Woman on the Edge of Time

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?