Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [90]
She encouraged Luciente, she egged her on. Bee stood now with White Oak, chatting and watching. Erzulia was dancing alone, gone into an absorbed passionate trance state where nothing lived but her and the music centered around the throbbing drums. Someone else watched too, a tall woman standing with two others on the steps that led to the meetinghouse. Her hair was in a white turban and one breast was bare, as were her feet. Around her neck a crescent moon was hung, against the white of her dress. She left the women on the steps and stalaed among the dancers toward them, approaching Luciente from behind. Bee moved onto the square and began to dance beside them. He smiled at Connie with an amusement she did not understand.
The tall woman paused behind Luciente, her hazel eyes crinkled with mischief. Unwinding her turban so that her auburn hair fell out loose onto her shoulders, she swung the long white scarf around and then cast it over Luciente, catching her by the waist and pulling her backward.
Off balance, Luciente stumbled back against her and remained pinned there, her face silly with surprise. “What happens?”
“You dance just as wickedly as when you were eighteen. Shameless still, shining on the dark. And that dress, it’s decadent. You’ll go down like Sappho at eighty, still greedily nibbling young lovers!”
“Diana, it’s you. Don’t tease me so.” She tried to turn her head but Diana had her pinned. “This is Connie, the person from the past.”
“I’m Diana, the person from Luciente’s past,” Diana said flamboyantly, laughing deep in her chest. “That flimsy chills me,” she crooned, sighting down her long nose. “Reeks of the same taste that dressed Achilles and Patroclus over there.”
“Diana!” Luciente twisted around in the loop of the scarf to put her hands on the taller woman’s shoulders. “You didn’t come looking for me to crit my flimsy.”
“To take it off perhaps?” Diana released the scarf. “Come walk with me … . It’s been a long time since we walkedtogether under the moon.”
Luciente gave a short joyful ringing laugh. “You fake! There’s no moon tonight. And you can’t bring off sounding forlorn with your mob of sweet friends giving me those looks from the steps!”
“Always so literal. Yet you can’t tell what looks they give from a hundred feet! I wear my moon—come!”
Bee said in her ear, “Now you’ll have to salvage with me.”
Luciente turned toward them, her face begging their pardon, blushing like a fifteen-year-old; then she gave her hand to Diana and they went off quickly among the dancers and in to the dark.
Connie looked after them, perplexed. “I’m not a goat for dancing,” Bee said at her side. “Came out to collect you when I saw Diana bearing down. When I like music, I want to let my mind sail on it.” With that easy comfort, he took her arm and ambled her off the square. His big hand felt warm and heavy on her: an affectionate acceptance of her like Luciente’s but not like Luciente’s. Because her arm swelled, grew enormous and hot with blood, with his touch on her.
“I don’t know you,” she said haltingly.
“Only through Luciente we know each other.”
“But you remind me of someone.”
“Is that so?” Amused and accepting at once. Past the range of the music—loud enough in the square but damped off by baffles beyond it—the night softened to small noises. Someone was singing to a mandolin. People went linked arm in arm, entwining shoulders and waists, to little huts where lights had begun to blink on and off again. Otter, her long hair released from pigtails and hanging straight and black as a flood of satin to her waist, stood under one of the floating lights staring at a youth who stood staring at her. Otter was touching the other’s face with her fingertips and then she laughed, breathlessly, as if she could hardly breathe. An old person, drunk, with gnarled