While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

remembered being surprised by him that night, surprised and delighted by his willingness to laugh at himself, by his evident pleasure in making us laugh. And I remembered that when I saw him for the first time after Dana’s death, he wept. His face—which I recalled now was quite handsome—crumpled up like a child’s, and he wept.
    I MET ELI—ELI AND DANA AND THE OTHERS—DURING A TIME
    when I was running away from my life. I had never done such a thing before, and I haven’t since, which makes it hard to remember what it was to be me at that time. Another me is how I think of it. Another life.
    I was in my first marriage then, an auspicious marriage, actually, to a medical student. Ted. Ted Norris was his name. I could have been said to be doing quite well. I was going to be a doctor’s wife and high-school teacher. But here’s how I saw my future, a long, narrow tunnel. A house. Children. Dogs. Money. Lovingly furnished rooms.
    Everything I’d wanted, of course, when I got mar Tied Everything that made me happy when I actually had it years later, with Daniel. But at this time the thought of it felt like the end of hope, like the closing down of all expectation. I think I realized I couldn’t do it the first day I was practice-teaching in high school, when someone—I can still remember his pimply, hangdog face, but not his name—raised his hand and called out, “Mrs. Norris?” He was all of three or four years younger than I was.
    That was me. Mrs. Norris. Josephine Norris. Josephine Becker Norris. He might as well have taken out a gun and shot me.
    “Yes?”
    said, but I was thinking, Get me out of here.
    So that was step one, quitting my hard-won teaching job.
    Step two was talring the first job I spotted in the help-wanted ads, as a waitress in a seed y bar in a marginal neighborhood near our apartment in Philadelpli. I wore a kind of third-rate Playboy bunny costume to work in-vt sty high heels, mesh tights, a short tunic over leotard. When I peeled all this off at the end of the evening, it reeked of nicotine. I reelKed of nicotine, too, though I rarely bothered to shower before bed. It was late, too late, when I got home, one-thirty or two in the morning. Ted was usually asleep anyway, and I was always tired from teetering on those heels all night.
    I turned my face into my long, teased, stinking hair and tumbled heavily into dreams haunted by liquor orders.
    You might have thought I was slumming, taking such a job, and of ‘t course, in a way, that would be fair. I was a college graduate, from a good school. I’d taken courses after college to prepare myself to teach high school. I’d married my promising husband. He certainly thought | I was slumming. But he saw my job as a kind of perverse joke, too, and took a malicious pride in it. That was fine with me.
    Whatever he thought. Whatever anyone thought. The point for me was that for once I didn’t have any idea what it would lead to. Some of the point anyway. The job was also a claim on my time from five or so in the afternoon until well after midnight nearly every day, time I might have spent cooking a nice meal, grading papers, making curtains, talking to my husband. All the things I’d prepared myself to do and promised others I would do.
    The Ace of Spades was a world I didn’t know. A side step. It was sexualized, exciting. On a busy night, the waitresses were always brushing past each other, touching each other, like lovers, a casual kind of touching among women that I’d never experienced. It thrilled me. And there was a thing I loved that used to happen just after we’d closed. It would be twelve-thirty or one o’clock. The customers would all be gone. We’d finished our workday, we were ready for a little fun, but everyplace else in town was closed, too, so we’d sit around and have a drink with the owners, the boys in the band.
    Nobody wanted to go home. The drinks were on the house. Everybody was a little bit on the make. Like me,