Desert Flowers

by Paul Pen

  “I just taught them the word,” Iris explained. “It was this book’s fault. It has stunned, moved, and astonished me.”

  Mom made a face to reproach Iris for the way she showed off her vocabulary. She looked at the book cover.

  “I don’t know why you need to read such ugly things,” she said, “considering how perfect our home, our family, and our lives are.”

  She looked to the horizon, at the acres of open space. Melissa watched her aim a broad smile at the landscape and everything in it: the cacti, the rocks, her daughters’ footsteps in the sand, her husband bringing in the shopping. Then she slapped Iris with the book to get her inside. Melissa waited for them to go in. When the mosquito screen closed in front of her, leaving her alone on the porch, she responded to her mother’s comment while nobody could hear her.

  “Yeah, sure . . . a perfect life.”

  Iris left the twisted book on a shelf in the kitchen. She’d read every novel on that bookshelf. For a bookend she used a jar filled with coins and bills. When she turned around she saw her father outside, trying to open the screen door with his foot, his arms laden with more bags. She ran to open it for him, dodging the twins, who were taking silverware and napkins to the table. Dad thanked her, blew the hair from his eyes, and reached the kitchen counter. He put the items down near the faucet while Mom checked the shopping.

  “And the rice?” she asked.

  He pulled a heavy sack from the bottom of a bag, and she kissed him on the cheek. Iris liked seeing how her parents would show their love for each other at any moment, with spontaneous gestures of affection among packs of meat and bread or when Dad came into the bathroom while Mom was brushing her teeth. It was an everyday love that was rarely spoken of in the books that she read, which were more given to passionate romances where one of the lovers usually ended up dead.

  “Why are you sighing?” Mom asked her, cutting open a corner of the bag of rice with scissors.

  Iris shook her head.

  “You two scare me with your adolescence.” Mom also gestured at Melissa with the scissors to include her in the remark.

  “Me? Don’t lump me in with her.” Melissa stuck her tongue out at Iris, happy not to be her age yet. Iris screwed up her nose, happy she was no longer Melissa’s age. At the table, Daisy and Dahlia said something into each other’s ears.

  “What’ve you brought for us, Daddy?”

  “You’ll see.” He was on his way out the door again. “Your stuff’s in the last bag.”

  The girls applauded.

  “You kids finish setting the table, and don’t interrupt your father,” Mom interceded. “He’s tired enough as it is after driving all day.”

  Iris took a pitcher of water from the refrigerator while the twins laid out the six sets of tableware. With synchronized movements they arranged the glasses first, then the napkins, and finally the silverware.

  Melissa let the arrangement be but made a space for her rock with the nose. “He’s going to have dinner with us,” she said.

  When Iris considered her sisters’ work to be done, she placed the pitcher in the center of the table. Ice cubes clinked against the glass. Seeing how the twins were still checking that the cutlery was centered on the napkins with pinpoint precision, Iris winked at Melissa and moved a few of the knives out of place. They put them back without stopping to tell her off and smiled with satisfaction when the symmetry was restored.

  “You two are crazy,” Iris said.

  Mom turned around at the sink. “Don’t say that to them.”

  Dad arrived back in the kitchen, this time carrying only one bag.

  “How’s the city?” Melissa asked.

  “Awful as ever. And it’s not a city: it’s a poky little town with six stores,” he said.

  “At least there’re people there,” said Melissa. “People with eyes. People who speak. I wish I could go every day and spend the day talking to people.”

  “With those ugly little people?”

  Mom cuffed Iris for the comment.

  “It’s true,” Iris said in her own defense. “There isn’t a single good-looking boy there.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Melissa said. “What I need is to talk.”

  “Then you’d better start learning Spanish, because only the man in library speaks English. Just enough to get me the books Dad asks him for. And all that about not caring about boys? Let’s see what you have to say in”—Iris went up to her sister and touched her breasts, assessing their growth—“in about two years.”

  Melissa blushed and cuffed her. Dad separated them as if they were fighting, though they were laughing.

  “When you learn to drive, that is if I teach you one day, you’ll be able to go to the town whenever you want.”

  “And what if we walk?” asked the twins.

  “It’ll take you four days and you’ll die of heatstroke, thirst, and hunger.”

  The twins drank from their water glasses as if they’d walked that distance just by thinking about it.

  “Sure, as if you’d let us go even if we did learn to drive,” Melissa said. “You don’t even let us go with you to the gas station.”

  “Do you think any of the other guys take their children to work?”

  Melissa shrugged.

  “Anyways,” Iris broke in, “if it’s about learning to drive, I could go already.” She winked at her mother, who was standing at the sink.

  “What was that?” Dad asked. “Why’s she winking at you?”

  Mom gave Iris a scolding look.

  “What?” he insisted.

  Prolonging the silence would only make Dad more impatient, so Iris came clean. “Mom’s taught me to drive a little.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Just a bit. With the Dodge,” Mom explained. “She knows how to accelerate and brake, that’s all. The first time, we rammed into a cactus.”

  “Don’t exaggerate!” Iris argued.

  “The first time?” Dad asked. “So there’ve been more than one?”

  Mother and daughter laughed.

  The twins whispered into each other’s ears before speaking.

  “You’re going to learn to drive before we do, and leave for the city,” they said. “You’re going to leave us here on our own.”

  “It’s not a city,” their father corrected them.

  “Please don’t leave us on our own,” Dahlia said.

  “Please don’t leave us on our own,” Daisy said.

  “We’ll get eaten by the coyotes and the birds with the weird necks,” said Dahlia.

  “We’ll get eaten by the coyotes and—”

  Melissa covered Daisy’s mouth with her hand so she couldn’t repeat the full sentence.

  “No one’s going to leave you on your own,” Dad reassured them. “Anyway, those birds with the weird necks, which are called vultures, only eat dead meat. And you’re in no danger because you seem very alive to me.” He waited for a reaction from the girls as he approached the table. “Or are you not?” He tickled their bellies, making them writhe with laughter. “See? No vulture’s going to eat little girls who squirm that much.”

  They showed the relief the information brought them by wiping imaginary sweat from their foreheads. But Iris saw Daisy’s face turn from reassurance to worry.

  “But if they eat dead meat, then they’re going to eat Edelweiss,” Daisy said.

  “But if they eat dead meat, then they’re going to eat Edelweiss,” repeated Dahlia.

  A shower of rice fell onto the floor, the grains reaching Iris’s feet. Melissa covered the girls’ mouths, but they were already quiet. Mom bent down with an apology and began sweeping up the mess with a brush.

  “It’s OK.” Her trembling hands said otherwise. “I’m fine.”

  Dad asked Iris to help Mom. He took care of the twins.

  “That won’t happen,” he told them. “Vultures can’t dig, so they’re not going to take Edelweiss. She’ll always be out there with us.�
�

  The twins whispered to each other. “We preferred it when she was here for real and we could play with her.”

  Iris comforted her mother by squeezing her hand as they knelt to clean up the rice. Mom dried her nose and forced a smile. “I’ll get used to it,” she whispered.

  “So, does anyone want to open the bag of special stuff from the town? Or shall we leave it for next weekend?”

  Iris noticed the relief in Mom’s face. She was grateful for the change of subject. Dad always knew how to make her feel better.

  “We do!” cried the little girls.

  They ran to their dad, who was searching in the bottom of the bag for the surprise he’d brought them from the town’s stationery store. Iris observed their excitement as she threw two handfuls of rice in the trash.

  “What colors are they?”

  “What colors are they?”

  Dad prolonged the moment by moving his hand around inside the bag.

  “I’ve brought you red beads”—he took out a plastic jar filled with them—“and green and purple and orange ones.”

  The twins eagerly gathered all the jars and passed them to each other, openmouthed. They celebrated the haul by deciding what they’d do with each color. The green would be for cactus drawings, the red for the sky, the purple for some flowers, and the orange for the rocks and Daddy’s truck.

  “And Iris chose these hairpins for you,” Dad announced.

  He gave Dahlia a pair of green ones. Daisy waited for hers, excited. When she received a white pair, she turned them down. Dahlia returned hers.

  “We don’t want them. They’re not the same,” they said in unison. “We have to look the same.”

  “Not always, girls, just when—”

  “We have to look the same,” they cut in.

  Dad gave Mom an inquiring look.

  “It’s a phase,” she said. “They’ll get over it.”

  Iris was about to suggest an idea to solve the problem, but her father was a step ahead of her. He separated the joined pairs of hairpins and created two new pairs, each with one green and one white pin. He offered a mixed pair to each girl.

  “And now?”

  “Now they’re the same. How did you do it?”

  “Magic!”

  “Magic!”

  Dad pinched their noses.

  “It’s not magic. Sometimes you just have to make an extra effort so that things are the way you want. We can all achieve what we want to achieve, whatever gets in our way.” He gave Mom a look that Iris ascribed romantic connotations to. “Got it?”

  The girls nodded and went back to the table.

  “And you?” Mom asked Iris from the sink, holding her hands under the water to wash away the rice dust. “What’ve you brought?”

  Before she could answer, her three sisters replied in chorus: “A book.”

  “Yup, another book, so what? One of the kind I like, to get the sour taste out of my mouth from that last one.” She took it out of the bag and read the title out loud. “Pride and Prejudice. I hope it’s full of love”—she went up to Melissa and whispered to her—“and more.”

  “I heard you.” Mom’s straightened finger pointed at her from the sink. Then she turned to dad. “She’s not serious, is she?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let me see that.”

  Iris handed the book to Mom, who examined the cover and read the synopsis on the back, then returned it. She must not have found a reason for concern.

  “All day long with your head stuck in those books, fantasizing about other lives. Sometimes I wonder whether you appreciate everything that your father and I do for you, how wonderful our life is.”

  Dad massaged her shoulder.

  “We appreciate what we have,” said the twins.

  “And I do, too, Mom,” added Iris. Then she spoke to the little girls. “But you’ll be sixteen one day, too, and you’ll feel like doing more than making pictures with beads. You’ll feel like meeting a boy.” Iris stretched out her arms toward the windows and spoke as if reciting. “And since you won’t find a young man in these barren, cactus-filled lands, you’ll have to make do with reading the passionate love stories of the characters in books. Books that, luckily, you won’t have to order, one by one, from a man in a bookshop lost in this forgotten corner of Mexico, because your eldest sister will have collected them for you on that bookshelf.”

  The twins listened, wide-eyed. Then they whispered to each other.

  “Our eldest sister was Edelweiss.”

  Mom’s shoulders dropped again. Melissa changed the direction of the conversation.

  “If you want I’ll introduce you to Needles,” she told Iris. “Or Pins. I reckon Pins is more your type.”

  “Very funny,” Iris replied. “But what I yearn for is a real boy.”

  Mom clicked her tongue at her.

  “Speaking of Needles and Pins . . .” Dad handed Melissa the paper bag.

  “Did you bring clothes?”

  Dad nodded. She got up from her chair to peer into the bag and smiled when she saw what it contained. She pulled out an old shirt, taking care not to unfold it. She also took out a pair of torn, faded jeans, which she positioned under the shirt, forming a human figure on the table. Finally, she took a cap from the bottom of the bag.

  “It’s from your gas station.” She showed everyone the logo printed on the front, the same as the one Dad had embroidered on his coveralls. “I wonder how I’ll manage it. I’ll need a ladder to put this on.”

  Mom announced that dinner was ready.

  Sitting at the table, Melissa struck up a conversation with the twins about hairpins, rocks with faces, and glue for beads. Dad told Mom all about his monthly trip to the town. Iris opted to open her book, position it beside her plate, and read with her elbows on the table, chewing over the pages. There was a moment when Mom looked at her, but she didn’t press her to improve her posture or stop reading. Instead she took Dad’s hand, and they both observed her as if she were the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. When she began to feel uncomfortable and gave them an embarrassed look, they turned to the twins with an identical expression. The twins had organized their french fries in rows and were eating them one by one. Then their parents focused on Melissa, who was holding a french fry to the place where the rock would have had a mouth and imitating the noise it would make as it chewed.

  Mom rested her head on Dad’s shoulder. He kissed her on the forehead. They sighed at the family scene before them. Iris turned her attention back to her book.

  Melissa opened her bedroom door with difficulty. Her hands were busy with the rock and the men’s clothing Dad had brought her. When she was in, she dropped the clothing on the bed. She placed the stone on the desk, without bothering to move aside the magazine cuttings and pencil drawings that covered it. She looked around the room for her scissors. They weren’t on the shelves over the headboard. Or on either of the bedside tables. She rummaged through the papers on the desk, and pieces of magazine fell onto the floor. She found them under one of her sketches, a family portrait, one that hadn’t convinced her. The ones she thought were good were pinned to the wall opposite her bed, which was almost completely covered in family memories captured in pencil. Each morning, the pictures glowed in front of her like an altarpiece, illuminated by the dawn’s pale yellow light—it was a sight she was grateful for on the days when she woke up certain that she didn’t belong to this place. With the scissors in her hand, she took more magazines from the desk drawer. They were copies of Cine avance that Dad would bring from the gas station when they were left on the shelf for more than two months without being bought. They talked about movies in a language she couldn’t read. She only recognized the names of actors and actresses, cities in the United States, and the original English titles of films. Melissa especially liked finding portraits of the actor Rock Hudson, as there was no person with a more fitting name to donate a pair of eyes to her stones. She flicked through several pa
ges, scissors at the ready, waiting to find him. She was out of luck, so she made do with a picture of James Dean, cutting the eyes from a full-page photograph. From the same drawer, she took a bottle of white glue, and with a paintbrush she applied it to the paper. She stuck the eyes just above the bulge on the rock that resembled a nose.

  “You can see me at last,” she said. “I’m Melissa. I’ll introduce you to everyone else later.”

  Daisy and Dahlia spoke behind her.

  “Aren’t we enough for you?”

  “Why do you say that?” She rummaged through the drawer until she found a different paintbrush from the one she’d used for the glue. “Of course you’re enough, but I want to have other friends. Can’t I have any friends other than you two?”

  She unscrewed the lid on a bottle of black tempera while the girls whispered to each other.

  “You have Iris, too. And Mommy and Daddy. And Edelweiss is still outside.”

  “I know, but what if, say, I want to talk to someone in the middle of the night? Who do I speak to? You’re all asleep then.”

  The girls shrugged.

  “Well, there you go.”

  Melissa tried to paint a smile on the rock, but its topography altered the course of the brushstroke, and she ended up tracing a distorted mouth. She judged it acceptable. She liked her stones to have their own personality, and if this one wanted to express itself with a funny face, so be it. She turned it around so that it looked at her sisters.

  “Say hello. His name’s James.”

  The girls waved. “He’s sad,” they said.

  “No he’s not. He’s just a bit serious,” Melissa contended. Then she whispered near the stone’s ear. “This is Daisy and Dahlia.”

  The girls exchanged little smiles.

  From the living room came the beginning of a song.

  “Music!” they yelled.

  They ran downstairs.

  “I’m going, too,” Melissa explained to James. “I hope you don’t mind. You won’t be on your own.”

  She left the stone in one of the few empty spaces that remained on the shelves above the headboard, beside ten other stones with stuck-on eyes and painted smiles. The wood was already sagging under the weight of them. With her fingers, Melissa tightened one of the fastening nuts that loosened every time the stones were moved. She named them all by way of an introduction.