Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [40]
They talked passionately, sitting side by side against a wall, sometimes interrupting the flow by half an hour or an hour, sometimes muttering out of the sides of their mouths as if they were kids talking in school. Too much animation, too obvious a pleasure in each other’s company would bring down punishment. The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.
“Who wants to be a hole?” Sybil asked her. “Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against? As for sex, it reminded me of going to the dentist the only time I indulged. Now, when you look at it clearly from the outside, Consuelo, with some measure of detachment, you see how perfectly futile”—few-tile, she pronounced it, loving vowel sounds—“futile it all appears, and how sordid besides.”
“But people do it ail the time, Sybil.” She was grinning. “Must be something in it, no?”
“Consuelo!” Sybil pronounced her name carefully and with a reasonable effort at the Spanish. “People play rummy and hearts and we both know how tedious those pastimes are. People put together jigsaw puzzles too. The attendants like it if you work jigsaw puzzles; they think that’s relating to reality, the poor boobs. Everybody who is presently touching”—their word for the state when inmates were responsive to things outside them—“has read every word of that newspaper under you. I know you have too, even the sports pages, although you can’t tell tennis from football!”
“It’s true, when a person is bored they … want to go to bed more. It’s like the jokes about the long winter night of the Eskimo. When you have nothing to do, you, yourself, are your own plaything. Look at all the … fooling around that goes on here.”
“I think we’re taught we want sex when we feel unhappy or lacking something. But often what we want is something higher.”
“For me, sex has more power than that,” Connie said a little sadly. “But I think we often settle for sex when we want love. And we often want love when we need something else, like a good job or a chance to go back to school.”
“People talk too much about sex,” Mrs. Perlmutter said, her hand inside her hospital-issue dress, feeling her own breast.
At odd moments, the better days, the mental hospital reminded her of being in college those almost two years she had had before she got knocked up. The similarity lay in the serious conversations, the leisure to argue about God and Sex and the State and the Good. Except for college students, who else in the world was sitting around talking philosophy? Outside, whole days of her life would leak by and she wouldn’t have one good thoughtful conversation. Sybil was a smart person, not street smart like Claud but thoughtful about the way things were and the way they might be. Outside, who talked to her?
On Ward L-6 every day smelled the same, looked the same, sounded the same. Patients rotated through their private cycles of night and day, touching and withdrawing, snowed by the heavy drugs. She was no longer Fargo’s favorite, because she spent too much time with Sybil. Today was Friday, a dangerous day, a day of doors opening and shutting.
A doctor came onto Ward L-6, a youngish doctor with pale hair and bloodshot pale blue eyes. He arrived two hours after the time when the doctor raced through, speaking only to the nurse and attendants, while patients touching that day chased after him pleading for attention, changes in medication, furloughs, privileges, a change of ward. Calling them bird dogs, the attendants ran interference. This pale doctor was showing Fargo some papers and Fargo and the nurse were going over the patient’s ward records with him, all those comments written on each of them that could get her sent to shock or raised a niche or two nearer the gates.
Even the patients not talking, not supposed to be in touch, knew something was up. Excitement rose