Woman on the Edge of Time

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 cafй 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.