Woman on the Edge of Time

After some banter with the bartender, Claud started to play his saxophone: blues, spirituals, some popular songs. She was glad. He played all right, but she was glad because she had something to be doing sitting there: she could watch the big black man with the opaque glasses playing saxophone and she could be beating time to music, and only from the corner of her eye keep a watch on the door. Not till Claud finished and passed the hat did she realize he was blind. That took her off guard, so that when he came back to her table, returned the quarter she had dropped in the hat and asked if he could sit down and buy her a beer, she had agreed—not to be rude, because his blindness took her off guard.

This rotten place, it gave her nothing to do and too much time to do it in. Here she was brooding on Claud again. She couldn’t take it. Remembering him just cut her to bleeding hunks. Dead.

Ten-thirty. She had been up for four hours and the big event had been waiting in line for breakfast for half an hour. On the ward it was a bad day. Mrs. Richard found the sixteen-year-old black girl, Sylvia, leaning against the radiator with the side of her face burned. She was dragged off to seclusion, numb with drugs, and whatever they did to her would not include treating the burn.

Then old Mrs. Stein came out of the toilet with shit rubbed in her hair, and while one of the attendants was dragging her back in, Sharma suddenly began to punch Glenda. “You goddamn whore! I know you’re carrying on with my husband. You both think I’m stupid! Whore of Babylon! You’re doing it with all the doctors. Everybody’s talking about you, whore! You do it with all of them!”

By eleven-thirty half the seclusion rooms on the ward were full and the patients lined up for an extra-heavy dose of tranks, given in liquid form that burned the throat raw and made her hoarse. She could feel minds stirring like poplars in a storm all through the ward, and occasionally a brittle branch would break off and crash to the floor. They were angry about being kept in, with none of the minute breaks in routine to look forward to that made a life on G-2. She sat on the floor in a place where she could catch a glimpse of a whole window full of nothing but leaves if she held her head just right. If she sat at the right angle, she couldn’t see the other buildings and the green could fill her eyes.

The medication was dragging her down, filling her mind with cotton fluff and odd hot pieces of hallucination and memory. Her head felt swollen: the heads of those embryos floating in the brooder, those oversized knowing heads floating upside down behind glass. She wanted to sleep, but patients were not allowed to lie down during the daytime.

Finally an event: time to line up for lunch. They shuffled into line, they wandered about as the attendants made them stand straight. They waited and waited for the door to unlock. All the wards in G building went to lunch downstairs, but on a staggered schedule. Glenda, with a face swollen from Sharma’s attack, came and stood next to her. Waited to see if she would speak.

Connie asked, “Does your face hurt?”

“She never does. All the best plastic.”

“I know Sharma didn’t really mean what she said.”

“Something to tell you. She went along the hall—the attendants took her.”

She waited. She knew Glenda was talking about herself and had something pressing to say.

“Come on now,” Mrs. Richard was braying. She was afraid of the patients and they all sensed it. “Close up that line. Come on now! A straight line!”

“She saw your friend with her feet sticking out.”

“Sybil?” She immediately flashed on her body under a sheet, the long auburn hair flying out. “What were they doing with Sybil?”

“Taking her to be burned. Saint Joan. She told me to tell you she was sorry about your friend.”

“Shock? They were taking Sybil for shock?”

“They burn it out. Then they fill it with cement.” Glenda peered into her face, then fled away farther back into the line.

She wanted to lie down. She wanted to crawl under a table. Would Sybil know her afterward? Sometimes after shock inmates didn’t remember friends or lovers. She felt low and mean. Sybil had had shock before. “They’ve done everything but hang me,” Sybil said. Sybil would fight them; but they were knocking her out, they were running the savage bolts through her soul. Sybil unconscious was merely another helpless woman.

Deliberately, quietly she got out of line and sat down on her cot. Mrs. Richard trotted after her, her small mouth pursing up in a pout of alarm. “Mrs. Ramos, get back in line. It’s time for your lunch.”

“Why should I stand there for twenty minutes waiting?” She tried to speak with quiet dignity but the medication slurred her tongue. “The medication makes me dizzy. I’ll wait here.”