The Falling Woman

5 Elizabeth

I tapped a cigarette out of the pack and watched the bright point of Barbara’s flashlight move across the plaza to the women’s hut. Barbara and Diane were shadows in the distance.

This daughter of mine was as cool as if she were encased in glass, shielded from the world by an invisible protective barrier. She was not unfriendly: during dinner she had smiled and joked with the others. But she seemed cautious, wary, and even when she removed her sunglasses, I could not begin to guess what she was thinking. I lit my cigarette, cupping my hand to protect the flame from the evening breeze, then shook the burning match to blow it out. Tony sat beside me, nursing a drink. I think it was his fourth.

In the corner of the plaza, not far from the table where the students played their interminable game of cards, a loincloth-clad Toltec priest was scraping remnants of flesh from the hide of a newly killed jaguar. A smoking torch cast red light on his bare back and shoulders; at his side, incense burned in a pottery vessel shaped like a jaguar. As he worked, he chanted incessantly, and his voice competed with the rock-and-roll tapes playing on Carlos’s cassette player.

‘Your daughter is a very nice young woman,’ Tony said. ‘I think she’ll fit right in.’

I said nothing. The priest chanted and the rock-and-roll band sang about love.

‘Did you have a nice chat when you took her around the site?’

‘Curious, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ He leaned back in his chair. The hand holding his glass of gin was propped up on one knee; the empty hand on the other. He was waiting. A moth was battering its head against the glass chimney of the lantern. I dimmed the light and moved it to the other end of the table, but the insect circled, found the lamp again, and continued its efforts to die.

‘I don’t understand what she wants from me,’ I said finally.

‘Didn’t you ask her that?’ Tony said.

‘I did. She said she wanted to dig up the past and see what was under the rubble.’

He nodded.

For a moment we listened to the slap of the cards, the low murmur of the students’ conversation, and the soft whir of the cassette player rewinding. The priest had stopped his wailing and I could hear the scrape of the obsidian knife against the hide. I realized that I was holding the burning cigarette, but not smoking. I took a long drag and exhaled slowly.

‘I don’t understand what she’s doing here,’ I said abruptly. ‘It’s all past history. I left her. Why should she look to me for comfort now?’

‘Is she looking to you for comfort?’

‘She’s looking for her mother. I’m nobody’s mother.’

‘Then she’ll figure that out,’ he said. ‘And then she’ll go. Is that what you want?’

I shrugged, unable to say what I wanted. ‘That would be fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’

‘All right,’ Tony said. ‘Maybe that will happen.’

We sat quietly for a while. The priest resumed his chanting, but the card game seemed to be winding down. Carlos had his arm around Maggie’s shoulders and the two of them were laughing a great deal. ‘She seems to have hit it off with Barbara,’ I said.

‘True. And having another person on survey isn’t a bad idea.’

‘I suppose.’ I frowned out at the darkness. ‘I wonder why she’s so wary. I suppose that’s Robert’s doing.’

‘Give the woman a chance, Liz,’ he said. ‘Just give her a chance.’

‘She seems bright enough,’ I said grudgingly.

‘That’s something.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘It was brave of her to come down here by herself. Is that what you’re waiting for?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not waiting for anything. I was just thinking that arriving unannounced seemed like the sort of thing that you would have done in her position.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ I admitted reluctantly.

‘I think I am.’

Carlos reached over to the tape player and the music clicked off. Carlos and Maggie headed off, arm in arm, on the path to the cenote, talking in loud whispers. John and Robin headed toward their huts. Tony poured himself one more drink. ‘You ever going to sleep?’ he asked.

‘Later,’ I said. ‘I’m not tired yet.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said.

I shrugged and watched him walk away. I sat alone at the table.

In the dim lantern light, I could see only the outlines of the huts. The trilling of the insects in the monte seemed to match some internal rhythm, and I knew with a certainty born of experience that if I went to my hut now, I would not sleep. I would watch the shadows on the ceiling swaying as my hammock swayed, and wait until the morning came. I had learned, at times like this, to wait it out. Alcohol would put me out for a time, but when I drank myself to sleep I woke at five in the morning, feeling stony-eyed and wide awake. Sleeping pills would put me out – the university physician had prescribed some for my bouts with insomnia – but I did not like to resort to drugs. A pill would shut the lights out, as surely as a pillow forced down over my face, and there would be nothing I could do to chase the darkness away.

The darkness seemed to be pressing closer. The heat was oppressive. Diane’s appearance made the past come back too vividly.

I had walked for miles in the two weeks before I ran away to New Mexico for the first time. Up and down the narrow streets, past fenced yards filled with weeds, past barking dogs and old men on porches and screaming children who always seemed to be running or fighting. Each morning, as soon as Robert drove away to the hospital, I would leave our small apartment. I always wore an oversized sun hat and a loose tent dress. On the days that Diane did not go to nursery school, she walked with me, her short legs working hard to keep up with my steady pace. When she started to whimper and complain, I would carry her for a few blocks. Then I would put her down and she would walk again.

I did not follow any particular route; I had no destination. I just walked – wandering randomly through the rundown section of Los Angeles where we rented our home. I had to walk: when I stayed in the apartment, I had trouble breathing. The walls were too close. I could not stay still.

My marriage to Robert had become intolerable, a cage I had entered willingly, but could not escape. Robert and I met in a chemistry class during my junior year of college. I had been working my way through school – relying on a small scholarship from my hometown Rotary Club and on the cash I could earn by typing papers for professors and more prosperous students. It was a hard life, but no worse than life in my parents’ house had been.

I was an only child. My father was a dour straight-backed man who earned his living as a plumber and believed in a dour straight-backed Christian God. He did not believe that women needed a college education. He disapproved of my passion for collecting Indian arrowheads, stone tools, and fragments of pots. My mother, like the female birds of many species, had developed a drab protective coloration that let her blend into the background, invisible as long as she remained silent. She counseled me to adopt the same strategy, to be quiet and meek, but I could never manage it. I always felt like a fledgling cuckoo bird, hatched from an egg laid in an alien nest, a chick too big, too loud, too rambunctious for its adopted parents. When I graduated from high school, my father suggested that I take a job clerking at the local drugstore. I packed my bags and left.

At college, people left me alone. I could read what I pleased, do as I pleased. I led an isolated life, having little in common with the women in my boardinghouse. I was uninterested in mixers, boyfriends, and football games, and far too interested in science classes and books.

Robert was a scholarship student, an earnest young man who was careful in his studies. We started by arguing over an experiment in chemistry class and ended up going to a dance together. We got along. He thought I was clever; he laughed at my jokes. I think, looking back on it, that I never realized I was lonely until, with Robert, I was no longer alone. We went to dances, to movies when we could scrape the money together; we shared ice cream sundaes in the campus coffee shop. And I felt, for the first time, as if I belonged somewhere: I belonged with Robert. I changed for him – softening my manner, becoming less argumentative, paying more attention to how I looked, to the clothes I wore.

One night, after a bottle of wine in the backseat of a borrowed Chevrolet, I lost my virginity. A few weeks later, my period failed to arrive on schedule. We married, the only solution that seemed reasonable at the time, and I dropped out of college, still typing papers to earn a living but also carrying the tremendous weight of a growing child within me. After Diane’s birth, during Robert’s years of medical school, I typed while caring for the baby, doing laundry, and cooking cauldrons of soup and pasta – soup because it was cheap and pasta because it was filling.

I came to remember with nostalgia the long nights alone in my small boardinghouse room, reading until dawn, then rising to go to classes. In college, my time was limited, but it was my own. As a mother, I had no time. I managed to read sometimes, but only after Diane was asleep. I attended one archaeology lecture at the local college, but Diane grew restless and disrupted the lecture by crying or asking me loud unintelligible questions. The professor asked me not to bring the child again, but we could not afford a babysitter.

I grew restless and my dreams became vivid: I wandered through exotic jungles filled with bright flowers, strange people, decaying ruins. I was impatient, angry with myself and the world around me.

Robert and I argued endlessly – about Diane, about money and the lack of it, about my housekeeping and the lack of it. I remember one evening at home quite vividly. Diane was asleep and I was darning Robert’s socks and trying to watch a television documentary about the Indians of the Brazilian rain forest. Robert was home and awake, a rare combination. He was pacing, filled with nervous energy. At a party given by one of Robert’s colleagues, an arrogant man had been talking about the limitations of what he called the ‘primitive’ mind. He seemed to regard all nonwhite races as primitive. I argued with him for a while, and ended up calling him a stupid bigoted fool. Word of this had finally filtered back to Robert.

‘Couldn’t you have used a little tact?’ he asked.

‘You want me to kowtow to that idiot?’

‘I want you to use a little sense. That idiot is head of surgery and he has a lot of pull at the hospital,’ Robert said. ‘You should know better. You used to know better.’

I watched an Indian slash a rubber tree with a machete and catch the flowing sap in a bucket.

‘What’s wrong with you these days?’ he asked. ‘Why are you always so touchy?’

I looked up from the television. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ I said sadly.

Robert stopped pacing, suddenly sympathetic. ‘Neither do I.’ He sat beside me on the couch, put a comforting arm around my shoulders. ‘Things will get better,’ he said. ‘We won’t always live here. When I have a good position, we can move to a better neighborhood.’

I thought about a better neighborhood and imagined endless vistas of suburban lawns, white picket fences, laughing children. ‘No,’ I said.

He squeezed my shoulders gently. ‘We’re almost there. Just one more year of residency…’

One more year would bring me one more year closer to a suburban home that I did not want. ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I want to go to the jungle.’

‘What?’

I gestured at the television screen, where Indian women squatted by an open fire. ‘That’s my idea of a better neighborhood,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Right,’ he said. My father had laughed when I told him that I was going to college.

‘I don’t belong here. I don’t know where I belong, but it isn’t here.’

He shook his head, still smiling. Unbelieving and amused by the whole idea. ‘For a smart woman, you can be really silly. What the hell would you do there? Besides, one week of the bugs and dirt and you’d be home.’

I watched him coolly, suddenly wondering if he had ever listened when I talked of anthropology and archaeology. I could see him clearly, but he seemed very distant, as if a wall of glass had been lowered between us at the moment that he laughed. Diane called to me from her room – she needed a drink of water. Without a word, I left to go to her.

Robert never really understood the nature of my discontent, not even after I ran away from home, not even after I slashed my wrists. He kept waiting for me to turn back into the woman he married, never realizing that she was a sham; she never existed.

And so I strode through the neighborhood, trying to burn off the energy that kept me awake at night, energy that made it impossible to rest at all. It was on those walks that I first started seeing the shadows of the past. A group of Indian men setting forth on a hunt. Four women carrying woven baskets filled with unidentifiable roots. I remember seeing a Spanish friar, mounted on a tired burro, crossing my path on his way to somewhere important. A troop of mounted soldiers raised dust as they trotted down the paved street, disappearing when they continued straight through a building that blocked their way.

I clearly remembered the day that I did not go walking. Diane was five and sick with the flu. I stayed home to nurse her, pacing within the apartment. It was August and the temperature was holding steady at over 100 degrees, a heat wave that the TV weatherman kept promising would end. After hours of fussing and complaining, Diane was asleep. Robert was working a late shift at the hospital. I sat at the kitchen table on a wooden chair that wobbled. It was hot, too hot, and I had been drinking beer all afternoon with a neighbor, a slatternly woman who had nothing good to say about anyone. I had been drinking with her only because I could not stand being alone. I was twenty-six years old, and it seemed wrong to sit alone drinking beer after beer. But at six, when the neighbor left, I kept drinking cold beer and staring at the walls.

In that old apartment, the water heater grumbled, the refrigerator hummed, the floor creaked for no discernible reason. When I listened closely to the refrigerator, I could hear voices, like distant cocktail-party conversation.

After the neighbor left, I became aware that I was not alone. Very slowly, I became conscious of the woman who sat across the table in the seat that the neighbor had vacated. She was watching me. The light in the kitchen was dim – I had not turned on the overhead lamp and the orange light of the setting sun was filtered through smears of dirt on the kitchen window. The woman’s face was in the shadows; I could not make it out.

I returned her stare for a moment, wondering vaguely how she had come to be there. ‘Want a beer?’ I asked her.

She shook her head.

‘So what do you think I should do? Run away? Or stay here and take care of the child?’

I had told the neighbor woman that I was thinking about leaving Robert. She had laughed at me and said that after a few months out on my own I would come running home.

The woman whose face I could not see did not laugh. ‘Run away.’ Did she speak or was it the rumble of the water heater? The shadows had never spoken to me before.

There was a coldness in my stomach. I felt ill from the beer, dizzy with the heat. ‘I can’t leave the child.’

I strained to see the woman’s face, but she was hidden in the shadows. ‘Why are you hiding?’ I asked her. ‘Talk to me. What can I do?’

‘Run away.’ There again, I heard the whisper.

‘I can’t leave. There must be something else I can do. There must be.’

She looked down at her hands and lifted them above the edge of the table to show me what she held. Across her open palms, laid like an offering on an altar, was a knife, a sharp blade chipped from obsidian and glinting in the dim light.

Somewhere in the distance, far away, I heard a child cry out, and I started. I recognized Diane’s voice. She was awake after a long nap and calling for me. I looked toward the shadows and the woman was gone.

I sat alone in the plaza and a large moth – maybe the brother of the moth that had tried so hard to reach the light and die – flew out of the darkness, hurled itself at the dim flame of the Coleman lantern, bounced off the glass, and returned to the night. I stood up, unwilling to sit still any longer. I did not want to remember. I walked out toward the Temple of the Seven Dolls, looking for Zuhuy-kak.

The monte was never silent. As I walked, the brush rustled around me with the soft careful movements of small animals. Insects sang and I could sometimes hear the chittering of bats overhead. Harmless sounds – I was accustomed to the monte at night. I passed Salvador’s hut and followed the trail that wound through the ancient ruins.

I heard a rustling sound, like skirts against the grass, and looked behind me. Just the wind.

A pompous young doctor at the nuthouse had explained to me that I was having difficulty distinguishing my fantasies from reality. ‘You just object because I won’t recognize your reality,’ I said to him. ‘I have no problems recognizing my own reality.’

The doctor was a little older than I was at the time, maybe twenty-nine or thirty years old. He was crew-cut, clean shaven, well-scrubbed, and his office smelled of shaving soap. ‘I don’t see the difference. There’s only one reality.’

‘That’s your opinion.’ My wrists were still wrapped with white surgical gauze from wrist to elbow. The gashes had almost healed, but my arms were still stiff and sore. I crossed my arms across my chest defiantly. ‘I don’t like your reality. I don’t like my husband’s reality either, but he won’t let me change it.’

The young doctor frowned. ‘You must cooperate, Betty,’ he said, looking genuinely concerned. ‘I want to help.’

‘My name is Elizabeth.’

‘Your husband calls you Betty.’

‘My husband is a fool. He doesn’t know my name. My husband wants to kill me.’

The young doctor protested that my husband cared very much for me, my husband wanted to protect me. The young doctor did not understand that there are shades of reality. Metaphor is reality once removed. I said that Robert wanted to kill me. Really, he wanted me to be quiet and compliant, as good as dead. He was not evil, but he did not understand what I needed to live. He wanted me to be dead to the world. When I saw the walls of the ward closing in, that was a kind of truth too. The world I lived in was small and getting smaller.

The young doctor believed in only one reality, the one in which young doctors are in charge and patients are very grateful. He would never admit to a reality in which spirits of the past prowl the streets of Los Angeles. That would not fit; that would not do. The doctor was a young fool then; probably an old fool now.

By the Spanish church I smoked a cigarette and listened for the sound of footsteps on the path. Nothing. I was alone. I fingered the bandage that covered the claw marks where the tree branch had raked my skin. My wrist ached, and the feeling brought back memories. My daughter slept nearby and that brought back memories too.

Sometimes, memories of my attempt at suicide return to me, unbidden and unwelcome. The scent of the aftershave that Robert favored, the wet warmth of steam rising from a newly drawn bath, the touch of cold glass to the skin of my inner wrist – these things recall the time that I locked the flimsy door to the bathroom, turned on the hot water so that it thundered into the tub. The rumble of the water covered the crash of breaking glass when I shattered a drinking tumbler in the sink. I did not like the thought of slicing my skin with a razor blade, cold metal against my skin. I held a long thin shard of sharp-edged glass in my hand and smiled; this was better, more appropriate.

It hurt, I remember that, but mixed with the pain was a sense of anticipation. I stood on the edge of something enormous, like the feeling just before orgasm when the body burns with a new intensity and every nerve is alive, so alive that each movement carries with it joy and pain. There are sensations so great that the body cannot contain them. We label these feelings pain for lack of a better word. I felt more than pain as I drew the glass edge along my wrist, more than the cold edge of the glass and the thin line of pain and the warm flow of blood down my arm. I could see the blood pump in time with the beating of my heart and I let it flow into the tub, where it mingled with the rushing water.

I was nearly unconscious when Robert broke the lock on the flimsy door and found me sprawled over the tub, my arms hooked over the porcelain lip, my wrists submerged in the hot water that overflowed the tub, pouring onto the floor, onto my naked body. I would have fought him, but my energy was gone. I had passed beyond fighting into a large empty place that roared with the sound of the sea. I was ready to go on, but Robert pulled me back.

Sometimes, I remember. I try not to.