Woman On The Edge Of Time (16 page)

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.”

She felt Luciente’s firm embrace and then she stood in her hut.

“We lost you suddenly last time.” Luciente hugged her. “You weren’t injured?”

“I think if I remember something too well it breaks this—whatever you call this link.”

“Could be you stop catching when your attent shifts. I guess we’ll get used to these abrupt discorporatings and hoppings to and fro in time.” Luciente was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She reminded Connie of an athlete, of a woman tennis player; except that they were hardly ever as dark as Luciente. Bee, on the bed’s edge, wore a long red and black robe covered with fine embroidery that stiffened it, with a softly rolled hood cast back on his broad shoulders.

“Come!” Luciente urged her, huskiness catching with haste. “Hurry! Bee’s coms wait.”

Indeed, squatting carefully outside so as not to stain their costumes were two women as dressed up as Bee, women she recognized from the lunch table. One wore a long shirt and leggings of soft pale deerskin much worked with shell and quill appliqué; she had braided her long black hair with strips of dyed leather into a tower precariously fastened. The other’s chestnut hair was loose and she wore long filigree earrings and a flowing blue gown. With quick grace both women rose to greet them.

Sitting a little apart on a stone was a fair-haired girl, yes, of thirteen or so. This child was easy for Connie to distinguish because her cotton shirt was open all the way down like a jacket, and her small cups of breasts were visible as she got up and turned toward them. The skin of her chest looked tattooed. Connie stared. As they moved into a close group, she could see it was paint. The girl wore pants and that open shirt and had at her feet a basket, which now she swung up to wear like a rucksack. She also picked up a bow and slung it over her shoulder. Connie could see at her waist a knife sheath, hanging under the shirt-as-jacket.

“This is our child, Innocente. Innocente, here is Connie, from the past.” Bee turned to her, stately today in his movements.
“This day is Innocente’s naming. Otter, Luxembourg, and I are about to leave together by floater to see per safely landed. We’ve been Innocente’s mothers, and this is end-of-mothering.”

“As if you won’t be tumbled to get rid of me!” Innocente stuck out her tongue at him.

“You guessed it. We plan to drop you in the bay.”

“Except that you float like a bladder.” Otter, the woman in deerskin, spoke.

“When I’m eaten by a bear, you’ll bottom!”

Otter slipped her arm around Innocente. “A skinny bit like you? And tough! Like chewing on locust wood.”

“Do you not want to go?” asked Luxembourg, in the flowing blue dress. “Say it—don’t comp yourself. If the time isn’t ripe, wait. We’re not nipping to let you escape us.”

Innocente screwed up her nose, kicking at the stone with new-looking heavy boots. “Fasure I want to go. It’s not that I’m running eager to get away from you lugs. Only, my two best friends are already youths. I think it’s time. I keep dreaming about going. Besides, what a ticky name you stuck me with. What am I supposed to be innocent of?”

“You said that twice you dreamed going,” Otter commented. “That sounds right. Nobody ever feels yin-and-yang sure.”

“Of that or anything else on earth.” Bee stroked the child’s shoulder. “You have me to blame. Innocente was a naming from the heart, partly for Luciente, who speaks Spanish. We’d been lovers only a short time. Partly I liked the sound, pretty in my mouth. Finally I’d just finished a task period working on reparations to former colonies, when I came home and put in to be a mother. I’d been traveling for a year in Latin America. It made me brood about those centuries of the rape of the earth, the riches stolen, the brutalizing and starving of generations … toward that day when all trace of that pillaging will be healed … . That’s how you got named. It’s up to you now to improve on it.” Bee stepped back. “Did you sharpen your knife?”

“Fasure. I checked everything. Canteen, stringing of my bow, arrow points.” Innocente looked at Connie. “Are you
coming?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just where are you going?”

“Where it’s been decided.” Innocente gave a dry, choppy laugh.

“Innocente will be dropped into one of the wilderness areas we use,” Luciente said. “This is how we transit from childhood to full member of our community.”

“Drop her in the wilderness? Alone?” Her voice rose.

“Fasure I’ll be alone,” Innocente said with indignation. “What point would there be, at now? I’ve been in the woods plenty.”

Connie turned to Bee. “Does she stay out there overnight?” They had to be crazy.

“For a week. Then the aunts person selected—advisers for the next years—return for per. Not us.” Otter adjusted her elaborate hair.

“But
they
won’t be able to speak to me for threemonth when I come back.” Innocente sounded gleeful. “They aren’t allowed to.”

“Lest we forget we aren’t mothers anymore and person is an equal member. Threemonth usually gives anyone a solid footing and breaks down the old habits of depending,” Otter went on.

“Suppose she breaks a leg. Suppose she’s bitten by a snake. Suppose she gets appendicitis!”

Bee smiled at her almost sadly. “We take the chance. We have found no way to break dependencies without some risk. What we can’t risk is our people remaining stuck in old patterns—quarreling through what you called adolescence.”

“A rite of passage that doesn’t involve some danger is too much a gift to create confidence,” Luxembourg said in her soft, rather deep voice.

“I’m afraid to go … but I’m willing, fasure. How come you don’t talk to me? You only talk to them,” Innocente said to Connie.

“How can you know what you’re getting into? You’re only a child!” She turned to Bee. “It’s criminal dropping her with wild animals and poison ivy and who knows what? How is she supposed to eat and clean herself and take care?”

“I know what to eat in the woods! I’m twelve and a half, not four. I can fly a floater myself, you ask if I can’t! There’s only
one other twelve-year-old who flies a floater alone in this whole township. You can’t expect me to go through life with an unearned name, stuck on me when I wasn’t conscious yet! How can I go deep into myself and develop my own strength if I don’t get to find out how I am alone as well as with others? … Zo?”

Luciente took Connie’s hand. “I see it’s strange to you. But your young remained economically dependent long after they were ready to work. We set our children free.”

Bee shook out the folds of his robe. “Come see us off. It’s time. Come with us in the floater if you like, or stay with Luciente and person can show you the children’s house. We have an hour’s flight. We want Innocente to have long hours of daylight to fix camp, scout food, and take stock of the area.”

Innocente strode off and they fell in behind. Soon they were ambling together, Innocente arm in arm with Luxembourg, who murmured in her ear soft cautions and advice, while Luciente and Otter walked linked, Luciente telling a broad story about Neruda’s naming.

“You’re just going to toss her out in a parachute into the woods and run away?” Connie asked Bee.

“Parachute? We lower per to the ground and mark the spot with a radio beacon and big red marker.”

Luciente leaned close, grinning. “We haven’t misplaced a child yet. You’re right, accidents happen … . But why try to control everything? Grasp, we think control interfers with pleasure and with communing—and we care about both.”

“I won’t go along. I don’t want to see a child abandoned!”

“Connie, can’t you see Innocente wants to go?”

“Kids can be brainwashed into wanting any piece of garbage. My … own child cried for a week once for a mechanical walking man she saw on the TV that cost so much I couldn’t believe it. Should I have let us go hungry two weeks to buy it to stop her tears?”

“We’ll see them away. They’ll be happier alone. It’s tender, end-of-mothering. Comprend, we sweat out our rituals together. We change them, we’re all the time changing them! But they body our sense of good.”

Gently Bee adjusted Innocente’s jacket. “Don’t slow or trance till you build your shelter, grasp?”

As they came over a small rise, they faced a bigger hill. Cut into its side was what appeared to be a hangar, its top standing open like a box with the lid up. Three grasshoppery machines the size of police helicopters stood inside. The hangar was built much larger than needed to accommodate them, as if sometimes it might hold more of them or something else besides.

A blond woman wearing overalls came toward them from the floater in front. She was tanned, her cropped hair was shoved up in a bandanna, her nose reddened by the sun, her eyes wide and blue, and her wiry arms were daubed with grease. “Zo, a good naming, Innocente. You’re off now?”

“You got the floater ready, Red Star?”

“Alt checked. You flying today?”

“Ha! They said no. What do you think?”

“You don’t even know where you’re going, or have you guessed?”

“If I did, they’d change it”

Slowly other people came drifting toward the hangar from the cornfields, the intensively cultivated gardens, from the fooder and brooder, from huts scattered among the gardens, from the free-form buildings they called just-grews. From the river docks where she could see a variety of conventional and odd, high-in-the-water fishing boats, diving gear, nets and winches, more people strolled toward them. They embraced Bee, Otter, and Luxembourg, they waited for Innocente to leave prowling over the machine so they could greet her. Luciente remained with Connie up on the rise, a little apart. This day had the feeling of a slightly formal but familial occasion, of a great big clan saying goodbye to someone going off to the army or getting married. Of course they were far too many for a real family. Not even her own Comacho clan back in El Paso, with additional strength up on a visit from Chihuahua, could muster such numbers to see them off when they left in their old Ford for Chicago and the promise of work in the steel mills, the last time she had seen gathered in one spot so many people related by blood.