Woman on the Edge of Time

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.

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!”

“There is a lot of pollution,” Luciente said. “There’s a paved roadway near here with internal combustion engines running on it, and it’s lined with dangerous refuse.”