Woman on the Edge of Time

Monday morning she was taken from Ward L-6 halfway across the grounds to the hospital building itself—the real hospital in the mental hospital. Normally it was a sleepy, understaffed building, but one floor seemed to have undergone changes. She got only a glimpse of maybe twenty other patients, men and women, waiting on chairs in the hall, before Fargo dragged her off. “Behave yourself now. I want to use the staff john. Now you keep quiet and don’t mess around.” Fargo installed her by the clean white sinks with liquid soap in a container that worked. Enviously she approached. Fargo was pissing. Over the liquid soap container with its yellow-green ooze, she saw a drab, funny-looking woman in the mirror. Quickly she looked away. Outside, no day passed without her seeing herself in mirrors, in shopwindows, everywhere reflected. The battered tin mirror in the bathroom on L-6 gave up only ripples of distortion.

Her hair looked disgusting: not only uncombed, straggly, dirty, but with white roots grown out along her part. Her hair had turned white down the center like a skunk as soon as she had passed thirty. Dolly gave her money for hair dye, which she hid as carefully from her caseworker as a stash of dope. It was her secret vice, dyeing her hair, but also it was a small act of self-affirmation. As long as her will kept her hair black as it had always been, as it should be, she was some part Consuelo who had won the scholarship to junior college, who had had the guts to depart Chicago for a strange city to get away from a rapist, who had broken Geraldo’s nose—yes, she was proud of that. Her definition of Connie included black hair.

Well, at least she was no longer overweight, but she was flabby. At home she had the exercise of running up and down four flights of stairs ten times a day, every time she needed something from the superette or the candy store, every time she checked the mail, took out garbage, got a pack of cigarettes, mailed a letter, went down to welfare, went out to those scrubwoman jobs welfare made her do. She carried her groceries, her laundry, her garbage. She walked many blocks. Here her only exercise was being herded to and from the showers.

Small particles of dead skin gave her flesh an ashy look. If only she had a brush, she could disentangle her hair, brush out the mats and clumps. Ah, she looked like a bundle of institutional laundry!

Fargo hauled her along. The young doctor was bustling around the hall, followed by a secretary and more attendants. Fargo turned her over to one of the new attendants, a fat red-faced man, who inserted her into a row of green plastic chairs where the men and women had been placed to wait. As each new arrival was checked in, all the waiting patients stared in hope that something about the newcomer would make clear their mutual situation.

“Do you know what we’re in for? What they’re going to do to us?” she whispered to a young man in the next chair.

“I don’t know.” He was white, skinny, long-legged and tall, with abundant kinky brown hair. “They came on my ward last week and they looked over five of us. That blond doctor and attendant. They only took him and me.” He pointed to a short black man beside him.

“They didn’t say what for?”

“Some kind of testing, we heard … . It looks to me like that room at the end of the hall is fixed up as a lab. Past the offices.”

“A lab? What kind of experiments could they do on us?”

He shrugged, “Man, I don’t know. Whatever it is, you bet it will hurt.” He sighed, combing back his nervous hands through his long, tangled hair. “My name’s Skip. This is Orville … . You don’t have any weed, do you? By some miracle? I can buy.”

“I’m Connie. I wish I did. Last time I was in, it was all over the place.”

“Some buildings it’s around, some it isn’t. In some you can get anything … . Not ours. God, can you imagine the incredible acts of brutality we might commit if we had a little dope? Monsters like us. You been in before, huh?” He waited for her nod. “Me too. Seven times in various spitals. One for each consecutive time I tried to off myself. Actually that was only five times.”

“And never made it?” She laughed.

“I’m persistent. Maybe I have a will to failure. Orville, here, he cut up his girlfriend. Did you do anything like that, maybe?”

Orville said flatly (probably for the sixtieth time, as she well knew), “I was overworked. I had this job as night watchman and then I was delivering pizzas weekends. I couldn’t cope with it all.”

“Sort of.” She clutched herself. “I smashed a bottle in the face of my niece’s pimp.” She grinned. “I wasn’t overworked. I just hated him.” Such a light feeling, like floating, to say that truthfully and let it hang there; at the same time the floating feeling was a cutting loose because she had been raised and had lived under a code where a woman never did anything like that, let alone speak of such actions.