Condolence Blooms

She had always wondered how they made the florets, the radish blooms of blanched white bulb, delicately outlined in vein-like red. Some where it must be considered an art, worthy of tools: a special knife and culinary training. She imagines classes in well-lit rooms, white tables with efficient plastic stools. Women in pale coats—they would have to be women– the radish rose is not likely to be the métier of a man.

Someone said her name, a woman in black. They were all in black, of course, though several wear navy. The very young, those who had yet to cultivate an appropriate wardrobe for mourning, who did not know a black dress can be pushed to the back of a closet or folded on a shelf. Death makes for allowances.

Her name is repeated and she turns. She has been staring at nothing, mouth slack, shoulder’s hunched. Instinctively she draws breath, closes her mouth and straightens her spine.

Laura. Aunt Laura. She does not like Laura.

As a child she was tidied for breakfast at Grandmothers. Breakfast at Grandmother’s is like a play.

There are night gowns and slippers, house-coats. Breakfast is hard-boiled eggs with bread crust. The television remains vacant, sulking in the corner while we watch Grandmother’s birds, bright swatches against the summer sky.

Her grandmother sleeps in a mask.

“Not a mask,” her mother explains, “its tape. For wrinkles.” When her grandmother kisses her goodnight she does not look the same. She wears gloves with Vaseline. She smells strange, like night-time sicknesses and colds.

Breakfasts at Grandmother’s have subsided, but Aunt Laura remains.

She moves toward the kitchen doors to flee.

The kitchen sits empty, counter tops covered in catering dishes, refills for the current line-up.

There are loaves of bread, typical to wakes: friendship, zucchini and banana.

Her mother made it once, to prove she could cook. It was a skill she kept secret and her deft hands moved like a seamstress’.

Measuring flour and sugar, slicing off the tops of uneven measuring mounds with the ruthless nature of a guillotine.

“How do you know how to do this?”

“Just because I haven’t done it in your life time doesn’t mean I never have.”

Now she stands alone in her mother’s kitchen. This banana bread has come from a stranger.

The door opens. “There are flowers. For you, a delivery,” it is the half-grown child of some cousin.

She nods. “They come.” There is nothing else to say, nothing that cannot be decided without her assistance.

The flowers, she’s found, arrive in the same way dawn split the sky each morning, like the pain following a burn. She wonders what she will do when they stopped arriving.

They mean nothing. A strange symbol for death, for condolence.

She has begun to rip the petals from their heads before she retires for the night, a ritual, the sort of thing one does when they are alone too often. Turning out lights, locking doors, removing the vibrant lips of a blossom one-by-one. As a child she said he loves me he loves me not, but now her mind is silent as she amputates petals. It is nothing but a measure, sand through a sieve: the passage of time.

I’ve measured out my life in coffee spoons. Once she loved that poem, it was read to her before sleep.

Yesterday, when the delivery of flowers arrived, she had stood in the hall, behind the closed door and eaten one of the blooms. Snapped the magenta head, a rose bud, from the stem and begun to chew, like a cow with cud. It tasted like it felt: soft, alive, the smooth resistance of the soft rose-skin against her tongue. It was neutral: neither bad nor good.

After swallowing she had allowed herself to look in the hallway mirror, holding the bouquet of cellophane-wrapped roses, one headless. She is morbid this morning and thinks of bodies in trash bags. As a child there was a strange murder, bodies were removed from the home, left in garbage sacks on the rail road tracks near the muddy river. It had been winter. Her mother accidentally drove by the house once on the way home from grocery shopping. Police tape, hash yellow flapping thick in the wind. The house had a purple door, bruise-colored and uninviting.

“I knew her,” her mother said, staring ahead. “That woman. I met her once at some dance.” It was frightening. To think of an average person, some one real, her mother knew, that had a pale purple door and two car garage. Someone like that had died violently, swaddled in thin, black plastic.

Her mother had died peacefully. She should be thankful. No trash bags or police tape.

Still staring in the mirror with the bouquet she notes the obvious: she is beginning to get fat. The skin on her thighs has begun to pucker; the smooth plane of her belly is now oblong. It is the last dregs of youth, staring at her from inside the mirror. Her chin is no longer defined and the clavicle bones she took for granted, feminine, bird-like wings in her chest, have become difficult to see. Soon, perhaps, she will begin to tape her face, to wear gloves on her hands and cover them with Vaseline.

Aware of the process, she cannot stop eating, just as she cannot stop her skin from sagging. The weight seems to cling, like gravy in a pan, a strong, sure arm whisking, thickening, adding flour to smooth it, growing. She is past thirty, as dowdy as a stranger. She was well warned, but nothing can properly describe the revolution between body and mind. The body wants to be old, ugly: to rot and die.

She watched her mother grow old. She should be prepared.

Still young, half-blind and heavy-footed with sleep, she makes her way to her mother’s room, lying beside her in the morning darkness. Yawning and blinking, her mother’s eyes water, gentle tears slipping down her face and into her hair.

She touches one, pushing her pointer finger into the trail. The tear splits and continues, unstoppable, luke-warm to the touch.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Cry.”

“It didn’t happen when I was young.”

Her mother looks sad and moves the pillow from beneath her head, lying flat on the bed and beckoning. She walks poorly on the mattress, wobbly like a baby.

“This is what I looked like when I was young.”

Her skin goes tight, the folds beneath the chin disappear. It is still her mother, but the eyes are too wide.

“It makes you look dead.”

Sitting up her mother recites:

“I gained it so, by climbing slow, by catching at the twigs that grow, between the bliss and me.”

“What does that mean?”

Standing now, at her mother’s wake, she can hear a minor murmur of the mourners. The words are indistinguishable. Hers is a language of grief, a foreign and strange tongue until it’s upon you.

Through the kitchen windows she sees flowers, the slight buds of peonies atop swaying stalks, knee high.

She walks outside without clippers, not to pick, but visit. The new, young buds growing beside their drooping, elders.