He was a young architect. He liked
starkly simple furniture, the kind
called, in those years (the late
Fifties), Danish Modern. He liked dishes
that were pure white with no pattern. He
liked the black-green leaves of rubber
plants in white pots, philodendrons
(split-leaf) in tubs under the
skylights. He liked the white glare of
the screaming Arizona sun, the long
forked branches of saguaros reaching
toward the sky. He liked living in a
sleek white apartment overlooking a
swimming pool under the palms.
She hated perpetual summer, this
landscape of bad dreams and synthetic
seasons. She loved the spaces of
Wyoming, the oblique blue glacial light
of Jackson Hole.
She relived the Wyoming summers of her
childhood--ggray shoal and green
moraine, stillness that sings from
granite mountains.h She yearned for
horses.
Long torpid nights in Arizona, she
dreamed of horses she had ridden, those
childhood summers in the Tetons when she
was learning to ride, learning the
language of horses and landscapes, she
who had known only the voices of suburbs
and cities.
Her china pattern was Royal Albertfs
gOld Country Roses.h Roses, roses,
incredibly rose-like roses, bursting and
blooming and dripping rose scent from
the borders of thin, translucent dinner
plates. Rose scent floating up from the
depths of delicate coffee cups that rang
like flowering bells when you touched
them, empty, with a solid-silver spoon.
A sterling silver spoon in Oneidafs
gDamask Rose.h Roses. A cliche. Lauren,
of the Chicago Ainsleys, who had always
loved roses and the dark rooms of
winter, whose husband told her she spoke
in cliches.
Smog building up with rush-hour traffic.
Shoppers buying china, sterling, and
crystal at Goldwaterfs and Diamondfs and
Switzerfs, in ChrisTown, Thomas Mall,
Camelback Village, and Park Central.
Buying gifts. . .gfor it is cruel
summer, the month of brides.h
Tall, glassy office buildings rose,
pastel and white, through the
grease-blue smog. Blinking red and
green, the planes came down toward Sky
Harbor, and rose again, going to leafy
places that Lauren longed for.
When they were divorced, she packed the
china roses and the silver ones and left
Phoenix on a morning in high summer.
One-eighteen in the shade that week,
then rain, and nights full of long tree
frog cries, wistful and desolate. That
morning the air was clearer, cooler, the
smog washed away. Camelback Mountain sad
in the first light.
The plane turned north, toward a
landscape of cool snows. She got a job
on a dude ranch in Colorado, breaking
horses. It was 1975.
When he began seeing another woman, when
the woman would come to his apartment
and stay until daybreak, they would eat
breakfast from the dazzling white dishes
Lauren had abhorred. White, not china,
not porcelain, not stoneware, but a
wondrously hard, gleaming plastic,
translucent as milk glass. Oneidafs
gWinter Song.h
He and the woman would look out at Squaw
Peak and Camelback Mountain, at the
saguaros pointing their spiny arms
toward heaven. Eventually they talked of
marriage.
Lauren was 42 that year. She had had no
children. She had wanted a daughter, a
girl who would love horses and flowered
china, Wedgwood and Spode and
Jasperware, and the dark comfort of
houses in prosperous Chicago suburbs.
In Jackson Hole one summer, an old man
suddenly thought of her, remembered her
name, the young girl riding, riding in
sunlight, in silver evening light under
the thunderclouds. Her gold braids. The
yellow flowers she had gathered and
fastened to her horsefs bridle, one
morning, one morning in a time so
distant. She glimmered for a moment,
then was gone, gone from his memory,
even her name.
That was the morning the plane turned
north, above the forked branches of the
cactus trees.
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