Free The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy Page B

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