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.