has no insight into her illness. Has delusions of persecution by niece’s fiancé and speaks of the State of New York as “murdering” a Negro boyfriend. This patient also constantly complains about the child put out for adoption. The patient has no consistent notions of right or wrong. She said that for the last two years she didn’t drink at all. She smokes about a pkg. a day. She denies any drug addiction, although she admits use of barbiturates in the past. She claims not to have had any relations with men in the past three years. She doesn’t admit any attachments to women either. This patient is a socially maladjusted individual subject to periodic dysphorias accompanied by fear, leading to violent episodes and aggressions. Admit to Ward L-6. Restrict to ward. Violence precautions.