Woman on the Edge of Time

“That isn’t what I want!” Luciente said hotly. “Bolivar doesn’t respect me!”

“Do you respect Bolivar?” Parra asked with interest.

“Why … yes.”

“Why?”

“Person is a good artist.”

“Luciente and Bolivar, sit down face to face inside the ring. Look at each other. Then let’s be quiet a few minutes. I’m not sure whether we should continue or just leave you to talk. The source of friction seems to lie in your lack of rapport—no friendship yet constant contact. You must set aside time to speak. To deliver your critting and praising privately.”

Luciente and Bolivar pulled the table apart and sat down face to face in the middle, where they looked at each other with itchy embarrassment. Connie turned to Parra to say softly, “Something puzzles me. It seems like everybody is careful not to say what seems real obvious to me—that Jackrabbit and Bolivar have … well, they’re both men. It’s homosexual. Like that might bother a woman more.”

“But why?” Parra looked at her as if she were really crazy. “All coupling, all befriending goes on between biological males, biological females, or both. That’s not a useful set of categories. We tend to divvy up people by what they’re good at and bad at, strengths and weaknesses, gifts and failings.”

She felt as if she had run into a blind wall. Yet Parra fascinated her. She could be no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, yet she was serving as people’s judge. Doctor of rivers. She herself could be such a person here. Yes, she would study how to fix the looted landscape, heal rivers choked with filth. Doctor the soil squandered for a quick profit on cash crops. Then she would be useful. She would like herself, as she had during the brief period she had been involved in the war-on-poverty hoax. People would respect her. There’s Consuelo, they’d say, doctor of soil, protector of rivers. Her children would be proud of her. Her lovers would not turn from her, would not die in prison, would not be cut down in the streets, like Martin.

How she had stood over him in the morgue, shaking with rage—yes, rage—because he was dead without reason. Because everybody was poor and the summer was hot and tempers flared and men without jobs proved they were still men on the bodies of other men, on the bodies of women. They had both been twenty when they married. From the cruelty of the Anglo boy who had got her pregnant and then ran in fright, saying she could prove nothing, Martin had healed her. She had told him the truth, yet he had married her. They were both twenty-one when he was dead. A knife in the heart. He had been so beautiful.

Tears flooded her eyes in a hot flush and then eased back. She was lying on the hospital bed. Laughter rattled from the nursing station. “I caught you with your pants down, baby! Gin!”

“Shit! You got me with a mittful of face cards.”

Martin had been dead almost half the time she had lived. What was the use of crying now? Yet she mourned him freshly, thinking that in the future they might have lived side by side few: half a century. There he could have that respect he longed for, the respect whose lack tormented him like a raging thirst. He loved her enough to marry her soiled by another man but not enough to back down once from a challenge, an insult, a threat. There Martin could have had his respect, his dignity, he could have had his work and his leisure. His life. He had admired in her those months at the community college, paid for in blood. In Mattapoisett she too would have respect. And learning.

“Listen,” a female voice was saying from the nursing station, “we only got another week or two stuck over here. Then it’s back to K building and we’ll have a foursome for bridge again. I get tired playing gin every night.”

“I don’t know why, sugar. You beat me all the time. If we weren’t playing penny a point you’d have cleaned me out!”

ELEVEN

“We already have your brother’s signature on the permission form,” Acker told her, rubbing his squared-off beard. “But we want you to give us your permission too. We want to be sure you understand how we’re going to help you. We want your wholehearted cooperation.” His eyes, the color of milky cocoa, waited on her.

“So you feel less guilty what you’re doing to us?” She slumped sullenly on the edge of her bed. He kept pestering her.

“What are we doing? Giving you a chance to get out of the hospital. Make a better life. End these episodes of destructive violence. That as a long-term goal. As a short-term goal, we’re going to move all our patients out of this state hospital into a ward in NYNPI—a nice research ward. You don’t know what it’s like to be in a well-equipped mental hospital. No dormitories. You can room with your friend Sybil. Good food. Your family will visit you when you’re right in Manhattan.”

“And a chance to get my brains scrambled like Alice.”

“In two months Alice will be home, Connie. If you leave us, you think you’ll be home in two months?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t doing so bad.”