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.