Look at Flower

by Robert Dunn

  A Coral Press original novel

  Copyright © by Robert Dunn 2011

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American copyright conventions.

  Published in the United States by Coral Press.

  All characters are fictional and bear no relation to anyone living.

  Cover Design: Linda Pouder

  Cover Type and Illustration: Johnny Myers

  Cover Photograph: Chris Carroll

  Come see more about Flower at:

  coralpress.com and

  lookatflower.com

  To Pat, the One I Love Most

  The Book You Love Most

  Prologue: The Back of the Closet

  After two years and seven months mother died. It was a horrible time, the cancer spreading through her bones, then in remission, then back again, the chemo and radiation stripping her of her hair, her coloring, her energy, her spirit . . . her life. She was only fifty-four. I can’t tell you the pain and dismay I felt standing by her gravesite. She’d been a wife (for twelve years, before she and my father, Andrew, divorced when I was ten); always a fine mother to me and my sister, Cecily; a children’s librarian (on to Harry Potter before anyone else I knew); a member of the town council; an indefatigable writer of letters to the editor of the local paper; a big reader; a great cook (she loved Julia Child, who died only two days before Mom—at ninety-three); and—no, there can’t be an and, because that says I’m summing her up, ending my list of all the things she was . . . and she was too much for that. She was a great woman, my mother, and I loved and respected her.

  Because my father had fallen out of our lives—he was long remarried and across the country—as the oldest child it was my job to go straighten out her affairs. I sent my wife, Kate, and son, Tommy (our one-and-a-half-year-old, who was acting up), back to the motel, and my sister and I headed to Mom’s apartment. It was neat, as always, and I quickly made sense of her checkbook and other documents. My mother was very conscientious, and nothing seemed out of order. Cecily was holding up pretty well, though every hour or so she had to excuse herself and go into the bathroom, where she shut the door.

  Mom had been living in a small apartment in San Francisco’s Marina district, and on Monday I planned to contact the landlord and tell him that the apartment would soon be vacant. I popped the top of a can of Diet Coke and went and sat in the chair that looked out on the Bay. Cecily was in the bathroom again, but when she came out, I knew what we had to do. I guess I was getting up my strength. I don’t mind being the strong guy—I think I’m fairly good at it, when I have to be—but the next step was one I dreaded.

  I heard water run in the sink, and then Cecily opened the door. She’s two years younger than me; a tall, gracious woman who hadn’t yet found a man. She lived in a small town in Washington, a librarian just like Mom.

  “I don’t think I can face it alone,” I said.

  “Peter, what?”

  “Her closet.” I sighed. Just imagining all the silky blouses and linen jackets and wool skirts that used to drape casually yet elegantly on her made my head pound. “Her clothes.”

  “I can do it.”

  “You can?”

  She nodded. “Makes sense to me. Her personal things like that and all—”

  “I’ve gotten a good jump on all the other stuff.”

  “I know, Petey. Thanks.”

  “What do you think we should do with it?”

  Cecily gave me a light smile, then shrugged. “Well, I always thought Mom dressed great, but, you know, she couldn’t really afford the kind of clothes that, well, you know—”

  I got what she was saying. Mom hadn’t been a high-end fashion plate, just a good-looking, barely middle-aged woman, with a job she loved and a quiet, simple life, at least as far as I knew. “So, what, Goodwill?”

  Cecily gave a slight, sad smile. “I think so, Pete.”

  “Well, if you can do it.” I was right then a little light-headed. “I’m—maybe I’ll just sit here a while.”

  Cecily was busy for half an hour or so in the bedroom, and then she came out. She held an orange-colored box, nine-by-twelve inches, four inches high, the hinges busted on three sides, and a piece of the orange covering torn off on the top. “What do you think this is?”

  I shook my head. When we were kids we kept Christmas ornaments in a box sort of like this, but it was quite a bit larger, if I remembered right. “What’s in it?”

  “Something typed.”

  “Really?” I’d become a lawyer, but I used to write short stories, and my curiosity was piqued. “Let me see.”

  She handed the box over. I lifted the lid and saw what looked like a 150 or so page manuscript. I leafed through it. It was typed, on a real typewriter—from the way the characters jumped up and down, some dark, some light, probably a portable. I thought back. When we were little there had been a blue Smith Corona on Mom’s desk, near the telephone.

  “She wrote something?” I said. “What do you think it is?”

  “I looked at the first page. It’s about someone named Flower.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Flower, eh? When’s it from?”

  Cecily read on silently, then said, “Some time in the ’60s, I think. It opens in Haight-Ashbury.”

  “That’s weird.” Mom never talked much about growing up; from what I could tell, she’d just as soon have forgotten it. I did know she’d come from a poor farming family in central Oregon, and that it had been a profound effort of self-invention to make her the cultured librarian she became. I also knew she’d been in the Bay Area before moving back when Cecily and I were grown, but that was the early ’70s, when she was at college at Berkeley. All I’d heard about before then was Oregon. “Is it a novel?”

  “I don’t know—can’t tell.”

  I beckoned for Cecily to pass me the manuscript. The paper was thin, frail, and starting to yellow. I thumbed the pages, and when I saw the name Cynda—my mom’s nickname—I felt myself twitch. A few pages later I found her given name.

  “It’s about someone named Lucinda,” I said.

  Cecily blinked. “A memoir?”

  “You ever hear anything about that?”

  “Mom in Haight-Ashbury?” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that.”

  I quickly calculated. “The times might work out. She was—well, she would have been a teenager back in the Summer of Love days. I don’t know—”

  “Does that make her Flower?”

  I held the box out in front of me, felt another shiver. If the idea of going through her closet, touching her personal clothes, the fabric that had wrapped her own skin, and then finding things like underwear, her secret garments . . . well, this box was even more unsettling. I read the first paragraph. Flower, sitting on the street in Haight-Ashbury, panhandling? I felt oddly shamed just looking over the typescript.

  “I don’t know,” I said. And thought: Not sure I want to.

  “We have to read it, Pete.”

  My breathing quickened. “Are you—”

  “It’s from Mom,” she said. “Here.” She reached out for the box, but oddly I found I couldn’t give it up.

  “I don’t know if I’m—”

  “It’s been a tough day, for sure,” Cecily said. I didn’t see her very often. She didn’t make it down to Woodland Hills much, and since Mom got sick and Tommy was born we didn’t go anywhere but San Francisco; and in truth, we’d never been that close—though, one thing you can say about Mom’s illness, it brought out feelings that had pretty much atrophied. “But, you know, we have to do this.” Cecily disappeared into the kitchen for a minute, then came out with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. “I know Mom wasn’t much of a drinker, but I found this.”

  “Really?” I w
as surprised by this, too. Mom had never drunk anything stronger than an occasional glass of wine, as far as I knew. She even hated beer.

  “Maybe for one of her boyfriends—” Cecily poured an inch and a half into each glass.

  I shook my head. Boyfriends? That was something else I’d never heard about, Mom’s boyfriends. I mean, she was . . . and. . . . Oh, my. My head was spinning and I simply didn’t know when or how it would stop.

  I never drank much, either, but I reached out for the Scotch—J & B Rare, I saw from the label—with unexpected intensity. The liquid burned my throat.

  “Can we both just turn the pages?” Cecily said. She’d brought a chair over beside me, pushed it close. I could hear her soft breathing right next to my ear.

  “I guess so.”

  “Here, I’ll do it if you don’t want to.” I felt urgency in her voice. She made a place between us for the manuscript, then sipped more of her Scotch.

  It took us a few pages to get our reading rhythm right, but then we were turning the pages automatically, pretty much right when the other was ready. Cecily kept the Scotch coming. And what we read about our mother, it’s safe to say, was more astonishing to both of us than words can tell.

  Look at Flower

  Look at Flower sitting on this grimy sidewalk half a block from Ashbury, my tin cup cool on the knees of my jeans where the stitching wore off and my pale skin pops through, wearing a top with embroidery this chick on Page sewed on for free, Toto tucked in between the third and fourth buttons (counting from the bottom), his back paws scratching my belly; look at Flower with her yellow-star-painted fingernails waving the cup and chanting in what Harley calls my sawtooth accent, whatever that means—Harley’s got me a little self-conscious, though what don’t I have to be self-conscious about, if I give it a moment’s thought (which I don’t)—anyway, I’m chanting “Spare change, spare change,” and rattling my cup and letting Toto pop out of my tangerine-colored shirt, when this tall guy in a black collarless suit as out of place here in the Haight as a penguin stops in front of me and says, “Child, can I speak with you?”

  You know, they run buses down Haight Street these days, tourists from Iowa and Kansas and Pennsylvania get on ’em in their limeade pants and plaid jackets, their faces agog through the windows as they see all the heathen hippies doing our heathen hippie thing here in the Summer of Love, like Life magazine called it, and so sometimes I feel just like a baboon in the zoo, and that’s what I feel like now with this man looking down at me. Oh, yeah, I tell him no.

  But of course he’s just like my Dad back in Bend, and he doesn’t take no for an answer; he squats down on his knees—they creak!—and looks straight at me and says, “You look like a darling angel, why are you here among these heathen?”

  See, I told you! They actually use that word!

  “It’s groovy, sir,” I say and plant a big winsome smile on my face—not only Toto’s got that move down—and flutter my spangled fingernails.

  “Groovy?”

  “Yeah, it’s groovy.” Big smile. They assume you’re dumb, you just play dumb. That’s what Harley says, though Harley is dumb, so who knows. He tells me his parents were so hip they named him after the motorcycle (though one night he let slip his dad was an orthodontist in Wichita—what’re the odds?). Still, Harley loves to drive his bike up and down Haight Street, popping wheelies.

  “Daughter, can I reach out to you?” And out goes his big ol’ hand.

  I shrink back, thinking he’s going to touch me.

  “I don’t think so, sir.” I know I have some dirt smudges on my cheeks and elbows from crashing in the park last night.

  “I can provide for you a warm meal and a safe, clean bed. I can—”

  This dude’s buggin’ me! He’s got a high forehead and wispy sandy hair that falls flat over his eyes, and he’s constantly brushing it back. Must be twenty years older than me. (I’m seventeen, telling everyone I’m twenty-one.) His teeth aren’t pretty, either, sort of yellow and a little crooked. (I got great teeth!) And so I simply stand up and say, “I gotta bug, mister, but I thank you for your interest.”

  And I’m up and walking away so fast he can hardly get off his broken knees.

  You ask Flower what day it is, and I couldn’t tell you; but I know there’s a be-in going down in the Panhandle, couple blocks south and closer to the Park, ’cuz, well, there just always is. The Panhandle’s this narrow line of grass between two car-whizzing streets, with these tall, strange trees that shed long, curly pieces of bark like God’s pencil shavings. When I get there I find hundreds of true souls, barefoot, wearing long Indian scarves, banging tambourines, flying kites, tooting pennywhistles, blowing bubbles big as beach balls that float slow and shimmery over the whole crowd. I see a guy I know, Jeff, with a joint as big as a banana; he waves to me, but I keep on going. Sometimes I think I’m so naturally spaced I don’t need weed or acid. Maybe, like everyone says, dope can help me get where I got to get to—but maybe it won’t.

  I push on close to the bandstand, which is pretty clever, it’s just a couple feet off the grass, so when a band’s playing, you can see them but they’re right there with you; we’re all tribes in this together.

  Except today Flower’s gotta listen to this band she doesn’t really dig, the Grateful Dead; I mean, they look pretty good up there, like everyone else sprouting hair and wearing beads, but, you know, their music just goes on and on. Harley says if I were stoneder, their groove would work better on me, but I still dig the Beatles best, remembering them on Ed Sullivan three years ago when I was fourteen and I had to sneak over to Lisa’s house to watch them, Mom saying she wasn’t going to let no long-haired bugs into her house; and there Lisa and I were, shrieking and hollering and pulling our hair out. Even now the Beatles are the coolest of them all, though they haven’t put out a record in almost a year, since Revolver. I’ve heard they know about the scene here in San Francisco and plan on checking the whole thing out. Now that’s a band I’d love to see here in the Panhandle.

  But these Dead guys just noodle around on their guitars (and I swear they’re way out of tune) and don’t play anything like a song. I get a little bored, which is the problem with not being high; but then I pull Toto out of my shirt and bring his wet nose to my mouth and just give him a great big kiss.

  What’s this? The guitarist with these busy muttonchops is beckoning to me, wants me to come up and dance with the band, I guess. Or maybe he wants Toto. He’s pointing at me and waving, then reaching down, and I take his hand—his fingers are really rough and callused—and pulls me up on the stage. He’s got this thick nest of brown hair and these amazing brown eyes.

  “Sugar,” he says, “get into it.”

  And Flower does. I love to dance, let my hands wave above me, feel the beat in my loins—preacherman got me using words like that?—swaying and bobbing, glowing and gyring, slipping and dipping with Toto in my arms, feeling the light just glow off my skin like some gorgeous Ginger Rogers, and just spacing, spacing, spacing. . . .

  What does Flower want? To be free. Cloud free, sunshine free, floating-leaf free. Out of this world free. And . . . I get there. At least today. At least for this one shining moment. I’m . . . just . . . gone. . . .

  - - - - -

  Look at Flower curled up like a cat on her mat in the corner of the Dead house, wearing her patched jeans and embroidered shirt. Yeah, I still don’t like their music any better, but I danced and pranced for hours on the stage, and all the guys in the band kept grinning at me; and then I simply went up to the muttonchopped guitar guy and said, “Hey, I need a place to crash tonight, can I come home with you?” and, “Yeah, sugar,” he said, “sure.”

  The guitarist is Jerry, and the bass player Phil, and they and a few other band dudes are rattling around somewhere. They all live in this great old house on Ashbury, right up from Haight. We headed over there after the show, and they said I could crash anywhere I wanted in this huge living room full of weird old things
, like stuffed animals and mummies and cigar shop Indians—it’s wild. I dropped my bag in a corner and Jerry said it’d be safe there.

  “What’re you guys doing?” I said.

  “Oh, we got a gig tonight at the Dog. We’ll be out late.”

  “So should I—”

  “No, sugar, just make yourself at home. We got a lot of people crashing here. Front door’s always open, though it’s a pretty heavy door.” He smiled his crooked smile. “You gotta leeeeaaannnnn into it—” And he play-pushed his shoulder against something rigid and unyielding. “But you push hard enough, sugar—and utter the magic words—it’ll always open right up.”

  I laughed. “And the magic words are?”

  “Well, they change every day.” Jerry winked. “Tell you what, you just say the first thing that pops into your head—you’ll be close enough.”

  So I hung around a bit, listening to some acoustic music drifting down from upstairs—hey, I heard the band singing along to the Beatles’ Help!—and then the house cleared out, and I took Toto out for a walk, and we spare-changed down Haight a little, and I got enough bread to buy a can of dog food as well as my favorite dinner from this Russian market, a pierogi, with meat and gravy bursting out of this sweet golden crust, and then Toto and I sat in the park for a while till the sun set, just mellowing down; and then we went back to the Dead house.

  The magic password? How about: Sunflower? Like that the door flew open. None of the band were there, but some chicks were making an angel-food cake in the kitchen; when they were done, they gave me a light, airy piece. Then Toto and I settled in a corner of the living room right underneath a naked mannequin from a department store, and I wrapped a corner of a fluffy rug around me as a blanket and used my own bag as my pillow. Toto squirmed a little, then curled up warm against my chest. He started snoring in his cute way, then I nodded out, too, and there we were, both fast asleep.

  Look at Flower waking up. There’s a shimmery lemon yellow sun glowing through these white café curtains, and the room I’m in is lit up and sparkling. It’s May! I love May. (I left home in rainy-Oregon February, been down here two-and-a-half bright and sunny months now.)