Margaret`s Great Aunt Olive fed us food made of roses and turned part of our childhood into something from a 19th Century storybook; but later, when we learned Olive was a lesbian, Margaret turned away from Olive and she turned away from me because I knew the truth. To this day I am mad at Margaret. Margaret is a fool.
Olive lived in a tall and narrow demi-mansion in an area of Washington, D.C., that was built in the last few decades before the turn of the century. The house had 20 rooms, and there was a secret staircase that went from the back of a closet on the third floor to the potato bin in the pantry. Margaret and I relished sneaking down that delightfully frightful staircase and hiding in the potato bin. Down the street from Olive`s house was the house of Mr. Freer, the man who owned the horrid ”Peacock Room” by James McNeill Whistler and who left his fortune to the Smithsonian to build the Freer Gallery. Also down the street was the house of my great-grandmother, who died the year I met Olive. They were a breed that faded before my eyes.
Even in my youngest years, many of the houses in that neighborhood already had become offices for the university and for the museum, both of which grew larger each year. By the time I went to college and lived in a 10- room flat on that same street there were drug dealers and pimps and graduate students living in Olive`s house, and my great-grandmother`s house was the office of an ”institute” that taught infants how to read and how not to cry.
My great-grandmother knew Olive. They were of a social group but were never really friends. I met Olive through Margaret, but sooner or later I would have met her anyway, given all the connections between families in that city. My family was tied to Margaret`s by social custom and by a marriage between two people who might have been third cousins.
I was 7 years old the first time I went to Olive`s house. Margaret had told me that this aunt of hers made food out of roses, and I didn`t believe her. I wanted to find proof against this outrageous story. Margaret and I were best friends, and finding proof for and against one another was part of our daily fun. We spent the weekend at Olive`s house, and for the next five or so years we went there one weekend a month.
Olive`s house was the sort of place that met its moment in the Victorian age and liked it that way. There were doilies on the backs of chairs and couches, embroidered scarves on the dresser tops, fringed covers on the tables, lace curtains that were hand-crocheted of an ecru color. To me it was a house of dreams, and I thought it the most wondrous place in existence.
Margaret and I roamed from room to room, touching everything and drawing in the dust. There were cut-glass jars with initialed silver lids on Olive`s dressing table, and we opened them and smeared our faces with lotions that smelled like flowers. We shook powder over ourselves and splashed floral cologne into the necks of dresses.
Olive allowed us to do these things. She allowed us to dig through drawers and wear old dresses that dragged the floor and crumbled as we walked and to decorate our fingers with old rings of coral or garnet or mother-of-pearl and to deck our skinny arms with bracelets. We fanned ourselves with ostrich plumes that flew apart and scattered in the air, and we slept in long silk Oriental robes that tore with every toss and turn in the night. We didn`t care. One dresser to another, we marauded. There seemed no end.
I dreamed that one day I would live in Olive`s house and that my husband, for surely I would have one, would look like the dashing man whose portrait hung in the hall near the parlor. He was Olive`s brother Garrard, and he had given Olive the money for the house and for everything she needed or wanted. He had died many years before, and he had a lot of money and left it to Olive. And although it was forbidden to speak aloud of money, Garrard`s stature was that of hero, and he was silently revered.
I thought of my own brother, grubby and stingy with his allowance, and knew even then that they didn`t make men like they used to. Now, of course, I am glad that they don`t, but then it seemed a tragedy of large and romantic proportion.
Olive did serve food made from roses: petals layered and pressed between slivers of pale butter and served on powdered and split ladyfinger cakes;
roses steeped in boiling sweet-water; conserve, jelly I thought it was called, made from rose hips and eaten on toast dripping with butter and cinnamon; rose petals in sugar glaze; rose wine, given to the children mixed with lots of water.
Margaret glowed with spite that first visit when Olive brought the tea tray into the parlor and announced that we`d be having rose butter and cake. I was entranced and stared at the pale butter striped with red petals. I said,
”Oh, yes, my favorite kind of butter.” Margaret swung her foot under the table and kicked me as hard as she was able.
Zinna lived with Olive, had since they graduated from college in 1906. Zinna wasn`t home that much. She left early in the morning to pursue research at the art library in the museum. Zinna was writing a monograph on Chinese porcelains, and she`d been working on this project for 30 years. I once heard my father tell my mother that someday someone would open Zinna`s desk and find nothing but old newspapers. And it was, in fact, a pretense. When Zinna died it was made known that her exploration into Chinese porcelain was of the slightest depth. She was an amateur.
My mother said it didn`t matter. Zinna left the house promptly at eight, a small leather valise tucked under one arm, a Waterman`s fountain pen poking from the pocket of her jacket. Someplace to go. Something to do. My mother told me that I didn`t know that generation. She asked if I had plans for my grown-up years. I said she knew as well as anyone that I was going to be a Harlem Globetrotter. She asked how I might feel if I knew that for my whole life long all I had to do was count the linens. I had no answer. She said that Zinna could play at the infamous monograph or she could count the linens. She said we would talk about Olive and Zinna on my next birthday, that the subject was closed. There were always things we were going to discuss on my next birthday. I asked her how many linens we owned. She said, ”Ask your father, but make sure I`m there when you do. I want to hear what he says.”
I recall Zinna leaning back on the couch, a cigarette in one hand, talking porcelains, of glazes, of the ”fragile strength” of the Orient. She mentioned Mr. Freer all too often. Once I heard her snap at Olive, saying Olive didn`t understand the subject of porcelains.
One night I walked into Olive`s room and saw Zinna combing Olive`s long white hair. They were wearing Oriental robes, and they were aghast at my presence. Zinna scolded me for not knocking. Olive took me to my room and told me that polite people knock before opening a door and that impoliteness bothered Zinna quite a lot because Zinna had ”bad nerves.” For a long time I thought Zinna was angry with me that night because of her bad nerves. Maybe she was.
I told my father about what happened and later I heard him talking with my mother. He said, ”What`s going to happen when she finds out they`re dykes?” My mother said, ”They`re not dykes. They`re maiden ladies.” He laughed. ”Maiden ladies! Now I`ve heard it all. Next you`ll tell me that rose food is just food made out of roses.” One of them shut the door, and I couldn`t hear what else they said.
I thought ”dyke” was a foreign word.
Olive let me help her in the garden. We`d go out just after sunrise when the dew still clung to the plants and we`d be quiet, whispering to one another as we worked. She carried an old gilt picture frame with a piece of cloth tacked to the edges. We laid the flowers on this, careful not to bruise them. Then we`d go into the kitchen, and I`d stand at the side and watch her wash the frail flowers and make them into food.
I thought I had attained something close to adulthood the day she let me make the rose butter. She kept a notebook on the table and made scrawled remarks about the garden and its harvest and the methods for making roses into food. She was kind. She laughed away the mistakes I made. She said she`d always wished for a daughter of her own but that Margaret and I were probably the best girls in the world.
One day Margaret hid in the potato bin. She waited for me to look for her, but I was busy with my own foolishness and forgot her. She fell asleep;
then she woke and was startled and jumped, and the potato bin tipped forward and fell open and Margaret tumbled into the pantry and saw Zinna kissing Olive.
Zinna left the house. Margaret howled. Margaret`s mother came and took her home. Olive called my mother and talked in hushed tones. Olive paced and wrung her hands. She told me to go into the yard and stay there.
I sat on the back steps and tried to figure out what was going on. Finally Olive brought two glasses of rose tea and sat with me and told me the truth. She said she loved Zinna, that some ladies loved other ladies instead of men; it was just a simple fact that shouldn`t frighten anyone. I asked if someday I`d love a lady. She smoothed my hair and said, ”No, a wonderful, wonderful man.” I asked if he would be like her brother Garrard.
I asked about Margaret`s leaving. She said, ”Margaret`s mother isn`t as smart as your mother, and someday Margaret will be just as big a jackass as she.” I was shocked by Olive`s language but also proud that my mother was smarter than Margaret`s mother. I sat close to Olive, and we finished our tea. Zinna came home, and the three of us had a late dinner of rosebuds pickled with pearl onions, canned baked beans and cocoa. Olive and Zinna talked about teaching me to play mah-jongg, but we sat on the back porch and sang songs,
”Harvest Moon” and ”Bicycle Built for Two,” and soon I was falling asleep and the mah-jongg was forgotten.
Margaret wouldn`t speak to me. She`d pass me in the halls at school and look the other way. She`d ride down the street on her bicycle and act as though strangers lived in our house. She kept company with girls who curled their hair and wore red nail polish. She told someone that as far as she was concerned I was a ”queer” and she didn`t want to know that I was alive. She saw my brother one day and told him that there wasn`t enough room in the Western hemisphere for her and me both, and my brother reached new heights in my eyes by telling her to shut up or he`d rip her eyebrows off.
My mother and Margaret`s mother had long conversations, but my mother wouldn`t tell me what they talked about. Margaret`s parents decided to send Margaret away to school. I stood in the corner of the yard and watched them load her suitcases into the car and then I screamed as loudly as I could,
”Good riddance to bad rubbish,” and I started sobbing, and my father came out into the yard and took me into the house and sat in the chair next to my bed while I cried myself to sleep.
I continued to spend weekends at Olive`s house. Zinna suffered a stroke at the art library and died in the ambulance. They say that Zinna`s death, and the subsequent scandal over the porcelain monograph, hastened Olive`s demise. She fell on the back steps and lay awash in dead roses till the man next door came home from his office and found her. My mother and I went to the hospital and talked to her even though she didn`t know who we were. Margaret`s mother sometimes went with us. Olive died, and my parents and Margaret`s parents arranged for her casket to be covered with roses.
Margaret came to the funeral. She stood in the back of the church and wouldn`t talk to anyone in her family or mine. I knew that the stink of incense always made her sick, but still she wouldn`t sit. My brother, who was 11 at the time, leaned close to me and said, ”That does it, I`m never gonna marry her.” I saw Margaret on the street many times, but she never acknowledged me. As I said, Margaret is a fool.
My father told me about Olive`s brother. Garrard was a tyrant. He bought Olive`s house for her to keep her trapped. Olive and Zinna wanted to leave the city, but Garrard had the money and he made them stay. He left his money to Olive so it could be said by all that he had done his best for his baby sister. Garrard didn`t love Olive. He hated her and he hated Zinna, because of what they were. His goodness to them, if it could be called that, was from a sense of duty. Garrard`s portrait hung in Olive`s house because she could not bear to admit that she was hated by her brother.
Years later I invited a man I thought I liked to my house for lunch. He picked up Zinna`s Waterman off the desk and said something about antique fountain pens. I started to tell him about Olive and Zinna. I said, ”When I was a girl, I had a friend named Margaret and we knew these two ladies who were lesbians, and they–” He interrupted me, and his tone was accusatory and he said, ”You could have told me this before.”
I looked up at him and I thought my heart was breaking and I started to explain. But then I knew that my heart was fine, and I stopped. Olive was right, I couldn`t love a man like Garrard. But, had he been a different man, I would have told him what I did the day after Olive`s funeral.
Margaret`s mother asked me to go to the house with her. She told me to take anything I wanted. I went into the pantry and pulled Olive`s notebooks off the shelves and dumped them into a box to take home. I went to Olive`s room and found her rings and took one that was gold with an oval bezal set with coral carved to look like a rose. I went into Zinna`s study and rummaged in her desk and took the Waterman pen. I wrote Olive`s name in the dust on Zinna`s mirror.
I went and peeked at Margaret`s mother; she looked busy reading through papers. I took a sharp sturdy knife from the kitchen and I dragged a table from the parlor into the hall and I climbed onto the table. I was 12 years old and I thought there was value in dramatic gesture. I worked as fast as I could, and into the dusty and beautiful wooden lintel above the front door I cut the words OLIVE LOVES ZINNA.
