The Language of Flowers (16 page)

“Victoria,” Elizabeth asked abruptly. “Are you happy here?”

I nodded, my heartbeat suddenly racing. No one had ever asked me a question like that without immediately following with something like,
because if you were happy, if you had the sense to know that you were lucky to be here, you wouldn’t act like such an ungrateful little brat
. But Elizabeth’s smile, when it finally came, was only relieved. “Good,” she said. “Because I’m happy you’re here. In fact, I’m not looking forward to you going back to school tomorrow. It’s been nice having you home; you’ve opened up a little. For the first time, you’ve seemed interested in something, and
while I admit I’m a bit jealous of the grapes, it does bring me joy to see you engaging in the world.”

“I hate school,” I said. Just uttering the word made my soup bubble up at the back of my throat, a sick, nauseous feeling.

“Do you really hate school? Because I know you don’t hate to learn.”

“I really hate it.” I swallowed once, and then told her what they called me, told her it was just like every school I’d ever been to, that I was singled out, labeled, watched, and never taught.

Elizabeth took her last bite of bread, and then carried her bowl to the sink.

“We’ll withdraw you tomorrow, then. I can teach you more here than you’ll ever learn in that school. And if you ask me, you’ve suffered enough for one lifetime.” She came back to the table, retrieved my bowl, and refilled it to the brim.

My relief was so expansive I finished the second bowl, and then a third. Still, an internal lightness threatened to lift me off the chair and throw me, spinning, up the stairs and into bed.

My photographs were awful. They were so bad I blamed the one-hour
photo lab where I had them printed and took the negatives to a specialty store. The sign in front boasted that they printed only the work of professionals. It took them three days to make the prints, and when I picked them up, they were just as bad. Worse, even. My mistakes were more pronounced, the blurry green-and-white blobs more defined within the muddy background. I threw the photos into the gutter and sat down on the curb outside the photography store, defeated.

“Experimenting with abstraction?” I turned. A young woman stood behind me, looking at the photographs littering the street. She wore an apron and smoked a cigarette. The ash floated down around the photos. I wished they would catch fire and burn.

“No,” I said. “Experimenting with failure.”

“New camera?” she asked.

“No, new to photography.”

“What do you need to know?”

I picked one of the prints up out of the street and handed it to her. “Everything,” I said.

She stepped on her cigarette and considered the print. “I think it’s a film-speed issue,” she said, motioning for me to follow her inside. She led me to the film display, pointing out numbers on the corners of the
boxes I hadn’t even noticed. The shutter speed was too slow, she explained, and the film speed a poor match for the low light of late afternoon. I wrote everything she said down on the back of the prints and shoved the stack into my back pocket.

I was anxious to get off work the following Saturday. The store was empty; we didn’t have a wedding. Renata was doing paperwork and didn’t look up from her desk all morning. When I tired of waiting for her to release me, I stood close to her desk and tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

“All right, go,” she said, waving me away. I turned and was halfway out the door when I heard her add, “And don’t come back tomorrow, or next week, or the week after.”

I stopped. “What?”

“You’ve worked twice as many hours as I’ve paid you for, you must know that.” I hadn’t been keeping track. It wasn’t as if I could have gotten another job even if I’d wanted to. I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and no skills. I assumed Renata understood this and worked me as she wished. I didn’t feel resentful.

“So?”

“Take a few weeks off. Stop in the Sunday after next and I’ll pay you as if you’d worked—I owe you the money. I’ll need you again around Christmas, and I have two weddings on New Year’s Day.” She handed me an envelope of cash, the one she should have given me the following day. I put it in my backpack.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

Grant was in the parking lot of the market when I arrived, loading up a bucket of unsold flowers. I approached and held up the blurry photos, spread out like a fan. “Now you want a lesson?” he asked, amused.

“No.” I climbed inside his truck.

He shook his head. “Chinese or Thai?”

I was reading the notes I had scratched on the back of the embarrassing
prints and didn’t answer. When he stopped for Thai, I waited in the car.

“Something spicy,” I called through the open window. “With shrimp.”

I had purchased ten rolls of color film, all different speeds. I would start with 100 in the bright afternoon light and work my way to 800 just after sunset. Grant sat on the picnic table with a book, glancing in my direction every few pages. I barely moved from a low crouch between two white rosebushes. All the flowers were open; in another week, the roses would be gone. As I had the week before, I numbered all my photographs and noted every angle and setting. I was determined to get it right.

When the darkness was nearly complete, I put away my camera. Grant no longer sat at the picnic table. Light shone from the windows of the water tower through a thick layer of steam. Grant was cooking, and I was starving. I gathered all ten rolls of film into my backpack and walked into the kitchen.

“Hungry?” He watched me zip up my backpack and inhale deeply.

“Are you really asking me that?”

Grant smiled. I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was empty except for yogurt and a gallon of orange juice. I picked up the orange juice and drank it out of the container.

“Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks.” I took another swig and sat down at the table. “What’re you making?”

He pointed to six empty cans of beef ravioli. I made a face.

“You want to cook?” he asked.

“I don’t cook. Group homes have cooks, and since then, I’ve eaten out.”

“You’ve always lived in group homes?”

“Since Elizabeth’s. Before that I lived with lots of different people. Some were good cooks,” I said, “others weren’t.”

He studied me as if he wanted to know more, but I didn’t elaborate. We sat down with bowls of ravioli. Outside, it had started to rain again, a pounding rain that threatened to turn the dirt roads into rivers.

When we finished eating, Grant washed his dish and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for him to come back down and drive me home, but he didn’t. I drank more orange juice and looked out the window. When I grew hungry again, I searched the cupboard until I found an unopened package of cookies and ate every one. Grant still did not return. I put on a pot of tea and stood over it, warming my hands on the open blue flame. The kettle began to whistle.

Filling two mugs, I pulled tea bags from a box on the counter and climbed the stairs.

Grant was sitting on the orange love seat on the second floor, a book open on his lap. I handed him a mug and sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf. The room was so small that even though I sat as far away from him as possible, he could have touched my knee with his toes by stretching his legs. I turned to the bookshelf. On the bottom was a stack of oversized books: gardening manuals, mostly, interspersed with biology and botany textbooks.

“Biology?” I asked, picking one up and opening it to a scientific drawing of a heart.

“I took a class at a community college. After my mother died, I thought briefly of selling the farm and going to college. But I dropped out of the class halfway through. I didn’t like the lecture halls. Too many people, and not enough flowers.”

A thick blue vein curved out of the heart. I traced it with my finger and looked up at Grant. “What’re you reading?”

“Gertrude Stein.”

I shook my head. I’d never heard of her.

“The poet?” he asked. “You know, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?”

I shook my head again.

“During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her,” Grant said. “She’d spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort.”

“What does she mean, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?” I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.

“That things just are what they are,” he said.

“ ‘A rose is a rose.’ ”

“ ‘Is a rose,’ ” he finished, smiling faintly.

I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. “Except when it’s yellow,” I said. “Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying.”

“That’s what I’ve always thought,” said Grant. “But I’m giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.” He turned back to his book.

I pulled another book off the shelf, higher up. It was a thin volume of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had read most of her work in my early teens, when I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers, and read everything I could get my hands on. The pages of the book were earmarked with notes scribbled in the margins. The poem I opened to was eleven verses, all beginning with the words
Love me
. I was surprised. I had read the poem, I was sure, but didn’t remember the dozens of references to love, only the references to flowers. I replaced the book and withdrew another, and then another. All the while, Grant sat, silently turning pages. I looked at my watch. Ten past ten.

Grant looked up. He checked his own watch and then looked out the window. It was still raining. “You want to go home?”

The roads were wet; the drive would be slow. I would get soaked in the two blocks between Bloom and the blue room, and Natalya’s band would be practicing. Renata did not expect me at work the following day. No, I realized, I did not particularly want to go home.

“Do I have another choice?” I asked. “I’m not sleeping here with you.”

“I won’t stay here. You can have my bed. Or sleep on the couch. Or wherever.”

“How do I know you won’t come back in the middle of the night?”

Grant pulled his keys out of his pocket and detached the key to the water tower. He handed it to me and walked down the stairs. I followed him out.

In the kitchen he grabbed a flashlight out of a drawer and a flannel jacket off a hook. I opened the door, and he walked out, lingering under the cover of the stoop. Rain ran in sheets around the protected step. “Good night,” he said.

“Spare key?” I asked.

Grant sighed and shook his head, but he was smiling. He leaned over and picked up a rusted watering can, half full of rainwater. He poured the water through the spout as if he was watering the sodden gravel. In the bottom was a key. “It’s probably rusted beyond use. But here you go, just in case.” He handed me the key, and our hands clasped around the wet metal.

“Thanks,” I said. “Good night.” He stood still as I inched the door closed and turned the lock.

I breathed in the emptiness of the water tower and climbed the stairs. On the third floor, I pulled the blanket off Grant’s bed and returned to the kitchen, curling up underneath the picnic table. If the door opened, I would hear it.

But all I heard, all night, was the rain.

Grant knocked on the door at half past ten the next morning. I was still asleep under the table. It had been twelve hours, and my body was stiff and slow to rise. At the door I paused, leaning against the solid wood and rubbing my eyes, my cheekbones, and the back of my neck. I opened the door.

Grant stood in the clothes he’d worn the night before and looked only slightly more awake than I felt. Stumbling into the kitchen, he sat down at the table.

The storm had passed. Outside the window, under the cloudless sky, flowers glistened. It was a perfect day for photography.

“Farmers’ market?” he asked. “On Sundays I sell down the road instead of in the city. You want to come?”

December was a bad time of year for fruit and vegetables, I remembered. Oranges, apples, broccoli, kale. But even if it had been midsummer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to the farmers’ market. I didn’t want to risk seeing Elizabeth. “Not really. I need film, though.”

“Come with me, then. You can wait in the truck while I sell what I have left over from yesterday. Then I’ll take you to the drugstore.”

Grant changed his clothes upstairs, and I brushed my teeth with
toothpaste and my finger. Splashing water on my face and hair, I went to wait in the truck. When Grant joined me a few minutes later, he had shaved and put on a clean gray sweatshirt and only slightly dirty jeans. He still looked tired, and he pulled up his hood as he locked the door of the water tower.

The road had flooded in places, and Grant drove slowly, his truck swaying like a boat in deep water. I closed my eyes.

Less than five minutes later, he stopped the truck, and when I opened my eyes, we were in a crowded parking lot. I slunk down in my seat while Grant jumped out. Pulling his hood low over his forehead, Grant slid the buckets out of his truck. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear against the locked door, trying not to hear the noises of the busy market or remember the many times I’d been there as a child. Finally, he returned.

“Ready?” he asked.

Grant drove to the nearest store, a country drugstore with fishing gear and pharmaceuticals. Being out in the world, in such close proximity to Elizabeth, made me nervous.

I paused, my hand on the door of the truck. “Elizabeth?”

“She won’t be here. I don’t know where she shops, but I’ve been coming here for over twenty years, and I’ve never seen her.”

Relieved, I walked inside and went straight to the photo counter, dropping my canisters in an envelope and pushing them through a slot.

“One hour?” I asked a bored-looking clerk in a blue apron.

“Less,” she said. “I haven’t had any film to print in days.”