Woman on the Edge of Time

“I wanted to know about the toys. You have all those gadgets here. Compared to your huts, it’s … fancy. Nice. But I don’t see many toys for the older kids. Can’t you afford to get them toys? I see nobody rich here, but I don’t see anybody poor. I think of how sad it’s been for families like mine who could never give their kids the beautiful dolls with real hair, the sleds, the bikes and racing cars they see advertised. If I had a house of children, I’d give them every toy in the world! I wouldn’t hold nothingback!”

Magdalena touched her on the cheek. “They play farming and cooking and repair and fishing and diving and manufacture and plant breeding and baby tending. When children aren’t kept out of the real work, they don’t have the same need for imitation things. I have studied about the care of children in earlier ages, so I understand more than Luciente what you’re talking about. In that time, Luciente, they had many toys for teaching sex roles to children. Children were kept in separate buildings all day and even after puberty were not supposed to begin full lives.”

Slowly they descended the broad stairs to the bottom and moved off along an arcade. As they turned a corner, in a little nook that was both bower and bench, a rampant twining vine of wisteria ancient and knotted like muscles held in its protective grasp a curved wooden bench that was a lovely size for curling up and napping or reading, for sitting and feeling sorry for oneself, for daydreaming, for imagining voyages and adventures, for whispering secrets to a best friend. There two children, a boy and a girl six or seven, had hung their light summer tunics on the vine like flags and they were seriously engaged in an attempt to have sex together. It did not look like an attempt that would prove immediately successful, but it was one into which they were putting great effort.

The girl gave them a quick indignant glare. Magdalena pulled Connie away by the arm, Luciente having withdrawn even more quickly. As Magdalena dragged her away, Connie asked, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”

Magdalena dropped her arm and began to laugh and although Luciente tried for a moment to keep a straight face she began to laugh with her. Connie stopped, furious. “They’re babies! If they were … playing with knives you’d stop them. What’s wrong with you?”

Magdalena shook her head in wonder. “They learn how to use knives … . Mostly they learn sex from each other. If a child has trouble, we try to heal, to help, but—”

“They can hurt each other!”

“How? If a child is rough, the other children deal with that. If I notice a child bullying, I try to work with that child, the mothers and family, to strengthen better ways.”

Luciente nudged her in the ribs. “Zo, as a child you never played sex with other children? Not ever?”

Connie paced on, frowning. She leaned on the railing of the courtyard. “Oh. Sure.” In fact, her brother Luis had taken her pants down under the porch and poked at her with his fingers, finishing with warnings not to tell Mamá. She had not liked the prodding by Luis, who had kept his own pants on, but it had given her an idea. Casually and a lot more gently, she had begun fooling around together with José, her favorite brother, one year and two months younger.

She took care of him often. Luis didn’t have to and he would be off with the boys. She would take José by the hand and they would play together. Ninety-nine games out of a hundred they played with paper dolls, with José’s wooden duck, with Luis’s wagon if he left it there, with dolls made out of wild flowers, games of school, of sitting at imaginary tables eating meals of grass soup and scolding babies, of charros, of detectives, of general bang-bang. But every so often they climbed into the old car up on blocks behind the chicken coop next door and they touched each other where it felt best to touch. They did not need to warn each other not to say anything. Both of them sensed that what felt really good must be forbidden. It was a silent, pleasurable game that had stopped certainly by the time they moved to Chicago. But not one ounce of Connie’s flesh believed it had done her any harm.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Maybe it don’t hurt. But I know if I saw my daughter playing that way, I’d have to stop her. I’d feel so guilty if I didn’t! I’d feel like a bad mother, a rotten mother.”

“How interesting,” Magdalena said politely, with her head cocked. “Our notions of evil center around power and greed—taking from other people their food, their liberty, their health, their land, their customs, their pride. We don’t find coupling bad unless it involves pain or is not invited.” She paused before a closed door. “Come. Watch a lesson.”