Free The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy Page A

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