The Language of Flowers (11 page)

I realized then that Elizabeth was talking to an answering machine, not a person. Picking up speed, her words tumbled forth. “You know,” she said, “all the women I’ve known who’ve had babies, the first thing they do is call their mothers; they want their mothers with them—even the women who hate their mothers.” Elizabeth laughed then, and relaxed her shoulders, which had been lifted almost all the way to her ears. She played with the spiraling cord with her finger. “So I understand that now, you know? In a completely different way. With our parents gone, all I have is you, and I think about you constantly—I almost can’t think of anything else.” Elizabeth paused, perhaps thinking about what she should say next, or how to say it. “I don’t have a baby—I was going to, adopt one, that is—but I ended up with a nine-year-old girl. I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, when I see you. I hope I’ll see you. Anyway, when you meet Victoria, you’ll understand—she has these wild animal eyes, like I had as a little girl, after I’d learned that the only way to get our mother out of her room was to start a grease fire on the stove or smash the entire season’s canned peaches.” Elizabeth laughed again, and wiped her eyes. I could see that she was crying, although she didn’t look sad. “Remember? So—I’m just calling to say that I forgive you for
what happened. It was so long ago, a lifetime ago, really. I should have called years before now, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I hope you’ll call, or come to see me. I miss you. And I want to meet Grant. Please.” Elizabeth waited, listening, and then set the phone down gently, so that I could barely hear the click of the receiver.

Scrambling back down the stairs, I stared at Elizabeth’s shoes intently, hoping she wouldn’t know I’d been listening. Finally, she emerged from the kitchen and limped down the steps. Her eyes were wiped dry but still glistened, and she looked lighter—happier, even—than I’d ever seen her. “Well, let me see if you’ve been successful,” she said. “Try them on.”

I put on her shoes, took them off, extracted a spine I’d missed underneath my big toe, and put them on again. I walked up and down the stairs three times.

“Thank you,” she said, slipping a shoe on her uninjured foot and sighing with pleasure. “Much, much better.” She stood up slowly. “Now run into the kitchen and grab an empty jam jar from the cupboard with the glasses, a dish towel, and the pair of scissors on the kitchen table.”

I did as she asked, and when I returned she was standing on the bottom step, testing her weight on her hurt foot. She looked from the road to her garden and back again as if trying to decide where to go.

“Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.” She took her first step toward the road and grimaced. “You’ll have to help me or we’ll never make it,” she said, reaching for my shoulder.

“Don’t you have a cane or something?” I asked, shrinking away from her touch.

Elizabeth laughed. “No, do you? I’m not an old lady, despite what you may think.” She reached toward me, and this time I didn’t retract. She was so tall she had to bend at the waist to lean on my shoulder. We took slow steps toward the road. She stopped once to readjust her shoe, and we kept walking. My shoulder burned beneath her hand.

“Here,” Elizabeth said, when we reached the road. She sat down on the gravel and leaned against the wooden post of the mailbox. “See?
Everywhere.” She gestured to the ditch separating the highway from the rows of vines. It was about as deep as I was tall, full of stiff, dry plants, without a flower anywhere.

“I don’t see anything.” I was disappointed.

“Climb down in there,” she said. I turned around and slid down the steep dirt wall. She handed me the jam jar and scissors. “Look for dime-sized flowers that were once purple, although this time of year they’ve likely faded to brown like everything else in Northern California. They’re sharp, though, so pick them carefully when you find them.”

I took the jar and scissors, and crouched down into the weeds. The brush was thick, golden, and smelled like the end of summer. I cut a dry plant at the root. It stood tall in its place, supported by weeds on all sides. Detangling it, I threw it onto Elizabeth’s lap.

“Is that it?”

“Yes, but this one doesn’t have flowers. Keep looking.”

I scrambled up the side of the ditch a few inches to get a better view but still didn’t see anything purple. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could in frustration. It hit the opposite wall and flew back in my direction so that I had to jump out of the way. Elizabeth laughed.

Leaping back into the weeds, I parted the brush with my hands and examined every dry stalk. “Here!” I said finally, snatching a clover-sized bud and throwing it into the jar. The flower looked like a small golden puffer fish with a faded tuft of purple hair. I climbed back to Elizabeth to show her the flower, which was bouncing around inside the jar like a living thing. I clapped my hand over the top to keep it from escaping.

“Thistle!” I said, handing her the jar. “For you,” I added. I reached out awkwardly and patted her once on the shoulder. It was perhaps the first time in my entire life I had initiated contact with another human being—at least the first time in my memory. Meredith had told me I was a clingy baby, reaching out and clutching hair, ears, or fingers if I could find them—the straps of my infant car seat if I could not—with pulsing purple fists. But I didn’t remember any of this, and so my action—the quick connection of the palm of my hand to Elizabeth’s shoulder blade—surprised me. I stepped back, glaring at her as if she had made me do it.

But Elizabeth just smiled. “If I didn’t know the meaning, I would be thrilled,” she said. “I think this is the kindest you’ve been to me, and all to express your hatred and mistrust of humankind.” For the second time that afternoon her eyes filled, and, like before, she did not look sad.

She reached out to hug me, but before she could draw me in, I slipped out of her arms and back into the ditch.

The solid form of the chair on which I sat began to liquefy. Without
knowing how I got there, I lay on my stomach on the library floor, books spread in a semicircle around me. The more I read, the more I felt my understanding of the universe slip away from me. Columbine symbolized both
desertion
and
folly;
poppy,
imagination
and
extravagance
. The almond blossom, listed as
indiscretion
in Elizabeth’s dictionary, appeared in others as
hope
and occasionally
thoughtlessness
. The definitions were not only different, they were often contradictory. Even common thistle—the staple of my communication—appeared as
misanthropy
only when it wasn’t defined as
austerity
.

The temperature in the library rose with the sun. By mid-afternoon I was sweating, swiping at my forehead with a wet hand as if trying to wipe memories from a saturated mind. I had given Meredith peony,
anger
but also
shame
. Admitting shame was closer to an apology than I ever hoped to get with Meredith. If anything, she should be coming to me with bunches and bunches of peony, quilting peony-covered bedspreads, baking peony-covered cakes. If peony could be misinterpreted, how many times, to how many people, had I misspoken? The thought made my stomach turn.

My choices for the flower vendor hung as a threatening unknown.
Rhododendron clung solidly to the definition of
beware
throughout every dictionary before me, but there were likely hundreds, if not thousands, more dictionaries in circulation. It was impossible to know how he had interpreted my messages or what he was thinking as he sat in the donut shop. It was past five o’clock. He would be waiting, his eyes on the door.

I had to go. Leaving books scattered on the library floor, I skipped down four flights of stairs and walked out into the darkening San Francisco sky.

It was almost six by the time I got to the donut shop. I opened the double glass doors and found him sitting alone in a booth, a half-dozen donuts in a pink box before him.

I walked over to the table but did not sit down.

“Rhododendron,” I demanded, as Elizabeth once had.

“Beware.”

“Mistletoe.”

“I surmount all obstacles.”

I nodded and continued. “Snapdragon?”

“Presumption.”

“White poplar?”

“Time.”
I nodded again, scattering before him the few thistles I had collected on my walk across the city. “Common thistle,” he said.
“Misanthropy.”

I sat down. It had been a test, and he had passed. My relief was disproportional to his five correct answers. Suddenly starving, I dug a maple bar out of the box. I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

“Why thistle?” he asked, helping himself to a chocolate old-fashioned.

“Because,” I said between huge bites, “it’s all you need to know about me.”

He finished his donut and started on another. He shook his head. “Not possible.”

I took a glazed and a sprinkled donut out of the box and set them on a napkin. He was eating so fast I was afraid the box would be empty before I finished my first.

“So, what else is there?” I asked, my mouth full.

He paused, and then looked into my eyes.

“Where’ve you been for the past eight years?”

His question stunned me.

I stopped chewing and tried to swallow, but I’d put too much in my mouth. I spit a brown ball onto a white napkin and looked up.

All at once, I saw it. The realization was as shocking for its obviousness as for the fact that we had met again; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him instantly. The boy he had been lurked inside the man he had become, his eyes still deep and afraid, his body, filled out now, still curved in at the shoulders, protective. I flashed on the first time I’d ever seen him, a lanky teenager leaning against the back of a pickup truck, tossing roses.

“Grant.”

He nodded.

My instinct was to run. I’d spent so many years trying not to think about what I’d done, trying not to remember all that I’d lost. But as much as I wanted to flee, my desire to know what had become of Elizabeth, of the grapes, was stronger.

I covered my face with my hands. They smelled of sugar. In the space between my fingers I whispered my question, not at all sure he would answer: “Elizabeth?”

He was silent. I peered at him through lines of flesh. He didn’t look angry, as I’d expected, but tormented. He pulled at a patch of hair above his ear, the skin stretching away from his scalp. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen her since—”

He stopped, looking out the window and then at me. I dropped my hands from my face, searching for his anger. Still, he looked only distressed. The silence was thick between us.

“I don’t know why you asked me here,” I said finally. “I don’t know why you’d want to see me, after everything that happened.”

Grant exhaled, the tension in his eyebrows releasing. “I was afraid
you
wouldn’t want to see
me.
”

He licked a finger. The fluorescent light illuminated his eyes and reflected off the stubble on his chin. I was unaccustomed to men in general, having spent my adolescence in all-female group homes with only an occasional male therapist or teacher, and I couldn’t remember having ever been in such proximity to a man who was both young and handsome. Grant was so different from everything I was used to—from the size of his hands, heavy on the table, to the low, quiet voice that echoed into the silence between us.

“Your mother taught you?” I asked, gesturing to the scattered thistle.

He nodded. “But she died seven years ago. Your rhododendron was the first message-laden flower I’ve received since. I was surprised I hadn’t forgotten the definition.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About your mother.” My words didn’t sound heartfelt, but Grant didn’t appear to notice. He shrugged.

“Elizabeth taught you?” he asked.

I nodded. “She taught me what she knew,” I said, “but she didn’t know everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“ ‘The language of flowers is nonnegotiable, Victoria,’ ”
I said, my voice a stern imitation of Elizabeth’s. “And today, in the library, I learned there are three contradictory definitions of the almond blossom.”

“Indiscretion.”

“Yes. And no.” I told Grant that white poplar wasn’t listed in my dictionary, and about my trip to the library and the sighting of the yellow rose.

“Jealousy,”
Grant said, when I described the small illustration on the cover of the book.

“Exactly what it said,” I told him. “But not what I learned.” I finished the last donut, licked my fingers, and retrieved my worn dictionary from my backpack. I opened to the R’s and scanned the page for
rose, yellow
. I pointed.

“Infidelity.”
His eyes widened. “Whoa.”

“Changes everything, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “Changes everything.”

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a book with a red cloth cover and stem-green endpapers. He turned to the page with yellow rose and set the dictionaries side by side.
Jealousy, infidelity
. This simple discrepancy, and the ways in which the yellow rose had altered both our lives, hung between us. Grant might have known the details, but I didn’t, and I didn’t ask. Being with him was enough; I had no desire to further uncover the past.

It didn’t seem like Grant wanted to dwell on the past, either. He closed the empty donut box. “You hungry?”

I was always hungry. But even more, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Grant wasn’t angry; being with him felt like being forgiven. I wanted to soak it up, take it with me, face the next day a little less haunted, a little less hateful.

I took a breath. “Starving.”

“Me, too.” He closed both dictionaries and slid mine across the table toward my backpack. “Let’s get dinner and compare. It’s the only way.”

Grant and I decided to eat dinner at Mary’s Diner, because it stayed open all night. We had hundreds of pages of flowers to compare, and for every discrepancy, we debated the better definition. We agreed that the loser would cross the old definition out of their dictionary and write in the new one.