Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [67]
The girl gave them a quick indignant glare. Magdalena pulled Connie away by the arm, Luciente having withdrawn even more quickly. As Magdalena dragged her away, Connie asked, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”
Magdalena dropped her arm and began to laugh and although Luciente tried for a moment to keep a straight face she began to laugh with her. Connie stopped, furious. “They’re babies! If they were … playing with knives you’d stop them. What’s wrong with you?”
Magdalena shook her head in wonder. “They learn how to use knives … . Mostly they learn sex from each other. If a child has trouble, we try to heal, to help, but—”
“They can hurt each other!”
“How? If a child is rough, the other children deal with that. If I notice a child bullying, I try to work with that child, the mothers and family, to strengthen better ways.”
Luciente nudged her in the ribs. “Zo, as a child you never played sex with other children? Not ever?”
Connie paced on, frowning. She leaned on the railing of the courtyard. “Oh. Sure.” In fact, her brother Luis had taken her pants down under the porch and poked at her with his fingers, finishing with warnings not to tell Mamá. She had not liked the prodding by Luis, who had kept his own pants on, but it had given her an idea. Casually and a lot more gently, she had begun fooling around together with José, her favorite brother, one year and two months younger.
She took care of him often. Luis didn’t have to and he would be off with the boys. She would take José by the hand and they would play together. Ninety-nine games out of a hundred they played with paper dolls, with José’s wooden duck, with Luis’s wagon if he left it there, with dolls made out of wild flowers, games of school, of sitting at imaginary tables eating meals of grass soup and scolding babies, of charros, of detectives, of general bang-bang. But every so often they climbed into the old car up on blocks behind the chicken coop next door and they touched each other where it felt best to touch. They did not need to warn each other not to say anything. Both of them sensed that what felt really good must be forbidden. It was a silent, pleasurable game that had stopped certainly by the time they moved to Chicago. But not one ounce of Connie’s flesh believed it had done her any harm.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Maybe it don’t hurt. But I know if I saw my daughter playing that way, I’d have to stop her. I’d feel so guilty if I didn’t! I’d feel like a bad mother, a rotten mother.”
“How interesting,” Magdalena said politely, with her head cocked. “Our notions of evil center around power and greed—taking from other people their food, their liberty, their health, their land, their customs, their pride. We don’t find coupling bad unless it involves pain or is not invited.” She paused before a closed door. “Come. Watch a lesson.”
Inside, a little boy with red-brown skin sat curled up in a wooden chair wearing a metallic cap like a gold hairnet. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly as if in sleep. Magdalena cautioned her with a tiny hand to keep quiet. The boy opened his eyes and turned to a screen on which a moving light showed waves that slid evenly across.
“Good, Sparrow! Now without the guide.” An old man sat against the wall like a bag of bones, with only shreds of white hair clinging to his huge skull.
“What is he learning?”
“Pulse and blood pressure,” the boy said. “How do you start in your village?”
“Start what?”
“Inknowing,” the child said wonderingly. “Do you call it different where you come from?”
She turned to Magdalena, who said, “In your day some of it was called yoga, some meditating, some biofeedback, and some had no name at all.”
“We aren’t mad to control,” Luciente said, “but we want to prevent overreacting—heart attacks, indigestion, panic. We want to get used to knowing exactly what we feel, so we don’t shove on other people what’s coming from inside.”
“We want to teach inknowing and outknowing.” Magdalena gestured apology and swept the women gently back into the hall, shutting the door. “To feel with other