Nowhere

Rose wrote a column for an online magazine. It made her sweat to write it. She wrote it as a favor for someone she had gone to school with.

The editor was not only hip, he was sweet. He had been her boyfriend for a while in college. They had broken up after she found Playboy magazines all over his studio (“I use them for life drawing, I swear” ). Now he was an art professor who invited graduate students to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. Rose was surprised when she learned he was also an editor. But the online arts magazine recruited him after someone showed the advertising department one of his department newsletters. The short articles were funny: “Ten Things We Love about Nowhere University.” “Ten Cartoon People We’d Like to Know” (with illustrations of Dilbert, Zonker, Cathy, etc.). “The Celebrity Wedding We Care Least about (1. Princess Di’s, 2. Tom Cruise’s, Elton John’s, etc.)

So her friend was editing this arts magazine, getting paid nothing.

Please write about architecture. We have nothing on architecture, he begged .

Please not.

It bored Rose so much to criticize architecture that she almost fell asleep writing the column.

Can’t I just draw the buildings?

Well, maybe.

For a while she drew cartoons critiquing architecture and he wrote captions. It was a collaboration.

But then she did this weird thing. She started writing about her daily life.

Daily life in ancient Rome. She remembered the papers she’d had to write in school.

She wrote about canning tomatoes. Where she shopped. What she thought of work.

The editor published it.

There was no call for Rose’s life. But Rose wrote it anyway.

The mail was weird.

“You’re obvious a serious person, but you hang around with so many losers. Lose Dorrie. Seriously. She annoys us.”

“Who are you, you pretentious bitch? Why should we care what you do? You, you, you.”

The mail depressed Rose, but the editor laughed and said it meant people were reading. You’re the person they love to hate.

Rose wrote quietly under a pseudonym. No one in her office knew she wrote the column. And she shut up for a while about Dorrie.

But one day Dorrie popped over to the house cautiously when Ben was out. Rose and Megan let her in, defying Ben’s orders. She was bruised and part of her head had been shaved so she could have stitches.

What happened?

Dorrie started to cry.

It had only been five o’clock, only beginning to be dark. She had left the church, where she had been helping a nun file some papers in the shelter’s office. She had noticed someone, but thought he was going into the church to pray. The man had slapped her head, knocked her down, and stolen her bookbag. No, no money. Just a library card and a couple of poetry books. She had also lost her copy of RICHARD III. The thing was she wondered if she could borrow a copy. She couldn’t check anything out of the library. Well, yes, the guy had gotten away with her I.D. The librarians required I.D. before they gave her a new card.

Rose took Dorrie to get a new I.D. and gave them hell at the library for denying her a new library card.

She comes here almost every day. You have to know her by now.

It’s our policy.

Dorrie got a new card.

Rose went home and wrote her column on her palm pilot. About Dorrie.

You could be Dorrie. You could be the woman who develops a mental illness. You could be the one who gets beaten up outside a church and loses a backpack.

Now that the Democrats have been elected (with the help of my ballot: just call me the Good Citizen), what are they going to do to help Dorrie? Find her housing in a decent neighborhood? Invest money in research for cures for mental illness? Set up a free taxi service after dark?

Do you have any idea how little money is spent on research for medicines for mental illness? Do you ever wonder why the same medications are prescribed for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, agoraphobia, etc.?

A Republican wrote back, I resent the implication that Republicans aren't involved.

This column upset more people than usual. Just tell us about your personal life, they wrote.

Pine Cones

Rose found the pine cones. Twenty of them in a box. Twenty small pine cones which she meant to glue upside down on a straw wreath. She had gathered them one winter on a long walk in a neighborhood of mansions and shabby falling-apart houses. The mansions were a bit run-down, but beautiful. She’d love to renovate them. She thought about taking pictures, but the neighborhood seemed dangerous. Nobody was out on the street, but it had an atmosphere. She was sensitive to atmosphere. There were, however, pine trees everywhere. She stooped and picked up the pine cones. The pine cones were so small they fit in her pockets. Cars and trucks shot by slowly and she had a feeling they were pausing to look at her. Was she dressed too fancily in her secondhand Chanel coat, bought on e-bay? She shivered. She buttoned the top button of her coat. When a man in black came out on his porch and stood there holding a book, she scuttled down the street till she found a convenience store, asked directions, and then headed back to her office.

Find any good houses? her boss Kent had asked. He was always looking for a new old house. He wanted to move into the city.

Yes, but I’m not sure where I was. She looked at the map. Maybe I was here. Somewhere near a convenience store on Third Street.

He sighed. He couldn’t move there. All right for walks, though.

She took her pine cones home and put them in a shoebox. She liked shoeboxes. She collected them. She kept her sewing kit in one, a seashell collection in another. She kept her pine cones in a Timberland shoebox for two years.

First she covered the wreath with raffia. Then she attached the pine cones with a glue gun. The pine coney looked so beautiful upside down. Like lilliputian planets with sworls and petals. And she liked to use the glue gun. It got rid of her hostilities. Gluing pine cones on a wreath was somehow so much more satisfying than dealing with contractors.

The contractors were late. They should have finished the exterior. It was November and had already snowed twice. Instead they were working on a million other jobs. Occasionally they showed up and installed a new window. What was she paying them for? She had to be firm but indulgent. She couldn’t speak her mind. She couldn’t talk to them the way Kent did. If she did, they would resist. She had to act like a thin little woman. Thin little women didn’t yell. Not that she was that thin anymore. She weighed 142 pounds. Twenty years ago she had weighed 122. She had been nearly anorexic.

I want to be anorexic like you, her friend had said.

But people still treated her like a thin little woman.

Ben had never known her when she was skinny.

Kent yelled at the contractors. He was ferocious. He was a former state representative who had retired from politics and gone back to architecture. People did what he told them to. He was genial in his office but was a beast when he dealt with outsiders. He didn’t usually yell at anyone, but he yelled when the contractors were late.

What the hell? This is an important contract.

Rose was thrilled. Oh my God, he’s never lost it like that. If only I could.

Rose was often grim. She could keep her face utterly still, not move a muscle. Unlike Megan, whose face twitched. Megan had a naturally twitchy face.

That’s why I had to go into a helping profession, Megan often said.

But Rose couldn’t get men to obey her. Her still face wasn't enough. She wondered how Pelosi was going to do it. How did Hillary do it?

Rose was making the wreath for her neighbors. She thought she should join in the decorative fervor, hang something on her door.

Pine cones. She had never seen a prettier wreath. And to think she found them lying on the ground.

They sold them at craft stores.

Condign

Condign.

Rose had found the word in Osbert Sitwell’s BEFORE THE BOMBARDMENT. It was a condign novel, which no one read anymore. Maybe in Britain. She didn’t know what the British read. She had found it at a university library.

She loved the characters, Miss Collier-Floodgaye, a woman so lonely she believed she had to pay for friendship, and her paid companion, Miss Bramley. And she loved the epigraph:

“Is it Winter the Huntsman
who gallops through his iron glades,
Cracking his cruel whip
To the gathering shades?”

Winter the Huntsman. It had already snowed twice. She wore her boots to the mall.

Rose thought it condign that while sitting on a bench at the mall she prognosticated that she would become as addicted to shopping as she was to the books of Osbert Sitwell if Megan continued to live with her.

Megan was more or less living with them until Thanksgiving. Thank God it was November. Wreaths and pumpkins and inflatable turkeys. One of their neighbors put up his Christmas decorations. It was a lights festival: lights around the roof and bushes, Santa and the reindeer in the front yard. He was a friend of Ben’s. Ben helped the guy decorate every year: Lester was a Christmas nut who had served in World War II. He was 85, but pretty spry on that ladder. Lester was the one who saw Megan sitting on the front stoop in her nightgown smoking without a coat on.

Rose made an appointment with a psychiatrist. This can’t go on.

Megan actually got dressed like a normal person. She wore a prim skirt and sweater and tights she borrowed from Rose’s closet.

Why don’t you get dressed when you’re staying home? Then we wouldn’t have to go to the doctor, Rose said impatiently.

I can be straight. Watch how straight I can be.

Megan conversed with the psychiatrist about the history she was writing of the sixties. She mentioned her fascination with the Kennedys.

Isn’t that somewhat offbeat? Don’t you think there have been enough histories of the Kennedys and the sixties?

No. People are fascinated. There are always new books. And there’s a new movie called BOBBY.

The psychiatrist diagnosed her with agoraphobia, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse. He prescribed pills and also wanted her to attend group.

Megan laughed herself silly. I am not attending any group. I am beyond group.

Shouldn’t you at least try? I’ll go with you.

I’ll take the pills.

Every morning Rose and Megan took pills together. Rose took one, Megan took three. They took pills, drank orange juice, and read the newspaper.

The pills did not make Megan get dressed. She slept more, though. She went to bed earlier.

Rose was at the mall. She had taken to going to the mall after work to get away from Megan. She watched the peripatetic shoppers. They walked around the mall talking on phones, ignoring the clouds of perfume that someone mistakenly believed made the mall more attractive. The smell was not Chanel No. 5. It was acidic, like walking through Lysol. It clung to her clothes. She had to go home and wash her clothes the way she had when she had been a waitress at a diner years ago. A few carried bags from the Gap, others from the Limited, others from Borders, still others from the department store. But most carried nothing. It was a dying mall. The middle-class housewives with the expensively dyed hair shopped at the mall on the outskirts of town. The modish mall was so far out of town that it was in another county.

What did Rose need at the mall today? She bought two new blankets, a muffin pan and cookie sheet, candles, hats and gloves for her and Ben, sweatshirts, Comet, dish soap, and Lysol, a miniature teddy bear for her dog (who loved to chew them), another teddy bear for her mother (who collected them), and a new dictionary (her old one had fallen apart).

When she got home she spent another two hours making soup in the kitchen. Quiet time. Listening to the radio, wearing her favorite slippers and new sweats.

Megan came in and, laughing, ate half a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies.

I’m making soup. Don’t you want some?

This is all I want, Megan said.

Then she left the room. Rose blended the soup, ate two bowls, and then cried.

They Poach Rabbits, Don't They?

There’s nothing to eat. Nothing. Except apples. Do you want poached fruit?

Nobody poaches fruit, said Ben. Fruit...not poachable. They poach rabbits, don’t they?

I wouldn’t poach a rabbit with a ten-foot pole. Ugh. I’m not Elizabeth David. But I have a recipe for poached fruit, said Rose.

She started to poach the fruit. First the syrup: she combined sugar, cinnamon, cloves, vanilla bean ,lemon, and peppercorns in a pan of water and simmered for ten minutes. Then she peeled and quartered the apples while Ben chose the CD. Apples. Red-skinned apples. She thought about apples and hoped he’d choose the Beatles. He usually made her listen to rock bands she hated, like the Who. She hated the Who so much that when the Who gave a concert in her town, in 2000 and then again in 2006, she left for the day.

She had once seen Pete Townshend whizzing across town in a Honda Civic. Really. They had made eye contact. And then she had had the feeling that she was followed. Really. And then two months later she had seen him at MOMA when she was on a trip to New York. She had raced out of the museum, where she had been examining the collage boxes of Joseph Cornell, because she felt in danger of becoming an exhibition. She hurried into the subway. She felt safer there, catching a train, going nowhere.

Things happened when the Who was in America. Everybody laughed at her. What could happen? For God’s sake! What did she imagine? Was life a horror novel? This was the year the Democrats won the midterm election. Wasn’t the Who a good influence then?

No. That wasn’t the Whoish thing she meant. Bad things happened. Every rock group has a different influence. It was clear to her that the atmosphere changed; the neighborhood gangs became more active. Violence was up in 2006. And there were always bad drugs in town when the Who was here. Even Ben admitted that. He heard things when he moonlighted at the emergency room, which he always had to do before Christmas to make up for the money he lost by directing the play.

Ben listened to the Who. She had listened to the Who many years ago. She had liked their songs before they sold them to SUV commercials and “Friends.”

It’s important to listen to the Who, Ben said. He believed that rock lyrics had a message that didn’t get conveyed by the media.

Grudgingly, she admitted they had something important to say. That didn’t mean they didn’t scare her to death.

As for herself, she protected herself from rock whenever possible. Rockers were not utopians. They sang about their hatred and contempt for society. Rock critics were two-faced. They were cynical about the business but lauded the new bands anyway. Were they so great? She had often been...dismayed. She couldn’t deny it. Had she ever known an ethical rock critic? Well...maybe one or two who wrote for Rolling Stone in the sixties... Now they were all about sniffing the coke. And, weirdly, they wanted to meet the stars. So they reduce them to stories.

She hoped and prayed she would never, never, never meet a rock star. That Ben wouldn’t bring one home from a party. It had been bad enough years ago when she had had a boyfriend who played electric guitar. She had had to sit around with everybody, saying nothing, pretending to get stoned.

She should write a mystery. Her therapist had suggested this years ago. The detective? A rock critic? No, she didn’t think so. More likely somebody unconnected to rock. A P.I. Everybody loved a good P.I. novel. Especially if the P.I. had a dog, money troubles, jogged, hated high heels, and was an orphan like V.I. Warshawki or Kinsey Milhone. Her P.I. could investigate rock and roll deaths. All those overdoses. Come on. Mama Cass offed by a sandwich? She didn’t think so.

When the poached apples were done, Ben turned off the Who.

Won’t get fooled again, she said. Wait till you taste this. “Fruits poached in a syrup gain flavor and sophistication.”

Good God, he said. These are the only sophisticated apples I’ve ever eaten.

They snickered. Then they ate most of them, then went into the living room and made out on the couch.

After

After listening to opera all afternoon, Rose felt compos mentis again. But she didn’t want anything to do with her sister. Megan was just...inappropriate. Giving her that joint this morning. And Megan had advised her to vote socialist. She didn’t want to admit that Megan might be right. When she saw the politicians smiling fulsomely at the camera, she thought Megan had a point. The politicians were mostly Democrats, friends of Ben, whom she’d met at parties during other election years. They were better than Republicans, but still conservative and hypocritical. They said what pollsters told them to say. It was always the same thing: the economy, health insurance, the war. Yadda yadda yadda. All that would be taken care of now. Sure. What would they do? The health insurance situation never changed. She had a feeling that the war would go on and on like Vietnam even though President Bush announced Rumsfeld’s resignation. Obviously brought on by the election. Well, that was a good thing. So why didn’t she feel triumphant? Why didn’t she believe it would get better?

She listened to Wagner’s Parsifal in her bedroom.

Megan finally brought her a sandwich and some herbal tea.

No, thanks.

It’s only peanut butter. It’s not like I’m spoiling you.

Who are these politicians? Where’s my Huey Long?

Yeah but...just yesterday you were yelling, Nail them up! Nail them up! Nail them up!

Well, we nailed them up.

You did. I voted socialist.

Really?

Of course. The Democrats got us into the war by letting Bush do anything he wanted.

I’d like to revoke my vote.

Don’t you think any of them will help us? How about Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco?

Oh, Nancy. She doesn’t have a clue. Don’t you love it when they say she’s the only Democrat who knows what Middle Americans want?

She’s clueless...Drewless. More liberal than most, but she voted for the Patriot Act, I think. Did you smoke the joint?

No. You can have it back.

Now if you’d only let me smoke in your house...

No.

But Nancy of San Francisco would let me.

Huh.

The sisters wore bathrobes and slippers. It was almost five. They both sipped tea and looked out the window. It was a beautiful day. Violet sky, sun already going down. A few dead leaves clung to the trees. The trees looked the way they would until April.

Let’s get dressed and go out and rake leaves, Rose said suddenly.

Rake ‘em up! Rake ‘em up! Rake ‘em Up!

Yeah. Something normal like that.

You know Rose you’re not normal. Don’t be serious about elections. They don’t matter.

Well, if you say so, said Rose, struggling into her jeans and a rumpled T-shirt.

Brainwashed

Rose called in sick. She wept buckets. She woke up in a fog, regretting having voted. Why had she voted? It didn't matter whether, what, or why she voted. She lived in a Republican country. She had done her civic duty because it was supposed to be the mature thing to do. She had been brainwashed. She had been used by politiicans who would do nothing as usual. Her vote meant nothing. The flag was red, white, and blue. Predominantly red, she thought.

She tried to picture the flag in her mind...she pictured Wal-Mart. Perhaps Wal-Mart had red plastic carts.

The man who owned Curves gave millions of dollars to the anti-abortion lobbyists each years.

What her country stood for was: big business, chains, elevator music (now Starbucks music), Karl Rove, chemical dumping, prostitutes who turned tricks at fast food restaurants (she had walked in on this in a restroom), a mysterious thing called a “Facebook page,” microchips implanted in animals and human beings, cognitive psychology and computer software.

Rose screamed at Ben, Why did you let me vote?

I think it's the right thing to do. You wanted to.

I was brainwashed. Prozac and patriotic fever.

It's gone?

Yes. I'm depressed again.

Megan brought a cup of coffee to her tearful sister. On the saucer was a joint.

I don't need this, Rose said.

You might. Today is the rest of your life. And then she wafted mysteriously away.

Voting

Rose’s Prozac restored her to her old self, a woman who believed in suffrage and citizenship. She could scarcely remember her depressed decision earlier not to vote.

She read the newspaper and made a checklist of candidates. She talked them up to her colleagues. She persuaded her boss Kent to vote. He was "independent." They notoriously didn't make it to the polls.

I'll go on strike if you don't vote, she said. Vote for anyone.

You're scary, he joked.

She could still recite the intro to the Declaration of Independence if she concentrated. She threatened to recite it to him.

Our father who art in heaven...

No, wait. That was the Lord's Prayer. Catholicism doesn't matter here. It isn't a Kennedy world.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed..."

Rose and Ben had been voting at the Catholic church for years. They were glad to vote because, if nothing else, they got away from Rose’s sister Megan for a while. Megan didn’t leave the house. Rose felt guilty about leaving her alone. But tonight she and Ben had an excuse to go out and Megan as usual refused to accompany them.

In the darkness one of the nuns hurried past them up the steps and said hello. Startled, Rose started to fall. She muttered that she felt a little dizzy.

Panic attack? Ben asked.

No. Nuns scare me . I still remember kneeling in school, when a nun wanted to see if my skirt hem touched the ground. She made me kneel because my skirt was too short.

They sat on the damp steps of the church until she recovered. She enjoyed going to Mass, but she didn’t want to go into the church. She had to go into the church. Voting. Got to vote. Too many bad things had happened since 2000. The twenty-first century was going down. That’s what it was about. The dollar was worthless, though economists lied and said the economy was in good shape. The U.S.A. was just a country that fought with Iraq. Crazed SUV drivers intimidated people in parking lots. Oil wars, fought even in parking lots. Who can drive the biggest vehicle? Right-wing nuts picketed plays.

Ben said he hated voting in a church.

I believe in separation of church and state. Should we genuflect at the voting booth?

The elderly women at the tables checked their names on a list and gave them voting cards. They went into the booths and voted.

They walked to the restaurant. They were glad to get away from Rose’s sister, Megan, who was having a nervous breakdown in their house. Megan wouldn’t see a doctor. She wore a bathrobe and clogs she had borrowed from Rose. Every day Rose came home to find the mail had been opened by Megan: bills, junk, letters, and packages. Rose didn’t like to scream at someone who had gone nuts, but she said, Are you the CIA or what? and they quarreled. She felt like getting stoned with Megan to get away from worrying about her. But she didn’t. It was against her principles. She had her Prozac. And she didn’t think marijuana was doing Megan any good.

The bed in the spare room was now covered with Look and Life magazines Megan had bought years ago in a store in Cape Cod when her husband was still alive...Rose wondered how the Kennedys felt about this crap being sold near their summer home. Spread out across the bed were biographies of the Kennedys, SOUL ON ICE, Beatles biographies, Edward Gorey books, journalism by Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe, novels by Brigid Brophy,William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. She took notes in Mead marbled composition notebooks in all sizes, filled with writing....some of it quite good. But it was all in note form. Nothing really got done. Megan sat in bed, writing occasionally, stoned, then read POLDARK half the time.

And then there was the Ben problem. Rose waited up late to spend time with Ben. Megan didn’t like Ben much. At a late dinner the night before Megan urged Ben and Rose to vote socialist, just to agitate Ben, though as far as Rose knew Megan always voted Democrat. Ben got very upset.

Ignore her, said Rose to Ben. To Megan she said, Leave him alone. You’re so perverse. Why do you do it?

He’s so despotic. I can’t take it.

Well, take it. Everybody likes Ben.

Oh, then I’m jealous. I don’t have a husband anymore. I miss my husband. He and I voted socialist when we were in our twenties. I was just reminiscing really.

Well...that wasn’t clear, Meg. Now we’re just trying to hold the country together.

With votes? How naive.

What else do you suggest?

Drop out. Have a garden.

They giggled. Megan had actually tried that for a while. In a commune.

Once the door was closed Rose could forget about Megan. That morning it rained and she and Ben walked under an umbrella, holding hands. Under the umbrella. So Little Women. So Jo and Professor Bhaer.

Creme

It was Christmas every day.

Megan wanted to go home. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy staying at Rose’s and Ben's house by the river. But it wasn't even Thanksgiving and she was bored. She tried to write her history. She sat in bed, writing in her notebooks, the books about the ‘60s spread out all around her. But she couldn't work.

She watched CNN and waited for the mail. The mail was an event. Ben and Rose received packages almost every day. Rose rushed home from work to see the mail. Megan had never seen so much mail. One day they received a gourmet coffee maker, another day they received some mugs from England imprinted with the covers of old Penguin paperbacks (JANE EYRE, 1984, DUBLINERS, and THE COMMON READER), then a basket of soap, hand lotion, body mousse, shampoo, and facial creme.

God, you get a lot of stuff. Can I have the body mousse?

Sure. Take it. I know it’s silly. But we don’t have much time to shop till after the Shakespeare thing, Rose explained. So we order stuff.

Well, so do I. But not all this.

Some of it’s for Christmas. The coffee maker is for Mom. The Penguin mugs are for the nieces and nephews.

I want a Penguin mug.

You shall have one. Are you 1984?

I am 1984, but I prefer THE COMMON READER, Megan confessed.

Megan spent a lot of time taking bubble baths. She read in the bath, leaning her head against the inflatable pillow. She thought about the 1960s. She thought about Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, and Isabel Colegate. But she didn’t read them in the bath. She read frivolous novels in the bath. She had almost finished the POLDARK books and had advanced to Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels. Rose had an Ivy Compton-Burnett Omnibus, an old paperback with three of the novels, that was perfect for reading in the tub. Rose got a little snippy with Megan when she saw the damp pages.

Do you have to read in the bath?

Sorry, sorry. I do read in the bath. I’ll read one of my own books.

Maybe something that doesn’t matter. This omnibus is out of print.

Megan didn’t know what body mousse was, but it smelled like lemons and she rubbed it on her arms and legs after her bath. The facial creme was something basic, recommended by dermatologists, in a very large jar. Megan spent a whole day with the dermatological creme on her face. It was amazing creme. When she rubbed it on her hands, all the lines instantly disappeared. For a minute she saw her youthful beautiful hands again and then the lines bounced back. She hoped that the creme would soften her face. She imagined her face smooth and sleek.

Thanksgiving. She was supposed to be doing some linoleum block project for Rose: printing some design on a linen tablecloth. She drew designs while she watched CNN. What was Thanksgiving? A cornucopia? Squash? Turkeys? Nothing seemed quite right. Finally she decided to go with the cornucopia.

She had fewer panic attacks at Rose’s. Rose was somehow calm, unhappy like all the women in their family, but intense about her cooking, happy to come home every night and tread around the kitchen in stocking feet, making casseroles. She made a sweet and sour lentil dish to die for.

Megan still had creme on her face when Rose came home. Rose wore egg white masks, now Megan had her mask of greasy creme. They were so different. Megan knew somehow she was going to take the facial creme when she went home. Megan had never understood what it meant to have things. Her lifestyle was different. It was more about marijuana.

If she could get off the drugs, as her neighbor once yelled at her. She had been out in the street, sweeping leaves with a broom and occasionally stopping to gather some. Her neighbor had stopped his car and yelled, You’re in the way. Get off the drugs!

Good God. She had been on the drugs, as he put it, for a good forty years.

Poldark, Yawning, TV

No way, said Megan. She had smoked her grass in the backyard by the river. She could not believe her sister watched sitcoms. You think this is funny?

I’m hoping, said Rose.

It isn’t funny. We haven’t laughed once.

But it’s Tina Fey. 30rock. It’s cult TV. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE?

Fey obviously wasn’t doing much writing then. She must have been screwing the boss.

But I love Alec Baldwin. Don’t you love Alec Baldwin?

He’s handsome, but he has nothing to work with.

I thought you loved TV.

I only watch CNN.

No Katie Couric?

Megan laughed. She opened the fourth Poldark novel, WARLEGGAN, while Rose watched TV. Since she’d arrived at Rose’s, she’d binged on the Poldark series, reading one book a day.


Good God, what the hell are these? she'd said when she found them on the shelves.

Remember the ‘70s when POLDARK was on TV? How you made me audiotape it when you had to miss an episode?

And you still have your old paperbacks?

I ordered a set from A Common Reader after the library discarded its copies. You never know what you’ll want to read when you have a cold.

Do I have a cold? Megan yawned.

Megan, who only read newspapers and history, had never read historical novels, but these amused her. She loved the Poldark cover blurbs: “Passion, Tide and Time - The Legendary Poldark Saga Returns.” She was intrigued by the opening sentences of WARLEGGAN: “In that coastal triangle of Cornwall lying between Truro, St. Ann’s, and St. Michael, social life did not extend far in the 1790s. There were six big houses--or six inhabited by gentlefolk--but circumstances did not encourage intercourse between them.”

Pretty soon Rose was reading Poldark, too. She didn’t have much time, so she skipped the first novel in the series. Megan told her ROSS POLDARK was slow and she might as well start with DEMELZA. Rose read for an hour in the evening after practicing several of the Martha Stewart and Julia Child dishes for Thanksgiving. They discussed Ross, Demelza, Francis, Elizabeth, and Warleggan while Megan made an evergreen wreath for the door. Even stoned, Megan was a good artist.

And when was Megan not stoned? It’s a way of life. It’s just marijuana. I’ll go home if it bothers you.

Rose made Megan smoke in the backyard.

Their mother called every night. Megan, I’m so thankful you’re with Rose. I can’t wait to see you.

Mother, I thought you hated holidays.

I do. They’re such a letdown. But I want to see you. I was so worried. We had lost touch.

Megan went out and smoked a whole joint after talking to her mother. She didn’t know if she could take the holidays.

Megan read all day and became Demelza. She fell madly in love with Ross Poldark: she remembered how it felt to be in love with her husband, a handsome, devoted man who had been almost as dashing as Ross. Megan had had a good marriage: her husband’s death had devastated her. Pretending she was Demelza comforted her. When Ross’s attraction to his first love, Elizabeth, flared up, Demelza flirted with a Scottish cavalry officer.

After all these years, she still hated Elizabeth. What an unsympathetic character. But it was so much fun to hate her!

Ben, who read nothing but Shakespeare, didn’t know what to make of POLDARK. Good God, you women must be insane. How can you read such crap?

We’ll read whatever we want whenever we want, said Rose, refusing to be intimidated.

Megan was bored by prejudice. We’re just relaxing and have fun. This isn’t our usual reading material. And it's more amusing than that show you watch, 3oROCK

She yawned.