Her eyes were dark brown and wary, nervous to share a glance. She’d look away quickly should another pair of eyes catch her. Easy to misread that. Stuck up, some judged, weird, others would decide, and both would be wrong. Just run-of-the-mill shy is all she was.
Rosalie was the name her parents gave her and like the others with their judgments they’d decided before she’d even had a chance of being born this name above all others best suited her. The eyes of unborn Rosalie in the womb, closed though they had been those nine months, were virgin brown and thoughtful. She was thoughtful even then, I’d wager. Her mother was unhappy the entire pregnancy but she wouldn’t know this until later. Twenty-four years she’d have to live and grow before she would be deemed worthy of bearing that knowledge. A common situation: her parents had merely been young when they’d conceived her, hardly aware of who they were as separate people, so should it have surprised her when her mother sat across from her at a kitchen table years after the divorce, in the earliest year of recovery from alcoholism, to tell her—the miracle she was had been the natural outcome of a juvenile misunderstanding. Rosalie felt guilt hearing her mother’s confession. Was that how confessions were supposed to land? One person admits a sin so another can bear the guilt? Luckily she’d been raised beyond reach of any stubborn ancient religion. She was sorry to have caused a premature end to her mother’s youth but not so sorry she needed forgiving.
I met her at a party, in the back yard of a mutual friend. An August brighter and hotter than any in memory. Lawn chairs and a fire pit and a grill and people drinking and sharing a smoke, a train track within earshot but out of sight. Every hour a recurrent explosion of cars would barrel past, so people had to lean and shout into each other’s ears. Someone introduced us as train-thunder ricocheted between houses. I mouthed a hello and greeting. A stressed confused look as she tried to make out what I was asking or telling her. The booming lasted five, ten minutes at least, so I did what I usually would when nerves got the better of me—made attempts to channel awkwardness into playfulness. This must have been a welcome turn for her because she played along. Like actors in a silent movie we conversed naturally, feigning words, gesturing as if working to break free from the confines of a disagreement. People at the edge of the yard glanced our direction, concerned. What was going on over there? Were they arguing? Train passed, train trailing off into the distance, volume receding to a low rumble, we continued faking conversation, taking enjoyment in their confusion. Once the game was finished, we were left exposed with nothing much to talk about. So we excused ourselves, wandered to stand at the edge of other groups scattered on the lawn. In that company beer and bourbon and weed did much of the talking. Bored most the remainder of the evening, I wondered what the worried-looking unusual woman and I might have been discussing, buried under several hundred tons of passing freight.
In hindsight I think this: “Where do you think these trains are headed?” / “From where we’re standing and where the sun’s angled in the sky, looks like west, southwest slightly.”/ “What do you think they’re carrying?” / “They make a mighty booming sound, so I’d guess, what, livestock or automobile parts or tanks filled with some species of lethal chemical.” / “When do you think these rails were first laid?” / “Anytime between the middle of the 19th century till now.” / “And who specifically laid them?” / “Unknowable anonymous souls with strong backs and time to spare.” / “Always there’s graffiti scrawled along the sides of these freight cars. Who do you think sprayed the oldest messages?”/ “Better to ask: how many people on a daily basis happen to catch their meaning?” / “If it’s graffiti, isn’t it more a matter of who notices and is inspired to wonder?” / “Huh, true. Just like this fake conversation we’re aping. People stand within earshot but because the sounds of our voices are drowned out, they’re inclined to wonder what we’re saying.” / “If they could hear us, they’d lose interest quickly enough.” / “But since they have to strain to listen, study us closely to guess what we might be saying to each other, suddenly we’re worthy of their interest.” / “Doesn’t matter, then, what we’re saying, or that we’re even saying anything.” / “Just that all this play-talking inspires a strong desire to eavesdrop.” / “Meanwhile the trains head west without a care for who or what they’re leaving behind.” / “And not even much of a care for what they’re carrying.”
If she were to hear this, Rosalie would look at me, down a bit and to the side a bit from direct eye contact. As if wondering what I was getting at, hesitant there might be veiled criticism in it; then I’d have to reassure her it was just my way of creating a little deviation from the expected path. The day we met was an idea so I was playing with it. Walking a step behind me but beside me in the cemetery where we’d meet to catch up with how life had been shaping us since the last time we’d met, she’d look down at the leaves on the walk, then up at a bird in the branches, and I’d be left to wonder whether this was intended as a sign I should change the subject. We’d dated a few weeks years before, not long after we met at that summer party; she’d chosen to end things in the same manner: no actual admission I wasn’t someone she cared to share her time or body with. Instead she went quiet. Brief responses to texts, then no responses at all. Weeks passed before we met at a bar, separately visiting the same shared group of friends. She apologized for disappearing but didn’t offer an explanation for why. I suppose it was understood I shouldn’t ask, that that might be a cross-examination at the expense of her comfort and maybe mine also. Once it was clear I accepted her terms and conditions, in her eyes gradually I was able to become harmless and frivolously affable again. Why tense up when I came around, if I didn’t seem to take issue with her silences and didn’t seem to want anything from her?
That evening at the bar ended with us standing on the patio talking with an ease that hadn’t been possible when we’d tried to cross the lines of acquaintanceship into sex and couplehood. Maybe without knowing it we’d taken a wrong turn at a critical junction months before, I said. We’d mistaken a mutual appreciation for pantomime for flirting, so headed towards intimacy when the more appropriate turn should have been towards friendship. Easy enough to miss, she agreed, because when it came to the chase for the next partner most of us were inclined towards hopefulness. But look at us, I pointed out, standing at the edge of another group of familiars, making easy conversation again. Why was the ease there? She looked up then to the left, past a streetlight across the street and past the moon which floated subtle in the sky, the evening cloudy, the ambient lighting of the city a muted pinkish salmon. Curiosity, she said after a pause. We’re both curious people by nature but hamstrung a bit because we both have this strong dislike of small talk. It sounded true enough so I agreed.
After that, we casually fell into a rhythm of falling out of touch then meeting up on random occasions. Somewhere along the way, we formalized that into seeking one another’s company every couple of months, a text message, a plan to walk in one of the city’s larger parks or, the increasingly more favorable option, in the city’s oldest cemetery. She lived three blocks from the cemetery’s main entrance and she walked there alone often. After a few years of knowing and walking alongside one another, our sporadic walks became more regular, once a month, and could last several hours, expanding their vocabulary of activities to include more than simple walking: sharing a bench, for instance, to watch people arrive in cars to lay flowers at a grave, or standing beneath trees or before certain graves ourselves, admiring the antiquated resonances within the names of people deceased for two or three centuries. Rosalie and I were both continual survivors of families with problems larger and stronger than could be solved by just one person. We’d both learned this over a painfully long period of trial and error, forced to accept the most reliable method of addressing those problems was to maintain a careful distance from mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Walking and standing and sitting among thousands of headstones, it didn’t pass mention that many of these were grouped into families, and that their togetherness underground might be one final illusion.
The cemetery’s layout was tentacular, a mess of paths and sinkholes and hills and ponds surrounded by a winding ten-foot brick wall topped by razor wire. On one side of the main gate was a clock tower, on the other a guard house, and beyond those a long thoroughfare lined on either side by tall trees whose branches arched over the drive. At the entry visitors could acquire a map of the cemetery’s layout. Rosalie and I never opted for the map and never discussed the matter, because it was a given why we favored the cemetery above parks or neighborhoods: the point was to enter the same place, always, familiar with our surroundings, but then through conversation and wandering, only half-paying-attention where we turned, where we were going, to lose our way, arrive somewhere unfamiliar. Once we’d successfully become lost, we’d collaborate to solve the puzzle of the place with walking.
The park was open seven days a week and always closed at 4:30. Eschewing phones and watches, we’d judge the time and our progress referencing the angle of the sun. Overcast days would make it more of a challenge and, venturing in directions where a main road might be found, or a gate, we’d end up in sections of cemetery we hadn’t discovered before. In those moments Rosalie would remind me, corners of her mouth up-curled into quasi-smile, the cemetery was a live thing, new graves added weekly and daily. Bound as it was by an ambling brick wall, its interiors were forever changing. While some sections were set and finished, others were in-progress, shapeshifters without a definite plan; on a fall day they may look one way, on a summer or spring afternoon another. We both enjoyed finding little pockets of lost-ness and, if time allowed, exploring them. Like our conversations in general, expeditions into the cemetery began with the familiar then, if we were fortunate, branched gradually towards the unknown. Often a turn towards the latter was sparked by discussion of what we’d noticed or read since we’d last come together for a walk.
An example. One Saturday we enter the main gate on foot a few minutes past noon. We wave to the older gentleman in his seat, supposedly standing guard. He offers a map, we decline politely. He reminds us the cemetery closes in four and a half hours, we acknowledge the friendly reminder then move on. We stroll beneath the trees along the main thoroughfare until the road and path splits into three directions. Here is our first decision. We don’t deliberate, instead wander where our discussion takes us, in this instance left. This path takes us past a row of mausoleums buried half in a hillside, magnolia trees, a pair of peacocks dragging their tail fans along asphalt. Somewhere along the way we find a conversation about the recently late mathematician John Conway. Rosalie’s father, being an engineer, had inspired in her a fascination with mathematics by appealing to her love of puzzles. Think of numbers as puzzle pieces you can’t hold between your fingers, only in your mind, he said; for the girl she was, this was enough to win her curiosity. The afternoon her father made that comparison was thirty, thirty-five years ago, had dimmed in her memory for long stretches of erstwhile living, but just the other day, she says, it came back in an instant after she’d read a passage from a collaborative autobiography written between Conway and another mathematician. She couldn’t cite the page, but to illustrate the weirdness and fickleness of memory, she quoted the passage in question with help from a pocket notebook which she carried everywhere with her, opened to the page where she’d copied it out, for such these kinds of return visits: “This is something that perpetually intrigues me. There are these abstract objects that are as real as trees or cats, but we can only access them by thinking about them.” And now the mystery took on along layer, since the man had died himself of complications from contracting COVID. Like his beloved numbers, the same that were beloved by her father, John Conway was an abstraction that was nonetheless real, and made so by two strangers to him but friends to one another, strolling on a sunny afternoon in hopes of getting lost. This, then. This just one example of the kind of patterns Rosalie and I could make from the modest materials of a Saturday in late spring, trees in flower and people standing here and there around us visiting headstones and on occasion even talking to them.
Twelve times a year we met and walked there, once a month. Conversation was a country we visited so we could comment on thoughts that emerged spontaneously from the sights around us. Never was it a solid number, the acres that were available there for us to wander. Very quiet, spare of visitors. Very little to distract us from standing near a drift of swans on the memorial pond where people were invited to walk to the end of a short dock, to empty urns of their ashes. Groundskeepers could be seen in the distance cruising among monuments and headstones on industrial lawn mowers, shearing grass from their edges with weed-whackers. It took minimal effort to keep death neat and bucolic. In country, we did the work of ghosts and drifted, making speech where it was no longer allowed. I think of unborn Rosalie in the womb, her eyes a fact in the world’s consideration but hidden in her mother’s belly, blinking maybe in the third trimester, closing to meditate on a future her already-thoughtful mind couldn’t foresee. Brown. The eyes were of a color, but one no sonogram could determine. Not until she was pulled through the birth canal, wiped clean and lifted to the light, eyes scrunched against the pain of its violent newness. Minutes after Rosalie had been born and duly named, it would be observed by her mother and father and the doctor that her eyes were a rich dark brown, like chocolate or coffee, delectables by turns sweet or bitter. Both, then. Bittersweet. Having felt myself received through those eyes a few years before she left town, moving toward a life near the mountains, in Denver, I can say this is what it feels like, to be felt by her. And now that we’re half a country apart and not longer often in touch, maybe this is also what it must feel like to be an abstraction come alive on odd occasions when her thoughts wander back to the years that brought her to Denver.
Whatever happened to Rosalie, friends ask, remembering back yard parties and late nights at bars before their lives became serious and they were made to raise families. They would have been reminded by a photograph posted online or by a story retold to make them feel old, though the attention in telling it had been the opposite, to allow them to feel young again, if only for a millisecond. It took longer to say Rosalie’s name aloud, so the feeling passed as they talked about her. Whenever they ask, I tell them: she moved west. After watching trains pass through town most of her twenties and thirties, one day she finally decided to follow them. Did we keep in touch? We never were in touch, I answer. We kept out of touch so we could keep talking. We still are, it’s just were too far away from one another to make out what the other’s saying. Of course that’s just a dodge, evasiveness pitched as a bid for cleverness. My way of honoring her wishes, though she could never quite feel comfortable enough to make them known. To leave no tracks, so no one would notice someone had once sat among us, then stood up one day, and left. So no one would think to follow.
