The Language of Flowers

by Ванесса Диффенбау

  I scanned a half-dozen more books, my anxiety growing with each volume. I was afraid to know the stranger’s response but even more afraid that I wouldn’t find the definition and would never know what he was trying to say. After twenty minutes of searching, I finally found what I was looking for, a single line between plum and poppy. Poplar, white. Time. I exhaled, relieved but also confused.

  Closing the book, I pressed my head against its cool cover. Time, as a response to presumption, was more abstract than I had hoped. Time will tell? Give me time? His response was unspecific; he had clearly not learned from Elizabeth. I opened another book and then another, hoping for an extended definition of the white poplar, but a search of the entire collection did not yield a second reference. I was not surprised. It didn’t seem that poplar, a tree, would be a plant of choice for romantic communication. There was nothing wistful about the passing of sticks or long strips of bark.

  I was about to re-shelve the books when a pocket-sized volume caught my eye. The cover was illustrated with drawings of flowers in a grid of small squares, the definition in tiny print below each image. In the bottom row were delicately rendered drawings of roses in every hue. Under the faded yellow rose was the word jealousy.

  Had it been any other flower, I might not have noticed the discrepancy. But I had never forgotten the sorrow that passed over Elizabeth’s face when she gestured to her yellow rosebushes or the thoroughness with which she snipped every young bud in the spring, leaving them to shrivel in a pile by the garden fence. Replacing infidelity with jealousy—this changed the meaning entirely. One was an action, the other only an emotion. Opening the small book, I scanned the pages, then set it down and opened another.

  Hours passed as I took in hundreds of pages of new information. I sat frozen, only the pages of the books turning. Looking up flowers one at a time, I cross-referenced everything I had memorized with the dictionaries stacked on the table.

  It wasn’t long before I knew. Elizabeth had been as wrong about the language of flowers as she had been about me.

  13 .

  On the front steps, Elizabeth sat, soaking her foot in a pan of water. From where I stood at the bus stop, she looked small, her exposed ankles pale.

  She looked up as I approached her, and I felt a rush of nerves—she wasn’t done with me, this I knew. That morning, Elizabeth’s shriek, followed by the loud thump of a wooden heel hitting the linoleum floor, had announced her discovery of the cactus spines. I’d risen, dressed, and raced downstairs, but by the time I entered the kitchen, she was already seated at the table, calmly eating her oatmeal. She didn’t look up when I walked into the room, didn’t say anything when I sat down at the table.

  Her lack of reaction made me furious. What are you going to do with me? I’d screamed, and Elizabeth’s response had floored me. Cactus, she told me, her eyes taunting, meant ardent love, and though her shoes might never recover, she did appreciate the sentiment. I shook my head wildly, but Elizabeth reminded me of what she had explained in her garden, that each flower has only one meaning, to avoid confusion. I’d picked up my backpack and started to the door, but Elizabeth was behind me, a bouquet pressed to the back of my neck. Don’t you want to see my response? she asked. I spun around to face the tiny purple petals. Heliotrope, she said. Devoted affection.

  I hadn’t paused for breath, and what came out next was a fiery whisper.

  Cactus means I hate you, I’d said, slamming the door in her face.

  Now a full day of school had passed, and my anger had faded into something close to regret. But Elizabeth smiled when she saw me, her expression welcoming, as if she had completely forgotten my declaration of hatred only hours earlier.

  “How was your first day of school?” she asked.

  “Awful,” I said. I took the stairs two at a time, my legs stretching their full length as I attempted to pass Elizabeth, but her bony fingers flew out and closed around my ankle.

  “Sit,” she said. Her tight grasp thwarted my attempt at escape. I turned and sat on the step below her to avoid her eyes, but she pulled me up by the collar until I faced her.

  “Better,” she said, then handed me a plate of sliced pear and a muffin. “Now eat. I have a job for you that may take all afternoon, so you’ll start as soon as you’ve finished this.”

  I hated that Elizabeth was such a good cook. She kept me so well fed that I had yet to go back for the American cheese in my desk drawer. The pears on the plate were peeled and cored; the muffin was full of warm chunks of banana and melted peanut-butter chips. I ate every bite. When I finished, I traded the plate for a glass of milk.

  “There,” she said. “Now you should be able to work for as long as it takes to remove every spine from the insides of my shoes.” She handed me two leather gloves that were much too big for my hands, a pair of tweezers, and a flashlight. “When you’re done, you’ll put them on your feet and walk up and down the steps three times, so that I can see you’ve been successful.”

  I hurled the gloves down the stairs, and they landed like forgotten hands in the dirt. Thrusting my bare hands into the darkness of her shoe, my fingers searched the soft leather for spines. I found one and pinched it between my fingernails, drawing it out and flicking it onto the ground.

  Elizabeth watched me work in quiet concentration: first the leather inside, then the sides, and ending with the point of the toe. The shoe that Elizabeth had stepped into was the hardest, her weight having hammered the spines all the way through the leather. I dug each one out with the tweezers like a sloppy surgeon.

  “So, if not ardent love, what?” Elizabeth asked as I neared the end of my task. “If not your eternal devotion and passionate commitment to me, what?”

  “I told you before school,” I said. “Cactus means I hate you.”

  “It doesn’t,” Elizabeth said firmly. “I can teach you the flower for hate, if you like, but the word hate is unspecific. Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear. If you’ll tell me exactly how you’re feeling, I’ll be able to help you find the right flower to convey your message.”

  “I don’t like you,” I said. “I don’t like you locking me out of the house or throwing me into the kitchen sink. I don’t like you touching my back or grabbing my face or forcing me to play with Perla. I don’t like your flowers or your messages or your bony fingers. I don’t like anything about you, and I don’t like anything about the world, either.”

  “Much better!” Elizabeth seemed genuinely impressed by my hate-filled monologue. “The flower you’re looking for is clearly the common thistle, which symbolizes misanthropy. Misanthropy means hatred or mistrust of humankind.”

  “Does humankind mean everybody?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about this. Misanthropy. No one had ever described my feelings in a single word. I repeated it to myself until I was sure I wouldn’t forget.

  “Do you have any?”

  “I do,” she said. “Finish your task, and we’ll look together. I have a phone call to make, and I’m not leaving the kitchen until I’ve made it. When we’re both done, we’ll go looking for thistle together.”

  Elizabeth hobbled inside, and when the screen door banged closed, I scurried up the steps, crouching below the window. I rubbed my hand against the soft leather of the shoes, feeling for straggling spines. If Elizabeth was finally going to make the phone call she had been attempting for days, I wanted to listen. It was intriguing, the thought that Elizabeth, who never seemed to trip over a single word, had something she found hard to say. Peering in the window, I saw her sitting on the kitchen counter. She dialed seven numbers quickly, listened to perhaps the first ring, and then hung up. Slowly, she dialed again. This time she held the phone to her ear. From where I sat outside the window, I could see she was holding her breath. She listened for a long time.

  Finally, she spoke. “Catherine.” She pressed her hand over the receiver and made a sound between a gasp and a sob. I watched
her wipe at the corners of her eyes. She put the phone back to her mouth. “This is Elizabeth.” She paused again, and I listened intently, trying to hear the voice coming through the line, but couldn’t. Elizabeth continued, her voice fragile. “I know it’s been fifteen years, and I know you probably thought you’d never hear from me again. To tell you the truth, I thought you’d never hear from me again. But I have a daughter now, and I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  I realized then that Elizabeth was talking to an answering machine, not a person. Picking up speed, her words tumbled forth. “You know,” she said, “all the women I’ve known who’ve had babies, the first thing they do is call their mothers; they want their mothers with them—even the women who hate their mothers.” Elizabeth laughed then, and relaxed her shoulders, which had been lifted almost all the way to her ears. She played with the spiraling cord with her finger. “So I understand that now, you know? In a completely different way. With our parents gone, all I have is you, and I think about you constantly—I almost can’t think of anything else.” Elizabeth paused, perhaps thinking about what she should say next, or how to say it. “I don’t have a baby—I was going to, adopt one, that is—but I ended up with a nine-year-old girl. I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, when I see you. I hope I’ll see you. Anyway, when you meet Victoria, you’ll understand—she has these wild animal eyes, like I had as a little girl, after I’d learned that the only way to get our mother out of her room was to start a grease fire on the stove or smash the entire season’s canned peaches.” Elizabeth laughed again, and wiped her eyes. I could see that she was crying, although she didn’t look sad. “Remember? So—I’m just calling to say that I forgive you for what happened. It was so long ago, a lifetime ago, really. I should have called years before now, and I’m sorry I didn’t. I hope you’ll call, or come to see me. I miss you. And I want to meet Grant. Please.” Elizabeth waited, listening, and then set the phone down gently, so that I could barely hear the click of the receiver.

  Scrambling back down the stairs, I stared at Elizabeth’s shoes intently, hoping she wouldn’t know I’d been listening. Finally, she emerged from the kitchen and limped down the steps. Her eyes were wiped dry but still glistened, and she looked lighter—happier, even—than I’d ever seen her. “Well, let me see if you’ve been successful,” she said. “Try them on.”

  I put on her shoes, took them off, extracted a spine I’d missed underneath my big toe, and put them on again. I walked up and down the stairs three times.

  “Thank you,” she said, slipping a shoe on her uninjured foot and sighing with pleasure. “Much, much better.” She stood up slowly. “Now run into the kitchen and grab an empty jam jar from the cupboard with the glasses, a dish towel, and the pair of scissors on the kitchen table.”

  I did as she asked, and when I returned she was standing on the bottom step, testing her weight on her hurt foot. She looked from the road to her garden and back again as if trying to decide where to go.

  “Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.” She took her first step toward the road and grimaced. “You’ll have to help me or we’ll never make it,” she said, reaching for my shoulder.

  “Don’t you have a cane or something?” I asked, shrinking away from her touch.

  Elizabeth laughed. “No, do you? I’m not an old lady, despite what you may think.” She reached toward me, and this time I didn’t retract. She was so tall she had to bend at the waist to lean on my shoulder. We took slow steps toward the road. She stopped once to readjust her shoe, and we kept walking. My shoulder burned beneath her hand.

  “Here,” Elizabeth said, when we reached the road. She sat down on the gravel and leaned against the wooden post of the mailbox. “See? Everywhere.” She gestured to the ditch separating the highway from the rows of vines. It was about as deep as I was tall, full of stiff, dry plants, without a flower anywhere.

  “I don’t see anything.” I was disappointed.

  “Climb down in there,” she said. I turned around and slid down the steep dirt wall. She handed me the jam jar and scissors. “Look for dime-sized flowers that were once purple, although this time of year they’ve likely faded to brown like everything else in Northern California. They’re sharp, though, so pick them carefully when you find them.”

  I took the jar and scissors, and crouched down into the weeds. The brush was thick, golden, and smelled like the end of summer. I cut a dry plant at the root. It stood tall in its place, supported by weeds on all sides. Detangling it, I threw it onto Elizabeth’s lap.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes, but this one doesn’t have flowers. Keep looking.”

  I scrambled up the side of the ditch a few inches to get a better view but still didn’t see anything purple. I picked up a rock and threw it as hard as I could in frustration. It hit the opposite wall and flew back in my direction so that I had to jump out of the way. Elizabeth laughed.

  Leaping back into the weeds, I parted the brush with my hands and examined every dry stalk. “Here!” I said finally, snatching a clover-sized bud and throwing it into the jar. The flower looked like a small golden puffer fish with a faded tuft of purple hair. I climbed back to Elizabeth to show her the flower, which was bouncing around inside the jar like a living thing. I clapped my hand over the top to keep it from escaping.

  “Thistle!” I said, handing her the jar. “For you,” I added. I reached out awkwardly and patted her once on the shoulder. It was perhaps the first time in my entire life I had initiated contact with another human being—at least the first time in my memory. Meredith had told me I was a clingy baby, reaching out and clutching hair, ears, or fingers if I could find them—the straps of my infant car seat if I could not—with pulsing purple fists. But I didn’t remember any of this, and so my action—the quick connection of the palm of my hand to Elizabeth’s shoulder blade—surprised me. I stepped back, glaring at her as if she had made me do it.

  But Elizabeth just smiled. “If I didn’t know the meaning, I would be thrilled,” she said. “I think this is the kindest you’ve been to me, and all to express your hatred and mistrust of humankind.” For the second time that afternoon her eyes filled, and, like before, she did not look sad.

  She reached out to hug me, but before she could draw me in, I slipped out of her arms and back into the ditch.

  14 .

  The solid form of the chair on which I sat began to liquefy. Without knowing how I got there, I lay on my stomach on the library floor, books spread in a semicircle around me. The more I read, the more I felt my understanding of the universe slip away from me. Columbine symbolized both desertion and folly; poppy, imagination and extravagance. The almond blossom, listed as indiscretion in Elizabeth’s dictionary, appeared in others as hope and occasionally thoughtlessness. The definitions were not only different, they were often contradictory. Even common thistle—the staple of my communication—appeared as misanthropy only when it wasn’t defined as austerity.

  The temperature in the library rose with the sun. By mid-afternoon I was sweating, swiping at my forehead with a wet hand as if trying to wipe memories from a saturated mind. I had given Meredith peony, anger but also shame. Admitting shame was closer to an apology than I ever hoped to get with Meredith. If anything, she should be coming to me with bunches and bunches of peony, quilting peony-covered bedspreads, baking peony-covered cakes. If peony could be misinterpreted, how many times, to how many people, had I misspoken? The thought made my stomach turn.

  My choices for the flower vendor hung as a threatening unknown. Rhododendron clung solidly to the definition of beware throughout every dictionary before me, but there were likely hundreds, if not thousands, more dictionaries in circulation. It was impossible to know how he had interpreted my messages or what he was thinking as he sat in the donut shop. It was past five o’clock. He would be waiting, his eyes on the door.

  I had to go. Leaving books sca
ttered on the library floor, I skipped down four flights of stairs and walked out into the darkening San Francisco sky.

  It was almost six by the time I got to the donut shop. I opened the double glass doors and found him sitting alone in a booth, a half-dozen donuts in a pink box before him.

  I walked over to the table but did not sit down.

  “Rhododendron,” I demanded, as Elizabeth once had.

  “Beware.”

  “Mistletoe.”

  “I surmount all obstacles.”

  I nodded and continued. “Snapdragon?”

  “Presumption.”

  “White poplar?”

  “Time.” I nodded again, scattering before him the few thistles I had collected on my walk across the city. “Common thistle,” he said. “Misanthropy.”

  I sat down. It had been a test, and he had passed. My relief was disproportional to his five correct answers. Suddenly starving, I dug a maple bar out of the box. I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  “Why thistle?” he asked, helping himself to a chocolate old-fashioned.

  “Because,” I said between huge bites, “it’s all you need to know about me.”

  He finished his donut and started on another. He shook his head. “Not possible.”

  I took a glazed and a sprinkled donut out of the box and set them on a napkin. He was eating so fast I was afraid the box would be empty before I finished my first.

  “So, what else is there?” I asked, my mouth full.

  He paused, and then looked into my eyes.

  “Where’ve you been for the past eight years?”

  His question stunned me.

  I stopped chewing and tried to swallow, but I’d put too much in my mouth. I spit a brown ball onto a white napkin and looked up.

  All at once, I saw it. The realization was as shocking for its obviousness as for the fact that we had met again; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him instantly. The boy he had been lurked inside the man he had become, his eyes still deep and afraid, his body, filled out now, still curved in at the shoulders, protective. I flashed on the first time I’d ever seen him, a lanky teenager leaning against the back of a pickup truck, tossing roses.