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She could feel the skin on her belly, on her hips, on her thighs, touching the cloth of her skirt. She took a tentative step, then another. A little draft between her legs, coolness where she was used to heat. No! her public voice told her. You can’t do that.
The private new voice said nothing. It didn’t have to say anything. She could not do it now, not while other people were there to condemn. But later… later she would wear only what felt good on her body. Whatever that was.
Quickly, without paying attention to herself or her feelings of distaste, she undressed and dressed again, properly. The underclothes, all of them. The outer clothes, all of them. For now. For twenty-nine more days.
She had just dressed, and refolded her clothes into neater stacks, when Barto and Rosara came back. They had a new grievance.
“They say you are too old,” Barto said, glowering at her as if she had chosen that age on that day. “Retired,” Rosara said. “Too old to work.” Ridiculous. She had always worked; she would work until she died; that’s what people did. “Seventy,” Barto said. “You’re no longer on contract, and they say it will cost them to send you somewhere else, and you won’t be of use to the colony anyway” It did not surprise her, but it angered her. Useless? Did they think she was of no use now, because she had no formal job, and only kept the garden and the house, and did most of the cooking? “They are going to charge our account,” Rosara said.
“We will have to pay back the cost of shipping you.”
“There was a retirement guarantee in the contract.”
Barto said, “but when you didn’t remarry, didn’t have more children, you lost a portion of it.” They had not told her that. They had said she would lose her productivity bonus, even though she kept working full time. They had said nothing about retirement. But of course, they made the rules. And with this rule, perhaps they had made it easy for her to stay behind.
“I could just stay here,” Ofelia said. “Then they wouldn’t charge you—”
“Of course you can’t stay here!” Barto slammed his fist on the table, and the dishes rattled. “An old woman, alone — you would die.”
“I will die anyway,” Ofelia said. “That’s what they mean. And if I stayed, it wouldn’t cost you anything.” “But, mama! You can’t think I’d leave you here to die alone. You know I love you.” Barto looked as if he might cry, his great red face crumpling with the effort to project filial devotion. “I might die alone anyway, in the cryo. Isn’t it supposed to be more dangerous for old people?” She could see by the look on his face that he knew that already, had probably just been told that. “That would be better than dying here, the only person on the whole planet,” Barto said. “I would be with your father,” Ofelia said. It was an argument that might work with Barto, who remembered his father as a godlike person who could do no wrong. But she hated herself for the lie, even as she said it.
“Mama, don’t be sentimental! Papa’s dead. He’s been dead for—” Barto had to stop and work it out; Ofelia knew. Thirty-six years.
“I don’t want to leave his grave,” Ofelia said. Having begun, she could not stop. “And the others—” The other two boys, the girl who had died in infancy, Adelia. Over those graves she had cried real tears, and she could cry over them now.
“Mama!” Barto stepped toward her, but Rosara came between them.
“Barto. Let her alone. Of course it matters to her, her own children, your father—” At least Rosara had it in the right order. “And besides—” But trust Rosara to ruin the effect; she was going to explain that it would, after all, be a solution, even though they could not allow it. “If she did stay,” Rosara said, fulfilling Ofelia’s expectation, “then we would not have to pay—” “No!” Barto slapped Rosara; Ofelia had prudently backed away, and Rosara’s backward stagger didn’t hurt her. “She is my mother; I’m not leaving her here.”
Ofelia said, “I’m going to the center to sew the fabric boxes.” Barto would not follow her into the open; he never did. He might think her remark was capitulation, too.
That evening, neither Barto nor Rosara mentioned the incident. Ofelia said she had completed a fabric box, and would do more tomorrow. “If the machines produce enough fabric, we can make a box for each person in the colony. It will be difficult, in the short time, but—” “Rosara will help tomorrow,” Barto said.
Rosara sewed slowly and clumsily. “The machines are all busy,” Ofelia said. “I can make the other boxes for our family” “And I am supposed to report for vocational testing tomorrow,” Rosara said. “It is ridiculous to test you before me,” Barto said. That began a tirade against the Company. Ofelia didn’t listen. After eating, she scraped the dishes and carried out the scraps to the garden. She had not been in the garden since dawn; she drew a deep breath of the evening scents. There was just enough light to see the slidebug’s web between the rows, and avoid it. When she came back to the kitchen door, she peeked. Empty. The door to Rosara and Barto’s room was shut. That suited her. She cleaned the dishes and set them to dry.
In the morning, her first thought was Twenty-eight days. Her second thought was I’m not going, I will be
free in twenty-eight days.
She had wakened early, as always, and when she came into the garden the dawn mists still blurred her view down the lane. Plant by plant she examined the garden: the beans, with their tiny fragrant flowers, the tomatoes, the young spears of corn, the exuberant vines of gourds. Some of the tomato flowers had opened, curling back their petals like tiny lilies.
She heard brisk steps coming down the lane, and crouched. A Company rep went by, hardly glancing over the garden fence. After that, she hurried her garden work, plucking off the leaf-eaters and stem-suckers. She knew Barto would scold if he found her working in the garden now, when the work was useless. He might even be angry, and destroy the plants. When Barto and Rosara came out of their bedroom, she had breakfast on the table. She smiled at them.
“I’m just leaving for the center I’ll be there all day, I expect, sewing.” All day, sewing with the other women, in the rooms full of machines and women and children, shaping the bright cloth into fabric boxes, When her shoulders tired, someone always noticed and came to knead them and take a turn at the machine. Ofelia sat for awhile in a padded rocker in the passage, telling stories to small children. They were not her grandchildren, but she had been telling stories to small children for so long it didn’t matter. Here, with everyone talking as they worked, speculating on where they might be sent, and what it would be like, she could hardly remember she wasn’t going. The-women all called her Sera Ofelia, and asked her advice. She began to think she would be with them always, always have these toddlers crawling into her lap, always have some younger woman confiding a problem with her husband or a quarrel with a neighbor.
Only that night, in her bed, her skin remembered the feel of clothes without underclothes. Her hands
swept across her belly, her sides. She was old… her public voice said that, the voice that knew what to
say in the center to the other women. She was old and wrinkled and beyond any of the feelings that she
had felt in her youth, when she had been in love with Caitano and then Humberto. That was what the
public voice said. But the private voice, the new voice, said I’m not going. They’ll be gone, and I’ll be
here. Alone. Free.
The next morning she woke remembering that it was now twenty-seven days. And that day, and the next, and the next, fit the same pattern. She spent the days at the center, helping everyone else make the fabric boxes, helping them decide what to take and what to leave, holding the little children when they were frightened, telling stories to the older children. In the days she was one of them, one of the group being torn away from everything they had built in forty years, helpless and hopeless but still enduring. In the nights, she was herself, a strange person she did not know, a person she might just remember, from childhood.