Woman on the Edge of Time

She read fear in the eyes of Mrs. Richard, who hated the patients, whose hands shook slightly whenever she had to touch one of them, who gave out a sour stench of fear that roused Connie like the smell of gas escaping from the open cocks of a stove. “Mrs. Ramos, you’re confused. You’re very confused. It’s time to line up for your lunch.”

“Why do we have to stand around? It’s just garbage when we get it. Who wants to stand in line for garbage like that?” She tried to speak distinctly but was disgusted to hear her thick tongue slurring the words as if she were drunk.

“Come along now! Get back in line. You’re not cooperating! All the others are waiting in line for their lunch.”

Actually Glenda had stepped out and was wandering among the cots. Connie waited to see what Mrs. Richard would do, expecting her to call the nurse and bundle her back in line. But her little rebellion had to be punished. They threw her into seclusion. Lying on the floor, she felt like a fool. But how could she go down to lunch like a sheep while Sybil burned?

She slept awhile, hot fitful sleep. The room stank of old shit. She did not look around for fear of finding it. She banged on the door, hoping they would come and let her use the bathroom, but no one appeared.

She was sitting in the Boca de Oro, Comidas Chinas y Criollas, a small Cuban-Chinese restaurant with family-sized booths on 116th Street. She and Claud liked to go there. Angie was never much of an eater and in restaurants she inclined more to whining than to eating. But Angie liked the Boca de Oro, partly for the plain buttered noodles the waiter would serve her without making a big scene, and partly for a mural she liked. Connie told Claud he was lucky he didn’t have to look at it: prancing señoritas in towering mantillas, with a bull that resembled a fat dog about to sneeze.

They sat in a booth, a more real family in their assorted colors and sizes and shapes than Eddie and Angie and she had ever made up, with Claud taking one side of the booth by himself and his cane on Angie’s side for her to play with. Connie and Angie sat facing him, while Angie squirmed with pleasure and asked to go to the bathroom every five minutes. “You can’t go to our bathroom,” she kept telling Claud. Angie was fascinated by men’s and women’s bathrooms and why they used the same one at home but they couldn’t use the same one here. Lately Angie asked questions about toilets for hours. It drove Connie crazy. The more irritated she grew, the more Angie would push her with questions. Angie had a gift for sensing when her mother didn’t want to talk about a subject, and a vivid and driving urge to know why.

“You’d make a great cop,” Claud told Angie one time. “A special detective captain cop.”

Connie was serene with pleasure: pleasure that they had some money, that they were together, that they were being a good family, that Angie was behaving and eating her noodles, that Claud was sitting there vast and beaming and solid and warm. Like the sun his presence shone on her. She ate from his dish, she ate from her own, she nibbled a little of what Angie would not finish. Everything was spicy and good. It was spring, just after Easter, and Claud had given her money for a new dress. The dress was turquoise, fitted at the waist and swinging out when she walked. Claud said it felt good and sleek. She had touched up her hair just Saturday and then used the cream rinse that made it feel soft for Claud. She was bathing in a pool of sunshine. They were busted two weeks later.

She was in isolation, crying. Claud, Angie. The court-appointed lawyer told her to cop a plea and she ended up with a suspended sentence as accomplice to a pickpocket. But she spent weeks in jail before the trial and Angie had been put in the children’s shelter for the first time. Her probation officer would not permit contact with the man she thought of as her husband. The State said her husband was Eddie. She’d never had the money to divorce him for desertion. What was the point? Only sometimes she felt as if the name Ramos was a heavy load, a great dead bough she lugged on her shoulders. Its thickness was the body of a thin but bony man, the roughness of skin closed against her. Claud had been open to her and everybody—the judge, the probation officer, Luis, everybody—had tried to make her ashamed of being with him. Black and blind.

She could not stand remembering! She had felt disgusted by Luciente and Bee, but she did not care. She had to get out of here. She had to turn off her memory. She tried to open her mind, to invite. For a long, long time nothing stirred. Nothing but time sticking to her like cold grease.

Then at last she felt something. At once she begged, “Luciente, let me visit!”

The presence grew stronger. “Grasp, you could be a sender too. What a powerful and unusual mix!”

“Don’t flatter me.”

“Why not praise strengths? Speak good when you can, and critting doesn’t sting. Clear, now, clear hard.”