Love Grows Where Rosemary Goes
The narrator is telling his own story, of course, but at the center of that recollection is a slightly older teenage girl named Rosemary. Right off the bat he informs the reader that he watched Rosemary die right in front of him. So there is tragic irony tinged in every description, especially deeply emotional metaphorical descriptions such this:
“Since the night Rosemary had given me the books, I became more and more drawn to her. As the only Indians around, we shared a culture and blood unknown to the others. We were like branches intertwined from the same tree, the same root, reaching out toward the sky to the unknown.”
Rosemary in the Woods
The narrator has been informed by what seems to be a rather unreliable source that his beloved Rosemary goes to the woods with young men and comes back with drawings of them both naked. He gets the chance to furtively follow and becomes a voyeur jealousy-fired imagination is a much better show than the real deal:
“The air filled with the sweetness of fruit, and I could not contain myself from the dizzy exhaustion of the moment.”
New Experiences
Existence for the young narrator is a tumult. Circumstances change drastically and with comes new living conditions. What is so normal for most people has the amazingly ability to become almost a wonderland for others less fortunate:
“I’d never lived in the country before, so looking out the kitchen window at night was like looking in a mirror—there was vast darkness as far as you could see without any porch lights on.”
By George
It is not simply a tale of the narrator and Rosemary. There is also the narrator’s friend, George: the unreliable source of goings-on in the woods. To call them a trio or triangle would not be quite right. But still, there’s something there:
“In our room, George and I felt Rosemary’s presence between us like a swollen river. It was as if we sensed the pull of some force confirming the uncertainty of life. Nothing would change that.”
“The room was like a treasure-house.”
What room in this story could possibly be like a treasure-house and, for that matter, what exactly is a treasure house? He might mean treasure trove, but whatever the language there is, of course, only one possible answer to the question posed here. Only a room allowing full, unfettered, unsupervised access into every possession—from the mundane to the secretive—of the object of one’s obsession could possibly meet this high metaphorical standard. And, indeed, it is a house of treasures for the narrator though, it should always be admitted, sometimes one is better off not knowing everything there is to know about another person.
