Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [128]
“And will I get a wig, Tony?”
“Only the women, punk,” Tony grunted. “Hold still, or I’ll cut your ear off.”
“Like Van Gogh. He was mad too. But he did it to himself. Why don’t you let me have a scissors so I can do it?” Skip made a half-playful, half-serious grab.
Tony clouted him in the chest, and Skip fell back coughing. “Stop trying to hold the doctors up.”
Snip, snip, past his left ear, coming around. Only one long cluster of curls clung to his cheek. Tony sliced through that and then swept up. When he returned with a razor, Skip stopped joking. He had been given no breakfast. Soon he would be taken away to a hospital near Columbia, where Redding and Morgan would drill a hole in his skull and insert their electrodes. Skip would return to them violated.
She stood with Tina and Alvin as he was carted out. His eyes were open but without expression. After the outer door had shut on him, the patients hung around, as if by staring at the door they might read something of what was happening.
“You like that kid, uh?” Tina asked her. Her new roommate was about her own age, with a long record of drug busts and commitments and disorderly conducts.
“He loaned me money to call mi sobrina, and he knew I couldn’t even pay him back.”
“He’s got it to loan. Easy to be nice if you can afford it, hey? But I guess he’s in plenty trouble now, like the rest of us.” Tina was Puerto Rican, born in the Bronx, skinny with only a little extra meat on her hips. She talked fast but her sentences often trailed away as if she did not expect to be listened to. She was scrappy and would not settle down to being a good patient. She never stopped hating the hospital. “Just one more way to get busted,” she said, glaring at their room. She was the first one on any newspaper that came into the ward, after the staff, although she would read only the first section, the news, muttering to herself, sneering as if she could not be fooled, “Crooks, big crooks!”
They went off together to visit Alice, who lay on her bed staring at the ceiling, as she did most of the time now. She looked ten years older, she looked her full age and then some, all the sass and vinegar bled from her long body.
“Hey, Alice, you know what them bums are trying to pull now?” Tina asked, trying to rouse her.
But Alice only shook her head. The black pageboy wig was stuck on her head crooked, and she did not straighten it. When it fell off, she did not replace it. When the attendant found it on the floor, she scolded Alice, telling her how ungrateful she was. Alice lay and blinked.
The only time Connie saw her look like her old self was when one of the doctors came to use her for a demonstration to an interested visitor. Then her eyes shone blood red and she sang long chains of bitter curses until the doctor pushed the button that shut her up. Now that Dr. Morgan had lost his fear of her, there was something ugly in his demonstrations. He particularly liked to stimulate the point that produced in Alice a sensual rush, until once she kissed his hand and told him he was good to her.
“I got to fool those wiseasses,” she told them, “or they going to stick more needles in. I just stringing them along.” But she did not sound as if she believed that. When she tried to fight back, the monitor turned off her rage and left her confused. Alice seemed closer to being mad than she ever had. She made up stories to account for what she did, because she literally did not know what she would do next. Yet she felt as if she were deciding. “You wait and see,” she said, winking blearily, “who come out on top in the end.”
“You ran away because you want to return to society,” Acker was saying to her, his square beard wagging on his chin. “But what you don’t understand is that’s exactly what we want to help you do!”
Ever since she had run away, she had been of particular interest to Acker. She had the