‘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.’