The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  At the end of the trees I ducked into the first row of grapes, hiding within a dense plant. I pulled down the loose vines and wrapped them around my thin body. From my hiding spot I could hear Elizabeth coming toward me, and by adjusting the vines I could see her walking along one of the aisles. I let my hand drop from my mouth with relief as she passed my row.

  Reaching up, I picked a grape from the nearest bunch and bit through the thick skin. It was sour. I spit it out and smashed the rest of the bunch one at a time under my foot, the juice squishing between my toes.

  I didn’t see or hear Elizabeth come back in my direction. But just as I began to smash a second bunch of grapes, she reached down into the vines, grabbed me by the arms, and pulled me out of my hiding spot. She held me out in front of her. My feet dangled an inch above the ground while she looked me over.

  “I grew up here,” she said. “I know all the good hiding spots.”

  I tried to break loose, but Elizabeth held firmly to both my arms. She set my feet down on the dirt but did not loosen her grasp. I kicked dust onto her shins, and when she didn’t release my arms, I kicked her ankles. She did not step back.

  I let out a growl and snapped my teeth toward her outstretched arm, but she saw me coming and grabbed my face. She squeezed my cheeks until my jaw loosened and my lips puckered. I sucked in my breath in pain.

  “No biting,” she said, and then leaned forward as if she would kiss my pink puckered lips but stopped inches from my face, her dark eyes drilling into mine. “I like to be touched,” she said. “You’ll have to get used to it.”

  She flashed me an amused grin and let go of my face.

  “I won’t,” I promised. “I won’t ever get used to it.”

  But I stopped fighting and let her pull me up the front porch and inside the cool, dark house.

  3.

  Meredith turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove too slowly down Noriega, reading each street sign. An impatient car honked behind us.

  She’d been talking continuously since Fell Street, and the list of reasons my survival seemed unlikely stretched halfway across San Francisco: no high school diploma, no motivation, no support network, a complete lack of social skills. She was asking for my plan, demanding I think about my own self-sufficiency.

  I ignored her.

  It hadn’t always been this way between us. As a young child I’d soaked up her chatty optimism, sitting on the edge of a bed while she brushed and braided my thin brown hair, tying it up with a ribbon before presenting me like a gift to a new mother, a new father. But as the years passed, and family after family gave me back, Meredith’s hopefulness chilled. The once-gentle hairbrush pulled, stopping and starting with the rhythm of her lecturing. The description of how I should act lengthened with each placement change, and became more and more different from the child I knew myself to be. Meredith kept a running list of my deficiencies in her appointment book and read them to the judge like criminal convictions. Detached. Quick-tempered. Tight-lipped. Unrepentant. I remembered every word she said.

  But despite her frustrations, Meredith had kept my case. She refused to transfer it out of the adoptions unit even when a tired judge suggested, the summer I turned eight, that perhaps she’d done all she could. Meredith negated this claim without pause. For a buoyant, bewildered moment I thought her reaction had come from a place of hidden fondness for me, but when I turned my gaze I saw her pale skin pink in embarrassment. She had been my social worker since birth; if I was to be declared a failure, I was, by extension, her failure.

  We pulled up in front of The Gathering House, a peach, flat-roofed stucco house in a row of peach, flat-roofed stucco houses.

  “Three months,” Meredith said. “I want to hear you say it. I want to know you understand. Three months’ free rent, and after that you pay up or move out.”

  I said nothing. Meredith stepped out and slammed the car door behind her.

  My box in the backseat had shifted during the drive, my clothes spilling out onto the seat. I piled them back on top of the books and followed Meredith up the front steps. She rang the bell.

  It was more than a minute before the door opened, and when it did a cluster of girls stood in the entryway. I clutched my box tighter to my chest.

  A short, heavy-legged girl with long blond hair pushed open the metal screen and stuck out her hand. “I’m Eve,” she said.

  Meredith stepped on my foot, but I didn’t reach for her outstretched hand. “This is Victoria Jones,” she said, pushing me forward. “She’s eighteen today.”

  There was a mumbling of happy birthdays, and two girls exchanged eyebrow-arched glances.

  “Alexis was evicted last week,” Eve said. “You get her room.” She turned as if to take me there, and I followed her down a dark, carpeted hall to an open doorway. Slipping inside, I closed the door and turned the lock behind me.

  The room was bright white. It smelled like fresh paint, and the walls, when I touched them, were tacky. The painter had been sloppy. The carpet, once white like the walls but now mottled from use, was streaked with paint near the baseboard. I wished the painter had kept going, painted the entire carpet, the single mattress, and the dark wood nightstand. The white was clean and new, and I liked that it had belonged to no one before me.

  From the hall, Meredith called me. She knocked, and knocked again. I set my heavy box down in the middle of the room. Pulling out my clothes, I piled them onto the closet floor and stacked my books on the nightstand. When the box was empty, I ripped it into strips to cover the bare mattress and lay down on top. Light streamed through a small window and reflected off the walls, warming the exposed skin on my face, neck, and hands. The window was south-facing, I noticed, good for orchids and bulbs.

  “Victoria?” Meredith called again. “I need to know your plan. Just tell me your plan and I’ll leave you alone.”

  I closed my eyes, ignoring the sound of her knuckles against the wood. Finally, she stopped knocking.

  When I opened my eyes, an envelope lay on the carpet near the door. Inside, there was a twenty-dollar bill and a note that read: Buy food and find a job.

  Meredith’s twenty-dollar bill bought five gallons of whole milk. Every morning for a week I made my purchase at the corner store, drinking the creamy liquid slowly throughout the day as I wandered from city parks to schoolyards, identifying the local plants. Having never lived so near the ocean, I expected the landscape to be unfamiliar. I expected the dense morning fog, hovering only inches from the soil, would cultivate an array of vegetation I had never before seen. But except for wide mounds of aloe near the water’s edge, tall red flowers reaching for the sky, I found a surprising lack of newness. The same foreign plants I’d seen in gardens and nurseries all over the Bay Area—lantana, bougainvillea, potato vine, and nasturtium—dominated the neighborhood. Only the scale was different. Wrapped in the opaque moisture of the coast, plants grew bigger, brighter, and wilder, eclipsing low fences and garden sheds.

  When I finished a gallon of milk I would return home, cut the jug in half with a kitchen knife, and wait for night. The soil in the next-door neighbor’s flower bed was dark and rich, and I transferred it into my improvised flowerpots with a soupspoon. Poking holes in the bottoms of the jugs, I set them in the center of my bedroom floor, where they would get direct sun for only a few hours in the late mornings.

  I would look for a job; I knew I needed to. But for the first time in my life I had my own bedroom with a locking door, and no one telling me where to be or what to do. Before I started searching for work, I’d decided, I would grow a garden.

  By the end of my first week I had created fourteen flowerpots and surveyed a sixteen-block radius for my options. Focusing on fall-blooming flowers, I uprooted whole plants from front yards, community gardens, and playgrounds. Usually I walked home, my hands cradling muddy root balls, but on more than one occasion I ended up lost, or too far from The Gathering House. On these days I would sneak onto a crowded bus through the bac
k door, push my way onto a seat, and ride until the neighborhood became familiar. Back in my room, I spread out the shocked roots gently, covered them with the nutrient-rich soil, and watered deeply. The milk jugs drained right onto the carpet, and as the days passed, weeds began to sprout from the worn fiber. I hovered, watchful, plucking the invasive species almost before they could push their way out of the darkness.

  Meredith checked in on me weekly. The judge had declared her my permanent connection, because emancipation legislation required a connection and they couldn’t dig anyone else out of my file. I did my best to avoid her. When I returned from my walks, I surveyed The Gathering House from the corner, walking up the front steps only when her white car wasn’t parked in the driveway. Eventually she divined my tactic, and in early September I unlocked the front door to find her sitting at the dining room table.

  “Where’s your car?” I demanded.

  “Parked around the block,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in over a month, so I figured you must be avoiding me. Is there a reason?”

  “No reason.” I walked to the table and pushed someone’s dirty dishes out of the way. Sitting down, I placed fistfuls of lavender—which I had uprooted from a front yard in Pacific Heights—on the scratched wood between us. “Lavender,” I said, handing her a sprig. Mistrust.

  Meredith spun the sprig between her thumb and forefinger and set it down, uninterested. “Job?” she asked.

  “What job?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Why would I have one?”

  Meredith sighed. She picked up the lavender I’d given her and launched it, tip first, in my direction. It nose-dived like a poorly constructed paper airplane. Snatching it off the table, I smoothed its ruffled petals with a careful thumb.

  “You would have one,” Meredith said, “because you’ve looked for one, and applied, and been hired. Because if you don’t, you’ll be out on the street in six weeks, and there won’t be anyone opening their door for you on a cold night.”

  I looked to the front door, wondering how much longer until she’d leave.

  “You have to want it,” Meredith said. “I can only do so much. At the end of the day, you have to want it.”

  Want what? I always wondered when she said this. I wanted Meredith to leave. I wanted to drink the milk on the top shelf of the refrigerator labeled LORRAINE and add the empty jug to the collection in my room. I wanted to plant the lavender near my pillow and go to sleep inhaling the cool, dry scent.

  Meredith stood. “I’ll be back next week when you least expect me, and I want to see a thick stack of job applications in your backpack.” She paused at the door. “It’ll be hard for me to put you out on the street, but you should know that I’ll do it.”

  I did not believe it would be hard.

  I walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer, poking through egg rolls and frostbitten corn dogs until I heard the front door close.

  I spent my final weeks at The Gathering House transplanting my bedroom garden into McKinley Square, a small city park at the top of Potrero Hill. I’d found it while pacing the streets for help-wanted signs, and been distracted by the park’s perfect combination of sun, shade, solitude, and safety. Potrero Hill was one of the warmest neighborhoods in the city, and the park was located at a peak, with a clear view in every direction. A small, sandy play structure sat in the middle of a manicured square of lawn, but behind the lawn the park became forested and steep, tumbling downhill in a tangle of shrubs overlooking San Francisco General Hospital and a brewery. Instead of continuing my job search, I’d transported my jugs one at a time to the secluded spot. I chose the location for each planting thoughtfully—shade-loving plants under tall trees, those desiring sun a dozen yards down the hill, out of the shadows.

  The morning of my eviction I awoke before dawn. My room was empty, the floor still damp and dirty in patches where the milk jugs had been. My imminent homelessness had not been a conscious decision; yet, rising to dress on the morning I was to be turned out onto the street, I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. Where I had expected fear, or anger, I was filled with nervous anticipation, the feeling similar to what I’d experienced as a young girl, on the eve of each new adoptive placement. Now, as an adult, my hopes for the future were simple: I wanted to be alone, and to be surrounded by flowers. It seemed, finally, that I might get exactly what I wanted.

  My room was empty except for three sets of clothes, my backpack, a toothbrush, hair gel, and the books Elizabeth had given me. Lying in bed the night before, I’d listened to my housemates picking through the rest of my belongings like hungry animals devouring the fallen. It was standard procedure in foster and group homes, the scouring of things left behind by rushed, weepy children. My housemates, emancipated, carried on the tradition.

  It’d been years—nearly ten—since I’d participated in the scavenging, but I could still remember the thrill of finding something edible, something I could sell at school for a nickel, something mysterious or personal. In elementary school I began to collect these small, forgotten things like treasures—a silver charm with an engraved M, a watchband of fake turquoise snakeskin, a quarter-sized pillbox containing a blood-encrusted molar—stuffing them into a mesh zippered bag I’d stolen from someone’s laundry room. The objects pressed through the tiny holes of the fabric as the bag grew full and heavy.

  For a short time I told myself I was saving these objects for their rightful owners—not to give them back but to use as bribes for food or favors if we landed again in the same home. But as it grew I began to covet my collection, telling myself the stories of each object over and over again: the time I lived with Molly, the girl who loved cats; the bunk-mate whose watch had been ripped off and arm broken; the basement apartment where Sarah learned the truth about the Tooth Fairy. My attachment to the objects was not based on any connection with the individuals. More often than not I had avoided them, ignoring their names, their circumstances, the hopes they had for their futures. But over time the objects came to read like a string of clues to my past, a path of bread crumbs, and I had a vague sense of wanting to follow them back to the place before my memories began. Then, in a rushed, chaotic placement change, I’d been forced to leave the bag behind. For years afterward I’d refused to pack up my belongings, arriving at each new foster home stubbornly empty-handed.

  Quickly, I began to dress: two tank tops followed by three T-shirts and a hooded sweatshirt, brown stretch pants, socks, and shoes. My brown wool blanket would not fit in my backpack, so I folded it in half, wrapped it around my waist, and secured a pleat with a safety pin at each inch. The bottom I gathered and pinned in bunches like a formal petticoat, covering the whole thing with two skirts of varying lengths, the first long and lacy orange, the second A-line and burgundy. I studied myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth and washed my face, satisfied to see that I was neither attractive nor repulsive. My curves were well hidden beneath my clothing, and the extra-short haircut I’d given myself the night before made my bright blue eyes—the only remarkable feature on an otherwise ordinary face—look uncannily large, almost frightening in their dominance of my face. I smiled into the mirror. I didn’t look homeless. Not yet, at least.

  I paused in the doorway of my empty room. Sunlight shone off the white walls. I wondered who would come next, and what they’d think of the weeds sprouting from the carpet near the foot of the bed. If I had thought of it, I would have left the new girl a milk jug full of fennel. The feathery plant and licorice-sweet smell would have been a comfort. But it was too late. I nodded goodbye to the room that would no longer be mine, feeling a sudden gratitude for the angle of the sun, the locking door, the brief offering of time and space.

  I hurried into the living room. Through the window I saw Meredith’s car already in the driveway, the engine off. She studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, her hands clutching the steering wheel. Spinning around, I snuck out the back door and onto the first bus that
passed.

  I never saw Meredith again.

  4.

  From the brewery at the bottom of the hill, steam rose smokelike into the sky day and night. I watched the spread of white while I weeded, the image infusing my contentment with an edge of despair.

  November in San Francisco was mild, McKinley Square quiet. My garden, except for a sensitive matilija poppy, survived the transplant, and for the first twenty-four hours I imagined I could be satisfied with an anonymous life, hidden in the safety of the trees. I listened as I worked, prepared to run at the sound of footsteps, but no one wandered off the manicured lawn, no one poked a curious face into the forest where I crouched. Even the playground was empty except for a fifteen-minute window before school, when closely monitored children swung (one, two, three times) before continuing down the hill. By the third day, I could match the children’s voices with their names. I knew who listened to their mother (Genna), who was loved by their teacher (Chloe), and who would rather be buried alive in the sandbox than sit through another day of class (Greta, little Greta; if my asters had been in bloom, I would have left her a bucketful in the sandbox, so desolate was the voice that begged her mother to let her stay). The families couldn’t see me, and I couldn’t see them, but as the days passed I began to look forward to their visits. I spent the early mornings thinking about which child I would have been most like, had I had a mother to walk me to school every morning. I imagined myself obedient instead of defiant, quick to smile instead of sullen. I wondered if I would still love flowers, if I would still crave solitude. Questions, unanswerable, swirled like water at the roots of my wild geraniums, which I soaked deeply and often.

  When my hunger grew to the point of distraction, I climbed onto buses and rode to the Marina, Fillmore Street, or Pacific Heights. I toured high-end delis, lingering at polished marble countertops and sampling an olive, a slice of Canadian bacon, or a sliver of Havarti. I asked the questions Elizabeth would have asked: which olive oils were unfiltered; exactly how “fresh” was the albacore, the salmon, the sole; how sweet were the season’s first blood oranges? I accepted additional samples, feigned indecision. Then, when the attendant turned to another customer, I walked out the door.