Woman on the Edge of Time

After Claud had died of hepatitis in Clinton, she had mourned him in a haggard frenzy of alcohol and downers, diving for oblivion and hoping for death. She had sat for weeks in a chair, letting Angelina scream and weep herself to sleep in fear and hunger. Connie had torn at herself with her nails, with pills, with bottles, with lack of food and all poisons short of open suicide, until she had a nightmare and awakened shivering with sweat in late afternoon on the couch right under the window on Norfolk Street with the flashing blue light of a police car outside playing on the ceiling.

She dreamed that Claud was being born again: that her mourning hauled him out of the grave and drove his restless soul back into a baby’s body. Even now from his junkie mama, Claud was being crushed into the world with a habit, and waiting for him was the pot balanced on the edge of the stove that would blind him and seal his face ever after from the light of the world. Reform schools, the courts, zip sixes for kids picked up on federal raps, those rotten sixty-day-to-six-year indeterminate sentences, all the institutions that would punish him for being black and blind and surviving. All the scorn and meat hooks of the world were waiting to carve off chunks of his sweet flesh. As Claud was crammed into the baby’s writhing body, as he was forced into the small flesh and vast terror, he cursed her.

She wakened cold with sweat on the couch, her back aching, and the first thing she heard was Angelina screaming. Angelina was standing about ten feet away in their one room, screaming and kicking the wall with anger, kicking the leg of the metal table. Connie dragged herself from the bed hungover and strung out, and it hit her that having a baby was a crime—that maybe those bastards who had spayed her for practice, for fun, had been right. That she had borne herself all over again, and it was a crime to be born poor as it was a crime to be born brown. She had caused a new woman to grow where she had grown, and that was a crime. Then she came staggering off the couch and saw that Angie, in kicking the table, in kicking the wall—every blow the blow of a hammer on her aching head—had kicked a hole in her lousy cheap shoes. Those were the only shoes Angie had, and where in hell was Connie going to get her another pair? Angie couldn’t go out without shoes. There rose before Connie the long maze of conversations with her caseworker, of explanations, of pleas and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate, and trips down to the welfare office to wait all day first outside in the cold and then inside in line, forever and ever for a lousy cheap pair of shoes to replace the lousy cheap pair Angie had just destroyed.

“You fucking kid!” she screamed, and hit her. Hit too hard. Knocked her across the room into the door. Angie’s arm struck the heavy metal bolt of the police lock, and her wrist broke. The act was past in a moment. The consequence would go on as long as she breathed.

As she slumped against the wall of the bleak seclusion cell, tears ran into her lap, soaking the yellow dress, faded from repeated laundering. Tears for Claud dead, for Angelina adopted into a suburban white family whose beautiful exotic daughter she would grow into. Remembering what?

Why had Dolly betrayed her? Well, why had she betrayed her own daughter? She had thrown Angelina away from the pain of losing Claud. She should have loved her better; but to love you must love yourself, she knew that now, especially to love a daughter you see as yourself reborn. She slumped against the wall clutching her knees and tried to concentrate on the pain of the old burn that had never quite healed, to blot out memory.

She felt then that sense of approach almost as if someone were standing behind her wanting to come through, that presence brushing her consciousness. The feeling was at once an irritant and a relief. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, lacking anything else, and made a grimace of disgust at the sloppiness. How she hated to be dirty. She felt ugly, bloated with the drugs, skin deadened and flaking, lips dry and split, hair lank and dirty and bleared with feverish sweat. Her throat was sore and the back of her neck ached all the time.

Vanity before a hallucination? If she could so clearly imagine him, why couldn’t she imagine herself clean and beautiful? At least a proper hallucination would be some kind of company, so she let her eyes shut, leaned against the wall, and permitted the presence to fill her. For perhaps ten minutes she remained thus, head back and eyes tightly closed.

“Connie, at last! Fasure it’s been three weeks!”

“This is the first time I’ve been by myself since the first night.”

“Are we responsible for your being here?”

She did not immediately open her eyes. “No.”

“Fasure? You’re not just painting the bones?”

She briefly described the night of her commitment. When she opened her eyes she saw Luciente consulting the watch that whispered.