Lacemakers

To My Great Aunt, Whose Funeral I Didn’t Attend

71 To฀My฀Great฀Aunt,฀Whose฀Funeral฀I฀Didn’t฀Attend To me, you were the aunt of appetite, consuming, convertible open, the highway’s giddy winds, or reclining Monroe-like, flanked by men on some Los Angeles beach, as you do in one brittle photograph, cracked. Years later, our first meeting: your girth, rocking down the motor home stairs, your feet two cakes escaping their pans. I can’t picture their faces, the second cousins, great uncles gathered now at your casket—only the hands, orchids, cufflinks on some uncle’s not-quite-black suit. My family, nuclear, removed, never had “people.” Only your brother, Marvin, from Florida, who sends postcards: Played tennis today. Still puzzle our way through crosswords. Doctor says it keeps us young. The last year, I’m told, your wasted body (carried nightly to the upper room: your last denial of nature’s limits), was little but bones and fluids, body lost in its tented nightgown. I imagine you like the porcelain-faced doll you brought from your travels the second and last time we met. Even then, veins mapping your temples were rivers seen from the moon. No one wondered that in old age you held, as your brother does still, to a land of glitz and synthetics. Vacation places, mother would say, frivolous as high heels. I imagine your tall 72 house, half-empty now on a lane named for orchards long eaten by subdivision. Florida, my people who aren’t my people, what do I make of these but a little montage? Winterlessness. Speedboats caught on bleached film reels, the silver flashes of drivers against a too-fertile green. Ponce de Leon’s lost fountain. When he didn’t find that source of eternal youth, did the explorer—an ocean from home— console himself with a Florida orchid, the pearled twists of its petals like the curl of a child’s hair? Or, sailing back to Cuba, poison from the wound that would kill him leaking into his tissues, did he roll over in bed, furious that somewhere unseen in the peninsula’s lush growth, a miracle welled up, untouched, before sinking back again into a hungry swamp? ...