Of Bones and Rhododendrons

Abstract

Of Bones and Rhododendrons Marguerite W. Sullivan (bio) Pamela’s sense of style, it could be argued, was impeccable. Even in the wretched heat she looked flawless, pressed and primmed, crisp as a picture postcard in lemon yellow shorts and top, hair folded in upon itself like a slice of bread, skin smooth and dry and repellent. She never hit a false note, and one had to love her for this consistency, this reliability. She had an especially intimate smile, on the rare occasions she offered it, and I sometimes waited for it to appear, that smile, wide and generous and entirely without artifice. A smile that located the whole of her being in it, as I knew her from years past, and in the smile she walked up and down in a marvelously peaceful kind of procession. I believed I could always meet her there, where she walked inside the smile, and that neither of us would have anything to say in our procession, or if saying something would say something new, something entirely unheard of before. I can’t say why this consoled me so, this image of a procession with no speaking, or, even better, the speaking of things not heard before, and yet it did, and I closed my eyes for a moment and considered her smile again, all the while aware I would not see it that day. Her garden was just as perfect, splendid and overabundant and burgeoning, the kind you saw in magazines, and as I sat sucking on the lemonade and considering the mountain of pink peonies, sumptuous as frosted cakes, it occurred to me this was one of multitudes of such gardens all across the country, stretching for thousands of miles, these self-same splendid, ineluctable gardens that graced the backyards of countless houses in which lived all these people, all of them, just like us. Wasn’t that true? Unseen, in some ways beyond imagination, these people, and yet quite known. People with similar gardens could be thought of as remarkably similar: that thought brought a downward pinch to the corners of my mouth, and I wondered why the image of all the people and all the gardens seemed unsavory in their conformations. In Pamela’s garden, four twig chairs set to one side echoed a semicircle of tiger lilies, invoking a type of order achieved only in past generations and suggesting a degree of certainty much sought after that could be accomplished merely by inhabiting them. The two-tiered fountain of wrought iron clam shells in the center was placed amid tall bluish grasses and usually gave off a sputtering trickle of music against which we chattered inconsequentially, though on that day the fountain was motionless and silent and brought a parched enervation to the garden, notwithstanding which the male cardinal repeatedly landed on the edge, [End Page 12] poked his beak into the bottom shell, and sought the water that was always, he must have thought, there. Often it’s Pamela I see on Thursday afternoons, Tuesday being my day at the hospital and Wednesday my afternoon with the trainer. All our days together proceeded forward in this assumed amiability, this lackadaisical assuredness; the only thing calling to us from the immediate future was dinner, chores for dinner, discourse about dinner, dressing for dinner, and so on. But that day I felt an inexplicable need to pay attention to something further. I found myself looking more closely, listening more carefully, examining each thing in my purview until that same urge to frown possessed me. As if the material elements of the day, heavy in the wet air, threatened to drop away and disintegrate in the preponderance of the hours, and I must be ready for that. The fountain, halfway down the lawn just beyond where the cherry tree branches swept out from a curved flower bed, somehow rose into the foreground and made the heat more intractable, nearly leaden. Pamela spoke with unusual animation—she’s a passionate woman, some would say—and her words provided a swift waterway down which I drifted. Generally I experience a measure of comfort when people are speaking. You could say...