The Falling Woman (9 page)

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.

Chapter 6: Diane

J
ust after my father died, during the two weeks when I could not sleep and could not eat, my friend Marcia suggested I visit a psychologist. I went to see Marcia’s counselor, a square-shouldered woman with soft gray eyes that looked out of place in a face composed of angles and harsh planes. On the wood-paneled walls of her office hung watercolors in black frames—an odd combination of softness and severity. She sat in a rocking chair. I sat in an easy chair that was too soft.

She asked me to talk about myself. I considered, for a moment, telling her about the night before my father’s funeral. The memory had haunted me. For three nights running, I had dreamed of the great dark valley spreading beneath my father’s balcony. I remembered the dreams only vaguely, waking each time to a feeling of panic and a memory of falling. While awake, I avoided the balcony, especially at night.

I spent my days sorting through my father’s things—deciding what clothes would be donated to charity, what papers might be of interest to my father’s colleagues at the hospital. Aunt Alicia kept asking me when I had to be back to work. I had not told her that I had quit work and given up my apartment. By night, I drank, watched television, and tried to sleep. But whenever I managed to doze off, I woke from strange dreams, restless and unhappy.

I told the counselor that my father was dead, that I could not eat and I had trouble sleeping, that I was very nervous and upset. She asked me about my father and my relationship with him, and I told her that my father and I had had a good relationship, a very good relationship.

She asked about my mother and I told her that my mother did not enter into this at all. I told her that I had not seen my mother in fifteen years.

"How do you feel when you think about your mother?" she asked. Her voice matched her eyes—pale gray and gentle.

I shrugged. "I don't know. Sad, I guess. Sad that she left."

She waited, studying me. "What are your hands doing?"

My hands were clenched in fists. I did not speak.

"Can you give your hands a voice and let them tell me how they feel?"

I shook my head quickly and forced my hands to relax. "Holding on," I said in a thick voice that did not sound like my own. "I guess they were holding on. I didn't want her to go"

The gray eyes studied me dispassionately and I thought that she did not believe me.

On my first morning in camp I woke to the sound of a blaring car horn. The clock on the footlocker said it was 8:00. Already the air was hot. Barbara's and Robin's hammocks were empty. Maggie was still asleep, curled up with the sheet pulled over her head. I felt more relaxed than I had in months, and I resolved, lying in my hammock, to adopt Tony's easygoing attitude and take things as they came.

I slipped out of my hammock and dressed quickly. Barbara was at the water barrel, washing her face. I wished her a good morning and hung my towel in the tree.

"I wish you wouldn't be so cheerful before I have my coffee," she grumbled, but she waited for me to wash up. On the way to the plaza, we passed the kitchen, a small hut constructed of slats. Through the open door, I could see a thin woman in a white dress tending a small fire and cooking tortillas on a flat black pan.

"That's Maria," Barbara said. "She's married to Salvador, the foreman." A small girl with large dark eyes stood by Maria and watched me solemnly. In one hand, she held a tortilla. When I smiled at her, she hid behind her mother. Maria looked over her shoulder to see what the child was watching.

I smiled but Maria did not smile back. She studied me seriously, suspiciously I thought. After a moment, she turned back to the fire and the tortillas. The little girl smiled at me, then hid her face behind her mother's skirt.

Tony and my mother were already at the table. Breakfast was
huevos rancheros
with tortillas, strong coffee, and fresh orange juice. My mother looked tired, but seemed filled with nervous energy. She greeted me and waved me to a chair, then went on making out a shopping list. "Yes, yes, pineapples, I'll get fresh fruit. What else? I know I've forgotten something important."

My mother finished checking over her list, then glanced at me. "I'll be going to the market in the afternoon," she said. "If you'd like to come along, we can get you a hat."

"Sure," I said. "I'd like that."

Tony's eyes were red-rimmed. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse, rough as wool cloth against the skin. "I'll be going for a swim right after breakfast," Tony said softly. "Do you and Barbara want to join me?

You have time."

Barbara and I agreed.

The other students were just wandering down to breakfast when Tony, Barbara, and I finished our coffee. Barbara and I returned to our hut to change into swimsuits, then followed Tony down the path.

At the crest of a small rise, I stopped to look around. In the distance, the Temple of the Seven Dolls stood above the barren ground. "According to the guidebook I read, this is one of the largest sites in the Yucatán," I said. I looked at the jungle that surrounded us and shook my head. "Am I missing something?

Where are all the buildings?"

Tony stamped his foot lightly on the ground. "Underneath you," he said. "All around you." He waved a hand in the direction of the temple. "You have to learn how to look. Don't the mounds look a little more regular than hills should look? And you see how they're arranged so that they make a nice path from here to there." He drew a line in the air with his hand. "And look at the rocks that are scattered around. They aren't your average rocks."

"I suppose so," I said doubtfully.

"We're standing right on top of an old temple," he said.

"How do you know it's a temple?"

Barbara broke in. "Everything's a temple until someone proves otherwise," she said in a mildly derisive tone. "We could even give it a name: Temple of the Sun, say. Or Temple of the Jaguar—that sounds good.

The names are arbitrary anyway."

"Careful," Tony said, smiling faintly. "You're giving away professional secrets."

"She'll keep it in the family," Barbara said. "She's trustworthy."

She started down the trail and we followed. I studied the rocks around us as we walked. Occasionally, I saw one that bore the remnants of carving, but most just looked like rocks.

The cenote was a pool of clear blue water, set in the limestone rock. Right beside the path, the rock sloped gently down to the water. On the far side, the rocks rose out of the water in a sheer face that leveled off several feet above the water's surface. I could not see the bottom of the pool. Water lilies floated at the far end.

We left our towels in the sun on the sloping rock. Barbara and I climbed in slowly. The water was cold, a shock after the heat of the morning. I swam a dozen laps, down to the water lilies at the far end and back. I could see tiny fish, each no longer than my finger, hovering just under the water lilies. When I swam toward them, they scattered, heading down into the darkness.

Tony sat on the sloping rocks, basking in the sun like an ancient reptile trying to absorb the warmth. He had leaned back on his hands and tilted his face to the sun. Now that he had taken off his shirt, I could see how thin he was. His skin, tanned to the color of old leather, seemed to fit him badly, like a shirt handed down from a larger man.

I climbed out on the rocks beside him. Barbara was still in the water, floating contentedly on her back. I spread my towel beside his and he acknowledged my presence with a nod.