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Woman on the Edge of Time
Marge Piercy
Praise for Marge Piercy and WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
“The novel is a brilliant and shocking indictment of a society in which the powerless are manipulated by those in power.”
Library Journal
“Persuasive and involving … Piercy has created this ideal society with such passion, eloquence, and energy that the reader not only believes in it but feels a kind of reverse nostalgia for it … even the cynical reader will leave it refreshed and rallied.”
The Kirkus Reviews
“Co
Newsweek
“Piercy gets better and better … a new level of sophistication, drama, and power.”
Hartford Courant
“With each novel, Piercy demonstrates increasing mastery of the form. In this one, she weaves her heroine’s past, present, and futuristic fantasies into a profoundly affecting work.”
Booklist
By Marge Piercy:
This is a book that took a lot of help to write, although nobody who helped me should bear the burden for what I made. I owe a great debt of thanks to Michael Galen and everybody else at RT: A Journal of Radical Therapy;to Nancy Henley; Phyllis Chester; Michael Brown; to Mary Waters and others of the Mental Patients Liberation Front; to Dr. Paul Lowinger, especially strong thanks; to Jon Levine; to Mary Lou Shields; to Rosario Morales; to Frank Mirer of Harvard and Bernie Bulkin of Hunter, who helped me with the poisoning; all the people at HEALTHPAC and the Somerville Women’s Health Project who fed me information and helped me with contacts.
Above all I am grateful to people I ca
M.P.
ONE
Co
“It’s me–Dolly!” Her niece was screaming in the hall. “Let me in! Hurry!”
“Momentito.” Co
Blood was oozing from Dolly’s bruised mouth and she grasped a wad of matted paper handkerchiefs brown with old blood and spotted bright red with fresh. Her left eye was swollen shut. “Geraldo beat me.” Dolly let her peel off the blue winter coat trimmed with fur and press her broad hips in pink pants back into the kitchen chair. There Dolly collapsed and began to weep. Awkwardly Co
“The chair’s warm,” Dolly said after a few minutes. “Get me a handkerchief.”
Co
“It’s cold in here,” Dolly whimpered.
“I’ll make it warmer.” She lit the oven and turned on the burners. “Soon it’ll be like that hothouse of yours … . Geraldo beat you?”
Dolly opened her mouth wide, gaping. “Loo … Loo …”
As gently as she could she poked into Dolly’s bloody mouth. Her own flesh cringed.
Dolly jerked away. “He broke a tooth, didn’t he? That dirty rotten pimp! Will I lose a tooth?”
“I think you have one broken and maybe another loose. But who am I to say? I’m no dentist. You’re still bleeding!”
“He’s crazy, that pig! He wants to mess me up. Co
“It wasn’t five minutes … .”
“I thought I heard voices. Is somebody here?” Dolly looked toward the other room, the bedroom.
“Who would be here? I had the TV on.”
“It hurts so much. Give me something to kill the pain.”
“Aspirin?”
“Oh, come on. It hurts!”
“Hija mнa, how would I have anything?” Co
“Those pills they made you take, from the State.”
“Let me give you ice.” Dolly had heard her talking with Luciente: therefore he existed. Or Dolly had heard her talking to herself. Dolly had said the chair was warm: she had been sitting in the other chair, in front of the plate from her supper of eggs and beans. She must not think about it now, with Dolly suffering. His story was unbelievable! No, don’t think about it. She wrapped ice cubes in a kitchen towel and brought them to Dolly. “That prescription ran out a year ago.” Not that she had taken the tranquilizers. She had sold the pills for a little extra money, for a piece of pork or chicken once a week, soap to wash with. She found it hard to believe anybody would take that poison intentionally, but you could peddle any kind of pill in El Barrio. Still, there had been the nuisance of going down to Bellevue, since she had been living near Dolly’s when she had been sent away and never could get her case transferred.
“Consuelo!” Dolly leaned her swollen cheek on Co
“Why do you stay with him? What good is he? With your daughter, why have such a cabrуn hanging around?”
Dolly gave her the mocking glance that would greet any comment she might make for the rest of her life on the subject of the welfare of children; or did she imagine it? “Consuelo, I feel so sick. I feel lousy through and through. I have to lie down. Oh, if he makes me lose this baby, I’ll kill him!”
As she supported her niece’s weight into the bedroom she felt a flash of fear or perhaps of hope that Luciente would still be there. But the tiny room held only her swaybacked bed, the chair with her alarm clock on it, the dresser, the wine jug full of dried flowers, the airshaft window incompletely covered with old curtains from better days. She undressed Dolly tenderly as a baby, but her niece groaned and cursed and wept more. The satin polka dot shirt was streaked with blood and blood had soaked through her black satin brassiere with the nipples cut out. “But it won’t show on your nice bra,” Co
“Mira! Is there blood on my panties? See if he made me bleed there.”
“You aren’t bleeding there, I promise. Get under the covers. Oye, Dolly, it isn’t that easy to lose a baby! In the sixth month, if he beat you, maybe. But in the second month that baby is better protected than you are.” She put the alarm on the floor and sat in the straight chair beside the bed to hold Dolly’s limp hand. “Listen, I should take you to emergency. To Met.”
“Don’t make me go anyplace. I hurt too much.”
“They can give you something for the pain. I’ll get a gypsy cab to take us. It’s only fifteen blocks.”
“I’m ashamed. ‘What happened to you?’ ‘Oh, my pimp beat up on me.’ In the morning I’ll go to my own dentist. You take me down to him in the morning. Otera on Canal. You call him up at nine‑thirty in the morning and tell him to take me right away. Now hold the ice against my cheek.”