Woman on the Edge of Time

In the refrigerator she found pinto beans in chili sauce, good still. With reheated beans she would fry a couple of eggs. She was tired of eggs and yearned for meat. How she would like to sink her teeth in a pork chop. Her mouth watered in faint hope. She turned on the little black‑and‑white TV she was always hauling back and forth from bedroom to kitchen. The news came on. She listened with half an ear; she did not have it turned loud. The set was company, a human–or almost human–voice. She tended to leave it on even when she was cooking or reading. It was her family, she had once wryly told Mrs. Polcari, who had not understood.

She stood slowly stirring the beans and waiting for the oil in the black frypan to heat up so she could break the eggs. She was in no hurry. What would she hurry toward? Below in the street evening hummed to the rhythm of high and low drums, a rising tide of dealing and hustling, the push of the young and not so young to score, to get laid. At a simmer, the slow bubbles rising through the thick air, sex and traffic quickened El Barrio. In thousands of meetings–accidental, accidental on purpose, clandestine, dating and courting–men were picking up women on corners, on stoops, in the family apartments, couples were going down the rotten stairs shoulder to shoulder, to restaurants and movies and bars and dancing. Women with no money were working magic in front of dim mirrors, frowning with concentration, as they waited for men to arrive. Couples climbed into cars and shot off into the night. Couples picked up barbecued ribs and chicharrones, couples carried packages of Chinese‑Cuban takeout and beer upstairs to their rooms. Men met their pushers and their dealers, or missed them and turned to ash. On the roofs pigeons were released to fly, to circle together fluttering like clean handkerchiefs among the chimneys where kids turned on and shot up and packages and money were exchanged.

That electricity in the streets brushed static from her. She longed to be moving toward someone. She wanted to have someone to go to, someone to meet, someone to come to her; she wanted to be touched and held. So long! Maybe never again.

What did she live for? The beans were sticking to the bottom of the pot, so she turned the flame low and stirred. Protecting Dolly? Could she protect Dolly, really? A fantasy of someday recovering her daughter? Who would not know her. This is the woman the court saw fit to take you from, your evil and criminal and crazy mother. How Angelina had cried. So small, so thin, and so many tears. So many tears.

“I’m too proud to kill myself. Too proud to watch myself o.d. and die,” she said out loud. She turned up Walter Cronkite and seated herself to eat supper with him. Not that he would willingly eat with her, but boxed in her set with his public face hanging out, he had no choice. “Have a bite of chili, Walter?” She held out a fork with bent tines. Ojalб! If only she had a glass of red wine. Even beer would taste good and blur the knife edges, but she had only supermarket‑brand cola, and not much of that. At one time she had bought The New York Timesevery night, when she had been working as secretary–let us say, secretary‑mistress–to Professor Silvester of CUNY, another short time, like her almost two years in the community college, when she had been happy. She had got the job shortly after she had arrived in New York from Chicago. She had adored being secretary–should we say, secretary‑mistress‑errand girl‑laundress‑maid‑research assistant–to Professor Everett Silvester. It was civilized. It was, if she shut her eyes just right, almost where she wanted to be.

“In fact, you make me think of Professor Everett Silvester,” she said to Eric Severeid, and shut the sound off. Eric made fish faces in the TV and she grinned, wiping up her eggs and the remains of the beans with a shoe of bread. Eric had been calling down labor unions, about how they were greedy. Everett Silvester had been fond of calling down the world, one item at a time. A fight was creeping through her wall from the next apartment, a fight in Spanish about money. Even though an oil company ad featuring an oceanful of singing fish was on now, she turned the sound back up. Finally she spread out her Daily Newsand skimmed it.

GIRL SHOOTS M.D.

IN L.A. LOVE SPAT