Walk Out A Mean Free Path

            Thursday night she went down into the rubble-strewn, half-collapsed basement for the first time. The band were all working on a song she''d never heard before. They didn''t even notice her presence in the shadowed end of the cavern. Raquelle and Kevin and Peter were drinking Buds and watching them work.

She stood in the background, among the cobwebs and the clutter, feeling like a spectator. It felt right for her to skulk in the darkness. She felt she finally understood, looking at the way they all hung, so cool, there in the light.

            All of her life she''d heard of the beautiful people. The rich, the chic, the thin, the fabulous people. Now she''d run head-on into the other set of beautiful people. They were beautiful, yes, but poor. However, poverty was for them a certain romantic struggle, the kind of thing where the refrigerator would be empty except for a bottle of Vodka in the freezer, and there would be fresh flowers on the table, bought with the last dollar. These were fabulous people too, archetypes: rock-and-rollers, heart-of-gold groupies, wildly intelligent musicians and artists.

They were pouvre chic.

            Addy herself was poor, but chic she would never be. White trash could occasionally rise to chic, but she was burdened with an odd, but intrinsically middle-class background, overlain with the militarism of an inner-city institutional layer. In this group of people, to herself, she represented ugly and desperate middle

America: no class, no style, no fashion. She was doomed to inferiority.

            She didn''t know what acceptance felt like. Never, since her childhood, had she been anywhere that she fit. Dale''s family had outright disapproved of her. At work, she had a hard time talking with the other women. They were mostly older, and their concerns for husbands, children and grandchildren were meaningless to her.

The books she read were meaningless to them. She had never quite managed to tell about one without destroying its'' spirit.

            The reviewing business was acceptance by force. Maybe everyone felt like Carl did and he was the only one with enough honesty to say so. ''I''ll never know,'' she thought. ''All I can do is suspect.

It doesn''t matter. Isn''t it the same thing?   If they act like

I''m one of them, isn''t it the same as if I were?'' In her heart, she knew it wasn''t.

            She knew the reasons she''d stayed with Dale had made perfect sense. Whenever she was down they made perfect sense to her. ''At least I belonged to Dale,'' she thought. ''At least he knew what I was worth.'' Knowing that made the beatings understandable too he had been trying to educate her, to turn her into something a little more deserving. Now she felt that he''d done it wrong, but been right about her. ''Dale and I deserved each other. In this scene, people like me come and go all the time. At least with Dale I knew where I was; what I was.''

            When a break in the action occurred she drifted up towards the group in the light. Peter noticed her at last. Derek waved and smiled.