Woman on the Edge of Time

“Was that how it was with your daughter?” Miss Ferguson had light brown hair curled at the ends. She wore granny glasses and a pale blue pants suit. A pimple had broken out on the end of her nose that her right hand kept stealing up to touch.

“It isn’t the same this time! It isn’t!”

“How can we help you if you won’t let us?” Miss Ferguson glanced at her wristwatch, shuffling the papers in the folder. Her folder. “Three years ago you were admitted to Bellevue on the joint recommendation of a social worker from the Bureau of Child Welfare, your caseworker from welfare, and your parole officer. You were then hospitalized at Rockover State for eight months.”

“They said I was sick and I agreed. Someone close to me had died, and I didn’t want to live.”

“You have a history of child abuse–”

“Once! I was sick!”

“Your parental rights were terminated. Your daughter Angelina Ramos was put out for adoption.”

“I should never have agreed to that! I didn’t understand what was happening! I thought they were just going to take care of her.”

“It was the clinical judgment of the court psychiatrist that your daughter would be better off with foster parents.” The pimple was growing as she watched. Miss Ferguson kept feeling it gingerly, poking it while pretending not to.

“They were wrong to take my daughter!” She saw Miss Ferguson frown. “Imagine–your daughter. I hurt her once. That was a terrible thing to do, I know it. But to punish me for it the rest of my life!”

The social worker was giving her that human‑to‑cockroach look. Most people hit kids. But if you were on welfare and on probation and the whole social‑pigeonholing establishment had the right to trek regularly through your kitchen looking in the closets and under the bed, counting the bedbugs and your shoes, you had better not hit your kid once. The abused and neglected child, they had called Angelina officially. She had been mean to Angie, she had spent those months after she got the news about Claud’s death gulping downs, drinking bad red wine. A couple of times she had shot speed. She had thought nothing could hurt her anymore–until she lost Angelina. Maybe you always have more to lose until, like Claud, they took your life too.

“The acquaintance who died–that would be your … The black handicapped pickpocket whose assistant you were.”

Her face slammed shut. They trapped you into saying something and then they’d bring out their interpretations that made your life over. To make your life into a pattern of disease. Couldn’t even say blind. “Handicapped.” He wasn’t. He was a fine saxophone player. He was a talented pickpocket and he brought home good things for her and her baby. He had been as good to Angie as if she had been his own baby daughter. He had been good to her too, a loving man. The sweetest man she had ever had. As if Claud could be summed up in their rotten records, either the sweetness or the pain of him, his badass fury. They had killed him too. In prison he had taken part in a medical experiment for the money and hoping to shorten his time. They had injected him with hepatitis and the disease had run its course and he had died. Her probation officer, Briggs, would not let her go to the funeral. That bastard–did he think they would plot together, him from his closed coffin?

“The Puerto Rican man you describe as your niece’s ‘pimp’–is that the same man as her fiancй?”

“He isher pimp. That’s how he makes a living. He has three other girls.” Connie sat forward, giving up. Don’t try to win now, just survive. “Look, please, Miss Ferguson, look at my mouth, where he hit me. Would you look at me, please, just for one moment? My side. Here. It hurts awful. After they knocked me down, he kicked me while I was lying on the floor. When I breathe, each time, all the time, it hurts. I think–” She was about to say that her rib was broken or cracked, but they got nasty if you said anything medical. “I think something’s wrong inside me. Where he kicked me on the floor.”

“Who are the ‘they’you believe knocked you down? Is that your niece, Dolores Campos?”

“No! He came in with a–” She realized she didn’t want to say “doctor.” How careful she had to be with them. “– with a couple of pals–hoodlums. When I hit him, they knocked me down.”

“You do admit, you remember that you struck him.”

“Yes! He was beating Dolly.”

“Your niece says you attacked her.”

“She told me he made her say that. Ask her in a room alone. I beg you, ask her alone. She’s scared to go against Geraldo.” Her hands clasped in the gesture of praying and she heard her own voice whining. “Please, Miss Ferguson, have a doctor look at me. I hurt so much. Please, I beg you. Look at my mouth.”

“You say it hurts you. Where do you believe you feel pain?”

“In my side. My ribs. Also my mouth. And my back is burned. Those are the worse places. The rest is just bruises.”

“In your side?”

“It hurts every breath I take. Please?”