Read Online While I Was Gone by Sue Miller - Free Book Online

the start that I’d learned nothing about myself even as roommate, much less as a wife, from being with him.
    “Actually, though,” I said now, “I think I am. Quiet. But if I owned a record player, I wouldn’t be.” I was remembering the long days I spent alone in the attic apartment in Philadelphia. Often I’d played music and danced by myself, danced until my hair was lank with sweat.
    “Yeah, well, that’s another rule. We can’t play music in our rooms after eleven. In point of fact, Duncan is the only one who even has one—a record player. Eli did, but he gave it to the house, so it’s downstairs. We all use it.”
    “Nice of him,” I said.
    “Eli can’t help being nice,” Dana said.
    I was sent outside to the porch while they decided.
    I sat on the front steps and watched a group of children in the playground next door. They were tough-looking, older. Too old, it seemed to me, for the forlorn swing set and teeter-totter. In fact, they seemed to be doing something secret and possibly delinquent in the huddle they made in the corner of the play area—starting a fire, maybe. Or passing a joint. One of them glanced furtively over at me, and I turned quickly away. I busied myself looking at the house. My house.
    It was sided in pale-green asphalt, with water or mildew marks of blackish gray drooping like dirty aprons under many of the windows.
    A wide, worn porch bent around its front half. There were gaps in the rails and splintering floorboards. The railing along the front steps had been replaced with wrought iron.
    Though I tried not to, I couldn’t help wondering what the people inside the house might be saying about me. I hadn’t talked enough, felt. They’d think I was depressed. Which was only fair, of course.
    was depressed, wasn’t I? Certainly quiet as a mouse, at the very least.
    But apparently this was just what you wanted in a neighbor. My good luck, perhaps. I tried to visualize them then, talking, but found that the only face I could conjure up was Dana’s. I searched in my bag, found my cigarettes, and nervously smoked one.
    I had just pUt it Out and was about to light another, when Dana came out on the porch. I turned to her.
    “You’re ayes!” she cried.
    “Oh, I’m so pleased, Licia.”
    I stood up, grinning back at her.
    “Me too,” I said, and then realized how true that was. How relieved I was. My limbs felt longer suddenly, looser.
    Dana was doing a little barefoot dance, twirling. Her hair swung skirt like around her shoulders.
    “Oh, I had my merry way with them!”
    she crowed as she spun.
    “Ah,” I said.
    “Was there resistance?”
    Dana stopped.
    “Oh, no! You mustn’t think that! None!” she cried.
    “None! I just meant that I was the only one who really cared that much.”
    It struck me suddenly that I’d recognized this, that I’d known all along that she wanted me in the house.
    “Why did you care?”
    Dana shrugged.
    “I was desperate for another woman, for one. I mean, besides Sara. Who’s really more like one of John’s vestigial organs. I feel so outnumbered all the time.” And then a wide grin opened her face—you could see nearly every strong white tooth in her mouth.
    “And the moment I saw you, I thought, She could be my friend.”
    Her hands lifted elaborately, palms up, in a dancer’s gesture. It was as if she were holding something ceremonially to give to me.
    I looked away quickly, I was so embarrassed.
    When I moved in the next day, there was a coffee can set on the battered old desk, filled with spry white daisies.
    ALL THIS HAPPENED EARLY IN THE SUMMER OF 1968, WHEN
    dozens of houses like ours had sprung up all over Cambridge, all over Berkeley and Chicago and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some were more political than ours or had a theme of sorts—everyone was into organic food or political action or alternative theater or an arts magazine. Some were, like ours, mixed, a little bit of everything.
    You found rooms in these