Now, Now

Paper Roses

10 Paper Roses I am eleven. I have taken my mother’s razor. I want to be sexy but still good, like Marie Osmond, who lives in Utah and can get any boy she wants. Somewhere at the back of the house “Paper Roses” is playing on the radio. I listen, one leg propped on the edge of the sink, the other dotted with toilet paper— white blossoms with small red centers— and when it gets to the part where Marie sings O how real those roses seemed to be—I’m doing fine, driving long, straight rows through the lather, thinking, I am a born shaver! and then, Why didn’t she notice that sooner? And worse, if Marie’s love could turn out to be Only im-i-ta-a-tion- . . . a big red rose made of paper—then what chance did normal people have? When love came to you, long-stemmed and breathing out perfume, how could you know that it was safe to fall? Before you had fallen, before it was too late for you? Years go by, decades. I don’t think about Marie—why should I? It’s the future and I’m driving to my own 11 house, when the man on the radio says— offhand, like he’s not sure it’s news— that her son has leapt to his death from a hotel window, and now I am moving forward on the straight black road, and now I am standing at the sink with a razor in my hand, the days falling everywhere around me like soft red petals, as her voice, on key and wise with youthful sorrow, questions how it could have happened that way, how love could do a thing like that. ...