The Language of Flowers

by Ванесса Диффенбау

  “I will,” he said, disappearing behind the sheds.

  Elizabeth walked directly to her truck. When she turned and saw that I wasn’t following, she walked back to where I stood. “You’re coming with me,” she said. “Now.” She took a step toward me, and I remembered the way she’d carried me into the house, just two months before. I had grown since then, and gained back the weight I’d lost, but I didn’t doubt she could still throw me inside the truck if it was her will to do so. Following her into the cab, I imagined what was to come: the drive to social services, the white-walled waiting room, Elizabeth leaving even before the social worker on call could check me in to the system. It had all happened before. Clenching tight fists, I stared out the window.

  But as we started down the driveway, Elizabeth’s words surprised me. “We’re going to see my sister,” she said. “This feud has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”

  My body turned rigid. Elizabeth looked to me as if for a response, and I nodded stiffly, the reality of what she had said sinking in.

  She was going to keep me.

  My eyes filled with tears. The anger I’d felt toward Elizabeth that morning dissolved, replaced immediately by shock. I had not, for even one moment, believed Elizabeth when she said there was nothing I could do to make her give me back. But here I was, only moments after having been sent home from school—a suspension would follow, if not an expulsion—listening to Elizabeth talk about her sister. Confusion and something unexpected—relief, maybe, or even joy—swirled within me. I sucked in my lips, trying not to smile.

  “Catherine won’t believe you hit the bus driver over the head while he was driving,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, she won’t believe it because I did it, too—the exact same thing! Maybe I was in second grade, though? I can’t remember. At any rate, one minute he was driving, and the next minute he was glaring at me in the rearview mirror, and before I could stop myself, I was out of my seat, yelling, ‘Keep your eyes on the road, you fat bastard!’ And he was fat, let me tell you.”

  I started to laugh, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Folded over, my forehead pressed against the dashboard, my laughter escaped in a series of choking gulps that sounded like sobs. I covered my face with my hands. “My bus driver isn’t fat,” I said when I had calmed enough to speak, “but he’s ugly.”

  I started to laugh again, but Elizabeth’s silence quieted me.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m encouraging you,” she said. “What you did was clearly wrong. But I feel bad that I ignored your anger, and that I sent you to school in the state you were in. I should have explained myself better, should have included you.”

  Elizabeth understood.

  I pulled my forehead away from the dashboard and shifted my head onto her lap, suddenly feeling less alone than I ever had in my entire life. The steering wheel was only an inch from my nose, and I nuzzled the crown of my head into her stomach. If Elizabeth was surprised by my sudden affection, she didn’t show it. She moved her hand from the gearshift to my hairline, stroking my temple and down the bridge of my nose.

  “I hope she’s home,” she said, and I knew her thoughts had returned to Catherine. She switched on her blinker, waiting for a line of cars to pass before turning from the driveway onto the road.

  Elizabeth had not stopped thinking about her sister in the weeks leading up to the harvest. I knew this because of the phone calls, dozens of them, all messages left on Catherine’s answering machine. The first few were similar to the one I had overheard on the porch: moments of scattered reminiscing followed by a statement of forgiveness. But lately her messages had been different—chatty, and long—sometimes so long that the answering machine cut her off and she had to call back. She rambled on and on about the minutia of our daily lives, describing the endless tasting of the grapes and the cleaning of the picking bins. Often she described what she was cooking as she cooked it, tangling herself up in the long, spiraling cord as she moved from the stove to the spice rack and back again.

  The more time Elizabeth spent talking to Catherine, or, more specifically, Catherine’s answering machine, the more it struck me how little Elizabeth spoke to anyone else. She left the property only to go to the farmers’ market, the grocer, the hardware store, and, occasionally, the post office. These visits were only to pick up plants she had mail-ordered from a gardening catalog, never to mail or receive letters. It was obvious that in the small community, she knew everyone—she asked the butcher to give her regards to his wife, and when she approached the vendors behind the stands at the farmers’ market, she greeted each one by name. But she did not have conversations with these people. In fact, I thought, she had not had a single conversation that I had witnessed throughout the time I’d been with her. She spoke to Carlos as necessary but only about specific aspects of growing and harvesting grapes, and not once did their words meander off topic.

  As we drove to Catherine’s, my head in Elizabeth’s lap, I compared my quiet existence at Elizabeth’s to all the things I had previously understood to compose a life: large families, loud homes, welfare offices, busy cities, violent outbursts. I didn’t want to go back. I liked Elizabeth. I liked her flowers, her grapes, and her concentrated attention. Finally, I realized, I had found a place I wanted to stay.

  Pulling off the road, Elizabeth parked the truck and took a deep, nervous breath.

  “What did she do to you?” I asked, suddenly interested in a way I had never been before.

  Elizabeth looked unsurprised by my question but didn’t answer right away. She stroked my forehead, my cheek, and my shoulder. When she finally spoke, her words were a whisper. “She planted the yellow roses.”

  Then she pulled the parking brake and reached for the door handle.

  “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to meet Catherine.”

  3 .

  Grant drove through the city, his oversized truck slowing for tight turns in crowded intersections.

  “Grant?” I asked.

  “Yeah?”

  I searched the crumpled white paper bag for crumbs but didn’t find any. “I don’t want to see Elizabeth.”

  “So?”

  Like the white poplar, his response was unspecific. “So, what?”

  “So, if you don’t want to see her, don’t see her.”

  “She won’t come to the farm?”

  “She hasn’t visited since the day you came with her, and that was—what?—almost ten years ago?” Grant looked out at the water, and I couldn’t see his face, but when he spoke next, his voice bordered on anger. “She didn’t come for my mother’s funeral, but you think she’ll just show up today because you’re here?”

  He rolled down the window, and the wind became a wall between us.

  Grant and Elizabeth had no contact. He had said this over donuts, but I hadn’t believed it to be possible. Grant must know the truth, and if he did, what would have kept him from telling Elizabeth? I tried to think of an explanation for the remainder of the drive, but when he stopped in front of the locked metal gate, I still hadn’t come up with anything. He parked and got out to open the gate, then returned to the car and drove through the opening.

  The sight of the flowers eclipsed my contemplation. I jumped out of the car and dropped to my knees at the side of the road. There must have been a fenced property line somewhere, but it wasn’t visible, and the stretch of the flowers felt infinite. A gardening stake scrawled with a scientific name I didn’t recognize announced the genus and species of the nearest plant. I held fistfuls of the small yellow flowers to my face as if discovering water after many days in the desert. Pollen clung to my cheeks, and petals rained down on my chest and stomach and thighs. Grant laughed.

  “I’ll give you a minute,” he said, climbing back into the truck. “When you’re done here, walk behind the house.” His truck kicked up dust as it bumped over the road.

  I lay down in the dirt between the rows, disappearing from sight.

  I found Grant behind t
he farmhouse, sitting at a weathered picnic table. On the table sat a box of chocolates, two glasses of milk, and the scroll I’d given him that morning. I sat down across from him and gestured to the sheet of paper with my head.

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  Reaching for the chocolates, I scanned the selection. Dark chocolate, mostly, with nuts and caramel. Exactly what I would have chosen.

  Grant ran his finger along the paper, pausing on a line and tapping a word I couldn’t read upside down.

  “Hazel,” he said. “Reconciliation. Why shouldn’t it be peace?”

  “Because of the history of the Betulaceae family, divided for centuries into two families, Betulaceae and Corylaceae. Only recently brought together as subgroups within the same family,” I explained. “Bringing together—reconciliation.”

  Grant looked down at the table, and I could tell by his expression that he already knew the history of the family. “I’m never going to win with you, am I?”

  “You know you aren’t,” I said. “Did you really bring me here to try?”

  He looked at the house and then out into the fields.

  “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t.” He grabbed a handful of chocolates and stood up. “Eat chocolate. I’ll be right back, and then we’ll go for a walk.”

  I drank my milk. When Grant returned, he had an old camera around his neck, black and heavy on an embroidered strap. It looked as if it belonged in the Victorian era with the language of flowers.

  He took off the camera and handed it to me. “For your dictionary,” he said, and I immediately understood. I would create my own dictionary, and his flowers would illustrate the pages. “Make me a copy,” he said, “so that we’ll never have a misunderstanding.”

  This is all a misunderstanding, I thought to myself, taking the camera. I don’t ride in trucks with young men and sit at picnic tables and eat chocolate. I don’t drink milk while discussing families, flower or otherwise.

  Grant walked away, and I followed. He led me to a dirt road heading west, the sun setting over the hills in front of us. The sky was undecided, alternating orange and blue behind approaching thunderclouds, full of the nervous anticipation of rain. I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and lagged a step behind. Grant pointed to the left at a long row of wooden sheds, all padlocked. There had been a dried-flower business, he explained, but he’d shut it down when his mother became ill. He didn’t much care for the corpses of what had once been alive. On the right were acres of illuminated greenhouses, long hoses running out of cracked open doors. Grant approached one and held the door open for me. I slipped inside.

  “Orchids,” he said, gesturing to shelves of staked pots. “Not ready for market.” There wasn’t a bloom in sight.

  We stepped out and continued along the path, which climbed a hill and dipped down the other side. Somewhere beyond the fields of flowers the vineyard began, but the property line was too far away to see. Eventually, the path curved around the acres of greenhouses and back through open fields until we stood again in front of the farmhouse.

  Grant led me down a gradual slope into a rose garden. It was small, carefully tended, and looked like it belonged to the house and not the farm. Grant’s hand brushed mine as we walked, and I took a step away.

  “Have you ever given anyone a red rose?” Grant asked. I looked at him as if he was trying to force-feed me foxglove. “Moss rose? Myrtle? Pink?” he pressed.

  “Confession of love? Love? Pure love?” I asked, to make sure we shared the same definitions. He nodded. “No, no, and no.”

  I picked a pale blush-colored bud and shredded the petals one at a time.

  “I’m more of a thistle-peony-basil kind of girl,” I said.

  “Misanthropy-anger-hate,” said Grant. “Hmm.”

  I turned away. “You asked,” I said.

  “It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think?” he asked, looking around us at the roses. They were all in bloom, and not one was yellow. “Here you are, obsessed with a romantic language—a language invented for expression between lovers—and you use it to spread animosity.”

  “Why is every bush in bloom?” I asked, ignoring his observation. It was late in the season for roses.

  “My mother taught me to prune thoroughly the second week of October, so we would always have roses for Thanksgiving.”

  “You cook Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked, glancing toward the farmhouse. The window of the peaked gable was still broken, all these years later. Someone had put plywood behind it.

  “No,” he admitted. “My mother did when I was young, before she began to spend most of her days in bed. I always pruned her roses just as she taught me, though, hoping the view from her window might beckon her into the kitchen. Only once did it work, the Thanksgiving before she died. Now that she’s gone, I just do it out of habit.”

  I tried to remember whether Thanksgiving had already passed or if it was in the coming week. I paid little attention to holidays, although in the flower business they were hard to ignore. It must still be approaching, I thought. When I looked up, Grant was looking at me as if he was awaiting a response. “What?” I asked.

  “Do you know your biological mother?”

  I shook my head. He started to ask something else, but I cut him off. “Really. Don’t waste your time asking—I don’t know any more about her than you do.” I walked away and knelt on the ground, holding the camera’s viewfinder up to my eye. I snapped a blurry photo of knobby old wood and the tops of deep roots.

  “It’s manual. Do you know how to use it?” I shook my head. He pointed to the buttons and dials, defining photography terms I had never heard. I was paying attention only to the distance of his fingers from the camera hanging around my neck. Whenever he got too close to my chest, I took a step back.

  “Try it,” Grant said when he was done explaining. I held the camera up again and turned a dial to the left. An open pink blossom went from blurry to unrecognizable. “Other way,” Grant said. I turned the dial to the left again, ruffled by his voice too close to my ear.

  His hand closed around mine, and together we turned the dial to the right. His hands were soft and did not burn where they touched. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” He lifted my other hand to the top of the camera and pressed my index finger onto a round metal button. My heart stopped and started again. The lens clicked open and shut.

  Grant withdrew his hands, but I did not lower the camera. I didn’t trust my face. I didn’t know if he would see joy or hatred in my eyes, fear or pleasure written on my bright-red cheeks. I didn’t know what I felt except breathless.

  “Wind the film to take another picture,” he said. I didn’t move. “Want me to show you?”

  I stepped back. “No,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  “Too much information for one day?” Grant asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I took off the camera and handed it to him. “Way too much.”

  We walked back toward the house. Grant did not invite me inside. He walked straight to his truck and opened the passenger door, holding out his hand to me. I paused and then took it. He helped me inside and closed the door.

  We drove back to the city in silence. It began to rain, slowly at first, and then with a blinding, unexpected ferocity. Cars pulled over to wait out the storm, but it only strengthened. It was the first strong rain of the fall, and the earth opened to its long-awaited watering, releasing a metallic scent. Grant drove slowly, guided by his memory of the turns rather than the sight of the road. The Golden Gate Bridge was deserted. Water rose from the bay and fell from the sky with equal force. I imagined the water coming into the car, the level rising over our feet, knees, stomachs, and throats as we drove.

  Nervous to reveal the location of Natalya’s apartment, I asked Grant to drop me off in front of Bloom. It was still raining when he stopped in front of the store. I don’t know if he waved; I couldn’t see him through the water on the windshield.

  Natalya and her band were
setting up their instruments when I opened the door, and they nodded at me as I slipped up the stairs. Pulling my keys out of my backpack, I opened my small door, crawled inside, and curled up on the floor. The water from my wet clothes soaked into the fur carpet, and the whole world was wet and blue and cold. I shivered with my eyes wide open. I wouldn’t sleep that night.

  4 .

  “Ready?” Elizabeth asked.

  I was surprised to see the short distance we’d traveled. Elizabeth had parked behind a locked metal gate, in a driveway. To the right was the parking lot where the farmers’ market was held, and just beyond that, the vineyard. Somewhere beyond the vast expanse of asphalt, I realized, the two properties likely connected.

  Stepping out of the truck, Elizabeth withdrew a skeleton key from her pocket. She slipped the key into the lock, and the gate swung open. I waited for her to come back to the truck, but she beckoned for me to get out.

  “Let’s walk,” she said when I joined her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve set foot on this land.”

  She walked slowly up the driveway toward the house, pausing to pinch wilted flowers and stick her thumb an inch into the soil. Surrounded by flowers, I was struck by what I now understood as the magnitude of the sisters’ quarrel. Nothing I could think of would make Elizabeth angry enough to give up not only her sister but also these endless acres of flowers for as long as she had. It must have been the worst kind of betrayal.

  Elizabeth picked up her pace as she neared the house, smaller than ours, and yellow, but with a similar peaked-roof shape. As we walked up the front steps, I noticed the wood was soft, as if it hadn’t quite dried out from the past spring’s rain. The yellow paint was beginning to peel in large sections near the front door, and the gutter, knocked loose, hung low over the top step. Elizabeth ducked underneath it.