Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  My aunt called me night after night to yell. She told me to get rid of my cats, which she called filthy; she claimed they would hurt my niece. She threatened to call CPS. She yelled about her grandbaby, her grandbaby, her grandbaby. One morning, my cousin-sister and I jokingly pressed the tips of our fingers to the baby’s lips each time she cried and whispered, “Shh, shh, shh.” That night, my aunt called and yelled at me to never cover her grandbaby’s mouth. I felt a chill run through my body. How had she known? She practices black magic, my mother had said.

  I found out later my cousin-sister had mentioned the joke to her friend, who told my cousin-brother’s girlfriend, who told her mother. The information carried by mouth, not by magic. But I could not shake the feeling that my aunt’s eyes were always watching us.

  I tried to convince my cousin-sister to stay in my apartment after I moved out, but she applied for housing assistance on the reservation and received good news. Before I left for Canada for my wedding, I drove her to Phoenix, to stay with a friend until her new home was ready to move into.

  * * *

  —

  WE MARRIED IN January, a few days after the New Year. His mother made the skirt and the blouse I wore. The night before the ceremony, we stayed with his father and his stepmother, who left me a card on the nightstand. “Like you, my mother was not alive to see me marry my soulmate,” she wrote, “and I know how difficult this might be for you.” She gifted me one of her mother’s handkerchiefs, which she had carried on her own wedding day.

  The next morning, we drove to Kitchener, to our new apartment, empty except for two desks, a chair, and a mattress on the floor. I let my cat out of her carrier, and she bolted around the living room and then into the kitchen, where she hid in a cupboard above the fridge.

  My words feel inadequate. I had never felt that kind of love, but I have never learned how to write about happiness.

  * * *

  —

  TWO WEEKS LATER, I flew back to Tucson to finish packing my things. Three of my oldest friends were flying out for the Tucson version of our wedding celebration, which we started calling the “great wedding bird adventure,” and my sister Eileen flew out a few days early to visit me.

  When I first told her about my wedding plans, she told me she intended to go to rehab, to try and get clean, but she was still using when she arrived. On the drive to the reservation, she pulled a shawl over her head in the passenger seat to hide the act of sliding a needle into her arm—not from me, but from anyone who might have glanced down into the car. I said nothing and stared at the road. She fell asleep with her shawl draped across her chest.

  We stopped to meet our cousin-sister and our niece, and then we visited a trading post, where we each bought a turquoise ring. We planned to visit one of our grandmothers, but first she begged me to take her to visit our aunt. When I told her no, she started yelling at me: how it wasn’t fair; how she deserved to meet her family; how she wouldn’t have come if she knew I was going to be such a bitch.

  I relented. I drove her to our aunt’s, but parked at the end of the street. I didn’t want my aunt to see my car parked outside, even though I knew she would know I was there. I asked Eileen not to be long. I watched her weave down the rutted road, up our grandmother’s driveway, and knock on the front door. I thought of all the times my aunt and my cousin-sister had ignored those front-door knocks, the uncomfortable hush that fell as they waited for the unexpected visitor to leave, but to my surprise, the door opened and my sister disappeared inside.

  An hour later, I was still waiting, and our grandmother would be waiting, so I got out of the car and walked to the house.

  My aunt answered the door with an apology. “I was drunk,” she said, as if that could erase the things she said. It was the kind of apology I had lost all patience for.

  I told Eileen it was time to go.

  In the car, we started screaming at each other again. “I’ve hurt people, too,” Eileen yelled. “I’m a shitty person. But I’m not going to judge her. Like, who the fuck am I?”

  I understood why Eileen wanted to meet our aunt—why she identified with her. I was wrong to try and keep them apart, but I wasn’t ready to admit that to her yet.

  The argument shifted, and she told me I was stupid to marry a man I had just met. It wasn’t possible for me to know him. And when I tried to tell her what I loved about him—our shared worldview, the things we wanted out of life—she told me my version of love wasn’t love. She told me love should be passionate, full of fireworks. She told me I had never loved her, that I always chose my father over her. I tried to explain that I took care of him so she didn’t have to, that I took care of him out of love for them both. It was a crazy thing, to be screaming about love.

  We met our grandmother in a parking lot; she was on her way to a basketball game. My sister and I were both full of smiles and hugs and laughter, like magic, as if we had not been screaming moments before.

  When we were on the road again, Eileen slept. She woke as we neared Tucson. She asked me to take her to a park to look for dope, but I refused, and my refusal turned into another argument.

  Back in the apartment, I hid in my room and listened to her complain loudly on the phone with her boyfriend about what different people we were.

  * * *

  —

  MY FRIENDS ARRIVED, one by one. They shared an Airbnb on the north side of town. I cooked two pots of chili and brought them over with a cat puzzle. We pushed pieces of brown and black and gray around the table, and my friend’s boyfriend complained I wouldn’t let anyone consult the box, which I considered cheating.

  The next day, we carpooled to Willcox to see the wintering sandhill cranes. We hiked onto the playa as the sun set and waited for the birds to arrive. At first, they were pin-sized silhouettes above the mountains, but as twilight descended, they ventured closer, glints of silver in the crowded dark. They formed a burbling chorus above our heads. We could hear them shouting still as we walked back to our cars.

  Three days later, my husband and I packed my life inside my two-door Yaris: a suitcase of clothes, two boxes of books, and a box of my childhood toys. I packed a box of letters from my father and sister, and a box of photographs, and also the box of my mother’s things. Everything else I sold or gave away.

  * * *

  —

  MY FIRST WINTER in Canada was difficult. “Life has been good here,” I wrote in an email to Marie, “but I’ve cried a lot this week.”

  I missed Tucson. I missed my friends. I missed the sun and the birds and the cacti. I missed the desert, and I missed the mountains. I missed the smell of the earth, and I missed the smell of the rain. This longing surfaced often, without warning, and each time I retreated further inside myself.

  A dog barked too loudly upstairs. The neighbor, a man with an assault rifle tattooed across his back, made me nervous. I watched him out the window. He built and demolished and rebuilt a tree house in the backyard, though I never saw a child in it. One night, after a branch splintered in a storm, he climbed into the tree in the rain and used a circular saw to try to cut it down. One day, a woman walked into the yard holding a drink in one hand. They started arguing, and I watched her try to wrestle a hammer out of his hand. I did not want to watch, but I could not look away.

  Owen questioned, often, if I was happy. I was not always, but I felt closer to happy than I had ever been.

  * * *

  —

  EILEEN CALLS TO tell me she is clean. She met a boy online playing PUBG Mobile, and they fell into a quick kind of love. She moved with him to his parents’ house, somewhere in rural Ohio. She calls me on a walk and asks me to identify a bird. She tells me she is happy; she tells me she is loved.

  She calls me, crying, when he gets angry and controlling. She wants to leave, but she tells me she has nowhere to go.

  She calls me and
says she is back in Pittsburgh.

  She calls me and says she is moving in with her best friend, who teaches yoga in West Virginia. From there, she calls me less often. She sends me photos of a daycare her friend is renovating; Eileen helps them paint the shelves and tables primary shades of red, blue, and yellow.

  She calls and tells me she has started painting again. She sends me pictures of her works-in-progress: marbled lines of turquoise and luminescent swirls of shell. She starts livestreaming her painting sessions on Facebook, and I watch her paint a slice of pepperoni pizza, which floats in a cloudy blue sky. She sits cross-legged on the floor and paints a cow skull surrounded by two button cacti and a crushed beer can.

  She starts saving for her own place; she starts saving for a lawyer, to change the custody agreement for her son.

  She starts dating a tattoo artist. She calls me crying because his anxieties feed into her own. She tells me she has lost more than twenty pounds. She is always anxious. She tells me there is something broken inside him. “I can see it in his eyes,” she says, and I know it’s these broken eyes that hold her to him, this man who reminds me too much of our father. Eileen wants to take-care of him, like our mother would.

  She calls me as she walks, block after block, because her boyfriend would not give her a ride. She tells me she found an apartment, but she doesn’t have enough for the deposit. I can hear the city behind her: a car door slamming and two men’s voices, loud but indistinct. She passes her favorite bar and starts negotiating a drink with herself—she just wants one before her shift. I try to talk her out of it. I tell her to schedule a time to have a drink later, after she has the apartment nailed down. She walks into the bar and I tell her to order a Sprite instead. She tells me she loves me and hangs up.

  She messages me a few minutes later and says she didn’t have time to drink; she’s late for work. The “lol” at the end of the message is desperate and full of grief.

  She messages me a few hours later to tell me the apartment fell through. I offer to help her start looking for a new place while she is at work, but then she messages me from the backroom of the convenience store where she works. “I can’t stop crying,” she tells me. “How do I stop crying?” I tell her to breathe, as deeply as she can; to fill up the bottoms of her lungs. She tells me she is breathing, that it doesn’t work. Instead of telling her to think of something happy, I tell her it helps me to think about something that makes me happy-sad. It’s easier to stop those kinds of tears. I tell her I think about Don. I try to remind her of his orange boat. The smell of his van. The fishing poles that rattled above our heads. The time the four of us motored out to a little mangrove island and found hermit crabs poking around on the shore. She tells me she remembers the time he stopped to move a turtle across the road, and then she stops messaging me.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN MY SISTER and I were little, my grandmother told us to pray for our father to “be sober,” as if God could magically shift our father into another state of being, a state of sobriety; as if sobriety did not necessitate some shift in thought or in action by our father himself.

  My father sends me an email from California. Law enforcement is on the way, he writes. Please forgive me.

  I don’t respond. I don’t hear from him again for weeks. I search his name on VINELink, a victim notification network, and locate his inmate number.

  I consider writing him a letter, but I don’t.

  I cannot forgive my father; forgiveness risks too much. My mother chose my father, and men like him, and I must make another choice. I must choose my sisters.

  * * *

  —

  IN MAY, I heard about a Navajo weaving workshop that would be taught by Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas in Toronto, at the upcoming Indigenous Fashion Week. I had wanted to take a class with them for years, but the timing had never been right. My husband enrolled me in the class as a birthday gift.

  I stayed with my mother-in-law during the class and took the bus and the train into the city. The bus route was one of the strangest I had ever been on—it wove through a garden and a neighborhood full of mansions, with front gates and driveways full of expensive cars. The bus was always empty.

  I got lost trying to navigate the city. Google Maps told me to use a network of underground pedestrian tunnels called the PATH, in all caps, but I kept losing my way. I asked a man on the street for directions and, like a trickster in an urban fantasy, he said, “Take any door and you will find it.”

  I turned around and walked into a terminal with door after numbered door.

  I found the building by what felt like a miracle. Before class, I spotted Barbara and Lynda outside; Barbara wearing a black-and-red biil—a traditional Navajo dress—and Linda wearing a crushed velvet shirt.

  I listened closely as they introduced themselves in Navajo; I recognized my grandfather’s clan.

  “My grandfather’s clan was Tábąąhá, too,” I said, when it came time to introduce myself.

  Lynda gasped and clapped her hands. “We’re nálís!” Grandmothers, she said excitedly, in the Navajo way.

  It had been almost a year since the last time I wove, but I picked it up again fast. I asked Lynda to teach me how to create diagonal designs, and she helped me count out my rows.

  At the end of the last day, they held a special ceremony to trim our rugs’ selvage cords, the braided threads that look like tassels at a rug’s four corners. They told us the selvage cords were like the rug’s umbilical cord, and that, traditionally, Navajos bury a baby’s umbilical cord in the earth, so their children will always recognize home.

  We cut our cords one by one, their hands guiding ours. When it was my turn, they called me “granddaughter,” as if welcoming me into their family. Barbara closed my hand around the ends of wool, and as I walked away, I slid them into my pocket. I considered bringing them with me to Tucson the next time I visited, to pat beneath the sand, but then I remembered the new home I was trying to build. It was difficult for me to believe a few bits of string could make a place feel like home, but when I returned to the apartment my husband and I shared, I folded the ends of my selvage cords inside the handkerchief my mother-in-law gave me, which I placed inside my mother’s carved brown bowl.

  TITLE: Handmade Mother’s Day card of unknown provenance.

  DATE: undated

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: personal correspondence

  DESCRIPTION: A handmade Mother’s Day card on off-white paper. I am not sure whether my sister Eileen or I made it. Written in green crayon: “happy Mothers Day I love you MoMMy. and I will always love you even where I’m sad”

  TITLE: Alexandra slides down a metal slide.

  DATE: undated

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs

  DESCRIPTION: Lee’s daughter Alexandra on a slide in a park. She is bundled in a winter coat. She appears frozen in the eye of the camera; the world blurs around her.

  TITLE: Mike, Fran, Thomas, Marty, and Lee pose for a group photo.

  DATE: 1995

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color negatives

  DESCRIPTION: My parents and their partners pose for a photograph near a grill built of cinder blocks and concrete. My father’s friend Thomas, whom my father once saved from an electrical shock delivered by the internal components of a microwave, stands in the center.

  TITLE: Lee and Fran flash their breasts at the camera.

  DATE: 1995

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color negatives

  DESCRIPTION: Smiling, my mother and Fran stand outside their home and flash their breasts at the camera.

  TITLE: Tire tracks in the dirt.

  DATE: 1995

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color negatives

  Digital ORIGIN: reformatted digital

  DESCRIPTION: Evi
dence from other photographs in my mother’s collection suggests this was not an accidental exposure but an intentionally captured image of light, shadow, and earth.

  TITLE: Lee poses with her daughters Eileen and Danielle.

  DATE: 1995

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color negatives

  DESCRIPTION: My sister and I pose with our mother in the front yard of the house off Military Trail.

  For my sisters,

  the little Tweets

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANK YOU TO the University of Arizona Creative Writing MFA for providing time, space, and community. Thank you especially to Ander Monson and Alison Hawthorne Deming, whose support and guidance have shaped my writing practice forever.

  Thank you to my workshop colleagues for your early and formative feedback: Abby Dockter, Thomas Dai, Emily Maloney, Janet Towle, Peyton Prater-Stark, Clare McClane, Miranda Trimmier, and Kathryn Gougelet.

  Thank you to my writing teachers from another life: Catherine Dent, Kazim Ali, and Kim Van Alkemade, who provided me endless opportunities at Ship and beyond. Special thanks to Kim, who read and offered feedback on the very first draft of this book. Your ongoing support has meant everything to me.

  Thank you to my teachers at GrubStreet: Rita Zoey Chin and Jennifer De Leon.

  Thank you also to Katherine Wisser and Donna Webber, who introduced me to the world of libraries and archives at Simmons College.