The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

  So I was going to my room right after school, and then I ran out to the bowling alley to eat a burger Mrs. Zúniga made for me. It was all better going there, and they liked me so much they stopped making me pay for my games. That kind of made me hold back. I didn’t want to take advantage. But I did stay longer. I always got free coke refills. So I bowled frames, and if I stayed out late enough, he was usually asleep on his chair or even already in the bedroom and maybe my mom would be on the couch watching TV. She never watched TV before. It was crazy to see my mom in front of it. She’d even be asleep there, the phone stretched out, and I’d go quiet as I could to that bedroom. Neither of them were asking me anything when they saw me, but I figured out to say how I went to school or to some friend’s, like over to the twins for instance, even though I didn’t know where they lived.

  It was hard to see in the night—no lights nowhere—and if it were a hole to step in that went to the bottom of the earth, you wouldn’t know it was in front of you until you fell into it. But it was also a little harder to be seen. I was going to see if Nica had her TV on.

  “What’re you sneaking around to do?” I heard Cindy’s voice behind me say.

  I jumped, caught and guilty. I hadn’t seen her or thought one thing about her for a while.

  “You trying to steal more magazines from somebody?”

  That doubled my surprise. I had no idea where that was coming from. She got up real close to me, where I could almost taste her breath and touch the hot coming off her bare neck and shoulders.

  “I heard about it,” she whispered. “Gina told me.”

  She was wearing a bikini top and some torn cut-off jeans, but once she said that, I didn’t look.

  “What’re you talking about?” I asked.

  “You know!”

  We were near the window of Mr. Josep’s apartment, and he pulled his curtain back to see us. Cindy grabbed my hand and led me, like I might get lost. It was like she wasn’t even thinking I was up there for any other reason but to talk to her.

  “You know,” she said again once we were inside her apartment.

  It was a lot warmer in here. Too warm. I think she had the heater on. Except she also had the apartment door and the windows on either side of it open.

  “I don’t either. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you don’t know, do you?” she said, teasing. She put her hands to her chichis, pushed them together, and made a sexy face. “What can you think of now?”

  That made it less clear to me. I did see how she was pretty good there. I let myself look at them when she did that.

  Cindy was shaking her head at me. “You have to meet my sister,” she said. “Do you know she posed for Playboy magazine? People talk about my sister’s incredible body. She just isn’t very pretty. They say I have the pretty face.”

  “She has the body?” I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I was more thinking that Cindy was here in the living room, her hot living room, and she was in a bikini top.

  “I know I don’t look bad,” she said, “but I’m supposed to be the pretty one. Wait till you see my sister, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about.” She went over to the kitchen counter. “I’m glad you finally noticed me, though. I’m not so bad, am I?” She was refilling a glass she’d been drinking from. “Hey, you want some of this?”

  She held up a bottle of wine. She was mixing red wine and ginger ale.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She made it for herself without another thought. “We’re all waiting for my sister’s centerfold. They may only use her body. They can do that, you know. They do whatever they do and put in a prettier face on a better bod. Brush, I think they call it.”

  I’d sat down in the exact place I did the other time. “I think it’s called airbrush.” It was way hot in her apartment. “Do you have the heater up or what?”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said. “I like fresh air but I didn’t want to be cold.”

  I looked around. There were windows open too.

  She sat next to me on the couch, a little too close. Before I wasn’t sure what to do in general. Now I wasn’t sure of nothing.

  “I didn’t think!” she said. “Do you want ginger ale with ice?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m full.”

  I was too hot and I wanted to look away, so I looked down. My mind was still seeing her pushing her chichis together and wondering where her husband was. That Tino. I wondered what he was like. If he was a big dude. He was the only one I hadn’t seen yet, though I did hear him one time. I saw two dollar bills near a plate on the floor, sticking out from under the couch.

  “How come you’re so shy with me?” Cindy said. She scooted closer to me. “When you don’t mind looking at naked girls in a magazine?”

  “Whadaya mean by that? How come you keep talking about some magazine?”

  “Sonny, Gina told me already. She knows.”

  “Wha’d she say?”

  “Gina?”

  “Yeah, this Gina.”

  “They know you’re the one taking them, Sonny.”

  “I’m not,” I told her. “How can she say it’s me?”

  “It’s okay to look at them,” she said. “You’re a boy. You should want to look—”

  “I don’t take no pinche magazines.”

  “—maybe just don’t keep them.”

  “I didn’t take nothing,” I said. “Why are they saying it’s me anyways?” I was like upset, pissed off even. “Why would that Gina lady say that? Do you know her very well?”

  She got up and was looking around. I pocketed the two dollars, probably because I was mad. When she came back she had an ashtray and she picked out a half-burned cigarette. I knew it was mota, it wasn’t like I didn’t know. I’d taken a couple hits of it before. Mostly I didn’t want it to seem like I was afraid to get high with her, so I did what she did. We passed it back and forth really silent, not talking. When it was gone, she went back to drinking her drink, which was frosty on the outside because she’d made it so freaking hot in the apartment. She turned to me, like closer still, looking closer, and she seemed closer than ever.

  “Have you ever been with a girl?”

  I was feeling like I hadn’t done nothing ever.

  She leaned into me. “Kiss me,” she said. Then she kissed me and her tongue was in my mouth, like she was the boy and we were making out. I wasn’t thinking of that Tino. “Touch me,” she whispered into my ear. She pulled my hand to her chest. “Go on, touch me.” I reached my hand under the bikini top until it moved up and I was feeling her. She felt really good, big, soft. It was good. It was really good. She liked it too, but she was the one to make us stop.

  “I bet you haven’t been with a girl,” she said, suddenly pulling away, acting like it was me who’d made all the moves.

  The television in the living room was on and it seemed like my mom was asleep on the couch, the hazy glow of the TV a blanket over her. It was a weekday, and it was night, Cloyd was in bed already.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I was out,” I told her, surprised that she talked. I was feeling too much mota, and way strange. I wanted to go to that room where I slept.

  “I wish I were too,” she said.

  That sounded like her, the mom I knew from before. The one who never sat around and watched TV. Or drank beer—there was a beer bottle next to her. That was crazy. My mom didn’t drink beer, I think especially because it was fattening.

  “I’m bored,” she said.

  The phone was next to the beer bottle, the cord across the rug of the living room. She’d had one put in so she could have her own phone and number and then she got the long cord so she could move around with it. I knew about this because, unlike a few, this was one of their arguments that was easy to follow. They were having these other kinds of raising-the-voice-a-little-bit discussions that weren’t, if you asked me, much about what they were talking about.


  “What do you watch?” she asked, meaning the TV. “I’m trying to like TV.” She was serious even. “Can you put it on something you like and come sit with me?” She’d had her head on the arm of the couch, laying down, but now she sat up.

  I walked closer and turned so I could see the television, but I didn’t want to sit. “I don’t watch anything regular. I don’t really watch that much.” At this moment, all mota high, it was impossible for me: TV was crazy! The noises! The light! The normal people in it were like nobody in a real world, the one I walked around in.

  “You don’t like the TV in your room?”

  “Sure, it’s okay,” I said.

  “You never had one before.”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t like it though?”

  “I guess it’s pretty good to have in there,” I said. “I guess I don’t always want to watch.” I was wanting to leave. I wasn’t going to try to explain to her how I listen to the radio and watch the lights and look for colors and get squares and circles and stars and my own planets and moons and suns, and all that, right into my head, especially since I was messed up good and this was really hard because the TV was fucking crazy light and sound.

  “You want me to make him get you a better one?”

  “TV?”

  “Sí, m’ijo, a better TV.”

  I was so messed up it almost seemed like what she was saying was because I’d been smoking out. “No, I don’t need a new TV set. Thanks though.”

  There was a fat, tall gray space here. I was trying to think of the right way to go away without making her ask me what was up or wrong or whatever, when what came up was that it was her too, that she went some places by herself too.

  Then she just talked, broke into what I was thinking to myself and into what was playing on the TV. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  It sounded like it had an echo, like she was talking from a television. I didn’t know what to say, what I should say, what she meant, nothing.

  The silence became a fog.

  “There’s nothing ever good on,” she said finally.

  Her voice this time was like sunlight, and right then I thought of her that way: as a sun. She was the sun, and so much was winter, cloudy, dark, all moonless.

  “At first I didn’t mind,” she said. “All I had to do was change the channel.”

  “Maybe you can call somebody instead,” I suggested, looking at the phone. “You like to talk.”

  She looked at me. I think she realized I’d heard her talk on the phone. I didn’t mean it that way, and I didn’t want her to know.

  “I was thinking of Ceci,” I said. “Don’t you wonder how she is?” I wondered about her, if my mom ever talked to her. She never talked about her, I never asked. I don’t know why I was bringing this up, and now. It just came out of me.

  The TV made all the noise for a little longer time, and even if our eyes were on it we weren’t watching or listening to it, but wishing I hadn’t said what I did. I was standing there.

  “I’ve called everybody.” So much time had passed, I’d already forgotten we were talking about the phone.

  “I better go to sleep now,” I told her.

  “Buenas, m’ijo,” she said. I swear there was disappointment in her voice. I’d never heard that in her before.

  The stucco of the apartment building was painted a pale yellow, and bolted to its street side was a black wrought-iron sign, in a longhand-style lettering, two flood lamps in an ivy bed below aimed up at it: Los Flores. Beneath those words were three flowers branching out of one thick stem. I didn’t know that much about flowers, but my mom told me they were margaritas, which I think are called daisies. Why I was so much in my head about words and flowers was because Cloyd was having me paint the sign. Which I didn’t mind, because it wasn’t the weeds along the side. He said he wanted me to be very careful about splattering black paint on the green wall, and because he worried about it, he told me to go easy, to take my time. That’s why I was taking as long as I was. I went slow. I was taking my time and trying to do a good job.

  Los Flores: It’s that I really wasn’t sure one way or the other, because I wasn’t any expert on the Spanish language. I thought probably I was just wrong. Could be flower was a masculine word in Spanish, not a feminine. How would I know? There are words that seem like they should take a la and don’t. A TV show, for example, is el programa. Or for map, el mapa. Or like the word for a fashion model is modelo, even if the model is not a dude. I mean, probably I was just making myself feel confused, so I had mostly accepted it standing up there on a ladder, painting the wrought iron. One day I remembered to ask the twins.

  “Watch, it’s this way,” Joe said. “If it’s the name of a family, then it’s right. Me and Mike, say we wanted to open a bakery. We could call it Panadería Los Hermanos Hernández. So then Los Hernández means “the Hernández family.” Los Hernández means “the family of.” So Los Flores means the Flores family. Pero, Las Flores means “The Flowers.” What your daddy the Cloyd has up there just means the vato’s a dumbass.”

  “Un hija de puto,” Mike said.

  “You’d think he’d might have at least looked it up in a dictionary,” said Joe. “Or somebody who’s a relative, who has like a maid or a gardener he could ask.”

  “Yeah, or like he coulda checked it out in una libra de quote-toes por jotos,” Mike said.

  “This is probably why real Mexicans—you know, mexicanos—think we’re such pochos up here,” Joe said. “We grow up seeing words like that around, and then we get all used to them, and then we say them like that’s how they are and we don’t know how we got to be such pinches tontos.”

  “Hey, you know in the Lone Ranger?” Mike jumped in. “Como the Indian Tonto’s name is pronounced tanto, right? Like his name’s too much. That’s pretty dumb, right? But his name ain’t that, right? It’s spelled t-o-n-t-o, tonto.”

  I added those letters up fast. “Ay, his name is stupid,” I figured out. “Man, I’m so fucking stupid I didn’t realize he was Mister Stupid!”

  “Is too mush, Tanto,” Mike said. “Es muy estupid, stupid.”

  I tried to tell my mom but she didn’t hear me. She wasn’t dressed for listening or like she had been in the kitchen for very long or like she was planning to stay there either. It seemed to me she was wearing another new dress, and she was smelling washed and bath-oiled and lotioned and misted, and the high heels were glossier and redder than her lipstick. She was opening American cans of Mexican salsa.

  “He doesn’t even know I buy este chile at the grocery store,” she told me. “He thinks I make it. He even tells everybody I do.”

  “You do make it,” I said. “Or you could.”

  She crinkled her face at me like I’d suggested she go out like jogging or something.

  “You think I should cook for him day and night like he wants?”

  I tried to think of what she did all day, now that she didn’t have to work.

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “It’s for some client. Something to snack on while they’re drinking beer and talking about their business. He says it’s for a big contract. I think a whole housing development.”

  “That sounds big,” I said.

  She made one of those as-if-she-cared-about-that-part. “Like it would make him act like he has one extra dime to spare.”

  This was new complaining. She’d made some new move. At first I got thinking like, Oh, no! and then I got thinking like All right!

  “Do you know what he told me this morning?” she said.

  Oh yeah, of course I do.

  “Do you know what he told me?” she asked again like I hadn’t heard any of it the first time.

  I answered no, even though I didn’t feel like it.

  “He told me again that I was using too much toilet paper.”

  I wondered what any of this was really about, where it was really going. … Nah, that’s not right. I didn’t wonder. I only wished I di
dn’t have to hear any of it.

  “Not in so many words,” she said. “Just, ‘I think you need to buy some toilet paper when you go to the store.’ Or maybe he was talking about me not going to the grocery store enough. I don’t know.”

  She struggled with the can opener. That was because she didn’t want to use it. The other night I heard her telling Cloyd she was going to buy an electric one, and he was saying how they didn’t last and took up too much counter space. She goes, I can buy a better one when it breaks.

  I was trying to think of something else the hell to talk about. “So is that what you’re mad about?”

  “Why do you ask that? Who says I’m mad?”

  “It sounds like you’re mad.”

  “M’ijo, I’m not mad. I don’t have to get mad.”

  “It sounds like you’re mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Okay, you’re not mad.”

  “Don’t tell him I didn’t make this,” she said, as she poured another can into a big ceramic bowl.

  “Tell him what?”

  “That I don’t make this salsita!”

  “You should just tell him if you’re worried about it.”

  “I’m not worried about it. I’m asking you to not tell him. Can you do that for me?”

  “What are you gonna say when he finds out?”

  “How will he find out unless you tell him?” She put a dinner plate over the bowl. “Will you take this outside to the trash for me?” She handed me a bag with the cans in it.