Woman on the Edge of Time

Woman on the Edge of Time

Marge Piercy

Praise for Marge Piercy andWOMAN ON THEEDGE OF TIME

“The novel is a brilliant and shocking indictment of a society in which the powerless are manipulated by those in power.”

Library Journal

“Persuasive and involving … Piercy has created this ideal society with such passion, eloquence, and energy that the reader not only believes in it but feels a kind of reverse nostalgia for it … even the cynical reader will leave it refreshed and rallied.”

The Kirkus Reviews

“Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”

Newsweek

“Piercy gets better and better … a new level of sophistication, drama, and power.”

Hartford Courant

“With each novel, Piercy demonstrates increasing mastery of the form. In this one, she weaves her heroine’s past, present, and futuristic fantasies into a profoundly affecting work.”

Booklist

By Marge Piercy:

This is a book that took a lot of help to write, although nobody who helped me should bear the burden for what I made. I owe a great debt of thanks to Michael Galen and everybody else at RT: A Journal of Radical Therapy;to Nancy Henley; Phyllis Chester; Michael Brown; to Mary Waters and others of the Mental Patients Liberation Front; to Dr. Paul Lowinger, especially strong thanks; to Jon Levine; to Mary Lou Shields; to Rosario Morales; to Frank Mirer of Harvard and Bernie Bulkin of Hunter, who helped me with the poisoning; all the people at HEALTHPAC and the Somerville Women’s Health Project who fed me information and helped me with contacts.

Above all I am grateful to people I cannot thank by name, who risked their jobs to sneak me into places I wanted to enter; and grateful to the past and present inmates of mental institutions who shared their experiences with me, outside and inside. Thanks to the students at Old Rochester Regional High School, amused but supportive of my interest in Mattapoisett. Finally I’m in debt to the folks from Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett who worked so hard to make me understand–who found me dense and slow of wit, but always told me that at least I try.

M.P.

ONE

Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door. Either I saw him or I didn’t and I’m crazy for real this time, she thought.

“It’s me–Dolly!” Her niece was screaming in the hall. “Let me in! Hurry!”

“Momentito.” Connie fumbled with the bolt, the police lock, finally swinging the door wide. Dolly fell in past her, her face bloody. Connie clutched at Dolly, trying to see how badly she was hurt. “Quй pasa? Who did this?”

Blood was oozing from Dolly’s bruised mouth and she grasped a wad of matted paper handkerchiefs brown with old blood and spotted bright red with fresh. Her left eye was swollen shut. “Geraldo beat me.” Dolly let her peel off the blue winter coat trimmed with fur and press her broad hips in pink pants back into the kitchen chair. There Dolly collapsed and began to weep. Awkwardly Connie embraced her shoulders, her hands slipping on the satin of the blouse.

“The chair’s warm,” Dolly said after a few minutes. “Get me a handkerchief.”

Connie brought toilet paper from the hall bathroom–she had nothing else–and carefully locked the outside door again. Then she put some of the good Dominican coffee she saved for special into the drip pot and set water to boil in a kettle.

“It’s cold in here,” Dolly whimpered.

“I’ll make it warmer.” She lit the oven and turned on the burners. “Soon it’ll be like that hothouse of yours … . Geraldo beat you?”

Dolly opened her mouth wide, gaping. “Loo … Loo …”

As gently as she could she poked into Dolly’s bloody mouth. Her own flesh cringed.

Dolly jerked away. “He broke a tooth, didn’t he? That dirty rotten pimp! Will I lose a tooth?”

“I think you have one broken and maybe another loose. But who am I to say? I’m no dentist. You’re still bleeding!”

“He’s crazy, that pig! He wants to mess me up. Connie, how come you wouldn’t let me in? I was screaming in the hall forever.”

“It wasn’t five minutes … .”

“I thought I heard voices. Is somebody here?” Dolly looked toward the other room, the bedroom.

“Who would be here? I had the TV on.”

“It hurts so much. Give me something to kill the pain.”

“Aspirin?”

“Oh, come on. It hurts!”

“Hija mнa, how would I have anything?” Connie lifted her hands to show them empty, always empty.

“Those pills they made you take, from the State.”