Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [12]
Wednesday and Thursday went by like long, long freight trains and finally Friday came. On her ward two patients had weekend passes to go home. Three other women were being discharged. Their effects came up in bags and their relatives took them away. More women were brought up. Dolly did not come for her. Then the nurse, whistling a song with a Latin beat that had been on all the stations lately, even the white stations, stopped and spoke to her. “All right, Mrs. Ramos, get yourself together.”
“I’m getting out! I knew it. I’m getting out, right?”
“You’re going to the country. Trees and green grass, for a rest like you need.”
“Don’t hand me that!” She clutched herself. “You can’t send me up. I’m only in for observation.”
“Your family wants you to get well, just as the doctor does—”
“The doctor only spoke to me for five minutes!”
“You’re a sick woman. Everybody wants you to get well again,” the nurse said with that false sweetness. “Don’t you want to get well?”
“Who’s signing me in? Did my niece do this?”
“Your brother Lewis. So you won’t hurt yourself or anyone else. You’ve been a bad girl again, Mrs. Ramos.”
“Where are you sending me?”
“You just get your things together. You’ll find out.” The nurse strolled off whistling that catchy song by War that had been echoing in El Barrio for weeks.
The rain came down hard. The day was clammy and gusts of wind splashed the water in breaking waves against the closed sides of the ambulance-bus. She sat so that she could see out through the slit, wearing her own clothes that Dolly had brought her. Rain drummed on the metal roof, assaulting it. Under water. She was drowning.
Here she was with her life half spent, midway through her dark journey that had pushed her into the hands of the midwife in El Paso and carried her through the near West Side of Chicago, through the Bronx and the Lower East Side and El Barrio. The iron maiden was carrying her to Rockover again. Luis had signed her in. A bargain had been struck. Some truce had been negotiated between the two men over the bodies of their women. Luis, who never admitted his oldest daughter was a whore, but made her feel like one whenever he got her in his house. The iron maiden jounced roughly on, battering her. Halfway through the hard years allotted women she found herself stymied, trapped, drugged with the Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.
She had lost some weight and the old yellow dress hung loosely. Her lips and her nails were split from the drug and lack of protein. The dentist had yanked a tooth and filled two others in quick repair. Her rib ached. The tape was tight around her like a corset under the loose dress. Into the unnatural darkness of the April storm she was carried blind in the belly of the iron beast.
The ambulance-bus slowed abruptly. Making sharp turns. Slowing down again. She pressed her eye to the slit and stared at the budding trees, the hedges. At length she saw through the blowing veil of the rain the walls she knew too well, that place of punishment, of sorrow, of the slow or fast murder of the self called Rockover State.
Perhaps she deserved punishment for the craziness none had guessed, the questions no one had asked, the story no one had pried from her: that all of the month before she had been hallucinating with increasing sharpness a strange man. That she had dreamed and then waking-dreamed and finally seen on the streets that same smooth Indio face.
Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were