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

most of them had husbands or wives waiting in bed, but it didn’t matter for the moment. A lot of fingers were busily trailing over wherever there was bare flesh. I stayed clear of it, I always left alone, but I loved to feel the tension in the air, to watch the shifting couples form and re-form over the months.
    The attraction was that none of the rules from my world applied.
    W’lth everything I saw, everything I did, I felt that doors were opening. My life had been so orderly, such a careful, responsible progression, one polite step leading logically to the next. In this crummy, second-rate world, I had a sense of liberation, of possibility, and I embraced even its most tawdry aspects. I once complained to the genial, barrel-bodied bartender, Eddie, about the language a few of my customers were using in addressing me. He was silent a minute, pouring my shots, filling my chaser glasses with ice in a fixed and elegant rhythm. When he handed me back my check, he met my eyes and said, “Grow up, sweetheart.” I was shocked for only a few seconds, and then I laughed—Of course! I thought—and he grinned back at me.
    There was a fight at the bar one night just as we were closing. I’d never witnessed a fight among adult men before. I was handing over the last of my checks at the cash register when it started. From time to time as the evening had worn on I’d noticed the raised voices among the men sitting to my left. Now there was a kind of explosion over there, and someone slammed into my back. Eddie dropped his shaker and was on top of the bar within a second, pulling at a huge man who was bent over the harmless old regular we called the Judge. It was he who had fallen against me, and he was lying on the floor now, under the big guy—you could hear the dull wet whumps as he hit the Judge’s head over and over.
    Almost as soon as it had begun, it was finished. The men were in motion everywhere, violently pulling the big man away and out of the bar, bending his arms behind him with unnecessary force. Eddie was helping the Judge up, then getting him ice as he sat bleeding on a barstool in cheerful drunken amazement. Already everyone was laughing, talking excitedly. It was becoming a story.
    I stood there dumbfounded for a minute, and then I felt I had to sit down immediately. When I looked at myself in the mirror in the ladies’ room, I saw that I was covered with dark, spreading freckles. It took me a moment to recognize them as blood, the Judge’s blood, sprayed all over me when he got hit.
    I was perversely excited. I decided to wear it home. I wanted to scare my husband, to make him see something—I couldn’t have said what—about the world I was moving in now. I wanted a witness. I hoped a policeman would notice me and stop me.
    But it was dead in the city. At a red light, a car pulled up beside mine. A couple. She looked over. She turned to him. He bent forward and looked over too. Then the light changed and they took off, speeding to cut in front of me on the narrow street.
    Ted was asleep when I got home. We had pink bathroom fixtures in that apartment, and I remember watching the blood purl an odd rusty color in the water against the pink basin as I washed it off.
    IT WAS THERE, AT THE ACE OF SPADES, THAT I GOT THE IDEA
    to leave. Step three. I was substituting on a Wednesday for another waitress, Judy. Anita, the head waitress had called me that afternoon and asked me to cover as a favor. She’d pitched her voice dramatically low on the phone, “If anyone asks, you don’t know anything about why Judy not there.”
    I was about to point out to her that as a matter of fact I didn’t know anytinng about why Judy wouldn’t be there, but I checked myself, as often did with my coworkers, afraid I might sound snotty or smart-ass.
    Afraid I might sound like myself.
    The night was easy and slow. So slow that the band barely bothered to perform, instead sitting around in the bar, “drinking their paycheck,”