Woman on the Edge of Time

“Well, you do have bruises. All right, I’ll speak to the nurse.” Miss Ferguson caressed her pimple, pretending to adjust her glasses. With a nod she dismissed Connie.

Finally on Tuesday Connie was x‑rayed and her cracked rib was taped and her mouth looked at. They sent her with an attendant to the dentist. She missed visiting hour, so she did not find out whether Dolly was out of the hospital yet. But tomorrow, surely, Dolly must come and talk to them about releasing her. If she could get Dolly to tell the truth to the doctor, the nurse, even to the social worker, then they would let her go … . Even figuring the whole process of release would take a day or two, she could be out by Friday night.

She sat in a lopsided chair in the hall outside the dentist’s office, with the attendant beside her poring over an astrology magazine. How she would celebrate her release! Her dingy two rooms with the toilet in the hall shone in her mind, vast and luxurious after the hospital. Doors she could shut! A toilet with a door! Chairs to sit in, a table of her own to eat on, a TV set that she could turn on and off and tune to whatever program she wanted to watch, her own bed with clean sheets and no stink of old piss. Her precious freedom and privacy!

Yes, she would rise in the morning when she wanted to instead of when the attendant came yelling. No more Thorazine and sleeping pills, the brief high and the endless sluggish depths. Nights of sleep with real dreams. She would go hungry for a week for the pleasure of eating a real orange, an avocado. All day long nobody would tell her what to do. Miraculously she would walk through the streets without an attendant. She would breathe the beautiful living filthy air. She would walk until she felt like sitting down.

Around her kitchen she would sing and dance, she would sing love songs to the cucarachas and the chinces, her chinces! Her life that had felt so threadbare now spread out like a full red velvet rose–the rose that Claud had once brought her, loving it for its silkiness, its fragrance, and not knowing it was dark red Her ordinary penny‑pinching life appeared to her full beyond the possibility of savoring every moment. A life crammed overflowing with aromas of coffee, of dope smoke in hallways, of refried cooking oil as she climbed the stairs of her tenement, of the fragrance of fresh‑cut grass and new buds in Central Park. Sidewalk vendors. Cuchifritos. The spring rhythm of conga drums through the streets.

Waiting in the rickety chair for the dentist, her mouth filled with saliva and she glanced with envy at the coffee the attendant was sipping. White coffee, probably sweet too. To make conversation she asked, “What sign are you?”

The woman gave her a sideways glance. “Sagittarius.”

She had no idea when that was. “I’m Aries.”

“Your sign is cuckoo, girl.” The attendant went back to her magazine, turning slightly away.

She would be out soon. Soon! Swallow all insults. Keep quiet. She would have better things than coffee from a coffee machine! She would make herself the pot of Dominican coffee she had started that night for Dolly. She had such a hunger for Mexican cooking! Puerto Rican food was different. She had learned to eat it, to like it. In fact, she had cooked salcocho, mondongo, asopгo, and many plбtanos dishes for Eddie, for Dolly too, whose mother, Carmel, was Puerto Rican. But even the staples were not the same, all those root vegetables–yucca, yaulin, taro–the salt codfish, bacalao, instead of the base of corn and beans. She had grown up on pintos and the Puerto Ricans ate more black beans. She had noticed a few Mexican restaurants around New York, but they were too expensive for her. Ridiculous to live in a place where the taste of your own soul food was priced beyond you. She got to eat Chinese oftener than Mexican.

To breathe the air of freedom would be enough. She had not handled the interview well with Ferguson. She would talk about getting a job. She could even try again. Trekking from office to office. Maybe she had given up too easily. Maybe she could get temporary office work. Maybe at least she could persuade the social worker that she would. They liked that, if you could persuade them you were going to get a job. She thought of Ferguson and shrugged. Chances were it would be a different one next time anyhow.

She hadn’t typed in … four years? five years? Last time in, she had applied for a typing job, but they liked to use the younger women. Maybe they had a machine here she could practice on. She had to figure the angles. Best if she could manage to believe it herself, that she could get a job. Herself with a police record and a psychiatric record, a fat Chicana aged thirty‑seven without a man, without her own child, without the right clothes, with her plastic pocketbook cracked on the side and held together with tape. The dental assistant pitter‑pattered out to summon them, and the attendant hauled her up like a rag doll and marched her in for treatment.