Woman On The Edge Of Time (30 page)

“But you all speak Spanish?”

“For our first language, claro que sí, como no?”

“Why are you here? Why did you come up here?”

“To study with María de Lola Rodríguez. Es experta sobre ríos. En mi regíon tenemos todavía problemas terribles con los ríos, que estaban envenedados por completo en tu época. I’ve been studying five years. María says I can go back to my pueblo in a year, para ayudarles. Tengo muchas ganas de volver. I miss my people, ai!, me hacen tanta falta! And the winters burn my teeth.”

“Ojalá pudiera ver Tejas ahora! How I’d like to see Texas now!”

“Por supuesto! It’ll knock your eyes out!” Parra grabbed her by the shoulder. “What we’ve done with adobe in the last forty years—how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta! We have a wonderful system of little clinics everyplace. And in my departamento, we’ve bred many races of vegetables resistant
to … a la sequía, to drought. Verdad, you can ask Bee or Luciente … .”

Parra turned to the table and her face stilled. To the room at large she said, “Should we begin again?” She linked her arm through Connie’s and drew her to a chair, squeezing her shoulder as she seated her.

“I feel that Bolivar’s work emphasizes the individualistic, places style over the whole yin-and-yang. When Jackrabbit works with Bolivar, I feel a political thinness in Jackrabbit’s work, never there when person works alone.” Luciente sat with hands folded.

“Such a crit is too general to be useful,” a fat person with a bass voice said. “How can Bolivar respond to such vague slinging?”

“In their recent holi, the image of struggle was a male and a female embracing and fighting at once, which resolved into an image of two androgynes. Yet the force that destroyed so many races of beings, human and animal, was only in its source sexist. Its manifestation was profit-oriented greed.”

“Luciente crits justly,” Barbarossa said. “In truth, I didn’t think of it. But it seems to me the holi should have related the greed and waste to the political and economic systems.”

The old person with the glittery black eyes, Sojourner, shook her head. “Every piece of art can’t contain everything everybody would like to say! I’ve seen this mistake for sixty years. Our culture as a whole must speak the whole truth. But every object can’t! That’s the slogan mentality at work, as if there were certain holy words that must always be named.”

“But do we have to be satisfied with half truths?” Barbarossa asked.

“Sometimes an image radiates many possible truths,” Bolivar said. “Luciente appears to fix too narrowly on content and apply our common politics too rigidly.”

“Our common politics gives running room for disagreement,” Luciente said. “I like to be clear about political distinctions.”

“A powerful image says more than can be listed. It cannot be wholly explained rationally,” Jackrabbit said. “What does a melody mean?”

“Yet a work has gross meaning we can agree or disagree with,” Luciente said.

“Our history isn’t a set of axioms.” Bolivar spoke slowly, firmly. “I guess I see the original division of labor, that first dichotomy, as enabling later divvies into haves and have-nots, powerful and powerless, enjoyers and workers, rapists and victims. The patriarchal mind/body split turned the body to machine and the rest of the universe into booty on which the will could run rampant, using, discarding, destroying.”

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?”

“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!”

“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.”

“You won’t go back to G-2. If you transfer out of here, you’ll go back where we found you—on the violent ward, L-6. With comments on your record about how uncooperative you proved to be.”

She turned to the wall and would not speak to him and after a few minutes he strolled off. He would be back.

That Sunday, finally Dolly came. Dolly pranced into the
ward to embrace her, then held her at arm’s length. “You lost so much weight, Connie! How wonderful! It’s like one of those reducing farms rich bitches go to.”

“Not much like them.” Connie smiled. “Is Nita here?”

“They wouldn’t let us bring her in. She’s outside with Vic. Come on to the window and we can wave.”

Down below she saw a tall well-built man in ice cream white holding Nita by the hand. They were watching a woman searching for something in the grass and Vic was laughing and nudging Nita. “Nita! Nita!” Connie hollered out the window, but Nita did not hear her. Instead the weekend attendant gave her a sign to shut up. Reluctantly she obeyed, craning down at Nita.