Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [51]
She was sitting against the wall on the porch, tears trickling from her eyes. Had pain broken the hallucination? She did not care. She hated them, the bland bottleborn monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a litter of puppies without the stigmata of race and sex.
SIX
“Now listen, ladies,” Mrs. Richard said, wagging her fat forefinger. “None of you are getting off this ward till you tell me who stuck that dope behind the radiator. And I mean it!”
It was an aspirin box of dope that Glenda had got from her boyfriend on the men’s side. Glenda was married and so was her boyfriend, but nobody counted that against them. Outside, it would end; they would be stuck back in the frame they had fallen from, with a new glue of fear to hold them there. Romances between patients reminded Connie of grade school affairs, a matter of catching a glimpse at a high window, sending a note on a cart, holding hands briefly in the common day room, touching for an instant at group therapy, dancing together at a Christmas party. Sometimes patients with grounds privileges were rumored to fuck in a storage room or behind a hedge, but that was mostly fantasy. For staff, it was different.
Mrs. Richard and Nurse Wright reminded her of grade school teachers anyhow. Her first school hadn’t been that bad. She had gone with Luis hand in hand. All the children had been Mexican and the school within walking distance. No, the grade school she remembered with a shudder was her Chicago grade school.
“Say sit down.”
“Seet down.”
“Sit down. Now say it correctly, Consoola.”
“Seet down.”
Luis had mastered that Anglo sound and taught it to the rest of them, hitting them with his fists until they said it as he did. Luis punching her in the arm was better than the white teacher looking at her with that bored knowledge that she would fail and fail again to say the sound that seemed to have been invented to shame her. Luis did not teach them to say “sit.” Luis’s word of choice for his finally successful lesson was “shit.”
“Can I go to the bathroom? Teacher, I got to go.” Here she approached the nursing station and begged for a scrap of paper, a pencil, a cigarette, a light, a chance for one word with the doctor, permission to make a phone call. Everything but being tied down drugged blind or wheeled off to electroshock was a privilege. A job off the ward, a chance to take a walk, a candy bar.
One of the privileges was a trip to the beauty shop, where they made up women her age to look exactly like women her age made up. She wouldn’t come out of there looking like Mrs. Polcari. Last time she had been released, the beauty shop had done a job on her like Dolly’s mother, Carmel, did on the Puerto Rican women who came to her to be stuffed and cooked for weddings, important parties. She had looked ten years out of style, covered with funny wry curls and with a quarter inch of mask emphasizing every line, with green eyelids and a bright orange mouth and thickened lashes caked with mascara on the front of her like new awnings on a pawnshop window.
When she had arrived at the welfare hotel where they had her for the first months—junkies in the halls and ten kids to a room with a stopped-up sink—she was greeted by that garish face of an elderly doll lurid with the grime of traveling. Stretched out on the bed, she imagined Claud’s ghost touching her skin with his knowing fingers, those fingers faster than the rest of him and ending in sensitive bulbs. How he would have complained about what was smeared over her cheeks.
“You feel like satin pillows. Like the satin sheets