Places of Concrete

Rose sat in bed with a thousand pillows, intending never to get up (like Oblomov). Oblomov had the right idea: one could do all one's reading and e-mailing in bed (if Oblomov had had e-mail...) She went to work, she came home from work, she climbed into bed, she talked on the phone. No! Rose said when she heard that Jason was coming to help Gabrielle and Dorrie move.

It seemed that Jason was in touch with Gabrielle.

They’ve been writing letters and cards, said Megan.

Megan tried to be casual. The wedding was a month away. She held the phone, hating the phone, a compact, transistor-radio-size pink thing (pink for girls) that Jim had given her. What’s this for? If you’re on the road... I’m never on the road. It had a screen in case she needed to text somebody. Text? Is that write? She would never want to text anybody. Text as a verb.

The beginning of the end.

The phone bored her. Some things were worth buying--books, CDs, art. Other things weren’t. Most things weren’t. Since she had known Jim he had bought: phones, two kinds of satellite radios (he tried to explain why he needed two--different extra-terrestrial stations or something:--she didn’t want to know), a new computer (he could apparently do new fast things with it, who knew what, he didn’t do them anyway), furniture that you painted graffiti on.

God God God
Won’t you lead us through this mess
God God God
From the places of concrete
God God God

George Harrison, Megan told Rose.

it must have been after I knew George Harrison, Rose said.

Knew?

In the sense of listened to.

God God God apparently couldn’t lead them from the places of concrete. There they were.

Get us out of the places of concrete, Megan sighed.

Never going to happen. We’re never going to live in the country.

Why not? A little farm with chickens and cows? We’d be two women in scarves and full skirts, like the ones in the paintings.

No, we’re city gals. Like it or not.

The only good thing about the places of concrete was that it was spring, both agreed. Tulips were sprouting, green blades of grass were showing, crocuses were blooming. The tulips didn’t actually have flowers, but the green was up. And Megan could wear a short-sleeved shirt in the house without getting cold. It was warm in Snowden, too. Rose said the crazy people were out.

I was walking downtown the other day and a man....

Walked into a bar? guessed Megan.

No, he crossed the street and followed me and asked for money and when I couldn’t give him any, because I didn’t have any, he screamed, You shithead rich lady.

Shithead? Rich?

Yeah.

Did anybody notice?

Everybody pretended it hadn’t happened. No sympathy of course.

Of course not. They probably thought you deserved it because you were a woman.

Would he have said that to a man?

I don’t know. There would have been a lot of violent shouting then.

Yes, they probably thought I should have given him the contents of my handbag. But I didn’t have any money with me. I honestly don’t carry it around on walks.

So you shouldn’t. That town gives me the creeps. Something about it.

Oh, come on! Philadelphia is much more dangerous.

I don’t know. Nobody’s called me Shithead lately.

When Megan got off the phone, she swilled orange juice and worked on her embroidery. Meganish things. Jason might not marry April. Megan was getting that feeling. Suddenly he had stopped bringing her over. Once she had thought that would be a good thing, but now she wasn't sure. Megan didn’t really care if he married April, but the whole thing was weird. If she asked about plans, about the band, about the invitations, he said, Oh, shut up, we’re taking care of it.

I don’t know what’s going on, All I know is that it’s a headache. If I were April, I wouldn’t be happy about this at all.

Meanwhile, at Rose’s, things were hopping. She had deliberately avoided viewing Dorrie and Gabrielle's quarters since Ben moved back in. Now, when both Dorrie and Gabrielle were out, she got out of bed and sneaked upstairs. One room was okay: the living room. She breathed a sigh of relief. Nice yellow floors, clean windows. Then she looked into Gabrielle's bedroom and was appalled. Gabrielle never swept or dusted. How could such a good handywoman be such a mess? Her room was full of, well, junk: stuff she’d found on the streets (old lamps, an orange vinyl chair with its foam cushion showing),stuff she must have bought at crappy store, incense burners, pipes, ‘60s wool bags, and her underwear and T-shirts all over the floor. She also had books and papers on the bed and on the floor. How she found anything in that mess Rose would never know. Some of Rose’s books had wandered upstairs. Did Gabrielle really need Rose's copy of The Arabian Nights? Rose doubted it. Dorrie, of course, was neat. There was nothing in her third-floor room, just the bed and the shrine (Sacred Heart pictures, crucifix, rosary). Their kitchen was a mess: the dishes were washed, but the stove had never been cleaned. When Rose had watched TV with them, Gabrielle had kept things clean. Now that Rose was downstairs all the time, she didn’t bother.


The whole thing was a headache. She would have to say something but it was going to be a big bore. She felt like the commander of the star fleet in Star Trek, what’s-her-name, the woman with the bun in one of the later Star Trek series. You just had to be commanding all the time. Now at home, too. She took to her bed. She would never get up. It was so great in bed. Comfortable cushions, good coffee, her old Billie Holliday CDs.

I’m just never getting up, she told Ben.

So you say. He was used to it now. He preferred her to be up and making dinner in pajamas, but if this was how she wanted to live...the bedroom was bigger than the one in the river house. He had a comfortable chair and his desk here now so he could spend time with her.

Jason’s coming this weekend to help Dorrie and Gabrielle move.

What? Do they really need him?

Probably not.

He’s not going to have an affair with Gabrielle, is he? He’s getting married.

Who knows? Megan doesn’t know what’s going on. She says she wishes she’d never given birth.

Yes, well...too late for an abortion, Ben said drily.

Cards

Dorrie's cards. Dorrie kept her note cards in an old recipe box. No more recipes. Dorrie was down to 90 pounds. The doctor told her to drink a nutritional supplement: Ensure. She opened a can and drank it with a straw. If she lost weight, she would have to go back into the hospital. Anorexia. Three cans of Ensure a day and meals. It grew harder and harder to eat. A little yogurt, a little soup, some of Rose’s casseroles. The ensure went down easy.

Ben and Rose kept bringing her milkshakes. It didn’t matter to her if they were from McDonald’s or the good diner. They were good and they kept on the weight.

Have you considered the eating disorders group?

Dorrie begged them not to make her go to group. Only young women went to groups. They would talk about their eating habits and do strange things,yanking their eyes down and kicking their feet as though in some kind of 21st century Nazi salute that Dorrie didn’t know, and admit they were eating nothing for days and then eating whole containers of Haagen Daz ice cream. That was not her pattern. She just forgot. She didn’t want to know who threw up, who cut herself with knives. Her doctor agreed that the eating disorders group could be annoying. Most of them are borderline, he said. You’re not borderline. Oh, dear, thank God she wasn’t borderline. These women needed so much attention. All of them had read all there was to know about anorexia. I called this expert, I called that expert. What? Oh, they had to interview doctors these days: it wasn’t enough to read the articles. In Dorrie’s day she had done research from books and articles. Ever heard of a medical journal? she wanted to say. At the groups Dorrie said nothing. It was best. Sometimes she would say she forgot to eat. They would suggest she write it on her calendar. They passed around candy at the group: hard candy with no calories!

Check off three meals a day even if you have to eat them all at once.

Dorrie thought of Rose and Megan, both fat, at least by Dorrie’s standards, size 12 and size 16 respectively or at least she guessed so, eating all day long. She would look at them and want to be like them but she couldn’t eat . Something about it.

The names. She alphabetized them. She might as well. She didn’t put them on cards, but she was so used to alphabetizing that she couldn’t help but remember. She was the ideal librarian: a librarian who had never worked as a librarian. Alexa, Candi, Krista, Lola, Sandra, Susan. Alexa and Susan had been her roommates. Alexa had made phone calls all day long from the pay phone and walked up and down the halls with her iPod because she “had to lose weight.’ You only weigh 100, they tried to tell her in group. You’re 5 ft. 10. But Alexa continued to walk. And she made scenes.

Who’s been reading my journal?

It was supposed to be behind the nurse’s station. The nurses couldn’t find it.

Dorrie loved the way Alexa screamed. She never would make a scene like that. She had been brought up a “lady.” But Alexa explained that you might as well act crazy because they expected it. And she really didn’t want the nurses reading her journal.

One of them had it. That’s why they couldn’t find it.

How do you know?

You’ll ge to know after a while. The nurses are NOT your friends.

Well..

Sure. Information is supposed to be restricted. They’re NOT supposed to read your journal.

Alexa was emotional. She had to go to groups and Narcotics Anonymous all day long. She explained to Dorrie that she had done so much coke that she couldn’t sit still any more. She got a lot of attention from everyboyd.

Dorrie didn’t go to many groups. She, too, was journaling like mad. It was the only thing that brought her back to earth since mature women like her were not expected to need much help. She read aloud from her journal to her doctor and he told her he thought it needed “editing.”

Dr. Navarro, you are such a drag, said Dorrie. The main thing is that I’m writing a journal at all, not that I need to edit! You should encourage me.

Some animals are more equal than others, he said.

Dorrie did not think that was exactly true. She thought he should not be a doctor. What kind of psychiatrist said things like that to his patients?

Stephen smuggled in a cube of coke (a cube?) and he and Candi got caught snorting it (on a greeting card that Candi had taped to her wall). Dorrie was a little scared after that. She didn’t know exactly who these people were in the hospital. Stephen, it turned out, was some small-time dealer with a drug problem. He was there for rehab. He got kicked out. Where did he go? Dorrie didn’t know where they sent him. Candi was there because she had bipolar disorder and had wanted to kill her boyfriend. They let her stay. Her boyfriend had committed her after she tried to bean him with a big Oxford English dictionary.

He was cheating on me, she said. If I COULD kill him, I would, she added cheerfully.

Everybody laughed.

Now that’s not really funny, said the social worker.

No.

Let’s talk about Candi’s real feelings.

I was very, very hurt. I could not believe it had happened. Really could not believe it. He said he loved me. I thought we were so happy.

Don’t you feel like crying? It’s safe here.

I’m on 100 milligrams of antidepressant. I can’t cry like this.

I can’t cry, either, several people said.

So there they were. Depressed. But on pills, pills, pills. If you go off the pills, you’ll be depressed, Dr. Navarro said.

Dorrie knew there was no point in explaining that she was depressed anyway.

Dorrie was in such pain in the hospital that she spent most of the day in bed. Her other roommate, Susan, never said a word. She would not go to the dining room and wrote notes asking Dorrie to bring her tea.

Out of the hospital Dorrie went to group for a while and was reunited with Alexa, Susan, Candi, and the rest.

Silently she collected their names. God, tell me that’s not why I’m there. She didn’t want to do it. She wanted to forget. She remembered all of them. the names went on and on. It was a memorial to depression and eating disorders. No one was supposed to give last names but they all knew. She was afraid that someday she would have to bear witness. She could see it. Everybody she knew dead, a new revolutionary anti-psychotropic regime collecting history. And Dorrie had been there.

There is no such thing as anorexia or depression. What did they tell you!

They would wear...red hats? Like Che? Or blue hats like Mao?

Her history: taped sessions in the psychiatrist’s office. Note cards. Computer data. Something like that. All their histories would be there.

Dorrie looked at her note cards. Notes on World War I, World War II, and the years between, alphabetized and cross-referenced. Treaty of Versailles: “malignant & silly to an extent that made them obviously futile.” 1927: Wall Street Crash and worldwide reverberations. 1930: 2,300,000 unemployed in Germany. Flip, flip. The answers were in the cards.

She couldn’t keep diaries. She had done that once. Then somebody had broken into her slum apartment and read them. It was obvious. They had left some of them opened to what they supposed were significant pages. “Saw drug deal in street.” What was significant? They were always out there smoking by the busstop. She would have to be blind not to see them. The police knew. Who cared if Dorrie wrote it down? "Shut up if you want to live," somebody'd written in her diary.

Dorrie was spending too much time on index cards. She didn’t mind taking notes. They weren’t too organized, but were organized enough. French Navy, treaty limitations on. In case she ever wanted to know. She was learning so much about the art of war. It gave her a sinking feeling. Like the ships Britain and France agreed to sink after WWI. She was depressed. She realized there was not a single day when she had not seen war in the streets, in schools, in politics, in offices, in the hospital If I do this, will he do this? That’s what everybody was thinking every minute. It got to be a bore. She would stand by the bus stop and somebody would come up to her and start a conversation. Was it all right to talk, or not all right to talk? Poor Dorrie didn’t know anymore. Until she’d attended some of these groups, she’d felt perfectly fine about talking.

Dorrie really didn’t care what another person would do if she said or did X. She didn’t care to manipulate people. Wasn’t the fun of things spontaneity? Why did everything have to be so “Animal Farm” these days?

She had to say it: Dr. Navarro had given her some useful hints. He thought of her as an animal!

History: the Turks thought the Armenians were animals. The Nazis thought the Jews, Catholics, and intellectuals were animals.


She didn’t want to think too hard. She had to drink Ensure. She thought she might eat an orange. If only it weren’t so hard to peel an orange. She went into the kitchen and sat at the table and concentrated. She cut the orange and then peeled it. The slices were good! She was surprised at how much she liked it. She wanted to eat another orange but she could not peel it. She just couldn’t. She was too tired. She drank the Ensure.

If only someone were here...Gabrielle...anybody...to peel her orange.

Could you peel this? she asked when someone came up the stairs.

It wasn’t Gabrielle. It was Rose’s nephew, Jason, here to help them move.

Sure.

Vampire

Sunday. Her favorite day. The only day, as far as Rose was concerned. She had once disliked Sundays. Everybody had. There was that rainy day feeling, that boring going-to-Mass feeling, followed by breakfast out, pancakes for everybody, then hanging around, knowing you had to do your homework, pretending to do your homework, going to school without actually having done your homework, catching hell for not having done your homework.

Sunday 2007. She did no work on Sundays now. She did not even check her e-mail. The Shakespeare club? What a laugh. She wouldn’t go.

Are you out of your mind? she asked Ben.

It was usual for Rose to stay in bed on Sunday. She was reading the complete works of Ken Kesey and joked that she would never get out of bed until she had read all his books.

Ben brought in a huge mug of coffee and begged her to get out of bed.

You’ll miss the day.

Oh, if only. I’ve been up at 5 every day for a week.

It was only 6. She cried quietly because she couldn’t sleep late. She wasn’t getting enough sleep. Nobody would believe how drained she felt, as though a vampire had sucked her blood.

In luxury she sat in her brass bed, bought after she’d moved into the new house, quilts up to her chin, shivering because she wanted the window open. Wearing pajamas and a Chinese robe, she looked like a 1920s character with her new bobbed dyed hair. That’s what her clerks, Robert and Cecilia said anyway. She was jaded from working half-time at the architecture firm and full-time at Rock Bottom. 60 hours. Crazy. She was not Ben, who did this every week. She was starting to look haggard. She wore eye makeup to hide the circles under her eyes. She wore so much eye liner that she looked like a vampire herself.

The vampire theme in real life.

Ben and Rose had household problems. Gabrielle was something of a vampire, sucking the life blood out of them. She was using Dorrie so she could live in their house. Dorrie wanted to move out and Ben was giving her a settlement so she wouldn’t need to live with them. But they could not decide who should live where. Should Rose and Ben move back to the river house so Dorrie could stay here?

And what about this Gabrielle? She was impossible. So innocent on the surface, so corrupt and degenerate underneath. She used people and made no pretense otherwise.

How would you describe her look? Rose asked.

Scorn? Dislike?

What are we going to do? Is she good for Dorrie?

She’s the only one who cares about her at all. Ben sighed.

That would be true.

It’s not fun having them here.

Gabrielle--interrupts? Whenever we’re busy? Or whenever we have company?

She enjoys it. She doesn’t want us to be too comfortable.

Maybe we could let them have the river house.

Yes, yes. She’s clean, I guess. In an addicted kind of way.

That’s a nice small house. You let Dorrie live there, she lets Gabrielle live there or doesn’t, and she spends almost nothing. And she’s safe.

Gabrielle’s parents are apparently rich.

Does that surprise you?

Both of them sighed. Gabrielle is such a bitch. She has no idealism, she uses everybody, she’s like somebody on “Survivor.” Occasionally she makes an alliance with somebody.

Well...she has an alliance with Dorrie.

Ben got into bed with Rose and Binkie. He was already dressed. He wore khaki pants with holes in the knees and an old plaid shirt. He pulled on Rose’s big sleeves; he liked to feel the silky sleeves. He decided if Rose wouldn’t get up, he would stay with her.

Binkie, no, Rose said as Binkie climbed over her to see Ben.

Ben picked up something, anything to read. He yawned. He didn’t really care what he read. If it wasn’t Shakespeare, why bother? He found something by Ben Okri. Rose had quite a pile by the bed.

Were you planning to read this because it was by another Ben?

Sure.

They sat in silence, reading, reading, until Gabrielle poked her head in.

Not allowed, Ben and Rose cried out in unison.

Oh? Am I disturbing you? I thought I’d bring you coffee.

No, Gabrielle, we don’t want coffee.

Gabrielle smiled. She wasn’t offended in the least. She was bored, so she came downstairs and ruffled and annoyed the couple in bed. Nobody, not even Megan, would burst in on them in the bedroom. They wanted to be alone. They wanted privacy. They didn’t want to see Gabrielle every day.

What was she doing ? Ben asked after Gabrielle left.

Honestly, I can’t imagine. I hate to say bad things about Gen-X, but Gabrielle really, really doesn’t know her place.

Ben burst out laughing. He and Rose, always so left-wing, were now like their parents. Baby boomers and Generation X.

Wait! Gabe! Ben hollered.

Rose wondered, Why do men always call her Gabe?

Gabrielle came back. Coffee? she said, poking her head back in the door.

No, we want to tell you something. We’d like you and Dorrie to live in the river house. If you’d like to continue to live with Dorrie, that is.

Well, of course. That’s fantastic. Awesome, said Gabrielle. Does Dorrie know?

For once she sounded simple.

Go tell her, Rose said. But don’t come back. We don’t want to know till afternoon.

Storm Windows

Dorrie wanted to move.

Don’t move, everybody said. Rose, Ben, and Gabrielle tried to talk to her.

Gabrielle had the best reason for Dorrie not to move. She didn’t want Dorrie to move because then she would probably have to move. Staying at Rose’s was a WIN SCHOLARSHIP FUND/GO TO JAIL move in Monopoly for Gabrielle. Eventually Gabrielle would roll doubles and have go to some house or hotel on the board and play rent; meanwhile she wrote about Munif in her very nice nearly rent-free room while Dorrie, Rose, and Ben played menage a trois Monopoly, Twister, Risk, or whatever they were playing. The scholarship/get out of jail free card: Gabrielle worked for reduced rent. She had to take up carpets, scrape paint, take down storm windows, and other repugnant tasks. Storm windows. Who had seen storm windows in years?

The windows should be replaced.

I know, I know, said Rose. Soon.

Many of the tasks involved paint. Rose asked Gabrielle to paint the floors upstairs. Yellow. Why yellow? Why was everything of Rose’s yellow? The walls downstairs. The floor in one of the bedrooms. Primrose, chicken-hearted. She liked living at Rose’s. It was more what she was used to. Living in the slums had been all right--it had certainly given her experience and she had published a Zolaesque short story, “The Dog,” in a literary magazine under another name, Bea Bolton--but it was enough. The problem? Gabrielle had so much work in addition to Rose’s work. She taught, she read, she wrote, she met with her advisor--and then she came home and got high and worked for Rose.

Really, without heroin, she could never have worked for Rose.

Rose cooked huge dinners: tonight it was eggplant casserole. After she and Ben ate, Rose brought the leftovers upstairs to Dorrie and Gabrielle and then they didn’t have to cook. Both of them ate lightly. Rose was getting fat. Beside Dorrie and Gabrielle, she looked ridiculous.

Are these jeans too tight? she would ask anybody around, Ben, Dorrie, Gabrielle, whoever was there.

Well, a little.

Rose sighed. She could go to the mall and get a bigger size but she preferred to stay home.

Does anybody want to go to the mall with me?

Gabrielle laughed. She never went to the mall. Her mother, who more or less shopped full-time, sent her clothes. Her mother pored over magazines and then went to stores and priced things. She bought them on sale or sometimes at used clothing stores. She had bought Gabrielle a Chanel dress for only $20 because obviously the person who priced it didn’t know what she had. Gabrielle only had a few clothes but they were very, very good. Everybody looked gorgeous in them. She lent them to Dorrie and Dorrie was transformed into a model.

Gabrielle thoughtfully prepared to get high. She took her syringe and shot herself in the leg. She didn’t care about the thickened skin. She had to have her heroin. Then, quietly happy, she began to paint.

All that damned yellow primrose paint on the floor. Rose, Rose, Rose. Her taste sucked. Gabrielle started to swirl it. it made a nice design on the floor. Then she had to paint it straight because that was what was expected. A primrose floor. Gabrielle wanted to lie down in the wet paint and she did. It didn’t matter. She was wearing overalls. But then she had to get up and take a shower because the paint was in her hair. Yellow paint in her hair--not what anyone wanted to see. She had to help her career by looking good. She had blond hair of course. Her mother sent her money for it. When she thought about it, she went to a cheap place and had it colored. The rest of the time she spent the money on heroin.

Gabrielle got back into her overalls and painted some more.

You despise them. Why do you stay? Dorrie had asked her.

Gabrielle laughed. Who didn’t despise everybody? She wasn’t impressed with what she had seen of people. Her department alone would put you off for life. Gabrielle got ahead because she was bright but also because she looked good. No matter how much she knew, she wouldn’t get ahead if she looked like a friend of hers, a rather sweet idiot named Dolly who knew everything about Court Poetry (she especially knew Jamil ibn Ma’mar al-Udhri, c. 660-771) but who happened to be terminally unhip, wore tailored blouses, usually with a brooch, tucked into old skirts or trousers (very Seven Sisters), and didn’t have the faintest idea that you shouldn’t carry a coffee cup with you everywhere. (Dolly was so tired she couldn’t move without coffee.)

Something’s wrong with her, Gabrielle’s advisor said.

But there isn’t, Gabrielle insisted.

But she can’t get a job like that. She has no charm or polish.

She’s brilliant. I’ve read part of her thesis.

She’ll go back to library school because she’ll have to work as a Visiting Lecturer and will get tired of it.

She’s published, Gabrielle said.

Her advisor sighed. He tapped his cigarette into an ashtray. The building was no smoking but he did what he wanted. That won’t matter much.

You said it would matter. You always tell us it will matter.

But you will publish and you will get the jobs.

Gabrielle felt exasperated. Her advisor mocked Dolly but had no idea that Gabrielle was shooting up heroin every night. What a world. Dolly could teach. Gabrielle had even seen her in the classroom. So she and Dolly stuck together. Dolly concentrated on her studies and, poor girl, had no idea everyone was plotting against her. And Gabrielle’s sometime boyfriend Lund (that was his last time) helped Dolly, too. Lund was not in Arabic studies, of course. But he could hack his way into the files and change the comments in Dolly’s file so no one went on about how clumsy she was.

Lund was coming over tonight. He loved Gabrielle, God knows why. He also took heroin and, like Gabrielle, was not overly interested in sex. The drugs just didn’t do much in that area. But they liked to sit around together, chatting and watching TV. Lund was studying biology. No, not medicine. He couldn’t stand those types. He had been pre-med before he took a philosophy course. Now he wanted everything in his life simple. He wanted to work in a biology lab.

Gabe, this is great TV, he said of Lost.

It was their favorite show. There were quite a few shows that seemed good when they were stoned. They watched tapes of The View (they thought that was especially humorous), tapes of Martha Stewart (they never knew when they would want to try one of the impossible recipes), 24 ( they felt guilty because human rights organizations were now protesting the torture scenes), and Lost.

We never watch TV, they often said with a straight face.

Lie. Just lie, they said to Dorrie when she came home in tears and to Dolly when she wanted to tell professors stories about her days at the Seven Sisters college. Don’t let anyone know what you’re like. The less they know, the better off you’ll be.

Dorrie came in after 9 in a state of collapse. I’ve found a new apartment. Near here. A one-room living room-kitchen efficiency with a tiny bathroom. Very cheap.

Gabrielle groaned. Don’t go.

Dorrie said, I can’t live like this.

Risk

“Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk.”--R.E.M.’s “The Man in the Moon”

“You know who you are.”--R.E.M.’s “All the Way to Reno”

“I’ve said too much, I haven’t said enough.”--R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”

Rose listened to R.E.M when life got really bad. However miserable she was, it made her happy. Certain bands helped. She sang along to American bands. Bruce Springsteen: no. Somehow Springsteen was never right for her. Tom Petty: Yes. R.E.M.: yes. She couldn’t be a Beatle, couldn’t be a Rolling Stone. She did sing along to the John Lennon songs that were banned on the radio, though. Nothing with Eric Clapton ever. She couldn’t quite respect someone who had been in so MANY bands. She couldn’t think of all of them. He played on every album she owned. The Concert for George. Well, that was all right. “I Shot the Sheriff.” An all-time low. “Layla”: not her favorite. She had never know a man who didn’t want to sing “Layla.”

Layla, Lola, Lila: who the hell cared?

While she sang, Ben ignored her, looking at some papers.

He was back.

When Rose started singing “Losing My Religion,” Gabrielle shouted down the stairs, Whoa!

“I think I’m losing my religion,” Rose sang back.

Rose had also read the Jeffrey Rosen article. Like Megan, she was disturbed. She tried to get everybody in the house to read it. Gabrielle had laughed. Who cares about The New York Times? Dorrie read only poetry--and Churchill biographies, she conceded--and didn’t read newspapers. Ben didn’t care, either. Neurolaw and the other stuff...well, if you think they can’t get that anyway...surveillance on computers, in stores. They know everything about everything anyway. They can watch the tapes.

What?

You’re on tape most of your life. So am I.

You’re ridiculous.

They could catch bin Laden if they wanted to.

What?

The tapes.

Only Rose and Megan were solemn.

Is there a movement against this? asked Megan on the phone.

Of course not. You should hear them here. Nobody cares.

That’s pretty much the situation.

There was a pause in the conversation. No one liked intensity and insistence. Carrie had told them that. They never believed her.

One must be cool at all costs, said Megan.

That made them both laugh. If anyone in the world was not cool, it was the Underwoods. They were edgy, tense, intense, anxious. Multiple drugs diagnosed. Only Megan refused to take hers.

But Rose couldn’t be too unhappy. She was having a delightful time. She loved her little shop. She listened to music all day, sat in her office and worked on her spreadsheets, talked to peculiar people, sold strange T-shirts. The t-shirts had sayings in small print on one side of the shirt. Not garish or overwrought. That was what people wanted. It was almost political. You made your statement quietly. No marches, just a damned t-shirt or sweatshirt.

Well...Rose didn’t think it should be that way.

She had never been a sweatshirt kind of woman. She now wore strange hoodies with sayings on them. The clerks believed it helped sell sweatshirts and t-shirts. Rose didn’t really think it was that kind of shop, but she she sometimes took their advice. It was a tactic to keep them working for her. Rose wore a stretchy nylon hoodie when Robert insisted it would help sell it. It was hideous, but she did notice that when all three of them wore it others started to buy it.

Ben had thought Rose intended to marry Kent. She didn’t know where he had gotten that idea. Once she explained that it was all business, he didn’t mind the shop.

YOU’VE LOST YOUR MIND would be a better name for it, he said.

She laughed. She had almost lost her mind. She had thought of the shop because she was so miserable without Ben.

It still wasn’t clear what was going on. Ben was with Rose so much. Nobody knew if he was going to marry Dorrie. That had been the buzz for a while. Now Dorrie was out of the picture. Dorrie said she wasn’t going to marry Ben, that it wasn’t a good idea, that of course she loved him but she couldn’t see marriage. I get sick so often.

So then he visited Rose again. They were in love. That was very clear.

Rose said firmly that Ben WAS going to marry Dorrie. It was a joke. She didn’t want any attention so she let everybody think the marriage was still on. The divorce was still pending. Ben and Rose would never sign the papers. Rose wouldn’t go out in public with him because she didn’t want people to gossip.

Dorrie, puzzled, did not like to come downstairs too much. She was bored with talk about her wedding to Ben. It’s not going to happen, she would say. Nobody believed her.

But Rose and Ben said...

Rose and Ben...Dorrie wasn’t sure where to move next. To her old apartment house? Gabrielle said they’d exploited her and she might as well ignore them. They never come upstairs anyway.

So there were some very, very happy people and some unhappy people taking risks in Rose's household.

"Let’s play Risk"

Watch Out!

“Jeffrey’s crazy again tonight, absolutely crazy.” Megan borrowed a line from Strindberg. She was reading Miss Julie because Strindberg had at one time been a socialist and he was going into “the book.” Of course the line was supposed to say Miss Julie. But Megan did not like what she read in The New York Times Magazine. After midnight, Strindberg abandoned, she read Jeffrey Rosen, hoping Rosen had not written this. Perhaps an editor had edited out the sections about ethics. He wrote about evidence being introduced into court on the basis of a criminal’s brain scan in an MRI. (Forget the DNA: go with the MRI.) And he had discovered that Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology (a former classmate of Rosen’s), and Rene Marois, a neuroscientist, both at Vanderbilt, could predict what Rosen was thinking after a brain scan in an MRI .

This did not horrify Rosen. Jones was his old classmate.

Probably the only reason the damned thing made it into the magazine. But a good thing. Megan needed to know about it.

The brain scans were used to study criminals, but Rosen admitted the data could even change jury selection. Lawyers could examine brain scans and on those grounds pick jurors. No wild cards. The new powerful Tesla MRIs would also track brains and determine methods of learning, predict trades or professions, decide whether someone would be a good foster parent, etc., according to Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of social psychiatry and psychiatric ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Rosen spent only a couple of paragraphs discussing the ethics. it seemed to excite, not horrify, him.

Heil Jones, Marois, and Wolpe. Hitler's dead...but we've got this.

Rosen insanely allowed his old classmate and Marois to experiment on him. “Marois explained that he and Jones wanted to study the interactions among the emotion-generating regions of the brain, like the amygdala, and the prefrontal regions responsible for reason....We then turned to the results of the second experiment, in which I had been asked to alternate between thinking of faces and places without disclosing the order. ‘We think we can guess what you were thinking about, even though you didn’t tell us the order you started with,’ Malrois said proudly. ‘We think you started with places and we will prove to you that it wasn’t just luck.’ Marois showed me a picture of my parahippocampus, the area of the brain that responds strongly to places and the recognitions of scenes. ‘It’s lighting up like Christmas in all cylinders,’ Marois said. ‘It worked beautifully, even though we hadn’t tried this before.’”

Didn’t this worry Rosen? Didn't he realize he, as a journalist, would probably be tracked for life?

Crazy. Anything for a story

Sometimes, based on PET scans, criminals were now found insane and got rehab rather than capital punishment. Okay with Megan there.. But Megan understood sinkingly that they were being used as experiments. The research would be used to control minds.

Joshua D. Green, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard: “To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain.”

What did she care what an assistant professor said? An assistant professor should not be quoted in this article. This was too serious.

Bad journalism.

Megan was her brain. Was she just a brain?

Wait: this wasn’t the first caveat. 1984, Brave New World, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Wrinkle in Time.

That had worked for a while.

She did not believe this. People were: anima, personalities, souls, characters, selves.

Weren’t people against this?

Forget the war. Protest this. Why weren’t people protesting in the U.S.? Destroying the labs. Did they have any idea what this meant?

A sick man, Megan said. It wasn't clear whether she meant the neuroscientists or Rosen.

Jim agreed with her. He knew more about neurolaw than she did, though it was not his line of work.

It’s the whole new idea of having abortions to get the baby you want. No diseases. Perfect, perfect.

There is no perfect.

Of course there isn’t. There will be new problems.

No souls. Just brains.

It’s the nuclear bomb all over again.

They’re already experimenting on those poor people’s brains. They’re criminals, but they don’t deserve this.

Is there a movement?

Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to look it up.

Megan wanted to spread the word. It was midnight but she thought about calling her son. She hoped people would write in to the New York Times.

What a world we live in.

Jim insisted, It has always been horrible. You live knowing it’s horrible. The leaders are mostly...insane. If you’re lucky you get a Clinton once in a while. We have our small personal lives.

Mom says we’ll have a Republican for our next president. I read the news and I must say she might be right. There is no hope, Megan said unhappily.

How does she know? Jim laughed.

God only knows. But she’s always right. Seriously. She predicts these things. Neurolaw...Republicans.

What would she say about Jeffrey Rosen?

Watch out!

Narnia

"'Never in all my days have I seen such terrible things written in the skies as there have been nightly since this year began. The stars say nothing of the coming of Aslan, nor of peace, nor of joy. I know by my art that there have not been such disastrous conjunctions of the planets for five hundred years. It was already in my mind to warn your Majesty that some great evil hangs over Narnia."--Runewit, the Centaur, C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle (1956)

No, no, no, no, nuh, no no... That should have been her answer to Ben.

But it wasn’t.

Rose was singing. It was spring.

Spring. She hadn’t thought it would ever be spring again. It was like bloody Narnia (she meant the bloody literallly) this winter. It had snowed all the time, she kept expecting to see the white witch in a sleigh, Aslan with the fauns, unicorns, talking beasts, and dwarfs, and Peter and Susan and Lucy and Edmund everywhere. And she would have to fight with what? A sword?

She hadn’t liked the Narnia books much. Allegory had swept right over her. it had been almost like a pop-up book! Sitting in the back yard, reading Narnia books because she and Megan had quarreled over another series, Friday's Tunnel, who knows, and she had gotten stuck with Narnia. There had been a Narnia revival because of the movie. C. S. Lewis books everywhere. She thought the gorgeous style was better appreciated and understood by adults.

Fantasy wasn’t her thing anymore.

Sunlight on the sable-colored trees. Everything was sable-colored, including the mud. Very cold, very sunny, and the snow was gone. Mud everywhere. Earth, soil, clay, humus.

Her boots dragged through the mud. Hideous. Cars careered through the mud (careering cars) in the streets. She had to jump away. The boots were high-heeled things that were hard to walk in. Very fun to look at, but the heels kept her pelvis too high. She walked and sang, no one being out on the street to hear her, and brushed the mud off her boots on the wet grass. The mud and the puddles. She wore a white fur coat. The coat had belonged to her mother years ago. She could remember her mother, a hip mom in short polyester dresses, go-go boots, and a fake fur coat, driving them to the store, their daughters dumping junk food into the cart while Carrie stopped and talked to people. Don’t do that. We’re not having that. But her daughters, smiling, usually got away with it because Carrie didn’t want to be cross in public.

Rose would rather have had sable but it was white. Of course, it wasn’t real fur. Her mother had wanted to get rid of it because she thought it was an eyesore but knew that Rose might like it. it was really perfect.

Rose paraded in the coat and thought she looked very good in it. It was something to do with her new dyed hair. The fur was--fun. She looked a little fat, but not too fat. Everybody had good things to say about the coat, especially Ben.

Didn’t Carrie have a coat like that?

Yes, you know she did.

She sent it to you?

Rose patted her coat. There was no use in talking to Ben because of course he had seen the coat before. They had visited Carrie and, bored, gone through things in the attic. They had found old books of Megan’s (Megan was the boyish one in the family, the one most like Jo) and while snowbound read Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Then they made up a ridiculous board game about it. It was kind of like Monopoly except they had to sell knowledge about Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Rose lost. She laid down her tired head on the floor and sat up only when it was her turn to play. She rolled doubles all the time and sometimes made Ben play for her.

Rose loved the white fur coat and had begged Carrie for it. She wore the coat out to their favorite bar and everybody told her how pretty she was (well, she was still pretty then) and then they came home with bar food: pizza, garlic bread, french fries, things that didn’t go together.

Carrie said she couldn’t possibly give her fur coat to anybody who didn’t eat anything green.

Rose didn’t care because she was drunk anyway.

Carrie said, I might want it someday.

But Carrie looked less than adorable in it as she got older. Carrie was compressed, dwindling, had given up makeup. She was super-normal these days: a woman who went to meetings and played bridge and canasta Carrie confessed that she was bored but there was almost nothing else to do. A lot of her friends had died young (at 70) and Carrie had to make friends with “senior citizens.”

I am not a senior citizen, she vowed over the phone, and refused to join the AARP.

Rose was not a senior citizen, either, but it wouldn’t be that long. When exactly did you become a senior citizen? Carrie wouldn’t even use the discounts. She wouldn’t grow old.

But she had grown old.

Rose pretended she lived in another era. The 1930s, Britain (no UK), cold houses, warm clothes, fireplaces, gloves over lotion, somebody in a movie maybe...

Her assistants showed up at Rock Bottom first. Slackers. She supposed that was the word. They hadn’t quite finished college and in their early thirties worked for minimum wage while their friends married and had 2.5 children. They couldn’t figure out the spreadsheet program. One of them, Cecilia, was fighting with Robert because she was convinced she knew how to fix it, though what she wanted to do would freeze the computer forever, Robert feared. The whole thing was hopelessly stuck, hopelessly a mess. Cecilia was drinking her horrible concoction, something she bought at a health food store, something that tasted like parsnips and fennel and probably was, and Robert, with whom Rose had more sympathy, was drinking coffee and looking like he’d just taken drugs. (He was on meds for bipolar disorder and insomnia, like so many people).

Rose took off her white fur coat after they’d cooed over it. (Oh my God, said Cecilia. A high compliment. That’s a great coat, said Robert. Another high compliment.)

Look. Rose popped a computer button. This cleans up every mess.

The spreadsheet click-click-clicked and suddenly it was there.

Who taught you that?

I don’t know. I learned it somewhere.

From Ben. She’d learned it from Ben. She suddenly realized she’d learned everything about computers from Ben. it hadn’t been that bad. He’d given her a Mac, then showed her the PC, which was slower for her. One was an automatic, the other a stick.

Business wasn’t bad at the store. Cecilia and Robert attracted a lot of slackers. Cecilia knew music, Robert knew books. They were selling a lot online now.

Well, we’re not Amazon, Robert said gloomily as he prepared to mail out some books. Five books today.

Ten t-shirts! Rose said.

After Robert had gone to mail the packages and Cecilia had gone for lunch, she called Megan to tell her she had the coat.

The coat? No fair.

Did you want the coat?

The coat is about an 8?

The coat isn’t THAT small. Maybe a 12.

My 12 days are long gone. I’ll never see a 12 again.

Bet you will.

Wait a minute. You sound too happy.

You don’t want to hear this.

Don’t tell me. I’ve already figured it out.