I left on a Monday. I'd called Anita a day or two before and told her that my mother was ill, that I had to go to Maine and didn't know when I'd be back. I told Ted I was going to Washington for a few days to see a friend from college who'd ended up there. I got on a bus for Boston with a one-way ticket. I was familiar with the city from college visits, but I wasn't aware of knowing anyone who actually lived there. I thought I could find my way around easily and also be completely anonymous.

I didn't see my husband again for seven months.

I arrived with one bag on a rainy evening in May. Within three days, I was sitting in a bright, sparsely furnished living room in Cambridge, being interviewed by four people as a potential roommate for a group house. One of them was Dana, whom I came to love. One was Duncan, another was Larry. And one of them, a tall, slightly slouched man in his mid-twenties, with worried brown eyes and curling dark hair that came down just over the rim of his collar-I remembered him clearly now-was Eli Mayhew.

...

The first lie I told was my name. "Felicia," I said. And then, because this was, I suddenly realized, a seriously ridiculous name, I also said, "As in 'happy to be here,'" and dipped my head slightly. "But my friends call me Licia. Or Lish." I don't know where any of this came from. I certainly hadn't planned it. It just seemed suddenly the wisest course, to be someone else.

After that, the other lies seemed easy. Seemed to be not so much lies as the story of Licia Stead. And some it was true. I had just gotten a job at Red Brown's Blues, a bar in Inman Square. I was living temporarily at the YWCA. And if I wasn't from Montpelier, if I hadn't gone to school at the University of Vermont, well, Licia Stead might have.

I'd found the house advertised on the bulletin board at a dusty bicycle repair shop I'd gone into, searching for cheap transportation. It was next to ads for used furniture, typists, and three or four other housing options. I tore off one of the little fringed tags with a phone number and made my appointment, along with several other appointments, from a pay phone at the Y.

All this happened early in the summer of 1968, when dozens of houses like ours had sprung up all over Cambridge, all over Berkeley and Chicago and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Some were more political than ours or had a theme of sorts-everyone was into organic food or political action or alternative theater or an arts magazine. Some were, like ours, mixed, a little bit of everything. You found rooms in these houses through bulletin boards, as I had, or through friends, or political organizations, or underground streams of information. They coexisted, often uneasily, with houses belonging to mostly working-class neighbors. People who took care of their yards, who repaired their railings, who had combination screens and storm windows, who kept their doors locked at night.

Not us. The door stood open around the clock. Music blared into the street from the windows-Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Pablo Casals, the Stones, Julian Bream, the Beatles, Brahms, Janis Joplin. Bikes were parked all over the porch and the scrubby front yard. Unlocked, it goes without saying.

I lived that summer like a happy dream. I worked late at the blues club every night and often stayed up several hours later than that, talking to one or another of my housemates. Slowly, I felt, I came to know them all better than I'd ever known Ted, or anyone, in my other life. The house generally rose late through those summer months-no one but Sara had normal working hours-and often two or three of us did something together in the daytime. Drove to Singing Beach, took a picnic and a Frisbee down to the river. On a rainy day, we went to the movies. Or played long, cutthroat games of Scrabble in the living room, with the windows open to the porch and the steady racket of the rain on the porch roof or dripping down on the leaves of the leggy lilac bushes.