Free While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Page B

several people talking in the kitchen or the living room until two or three in the morning. I loved that.
    I loved even the house chores, which worked to bring people closer. One afternoon Eli came back from the lab for a few hours to eat—he had to return later to watch some experimental results. It was my night off, so I was in the kitchen, cooking. Eli helped me chop green peppers and celery and onions for chili. After only a few minutes, we were both weeping from the pungent fumes. We began to invent reasons we would offer if someone came in and asked us what was wrong, we had discovered we were the wrong zodiacal signs for each other, we had discovered that worker bees could not have sex.
    Eli had a wonderful, incongruous laugh, loose and high-pitched and infectious.
    We argued, too, that afternoon—about books, and then about a film we’d both seen a couple of years before—Blowup. Eli had been offended by the characters’ passivity, by what he saw as their indefensible amorality. I took their side. I argued that you couldn’t get hung up about guilt or responsibility for what had already happened.
    That what mattered was the moment, who you were now, how you lived in this place, at this time. I remember that I felt he was being unimaginative, uptight. I remember that I felt I was defending my life and the choices I’d made.
    The nights I went to bed early, I sometimes lay in the darkness with my door open, listening to the noises of the others. Often Duncan was making music in his room. He played so well that I couldn’t always tell if it was a record or Duncan, until—if it was Duncan—the heavenly stuff broke off abruptly, to profane muttering, and then began again. I could hear Dana’s hoarse voice cracking at the end of a sentence down in the living room, or Sara’s sweet murmur somewhere, or her faint cries of sexual happiness, or Eli, talking earnestly.
    I was sometimes miserable, often bitterly lonely with the distance my situation imposed. At the same time, I was happier than I’d ever been. I felt I’d come to see and understand, finally, that there was a way to live among others that didn’t require falsifying yourself.
    Somehow all the lies I’d told didn’t figure in this vision. Or were canceled out by what I saw as its deeper truth.
    It wasn’t that I had been conscious of falsifying myself when I was living my other life. I’m sure I hadn’t. I think, in fact, that I was barely conscious of having a self in that world. My mother tells me that I was a willful little girl, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is later, when I wasn’t willful anymore, the inner calm of knowing I was satisfying expectations, I was pleasing. The self isn’t important in such a feeling. It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all—that I came to understand, slowly, that I wasn’t who I had pretended to be. And now, when I was pretending to be someone completely other than myself, I felt, for the first time, at home in my skin.
    How much of my feeling about the house, about my new life, connected to Dana I wasn’t sure. I wouldn’t have joined the house without her, I knew that. I would have settled for a very different kind of place, one where I could have had privacy, solitude. A place where everyone separated after dinner and shut the doors to their rooms. Or a place where people didn’t eat together at all but kept their food in separate labeled containers in the refrigerator and pantry. One of the houses where I’d been interviewed was such a place. The labels said things like Hands of J? This is Sheila’s! and featured skulls and crossbones, Poison signs.
    From the start, Dana had actively sought me out, nearly daily. She helped me paint my room a sort of lilac pink the third day after I moved in. She’d been sunbathing in the driveway when I carried the paint and roller and tray past her, and she appeared in my doorway few minutes later,