Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  Laughing, I shared these stories about my father as if they were charming anecdotes, even though my date avoided my eyes and tried to sidetrack me with questions about what I studied in school and what books I read.

  After we finished our meal, he claimed he was supposed to meet his friends for pool across town. He didn’t invite me to tag along.

  As we were walking out, I spotted my roommate Nathan unexpectedly drinking with his cousin and his cousin’s wife by the bar. I parted from my date and joined them for another round of drinks.

  “How was your date?” Nathan asked.

  “I don’t think he’s calling back,” I laughed, and I quickly explained to them how the date had derailed.

  They steered the conversation back to Nathan and his new girlfriend, who had been over to our apartment a handful of times.

  “Don’t you think she has daddy issues?” I asked. “All she kept talking about was what her father wanted her to do with her life.”

  “Who has daddy issues?” his cousin asked, and we laughed.

  Sometime between my second drink and my third, I answered a call from a number I didn’t recognize. A man on a bus told me my father would be getting off near Harvard Street.

  “My dad’s here,” I announced, standing to leave.

  Nathan looked at me, his mouth set in a frown. “Good luck,” he said.

  I walked outside and into the drizzling rain. From beneath the bar’s awning, I watched the 57 bus pull away from the curb. A cluster of students scurried away. My father wasn’t there. I realized I had forgotten to ask which bus my father was on.

  I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and started walking. I waited on the corner across from a tattoo studio where the 64 and the 66 buses stopped, but they came and left without him. I wondered if I might have already missed him, so I started walking home. I waited on my front porch for twenty minutes, constantly checking my phone, but as my buzz started to wear off, I berated myself. I knew better; I should have been sober.

  The clock edged past midnight, and I jumped off my porch and started walking north, toward Harvard Square. I felt like if I just started calling his name he would hear me. I turned down Western Avenue, where the 70 and the 86 buses ran, and then I cut back toward my house. As I approached the McDonald’s, I found my father sitting on the sidewalk, his feet drifting into the street, his head between his knees.

  I stopped beside him and said his name.

  He lifted his head and stretched his arms toward me. “Oh, Danielle,” he groaned. “I got lost.”

  I hooked my arms under his and helped him stand. The smell of alcohol was thick on his breath.

  “I knew if I just started calling your name you would come find me,” he said.

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “I stopped to ask for directions,” he mumbled. “If I’d—if I’d just turned left.”

  I walked him back to my apartment. The weight of his body was heavy on my arm.

  The next morning, I tried to establish ground rules: No drinking or smoking in the house. But when I came home after work, I found him sipping from a giant McDonald’s cup full of orange drink mixed with cheap vodka, as if this weren’t an old trick. As if I wouldn’t be able to tell he was already drunk.

  I stood at the end of the couch and clenched my hands into tired fists. “What is the one thing I asked you?”

  “I’m not hurting anybody,” he said, beginning to roll a cigarette.

  “What is the one thing I asked you not to do?” I repeated.

  “I had a little to drink.” He swiped a few threads of tobacco onto the floor. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “You don’t respect me.”

  “Yes, I do,” he laughed, and he smiled up at me—his dark eyes glassy and far away.

  “You don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I asked you not to drink, and you did it anyway. This is my apartment. I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “It’s just another state of mind, Danielle.” He ran the tip of his tongue along the rolling paper’s adhesive and sealed it with a pinch of his tobacco-stained fingers. “Like when you were in the hospital and you had that stutter. Do you remember? Do you understand?”

  I understood.

  My father was stuck. His mind was an old record, the grooves scratched and collecting dirt. The needle skips backward, repeating the same notes.

  “Your grandmother was a worse drunk than me,” he said. “You had it easy.”

  “Easy?” I repeated. “I had it easy? You say that because you don’t remember. You drink, and you blackout, and you don’t remember anything. But I remember. I have to live with it every day.”

  My father avoided my eyes.

  I wanted to make him remember—the way he treated us, the things he did, the things he said. I recited my memories—my childhood on Nokomis, the years with Fran in Yoe, and the short, terrible months in York—but the more I talked, the louder my voice became. I screamed at him, out the open windows, for the whole world to hear.

  “I’m sorry, Danielle,” he said, reaching for me with his hands. “Can’t you forgive me?”

  “I’m leaving,” I said. I grabbed my keys and my wallet and ran out of the house.

  I had nowhere to go. No friend I felt I could call. I walked circles through my neighborhood and brushed the leaves of vines growing on fences; avoided dogs barking in their yards. I walked until my calves burned and my head ached, and then I walked back to my apartment.

  I was relieved to find him asleep—head back, mouth open—on the couch.

  I went to my room and closed the door and passed out.

  I woke, hours later, to his weight on the edge of my bed.

  He rested his hand on my shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

  I sat up, and he pulled me into his arms. “Please forgive me,” he begged, his body shaking with tears. “Forgive me. Please.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered, beginning to cry. “I forgive you.”

  The next morning I went to work, and when I came home, he was sober. We didn’t talk. My father was always short-tempered and quiet when he didn’t drink. We sat on the couch and watched one of his favorite films, Alice’s Restaurant, set in a deconsecrated church-turned-home. Alice, the titular character, opens a restaurant in a nearby town. She is involved with a man named Ray but has an affair with Shelly, an artist and ex–heroin addict. In one of the final scenes, Shelly returns to the church obviously high. Ray beats him until he reveals his stash, hidden in his art supplies, and then Shelly leaves on his motorcycle and dies.

  My father was a boy in the sixties and missed the antiestablishment, antiwar, countercultural movement that he idealized by a decade. Instead he grew into a punk, shaving his hair into a mohawk. He and his brothers all had motorcycles; my grandmother described them riding the bikes up and down the wooden stairs to the second floor of their apartment and parking the bikes in the living room.

  He was also a heroin addict, before my sister and I were born. He contracted hepatitis B from a needle and spent half a year unable to get off my grandmother’s couch. A few months into his illness, Grandma asked him to install a toilet paper holder, then found him weak and sweating on the bathroom floor. I never learned how my father stopped using heroin, but it was possible his illness was enough to scare him straight.

  My father didn’t stay with me long after our fight. He bought a bus ticket back to Pennsylvania, back to my grandmother’s couch.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MONTHS after my sister was released, I received a call from a New York number I didn’t recognize. The man on the phone told me he had bought my sister a bus ticket, arriving at three-thirty in the morning, and asked if I could pick her up.

  At the time, Boston’s public transit stopp
ed running at one, but I convinced Nathan to give me a ride to South Station. He waited in the car while I ran inside.

  In the center of the bus terminal, my sister sat perched on one of three gigantic suitcases. She was draped in a lime-green shawl that kept falling off her shoulders as she tried to right the suitcases that kept toppling over. I tried not to laugh.

  She followed me outside, to Nathan’s two-door car. Only two of her suitcases fit in his trunk.

  “What do you even have in these?” I complained.

  “God, just put it in the back seat!” she snapped.

  On the drive home, I watched her reflection in the rearview mirror. Nathan’s back seat was too small, and so she reclaimed her perch atop her suitcase—teetering back and forth each time the car took a turn. She wove an elaborate story about the man from New York, who was an opera singer she had met in a club. He had offered to let her stay with him while she and her girlfriend got clean. There was another house; his son; more names than I could remember; shenanigans with a phone. The story ended when he found out she was using again and kicked her out.

  She told me she wanted to get clean. I didn’t believe her, but I agreed to help.

  We let her stay in the same spare room my father had stayed in a few months before, but we didn’t give her a key to the apartment, because she couldn’t be trusted alone.

  Every day, she rode the train downtown and tried begging for money—she told people she had lost her Charlie card, or forgotten her wallet—but she came home with more spare subway tickets than cash. She tried to find work at one of the only strip clubs downtown, but she missed the audition, or wouldn’t make enough money, or didn’t like the club—her stories always changed. Instead, she called some of her old contacts, men with too much money, to wire her hundreds through Western Union.

  One night, after I came home from work, I sat with her in the living room and listened to her rattle off a list of all the drugs she had tried. The list began with the usual suspects—heroin, ecstasy, LSD—but also included dozens of pharmaceuticals and acronyms I didn’t recognize. Her eyes glowed. It felt like she was testing me—like she was trying to see how far she could push me before I snapped.

  “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you glorify this,” I said, finally. “You sound just like our dad.”

  Eileen groaned. “When are you going to realize our parents’ lives weren’t that bad, Danielle? You’re the miserable one,” she laughed. “You’re not happy.”

  I shrugged and tried to change the subject. “Why don’t you just go back to Pennsylvania and serve your time?”

  “I’m not a criminal,” she said, but her voice got louder. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You did do something wrong,” I said. “What about your son?”

  Eileen rolled her eyes. “I’m leaving.” She leapt out of the chair and paced toward the kitchen. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you. You sound just like Grandma.”

  I followed her through the kitchen, upstairs, to the tiny spare room. As she texted one of her new friends, who lived a few blocks from me, to come pick her up, I surveyed the room: Her entire life—her clothes and her makeup and her photo albums and her lingerie and her sketchbooks—was scattered across the floor. I skirted around the edge of the mess and picked things up, piece by piece. I tried to find a logical place for each thing, but she dropped to her knees and used her arms to shovel pile after pile into her suitcases like a front-end loader.

  “Why do you even have some of this stuff?” I asked, holding a heavy-framed photograph of her high school best friend.

  “I don’t know,” she snapped.

  Her phone rang, and she answered, “Hey, baby”—her voice suddenly sweet and small. She spun the fantasy of a girl lounging on a chaise as she fumbled with the zipper on her suitcase. She leaned heavily on the suitcase to try and squeeze it closed, but instead of groaning with the effort, she giggled a tinkling giggle for whoever was on the phone. She dragged two of her suitcases out of the room, and I picked up the last and followed. Halfway down the narrow stairs, Eileen tripped over her luggage and tumbled the rest of the way down.

  I froze in place and squeezed the banister. “Are you all right?”

  “What do you care?” she yelled back. Then, in that other voice, apologized to the man on the phone.

  I followed her through my apartment to the street, where her friend waited in a car parked out front. I helped her load the bags into his car, and then she closed herself into his passenger seat. We didn’t hug or say goodbye; she never even got off the phone.

  An hour later, she called me from the bus terminal. She didn’t have enough money to pay for her extra bags and wanted to know if I would pay her friend back if he swung by. She told me she could send me money later, but I knew she wouldn’t. I told her no.

  “Why do you always have to be such a bitch?” she asked, and then hung up.

  * * *

  —

  MY FATHER SPENT the next two years bouncing back and forth between my grandmother’s and his girlfriend’s apartments. He spent a few short months in South Carolina, where he slept on the steps of a courthouse and on other people’s porches; he claimed the cops didn’t bother him in South Carolina the way they did in York. One summer, he emailed me with plans to hike the Appalachian Trail, complete with photographs of camp stoves built out of aluminum cans and tea candles. Then he told me he wanted to build a tiny house; he tried to convince my grandmother to buy him a small plot of land in West Virginia. But mostly, he sat in my grandmother’s apartment and watched the few channels they got through public access.

  My sister spent the next two years avoiding the warrant for her arrest. She kept a low profile on social media and rarely texted me. She spent a few months traveling with one of her girlfriends. She hopped freight trains and hitched rides with semis across the country. She slept on the street, like our dad.

  When my mother called, she asked me how my father and sister were doing. I told her the few things that trickled through my grandmother to me and acted like I knew more than I did.

  so I can take-care of him

  MY GRANDMOTHER CALLS to tell me my father, who had been living on her couch, is on the street again. He visited Eileen in jail, and then he returned, drunk, to my grandmother’s apartment, where he ran into the building supervisor and said things he shouldn’t have said. The supervisor decided his presence would no longer be tolerated in the building and kicked him out for good.

  “If he just kept his mouth shut, he could have stayed here,” Grandma says, her voice cracking.

  My brain floods with the memory of their lives together in the old Opera House: my father’s tobacco plant growing on the wide windowsill; his junk piled high in the corners of the room. The smell of his cigarettes and the sound of my grandmother’s secondhand emphysema, a persistent, dry cough.

  “Your father was a real help to me, Danielle. He cooked dinner. He did my dishes. He cleaned the apartment.”

  “I know,” I say, chewing on my lips.

  My grandmother tells me the shelters are full so near Christmas. She tells me that my nephew’s father had to drive him to another county for a bed. She is worried, but all I can think is that this has happened before and will happen again, and again, and again, without change.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER MY GRANDMOTHER calls, I dream that one of my teeth fractures into a thousand small pieces. I have been ignoring a bad tooth for five years. I first noticed it during the Obama campaign, when it started as a small abscess, a fluid-filled sac on my gum. Between phone calls, I lanced the abscess with the sharp edge of a fingernail. But the pain has been getting worse; the tooth is loose in its socket. At work, I press my tongue against the tooth and rock it back and forth to ease the pain and pressure in my jaw.

  I finally schedule a
n emergency appointment with a dentist whose office is a few blocks from my apartment. The building is a converted tenement house, and I am unnerved slightly by the slanted floors and off-white walls. When the assistant leads me to the only chair, I notice a hole in the floor, like the one in my sister’s old apartment, which spies on the tile of the floor below.

  The dentist doesn’t believe me when I tell him I have an abscessed tooth; the rot lies underneath the ceramic filling, and the tooth appears fine at first glance. But when he prods the tooth with his metal tool, he laughs in surprise and exclaims, “It’s loose!”

  He still orders an X-ray, to be sure.

  “There’s fluid in the gum,” he says when he returns, “which is why it’s loose. You have two options: You can—”

  “Just pull it,” I say. I already know the tooth is dead, and I can’t afford a root canal.

  “That’s certainly the cheaper option,” he says. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Just pull it.”

  He numbs my gum, each needle a sharp pinch. Then he picks up a blunt-ended tool that looks almost like a screwdriver and levers it against the bottom of my tooth. I feel nothing, even after he pulls the tooth out of its socket with a cotton-ripping sound. He slips my molar into a blue autoclave packet—red strings of tissue still clinging to its root—and I almost ask if I can keep it. I imagine cracking it open with a hammer to expose the rot hidden inside.