Woman On The Edge Of Time (50 page)

When Adele noticed that Luis had run down for the moment, she said, “No gardenias this time. They have too strong a smell. It gives me a headache.”

“Okay, no gardenias. Yeah, they smell like cheap soap.” Luis nodded, looking pleased. He collected distinctions, judgments, he always had. At eleven years old he was saying seriously, “You know, a Cadillac is a better car than a Chrysler?” Their family’s ancient gray Ford had given way to an only slightly less ancient rust-colored Hudson. Her father had driven maybe the world’s last Hudson. It was chocolate-colored and the body was already rusting into shreds when they got it. It suggested a lump of dog shit on wheels.

An hour after they had all gone to bed, she got up. Then she discovered that Luis had locked her in. She pushed and pushed
on the door and then she tried to stick a comb in between the door and the jamb to push the catch back. It would not slide in. She turned back and slowly undressed. This was only Wednesday night. She had Thursday and Friday. He might forget to lock the door. She might find a key that fit it. He might get careless. A knife might work. Weary, heavy with drug, she let herself fall into the strange soft bed and dissolve into sleep.

“You’re dreadfully slow,” Adele complained. “My cleaning lady gets that done in forty-five minutes.”

“It’s the drug. It slows me down. They gave me a real heavy shot so I can hardly move.”

“It seems to me you move fast enough when it’s time to eat.” Adele was consulting a list. Everywhere she had lists—of groceries, of dry-cleaning, of jobs to be done, of people to be called. All morning, while Connie was cleaning and making desserts from the recipe books Adele shoved at her, not trusting her to cook on her own as she knew perfectly how to do, Adele was writing lists at a desk she had at the end of the kitchen. Every list made more work. Connie gripped the handle of the vacuum till her hand ached and took a deep breath and did not allow herself a word. She swept the yellow carpeting while before her the tropical fish Luis always kept swam to and fro in their glass prison in the living room, under the murmur of the bubbler.

Breakfast had been bacon and eggs and toast with strawberry jam and lots of real coffee from the blue and white percolator. All morning whenever she could sneak a chance to do it, she made and drank coffee. How wonderful she felt. Lunch was the next high point. Adele was talking on the phone and told her to help herself to leftovers. First she had a cheese and salami sandwich with a big mug of coffee, sweet and light the way she loved it. She heated the milk first. Then she ate a lot more cheese and salami without bread, so it wouldn’t fill her up too fast.

Each time she opened the door to that paradise of golden possibilities, she felt buffeted by choice. Deciding was so difficult she could hardly move her hand. Too much. She felt like weeping with joy. She went back and forth from the dinette to the refrigerator, carrying each time one new treasure—a piece
of leftover apple pie, more cheese, this kind white and blue like the coffeepot and strong-smelling, a golden delicious apple, chicken salad in a bowl. Finally Adele marched over, five phone calls later, and said, “You can’t still be eating lunch? Really! Lew said you were here to help me, and I have to watch you every minute, just as if you were the hired cleaning lady!”

Connie put on the turkey according to a recipe Adele had clipped from a slick women’s magazine, having filled it with a mix of nuts, cornmeal, mushrooms, green peppers, and raisins. Adele had her cover the poor bird with aluminum foil, although Connie knew that would spoil the bird and steam the skin. She obeyed. She felt chunk with food. Her time sense was altered by all the coffee. The world seemed to have slowed down as she speeded up. On the ward, hours passed and she never knew where they had gone. Now she felt as if she were running and when she looked at the clock an hour later, only fifteen minutes were used up. The drug and the caffeine battled in her, and she felt high and fast.

Candied sweet potatoes made from a can! As if she didn’t know real ways to cook sweet potatoes. Eddie had loved yams. She remembered the time she had told Luciente that with some money and a decent kitchen, she was a good cook! How many ways she had learned to cook in her life: Mexican, Puerto Rican, soul food, and what Professor Silvester called continental. All good food. She wished she could be cooking a feast for Luciente and Bee. She pretended she was making a Thanksgiving dinner for Luciente’s whole family, and for Sybil and Tina Ortiz too. They would all meet and sit down to feast together and they would drink wine and make jokes and maybe she would even, only politely for the season but with feeling, kiss Bee one last time. Then she would be the one cautioning Luciente to remember that the food was not nourishing, was not real, out of your own time!

She and Adele put all the boards into the dining room table, making it very long, and then covered it with snowy linen and set it with china and real silver plates and silver-plated salvers for breads and rolls and crystal goblets, except for the little children, who got ruby-tinted glasses for their milk. Luis came in to open the wine himself with a fuss, a sparkling rosé.

Now Luis sat at the table’s head in a chair with arms,
carving the huge turkey with an electric knife he flourished wildly. The strange stuffing he had already piled in a big bowl. On his right and left were Mark and Bob, his sons by his second marriage. Next to Bob, Dolly was dressed up in a jade green pants suit with a ruffled copper chiffon blouse, looking gorgeous and wound tight enough for her head suddenly to fly off. Nervousness ticked in her throat like a bomb. Delicately she ate green olives from a glass dish. Neither Shirley nor Carmel was there, of course, left to their own devices. Luis liked to command the attendance of all his children at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, having the money to back up his commands. But Nita was missing. Carmel had insisted she was too sick to go. Then came Celeste, Adele’s eight-year-old from her first marriage, Connie herself, and then baby Susan in her high chair on one side of Adele and the toddler Mike on the other side.

Luis, big with pleasure, lorded it now over his full plate and the dinners of everyone else. “Mark, you take more potatoes. That’s how come you’re so skinny. Makes you weak. That’s why you didn’t make the football team. Now, you try out for wrestling, listen to me—you can be skinny in wrestling. You wrestle in your own weight class, see?”

Mark grew red in the face and his fork slumped in his hand.

“Now take Dolly. She doesn’t need to eat to get fat. She just looks at the potatoes and she gains weight, right?”

“I’m not fat, Daddy. I’ve lost all the weight I need to.”

“It won’t last. It’s heredity. Look at your mother. If I didn’t work as hard as I do, I’d be as fat as she is.”

Luis was fat. He’d been fat for twenty years, but he refused to admit it. He talked about weight all the time. He wanted his women to be thin for him, she thought, wondering if she could ask for more turkey yet or if she should wait till it was offered. Dolly sat nervously poised for further attack from Luis. She had grown up thinking her parents married; then had come the period when Luis was proving legally he had never married and she was a bastard. Shirley’s parents would never let her marry a divorced man. But then Dolly had become the child of his first marriage, and since she was eighteen she had been supposed to call him Daddy. Adele was Anglo and they didn’t care how many times you got married, just so it was legal. So Dolly
had slid into being his legal up-front daughter again. If only he could have divorced Connie, his sister, or made her illegitimate, how happy Luis would be!

“Look at your aunt pack it away now. Eats like there’s no tomorrow. If you ate like her, Mark, you’d make the football team for sure. Bob, why aren’t you eating your sweet potatoes? Those are the best part of the meal.”

“They are not I don’t like them, Dad. They taste funny.”

“There’s nothing funny about the way they taste. At your age you don’t know what’s good … . Celeste, what are you doing?”

Celeste jumped. She was happily swishing her candied sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, and broccoli into a multicolored mush, pressing it all together and sculpting it into castles with her fork. “Nothing.”

“Adele, she’s playing with her food again. That’s a disgusting habit. You ought to have that put on your head to wear.”

Adele blinked from her serene, faintly smiling cocoon. Connie watched her sideways, sure she was on something. No wonder Adele got on so well with Luis. She was hardly ever in the same room with him, no more than his fancy guppies swimming behind glass. She tended her two youngest with a casual smiling absentminded air, all the time off somewhere screwing seven-foot bronze angels on sunset clouds. She could not help speculating what Adele was on. Adele might just be incredibly stoned, but Connie didn’t think so: she was too far off. Downers, most likely.

“Susan?” Adele focused on her baby in the high chair. “Why, she’s a little darling. She ate her pudding all up!”

“It’s Celeste again. Making mud pies with her food!”

“Oh, Celeste,” Adele said with a sweet smile. “You can play afterward. You know that upsets your daddy.” Her long thin hand laden with rings floated like a scarf through the air and sank to rest beside her scarcely touched plate.

Dolly refused seconds, which Luis seductively tried to press on her, pretending he was only teasing. Mark was still toying with his first serving. The twelve-year-old Bob ate dark meat and more dark meat, steadily ignoring everybody. He was chubby and darker than anyone else except her, with small chin
and black eyes, the Indian nose. Once when he cast a quick survey down the table, she flashed him a private smile; his eyes widening with surprise, he smiled back. Mainly he seemed to be pretending nothing was real except him and the turkey. He raised a screen of strong protection between his father on his right and himself. You will not hurt me! You won’t get through! the screen said. Indeed, Luis seemed to sense the barrier and he pretty much left Bob alone. He tried once. “That Cesar Chavez guy—I see they got him in jail again. Huh? You still got his picture on your bedroom wall?”

But under repeated prodding, Bob would say only, “I like him. He’s got a nice face.”

Connie smiled again at her tough nephew, who went to an Italian parochial school and had a picture of Chavez on his wall. At the table were those wrestling with Luis and those like Bob, Adele, herself, who were noncombatants. Bob and she rivaled Luis in how much they ate and their pleasure in eating. Adele picked politely. She was patting the baby’s face with a napkin and cooing, while she floated in a sky-high hammock behind her eyes.

After the pumpkin pie, the maple nut ice cream, and the coffee, Luis herded them into the living room she had decorated under his supervision with pots of pink and yellow chrysanthemums, big spidery blooms as big as baby Susan’s head. Mark, Bob, Celeste, and Mike galloped off to the family room one level down to watch TV, but Luis was serving drinks to the adults in the living room. Connie was excused to begin cleaning up. Dolly offered to help. Connie knew what kind of help she’d be, but looked forward to the company.

“No,” Luis said. “Connie can clean up just fine. You stay with us. I don’t see my big girl that often, do I?”

Dolly glanced at her little jeweled watch, then at the numberless blob of clock on the wall that Connie could never read. Vic was to come and pick Dolly up to take her back to the city, once he got done having Thanksgiving dinner with his mother in a restaurant near Leisure World retirement community.

Connie had run the glasses and dishes through the dishwasher and was just starting on the second sinkload of pots, when Dolly burst into the kitchen, weeping. Luis had been
teasing her about how she had been talking about marrying Geraldo and nothing had happened.

After Dolly had wept on Connie’s shoulder as so many, so countless many times before, blown her nose, and put her makeup back on layer by delicate layer in the small bathroom off the kitchen, she settled in a chair. “Why did you want so bad to spend Thanksgiving here?” Dolly asked her. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

“How come you have to? At least if you go to Carmel she doesn’t make you cry.”

“Yeah, Carmel keeps after me, she just makes me mad.”

“How come you didn’t bring Nita? Is she for real sick?”

“Carmel’s pretending. She doesn’t want to be alone on Thanksgiving. Nita has a little cold, a drippy nose, is all. Carmel says she has her the rest of the time, she gets to keep her holidays. She only did it to spite him. I get caught in the middle. I have to get back to work. He always wants to collect everybody together like some crazy sideshow!” A moment later she was sniveling again. “How can he say I’m fat? How can he? … You know Adele’s only nine years older than me? Just the difference between me and Mark!”

After Adele had put the little ones to bed, she wandered into the kitchen, where Connie and Dolly were putting the dishes away out of the dishwasher here and there, by chance.

“You put the good crystal in the dishwasher!” She was morose now, tense. “You could have broken it all! You don’t do that with crystal. You wash it by hand, of course. Are you so lazy? Or I suppose you’ve never seen a good piece of crystal before.” She was talking to herself. She puttered around the kitchen in low-pitched sulky anger. Dolly giggled softly; Adele appeared not to hear. We are not three women, Connie thought. We are ups and downs and heavy tranks meeting in the all-electric kitchen and bouncing off each other’s opaque sides like shiny pills colliding.

She stuffed a bread knife into the hem of her dress and walked carefully upstairs, aware of its swinging and bumping. Again that night Luis locked her in. Lying stiffly on the bed, this time she heard him turn the key in the lock. She went through the empty drawers of the dresser, she went through the shelves of the medicine cabinet, finding aspirin, toothpaste,
antiperspirant, shampoo, a room deodorizer. The bedroom window was closed with an air conditioner. The bathroom window opened a foot and a half after she worked on it with the knife for half an hour. Then she leaned out into that drop, two stories to concrete. No vines, no convenient fire escape, no porch or garage roof to drop to. She was still trapped. She worked on the doorjamb till she was drenched with sweat, but could not get the hall door open.