Read Online Range of Light by Valerie Miner - Free Book Online

summer projects. We go off to Maine in three weeks. Hope your back is better. Love, A.” I would mail it today. Send another when I returned from my trip, and he would never know I had been in California. I used to feel terrible about such behavior, but, as Lou said, people needed survival strategies. Lou had been such a psychological refuge over the years—not just a base of security but a voice of sanity, reassuring me that, yes, my family was a bit gothic and yes, geographical distance was healthy. A stronger person wouldn’t have needed such absolution.
    Cambridge was at its most vibrant in the morning with people rushing between bookstores and copy shops. Even on Sunday there was a refreshing hum. Sure, I missed the old Sundays when everything was closed and Lou and I would walk along the river or drive up the coast. But now I didn’t know how I would get everything accomplished if shops were closed on this day of rest. My capitalist sabbath was a tune-up day, gearing me for the week ahead. I kept telling myself to cut something out. For instance, Lou thought I spent too much time volunteering at the shelter, but then he did his own political work for Greenpeace. Probably I needed to concentrate better. And if living in Cambridge was an invitation to frenzy, it was better than being marooned in the suburbs of Wellesley. I did some of my most inspired thinking at Nick’s Coffee Shop, scribbling in a notebook. Was it odd that I was addicted to caffeine while Mother and Sari had craved downers?
    Occasionally at Nick’s in the summer, I pretended to be sitting in Berkeley or North Beach. People walked by slowly in the heat. They dressed in a way that was almost indistinguishable from Californians. Not quite so many sandals. But for most of the year, I felt the geocultural differences keenly. In Massachusetts, one was always conscious of who had arrived first. In this stratified social system, I was still an outsider after a quarter century. Among Californians, most white families, at least, were relatively new. Everyone had reached the edge. People dwelled in the present and the future. My schizophrenia wasn’t helped by the fact that people on each coast harbored mutual antagonisms. To Bostonians, Californians were New Age narcissists. To Californians, Massachusetts people were thin, rigid, bloodless snobs. To compensate for the misery of frozen weather and crumbling buildings, Easterners shrugged off California as a failed paradise crowded with brain-dead people who shoot each other on the freeways.
    Despite the caffeine and the early morning start, I was almost late for my hair appointment.
    â€œUsual color and cut?” Barbara inquired in that hectic, upbeat voice. During the last ten years I had come to trust Barbara to shape and paint my hair. In fact, I had no clue what color it actually was—Winter Black, Jet Evening, something like that.
    â€œGoing on a trip?” Her voice, rich with the busy texture of Dorchester.
    â€œYes. To California.”
    â€œVacation or one of those conferences?”
    â€œBoth,” I said, leaning back into the basin. I flashed on Mary, Queen of Scots, laying her neck on the guillotine: the perfect simile for spending a week alone with Kath.
    â€œWhere’s the vacation? Lying on a beach somewhere?”
    â€œNo.” My shoulders tightened. “A week hiking in the High Sierra.”
    â€œTaking the kids?”
    â€œNo, just a friend and I. An old girlfriend.” I sat up stiffly as she toweled my hair.
    â€œSounds like a good break.”
    I nodded with tentative satisfaction.
    â€œYou must know her pretty well to want to spend a week in the mountains together.”
    â€œWell, we’re old friends. Since fifth grade. That’s thirty-five years.”
    â€œOh, you’ll be fine. People don’t change that much. I have a friend from the eighth grade, and we still hang out together. Same dynamics. She’s