Woman on the Edge of Time

Luciente nodded. “Yet I can’t see male and female as equally to blame, for one had power and the other was property. Nothing in what you made speaks of that.”

“You have us!” Jackrabbit raised his eyebrows. “That’s so.”

“What we made was beautiful,” Bolivar said. “Weren’t you moved? A holi is composed of an hour’s images. You’re not respectful enough of beauty, Luciente.”

Sojourner said, “Luciente leans far in the direction of one value and Bolivar in the other. Yet instead of looking at each other with pleasure and thinking how much richer is the world in which everyone is not like me, each judges the other. How silly. You could enrich each other’s understanding through Jackrabbit, who is drawn both ways—as to everything that moves!”

“I don’t think the holies I make with Bolivar are better or worse than I make alone. I think Luciente looks at them more critically,” Jackrabbit said.

“We all owe you feedback, and it’s a pity Luciente’s critting waited until now to come out. We fail you as our artist,” Barbarossa said. “If we don’t crit you, how will you grow?”

The fat person spoke up. “What do you fear, Luciente, that you watch carefully when they work together? What makes you nervous?”

Luciente covered her face with her hands, frowning with thought. A full five minutes passed. Connie stole a look at Parra, presiding over the table but not butting in. She felt a melancholy belief that she would never see the new Tejas del Sur, departamento de Río Grande, which had borne this woman who had so much simple confidence and dignity early in her life.

“I’m not sure,” Luciente said slowly, uncovering her face. “I believe sometimes Bolivar seeks to recreate the earlier time when Jackrabbit and Bolivar were always together, each other’s core. To me that’s sliding back to a time now past, when growth means going forward. They seem to me to bind each other.”

“Like what you and Diana did?” Jackrabbit arched his brows.

“Maybe I fear that.”

“But Diana and Bolivar have different gifts. The intensity we slip into together lets us keep up our intimacy although weeks pass apart. Our intimacy has always been centered on work. Even at our most intense and coupled, we turn outward and give to the community.”

“True, Luciente,” Sojourner said. “Your binding with Diana kept you from working well. Never did you work together, yet you fed on each other.”

“Bolivar gets nervous too,” Hawk said tentatively. “Bolivar teases Luciente a lot, and it makes per feel silly. That’s how Bolivar pays Luciente back or punishes per or something.”

A gray-haired person with a deeply weathered face next to Bolivar smiled broadly. “It’s true, how not? Bolivar out-maneuvers Luciente. Bolivar’s clever, quick-witted. Luciente’s talkative but not witty. Luciente can’t strike back quick enough to win verbal battles. Now, Luciente thinks through things politically much more carefully than Bolivar. Everybody in Mouth-of-Mattapoisett knows Luciente was recruited for the reaching-back proj not only for per sending, but because of political soundness. Person can rep us clearly and fairly. But Luciente uses that political weight as a weapon against Bolivar. You smite each other with your different gifts. Isn’t that perverse, no?” The gray-haired person beamed from one to the other.

“Then Bolivar too is afraid,” Parra said. “We go too fast. Let’s ask Bolivar what person fears.”

“If I’m Jackrabbit’s past, how frail. Luciente is the present. The past disappears. Health is Luciente, growth is Luciente—according to Luciente! Yet Jackrabbit and I work well together. What’s backward about that? We love each other differently at twenty-five and nineteen than we did at nineteen and thirteen, but—”

Jackrabbit said to Luciente, “You’ve never stopped loving anybody you loved, you know that. Why can’t you inknow how it is for me? You don’t think you’re stale on Bee because it’s years old.”

Sojourner narrowed her eyes at Bolivar. “Suppose you won this little war? You have Jackrabbit all to yourself. Luciente goes off. Jackrabbit can’t travel with you all the time without giving up per workshop. Jackrabbit just put in for defending and mothering. How can person combine mothering with a wandering life like yours? You’re with us maybe a week out of the month.”

“I never tried to comp Jackrabbit into traveling with me all the time. Only sometimes we’re warmed to work together.”

“But it’s Jackrabbit’s work more than Luciente keeping per here in Mattapoisett, no?” The fat person spoke.

“Fasure.” Bolivar sighed. “Jackrabbit is more bound to place. Always when we traveled together, person would get irritable. Would sleep badly, grow a mean temper, and sling me.”

“Luciente,” Sojourner went on. “Suppose you won your war against Bolivar and whittled per down in the eyes of Jackrabbit. Will you give up Bee and spend all your free time with Jackrabbit? Will you give up the reaching-back proj or your work in the genetics base to work with Jackrabbit, the way Bolivar does?”