Woman on the Edge of Time

Locked into seclusion, Connie sat on the floor near the leaky radiator with her knees drawn up to her chest, slowly coming out of a huge dose of drugs. Weak through her whole useless watery body, she still felt nauseated, her head ached, her eyes and throat were sandpapery, her tongue felt swollen in her dry mouth, but at least she could think now. Her brain no longer felt crushed to a lump at the back of her skull and the slow cold weight of time had begun to slide forward.

Already her lips were split, her skin chapped from the tranquilizers, her bowels were stone, her hands shook. She no longer coughed, though. The tranks seemed to suppress the chronic cough that brought up bloody phlegm. Arriving had been so hard, so bleak. The first time here, she had been scared of the other patients—violent, crazy, out-of-control animals. She had learned. It was the staff she must watch out for. But the hopelessness of being stuck here again had boiled up in her two mornings before when the patients in her ward had been lined up for their dose of liquid Thorazine, and she had refused. Pills she could flush away, but the liquid there was no avoiding, and it killed her by inches. She had blindly fought till they had sunk a hypo in her and sent her crashing down.

Letting loose like that brought them down hard on her. She was still in seclusion, having been given four times the dose she had fought. Captivity stretched before her, a hall with no doors and no windows, yawning under dim bulbs. Surely she would die here. Her heart would beat more and more slowly and then stop, like a watch running down. At that thought the heart began to race in her chest. She stared at the room, empty except for the mattress and odd stains, names, dates, words scratched somehow into the wall with blood, fingernails, pencil stubs, shit: how did she come to be in this desperate place?

Her head leaning on the wall she thought it was going to be worse this time—for last time she had judged herself sick, she had rolled in self-pity and self-hatred like a hot sulfur spring, scalding herself. All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black—social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counselors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers—all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison. She was marked with the bleeding stigmata of shame. She had wanted to cooperate, to grow well. Even when she felt so bad she lay in a corner and wept and wept, laid level by guilt, that too was part of being sick: it proved she was sick rather than evil. Say one hundred Our Fathers. Say you understand how sick you’ve been and you want to learn to cope. You want to stop acting out. Speak up in Tuesday group therapy (but not too much and never about staff or how lousy this place was) and volunteer to clean up after the other, the incontinent patients.

“As a mother, your actions are disgraceful and uncontrolled,” the social worker menaced, at once angry and bored. Angelina was sitting in an office chair from which her little legs could not reach the floor and she was sucking a pencil from the social worker’s desk. Connie wanted to take the pencil from her. Lead poisoning: never chew pencils! But she did not dare touch her daughter in front of the bureaucrat from Child Welfare. Angelina had been given a sucker earlier and now she obviously wanted another; a sucker was a big event to her. That afternoon she was to be taken to a children’s detention center while Connie awaited “a determination of the case.” Connie’s case had been determined, all right. “Willful abuse for injuring the person or health of a minor child,” they said, but they also said she was not responsible for her actions. They kept saying what a pretty child Angelina was, and Connie guessed that partly they were expressing surprise that her child was so light. “It won’t be hard to place her, even at four,” she heard the social worker tell her probation officer. “She doesn’t look—I mean she could be anything.”

That was what white people noticed about her baby, but Angelina’s features were obviously her own, the ample sensuous hook of Mayan nose, the small mouth, puckered now as she pouted, the delicate chin, the eyes of shiny black almonds, In fact, what Connie saw when she looked at her daughter was a small dose of herself. Herself cowering in a chair, whimpering. Herself trying to stick out that tiny chin and shouting with an enraged monkey scowl, I will I will! I will too! I will too!Herself starting all over again with no better odds on getting more or less than a series of kicks in the teeth.