The Language of Flowers (15 page)

I closed the book, closed my eyes, and tried to sleep.

Two hours later I got up and dressed for the market. It was cold, and even as I changed my clothes and put on my jacket, I knew I could not give Annemarie Gerber daisies. I had been loyal to nothing except the language of flowers. If I started lying about it, there would be nothing left in my life that was beautiful or true. I hurried out the door and jogged down twelve cold blocks, hoping to beat Renata.

Grant was still in the parking lot, unloading his truck. I waited for him to hand me buckets and then carried them inside. There was only one stool in his booth; I sat down on it, and Grant leaned against the plywood wall.

“You’re early,” he said.

I looked at my watch. It was just past three in the morning. “You, too.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. I couldn’t, either, but I didn’t say anything.

“I met this woman,” I said. I turned my stool away from Grant as if I would help a customer through the window, but the market was nearly empty.

“Yeah?” he said. “Who?”

“Just some woman,” I said. “She came into Bloom yesterday. I helped her sister last weekend. She says her husband doesn’t want her anymore. You know, in a—” I stopped, unable to finish.

“Hmm,” Grant said. I felt his eyes all over my back, but I didn’t turn to face him. “That’s tough. It was the Victorian era, you know? Not a lot of talk about sex.”

I hadn’t thought of that. We watched the market begin to fill in silence. Renata would come through the door any minute, and I would think of nothing but someone else’s wedding flowers for hours.

“Desire,”
Grant said finally. “I would go with
desire
. I think that’s as close as you’ll get.”

I didn’t know desire. “How?”

“Jonquil,” Grant said. “It’s a form of narcissus. They grow wild in the southern states. I have some, but the bulbs won’t bloom till spring.”

Spring wasn’t for months. Annemarie didn’t appear as though she could wait that long. “There’s no other way?”

“We could force the bulbs in my greenhouse. I don’t, usually; the flowers are so associated with spring, there isn’t much of a market for them until late February. But we can try, if you want.”

“How long will it take?”

“Not long,” he said. “I bet you could see flowers by mid-January.”

“I’ll ask her,” I said. “Thanks.” I started to walk away, but Grant stopped me with his hand on my shoulder. I turned around.

“This afternoon?” he asked.

I thought about the flowers, his camera, and my dictionary. “I should be done by two,” I said.

“I’ll pick you up.”

“I’ll be hungry,” I said as I walked away.

Grant laughed. “I know.”

Annemarie looked more relieved than disappointed when I told her the news. January would be fine, she said, better than fine. The holidays were busy; the month would be a blur. She wrote down her phone number, wrapped her body tightly with the red belt of her coat, and walked out the door after Bethany, who was already halfway up the block. I had given her ranunculus:
You are radiant with charms
.

Grant was early, as he had been the week before. Renata invited him in. He sat at the table, watching us work and eating chicken curry out of a steaming foam container. A second container, unopened, sat beside him. When I finished the table arrangements, Renata said I could go.

“The boutonnieres?” I asked, looking into the box where she was lining up the bridesmaids’ bouquets.

“I can finish them,” she said. “I have plenty of time. You just go on.” She waved me out the door.

“You want to eat here?” Grant asked, handing me a plastic fork and a napkin.

“In the car. I don’t want to waste light.” Renata looked at us with curiosity but didn’t ask. She was the least meddlesome person I had ever met, and I felt a twinge of affection for her as I followed Grant out the door.

The curry and our breath fogged the windows on the long drive to Grant’s house. We drove in silence, the only noise the constant hum of the defroster. It was wet out, but the afternoon was clearing. By the time Grant opened the gate and drove past the house, the sky was blue. He went inside for the camera, and I was surprised to see him enter the square three-story building and not the house.

“What’s that?” I asked when he returned, gesturing to the building from which he had just come.

“The water tower,” he said. “I converted it into an apartment. You want to see inside?”

“Light,” I said, looking to where the sun was already starting to descend.

“Right.”

“Maybe after.”

“Okay. You want another lesson?” Grant asked. He stepped toward me and dropped the camera strap around my head. His hands brushed against the back of my neck.

I shook my head no. “Shutter speed, aperture, focus,” I said, turning dials and repeating the vocabulary he had thrown at me the week before. “I’ll teach myself.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be inside.” He turned and walked back into the water tower. I waited until I saw a light flip on in the third-story window before I turned toward the rose garden.

I would start with the white rose; it felt like a good place to begin. Sitting in front of a flowering bush, I dug a blank notebook out of my backpack. I would teach myself photography by documenting my successes and my failures. If, next week, I developed the film and saw that only one photo was clear, I needed to know exactly what I had done to produce the image. I numbered a sheet of paper from one to thirty-six.

In the waning light I photographed the same half-opened white rosebud, writing down in descriptive, nontechnical terms the reading of the light meter and the exact positions of the various dials and knobs. I recorded the focus, the position of the sun, and the angles of the shadows. I measured the distance of the camera to the rose in multiples of the length of my palm. When I ran out of light and film, I stopped.

Grant was sitting at his kitchen table when I returned. The door was open, and inside was as cold as outside. The sun had disappeared, and with it all warmth. I rubbed my hands together.

“Tea?” he asked, holding out a steaming mug.

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. “Please.”

We sat across from each other at a weathered wood picnic table identical to the one outside. It was pushed up against a small window that framed a view of the property: sloping rows of flowers, the sheds and greenhouses, and the abandoned house. Grant stood up to adjust the
lid on a rice cooker that was spewing liquid out of a small hole. He opened a cupboard and retrieved a bottle of soy sauce, which he set on the uneven table.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. I looked at the stove. Nothing was cooking except the rice. “You want a tour?”

I shrugged but stood up.

“This is the kitchen.” The cupboards were painted a pale green, the countertops gray Formica with silver trim. He didn’t appear to own a cutting board, and the counters were dented and scraped from slicing. There was an antique white-and-chrome gas stove with a folding shelf, and on the shelf sat a row of empty green glass vases and a single wooden spoon. The spoon had a white sticker with a faded price on its tip, leading me to think it had either never been used or never been washed. Either way, I was not particularly anxious to sample his cooking.

In the corner of the room was a black metal staircase, spiraling through a small square hole. Grant began to climb, and I followed him up. The second floor contained a living room big enough for only an orange velour love seat and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. An open door led to a white tile bathroom with a claw-foot tub. There was no television and no stereo. I didn’t even see a telephone.

Grant stepped back onto the staircase and led me to the third floor, which was covered wall to wall with a thick foam mattress. Crumbling foam was visible where the sheets had peeled away from the edges. Clothes sat in piles in two corners, one folded, the other not. Where there should have been pillows, there were stacks of books.

“My bedroom,” Grant said.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“In the middle. Closer to the books than the clothes, usually.” He climbed across the foam mattress and switched off the reading lamp. I held on to the banister and climbed back down into the kitchen.

“Nice,” I said. “Quiet.”

“I like it that way. I can forget where I am, you know?” I did know. In Grant’s water tower, settled in the absence of all things automatic and digital, it was easy to forget not just the location but also the decade.

“My roommate’s punk band practices all night in the downstairs of our apartment,” I said.

“That sounds awful.”

“It is.”

He walked over to the counter and spooned hot, soggy rice into large ceramic soup bowls. He handed me a bowl and a spoon. We began to eat. The rice warmed my mouth, throat, and stomach. It was much better than I had expected.

“No phone?” I asked, looking around. I’d thought I was the only young person in the modern world not attached to a communication device. Grant shook his head no. I continued: “No other family?”

Grant shook his head again. “My father left before I was born, went back to London. I’ve never met him. When my mother died, she left me the land and the flowers, nothing else.” He took another bite of rice.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

Grant poured on more soy sauce. “Sometimes. I miss her as she was when I was a child, when she cooked dinner every night and packed my lunches with sandwiches and edible flowers. But toward the end of her life, she began to confuse me with my father. She’d go into a rage and throw me out of the house. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she would apologize with flowers.”

“Is that why you live here?”

Grant nodded. “And I’ve always liked being alone. No one can understand that.” I understood.

He finished his rice and helped himself to another bowl, then reached for mine and filled it up as well. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

Grant got up to wash his dish and set it upside down on a metal drying rack. I washed my own and did the same. “Ready to go?” he asked.

“The film?” I grabbed the camera from where he had hung it on a hook and handed it to him. “I don’t know how to release it.”

He rewound the camera and unloaded the film. I pocketed it.

“Thanks.”

We climbed into Grant’s truck and started down the road. We were
halfway back to the city when I remembered Annemarie’s request. I sucked in my breath.

“What?” he asked.

“The jonquil. I forgot.”

“I planted it while you were in the rose garden. It’s in a paper box in the greenhouse—the bulbs require darkness until the foliage starts to grow. You can check on them next Saturday.”

Next Saturday. As if we had a standing date. I watched Grant drive, his profile hard and unsmiling. I would check on them next Saturday. It was a simple statement but one that changed everything as completely as the discovery of the yellow rose.

Jealousy, infidelity. Solitude, friendship
.

It was dark out by the time I came in for dinner. The house was bright
, and inside the frame of the open door, Elizabeth sat alone at the kitchen table. She had made chicken soup—the smell had reached me in the vines, the scent a physical draw—and she sat hunched over her bowl, as if studying her reflection in the broth.

“Why don’t you have any friends?” I asked.

The words escaped without premeditation. For a week I’d watched Elizabeth manage the harvest with a heavy, dejected quality, and the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, alone and so obviously lonely, pushed the words right out of me.

Elizabeth looked over to where I stood. Quietly, she stood up, dumping the contents of her bowl back into the soup pot. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire beneath it.

She turned to me. “Well, why don’t you?”

“I don’t want any,” I said. Besides Perla, the only children I knew were from my class at school. They called me
orphan girl
, and it had gotten so that I doubted even my teacher remembered my real name.

“Why not?” Elizabeth pressed.

“I don’t know,” I said, my voice growing defensive. But I did know.

I had been suspended for five days for my attack on the school bus driver, and for the first time in my life, I was not miserable. Home with
Elizabeth, I didn’t need anyone else. Every day I followed behind as she managed the harvest, steering workers toward ripe vines and away from grapes that needed another day in the sun, another two. She popped grapes into her own mouth and then into mine, spewing numbers that correlated to the ripeness: 74/6, 73/7, and 75/6.
This
, she would say, when we located a ripe bunch,
is what you need to remember. This exact flavor—the sugars at seventy-five, the tannins at seven. This is a perfectly ripe wine grape, which neither machine nor amateur can identify
. By the end of the week, I had chewed and spit grapes from nearly every plant, and the numbers began to come to me almost before the grapes entered my mouth, as if my tongue was simply reading them like the number on a postage stamp.

The soup began to simmer, and Elizabeth stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “And wash up. The soup’s hot.”

At the table, Elizabeth set out two bowls and loaves of bread as big as cantaloupes. I tore the bread in half, scooping out the soft, white middle and dipping it in the steaming broth.

“I had a friend, once,” Elizabeth said. “My sister was my friend. I had my sister and my work and my first love, and there was nothing else in the world I wanted. Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. So I focused every waking moment on running a successful business, on growing the most sought-after wine grapes in the region. The goal I set was so ambitious, and took so much time, that I didn’t have even a minute to think about everything I’d lost.”

Taking me in, I understood, had changed that. I was a constant reminder of family, of love, and I wondered if she regretted her decision.