Woman on the Edge of Time

She smiled, tucking her small chin into her palm. She saw herself marching into Everett’s Riverside Drive apartment and pulling out of a ratty shopping bag a Saturday Night Special. Mamб, how scared he would be; he would shit in his pants with terror. Would the newspapermen ask her to sit on a table showing her legs? It would be sordid but not unsatisfying, to pump at leisure and with careful and by no means wasteful aim several bullets into Professor Everett Silvester of the Romance Languages Department of CUNY, who liked to have a Spanish‑speaking secretary, that is, a new one every year–dismissed when he went away for summer vacation. He called them all Chiquita, like bananas. So many years had run over her since then, he might not recognize her, he might confuse her with some other year’s hot Latin secretary. The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.

Ah, she should be thinking about Dolly. Dolly must leave Geraldo; and do what for money? To try to get money out of Luis was squeezing orange juice from a paper clip … . Dolly and she would live together. This place was small here for all of them, but it would get Dolly away from Geraldo and then they could look for another apartment together. Money. How to get money? She would wake again in a house with children. She would help Dolly through the pregnancy and cook and clean and rub her back. But would Dolly trust her? Leaving a child‑abuser with your little ones–for shame! That’s how Luis would make her feel. Carmel would flop back and forth, a little jealous, a little relieved. Carmel worked in a beauty parlor and always her hair was some new neon color and crimped into curls resembling the colored excelsior that used to come in Easter baskets, but she stood on her feet in a blast of hot air for ten hours a day, evenings too, just getting by. Little enough she got from Luis, because she had truly loved him but had not been able to get him to marry her legally. She had been his common‑law wife, a consensual marriage the whole family had viewed as a perfectly good marriage until the lawyers of Shirley’s family had proved that it never existed.

Her father, Jesъs, had brought them Easter baskets one year when Connie was ten, little baskets from the dime store full of shredded cellophane and jelly beans and a chocolate bunny wrapped in foil. Tonight she could use something sweet, a chocolate bunny, even a purple jelly bean. She lit her after‑supper cigarette and flicked the channels all around. Nothing. Coughing from deep in her chest, she flipped the pages of the rumpled paper, looking for something to touch her mind.

She felt so lonely, so aware of being alone this Friday night with spring percolating through the tenements that when she had smoked the cigarette down to the filter she laid her face on her crooked elbow and shut her eyes. Smell of newsprint. He had asked her to think of him. Who knew what he wanted? To kill her and then it would be over and done. She shut her eyes and tried to think of nothing as debris of the day flickered past. Dolly’s face frowning with worry. Then she saw that Indio face. She did not care. Passive. Receptive. Here she was, abandoning herself to the stronger will of one more male. Letting herself be used, this time not even for something simple like sex or food or comfort but for something murky. It could only be bad. Yet she found herself concentrating on that face, waiting.

Maybe a life could become threadbare enough so that even disaster beckoned, just so it wore a different face than the usual grimace of trouble. “So come, Luciente. See, this time you can come without me being asleep or stoned.” She was going crazy a new way. After all, she no longer had a baby daughter to punish for being hers.

Still, she jerked as a tentative hand tapped her shoulder. “Thank you, Connie. Much easier this way.”

“Easier for what? To rob me? To kill me?” She sat up, shaking back her hair.

Luciente took the chair where Mrs. Polcari always sat. “Please, you embarrass me. I don’t understand what I do that scares you. Tell me how to make you less … anxious.”

“How? That’s easy. What do you want? How do you get in here?”

“Obviously this laying a tablecloth over the compost is doing no good. Try to believe me–I say this, knowing you won’t.” Luciente laughed like a kid, showing strong ivory teeth. “I’m not from your time.”

“Sure, you’re from Mars and you came in a big green saucer. I read about it in the Enquirer.”

“No, no! I’m from a village in Massachusetts–Mattapoisett. Only I live there in 2137.”

Connie snorted. She tossed her hair back. “And you came flying to me in your time machine.”