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.