Woman on the Edge of Time

At eleven the knock. Mrs. Polcari was slim, with short brown hair smooth as a polished wooden bowl to her cheeks. Today she wore silver earrings with little green stones that might be jade. Large hazel eyes with long sweeping lashes looked out surprised from gold wire-rimmed glasses. She had once asked Mrs. Polcari why she didn’t wear contact lenses and been rewarded with a cold stare. But such pretty eyes. If you had the money, a young girl like her, why not? Her large ripe mouth opened to a glitter of good regular white teeth when she, very occasionally, smiled. Girlish, modish, like one of those college girls she used to see when she had worked for Professor Silvester. Mrs. Polcari smelled of Arpege.

Today Mrs. Polcari was pushing a training program that sounded like someone’s bright idea for producing real cheap domestic labor without importing women from Haiti. “Ah, I don’t know,” she said to Mrs. Polcari. “When you been out of a job so long, who’ll take you back?” Cleaning some white woman’s kitchen was about the last item on her list of what she’d do to survive.

“You’re too … negative, Mrs. Ramos. Look at me. I went back to work after my children started school. I didn’t work all those years.”

“How come you had children so young? You got married in high school?” How unusual for a white woman to have children before she was eighteen.

Mrs. Polcari made a face. “Don’t butter me up, Mrs. Ramos. I didn’t get married until I was twenty-six. My mother was sure I was going to die an old maid.”

“How old are your kids, then, Mrs. Polcari?”

“The older boy is ten now, the younger just turned eight.”

So she had to be at least thirty-six.

After Mrs. Polcari left she stared in the mirror over the sink, touching her cheeks. How did they stay so young? Did they take pills? Something kept them intact years longer, the women with clean hair smelling of Arpege. The women went on through college and got the clean jobs and married professional men and lived in houses filled with machines and lapped by grass. She had not looked that young since—since before Angelina was born.

Envy, sure, but the sense too of being cheated soured her, and the shame, the shame of being second-class goods. Wore out fast. Shoddy merchandise. “We wear out so early,” she said to the mirror, not really sure who the “we” was. Her life was thin in meaningful “we”s. Once she had heard a social worker talking about Puerto Ricans, or “them” as they were popularly called in that clinic (as were her people in similar clinics in Texas), saying that “they” got old fast and died young, so the student doing her field work assignment shouldn’t be surprised by some of the diseases they had, such as TB. It reminded her of Luis talking about the tropical fish he kept in his living room, marriage after marriage: Oh, they die easily, those neon tetras, you just buy more when your tank runs out.

At least her dour pride kept her cleaning for Mrs. Polcari, who was not subject to the same physical laws, the same decay, the same grinding down under the scouring of time. Let Mrs. Polcari look down on her as a case with a bad history, a problem case; but no dirt would Mrs. Polcari find on the chair she set her little behind on and no dirt would she find on the table from which she would sometimes agree to drink a cup of instant coffee with no sugar.

After two days of scrubbing floors for the city (welfare work program), she woke very early with morning pain low in her back but found herself smiling from sleep. La madrugada—daybreak—a word that always left honey in her mouth. That taste of sweet. The face of the young Indio smiling, beckoning, curiously gentle. He lacked the macho presence of men in her own family, nor did he have Claud’s massive strength, or Eddie’s edgy combativeness. His hands as they clasped hers, however, were not soft. Shaking hands? Absurd. Warm, calloused, with a faint chemical odor.

“What should I call you?” the voice had asked. High-pitched, almost effeminate voice, but pleasant and without any trace of accent.

“Connie,” she had said. “Call me Connie.”

“My name is Luciente.”

Strange that she had dreamed in English. Me llamo luciente: shining, brilliant, full of light. Strange that with someone obviously Mexican-American she had not said Consuelo. Me llamo Consuelo.

“Come,” he had urged, and she remembered then the touch of that warm, gentle, calloused hand on her bare arm. Trying to draw her along.