Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  I tried to avoid her eyes.

  In the middle of the night, I woke abruptly to a sudden weight on my chest. My aunt had dropped the carrier onto me; I watched her zip him inside. “Leave him in there,” my aunt commanded. Sometime later, I woke again after he wedged the point of his nose between the zippers and wiggled his way free. Before I could react, he curled up like a stole around my neck and fell back asleep. He slept there until morning, when I left to weave.

  * * *

  —

  WEAVING A NAVAJO rug requires mastery over the tension of your wool. Each time Jennie visited my loom, she pressed valleys into my thread and warned me not to weave so tight. I remembered when my grandmother had tried to teach me how to crochet: The yarn felt like it was slipping through my fingers, so I overreacted, pulling the yarn too tight. By the end, I could barely fit the hook through a stitch. Each time Jennie visited my loom, she corrected me, but the walls of my rug caved steadily in.

  * * *

  —

  NEITHER MY COUSIN nor my kitten were home when I returned, but a few minutes after I arrived, one of the neighbors knocked on the door. Miss dangled from his hands. “She really chased my two cats around!” he laughed. “They needed it, too. They’re both fat.”

  I accepted Miss into my hands and let him climb onto my shoulder. “He’s a boy,” I said.

  “That’s not a boy,” he insisted.

  I was too tired to argue. I thanked him and closed the door. I walked across the room and set Miss down on the couch, and then I began packing my things. I was angry—with myself for overstaying my welcome, but also with my aunt. I was not the daughter, and she was not the mother, that either of us wanted.

  I apologized to Mary Walker, but told her I needed to leave. Understanding, she told me not to worry, that I would always be welcome back.

  [Dumpster]

  IN TUCSON, WHILE taking out the trash one morning, I witnessed a temporal fracture, the narrative of my life unraveling into two separate timelines. In one, I watched my friend walk down the sidewalk toward my apartment. We were heading to a breakfast meeting with two editors, and I had offered to give her a ride. A homeless man staggered behind her and seemed to call out to her. She held her eyes on her phone and stepped away from him and into the street.

  In the second timeline, I watched my father stagger down the sidewalk toward my apartment. We hadn’t spoken in weeks, and I was surprised to see him. A woman walked some distance ahead of him and seemed preoccupied with her phone. He stretched his hand forward and called out to her, but when she lengthened the distance between them, he dropped his eyes to the ground.

  I hurried across the lot and stopped on the sidewalk, some middle distance between my friend and my father, and told her I needed a minute. “That’s my dad,” I said, as if those three words could reconcile this moment for her, or for me, or for him.

  My father walked with an obvious limp. His head hung as heavy as the black bag in his hand. I took his bag and we walked, slow and quiet, toward my apartment door. My father told me someone attacked him; the blood bloomed around his eye. The man had kicked him repeatedly in the side. I set his bag in the living room and helped him onto the couch. He fell asleep before I even closed the door.

  Later, I found court documents in my father’s bag: a record of domestic assault and a mandate to attend domestic violence classes. I folded the documents back into their envelope and slid the envelope back inside his bag.

  My father and his girlfriend got back together, even after she called me to ask if he had ever hurt us girls.

  I told her he had. I remembered the way he had pinned my sister by the throat to the ground. But I didn’t need to elaborate.

  “Oh god,” she said, filling in my affirmation with her own memories. “Oh god.”

  “You should leave him,” I told her. “He’s never going to change.”

  “But I love him,” she said. “I love him.”

  I fell quiet. There wasn’t anything I could say that would convince her to leave.

  Weeks later, they moved to California together. There, she finally did leave him after he hurt her again. A new court placed him on probation and mandated he take domestic violence classes.

  My father sent me pictures from his life in San Jose: the portable trailers where the homeless could shower; ride-share bikes discarded in piles on the side of the road; picnic tables arranged in the sand and the sun. He captioned the last photograph: “This may be the hardest year of my life.”

  [Correspondence]

  AFTER MY MOTHER’S memorial service, a man who knew her begins emailing me. My aunt has given him my address. He tells me the Lees were like his second family and that one of my uncles was his closest friend.

  He describes my mother as “the intellectual one”; as “exceptionally bright.” She was academic, always reading. He pictures her with books folded under her arms. “Studying was your mother’s world,” he writes. “It was as if she found solace in this lone world of hers.” When I forward the email to Marie, she responds: Oh gosh. Sounds like a description of you almost…

  He tells me that one time, she and her brother got into a fight. He knocked her books out of her arms, but she didn’t fight back. She cried, picked up her books, and carried on her way.

  He tells me her parents were abusive. They drank. He thought my mother wanted a life away from what she went through growing up.

  He tells me to let him know when I plan to visit the reservation; he tells me he has more to share. I never do. I am afraid of the girl he knew—knowing, myself, where she would go.

  A few months after we begin corresponding, my aunt calls and asks if I am still speaking to him. I tell her I am. “He’s a liar,” she warns me. “Don’t listen to anything he says.”

  [Changing Woman]

  TWO MONTHS LATER, at the end of the summer, I enrolled in another weaving workshop in Window Rock. I rented a room in town instead of staying with my aunt.

  My cousin-sister had her baby a few weeks earlier; she was the tiniest little girl.

  I attended classes between running errands: driving my cousin to her neonatal appointments, to the laundromat in Fort Defiance, to the Walmart in Gallup to buy a breast pump and diapers and a new car seat. I skipped the weaving field trips the other women took to Canyon de Chelly and the Hubbell Trading Post so I could spend time with my niece, who was precious, a thing I couldn’t let go.

  Because the workshop was being held at the hotel and not at Richardson, I was able to weave after dinner and late into the night. I wove obsessively, single-mindedly, as I so often lived my life. I knew there were stories of women falling sick from weaving in excess, and taboos about weaving at night, but I was determined to finish my rug before I left at the end of the week. In my exhaustion, I missed counts: My weft skipped over warp threads, and the lines of my design grew crooked.

  My aunt asked to see pictures of my progress, but when I showed her the partially finished rug, she squinted and asked what the design meant.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just practicing.” Mary Walker had told us to consider our first project as a sampler, a way to hone our technique.

  “It should tell a story,” my aunt insisted, and she pointed at the top of the rug, where the bare bones of the warp still showed through. “This could be the sky,” she said, and then she pointed at the squash blossom set against blue. “And that could be the sun.”

  I told her I would think about it.

  * * *

  —

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON, I visited one of my grandmothers in Sanders. She drove me around my family’s allotment, and she took me to visit Pauline Tom’s house, where one of my grandfathers still lived. Water collected in a deep, muddy pool in the front yard. We entered through the back. A dusty, blinking kitten cleaned his paw in front of the door, overlooking the water.
The house, three small rooms, smelled like a litter box.

  “She raised eight kids here,” my grandmother said.

  We drove up the road to visit another grandmother, and when I showed them a picture of my rug, her husband chuckled. “That’s not a Navajo design,” he said, knowingly; his cousin was Barbara Teller, he said, and he would know.

  I assured them I knew, that I was just practicing. For the rest of the visit, they talked around and over my head.

  We returned to my grandmother’s trailer, and while she made dinner, I walked down her dirt road toward the river. A white dog followed me. I walked past a pink trailer and an old corral. The grass was tall and yellow. I found an empty wash, then turned around and walked back. As I walked toward the front door, a rufous hummingbird buzzed away from her feeder.

  We sat on her couch and ate spaghetti with garlic bread, and she told me about my cousin’s kinaaldá, which had been held at her house a few weeks before. Women from all branches of our family had gathered around my grandmothers’ shade. They leaned thin boards of wood against its poles to build a makeshift hogan. My cousin ran in the morning with her sisters and brothers, and my grandmothers smiled, recalling their laughter. Then they lay my cousin out on a Pendleton blanket and massaged her entire body. They lined a pit, dug into the ground at the center of the hogan, with corn husks, and she mixed the cake over the warm coals. My grandmothers were there throughout the ceremony, to guide her. “She did such a good job,” my grandmother said, “and the kinaaldá is so important. It gives these girls a sense of worth, a sense of pride.”

  Before I left, she dug inside her fridge and cut a thin wedge from the cake’s heart. She wrapped it in aluminum foil and handed it to me. “You have so much to learn,” my grandmother said, pressing the package into my hands.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER MY MOTHER’S memorial service, as we drove back to my grandmother’s house, my cousin-sister had pointed over my shoulder, out the window, at the steppe and the mesas beyond the road. “That’s where I ran for my kinaaldá,” she said.

  “Your what?” I had asked, startled by the word I didn’t recognize.

  “Her key-naal-dah,” my aunt repeated, stressing each syllable. “Her puberty ceremony.”

  My mind flashed suddenly to an entry I had read in my mother’s diary, about my cousin-sister: The entry declared she was on the rag. I hadn’t known who she was then. I flipped through her diaries looking for a mention of my period and felt an acute sense of jealousy when I didn’t find anything.

  “She did the entire ceremony herself,” my aunt said, glowing.

  My eyes locked on to the edge of pink stone and blue sky. “I never did anything like that,” I said, remembering the way I had tried to conceal my first period from my grandmother and Fran.

  My aunt sighed. “Didn’t your mom teach you nothing?”

  Once we were home, my aunt gave me a picture book: Kinaaldá: A Navajo Girl Grows Up. The book tells the story of the first kinaaldá, which is the story of Changing Woman. In the story, First Man found a baby girl one morning at dawn, and he and First Woman raised her under the direction of the Holy People. This girl was Changing Woman, who was named for the speed at which she grew—for each day, she grew a year, and at the end of twelve days, she reached puberty. The Holy People held the first kinaaldá to mark her transformation. In the Navajo creation stories, Changing Woman is Mother; is Earth; is fertility; is time. As the seasons pass, she ages—an old woman in winter, born again each spring. She birthed the people, the Diné, by rubbing excess skin from her arms and breasts. She created the four original clans and gave the people the blessingway: rites and prayers of healing, creation, harmony, and peace.

  My great-grandmother, Pauline Tom, was very traditional. She knew the ways. She knew the stories and the ceremonies. She tried to teach my grandmothers, and they tried to teach my mothers, and they tried to teach their daughters, but not everyone listened or cared.

  Later that night, in the dark, my cousin-sister told me her mother disappeared from her kinaaldá, that her grandmothers were not there.

  “Where was your mom?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she sighed, an exaggerated sigh that masked a laugh. “She was just off with some man.”

  * * *

  —

  I STRUGGLED WITH the final, long inch of my rug, which required a different, smaller set of tools. Instead of cedar, the weavers adapted the thin metal wire they stripped out of an old umbrella to use as a batten. The last few rows were woven using a tapestry needle. My back and shoulders ached, but I was determined to finish.

  I noticed Lori watching me, and when I caught her eye, she smiled. “Nizhóní,” she said. Beautiful.

  Before I even finished my rug, Jennie prepared a new warp for me to weave at home. Then she helped me take my finished rug off the loom. I gave the rug to my cousin-sister before I left.

  I drove six hours home in the dark. Once home, I dug around the kitchen until I remembered the cake my grandmother had given me. I pulled it out of my bag and ate it with my hands. The cake was moist and dense and gritty, and just a little bit sweet.

  [Selvage]

  DURING THE LAST short weeks of summer, I met someone playing a videogame. He lived in Canada, but after we started talking, he booked a flight to visit me in Tucson. He spent ten days with me.

  I wanted to take him hiking, but the Tucson summer was too hot for him, so we spent most of those days sharing our favorite things with each other: We binge-watched an entire season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and we played through the beginning of Dark Souls, and on the long drive to the reservation, we listened to Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men.

  I wanted him to meet my cousin-sister and my niece, a lima bean in his hands. I wanted to show him the pink mesas and the red clay and the sagebrush that flowered yellow. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  We drove my cousin-sister to pick up dinner, and she told us quiet, sad stories from the back seat. When we returned to the house, my aunt pressed my new boyfriend to take shots with her, but he declined. My cousin-brother and his girlfriend turned up, and they started grilling steaks in the backyard. The girlfriend swatted at a small dog with a broom, and I could feel him tense beside me. He grew quieter and quieter the longer we stayed, and I told him we could leave.

  We rented a room and lay in bed facing each other. The tears collected in our eyes. He understood all the ways I wished that place could be; I understood if I wanted to be whole, I would never be able to stay.

  A few weeks after he returned home, he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

  In November, I visited him in Toronto, where I met his family for the first time. I brought Miss with me, and he stayed in Toronto, to live with my future mother-in-law. My future husband lived an hour and a half outside Toronto, in a place called Kitchener-Waterloo. We spent most days at his rented office space, where he tutored high school and university students in physics and chemistry. I graded papers in the lobby.

  The town and the landscape reminded me of Pennsylvania. One evening after work, we passed an Amish horse and buggy on the road.

  His stepmother helped us plan the wedding, which was held at a country club. When Owen first suggested it, I had laughed hysterically, and then begun to cry. I didn’t belong there, I told him. But the club was one originally founded by the Jewish families who couldn’t get into the usual country clubs; its charter mandated a diverse membership. Before I left for Tucson, we toured the venue. His father handed us a packet when we arrived, complete with possible table arrangements, hors d’oeuvres, and the menu. We ruled out a walking down the aisle, a giving away, and a first dance. I felt less nervous about what I was getting into.

  The wedding was less than six weeks away.

  * * *

  —

  MY COUSIN-SISTER, CRYING, called me a few days lat
er. She asked if she could stay with me for a while. She and my aunt were still fighting, and she didn’t feel safe. Immediately, I answered yes.

  I drove up to get her the next day. We weren’t able to fit everything—her clothes, the baby’s clothes, her toys, her Pack ’n Play—but we fit all that we could.

  My aunt tried to weave a different narrative of events, but she didn’t try to stop us from leaving.

  My cousin-sister and her baby stayed with me for more than a month. The three of us slept together in my bed; we swaddled my niece and carefully tucked her between us at night.

  My cousin-sister became friends with one of my downstairs neighbors, a woman with two children of her own. I had never spoken to my neighbor, any of my neighbors, in the years I had lived there. My cousin-sister and the neighbor went for long walks during the day.

  I tried to talk with my cousin-sister about her and her daughter’s future. She wanted to be a florist, to own her own business one day. I tried to help her imagine a life away from her mother. I tried to imagine the ways I might help.

  I convinced her to attend an Al-Anon meeting, a program similar to AA, but for the families of alcoholics, this one specifically for adult children of alcoholics. I had been meaning to go to one for years, but I had never worked up the courage to go alone. We tucked my niece into her car seat and arrived at the church early. We loitered at the edge of the parking lot, and I noticed an explosion of feathers beneath a mesquite tree where a hawk must have made a snack of a dove.

  A meeting is a difficult place for a baby. She fussed and then exploded, pale brown down her legs. My cousin-sister ducked out of the meeting but signaled me to stay. I listened to the others talk about isolation, and I began to cry. My cousin-sister did not return, so before the meeting concluded, I excused myself after her. Her daughter was still crying, and I offered to drive us home. In the car, she told me she had hoped to hear what they said, and I tried to explain what I had heard, but that didn’t feel like enough.