The Language of Flowers

by Ванесса Диффенбау

  “If you’re done,” Elizabeth said, “wait for me on the tractor. I’ll clean up and meet you out there.”

  Outside, I leaned against the tall tire, surveying the vines. It was turning out to be a good year. Elizabeth and I had thinned and fertilized in just the right amounts; the grapes that remained were fat and starting to sweeten. I’d spent all fall working beside Elizabeth on the vineyard, writing three-paragraph essays on seasons, soil, and grape growing; memorizing field guides and plant families. In the evenings, just as I had the autumn before, I accompanied Elizabeth on her tasting tours.

  I checked my watch. We had a long night of tasting ahead of us, and I was anxious to start. But Elizabeth didn’t come, not after five minutes, and not after ten. I decided to go back inside. I would drink some milk and watch Elizabeth finish cleaning the kitchen.

  When I reached the front porch, I heard her voice, half angry, half pleading. She was on the phone. All at once I realized why Elizabeth had kept me waiting by the tractor, and just as suddenly I realized that the failed adoption was not my fault. It was Catherine’s. If she’d shown up, if she’d responded with words or flowers, if she hadn’t left Elizabeth so alone, everything would have been different. Elizabeth would have gotten out of bed and tightened the ribbons on my dress and driven us to court, Grant and Catherine in tow. Filling with rage, I stormed into the kitchen.

  “I fucking hate that woman!” I shouted.

  Elizabeth looked up. She moved her hand to cover the mouthpiece. Springing forward, I ripped the phone out of her hand. “You fucking ruined my life!” I shouted, and then slammed it against the base. The call disconnected, but the phone bounced off the hook, hitting the hardwood floor and then dangling an inch above the ground. Elizabeth folded her head into her hands and leaned against the counter. She appeared neither surprised nor offended by my unexpected outburst. I waited for her to speak, but she was quiet for a long time.

  “Victoria, I know you’re angry,” she said finally. “You have every right to be. But don’t be mad at Catherine. I’m the one who messed up. Blame me. I’m your mother—don’t you know that’s what mothers are for?” The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, a wry, tired smile, and she met my gaze.

  Squeezing my hands into fists, I rocked backward on my heels, begging myself not to attack her. Even in the height of my anger, I understood that above all else, I wanted to stay with Elizabeth.

  “No,” I said, when I’d calmed enough to speak. “You’re not my mother. You would have been, if Catherine hadn’t ruined my life.”

  Storming over to the stairs, I was startled by a flash of motion out the front window. A truck sped up the driveway. In profile, I saw Grant hunched over the steering wheel. Brakes squealed and gravel flew as he parked in front of the house.

  I sprinted upstairs at the same time Grant pounded up the front porch. At the top, I leaned against the wall, out of sight. Grant didn’t knock and didn’t wait for Elizabeth to come to the door.

  “You have to stop,” he said, out of breath.

  Elizabeth crossed the room. I imagined her standing in front of him, only the screen separating their bodies.

  “I won’t stop,” she said. “Eventually, she’ll accept my forgiveness. She has to.”

  “She won’t. You don’t know her anymore.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Just that. You don’t know her.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elizabeth whispered, her voice barely audible over a persistent tapping. It sounded like Grant’s foot on the porch, or his knuckles on the frame of the screen. The noise was nervous, impatient.

  “I only came over to tell you to stop calling—please.” There was silence between them.

  “You can’t tell me to forget her. She’s my sister.”

  “Maybe,” Grant said.

  “ ‘Maybe’?” Elizabeth’s voice rose suddenly. I could picture her face flushed, hot. Had Elizabeth been stalking the wrong woman? Was Grant even her nephew?

  “All I mean is, she isn’t the sister you knew. Please believe me.”

  “People change,” Elizabeth said. “Love doesn’t. Family doesn’t.”

  There was silence again, and I wished I could see their faces, to see if they were angry, or indifferent, or on the verge of tears.

  “Yes,” Grant said finally. “Love does.” I heard footsteps, and I knew he was leaving. When his voice reached me again, it was from far away. “She keeps filling jam jars with lighter fluid. Lining them up on the kitchen windowsill. Says she’s going to burn down your vineyard.”

  “No.” Elizabeth did not sound shocked or afraid, only disbelieving. “She wouldn’t do it. I don’t care how much she’s changed in fifteen years. She wouldn’t do that. She loves these vines as much as I do. She always has.”

  His truck door slammed. “I just thought you should know,” he said. The engine started, a quiet hum, and it idled there, in the driveway. I imagined Grant’s and Elizabeth’s gazes meeting, each searching the other for the truth.

  Finally, Elizabeth called out to him. “Grant?” she said. “You don’t have to leave. There’s leftovers from dinner, and you’re welcome here.”

  Wheels turned in the gravel. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come, and I won’t come again. She can never know.”

  3 .

  I waited a second month, and then a third, just to be certain, slipping rent under Natalya’s door when it was due. By the end of October, the nausea had lessened. It returned only when I didn’t eat enough, which was rare. I had plenty of money for meals. Grant’s cash and my own savings would have kept me well fed throughout my pregnancy, but I knew I wouldn’t have to wait that long.

  As the leaves fell, I became sure that Grant had given up. I imagined looking through the windows of his water tower and watching him box up the romantic poets and cover the orange box with an opaque cloth, the calculated actions of a man with a past to forget. And soon, I told myself, he would forget. There would be many women at the flower market, women who were more beautiful, exotic, and sexual than I would ever be. If he hadn’t already found one, he would. But even as I tried to convince myself, Grant’s image passed through my mind, his hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his forehead. Not once had I seen him look up at a woman passing his stall.

  The day I felt the baby kick for the first time, I returned to the blue room. I lugged the duffel bag across the city to my car and drove to the apartment. Letting myself in the front door, I carried everything up the stairs in three trips. Natalya’s door was open, and I stood over her bed, watching her sleep. She had recently dyed her hair again, and the pink had rubbed off in streaks on the white pillowcase. She smelled like sweet wine and cloves, and she didn’t stir. I shook her awake.

  “Has he come?” I asked.

  Natalya covered her eyes with her elbow and sighed. “Yeah, a few weeks ago.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just that you were gone.”

  “I was.”

  “Yeah. Where’d you go?”

  I ignored her question. “Did you tell him I was still paying rent?”

  She sat up and shook her head. “I wasn’t entirely sure the money was from you.” She reached out and placed her hand on my stomach. In just the past few weeks, I had gone from looking fat to looking undeniably pregnant. “Renata told me,” she said.

  The baby kicked again, its fingers and feet pressing into my internal organs, scraping the walls of my liver, my heart, my spleen. I gagged and ran into kitchen, throwing up into the sink. Dropping down to the floor, I felt the nausea ebb and flow with the motion of the baby. I thought I was past the sickness of early pregnancy; I also thought I had overcome the urge to vomit every time I was touched. One of my two assumptions was inaccurate.

  Renata had told Natalya. If she had told Natalya, there was no reason to think she hadn’t told Grant. I climbed my way up the kitchen cabinets and threw up into the sink a second time.

  Th
ere was a new sign in the window of Bloom. Shorter hours, closed on Sundays. When I arrived in the early afternoon, the storefront was dark and locked, even though the sign said it should be open. I knocked, and when Renata didn’t come, I knocked again. The key was in my pocket, but I didn’t use it. I sat down on the curb and waited.

  Fifteen minutes later, Renata returned, the silver tube of a wrapped burrito in her hand. I watched the light reflect off the aluminum and onto the walls of the buildings she passed. I stood up but did not look at her, even when she was standing directly in front of me. My eyes studied my feet, still visible beneath the curve of my stomach.

  “Did you tell him?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t know?” The shock and accusation in her voice pushed me backward. I stumbled off the curb and into the street. Renata steadied me with her hand on my shoulder. When I looked up, her eyes were kinder than her words had been.

  She nodded to my stomach. “When are you due?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The baby would come when it did. I would not see a doctor, and I would not give birth in a hospital. Renata seemed to understand all this without me having to tell her.

  “My mother will help you. And she won’t charge you anything. She considers it the work for which she was put on this earth.” I could hear Renata’s words coming out of Mother Ruby’s mouth, her accent thicker and her hands on my body. I shook my head.

  “Then what do you want from me?” Renata demanded, her frustration escaping in short, punctuated words.

  “I want to work,” I said. “And I want you not to tell Grant—that I’m back or that I’m having a baby.”

  She sighed. “He deserves to know.”

  I nodded. “I know he does.” Grant deserved a lot of things, all of them better than me. “You won’t tell him?”

  Renata shook her head. “No. But I won’t lie for you. You can’t work for me, not with Grant asking me every Saturday if you’ve returned to your job. I’ve never been a good liar, and I don’t want to learn now.”

  I crumpled onto the curb, and Renata sat beside me. When I checked my pulse underneath the wristband of my watch, the beat was imperceptible. I couldn’t get another job. Even before getting pregnant, the likelihood was slim, and it would be impossible in my current, increasingly visible, condition. The money I had saved would eventually run out. I wouldn’t be able to feed myself or buy whatever it was that made children so infamously expensive.

  “Then what will I do?” My despair became anger as it left my body, but Renata didn’t flinch.

  “Ask Grant,” she said.

  I stood up to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. She unlocked the door to Bloom and opened the cash register. Lifting the cash drawer, she extracted a sealed red envelope, my name printed neatly across the front, and a stack of twenty-dollar bills. Walking back outside, she held out the cash.

  “Your final paycheck,” she said. I didn’t count the money she handed me, but I could tell it was much more than I had earned. When I had put it in my backpack, she handed me the envelope and her unopened burrito. “Protein,” she said. “That’s what my mother always says. It builds the baby’s brain. Or maybe it’s the bones—I can’t remember.”

  I thanked her, turning to walk down the hill.

  “If you ever need anything,” she called after me, “you know where to find me.”

  The rest of the day I spent in the blue room, fighting off waves of nausea as the baby fluttered inside me. The red envelope lay on the white fur floor like a bloodstain, and I sat cross-legged beside it. I couldn’t decide whether to open it or to slip it under the rug and forget about it.

  Finally, I decided I had to know. It would be hard to read Grant’s words but even harder to go through the pregnancy without knowing if he had guessed the reason for my abrupt parting.

  But when I opened the envelope, it was not what I had expected. It was a wedding invitation: Bethany and Ray, the first weekend in November, Ocean Beach. The wedding was less than two weeks away. I was invited, Bethany wrote on the back, as a guest, but would I also do the flowers? What she wanted most, she wrote, was permanence, and after that, passion. The opposite of the cherry blossom, I thought, cringing at the memory of the afternoon in Catherine’s studio and everything that moment had become. I would suggest honeysuckle, I decided, devotion. The very strength of the vine suggested a permanence I had never experienced but hoped Bethany would.

  Bethany had included her phone number and asked me to call by the end of August. The date had long passed, and she had likely found another florist, but I had to try. It was the only foreseeable source of income in what would be a long, idle winter.

  Picking up on the second ring, Bethany gasped at the sound of my voice.

  “Victoria!” she said. “I’d given up! I found another florist, but that woman is about to lose a job, deposit or no.”

  She and Ray could meet the following day, she said. I gave her directions to my house.

  “I hope you’ll stay for the wedding,” she said before she hung up. “You know, I credit your bouquet as the beginning of everything.”

  “I will,” I said. And I would bring something resembling business cards.

  I asked Natalya if I could meet with Bethany and Ray downstairs, and she agreed. Early the following morning, I bought a card table and three folding chairs at a flea market in South San Francisco. They fit inside the back of my car, the hatchback tied down with a rope. In addition to the furniture, I bought a rose-colored cut crystal vase with a discreet chip for a dollar and a white lace tablecloth with a pink plastic liner for three. I wrapped the vase in the tablecloth and took the side streets home.

  Before Bethany and Ray arrived, I set up the card table in the empty office space. Covering it with the lace cloth, I set the crystal vase in the center, full of flowers from my garden in McKinley Square. Next to the vase sat my blue photo box. I checked and rechecked my alphabetization while I waited for the door to open.

  Finally, it did, and Bethany stood in the empty doorway more beautiful than I remembered, Ray more handsome than I imagined. They would make a breathtaking couple, I thought, draping honeysuckle in long lines through the white sand.

  Bethany opened her arms to hug me, and I allowed it, my belly a ball between us. Looking down, she gasped and placed her hands on my stomach. I wondered how many times I would have to endure this in the coming months, from acquaintances and strangers on the street. Pregnancy seemed to remove the unspoken societal laws of personal space. I disliked it almost as much as the feeling of another human being growing within my body.

  “Congratulations!” Bethany said, hugging me again. “When are you due?”

  It was the second time I’d been asked in two days, and I knew the frequency would increase along with my size. I counted the months in my head.

  “February,” I said. “Or March. The doctors aren’t sure.”

  Bethany introduced me to Ray, and we shook hands. Motioning to the table and chairs, I asked them to sit down. I sat across from them, apologizing for taking so long to call.

  “We’re just so glad you did,” Bethany said, squeezing Ray’s thick arm. “I’ve told Ray all about you.”

  I pushed the blue box toward the couple. It glowed under the fluorescent office lights. “I can do anything you want for your wedding. Nearly everything is available at the flower market, even out of season.” Bethany opened the lid, and I cringed as if she was again touching my body.

  Ray picked up the first card. In the years that followed, I watched many men squirm in front of my flower dictionary, the fluorescent lights casting a sickly shadow on their nervous faces. But Ray wasn’t one of them. His bulk was deceiving; he discussed emotions like Annemarie’s lady friends, with loquacious enthusiasm and indecision. They got stuck on the first card, acacia, as Grant and I had, but for completely different reasons.

  “Secret love,” he said. “I like that.”

  �
�� ‘Secret’?” Bethany asked. “Why secret?” She said it with mock offense, as if he was suggesting they hide their love from the world.

  “Because what we have is secret. My friends, when they talk about their girlfriends or wives, complaining or bragging, I just keep quiet. What we have—it’s different. I want to keep it that way. Untouched. Secret.”

  “Mmm,” Bethany said. “Yes.” She turned over the card and viewed the photo of the acacia blossom, a feathery golden sphere-shaped flower hanging on a delicate stem. There was more than one acacia tree in McKinley Square. I hoped they were in bloom. “What can you do with this?” she asked.

  “It depends on what else you want. Acacia isn’t a centerpiece flower. I would probably drape it around the edge of a nosegay, half concealing your hands.”

  “I like that,” said Bethany. She turned back to Ray. “What else?”

  In the end, they decided on fuchsia moss roses with pale pink lilac, cream-colored dahlia, honeysuckle, and the golden acacia. They would have to return the bridesmaid’s dresses; the burgundy silk would clash. Bethany was relieved they were from a department store and that she hadn’t special-ordered. The flowers were the most important, she said with confidence, and Ray agreed.

  As they stood up to go, I told them I would deliver the flowers at noon and return for the two-o’clock wedding. “I can adjust your bouquet at the last minute,” I told her, “if it needs anything.”

  Bethany hugged me again. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “My greatest fear is that the roses will suddenly snap when the wedding music starts to play, and both my wedding and my good fortune will be shattered.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Flowers don’t spontaneously combust.” I looked from Bethany to Ray as I said it. She smiled. I was talking about Ray, not the flowers, and she understood.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I bring business cards?” I asked. “I’m just starting out here.” I nodded to the white walls.

  “Of course!” she said. “Bring cards! And bring a guest; we forgot to tell you that.” Bethany nodded to my stomach and winked. The baby kicked; my nausea returned.