The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  “Chestnut Street,” she said. “San Francisco. They have a whole row of children’s boutiques, the kind with two-hundred-dollar velour sweat suits for newborns, toddler dresses made out of silk organza—that sort of thing. One dress for your adoption will cost me more than what I can get for two tons of grapes—but if not now, when? You’re ten, you know? Next week you’ll be my little girl, but you won’t be a little girl much longer. I have to dress you up while I can.” She smiled at me again, her smile an invitation.

  I inched closer to her, pressing my head into her shoulder as we drove. She’d taught me to sit up straight and away from her in the truck, so that we wouldn’t get pulled over for a seat belt violation, but today, her smile said, was an exception. She drove with one arm on the steering wheel, the other around my shoulders, squeezing me to her. I’d never been taken shopping for new clothes, not once, and it seemed to me the perfect way to start my life as someone’s daughter. I hummed along with the oldies on the radio as we drove over the bridge and into the city, struggling with the conflicting emotions of wanting the day to last forever and wanting the day to be over and the next two as well. My court date was only three days away.

  On Chestnut Street, Elizabeth parked the car, and I followed her into an open doorway. The shop was empty except for a saleswoman standing at a glass counter, arranging diamond-studded clips to a felt cutout of a tree. “May I help you?” she asked, her smile taking me in with what appeared to be genuine interest. “Looking for something special?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Something for Victoria.”

  “And how old are you, sweetheart? Seven? Eight?”

  “Ten,” I said.

  The saleswoman looked embarrassed, but her words didn’t offend me. “I was warned never to guess,” she said. “Let me show you what I have in your size.” I followed her to the back of the store, where a single row of dresses hung opposite a mirror with a wooden ballet bar. Elizabeth grasped the bar and did an exaggerated squat, her knees bending deeply at angles, her toes pointed out. She was thin and pointy like a classical ballerina, but not even close to graceful. We both laughed.

  I thumbed through the dresses once, then a second time. “If there isn’t anything you like,” Elizabeth said from behind me, “there’re other shops.”

  But that wasn’t the problem. I liked all the dresses, every single one. My hand settled on the velvet ribbons of a halter. Pulling the dress off the bar, I held it up against my body. It was only a size eight but reached well below my knees. The light blue top was separated from the patterned skirt by a brown velvet ribbon that tied behind the back. It was the pattern of the full skirt I was drawn to: raised brown-velvet flowers over a background of blue. The concentric petals reminded me of hundred-petaled roses or chrysanthemum. I looked at Elizabeth.

  “Try it on,” she said.

  In the small dressing room, I took off my clothes. Standing in front of the mirror in my white cotton underpants, Elizabeth seated behind me, I took in my pale image, skin light and unmarked, my waist straight over narrow hips. Elizabeth studied my body with such pride I imagined it to be the way a mother looked at a biological daughter, whose every limb had been formed within her body.

  “Arms up,” she said. Slipping the dress over my head, she tied the ribbons of the halter-top under my hair and the second set of ribbons above my waistline.

  The dress fit me perfectly. I gazed at my reflection, my arms held out stiffly on either side of the full skirt.

  When my eyes met Elizabeth’s, her face was so full of emotion I couldn’t tell if she would laugh or cry. She pulled me to her, her forearms under my armpits, hands clasped over my chest. The back of my head pressed into her ribs.

  “Look at you,” she said. “My baby.” And somehow, in that moment, her words spoke the truth. I had the vague sense of being a very young child—a newborn, even—tightly held and cradled in her arms. It was as if the childhood I had lived belonged to someone else, a girl who no longer existed, a girl who had been replaced by the one in the mirror.

  “Catherine will love you, too,” Elizabeth whispered. “You’ll see.”

  15.

  Before the start of wedding season, Renata hired me full-time. She offered me benefits or a bonus—not both. I was perfectly healthy and tired of relying on Grant to drive me to and from the flower farm, so I took the cash.

  The drummer in Natalya’s band sold me his old hatchback. His new drum kit—which seemed significantly louder than his old one—did not fit inside, so he took my bonus and gave me the pink slip. It seemed like a fair exchange, but I knew nothing about the value of cars. I didn’t have a license and didn’t know how to drive. Grant towed the hatchback from Bloom to the farm on the back of his flower truck and didn’t let me out of the front gate for weeks. When he did, it was just to drive to the drugstore and back. Still, I was terrified. It took another month before I was ready to drive into the city alone.

  That spring I spent mornings working for Renata and afternoons searching for the remaining flowers for my dictionary. After capturing everything on Grant’s farm, I moved on to Golden Gate Park and the waterfront. All of Northern California was a botanical garden, with wildflowers springing up between busy freeways and chamomile thriving in sidewalk cracks. Sometimes Grant accompanied me; he was good at plant identification but tired quickly of small, square-block city parks and skinny sunbathers.

  On weekends, if Renata and I finished in time, Grant and I went hiking in the redwoods north of San Francisco. We always sat in the parking lot long enough to see which hiking trails were the most crowded before choosing our direction. Alone in the forest, Grant was content to watch me photograph for hours, and he would talk in detail about every plant species and its relation to the others in the ecosystem. When he finished telling me what he knew, he would lean back against the soft moss covering the trunk of a redwood tree and look up through the branches to the pale sky. Silence stretched between us, and I always expected him to bring up Elizabeth, or Catherine, or the night he accused me of lying. I spent hours thinking of what I would say, how I would explain the truth without turning him against me forever. But Grant did not bring up the past, not in the forest or anywhere else. It seemed he was content to keep our life together confined to the flowers and the present moment.

  Many nights I slept in the water tower. Grant had taken up cooking in a serious way, and his kitchen counter was stacked with illustrated cookbooks. As I sat at the kitchen table and read, or looked out the window, or told an obnoxious bride story, Grant chopped and seasoned and stirred. After dinner he would kiss me, only once, and wait to see my reaction. Sometimes I kissed him back, and he would pull me to him, and we would stand intertwined in the doorway for half an hour; other times my lips remained cold and unmoving. Even I didn’t know how I would react on any given day. About our deepening relationship, I felt fear and desire in equal, unpredictable parts. At the end of each night he walked outside to wherever it was he slept, and I locked the door behind him.

  On a weeknight in late May, after months of this ritual, Grant leaned forward as if to kiss me but stopped just inches from my lips. He put his hands on the small of my back and pulled me to him so that the length of our bodies touched but not our faces. “I think it’s time,” he said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For me to have my bed back.”

  I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth and looked out the window.

  “What’re you afraid of?” he asked, when I had been quiet for a long time.

  I thought about his question. He was right, I knew, that it was fear that kept us apart; but of what, specifically, was I afraid?

  “I don’t like to be touched,” I said, repeating Meredith’s long-ago words. But even as I spoke them, I knew they sounded ridiculous. Our entire bodies were pressed together, and I didn’t pull away.

  “Then I won’t touch you,” he said. “Not unless you ask me to.”

  “Not ev
en when I’m asleep?”

  “Especially not then.” I knew he wouldn’t.

  I nodded. “You can sleep in your bed,” I said. “But I’m sleeping on the couch. And I better not wake up with you beside me or I’m driving straight home.”

  “You won’t,” Grant said. “I promise.”

  That night I lay awake on the love seat, trying not to fall asleep until Grant did, but he wasn’t sleeping, either. I heard him rolling around above me, rearranging the covers, knocking over a stack of books. Finally, after a long period of silence, when I was sure he had fallen asleep, I heard a soft tapping on the ceiling above me.

  “Victoria?” A whisper came spiraling down the stairs.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night.” I pressed a smile into the orange velour.

  After a full season of jonquil, Annemarie was a different person. She came in every Friday morning for a fresh bouquet, and her skin was pinker and her body, finally free from the belted jacket, curved underneath thin cotton sweaters. Bethany, she told me, had gone to Europe for a month with Ray and would come back engaged. She said it with certainty, as if it had already happened.

  Annemarie brought her friends, many with frilly-dressed little girls and all with disappointing marriages. They leaned on the counter while their children pulled flowers out of buckets taller than they were and spun around the room. The women discussed the details of their relationships, trying to reduce their problems to a single word. I had explained the importance of specificity, and the ladies clung to my words. The conversations were sad, and amusing, and strangely hopeful all at the same time. The relentlessness with which these women tried to repair their relationships was foreign to me; I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply give up.

  I knew that if it were me I would have let go: of the man, of the child, and of the women with whom I discussed them. But for the first time in my life, this thought did not bring me relief. I began to notice the ways in which I kept myself isolated. There were obvious things, such as living in a closet with six locks, and subtler ones, such as working on the opposite side of the table from Renata or standing behind the cash register when I talked to customers. Whenever possible, I separated my body from those around me with plaster walls, solid wood tables, or heavy metal objects.

  But somehow, over six careful months, Grant had broken through this. I not only permitted his touch, I craved it, and I started to wonder if, perhaps, change was possible for me. I began to hope my pattern of letting go was something that could be outgrown, like a childhood dislike of onions or spicy food.

  By the end of May I had nearly completed my dictionary. I captured images of many of the remaining, elusive plants at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. After printing, mounting, and labeling each photo, I put X’s in my dictionary and scanned the pages to see how many flowers were left. Only one: the cherry blossom. I was upset with myself for the omission. There were plenty of cherry trees in the Bay Area, dozens of varietals in the Japanese Tea Garden alone. But their bloom period was short—weeks or even days, depending on the year—and I had been too distracted by spring to capture their brief moment of beauty.

  Grant would know where to find a cherry blossom, even now, long past its season. I wrote the single missing flower on a scrap of paper and taped it to the outside of the orange box. It was time to bring it to him.

  I put the box in the backseat of my car and strapped it in with a seat belt. It was Sunday, and I got to the water tower before Grant got home from the farmers’ market. Letting myself in with the spare key, I opened the cupboard and helped myself to a loaf of raisin bread. The box, bright orange on the weathered wood table, took up more space than it should have. It felt loud and new in the small kitchen of quiet antique appliances. I was about to take it upstairs when I heard Grant’s truck settle into the gravel.

  He opened the door and went immediately to the box.

  “Is this it?” he asked.

  I nodded, handing him the scrap of paper with the missing flower. “But not quite complete.”

  Grant let the scrap of paper fall to the floor and opened the lid. He flipped through the cards, admiring my photographs one at a time. I turned one over to show him the printed flower meanings, then replaced it and shut the lid on his fingers.

  “You can look later,” I said, retrieving the note from the floor and flapping it in the air in front of him. “Right now I need help finding this.”

  Grant held up the paper and read the missing flower. He shook his head. “A cherry blossom? You’ll have to wait until next April.”

  My camera tapped against the table. “Almost a full year? I can’t wait that long.”

  Grant laughed. “What do you want me to do? Transplant a cherry tree into my greenhouse? Even then, it wouldn’t bloom.”

  “So, what can I do?”

  He thought for a moment, knowing I wouldn’t give up easily. “Look in my botany textbooks,” he suggested.

  I wrinkled my nose and leaned forward until I was close enough to kiss him, but I didn’t. Instead, I rubbed my nose against his stubbly cheek and bit his ear. “Please?”

  “Please what?” he asked.

  “Please suggest something more beautiful than a textbook illustration.”

  Grant looked out the window. He seemed to be debating something internally. It was almost as if he had possession of a late-blooming cherry blossom in his pocket and was trying to decide if I was important and trustworthy enough to receive it. Finally, he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Grant walked out the door. I put my camera around my neck and walked in his footsteps. We crossed the gravel and climbed the steps of the main house. He withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the back door, which opened into a laundry room. A pale pink woman’s blouse fluttered on the drying rack. Grant led me into the kitchen, where the curtains were drawn, and the counters were dusty and dark. All the appliances were unplugged, and the absolute quiet of the refrigerator was unsettling.

  From the kitchen we walked through a swinging door to the dining room. The table had been pushed to the side and a sleeping bag was spread out on the wood floor. I recognized Grant’s sweatshirt and balled socks beside it.

  “When you had evicted me from my own home,” he said, smiling and pointing to the pile.

  “Don’t you have a bedroom here?”

  Grant nodded. “I haven’t slept there for a decade, though,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’ve only been upstairs once since my mother died.”

  The stairs loomed on my left, a wide wooden banister curving up the side of the room. Grant took a step toward them.

  “Come on,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.” At the top of the stairs we came to a long hall, with doors shut on both sides of the corridor. The hallway ended in front of five steps. We walked up and ducked through a low door.

  The small room was hotter than the rest of the house, and filled with the smell of dust and dried paint. I knew before locating the gabled, boarded-up window that we were in Catherine’s studio. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I took in the paneled walls, the long drafting table, and the shelves of art supplies. Half-empty glass jars of purple paint lined the top shelf, paintbrushes frozen in hard pools of lavender and periwinkle. A string circling the room displayed drawings—large, intricately rendered flowers in graphite and charcoal—hung with wooden clothespins.

  “My mother was an artist,” Grant said, gesturing to the work. “She spent hours of every day up here. For most of my life, she drew only flowers: rare ones, tropical ones, or short-blooming, delicate ones. She had a fear of not having the right flower to express what she wanted to say at any given moment.”

  He led me to an oak file cabinet in the corner of the room and opened the middle drawer. It was labeled L–Q. Every file was marked with a plant name, and each held a file folder with a single drawing: parsley, passionf
lower, peppermint, periwinkle, pineapple, and pink. He thumbed through the P’s until he got to poplar, white. He withdrew the file folder and opened it; it was empty. The drawing was in the blue room, still wrapped in a silk ribbon with the inked day and time of our first date.

  Grant closed the drawer and opened another, looking through the files until he found a drawing of a cherry blossom. He placed it on the empty drafting table and disappeared through the door.

  I sat down, admiring the work. The lines were quick, confident, the shadows deep and complex. The blossom filled the entire paper, and its beauty was nearly overwhelming. I bit my lip.

  Grant returned, watching my expression as I studied the paper. “Definition?” he asked.

  “Good education,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Impermanence. The beauty and transience of life.”

  This time, he was right. I nodded.

  Grant held up a hammer he had retrieved and pried the board off the window. Light flooded through the broken glass and onto the tabletop like a spotlight. He placed the drawing in the rectangles of light and sat on the edge of the table. “Shoot,” he said, caressing first the camera and then my body beneath it.

  He watched as I extracted the camera from its case and turned to the image. I shot from every angle: standing on the floor, on a chair, and then in front of the window, blocking the harsh light. I adjusted the shutter speed and the focus. Grant’s eyes were on my fingers, my face, and my feet crouched on the tabletop. I went through an entire roll. His eyes did not waver as I loaded a second roll and then a third. My skin lifted under his gaze as if the surface of my body were reaching toward him without the permission of my mind.

  When I was done, I returned the drawing to the file folder. The next day I would have the film developed, and my dictionary would be complete. I turned the camera to where Grant sat, unmoving, on the table, and studied his face through the viewfinder.