Woman on the Edge of Time

After Mrs. Polcari left she stared in the mirror over the sink, touching her cheeks. How did they stay so young? Did they take pills? Something kept them intact years longer, the women with clean hair smelling of Arpege. The women went on through college and got the clean jobs and married professional men and lived in houses filled with machines and lapped by grass. She had not looked that young since–since before Angelina was born.

Envy, sure, but the sense too of being cheated soured her, and the shame, the shame of being second‑class goods. Wore out fast. Shoddy merchandise. “We wear out so early,” she said to the mirror, not really sure who the “we” was. Her life was thin in meaningful “we”s. Once she had heard a social worker talking about Puerto Ricans, or “them” as they were popularly called in that clinic (as were her people in similar clinics in Texas), saying that “they” got old fast and died young, so the student doing her field work assignment shouldn’t be surprised by some of the diseases they had, such as TB. It reminded her of Luis talking about the tropical fish he kept in his living room, marriage after marriage: Oh, they die easily, those neon tetras, you just buy more when your tank runs out.

At least her dour pride kept her cleaning for Mrs. Polcari, who was not subject to the same physical laws, the same decay, the same grinding down under the scouring of time. Let Mrs. Polcari look down on her as a case with a bad history, a problem case; but no dirt would Mrs. Polcari find on the chair she set her little behind on and no dirt would she find on the table from which she would sometimes agree to drink a cup of instant coffee with no sugar.

After two days of scrubbing floors for the city (welfare work program), she woke very early with morning pain low in her back but found herself smiling from sleep. La madrugada–daybreak–a word that always left honey in her mouth. That taste of sweet. The face of the young Indio smiling, beckoning, curiously gentle. He lacked the macho presence of men in her own family, nor did he have Claud’s massive strength, or Eddie’s edgy combativeness. His hands as they clasped hers, however, were not soft. Shaking hands? Absurd. Warm, calloused, with a faint chemical odor.

“What should I call you?” the voice had asked. High‑pitched, almost effeminate voice, but pleasant and without any trace of accent.

“Connie,” she had said. “Call me Connie.”

“My name is Luciente.”

Strange that she had dreamed in English. Me llamo luciente: shining, brilliant, full of light. Strange that with someone obviously Mexican‑American she had not said Consuelo. Me llamo Consuelo.

“Come,” he had urged, and she remembered then the touch of that warm, gentle, calloused hand on her bare arm. Trying to draw her along.

Mostly she dreamed in English, but even yet she had an occasional dream in Spanish. Years ago she had tried to figure out the kinds of dreams she had in each language, during her precious nearly two years at the community college when she had taken a psychology course. She should not have drawn back timidly from the young man with his high, pleasant voice and his workman’s hands. She should have sidled up to him and rubbed her fat breasts against his chest. Even in sleep, she got nothing. She rubbed her arm idly where his warm hand had touched her. Coaxing. She had taken to dreaming about young boys. Maybe as she got older the boys of her dreaming soul would grow younger and more beardless, slender as matches.

She rolled over, began to cough, to choke on phlegm. Cursing, she spat into a square of toilet paper and reached for the crumpled pack on the chair. Then she froze. Her fingers. That scent. She smelled her arm. Yes, her arm gave off that chemical on Luciente’s fingers. The hair rose on her nape.

Idiot! They’d soon be locking her up again. So she’d got her arm in something, probably cleaning that office, and dreamed about it, like making the ringing of an alarm into a bell tolling. The phlegm she coughed up was brown. A little blood from her throat; that’s what she ought to be worrying about. She was too nervous to stop smoking, even though she knew it was hurting her. Oh, well, a taxi would run her down before she could die of cancer. A mugger would bash her head in. She would get cancer from eating garbage on the little money from welfare.

Her neighbor Mrs. Silva knocked on her door shortly after she came back from shopping, from buying two rolls of toilet paper, bread, bananas, spaghetti, eggs. She wanted hamburger but she hadn’t the money for meat. Her niece Dolores, called Dolly, was on Mrs. Silva’s phone: Luis’s oldest, by his first marriage. Luis had got married a lot and by every wife he had kids. Her favorite was Dolly, who was twenty‑two, plump and sweet as a candied yam. When Dolly had to get hold of her, she called Mrs. Silva.