Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [86]
“Free. Our ancestors said that was the most beautiful word in the language.” Luciente stopped to beg a swallow of wine from White Oak, wearing a long white tunic slit up the sides and toting a jug of red wine. “Connie! Tell me why it took so long for you lugs to get started? Grasp, it seems sometimes like you would put up with anything, anything at all, and pay for it through the teeth. How come you took so long to get together and start fighting for what was yours? It’s running easy to know smart looking backward, but it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer.”
“Who can you hate like you hate your neighbor?” Connie reached for the wine.
“If I didn’t like my neighbors, I wouldn’t live with them.”
“We hate ourselves sometimes, Luciente, worse than we hate the rich. When did I ever meet a richie face to face? The closest I ever came to somebody with real power was when I was standing there in front of the judge who sentenced me. The people I’ve hated, the power they have is just power over me. Big deal, some power! Caseworkers, pimps, social workers.”
“Much I don’t comprehend that led to us,” Luciente said gently, arm around her waist as they bumped downhill. “But not inevitably, grasp? Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future. Do you grasp?” Luciente’s hand became iron on her ribs. Her voice was piercing and serious.
“But you exist.” She tried to laugh. “So it all worked out.”
“Maybe. Yours is a crux-time. Alternate universes coexist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re learning, how not?” Luciente stooped to peer into her face. “Our ancestor.”
“Me!” Connie hooted. “Honorable ancestor! Sure, pray to my ghost Don’t forget plenty of pork and chicken, for sacrifices!”
Four older people were playing violins and such together under a gathering of those cool floating lights. Others sprawled on the ground listening. Music older than she was.
“Beethoven,” Luciente offered. “Quartet in B Flat. The Grosse Fugue.”
“Claud’s friend Otis used to say that after the revolution, all their Kulchur would be burned in the streets and nobody would bother with all that stuff from Europe.”
“We enjoy no one culture, but many. Many arts. All with own inknowing, seeing, intents, beauties. Fasure some of what we inherit feels … closed, trivial, bloated with ego, posturings of lugs who had to attract rich patrons or corporate approval to survive … but much of it we have to love, Connie.”
Beyond the shimmer pool cast by the floating lights, real fireflies slow-blinked their lures on the soft air. At a giant maple a child stood with eyes closed, counting by fives to one hundred: hide-and-seek, a game ancient in her own childhood. Game she had loved as a child in hot dusty Texas streets. Rushing to hide, perhaps alone, perhaps with her best friend Lupe, whose two fat braids always hung before her dark, heart-shaped face. Waiting to be found. Suspense plucked at her with a quasi-sexual thrill as she waited, or as they waited together, giggling and clutched. The worst was not to be found, to go on waiting. The apparent purpose of the game (to hide so cleverly that no one would find you) giving way to the real purpose: to sneak in free. Perhaps, perhaps even better if Neftali, around whose sharp bronze face she had cast a secret ring of fire, was to find her. Yes, hide-and-seek wove into its ritual from generation to generation something of the hidden inner life of children. I’m going to run away from home and you won’t see me anymore! But come and search for me. The fear they would not care, would not come after. To be hidden away and then found and brought joyfully out to the others. Yet afraid she lay hidden, her heart beating absurdly in the dust under the