The Language of Flowers (10 page)

When I arrived at the flower market, the sky was still dark, and I almost didn’t see him standing to the right of the entrance. He was still, and flowerless, his head bent to the ground but his eyes up, waiting. I walked to the door with a purposeful step, eyes on the metal handle. The market would be busy and loud, but outside it was nearly silent. As I passed he raised a hand, holding up a rolled paper tied with a yellow ribbon. I took the scroll like a runner taking a baton, never breaking stride, and opened the door. The noise greeted me like the roar of a crowd. When I peeked back over my shoulder, he was gone.

Inside, his booth was empty. I crouched inside the white wood, untied the ribbon, and unwrapped the scroll. The paper was visibly old, yellowed and flaking at the corners. It resisted straightening. I held the two bottom corners down with my big toes, the top corners with my thumbs.

The paper held a drawing in faded graphite, not of a flower but of the trunk of a tree, its bark textured and peeling. I ran my fingertip along the bark; although the paper was flat, the drawing was so realistic I could almost feel the rough knobs. In the bottom right-hand corner were the words
White Poplar
in a curving script.

White poplar. It was not a plant I knew by heart. Taking off my backpack, I withdrew my flower dictionary. I scanned the W’s first, then the P’s, but neither
white poplar
nor
poplar, white
was listed. If there was a meaning, I wouldn’t be able to glean it from my dictionary. I rerolled and tied the scroll with the ribbon, but stopped midway through the bow.

On the underside of the ribbon, in a scratchy hand I recognized from flower prices on a chalkboard, were the words
Monday, 5 p.m., 16th and Mission. Donuts for dinner
. The black ink had spread into the silk so that the words were almost unreadable, but the time and place were clear.

I bought flowers that morning without thinking, without bargaining, and when I opened the shop an hour later, I was surprised by the things I carried.

The morning was slow, and I was grateful. I sat on a tall stool behind the register and flipped through a heavy phone book. The number listed for the San Francisco Public Library had a long recorded message. I listened to it twice, jotting down hours and locations on the back of my hand. Main Library closed at five p.m. on Sundays, as did Bloom. I would have to wait until Monday. Then, based on the meaning I uncovered, I would decide whether or not to meet for donuts.

At the end of the day, just as I had transferred the display flowers from the window to the walk-in, the front door opened. A woman stood alone, looking confused in the empty space.

“Can I help you?” I asked, feeling impatient and ready to leave.

“Are you Victoria?”

I nodded.

“Earl sent me. He asked me to tell you he needs more of the same, exactly the same.” She handed me thirty dollars. “He said to keep the change.”

I placed the money on the counter and went into the walk-in, not sure if we had enough spider mums. I laughed aloud when I saw the giant bunch I had purchased that morning. What remained of the periwinkle sat forgotten on the floor, where I had left it the week before. Renata hadn’t watered the plant, and it was dry but not dead.

“Why didn’t Earl come?” I asked as I began the arrangement.

The woman’s eyes flitted between my work and the window. She had the energy of a trapped bird.

“He wanted me to meet you.”

I didn’t say anything, and didn’t look up. In my peripheral vision I could see her pull at the roots of her burgundy-brown hair, the color covering what was probably speckled gray.

“He thought you might be able to make me a bouquet—something special.”

“For what reason?” I asked.

She paused, looking out the window again. “I’m single but don’t want to be.”

I looked around. My success with Earl had made me confident. She needed red roses and lilac, I decided, neither of which I had purchased. I tended to avoid them. “Next Saturday,” I said. “Can you come back?”

She nodded. “Lord knows I can wait,” she said, rolling her eyes. She watched my fingers fly in circles around the mums in silence. When she walked out the door ten minutes later, she seemed lighter, jogging up the block toward Earl’s like a much younger woman.

I rode the bus to Main Library the next morning and waited on the steps until it opened. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Books on the language of flowers were on the top floor, wedged between the Victorian poets and an extensive gardening collection. There were more than I had expected. They ranged from ancient, crumbling hardcovers like the one I carried to illustrated paperbacks that seemed to have come from antique coffee tables. All the volumes had one thing in common—they looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. Elizabeth had told me the language of flowers was once common knowledge, and it always amazed me that it had retreated into the virtual unknown. I stacked as many books as I could carry onto trembling arms.

At the nearest table I opened a leather-bound volume, its once-gilded title faded to a scattering of gold dust. The card in the inside pocket had last been stamped before I was born. The book contained a complete history of the language of flowers. It began with the original flower dictionary published in nineteenth-century France and included a long list of the royalty who had courted with the language, giving detailed descriptions of the bouquets they traded. I skimmed to the end of the book, which listed a brief dictionary of flowers. White poplar was not included.

I scanned a half-dozen more books, my anxiety growing with each volume. I was afraid to know the stranger’s response but even more
afraid that I wouldn’t find the definition and would never know what he was trying to say. After twenty minutes of searching, I finally found what I was looking for, a single line between plum and poppy. Poplar, white.
Time
. I exhaled, relieved but also confused.

Closing the book, I pressed my head against its cool cover. Time, as a response to presumption, was more abstract than I had hoped.
Time will tell? Give me time?
His response was unspecific; he had clearly not learned from Elizabeth. I opened another book and then another, hoping for an extended definition of the white poplar, but a search of the entire collection did not yield a second reference. I was not surprised. It didn’t seem that poplar, a tree, would be a plant of choice for romantic communication. There was nothing wistful about the passing of sticks or long strips of bark.

I was about to re-shelve the books when a pocket-sized volume caught my eye. The cover was illustrated with drawings of flowers in a grid of small squares, the definition in tiny print below each image. In the bottom row were delicately rendered drawings of roses in every hue. Under the faded yellow rose was the word
jealousy
.

Had it been any other flower, I might not have noticed the discrepancy. But I had never forgotten the sorrow that passed over Elizabeth’s face when she gestured to her yellow rosebushes or the thoroughness with which she snipped every young bud in the spring, leaving them to shrivel in a pile by the garden fence. Replacing infidelity with jealousy—this changed the meaning entirely. One was an action, the other only an emotion. Opening the small book, I scanned the pages, then set it down and opened another.

Hours passed as I took in hundreds of pages of new information. I sat frozen, only the pages of the books turning. Looking up flowers one at a time, I cross-referenced everything I had memorized with the dictionaries stacked on the table.

It wasn’t long before I knew. Elizabeth had been as wrong about the language of flowers as she had been about me.

On the front steps, Elizabeth sat, soaking her foot in a pan of water. From
where I stood at the bus stop, she looked small, her exposed ankles pale.

She looked up as I approached her, and I felt a rush of nerves—she wasn’t done with me, this I knew. That morning, Elizabeth’s shriek, followed by the loud thump of a wooden heel hitting the linoleum floor, had announced her discovery of the cactus spines. I’d risen, dressed, and raced downstairs, but by the time I entered the kitchen, she was already seated at the table, calmly eating her oatmeal. She didn’t look up when I walked into the room, didn’t say anything when I sat down at the table.

Her lack of reaction made me furious.
What are you going to do with me?
I’d screamed, and Elizabeth’s response had floored me. Cactus, she told me, her eyes taunting, meant
ardent love
, and though her shoes might never recover, she did appreciate the sentiment. I shook my head wildly, but Elizabeth reminded me of what she had explained in her garden, that each flower has only one meaning, to avoid confusion. I’d picked up my backpack and started to the door, but Elizabeth was behind me, a bouquet pressed to the back of my neck.
Don’t you want to see my response?
she asked. I spun around to face the tiny purple petals.
Heliotrope
, she said.
Devoted affection
.

I hadn’t paused for breath, and what came out next was a fiery whisper.

Cactus means I hate you
, I’d said, slamming the door in her face.

Now a full day of school had passed, and my anger had faded into something close to regret. But Elizabeth smiled when she saw me, her expression welcoming, as if she had completely forgotten my declaration of hatred only hours earlier.

“How was your first day of school?” she asked.

“Awful,” I said. I took the stairs two at a time, my legs stretching their full length as I attempted to pass Elizabeth, but her bony fingers flew out and closed around my ankle.

“Sit,” she said. Her tight grasp thwarted my attempt at escape. I turned and sat on the step below her to avoid her eyes, but she pulled me up by the collar until I faced her.

“Better,” she said, then handed me a plate of sliced pear and a muffin. “Now eat. I have a job for you that may take all afternoon, so you’ll start as soon as you’ve finished this.”

I hated that Elizabeth was such a good cook. She kept me so well fed that I had yet to go back for the American cheese in my desk drawer. The pears on the plate were peeled and cored; the muffin was full of warm chunks of banana and melted peanut-butter chips. I ate every bite. When I finished, I traded the plate for a glass of milk.

“There,” she said. “Now you should be able to work for as long as it takes to remove every spine from the insides of my shoes.” She handed me two leather gloves that were much too big for my hands, a pair of tweezers, and a flashlight. “When you’re done, you’ll put them on your feet and walk up and down the steps three times, so that I can see you’ve been successful.”

I hurled the gloves down the stairs, and they landed like forgotten hands in the dirt. Thrusting my bare hands into the darkness of her shoe, my fingers searched the soft leather for spines. I found one and pinched it between my fingernails, drawing it out and flicking it onto the ground.

Elizabeth watched me work in quiet concentration: first the leather inside, then the sides, and ending with the point of the toe. The shoe
that Elizabeth had stepped into was the hardest, her weight having hammered the spines all the way through the leather. I dug each one out with the tweezers like a sloppy surgeon.

“So, if not ardent love, what?” Elizabeth asked as I neared the end of my task. “If not your eternal devotion and passionate commitment to me, what?”

“I told you before school,” I said. “Cactus means I hate you.”

“It doesn’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “I can teach you the flower for hate, if you like, but the word
hate
is unspecific. Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear. If you’ll tell me exactly how you’re feeling, I’ll be able to help you find the right flower to convey your message.”

“I don’t like you,” I said. “I don’t like you locking me out of the house or throwing me into the kitchen sink. I don’t like you touching my back or grabbing my face or forcing me to play with Perla. I don’t like your flowers or your messages or your bony fingers. I don’t like anything about you, and I don’t like anything about the world, either.”

“Much better!” Elizabeth seemed genuinely impressed by my hate-filled monologue. “The flower you’re looking for is clearly the common thistle, which symbolizes misanthropy.
Misanthropy
means hatred or mistrust of humankind.”

“Does humankind mean everybody?”

“Yes.”

I thought about this.
Misanthropy
. No one had ever described my feelings in a single word. I repeated it to myself until I was sure I wouldn’t forget.

“Do you have any?”

“I do,” she said. “Finish your task, and we’ll look together. I have a phone call to make, and I’m not leaving the kitchen until I’ve made it. When we’re both done, we’ll go looking for thistle together.”

Elizabeth hobbled inside, and when the screen door banged closed, I scurried up the steps, crouching below the window. I rubbed my hand against the soft leather of the shoes, feeling for straggling spines. If Elizabeth was finally going to make the phone call she had been attempting for days, I wanted to listen. It was intriguing, the thought that Elizabeth,
who never seemed to trip over a single word, had something she found hard to say. Peering in the window, I saw her sitting on the kitchen counter. She dialed seven numbers quickly, listened to perhaps the first ring, and then hung up. Slowly, she dialed again. This time she held the phone to her ear. From where I sat outside the window, I could see she was holding her breath. She listened for a long time.

Finally, she spoke. “Catherine.” She pressed her hand over the receiver and made a sound between a gasp and a sob. I watched her wipe at the corners of her eyes. She put the phone back to her mouth. “This is Elizabeth.” She paused again, and I listened intently, trying to hear the voice coming through the line, but couldn’t. Elizabeth continued, her voice fragile. “I know it’s been fifteen years, and I know you probably thought you’d never hear from me again. To tell you the truth,
I
thought you’d never hear from me again. But I have a daughter now, and I can’t stop thinking about you.”