"A Pink Carnation for Breakfast" ©

 

 

Alice Smartley was distraught when she retrieved the pink carnation from her doorstep on an overcast Saturday late in February. She touched the fleshy, convoluted flower with her long, pale fingers, and shuddered, uncertain whether it was the nip in the air or something else that pressed on her. There were a number of reasons for her discomfort, the greatest among them physical. She was hungry.

 

The pink carnations, mementos, she presumed, of past romance, had appeared at her door every Saturday, bleak or bright, for longer than she could date. It bothered her that she did not know who sent them, but this annoyance was not the only reason that worried her. For years, she had received them as her due, at first barely noticing them, then thinking them a quaint affection. Until recently, she had been too preoccupied with current affairs to put the flowers in a vase with water, but laid them carelessly on a table to be discovered the next day, withered and limp. Just as usual, she tossed them in the trash, saying aloud in an absent-minded whisper, “How sweet,” before preparing herself for the trysts and conquests of the day, whether gloomy or glorious.

 

Over the years that the pink carnations had been arriving, it is not surprising that Alice Smartley aged, although such knowledge is generally not something possessed by women like Alice, who learn neither from personal trials nor the anguish of others. Like the flowers she indifferently received and haphazardly discarded, she threw youthful years aside without a second thought, assuming that more were to come and more were her due, and that each day of her unreeling life would be as fresh as a newly-cut flower in the morning. Much later, she was indignant to learn that the glory of cut flowers has a short life span. By the time that knowledge descended on her like a sudden summer shower, she was already hungry, and it was hunger that made her think.

 

Alice’s stomach growled like the engine of an old car refusing to start. She asked herself, in an audible whisper, for whispers, sighs and moans were the stage directions she had written for herself, “I wonder who could be sending these pink carnations all these years? A former lover, surely, but who?”

 

It was not romance that irretrievably pushed Alice into asking herself the question. It was her empty stomach. The slender body that in her youth was supple was sinewy and stretched by the time she was forty. What had been a face of sharp attraction whose smile required only a few shapeless words on occasion to whet the liquid desire of aspiring beaux grew into the taut mask of a second-rate cosmetic artist that crackled with brittle clichés.

 

At first, Alice ate little to maintain her slim lines, a picky eater as casual to regular meals as a boa constrictor. Later, when she found herself without a job, no saleable talents or skills other than the transitory charms she received from her parents and the wiles she had acquired through human confrontation, and no lovers who could support her for more than a few days, even a night, the food that she had before assumed a birthright to pitch in the trash wasn’t on the table.

 

Alice expected the needs of her life to fall in place without asking. When they didn’t, she was disturbed. She was not a whore to ask lovers for money. She was accustomed to men giving her money, insisting that she take their offerings. Livelihood had been given to her without asking and she expected no less.

 

“Who is leaving these pink carnations on my doorstep?” Alice whispered on that overcast February Saturday. Silently, she continued, “I really must remember. I’m so hungry. I’m sure this devoted lover will come to my aid now. I really do need him.”

 

Alice had little to go on. Her memory was over-populated with men with no faces—or purposely defaced beyond recognition. In that world, there were only men without faces. Blurred faces in a busy train station.

 

These days, flowers came once a week with greater regularity than gentlemen, not one who had called in months.

 

In her small, rented room, Alice placed the pink carnation in an empty pickle jar and placed the jar in the middle of an empty, chrome-dinette table, sat, and looked at it for clues. She unfolded the card that had been attached to the flower and read the same note that echoed through the years. “To Bloom. Love, the Gardener.”

 

With all the effort that a mind more starved for thought than her body was for food, Alice Smartley concentrated. She squinted at the flower, as though slit eyes could see better into the past. Perhaps they could. She sat at the table for hours, exhausted from hunger, determined to remember.

 

“Yes, there was that time—when was it?—when I was seeing gentlemen who visited art galleries. My skin was so pale, so white that they began to give me pink carnations and call me Bloom. Yes, undoubtedly that’s it. It must be one of those gentlemen!”

 

Alice rushed over to a small desk under the sole window of her frayed, one-room apartment furnished with second-hand furniture. In a bottom drawer, she grabbed a pile of fading love letters, photos, business cards, playbills and other paper memorabilia, and took them to the table.

 

When evening arrived, Alice was delirious with yellowed memories and nagging hunger. She had sorted through the pile and separated two photographs taken at the Les Beaux Temps Art Gallery.

 

In the first photograph, she sat in a plush, wingback armchair with two men standing on either side. The men were smiling and giddy, wine glasses raised in the direction of the photographer. It was a Polaroid photo and had turned orange through the years. Alice was as curious to see the photographer as she was about those in the picture. On the back of the photo in blue, ballpoint lines that grew fuzzy on the paper like bacteria in a Petri dish, she thought she made out “To Bloom. The Gardener.” The ink was indelible. Like most things that can’t be erased or forgotten, it was barely legible.

 

Alice’s stomach constricted with a quick spasm.

 

The second photograph had Alice in the same armchair. There was only one man in the picture. He also extended a wine glass to the camera. The picture was also discolored. Worse, Alice had years before nonchalantly used it as a doily for a coffee cup. A dark portion of the ring it left eclipsed the man’s face entirely. “That must be the photographer of the other photo,” Alice figured. On the back, inscribed in an equally indelible hand were the same words, “To Bloom. The Gardener.”

 

An ordinary person would imagine that Alice had opened the door of memory and was on the threshold of entering the past. This wasn’t so, for no sooner had the photographs opened the past than they jostled open another cloudy memory. Each of these men had called Alice “Bloom” in the most intimate of times and she had called each of them “my gardener.”

 

“I was their pink carnation! They always called me that and I was that! A pink carnation for my gardeners to pick!” Alice cried in delight. She did not question, she did not wonder, she did not bother to ask where yesterday’s pink carnation was at the moment. She merely seized the moment, even though that moment was a distant past one. She allowed the empty past to become the plaything of the present. Still, she felt hunger and that was not very playful.

 

. . . excerpt only  . . .