Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [44]
They were on her brother Joe now. The holy ghost of poor Joe, who had died of a perforated ulcer just after he got out of the pen for a drugstore holdup. Now they were questioning her about the beatings her father had given her as a child. She kept her face frozen, her voice level. Inappropriate affect, they called that—as if to have strangers pawing through the rags of her life like people going through cast-off clothes at a rummage sale was not painful enough to call forth every measure of control she could manage. Her mother, her father, her brother, her lover, her husband, her daughter, all fingered, sized up, dissected, labeled. Still, their white faces looked bored. The denim type, Acker, and Miss Moynihan in the lab coat were exchanging flirtatious glances. They could eat her for dessert and go on to six others and never belch. They were white through and through like Wonder Bread, white and full of holes.
Suddenly Dr. Redding came to life and took over. “Have you ever suffered headaches? pain anywhere in the head region?”
“Headaches?” Now what was this? “The medication does that sometimes,” she said cautiously.
“The medication?”
“The tranquilizers.”
“Other times. Outside the hospital. Haven’t you had headaches outside the hospital, Connie?”
One of those first-name doctors who reduced you to five years old. “Not often.”
“How often?”
She shrugged. What was he getting at? Were they wanting to try out drugs on them? “My back aches. My feet sometimes. I’ve had female complaints. My eyes, my head never has troubled me much in my life. Knock on wood.”
“How about in connection with some of those incidents we’ve gone over? I notice in the incident where you used violence against your daughter there’s a mention in the record of your feeling unwell.”
“Doctor, I was hung over. Strung out. I was very bad. I’d been drinking for three months.”
“Connie, you’re diagnosing, aren’t you?” He seemed to suspect she was concealing headaches. “Dizziness? Blackouts?”
“Like fainting? No, I never fainted in my whole life.”
“Yet you say you were unconscious the night you were admitted to Bellevue.”
“Geraldo and Slick hit me in the head. Slick knocked me out.”
“Do you remember any blows to the head previously? Before the last accident when you were readmitted to Bellevue?”
“Sure, occasionally.”
“Why don’t you describe those occasions?”
“I don’t remember them all … .” She paused when she saw Dr. Redding making a satisfied note of that. “Eddie, Eddie Ramos, my husband, used to hit me in the head sometimes.”
“That’s the second husband, the one she’s still married to,” Acker, the denim type, said.
“He didn’t sign the commitment. Where is he?” Dr. Redding demanded of Acker.
“Whereabouts unknown, Doctor.”
“I suppose no one has tried too hard to find our pugilist,” Dr. Redding said with a slight smile. “Connie, do you remember your head being x-rayed after any of these incidents with your second husband?”
“No. I never got beat up that bad, to go into the hospital and get x-rays.” They had to be kidding. When she had been with Eddie she had not been on welfare and who would have paid for x-rays and doctors? The only time she had gone in was when she had been bleeding after the abortion, and that had been terrible in its consequences.
“Not that badly, Connie? … Did he knock you down?”
“Sure.” She had noticed before that white men got off on descriptions of brown and black women being beaten. “Hay que tratarlas mal,” Eddie would always say.
“Get a set of x-rays on her before we begin the EEG monitoring,” Dr. Redding said to Dr. Morgan. “We’ll go with this one in the initial stages. How many live ones does that give us today?”
“Seven, Doctor,” the secretary chirped.
“That’s all? Let’s get cracking. Okay, Connie. Take her out.” Dr. Redding was already rummaging through the next set of records as she was whisked out and dumped in her chair again.
At two the staff emerged, Dr. Redding looking irritated. “This won’t do. We need more. You’ve