Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [182]
“How is Bee?”
“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.”
“He’s teaching a class?”
“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games … . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger—oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”
“Is this a feast?” She stared at the people wandering through the room and out into the square, stopping to examine objects laid out, watching holies, arguing over graphs and exhibits.
“No, no, a memorial. Nothing to celebrate, fasure. In winter we make time for studying, communing. Often villages send out a traveling group who go around till they get worn with being on the road … . We’ve been chewing on—Bee, Otter, White Oak, me—going around with a skit on Shaping. This troupe is from Garibaldi on Mystic, where they make pasta, computer poppers, and breed grapevines. A beautiful place, Otter says. When person was eighteen, stayed a month during harvest working and coupling with Vittorio, who’s with the troupe. Otter is crazy with pleasure to see per again … .” They were strolling among the booths, hand in hand. Bee was using a very small holi projector which produced one moment a box of a children’s breakfast cereal from her own time called Sweetee Pyes and the next an image of braceros picking lettuce. He looked at once so serious, frowning at the Sweetee Pyes and rumbling deep in his chest, and at the same time so fine, with the delicate tattoo of the bee rippling on his arm, she lost track of what Luciente was telling her.
Hawk came dodging toward them. She greeted Connie and then burst out, “Luciente! I’ve fixed. It’s time to travel. I’m going on with this troupe. Bolt’s coming with me.”
Luciente put her hands on Hawk’s slight shoulders. “Do they agree?”
Hawk quivered with excitement. “They say we can learn the parts of two people who want to go home. I’ll learn Italian and get to see villages, and when I find one that warms me, I’ll stay on and work.”
“When do you go?”
“Thursday morning. Tomorrow they’re doing an opera. They say I sing well enough for the chorus, if I start working on the music.”
Connie remembered Hawk setting out for her week in the woods. “How are you going to travel?”
“By dipper. Then, when we’re further south, by bike.”
“Do you own a bike?”
“Own? Like I dropped a rock on my own foot?”
“A bike that’s yours.”
Hawk scratched her ear. “Any bike not in use, I can use. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to everybody!” Hawk stood on one foot. “You think Bee would like my painting of per? It’s not … top good, but it has a lot of colors in it.”
“How not?” Luciente kissed her cheek. “If person should be so blind as not to want it, I want it.”
“I’m in velvet we’re done with taboo so I can say goodbye properly to my mothers … . Don’t tell Bee I’m going—I want to tell myself, hold?”
“Hold” Luciente shook her hand and Hawk skipped off.
“I love winter,” Luciente said as they strolled on. “Eating and getting fat and going tobogganing and ice skimming. Talking and talking and talking. I’m redding Chinese, sweetness,