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.

Poor Duckface

Poor Duckface. Left at the church. So many allusions. Especially the "Get me to the church on time" thing.

Duck-face. Duck facing.

That’s how her mind worked. Not everybody understood it.

How do you do these things? her grad school advisor used to ask.

I don’t know. I just know. She really could identify quotes from May Sinclair and other authors without having read many of their books. Others guessed. She knew.

it was just a talent she had.

Dorrie’s paper on Babbitt, a novel no one else wanted to read, had been written and written and written and all the drafts ultimately stolen by Patty, a woman with brains who hated her. Patty mocked her constantly. She made fun of the way Dorrie talked. It took Dorrie a while to come to the point, but she had a point. She was not pointless. Yet Patty tried to make her seem pointless. Patty could talk, but Dorrie could write. Dorrie came to the point quickly in her writing. For years she thought that writers couldn’t talk, that they were all like her, people with disorganized brains, but then she met some writers and found they could talk.

Patty who could talk had brains, all right. The brains to steal Dorrie’s paper while Dorrie went to the restroom at the house where the graduate students all had desks. Dorrie came back and it was gone from her desk.

Make copies, her friend Ben advised over the phone. He was already with Doctors without Borders. The phone bills were enormous. He called her once a week because eh knew Dorrie was frail. He loved Dorrie. She was faithful to him. She went out with men, mainly to the diner or the bar her department frequented, but she didn’t have sex with them. They all coddled her. Dorrie was sweet.

Not necessarily smart, but very nice indeed, her friend Fig said.

Dorrie swatted him.

Dorrie’s advisor knew about the stolen paper when Patty handed it in. Good God, Patty, Dorrie showed me a rough draft of this. I’ve got the notes right here. Look at this?

Patty cried. I couldn’t work. I had to have a paper. She has so many ideas.

Weeping Patty called her parents and they flew in from Washington and took her to a hospital. She was having a nervous breakdown, which was unlike Dorrie’s nervous breakdowns or any other nervous breakdowns she had heard about. Patty made friends with the nurses. Apparently she lay around in bed and joked with the nurses all day. Fig went to visit Patty because he was nosy and wanted to see if she was really sick.

Not a damned thing wrong with her.

Later, when Dorrie was sick, she cried and prayed. She had not once made friends with the nurses. She was so frozen she couldn’t talk. She went into the common room and drank soda when she started to feel less frozen. But she had been in real pain. Not joke, joke, joke, like Patty.

Patty’s parents told the chair of the department, There, you see. Patty never plagiarized before. The theft of this paper was because she was in a major depression.

So Patty had a doctor’s excuse. The university had to accept her back. But they made it clear that there could be no repetition of the incident.

The professor and Dorrie didn’t know what to make of it.

I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years of teaching. She should have been kicked out of the program. She’ll never get a recommendation from me. But I suppose her parents can buy her a Ph.D.

Isn’t her father an admiral or something?

A senator.

Dorrie’s professor thought she was very funny because she didn’t know any facts. She could write about Marlowe, she could write about the Renaissance, and she could look up everything but she didn’t care about the present.

Who’s the president? he asked one day when she tripped into class a little late.

Reagan? Dorrie said absently. Oh? Do you mean I’m a moron?

Everybody in the class was laughing.

No, it’s just a joke.

Everything was a joke. Because if it wasn’t a joke, it was just too terrifying and repellent.

But people were fond of Dorrie. She was friends with everyone in the department except Patty. And when she dropped out to marry Ben without finishing her dissertation on Sinclair Lewis, everybody was sorry.

You’ll be back, her professor said. Do you have any idea how good you are?

Dorrie somehow thought this was funny. She had never slept, could barely speak, could never get through all the reading, and had taken to reading Agatha Christie mysteries so she could get her three or four hours of sleep.

What you need...Fig used to say.

Fig was dashing, a German blonde. He looked a little like Ben. Dorrie and Fig hung around a lot. In the small town there was nothing to do but buy natural foods and sit around at coffeehouses. They did their homework together endlessly. Fig yawned. Fig had read everything at his school in Germany and didn’t have to do much work in the U.S. Why bother? Reading May Sinclair could do no one any good, he said. He would tell Dorrie everything she needed to know about May Sinclair and they could go to a concert. Laughing, Dorrie protested. But she listened and then they went out together and then she came home and had to stay up all night and read.

Maybe she should have married Fig! No, Fig had never asked her. He had thought they should sleep together because they were in grad school together.

Fig hadn’t liked Ben much. He’s too--fake.

Fake? That doesn’t sound like you, Fig.

He’s a phony. So Uriah Heepish. So much like--Patty.

Everybody likes Ben, Fig, Dorrie said wearily.

That’s the problem.

It was a problem. She did know what he meant. If you didn’t have to try at anything, if everybody said you were great, you became--false. Ben wasn’t really sincere anymore about helping the poor at his law practice. He did help them, but he didn’t care. She could see the difference. He cared about hanging out with the famous. He knew Bill Clinton, for God’s sake.

Dorrie didn’t want to know Bill Clinton. She had voted for him, but she didn’t want to know him.

Now, like poor Duckface, Dorrie was thinking about marrying Ben (again). But she didn’t really want to be Duckface. She could see herself in the church, left at the church, while Ben decided he loved Rose (he did love Rose: Dorrie knew it) and then told her he couldn’t marry her. There was a long tradition of movies about this: The Graduate, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

She would be wearing a white dress (sure) and her father would be giving her away (oh sure).

Would she get to sock Ben in the face?

Duckface, Duckface!

No, she would never come out of her room again. She would simply refuse to get married. She was in love with Ben (sort of) and would probably always love him but he had practically killed two women already. Rose was not happy. Rose was so unhappy she wanted to marry Ben off to Dorrie. What was that about? Dorrie didn’t like to think. And she couldn’t believe Ben was so crazy that he would do anything Rose said.

Dorrie would love to go to Seattle again but she thought she was banned from that city. Truly. If she showed up they would put her in mental hospital. She wouldn’t be surprised. She really wasn’t sure where to go. Her doctor and social worker thought she was best off where her family was. Why? Because in case of emergency... In case of emergency they did nothing except put her in the hospital. The only person who helped her at all was Rose, because Rose was a social worker type and because she couldn’t believe Ben hadn’t given her a settlement. The alimony was for three years and then Dorrie was supposed to have a job. Of course Dorrie had fallen in the world...

She called Fig. She knew she shouldn’t but she did. He lived in Colorado and taught literature. He had a wife, no kids. Nobody of their generation had had kids. That’s how it seemed somehow.

She listened to his voice on the answering machine. He read a poem. He changed it often. She liked calling just to hear the poem. Sometimes she left a message.

It’s me. Dorrie from grad school. Just called to say hi.

Once he had called her. Fig had called Ben’s number. He was still the same Fig. It had seemed miraculous that he had changed so little.

And that was enough. She didn’t tell him she had fallen in the world. She didn’t leave Rose’s number. What good would that do?

I am definitely not a duckface. Duckface? Desperate.

Mirror Breaker

It was about shock treatment.

It was about a cheap woman with dyed blond hair who laughed at Dorrie and believed, because she had connections (a mother who played tennis every day at a club, a father who was a mogul of a film studio in California) that she, Pallie, had come by her job at the library honestly, and that she had the right to look down on Dorrie.

Pallie was not a librarian. You could tell that almost in an instant. She read chick lit and paid no attention to patrons. If they were standing in line, she often kept reading and referred them to another librarian. Her job was a gift from her father and no one could fire her. Pallie had a bachelor’s in one of those nothing fields, Dorrie honestly was not sure what. Probably one of those things you couldn’t get a bachelor’s in in at Dorrie’s school. Business, for example. Dorrie’s university had offered MBAs but had maintained that a bachelor’s in business was worthless. You had to study the liberal arts.

No one would have hired the blonde except for her mother and father. She would have been working at Starbucks along with her contemporaries. Only middle-aged women and men sat behind the reference desk. Pallie, knowing nothing, making mistakes, turned over most of the questions to her colleagues.

Shock treatment? What’s wrong with shock treatment? Pallie said to Dorrie one day when Dorrie was reading a biography of a psychiatrist.

There went Dorrie’s memory.

One librarian, not a professional, but a bright woman with a master’s in English who had been hired because of her education, looked askance at Pallie.

Are you trying to tell our friend here she would enjoy it? Because you are out of your mind.

Pallie laughed. I understand it’s a trip.

Almost in tears, Dorrie looked out the window. The window was still glass. She had thought Pallie’s comment might have broken it.

Do you break the mirror? Dorrie wondered.

Shock treatment shakes your head, shakes your memory, hurts like hell.

Don’t mind her, said the other woman.

A man at a table behind her stood up and said, Pallie is mean. Truly mean. She only cares about getting a man. I’ve seen her do some things you wouldn’t believe. Stand up. Stand up for yourself.

Dorrie waited for the bus. What she had to put up with--what she would stop putting up with. Why not say what she thought? The man in the cafe was right. She marched back from the bus stop to the library and found Pallie lingering in front of a bookcase.

You have no right to say what you said about shock treatment. You’re very offensive. How do you have this job?

Pallie said, This woman threatened me. Somebody help.

The librarian behind the desk came out from behind it and said, I heard what you said to Dorrie. If I were you, I wouldn’t tell anyone Dorrie told you off. Because you see I would tell the truth. Dorrie did not threaten you.

The blonde blanched. Or did she really? The librarian rolled her eyes at Dorrie. Neither of them trusted Pallie.

Pallie was--what? Dorrie didn’t really get it. Pallie was less well-educated than most of the people she knew. Less so than Rose, Ben, Gabrielle, and Dorrie’s relatives. She looked cheap. Yet somehow she was more powerful than any of them. Why? What was it about?

It was about money. Pallie would like to see everyone getting shock treatment. It would amuse her if she could watch Dorrie, the librarian, and the man in the cafe get shock treatment. Pallie was Neronian. There was something truly wrong with her. Dorrie might pity her if she didn’t understand that this woman was sadistic. Dorrie had once had shock treatment because she was briefly in a state hospital in Seattle, committed without insurance, and she had no relatives to say no. They just gave it to her. The doctors now pretended the shock treatment was much improved and really helped. Dorrie had been sick for days. She could remember everything. At least she hadn’t lost memory. But sometimes she wondered what she was here for. Nobody wanted to hear these stories.

Too depressing.

The bus took Dorrie straight to her good neighborhood. No more walking in the street, every other house burnt-out, lots empty, the unemployed with nothing to do threatening people occasionally, ignoring Dorrie, though, because they knew her, then past the monsters, racketeers, and harmless addicts . Rose had found a good urban neighborhood. Beautiful houses. Rose fixed up houses. The house was a safe behemoth. it had been unbelievably ugly before Rose had it painted. No unemployed Dorrie could see on the streets. No rough people. Rose’s house was a refuge. Nobody knew Dorrie, but that was all right. Everybody was at work except for Dorrie. She went into the house, up the stairs, into the room, and locked the door. In her room she had only one Sacred Heart picture now. She knew she had been crazy. She cried for quite a long time and then checked the door to make sure it was locked. She knew that was paranoid. But she didn’t want Gabrielle or Rose walking in on her. Pallie had made her feel unsafe.

Then she sat up and began to read Winston Churchill’s antiwar essay, “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” She no longer thought he was a hawk.

“Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending. But up to the present time the means of destruction at the disposal of man have not kept pace with is ferocity....

“Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.

“’Wars,’ said a distinguished American to me some years ago,’“are fought with Steel; weapons may change, but Steel remains the core of all modern warfare. France has got the Steel of Europe and Germany has lost it. Here, at any rate, is an element of permanency.’ ‘Are you sure,’ I asked, ‘that the wars of the future will be fought with Steel?’ A few weeks later I talked with a German. ‘What about Aluminum?’ he replied. ‘Some think,’ he said, ‘that the next war will be fought with Electricity.’ And on this a vista opens out of electrical rays which could paralyse the engines of a motor-car, could claw down aeroplanes from the sky, and conceivably be made destructive of human life or human vision....”

Dorrie wished she could explain about Winston Churchill and his influence on her. She did feel his voice through his writings. That's why she was taking notes. Who knows? Maybe it would help someone someday. After the next apocalypse, after the next 9/11, she would bring out her notes on Churchill and read them to Ben, if she married him. Ben, of course, read only Shakespeare. But maybe she could persuade him to read Churchill.

Churchill

In April 1940 Chamberlain’s government fell. Reading a biography of Churchill, Dorrie was quite fascinated. Chamberlain had simply been anxious and shrinking. Winston Churchill--what a hawk!-- took over as prime minister. Churchill wrote later. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat."

Blood, Sweat, and Tears? Had that been a song or a rock group? Outside at the library cafe, sun on the umbrella, the papers and books in her backpack spread out across the table, Dorrie was reading one of Churchill’s autobiographies and a biography practically simultaneously and nerously drank coffee.The coffee was not recommended by her doctor but Dorrie figured she could do what she wanted. Forty-five, still barely alive, she could drink coffee if she wanted. Her doctor thought she would delude herself that she was a genius if she drank too much coffee.

Isn’t that manic? Since when am I manic?

We allow no caffeine in the hospital. It’s decaf for a reason.

You couldn’t drink and take meds. Once she had tried a glass of wine and had been exhausted and faint in a matter of minutes. Coffee was different. it did nothing. It was social. She could sit in the cafe and be among people.

Whom could she ask about Blood, Sweat, and Tears? That man over there at the table? No, he looked too respectable. But if they were a band, what on earth had they played?

Rose or Gabrielle would have it in a minute. Rose had apparently spent her youth listening to music and Gabrielle had listened to her father’s. Dorrie had skipped the music course. That’s how she put it.

The sun felt so good on her face. Snow was melting. Her boots were soaked. It puddled up in the day and froze by night.

Dorrie had a theory. You could read anyone’s life and study your own. Biographies were not her interest, but she was reading everything about Churchill. Once started it was seductive. She especially liked Churchill’s memoirs and had finished the third volume of Churchill’s Second World War.

I don’t know. Why am I thinking about rock music? That’s wacky. The connection between World War II and rock? I don’t think there’s supposed to be one. I think it’s all about jazz and blues.

Her thoughts were confused. Hadn’t always been. She leaned over and asked the man at the other table, Do you know anything about Blood, Sweat, and Tears?

You mean haveI personally been tormented? He laughed at her.

I’m trying to figure out if it was a band or a song. You see there’s this quote from Winston Churchill...

She saw his eyes do that thing people's did. The mention of Winston Churchill and Blood, Sweat, and Tears.. Well, she’s crazy. But I’m not, she wanted to say aloud. It was a funny thing. He had been interested in banter when she asked her question but had stopped taking when she had become serious--AND had stopped taking her seriously. It had taken about two seconds of non-one-liners. He had not allowed her to explain her thinking. It was not disconnected thought. But she thought and talked in narrative form.

Well, once they had given up there was nothing you could do.

She took off her coat. She sat in the sun wearing sweater, jeans, and wet boots. People laughed at her. She knew they did.

A woman sat down at the table and said, I guess it is warm enough out here.

Dorrie looked at her warily. The woman looked presentable, if a little coarse: there were other empty tables, though. What did the woman want from Dorrie? it couldn’t be good. It was like the gangs at the malls: Dorrie had read about them in The Snowden Jounral. They worked in pairs or trios and stole purses, merchandise, whatever they could get.

Dorrie knew that the man who had dismissed her was all right, that the woman was not. Frowning, she told the woman, I’m expecting someone. You’ll have to sit somewhere else.

Dorrie was thrilled with herself. She had toughened up again.

She thought crime was on the rise among women. The stats wouldn’t admit it, but the stats were just what the police said. Dorrie had seen the change. Malls and libraries had gone from places where middle-class people went and homeless people hung out to places where criminials looked for marks.

But you couldn’t stay home all the time.

When Ben came to see her, she was actually glad.

Hello, my fiancee, he said.

Well, it’s not definite.

The man who had thought her crazy now looked at her with interest. Of course it seemed this man knew Ben. They exchanged a few words and Ben introduced Dorrie as his future wife.

It’s not definite, she said.

The two men laughed. The man, an art professor, thought Dorrie was a card. Then it came to Dorrie. This man wrote poetry. She recognized his name. He was the one Rose slept with!

Suddenly she didn’t want to be around.

I have to go in for a minute and checck something in a reference book. Will you get me a croissant? she asked Ben casually.

Inside she looked up Blood, Sweat, and Tears. It was a band.

When she came back outside, the professor was gone.

Wedding

Megan turned down Jim's proposal. It was romantic: a legal prenuptial contract with a ring.

Ah, how sweet. But I couldn't. She kissed him.

He was amused by her politics and rudeness now, but for how long? She and her first husband had spent one week making seashell crafts, mocking Megan's mother, who had come to visit before Jason was born. Deep breathing? Hell, no, Mom. I'm using arts and crafts to take my mind off labor.

Jim didn't have that kind of humor. He left for a week to negotiate a contract. He was surprised that she had turned him down. He was determined to win. How could she explain to him that she was too old to get married, that she had her pension, her house, and her son, and didn't need a husband? She simply couldn't. He didn't understand.

My socialist girlfriend, he said fondly.

But now Jason and April wanted a big wedding. The last wedding Megan had gone to was Rose’s to Ben ten years ago. That had been a very nice party on a houseboat, but the ceremony had taken about two minutes. A nice ride on the river. That was her kind of wedding.

Her soon-to-be daughter-in-law April watched Four Weddings and A Funeral and My Best Friend's Wedding over and over. Look at the church, look at the clothes, look at London! That was her generation--watching films again and again--and the film was April’s role model for a wedding. She wanted a hat and dress like Andie MacDowell’s or Carmen Diaz's. She wanted Jason to dress up like Hugh Grant. She wanted a group of friends in the cathedral. it seemed that April knew somebody who had gotten them a wedding date in April. When you were a police officer, you knew people.

April had ordered the dress from anexpensive catalogue. It was very white. She looked fleshy and rotund in it. Not very bridal. But she loved it. Jason looked unremarkable in his tux.

Where did you get the money for that dress? Can I help you with it? Megan asked.

April looked embarrassed. I've been saving my money.

April and Ben would invite: the newsroom and the police force. The two families. Who were their intimate friends? It looked like Megan was it.

As Megan watched Four Weddings and a Funeral with April, she felt despair. April and Jason weren’t as cute as Andie and Hugh. Who looked like Andie MacDowell? Nobody. Especially not April. Who looked like Hugh? Much as she loved her son, the answer was: not Jason. She felt their marriage was doomed.

You know you don’t have to get married just because you’re pregnant.

We know. But we think it will be easier, don’t you?

We want to get married. Don’t worry about it, said Jason. Don't be so rude.

Was I being rude?

Jason said, You're always rude.

April laughed. You should marry Jim. We could have a double wedding.

For a minute Megan thought April knew about Jim's proposal. Then she joked, Please, no. I'm not getting married. Fat old women really don't.

And then they had to say she wasn't fat. Nobody understood her jokes.

It seemed April was five months along. No wonder she was so fat in her police uniform! She was not naturally a fat person: Megan had now seen pictures. It was April's dream to be a mother and a cop, married to a metro reporter who would work the day shift. She would work the night shift so the baby, named Vivian, would never be in day care.

Megan wasn't sure it was her dream to be the granddaughter of a cop-Metro reporter.

April hung around reading Bride Magazine and showing Megan snapshots. Megan had to look at pictures of the fetus. She almost had a heart attack. No, that’s a cliché. But why did people want pictures of their fetus? You couldn’t see anything. It was just a...fetus. But it was named Vivian. it turned out it was Jason’s favorite name. Why? Why had she never known that about her son? She just felt startled by the whole thing. She couldn’t see why they had to have a big wedding. She didn’t understand why her son wanted to get married in a tux in a church to a woman in a white dress.

They were hanging around her house one night watching TV. Megan had not seen so much of Jason in years. April liked her. It was very entertaining for her to visit a woman who seldom cleaned her house. Newspapers everywhere. Biographies of Upton Sinclair on the dining room table. Upton Sinclair was going into the socialist book. He had run for governor of California on the socialist ticket.

April laughed when she saw Sinclair’s book, I, Candidate for California and How I Got Licked.

What are you doing with all this stuff?

I’m writing about socialists. it’s something to do. Read that one for me, will you? Tell me if it’s any good.

April sat down and read part of the book. She was not a socialist, but she was cheerful about Megan’s socialism. She liked Upton Sinclair. She read The Jungle when Jason told her it was really journalism.

Where did you grow up? California? Why are you so happy all the time? Megan asked.

April laughed. I’m just that way.

Jason was pooped. He insisted that they watch some political humor thing on TV. Megan didn’t think it was very good.

It’s not CNN.

I have to watch other things. I have to keep up, he said.

Why? Megan honestly wanted to know. Why did he have to keep up when in the newsroom he was researching internet sites, watching TV news, and interviewing people all day long.

it’s just...a thing. it’s like your socialism.

Socialism. That had been a problem when she met April’s parents. She and Jim, who had been out of town for work, drove over to April’s parents’ house for dinner. Megan had dressed in her most conventional velvet skirt and white blouse. April’s mother and father were waiting in the doorway of the suburban house. Hyacinth and What’shisname? It had been a while. At dinner, a delicious lobster dish right out of the Lucia books (did Megan dare mention Lucia?) they talked about their country club and their hustling for the Republican party. Jim jabbed her, but too late; she said that she was a Socialist.

Megan knew this was the wrong thing to say as soon as Jim jabbed her and Jason kicked her under the table. She was sorry when she saw April’s face. But why hadn’t they warned her.

If you don’t vote Republican or Democrat, it is just a throwaway vote, said April’s mother.

I agree, said Jason.

So do I, said Jim.

Now she was outnumbered. Megan liked speaking out. It was part of her modus operandi: speak your mind.

Not necessarily. The whole thing seems to be fixed anyway. Look at 2000 and 2004. You vote your conscience. If your conscience says socialist, you vote socialist.

But, Mom, what about Hillary? You said you like Hillary.

I do like Hillary, she said pleasantly. I haven’t decided whom I’m going to vote for. It’s too early. I compare all the candidates next year when it’s time for the primary and then I decide. I don’t vote for president in 2007.

So you don’t automatically vote Socialist?

She’s a Democrat. She’s basically a Democrat. I happen to know she voted for Kerry in 2004, said Jason.

Megan kept her mouth shut. It was best not to speak TOO much.

Far, Far

Attitude. Mettle, spirit, resolution. The attitude of Lucia, mayor of Tilling! E. F. Benson and Tom Holt! If only she could have that attitude!

Far, far from the Lucia she loved, Dorrie had no attitude. Where was her attitude? Dorrie sat in her room, reading about Winston Churchill. She had never read biographies. She knew too much about how famous men threw out their letters and changed their stories. They lied in interviews. So who could stand history? She read only poetry. But there was something going on in the world...Wars or something. Since her hospitalization, she had not been able to read poetry.

Donne wrote:

Then as the earths inward narrow crooked lanes
Do purge sea waters fretfule salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my paines
Through rimes vexation, I should them allay.

But if you couldn't find the damned inward narrow crooked lanes, you couldn't go anywhere. You were dunned!

Her doctor wasn’t especially concerned. Is she able to walk, talk, take care of herself? She was better. He was glad she was better. He found her a place to live again. He said she would get better.

Everything will be well.

Dorrie knew, knew, knew all about it. She wasn’t the first one. Lauren Slater, the beautiful psychologist and writer, mentioned that she could not write poetry after she began to take Prozac. it saved her life. Seven hospitalizations, an unclean house. Prozac allowed her to travel--she needed a good airport connection, though--but she had to write memoirs Instead of poetry.

Lauren Slater, the clasp in her hair, a lovely woman in her thirties joking about how fat she was. She was pregnant, hardly fat. She didn’t want to sign Dorrie’s book. She was bored by Dorrie. Dorrie was ill. Slater sat with Dorrie and her friends in a restaurant. She had given a reading.

Just take the drugs, she said. She thought therapy was useless.

Who couldn’t agree more?

But Rose worried because she wanted Dorrie to marry Ben.

In Dorrie’s room she had a book by Patricia Chao inscribed to Lauren Slater. She had forgotten to give it to her.

What Dorrie liked most she wasn’t allowed to do. That’s what happened in mental illness. People wanted to kill off the mentally ill of the world. Drive them. Hospitalize them. Change their genes. There they all were. William Styron, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell--all dead--and Lauren Slater, still alive.

There was nothing to do but...be quiet. People kept coming up to Dorrie at the library. They were looking for someone...something to steal...someone to be their beard. She glared. She knew she looked vulnerable. She couldn’t be tough after a hospitalization. She couldn’t stride and look them in the eye, or avoid their eyes...whatever was necessary. Walk tough. She sank into her chair. One of the librarians made her move closer to her.

You don’t want to be around them.

Dorrie burst into tears.

Oh my God, crying again.

The librarian said, It doesn’t matter.

Some librarians were nice, others awful. The Patriot Act. The computer thing. Dorrie could no longer use the computers at the library. She didn’t want to sign in and be tracked when she used her Yahoo account. The mentally ill were used in experiments. Where did they go? What did they do? She tried to keep away from that. She used Rose’s computer when Rose was out. She checked out all the controversial books she could think of: poetry, plays, anti-war books, careless, crabbed books about Bush.

Oh my God. Her paper was spilling all over the floor. She had been writing, making notes, and now the pages were everywhere. Somebody had tried to help her and Dorrie had said, No. The woman was trying to see what she had written. Dorrie knew that you had to be careful in libraries. People sat with their laptops, peering around. Usually they weren’t doing anything on their laptops. They just had a menu up. This woman, who had reddish brown hair , grabbed a piece of paper and took off with it.

That’s mine, Dorrie said grimly.

The librarian ran after the brown-haired woman and got the paper back. She can’t come in here anymore. She’s banned, she told Dorrie.

Dorrie wasn’t sure that the librarian could do that. Ban her? But maybe.

She’s stealing other things as well, the librarian said. We can’t prove it.

Dorrie usually took care of herself. Now she was a little upset about the criminals at the library. But she went anyway, riding the bus downtown, appreciating the spring, looking at the greenery coming up. Sometimes she would sit on the lawn (which was wet) and try to read poetry. But not today.

The war. You could never win a war with suicide bombers. When would they learn?

Dorrie kept seeing Ben. By accident. Accidentally on purpose. He was running into her at the library. He was blond, emaciated, wasted. Not the Ben with Rose. Ben and Rose had belonged together.

He kept saying he wasn’t thinner and claimed he wanted to marry Dorrie.

Dorrie didn’t believe it. What the hell...?

I’ve thought about it. We should get back together. You could sleep in the spare room or the basement or wherever you want.

Dorrie sighed. She wasn’t afraid of Ben. But there had been an incident. He had tried to drown her in the river. He had been in a rage because she had argued with him and had held her down until someone came along and found them. The whole incident had been reported to the police by the man and she had not charged him. She had said, He was drunk, even though it wasn’t so. It was after that she took off. Seattle, a brief stint working at a coffeehouse, but then they had fired her because she mixed up the drinks. Skinny latte? Half and half? Who cared? Sorry, sorry, sorry. The streets. She would be cold but so tired that she would lie down and fall asleep. No blankets, just a coat. it was as if her body got warmer. She was mad, they said. They picked her up off the streets and put her in a hospital. Just like that. That was the end.

And she had never told anyone about Ben but it seemed Rose knew about it. Rose asked if Dorrie was afraid of Ben. No. Did she realize she needed a place to live? Yes. Did she realize Ben could take care of her better than Rose could because she would probably have to charge high rent for the rooms soon? Okay.

Dorrie didn’t know what was going on. But it looked as though there would be a wedding.

Some Man (1984)

I finished crying almost at once. The cat sat at my feet and whined. The kettle started to whistle, and the neighbors turned up their country and western music. I steeped the Lipton for about five minutes till the tea was black as coffee.

“That’s what I get for doing the right thing. Trying to get the kid a good education. Should’ve left her in public school. Toughened her up. Given her karate lessons, something. Kept her safe from religious fanatics.” On a notepad I scribbled, Buy hamburger.

The tea throbbed in my blood like speed. My speed days were long gone, like Jeff. If I hadn’t adopted Elizabeth, I could’ve been with Jeff in Boston right now. Civilized condo, Wall Street Journal. He probably went in for goddamned aperitifs. But I was stuck with doing the right thing, using my cum laude degree and a reference from the boss to save my sister from a foster home. I was a bulwark of my neighborhood association, hosting meetings once a month for the likes of Crazy Harry, who got off his balloon tire bike just long enough to eat the free sandwiches.

In the bedroom I brushed my hair and smeared some lipstick on. Well, I was in the mood to drive men crazy, though that had never been my forte. I headed over to the Harvest. a musty-smelling bar that attracted would-be artists and punkers. Even though we laughed up our sleeve at half the regulars, Jeff and I used to be fond of Big Dave and his string of women.

Big Dave was the first person I saw. He was standing at the bar, hugging a large woman whose tits overflowed from her tube top. Typical. I smirked at him. “Hi, Dave.”

“Sally, where’ve you been?” He patted my head with a huge hairy hand. “Hey, don’t you need Big Dave to pat your head any more?”

“I finally got over that asshole,” I said. “He’s in Boston now. In a condo.”

Dave shook his head. “Shit, they complain the Moonies brainwash people. Why doesn’t someone investigate the law schools?”

“Dave.” I wasn’t in the mood to discuss Jeff. “I need something stronger than beer. What do you recommend?”


Three margaritas later, I was shooting pool with a real scumbag. In Elizabeth’s lingo, he was a “hunk a la mode”: blond, muscular, tanned, definitely in the running for Lifeguard of the Year.

“I’m Buck,” the guy told me. “Buck Rogers. Wanna take me on for a game of pool?”

Glad to meet you. I’m Nancy Drew.”

“Nancy, huh? I’ve heard the name. Good to know you.”

I’d never played pool in my life. As a girl, I despised games. Dancing was cool, so was swimming, but I loathed anything reminiscent of Christmas Day at the relatives’. No ping pong, no pool, and under no circumstances would I so much as shuffle a deck of cards. But I picked up the cue at the Harvest as if I’d been playing with the cousins every holiday of my life.

“Nancy, this is not to insult you, but the white ball is supposed to stay on the table.”

“New rules. You play with me, you play my way. I say: let’s get creative. Let’s whack the red ball around for awhile. Let’s do it like checker: you be black, I’ll be red.” I squinted and aimed the stick at the red ball, which bounced around the table before rolling to an aimless stop.

Big Dave applauded. “Way to go, Sal.”

“Nancy. I’m Nancy tonight.” I was starting to sweat when Buck suggested we step out for some air.

Close up, entangled in those lifeguard arms, I could see his foundation makeup. I had never embraced a man who wore makeup. “Buck,” I asked, “what’s that on your face?”

“I’ve still got to go to work tonight. Part of my job is looking good for chicks like you.” He kissed me. His kisses failed to trigger a respondent charge.

“Let’s just be friends, Buck. Let’s talk about your work.”

“What’s to talk about? I used to work for the city, mowing cemeteries, shit like that. Right now I’m working three nights a week as a dancer at the Cat’s Meow. If you don’t believe me, get a load of my costume.” Out of his jeans pocket he pulled a leopard-spotted bikini.

“You’re serious? You dance in that?”

“The pay’s not bad.” His eyes narrowed at me. “If you think I’m going to stand here and be mocked out, think again.”

I edged away from him, then stumbled into the bar. I sat down on the barstool next to Dave. “I think I need protection.”

Dave laughed. “I sort of wondered what you were messing around with.” He massaged my shoulders. I leaned into him. Sometimes big is all you need.


In the morning I called in sick before riding in Dave’s truck to the Tastee Diner for breakfast. Nothing on the menu looked good. Finally I ordered toast. Dave had steak and eggs.

“Dave, I hope you’ll forgive me for sort of busting up you and that woman last night.” I peeled the cellophane top off a tiny jam container.

“Sally, no, I was flattered. I’ve always liked you. Any time.”

“Well, I like you, too. I hope I didn’t act like a jerk last night, that’s all.”

“You surprised me. Nothing wrong with that.”

When I put down my knife, he was smiling at me. I reached for his hand. “What a nice guy. The nicest man in the world maybe. Willing to rescue a desperate woman.”

“You make me sound like a plumber or something. Now shut up, eat your breakfast. Decide when I get to see you again.”

When I got home, Elizabeth was sprawled on the couch in front of “The Today Show.” I went into the kitchen to make coffee, ignoring her even when she trailed after me, huddled in a blanket like a refugee.

She demanded, “Why aren’t you at work?”

“I called in sick. Why aren’t you in school?”

“I was worried when you didn’t come home last night. I got scared and spent the night at Lydia’s. Where were you?”

“Up to no good, little girl. Maybe I’m pregnant, too, and we can be unwed mothers together. Does your school have a program?”

“You shit. You’re such a bitch. Why are you taking it like this? You know I’m into the pro-life thing.”

“I’m your sister, not your friend, pal. Now that you’re going to have this baby, it’s every man for himself. I’m not going to sit back and watch you ruin your life.” I picked up a mug labeled SALLY and rinsed it out in the sink.

“Well, I hope you spent the night with somebody nice. Otherwise, you’re no better than me, asshole.” Elizabeth started to cry. The long side of her asymmetric haircut hung down on her face. Her shoulders shook.

“Elizabeth.” i sighed and poured the coffee. “I just don’t see where those nuns get off encouraging fans of Prince and Madonna to have babies.”

I took the coffee out on the fire escape. The weather was unseasonably warm. The pigeons wheeled around the narrow strip of sky between our tenement and the next one. My leg itched. The cat’s fleas had launched their spring attack. I scratched. When I closed my eyes I imagined Big Dave. It was nice to be with a man not my type. Maybe he would be my new type.

Elizabeth was singing, “Burning down the house.” She opened the door and stared at me. “Are you napping out here? I made us lunch. Aren’t you ever going to talk to me again?”

“I’m imagining new vistas, Elizabeth. Leave me to my hangover.”

Why had I thrown away the money on Catholic school tuition? But then the phone rang, and, groaning I had to go inside to talk to someone on the other end. “Some man,” Elizabeth told me.

Flannel Pajamas

Rose was half aware of her blankets: three over her, one underneath. It was the perfect sleeping bag when one didn’t have a husband.

Rose dreamed. She had moved into the river house. She had not been able to keep away. Everything was the way she liked it. it was clean...it was clean.. it was clean. Binkie loved the back yard. They were happy and comfortable. But Ben was gone. Suddenly she was wandering around the house, hoping he was in the next room, but when she got there he was gone.

She woke up. The river house! She sat up and moaned. She drank a glass of water. No, she was in her new house. A Victorian, actually. An old house. The blankets were warm, ,her flannel pajamas were warm, her flannel sheets were warm.

When had Rose first worn flannel? When she borrowed a shirt from a college boyfriend? She had never felt anything like it. Her mother, Carrie Underwood, had not dressed her daughters in flannel nightgowns. They had slept in their undershirts (no Underwood woman wore a bra).

Wearing her boyfriend’s shirts had made Rose feel sexy. It was something women learned from the movies. (Goodbye, Charlie?) Rose’s boyfriend’s shirts were down to her knees.

Rose woke up and didn’t want to be here. She felt like..Dorrie. Wake, woke, awake. Where could she go in the middle of the night? In an ice storm? Could she fly to...Austin? Austin City Limits...Das Kapital...Texas, her old state, where she had gone to school. Her book was on the bedside table. Rose was reading The Awakening. She had discovered she had two copies of the same Penguin. Rose must have borrowed her mother’s book or maybe she had ordered two copies because she was mad. She had purchased two copies of a Wilkie Collins novel from Dover and had been too exhausted to send it back. (Well, it had only cost $5.) She had given it to someone in her book group.

The middle of the night. The ice storm. Thunder, rain on snow. Ice on branches. Branches down! They cracked and dropped.

Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.

Rose went outside and picked up some branches. Binkie leaped in the snow. Binkie wasn’t wild about the snow. He loved Rose, though. He missed her during the day. She hadn’t taken him for enough walks lately. They both hated the snow.

Now she shoveled snow in the dark, the only woman outside in flannel pajamas and a coat at 5 a.m.. The bracing white snowy world was tranquil. She smoked a cigarette on the steps after she had cleared the branches from the sidewalk. She was awake because she was worried. What would she do with this huge house? Because she would have to kick Dorrie and Gabrielle out. It was against her religion, but life was getting too weird. Gabrielle was popping into Rose’s living room and kitchen all the time and acting as though they were best friends. Rose had told Gabielle she needed to be alone but Gabrielle didn’t take a hint. And reluctantly Rose had allowed Dorrie to move back in because her brother wouldn’t allow her to stay even for a short time after her hospitalization. Dorrie was like a ghost. She barely spoke. She was on something strong: Haldol? It had turned her into a zombie. it couldn’t be Haldol. They must use something else these days. Haldol was...I Promised You a Rose Garden? Well, some old book.

Oh God, oh God.

The only solution Rose could see was to divide the house into apartments, and she didn’t want to.

She sat on the step and did not know what to do. What she wanted? Honestly she wanted to stop having dreams. And she wanted to figure out what to do about Dorrie and Gabrielle. She knew Gabrielle would be all right, but she didn’t know what to do about Dorrie. She thought Ben should marry her. She did. That was the best thing that could happen.

Rose called Ben on her cell phone. She knew she should not. But he answered. He was awake. Roaring awake.

I’m not going to marry Dorrie, so fuck off.

You should take care of her. I’m in despair. And I think she could take care of the house for you.

Well, I can’t marry her. You cannot make me marry her.

Yes, I can, she said firmly. And she whispered something into the phone.

No. I don’t believe you would do that.

Oh, I would.

It was something she knew. She was the only person who knew it. Almost the only person who knew it. Something that had happened between Ben and Dorrie. Rose had met a social worker recently at a party. The social worker had told her Dorrie’s sad story, not knowing that Rose had been Ben’s wife.

Rose had gone home and swallowed a Xanax, though she hadn’t taken Xanax in a long time. It was just an old prescription.
.
Rose went inside. She crawled into bed and Binkie hopped up on the covers. Then she had the worst dream: Ben was dead. Dead as a doornail. (Marley’s ghost.) They found him in the river. (Our Mutual Friend.) He floated on the river, white as a ghost, finally as thin as he wanted to be, a skeleton.

It seemed in the dream that his father, a friend of the Kennedys, had contracts out on Rose, Dorrie, Kent, and a number of other friends of Ben. Because somebody had killed Ben. Ben had so many friends that it was hard to imagine anyone killing Ben. But girlfriends and the river...the River House. It was something to do with Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne in the river.

Rose screamed and woke up.

Somebody screamed, Is something happening?

Just a bad dream, Rose yelled back. Was it Gabrielle or Dorrie? Who cared?

It was Gabrielle. God, what’s wrong? Could I make you a cup of coffee? It’s 5:30.

No. I’ll go back to bed now.

Satan?

Rose watched Sister Act whenever she was depressed. Whoopi Goldberg. Very funny. Megan would have called it mindless. Rose laughed her head off.

SCENE: A CONVENT, SOMEWHERE IN SAN FRANCISCO

Whoopi: Where’s the phone?

Maggie Smith: Who are you going to call?

Whoopi: Satan?

Whoopi, hiding from the mob in a convent. Missing Vegas, she revisited her Catholic childhood. This is a nightmare, she kept saying.

Who are you going to call? Satan? Might as well. He could hardly be worse than God, Rose thought. She thought about her Catholic marriage to Ben.

Eve calling Satan? That’s what Rose was doing these days. Bad girls had more fun. Cigarettes, “I’m so tired from balling,” as she used to say to her friends, Nancy Mitford’s books. Fun. Eve must have felt so relieved when she ate the damned apple. What was God thinking of? He was monstrous. Apples are good for you. Vitamin A. The goddamned serpent had some sense.

Apple computers also had a lot going for them. Apple. Steve Job’s joke?

Rose had always loved Satan in Paradise Lost. The hero. So much more personable than God. And sensible. Not what Milton had had in mind at all. God had no sense at all. She also wasn’t crazy about God in the Old Testament.

Jesus was a sympathetic figure in Paradise Regained. So she did like Milton.

So she had had two Gods: that of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. That of the Old Testament and the New Testament. She loved the Satan of Paradise Lost, the Christ of Paradise Regained.

A two-headed God?

Rose was Satan. That’s what she’d been told on the day her store, Rock Bottom Rig, opened. The priest visited her. He was her favorite priest. The priest she and Ben knew. He told her what she was doing was wrong, that it was not humorous, that it was unholy.

You’re supposed to be pro-life.

Guiltily she thought about the pro-abortion marches she had attended. She could never tell the priests or the nuns. They had anti-abortion posters in the shelter. March, march, march. Marching for abortion, against the war, against capital punishment: what she had done with Ben. The most important thing she had done with Ben.

I am prof-life, she said, thinking she was in favor of justice and against capital punishment. Caput punishment. The head. The head was supposed to be determined by God, not judges and juries. Who often made mistakes. Mob justice.

Attica, Attica!

Atticus Finch.

There were no Atticus Finches. He was a character in a novel.

O.J. must be guilty, everyone said. How did they know? That had always puzzled her. She hadn’t watched the trial, had been appalled when she saw O.J. on the highway in his SUV tracked by police. Was this America? O.J. in his SUV on TV, doubtless frightened to death. The court playing to the TV audience. If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Somehow she hadn’t believed any of it. It had just been too bizarre. Like other TV trials.

When the priest left, several customers came in. Juliette, Wolf, her book group, and their friends. They laughed, had coffee (free), bought books and T-shirts.

Ben came in. You’ve really lost it.

What do you mean?

What is this?

It’s my store.

She quoted Roethke’s “In a Dark Time”--she had been quoting Roethke all day--she had decided to learn one poem a day, so she could quote it to customers:

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.”

That’s upbeat, Ben said.

I haven’t lost it, she said coolly. She wore a T-shirt that said, “The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”--Henry James, Sr.

The door jingled. College students came in. She assumed they were college students. Dressed in black, multi-pierced, tattooed, the women with hair dyed burgundy brown, the men with shaved heads or almost shaved. Dragging book bags and laptops.

I want that T-shirt, said one of the men, studying her.

She sold one to him.

Ben stood in the background. He looked ready to bash everything. He did not try to be nice to the customers. She had never seen him so angry.

The girls bought The Bastard of Istanbul. On sale. Rose told them how good it was. She was selling it because one of the characters overdosed, was revived by aunts and her mother, and began to want to remember instead of to blow everything up, linked to family by an Armenian-American cousin who was connected to history.

Everything is connected. Is connected. Connected. How many writers had known that? Had figured it out?

And the musicians knew. She could hardly listen to some of REM’s horrifying lyrics.

Rose told Ben he had to go. He said no, she was still his wife. She said no, they were getting divorced.

Kent jingled in. Ben said, What are you doing here?

Kent said, Is there a problem? I’m a partner here.

Ben slammed out of the store.

What was that?

She found a Kleenex and blew her nose. Okay. I’m fine. We’ve sold $1,000 worth of merchandise.

On the first day?

Yes. And I got into graduate school. A fellowship at Snowden U.

Good God. This calls for a celebration.