The Yellow Rose

Daisy’s voice breathes money, and so did my grandmother’s. Her name was Louise and she died several years ago, though I only recall select tableaus, pictures time refused to wash away, pictures of what she made our family. I remember her wearing a yellow dress before I remember the grey hospital room and her gurgling breaths through the ventilator. She beat cancer, twice I think, but what took her down in the end I didn’t fully understand, like I didn’t understand why I was the only one who visited her in the nursing home.

The stained glass I made for her hung over the wilting plant below the window. She said she looked at it every day and thought of me. One day, as I walked from the overhang to the parking lot, I looked up at the Spanish tiled building to see if I could find her window. Three from the left on the fourth floor, I saw her sitting at the chair next to the window, waving at me. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay. The halls felt so sterile, like a condemned resort building.

Things hadn’t always been like this. Louise once had her Gatsby. I remember my grandfather Lamar as a gauzy black and white photograph, like a headshot of an old Hollywood star. He mapped the brain at the University of Florida and drank three glasses of wine every night at dinner. One night alcohol and pills mixed. The kids found him and ran for the neighbors, but Lamar didn’t out live the sunrise.

Louise sold real estate and mingled with the horse racing crowd in Ocala, where she lived and died, brought my parents together, gave them their jobs, and told them where to live. The people said they loved her, and after her funeral, at the house in Ocala with the vine-lined drive, they reminisced this love. Her eloquence, her grace, her love for her children who looked on at all the parties wondering when their turn for mommy’s love came. I took a finger sandwich and went outside to better company, to feed it to my uncle’s golden retriever. The house belongs to my uncle now, though he cheated her out of it long before that as she lost the control she had on all of our lives.

I had been to a party at the same house a year or so earlier. Louise came to visit, so high society showed itself. I was fourteen, so the open bar wasn’t so open, though drinking in the house always seemed sacrilegious. And the conversation thought higher of itself than necessary. Intelligence from a fourteen year old was absolutely preposterous.  

A year before her death, Louise lived in a lake house with a green light at the end of her dock. Her lover was a Texas oil tycoon with bad ankles, who never said a word to me. He thought women should be seen, not heard, but I was fine as long as he footed the bill, and I get the feeling, so was Louise. When he died of old age, his children made sure she got nothing. So she came home to the house in Ocala she no longer owned, the house where her husband and son both committed suicide. (They never told me about uncle, Lamar, I guess his name was as well, or how he died. I was never old enough.)

The love of the people faded while she lived in Texas, so she cocooned herself in the memory of the house.  In the basement, under the terrace, she found my mother’s old rocking horse in the light of a single dusty bulb.  She found photos and moth-eaten bibs, julep cups and rusting mirrors buried under piles of dust that left her coughing.

The day she moved to the nursing home, we dismantled her whole room. We took down the scarves draped across the walls and wrapped her rows of perfume bottles in newspaper before packing them in boxes she’d never see again. My uncle sent me to get her last things. Louise sat at her naked vanity, with the gauze still over the lights. She stood, and I forgot her age, as she placed a perfume-sprayed handkerchief into my hand. My back pocket smelled like folded roses as I carried her trunk over the threshold to the vined drive.

On that last hour, I entered her room in the hospital. The drawn blinds dusked her pale skeleton. She still looked like Daisy, fair on the outside, but the corrupted inside. The gold in the center killed her, not fluid in her lungs, because she wanted those people to come, to praise her wit and laud her eloquence. Only the people, whose hands I shook at the funeral, who only showed up for the wine and the will, could have saved her.

Then she called me by my mother’s name, beckoned me to her side. I remembered, not Daisy, but the yellow rose, and cried.