While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Page B

smoke? Oh. How much? (The house allowed smoking, I had checked, because I did smoke then, sporadically.) What would my hours at work be? While I was talking, she smiled steadily at me, an extraordinary, warm, encouraging smile. And then she’d fire away again. Did I like to cook? Did I like movies? What movies?
    Every now and then after one of these questions, one or the other of the men in the room would groan audibly, or say, “Jesus, Dana.”
    Once, one of them—Duncan—said in a singsong voice, “What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food?”
    Dana gave him the finger, then turned to me.
    “I know they’re dumb questions, but we just need to hear you talk. Maybe you have questions for us?”
    I had been to two other houses before this. The gravity of my interviews in them had intimidated me. Now I realized that I just hadn’t liked the people I met.
    I liked this. I liked the ease these people had with each other.
    In particular I liked Dana, her generosity, the warm attentiveness that I felt like a bright light falling on me. What I wanted to ask-all I wanted to ask, really—was, “Will you take me?” I didn’t think I could ask that. Instead I framed a few questions, as famous, nearly, as hers.
    Rules?
    There weren’t many. No smoking in the bedrooms, for fear of fire.
    Everyone cooked a group meal once a week. You had to sign up for any given dinner two days before so the chef would know how much to prepare. You couldn’t have someone sleep over more than once a week or you had to pay extra rent. No sleeping with other house members, unless you were officially living together. There was much throat-clearing among the men over this, and Dana blushed richly under the freckles.
    What would my room be like?
    Dana would show me.
    It was a neat room, lots of light, Dana said, leading me up the stairs.
    A conversation had started among the men as soon as we left the living room, and I could hear a muffled laugh below us now. Dana was saying she wished my room had been available when she moved in, but now she was all set up in her space and didn’t want to switch.
    The stairs opened onto a large central hallway. I quickly took in three or four rooms opening off it. We turned left and then left again along a narrow walkway between the stair rail and a wall, toward a door at the front of the house.
    “It’s kind of down here by itself,” Dana said, turning back to me, smiling again.
    The room was small, but it had windows on two sides. One looked out over the driveway, the other across the street to the similarly exhausted-looking houses there. It had three pieces of furniture-a bed, a bureau, and a nicked desk. One of the drooping parchment colored window shades was torn. Both had faint white lines in them, lines that leaked tiny stars of light here and there.
    “Duncan’s room is next to you. You’re lucky. You’d be lucky, I mean. He’s quiet. I have John and Sara. They’re not here right now.
    love them both, but they make an astonishing amount of noise.”
    “Doing what?” I asked.
    She shrugged.
    “Well, they have to laugh a lot, cause they’re big dopers. Most ny drug will do. It’s a kind of principle with them, ‘the expansion of l,her brains.” Her fingers made nervous quotation marks.
    “You sould offer them anything, acne medication or anything, and they’d false X,” She tilted her head back, pretending to swallow.
    “Glug, glug, * ,” Mnen she looked at me, her eyes wide.
    “But also,” she said, they screw a great, great deal.”
    She had a funny voice, I thought. Harsh and staccato, and somehow touching.
    “I am quiet as a mouse,” she announced.
    “And you?”
    “I never really thought about it. I’ve never lived with anyone.” The words were out before I even realized that I was Lying again. But this time it felt like the truth, I think because I hadn’t considered my marriage truly living with someone. Ted and I had moved in such different worlds from