Woman On The Edge Of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

grass, for a rest like you need.”
    “Don’t hand me that!” She clutched herself. “You can’t send me up. I’m only in for observation.”
    “Your family wants you to get well, just as the doctor does—”
    “The doctor only spoke to me for five minutes!”
    “You’re a sick woman. Everybody wants you to get well again,” the nurse said with that false sweetness. “Don’t you want to get well?”
    “Who’s signing me in? Did my niece do this?”
    “Your brother Lewis. So you won’t hurt yourself or anyone else. You’ve been a bad girl again, Mrs. Ramos.”
    “Where are you sending me?”
    “You just get your things together. You’ll find out.” Thenurse strolled off whistling that catchy song by War that had been echoing in El Barrio for weeks.
    The rain came down hard. The day was clammy and gusts of wind splashed the water in breaking waves against the closed sides of the ambulance-bus. She sat so that she could see out through the slit, wearing her own clothes that Dolly had brought her. Rain drummed on the metal roof, assaulting it. Under water. She was drowning.
    Here she was with her life half spent, midway through her dark journey that had pushed her into the hands of the midwife in El Paso and carried her through the near West Side of Chicago, through the Bronx and the Lower East Side and El Barrio. The iron maiden was carrying her to Rockover again. Luis had signed her in. A bargain had been struck. Some truce had been negotiated between the two men over the bodies of their women. Luis, who never admitted his oldest daughter was a whore, but made her feel like one whenever he got her in his house. The iron maiden jounced roughly on, battering her. Halfway through the hard years allotted women she found herself stymied, trapped, drugged with the Thorazine that sapped her will and dulled her brain and drained her body of energy.
    She had lost some weight and the old yellow dress hung loosely. Her lips and her nails were split from the drug and lack of protein. The dentist had yanked a tooth and filled two others in quick repair. Her rib ached. The tape was tight around her like a corset under the loose dress. Into the unnatural darkness of the April storm she was carried blind in the belly of the iron beast.
    The ambulance-bus slowed abruptly. Making sharp turns. Slowing down again. She pressed her eye to the slit and stared at the budding trees, the hedges. At length she saw through the blowing veil of the rain the walls she knew too well, that place of punishment, of sorrow, of the slow or fast murder of the self called Rockover State.
    Perhaps she deserved punishment for the craziness none had guessed, the questions no one had asked, the story no one had pried from her: that all of the month before she had been hallucinating with increasing sharpness a strange man.That she had dreamed and then waking-dreamed and finally seen on the streets that same smooth Indio face.
    Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror. Into the asylum that offered none, the broken-springed bus roughly galloped. Over the old buildings the rain blew in long gray ropy strands cascading down the brick walls. As she was beckoned out with rough speed, she was surprised to see gulls wheeling above, far inland, as over other refuse grounds. Little was recycled here. She was human garbage carried to the dump.

TWO
    The first time. Was there a once? The dreams surely began with an original; yet she had the sense, the first morning she awakened remembering, that there were more she had not remembered, a sensation of return, blurred but convincing. She lay on her back in the rutted center of the bed, the valley that made