Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Saturday her excitement strummed like a wire. She noticed every visitor. So that was Sharma’s husband, the one she was always accusing other women of sleeping with–that awkward sleepy‑faced middle‑aged boy who kept gaping around him but never looked into any of their faces. Introduced to him as she passed–Sharma was proud of having her husband visit–she tried to meet his gaze but he stared unwaveringly into her torso, breast high. She mistrusted him instantly. Yes, she felt he had another woman already, who cooked his breakfast and laundered his shirts and lay in his bed. She could feel that coming off him. Sharma knew too. Connie fled.

Weekends were bad unless a patient had visitors. The locked door of the ward hardly budged, not for the unpaid labor called industrial therapy, not for OT, not for group therapy, not for the doctor on his galloping visit.

The evening medication did not work on her. Her adrenaline hummed in the dark ward like a generator and it burned off the Thorazine and the Seconal like fuel. She was dreadfully alert and bored. How many, many hours must wear away before dawn could stain the high windows? How many more hours of the day must flow, a river of lard, over her before Dolly would appear? Dolly must be persuaded to start trying to get her out of here, before Luis signed whatever release the doctors were after. But don’t push Dolly; to reestablish contact was everything. Everybody outside had freedom and power by contrast. The poorest most strung out fucked up worked over brought down junkie in Harlem had more freedom, more place, richer choices, sweeter dignity than the most privileged patient in the whole bughouse.

She opened her mind to Luciente and waited. Nothing happened. Time crawled like ants over her clenched eyelids and nothing stirred. Hey, Luciente! she thought. Oye, where the hell are you? Don’t shut me out! She imagined Luciente in bed with … Bee?

A sluggish presence eventually touched her. “Mmmm, it’s me–Luciente. A moment.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“Not expecting you … silly with wine and marijuana. Wait. Will clear and return.” The contact faded.

Guiltily she turned on her cot Butting into Luciente’s pleasure. At the same time a dour envy lapped her mind. Saturday night was a big night everywhere, even in the future. Everybody was having a good time, everybody in the world, in the universe, everybody but her, alone and bored. Everybody was loving everybody else, everybody was drinking wine and smoking dope and dancing and sitting on each other’s laps and whispering in each other’s ears. Everybody was kissing their children good night and tucking them in and going back to the guests at the long table laid out with the remains of roast suckling pig, lechуn asado, as at Dolly’s wedding, everybody but her.

“Here I am,” Luciente said. “Come through now. I’m coning.”

“Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. Go back to your party.”

“Why shouldn’t you come? I didn’t think of it, but … why not? Everybody here says it would be lovely to invite you.” Luciente gave what felt like an abrupt impatient brutal tug on her and she was clutching Luciente by the upper arms and standing in a warm night lit by floating bulbs a few feet over their heads, lights like big pastel fireflies, some steady, some winking on and off as fireflies do, but all with that cool light.

A rabble of kids ran by screaming and laughing, carrying streamers that clittered and clattered in the noise of their running, children in bright butterfly costumes with their faces painted. Two dogs chased them, barking, one with ribbons plaited into its high plumy tail.

“We’re entertaining Cranberry. We won a decision about the dipper routes.”

She stepped back to examine Luciente, who was wearing a backless dress of a translucent crimson chiffon that tied behind her neck. The skirt was cut diagonally, quite short on one side and medium length on the other. “I’ve never seen you in a dress.”

“It’s my flimsy for the evening–Jackrabbit designed it … . A flimsy is a once‑garment for festivals. Made out of algae, natural dyes. We throw them in the compost afterward. Not like costumes. Costumes circulate–like the robe Bee wore for naming? Costumes you sign out of the library for once or for a month, then they go back for someone else. But flimsies are fancies for once only. Part of the pleasure of festivals is designing flimsies–outrageous, silly, ones that disguise you, ones in which you will be absolutely gorgeous and desired by everybody in the township!”

“That must be what yours is for.”

Luciente threw up her hands. “At a festival, why not be looked at?”

“What about me? Can you dress me up?”

“I don’t have a flimsy for you.” Luciente looked grief‑stricken. Then she snapped her fingers. “All is running good. You put on Red Star’s flimsy. Red Star ordered it but that person had an accident picking cherries and is healing at Cranberry. We’ll get per flimsy from the presser for you.”

Luciente scooped her along and they dodged through groups wandering the paths of the village, people in wild and bright, in delicate and fanciful flimsies, carrying wine bottles and passing joints and eating small cakes that left a scent of spice on the air, trailing flowers in leis and in hair and beards, playing on flutes and recorders and guitars and stringed instruments strange and twangy, high and shimmery in their sound, beating on drums and sets of drums and carrying along objects that sputtered sound and light and scent.

The rooms of the children’s house glittered and footsteps echoed down the stairways, laughter and shrieking flew out of every crevice. Adults and children in their flimsies played a game of catch with floating objects that moved in slow‑motion S’s. In a room full of tools and devices Luciente addressed a machine. “Produce the flimsy ordered by Red Star.”

Out of the slot a garment slowly protruded, like a paper towel feeding itself from a roll. Luciente grabbed it and shook it out. “Here! Put it on.”

“Here?” She glanced at the busy hall.

“I’ll turn my back,” Luciente said with exaggerated patience, and shrugged to the walls.

The garment was a jiggling thing made of small bubbles, weightless and loosely bound together so that they swayed and bounced and gathered the light as she moved. The garment lay lightly upon her shoulders but did not touch her body elsewhere. She felt very naked under it.

“That’s clever.” Luciente eyed the flimsy, circling her. “Marvelous the way it shivers and moves. You backed into luck.”

“It isn’t … transparent?”

“Transparent? Hardly at all. Come!”

In the fooder many of the panes had been removed so the breeze off the river could blow through the dining room, where small groups still sat picking at the remains of the meal, gossiping and smoking and drinking. One table was singing together in a foreign language, beating time on the tabletop.

“What did you have?” she asked with the passion for food of the institutionalized.

“Would you like leftovers? Of course. I’ll set up a plate.”

A cold cucumber soup flavored with mint. Slices of a dark rich meat not familiar to her in a sauce tasting of port, dollops of a root vegetable like yams but less sweet and more nutty–maybe squash? Luciente had told her they bred squashes here. A salad of greens with egg‑garlic dressing. Something rubbery, pickled, hot as chili with a strange musky taste. Young chewy red wine.

“Remember, this won’t nourish you,” Luciente said mournfully, stealing a taste from her plate. “The bread is gone. We bake it fresh daily. Was a graham fruit bread and every bit was gobbled.”

“Who cooks? What is this meat?” she asked between bites.

“Roast goose. We take turns. Hawk–the person who was Innocente, remember?–and I spit‑roasted the geese. By rotation every night we have a chef and four assistants.”

“Who cleans up?”

“Mechanically done. Nobody wants to wash dishes.”

“In my time neither. Does it really work?”

“Better than people, more patient. For washing dishes, we are willing to spend precious energy.”

“Couldn’t a machine cook too?”

“Fasure. But not inventively. To be a chef is like mothering: you must volunteer, you must feel called. Myself, I have no gift and only help in the kitchen. But Bee is a chef and at the next feast, person will make the menu and direct–the feast of July nineteenth, date of Seneca Equal Rights Convention, beginning women’s movement. Myself, I play Harriet Tubman. I say a great speech–Ain’t I a woman?–that I give just before I lead the slaves to revolt and sack the Pentagon, a large machine producing radiation on the Potomac–a military industrial machine?”

“Oh, is that how it happened?” she said. “In what century was that battle?”

“Grasp, that’s the essence of it. History gets telescoped a little. The kids get restless if the ritual runs too long. They like best the part where they sack the Pentagon. Everybody joins in and then at the bottom are little honey cakes with quotes from revolutionary women baked in them and stories of their lives, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Then we all go party.”

“That’s only two weeks away. Do you have a big holiday every two weeks?”

“We have around eighteen regular holidays, maybe another ten little ones, and then the feasts when we win or lose a decision and when we break production norms. We like holidays–a time to remember heroines and heros, to loose tensions, to have a good time, to praise the history that leads to us–”

“Like Harriet Tubman sacking the Pentagon?”

“Zo, that does body vital ideas in the struggle … . The history you people celebrate–all kings and presidents and Columbus discovered a conveniently empty country already discovered by a lot of people who happened to be living here–was just as legendary … . Did you enjoy the food?”

“You eat well here anyhow.”

“Very important! Enough food, good food, nourishing food. We care a lot that all have that. Nobody born now anyplace on the whole world, Connie, is born to less in any areas we control. Theystill have the space platforms, the moon, and Antarctica. Myself, my favorite holiday in the whole year is Thanks‑making. Then we fast for twenty‑four hours and go around asking forgiveness from everyone we have offended in the year past. It comes right at the end of fall harvest, when all our crops are in except a few root crops we winter over, and the greenhouse stuff. Then we feast and go around the fooder breaking bread together, eating slowly and for hours. Wine and turkey and–oh, it takes another day to sleep it off!”

By the time Connie finished her nibbling, almost everyone had drifted out of the fooder, and they followed after. In the tall trees outside the children’s house many swings had been put up, conventional, one‑person swings, trapezes, two‑and three‑person swings like cages, round swings, swings people lay in. From all the swings and trapezes, children and middle‑aged people and an old woman with long white hair were hurtling through the air, calling to each other like a forestful of monkeys.

“That’s Tecumseh.” Luciente pointed to a girl hanging by her bare feet on a trapeze, flipping over and over as if her body had no bones. “Tecumseh won a first today in gymnastics. How graceful and fluid person is!”

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen, I think? Tecumseh waited till only a couple of years ago for naming.”

“So you do have sports. You said you taught kids not to compete, but she won a first.”

“But to try to do things well! That’s fun … . A child playing alone will still try to jump higher than that child jumped yesterday, no? We don’t keep back from saluting each other for doing well. We want each other to feel … cherished? … It’s a point of emphasis, no? Maybe always some cooperating, some competing goes on. Instead of competing for a living, for scarce resources, for food, we try to cooperate on all that. Competing is like … decoration. Something that belongs to sports, games, fighting, wrestling, running, racing, poemfests, carnival …”

In the meadow near the floater pad people were playing games that involved contact or a lot of running around or a lot of acting up and yelling. Some were games with things, like soft collapsible swords, pillows that spilled light bubbles when they broke. People were gliding on big wings off the hill by the river, and every so often someone fell in, settling into the water and then swimming to shore as the wings dissolved.

“You make a lot of things that fall apart quickly. They did that in my time also. Called it planned obsolescence.”

“Playthings, flimsies, some pretty things we make for a moment. They’re called butterflies. But objects we make for daily use, we make to last. It would be a pity to use up scarce copper or steel on a machine that worked poorly.”

“Ummmm. Luxury items are made for once only and the necessities to last?”

“Not exactly.” Luciente stopped in front of a glass wall that mirrored them to admire her dress, turning to and fro like a child in a new suit. “Luxuries fall into two categories: circulating and once‑only. Look, they’re playing web. There’s Jackrabbit and Bolivar.”

About ten people were playing with long luminous cords, which they fixed somehow at intervals and wove in and out so that a great dully glowing web was created in which people got caught. A box would be built around them before they were aware or could dash out, and then they were apparently a prisoner until embraced and let out when everybody was so trapped but one. Jackrabbit was hopping among the strands, leaving a nimble zigzag wake.

“Circulating luxuries pass through the libraries of each village–beautiful new objects get added and some things wear out or get damaged. Costumes, jewelry, vases, paintings, sculpture–some is always on loan to our village. And always passing on. Some are for personal wearing, at feasts and rituals. Some are for enjoyment in the children’s house, the meetinghouse, the fooder, the labs, the diving gear factory. Outside as we walk around.”

“But you have to give them back. You don’t get to keep anything for yourself! It all belongs to the government?”

“We pass along the pleasure, Pepper and Salt. Think, for my birthday last year I wore a sable cloak like the Queen of the Night. I have worn emeralds and for a month a Michelangelo hung where I could see it every day. All the pleasure I can suck from these things I’ve had and pass on to pleasure others!”

Bolivar was about to be enclosed in a box. Quickly Jackrabbit leaped forward and was sealed in with him. The others laughed and called out. Jackrabbit and Bolivar embraced in the fictitious confines of the cell, the walls of luminous rope. Connie could feel that Luciente was not pleased. Jealousy like a damp wind, she could feel it. She was sad for Luciente. So they did feel jealousy here. Both young men were dressed alike, naked except for knee‑length cloaks thrown back. Each had painted on his chest an elaborate flower, Jackrabbit’s a lush peony, Bolivar’s a trumpeting pale lily. Luciente forgot what she had been saying, forgot her bouncy explanations, and her eyes brooded on them twinned in the web, their slender bodies embracing naked under the rippled backs of the cloaks. Bolivar had been Jackrabbit’s lover long before Luciente; Bolivar was older than Jackrabbit but much younger than Luciente, who stood fingering the chiffon of her dress, clumsy before their straight, supple, lithe alikeness, feeling cast out from the luminous web of their play.

She took Luciente’s arm, as Luciente had so often seized hers, and pulled her firmly downhill in the other direction. “Show me more. So many people. Are they only from Mattapoisett and Cranberry?”

Luciente peered into her face, and her black eyes said she understood Connie’s kindness. Gently Luciente brushed her lips against hers. “No. It was a feast only for Cranberry and us–the dinner part. But the afternoon games were for everybody and this evening people are here from all the towns in Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett. Whoever feels like partying with us.”

Feeling she had intruded on Luciente’s privacy, which she could hardly avoid when they were linked, she wanted to give her friend a piece of her own life. “Tomorrow my niece Dolly is going to visit me for the first time since I been in.”

“Niece Dolly … Ah, person you protected from per seller in a situation of brutality and exploitation! I recall. You’re keening to see per?”

“Yes …”

“Good. Let love flow between you. You must forgive Dolly for betraying you, and Dolly must forgive you for trying to save per and failing, no?”

“I’m excited. She’s broken with Geraldo! I’m going to get her to work on springing me. Soon I’ll be free.”

“Free. Our ancestors said that was the most beautiful word in the language.” Luciente stopped to beg a swallow of wine from White Oak, wearing a long white tunic slit up the sides and toting a jug of red wine. “Connie! Tell me why it took so long for you lugs to get started? Grasp, it seems sometimes like you would put up with anything, anything at all, and pay for it through the teeth. How come you took so long to get together and start fighting for what was yours? It’s running easy to know smart looking backward, but it seems as if people fought hardest against those who had a little more than themselves or often a little less, instead of the lugs who got richer and richer.”

“Who can you hate like you hate your neighbor?” Connie reached for the wine.

“If I didn’t like my neighbors, I wouldn’t live with them.”

“We hate ourselves sometimes, Luciente, worse than we hate the rich. When did I ever meet a richie face to face? The closest I ever came to somebody with real power was when I was standing there in front of the judge who sentenced me. The people I’ve hated, the power they have is just power over me.Big deal, some power! Caseworkers, pimps, social workers.”

“Much I don’t comprehend that led to us,” Luciente said gently, arm around her waist as they bumped downhill. “But not inevitably,grasp? Those of your time who fought hard for change, often they had myths that a revolution was inevitable. But nothing is! All things interlock. We are only one possible future. Do you grasp?” Luciente’s hand became iron on her ribs. Her voice was piercing and serious.

“But you exist.” She tried to laugh. “So it all worked out.”

“Maybe. Yours is a crux‑time. Alternate universes coexist. Probabilities clash and possibilities wink out forever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re learning, how not?” Luciente stooped to peer into her face. “Our ancestor.”

“Me!” Connie hooted. “Honorable ancestor! Sure, pray to my ghost Don’t forget plenty of pork and chicken, for sacrifices!”

Four older people were playing violins and such together under a gathering of those cool floating lights. Others sprawled on the ground listening. Music older than she was.

“Beethoven,” Luciente offered. “Quartet in B Flat. The Grosse Fugue.”

“Claud’s friend Otis used to say that after the revolution, all their Kulchur would be burned in the streets and nobody would bother with all that stuff from Europe.”

“We enjoy no one culture, but many. Many arts. All with own inknowing, seeing, intents, beauties. Fasure some of what we inherit feels … closed, trivial, bloated with ego, posturings of lugs who had to attract rich patrons or corporate approval to survive … but much of it we have to love, Connie.”

Beyond the shimmer pool cast by the floating lights, real fireflies slow‑blinked their lures on the soft air. At a giant maple a child stood with eyes closed, counting by fives to one hundred: hide‑and‑seek, a game ancient in her own childhood. Game she had loved as a child in hot dusty Texas streets. Rushing to hide, perhaps alone, perhaps with her best friend Lupe, whose two fat braids always hung before her dark, heart‑shaped face. Waiting to be found. Suspense plucked at her with a quasi‑sexual thrill as she waited, or as they waited together, giggling and clutched. The worst was not to be found, to go on waiting. The apparent purpose of the game (to hide so cleverly that no one would find you) giving way to the real purpose: to sneak in free. Perhaps, perhaps even better if Neftali, around whose sharp bronze face she had cast a secret ring of fire, was to find her. Yes, hide‑and‑seek wove into its ritual from generation to generation something of the hidden inner life of children. I’m going to run away from home and you won’t see me anymore! But come and search for me. The fear theywould not care, would not come after. To be hidden away and then found and brought joyfully out to the others. Yet afraid she lay hidden, her heart beating absurdly in the dust under the pickup truck. Who would come? What would they do?

The child turned from the tree and stood blinking into the darkness, hesitating on one foot. “It’s her!” Connie cried.

“My child, Dawn.” Luciente spoke softly in the shadows. “Let them play.”

The flimsy had a pelt and a furry tail. “Is she a squirrel?”

“Yes! Person has a fix on squirrels lately. Other children feed birds and try to build squirrelproof bird feeders. Dawn built a squirrel feeder.”

Dawn darted away into the bushes and a moment later they heard a squeal of discovery. Dawn came racing after a boy who streaked ahead of her toward the tree‑safe. Just short of the tree, she launched a flying tackle and brought him down. “Got you!”

“She looks so delicate!”

“Well‑coordinated. Good muscles. Fast reflexes. Dawn works hard at martial arts. You should have seen per fighting this afternoon.” Luciente’s excitement returned and she dragged Connie along a little too fast toward a game consisting of a large board with people on it instead of pieces. The game seemed quarrelsome and noisy, and debate raged over the players, whose faces were hidden by masks. They had just come to one edge of the painted board when Luciente’s kenner said, “New holi in meetinghouse. Name: Pageant of the Lost. Duration: one hour. Starts: on the hour in ten minutes.”

“That’s Jackrabbit’s new holi. And Bolivar’s. They worked on it all week.”

“Bolivar has stayed since Sappho died?”

“Basically Bolivar works as a spectacler. This is per village, but person’s gone more than here. Has to be on call for villages that want rituals, feasts, pageants. Bolivar’s quite good. When they work together, beautiful events result.” Luciente spoke with a stilted justice, carefully fair. “Jackrabbit does rituals alone sometimes, but mostly person works in graphic arts.” Arm in arm they strolled toward the meetinghouse, a building long and low like a loaf of bread.

Inside it was larger than she would have thought, for it was built into the hill. “For meetings we use only a part, so we are more face to face. Walls can be dropped at any point. This is the biggest it gets.”

The rounded ceiling reminded her of the planetarium, the time she had taken Angie for the Easter show. Angie had been frightened of the dark and the stars that seemed to rush toward them and, crawling into her lap to bury her head, refused to look. Gradually Connie had aroused her curiosity and managed to get her to peep at the sparkling night sky of the ceiling. This ceiling too became a night sky with more purple in its black than the night they had just abandoned, with a pale moth‑green moon rising in the south over one of the entrances. Slowly as people came wandering in to their seats, a different color moon rose majestically over each of the doors: white to the north, yellow to the east, red to the west, and green to the south. As the moons reached the zenith, the four of them began a stately dance to music welling up. Their shapes began to shift from round to oblong to crescent to wing‑shaped like birds, images of dignified flight; now slow hopping courtship of the whooping cranes, extending their broad wings.

As the room filled and the doors shut, the cranes came down from the ceiling and became flesh–although she had learned that these vivid three‑dimensional images were a mere trick of projectors and lights. A voice like a bird, a reedy voice, talked over the music about whooping cranes and faded into the music. The image broadened. One enormous crane filled it and then his head spread into clouds and his feet turned to water; little black and white dots came bobbing on the waves toward them, the Labrador duck. Last one shot in 1875 off Long Island.

The great vulture, the California condor glided on twelve‑foot wingspan. The bald eagle screamed and carried fish home to stuff into the beaks of its huge fledglings, clumsy in the twiggy nest at the top of a dead pine. The grizzly stood at bay. The humpbacked whale rolled and dived and roamed the lightless depths, singing its epics improvised on the age‑old patterns of its vast oral culture–was fired on by a factory ship and its warm flesh carved up on the spot for dog food. The last brown‑skinned inhabitant of Tasmania was hunted down and shot on a rocky ledge. Her body smashed on the stark rocks, last of a unique and delicate, small‑bodied branch of the human family. Passenger pigeons darkened the sky with their fluttering passage, settled into trees that shone with them like soft blue and gray fruit, their cooing, the feathery warmth of their rosy and buff breasts filling the air. Alarmed, they startled into flight; the whistling of their thousands of wings beat the air to a wind that rustled the trees. They were shot, they were clubbed, they were taken by live decoy nailed through the feet to a perch, they were lumbered out of their homes, they were slaughtered and fed to livestock. Finally they were gone, the last female dying in a Cincinnati zoo. Ishi, last of the Yaqui of California, came out of the woods where he had lived alone, last of his hunted people, to a world where no soul spoke his language, and died in the Museum of Natural History. Archaic stone lions crouching in a row on wind‑swept Delos, lions marching across the tiled walls of Babylon, gave way to the last of the Asian lions, sick, starving under the drought‑parched tree in India. The lion’s body became the western prairies where General Sherman led an extermination campaign against Indians and buffalo together. Heaps of corpses rotted under the alkali sun. The wheat grew up through the bodies and the wind blew the land away in dust‑storms that darkened the sky. Briefly they became bones flying and then the sky was empty as a skull.

The bones lay in the dust. Slowly they put out roots that sank deep in ravaged earth. Slowly the bones burgeoned into sprouting wands. The wands grew to a tree. The oak thrust its taproot deep and outstretched its massive boughs. The tree became a human couple embracing, man and woman. They clutched, they embraced, they wrestled, they strangled each other. Finally they passed into and through each other. Two androgynes stood: one lithe with black skin and blue eyes and red hair, who bent down to touch with her/his hands the earth; the other, stocky, with light brown skin and black hair and brown eyes, spread his/her arms wide to the trees and sky and a hawk perched on the wrist. A green and brown web flowed out from them and into them. They stood on the shoulder of a huge ant. Grapevines grew from their finger ends. Bees swarmed through the heads. The animal images felt real: they did not appear animations but living beings. The last image was water flowing, which became a crane flying.

“Only in us do the dead live.

Water flows downhill through us.

The sun cools in our bones.

We are joined with all living

in one singing web of energy.

In us live the dead who made us.

In us live the children unborn.

Breathing each other’s air

drinking each other’s water

eating each other’s flesh we grow

like a tree from the earth.”

The crane flew to the ceiling and slowly split into four moons that set in the four directions. The room lightened. She saw Dawn’s upturned face two rows away, watching the eastern moon go down. In their real future, she had been dead a hundred years or more; she was the dead who lived in them. Ancestor. Feeling remote from the moment, she fixed her eyes on Dawn’s wondering face. A terrible desire to hold that child’s body tantalized her flesh with the electrical itch of wanting. To touch her gently. Just once.

Luciente knew or read her gaze. When the room was light she called, “Dawn? Please come a moment?”

Dawn glanced around, saw them and climbed nimbly over the rows that were emptying. “G’light. You’re the person from the past!”

“Per name is Connie,” Luciente said, kissing the small ear that showed through the tumbled hair.

“May I kiss you?” Her voice shook.

Dawn looked at her with a limpid sandy brown gaze, questioning. Hesitating. The tremor in her voice. Wanting too much. Scary to a kid. But Dawn finally said, “Okay.”

Quickly she kissed Dawn’s cheek, cupping her small shoulders gently in her hands. Twice the size Angelina had been that last time, but small still. Small‑boned. Dawn skipped away then, looking back in open curiosity. Then off at the heels of two other running children.

“Goodbye, little squirrel,” she said after her.

“Dawn likes red squirrels better because they’re smaller but bolder.”

“Like her.”

They strolled toward the western entrance. “At four, Dawn was timid. We worried. Me, my coms. We all struggled to bring per out.”

“But you say you respect difference.”

“Different strengths we respect. Not weakness. What is the use in not actively engaging life? It passes anyhow.”

She thought of the asylum. “Sometimes you have no choice.”

Outside in the soft night music ticked the air. In the square outside the meetinghouse six musicians were playing. People were beginning to dance alone, in couples, in small and large circles. Bee and Erzulia were leaning together arm in arm on the far side, talking with their heads bent close. The music was subtle over a strong beat and a counterbeat: rhythm crossing rhythm but entering the feet, the legs, the hips, the ass, the shoulders. Dawn was dancing with the two children she had chased outside, turning round and round, pulling hard on each other’s taut link of arms.