KM Baysal
Pink Camellias (Longing)
It was the line of pink camellias trailing along my husband’s spine that finally convinced him to go to the doctor. They had been popping up here and there—bright pink blooms springing from his armpit, his shoulder, tucked behind a knee— for about a week before he said anything. When they sprang up along his spine and in that unreachable spot between his shoulder blades, he had to tell me.
The doctor said he had been seeing a lot of this lately. People of all ages and ethnicities were spontaneously growing flowers. It wasn’t as alarming as it seemed; no injury or disease was associated with their existence. Preliminary studies suggested the blooms were manifestations of unprocessed or unspoken emotions. Just a theory, he said, as my husband frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. The doctor recommended we keep plucking the flowers until someone developed an inhibitor cream.
A stoic man, my husband dismissed the doctor’s theory and continued to grow flowers. He didn’t only grow camellias. He’d wake to find daffodils, or geraniums, or camellias in every shade imaginable growing in patches all over his body, embarrassed but forced to ask for my help in their removal. As long as I’d known him, he was shy about being naked. Even when we were first dating, our mid-twenties bodies in their most attractive state, he’d only shed his clothing for as long as it took to have sex, donning a tee shirt and boxers as soon as he could afterward. Meanwhile, I’d prance around the apartment with abandon, exhilarated by the kiss of the cool or warm air on parts generally kept covered, reveling in the effect my nakedness had on him. Over the years as age and familiarity set in, we revealed less and less of ourselves. There was comfort and ease to be found in the dark.
I suggested we make a game out of his condition to lighten the mood. Together, we’d pick the morning’s offering, attempting to identify each flower as we went. It was awkward at first, this reacquaintance with his body in daylight. I traced the half-moon of freckles behind his left ear with my fingers. Gasped at the tuft of hair on his chest that had turned salt-and-pepper without my notice. Marveled that the scar on his knee from a bike accident once red and angry had faded to a ghostly white. All the while, plucking gorgeous blooms of sapphire, violet, and gold from his olive skin and arranging them in vases throughout the house. Our lives were suddenly full of vibrant rainbows and intoxicating perfumes.
As I arranged a vase full of purple forget-me-nots and pink morning glories, I recalled Ophelia distributing flowers and how each had a special meaning. It didn’t take long to find an internet guide on the symbolism. Forget-me-nots meant just that, and morning glories represented affection. I researched other blooms we had picked: light pink and peach peonies (bashfulness or shame) and violets (watchfulness and modesty) the day after the doctor’s appointment; red geraniums (folly) and yellow chrysanthemums (slighted love) the morning after an argument; pink and white hollyhocks (ambition) cropped up all over the day he planned to ask for a promotion to regional manager.
I waited a bit before sharing my discovery. I liked having such a visceral guide to his emotions every day, and I loved the closeness our morning ritual had reignited. He started to insist on checking my body for flowers, too, even though we both knew there weren’t any. A soft touch on my hip, a brush of my thigh, a light kiss on the back of my neck inevitably led us to more intimate pursuits when we had time, lingering over and delighting in each other’s bodies like we did when we first fell in love. I didn’t want that to end, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were sneaking peeks at his journal.
One night after we searched for errant blooms on each other, my head resting on his chest, his arm circling my waist, I told him. That morning’s blooms were red roses, white heliotrope, and honeysuckle (all representing love)— an auspicious sign. He smiled and told me he already knew. He had looked them up as well. I reluctantly offered to stop checking the meanings to give him some privacy, but he shook his head, pulled me closer and asked now why would he want that. The next morning, every inch of him was covered in purple and blue hydrangeas (gratitude for being understood), and red tulips (passion), an entire field of flowers waiting to be picked.
Aftermath
It wasn’t until much later, after our parents rushed to our high school and all us kids in our sequined prom dresses and cheap polyester suits were accounted for; after we found Coach’s wife, Mrs. Owens, calling his name as she ran in and out of the gym, saying Coach was chaperoning the prom, but only Billy recalled seeing him there early in the evening, chatting with Ms. Green, the school secretary, as they manned the beverage table, and Caroline said the table was empty when she arrived an hour late claiming she had a hair mishap, but we all knew it was really because she was making out with Mark in his dad’s old Mercedes in the parking lot; after the mayor and the volunteer EMTs and firemen and police followed the route the tornado took to barrel through town like a bulldozer, proclaiming it a miracle that the there was so little damage, that the funnel mercifully picked a mostly clear path, lifting a shingled roof here, an old rusty car there; after they found Coach’s body in his red Toyota by the river crushed under a massive oak tree that was rotted inside, and people wondered what he was doing down there, in the backseat no less, when he was supposed to be chaperoning the prom; after our mothers circled together and spoke in whispers at the funeral, none daring to say how grateful they were that it wasn’t their husband but each of them thinking it, and all the while keeping a close eye on our fathers standing a few feet away; after they dropped off pierogies and casseroles and chocolate cakes to comfort Mrs. Owens and people talked about what a good man Coach was, recalled how he announced the raffle drawings at the school carnival each summer with gusto, how he always had a smile and a word of encouragement for even the worst basketball player on the team, voices trailing off into the distance as they imagined their own lives being cut short in such a sudden way; long after our classmates mowed Mrs. Owens’ lawn, shoveled her driveway, paused to chat when she sat on her porch drinking her morning coffee and rocking in Coach’s favorite chair with a sad, lost look on her face that never went away, a look of grief and heartbreak and something that we couldn’t quite name; years after we graduated and some of us moved, some of us stayed, some married our high school sweethearts, some divorced those sweethearts and married others, some had kids, some adopted pets, all found and lost jobs, gained and lost weight, acquired wrinkles and a few gray hairs; after a group of us met at the rec center for our twentieth reunion, sitting at folding tables with purple plastic tablecloths, drinking cold Miller Lite from red plastic cups and laughing about the time that Billy lit a stack of papers on fire in the restroom trashcan so our trigonometry final would be postponed; it was after all that reminiscing when Billy somberly recalled the night of the tornado and Coach’s untimely death, and Caroline remembered seeing Ms. Green huddled by the ambulance down by the river wearing Coach’s prized varsity jacket, the one he wore on all but the hottest summer days, and after Mark recounted finding Ms. Green a week later in Coach’s office cradling his favorite basketball—signed by the 1995 state championship team—and watching the principal, Mr. Long, escort her out while she clutched the ball to her chest and fought back tears, that we finally realized Ms. Green’s grief was not the same as ours, and what we thought we understood about the lives of the adults in our little town was not as simple as it had seemed.
KM Baysal lives, works, and writes in NYC. She can often be found haunting the New York Public Library or cozy coffee shops, tapping away on her keyboard. She is currently working on a fantasy novel.
