Woman on the Edge of Time

It was not impatience she felt as she stood in line for the usual breakfast slop, wan oatmeal and the rationed cup of bitter coffee more precious than dope. All the day stretched toward Dolly’s arrival, but to yearn was to be full. She kept the memory of the evening too rich yet to squander, a candy she could suck and suck during the week and not use up.

Could she tell Dolly about Bee? She could refer to him as if he were a patient she was flirting with. What would Dolly’s new man be like? She must get on a better footing with him than she had with Geraldo. Yet from the letter he was her pimp. How could she like a pimp? Parasites of women’s sweat. Body lice. Why was Dolly still on the streets? Debts, money, her daughter Nita to feed.

No reproaches! May love flow: Luciente waved her calloused hand. Connie combed and combed her wiry hair. That ugly white parting. How drab she looked, how ashen her skin seemed. Dolly, so young and plump and juicy, how could she help wanting to turn away when she saw her aunt? Madwoman with skunk hair wrapped in a faded dress sizes too big, shuffling to meet them like something that crawled out of the wall.

Mrs. Yoshiko, the weekend attendant, brought her a bright red lipstick, Mrs. Yoshiko, exactly her height, laughed and stuck some pins in her hair so that it looked different and a little better. “Good now.” She spoke little English but she smiled sometimes and sometimes she looked at them when they spoke.

After lunch she sat at a card table playing gin rummy with Mrs. Stein and losing lots of little white chips torn out of a magazine they used for money. She waited. One o’clock! Visiting hours began. No one for her.

Of course she could hardly expect Dolly to arrive at one! It took two hours to get here from New York. Longer in heavy traffic. A summer Sunday, say three hours. If there was a traffic jam, three and a half! She could not begin expecting until … let’s see: suppose Dolly got up at ten. Ten-thirty if she worked last night. Say eleven. Wouldn’t get out of the house until noon. Her boyfriend was picking her up. Say twelve-thirty. So they might not arrive until almost four. She would begin allowing herself to expect Dolly at three-thirty.

Yet every time the phone rang in the nurses’ station, every time the door lock clacked over, she froze, the cards blurred. She hoped and waited and watched the other visitors come and go. The afternoon bled away. She could not play cards anymore. She paced as slowly as she could force herself to, through the dormitory to the day room, back and forth across the porch. Every time the phone rang or the door clacked over, she rushed back to the nursing station to stand about awkwardly, waiting, hoping.

At five it was all over. The last visitor was shooed out. Dolly had not come.

TEN

Monday arrived with a thud. Skip turned out to be right and she was carted off to a new ward, set up like a regular hospital ward in the medical building. A plywood partition divided the women from the men, with a door at the moment open. The outer doors on the ward were locked. It had fewer amenities than G-2: no porch, no separate day room with TV. Fats was still with them, but the woman attendant didn’t seem to know where anything was on the hospital grounds and complained loudly she had to get up at five-thirty to come out here. Mrs. Valente was a big woman with something wrong with her tongue or palate that gave her speech a muffled, battered quality.

Sybil was here already, her long legs drawn up cross-legged as she camped on her bed waiting to see what was going to happen. Sybil had thrown a bathrobe over the next cot to save it for her, and she grabbed it gratefully. Near the nurses’ station a bed had its sides up. In it a black woman lay with a great white helmet of bandages on her head and a gadget perched on top of the bandage like a metal beanie.

“That’s Alice Blue Bottom,” Sybil hissed. “Look what they’ve done to her!”

“What is it? Did she have an accident?”

“I don’t think so. Doesn’t that look bizarre?”

Connie peered down the ward. “Are you sure it’s her?”

“I read the name on the chart at the foot of her bed, Consuelo.”

“Is she unconscious?” She noticed a machine up on legs beside the bed.

“No. She made a face at me when I came in, which is why I read the name on her chart. I was embarrassed not to recognize her, so I said, Hello, and she said, Look what they have done to me! She did not put it exactly that way, but that was the gist of her earthy expressions.”

“What did she say they did?”

“Valente hustled me past before I could ask any questions.”

“It looks like they busted her head. Maybe she tried to get away.” Connie stared at the tall barred windows.

“Is Valente so crude she’d leave visible damage? A sock with a soap in it, that’s what the attendant used to use on me.”

Skip came to the doorway. “Hsssst! Connie!”

“Skip, I can’t pay you back yet. My niece didn’t come Sunday. But she’s coming next weekend,” she said quickly.