Desert Flowers

by Paul Pen

  “James, look, this is Marlon, this is John, this is Clark, and this is Rock. These are Cary, Gregory, and another Rock. And those are Natalie and Doris, with one more Rock.” She snapped her fingers to end the string of names. “Say hello to James, everyone. He’s going to stay in the bedroom with you.”

  Melissa fell silent.

  Listening.

  “They’re Dad’s old records,” she said in reply to a question.

  She nodded at the stones.

  “Sure I will.”

  She smiled at Gregory.

  “Soon. The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. The music won’t last long anyway.”

  With no further explanation, Melissa went downstairs.

  Iris heard her sister go down the stairs. She was sitting in front of the dressing table in her bedroom, completing her hundred strokes a day with the hairbrush. Mom said it was the best way to maintain the natural shine of blonde hair, the color that all the sisters shared in different tones. On stroke number eighty-three, she put down the brush to follow Melissa and join the family by the record player. Before reaching the stairs, she spotted an open magazine on her sister’s desk. It showed an image of a man with his arms almost bare.

  Iris’s pulse accelerated.

  When she walked up to it, she discovered that the actor was wearing a white T-shirt with very short sleeves. She licked her lips. With her finger, she went over the arms’ muscles, the curve of the shoulders. She felt the actor’s pectorals on the page, his abdomen. She was tempted to touch lower down. She ran the tip of her finger over the picture, daring herself to go a little further. She felt her cheeks flush hot. Her breathing quickened just thinking of touching that part of the pants. When she finally mustered the courage to explore lower down, she realized the picture had had its eyes cut out. Those holes in the face neutralized her desire. She left the room.

  She found the rest of the family in the living room. Her parents were dancing, rocking to the music coming from the record player, Dad holding Mom around the waist, her hands on his neck. With their faces within kissing distance, Dad whispered the song lyrics.

  “I want to live with you among the flowers. With them and me you’ll never be alone . . .”

  Mom’s eyes were bright. “I want this to last forever,” she said.

  In her mother’s voice, Iris identified the note of fear it sometimes took on. She’d read about the constant fear that stalks mothers from the moment they give birth, but the intensity of the worry that could suddenly well up in Mom suggested a certainty that something bad was going to happen.

  “It will last forever, Rose, I promise you,” Dad whispered in her ear. “We’re just fine.”

  Iris felt uncomfortable when she heard what seemed like a secret.

  Mom rested her face against Dad’s chest. With her eyes closed, she let out a sigh that ended in a smile, as if she completely trusted Dad’s words.

  “The future and this place it’s only ours . . .” he sang.

  Copying their parents, Dahlia made Daisy her dance partner. They danced holding each other like adults, laughing. They kept treading on the little rug that always slipped underfoot, laughing harder every time they slid and had to improvise an emergency dance step to stop themselves from falling.

  When the needle on the record player reached the end of the song, Melissa returned it to the beginning of the groove and gave Iris an exaggerated bow.

  Iris took the hand her sister offered her. “If only you were a real boy,” she whispered when she knew her parents wouldn’t hear. “I’d hand my soul to Charon if it meant I could turn your arms into a man’s.”

  “Do you really have to use those words to say things?”

  “I have a large vocabulary and I make use of it. Please forgive me if it bothers you.”

  “It doesn’t bother me. And if you need a man”—Melissa deepened her voice to make it sound masculine—“you can call me Bob.”

  Iris raised her eyebrows. “I need a real man, not my little sister putting on voices and using the name from a record sleeve.”

  She gestured at the cover on the floor, near the turntable. The name Bob Davis was on it, along with a portrait of the singer and a bunch of flowers. The sisters laughed as they performed dance moves that were more energetic and complex than the song called for. Trying to copy their movements, the twins slipped on the rug, falling on the floor at the same time, onto their backsides. They burst into giggles that infected the whole family. Iris pressed her hand against her belly to relieve the abdominal pain. Then the little girls both noticed the guitar that hung from the wall. They said something into each other’s ears before suggesting it out loud.

  “Play the guitar, Daddy!”

  Mom stopped dancing. Dad stood looking at the floor. Iris saw Edelweiss’s name inscribed on the instrument. Her sister had carved it on one side of the sound box herself. Edelweiss could spend entire days with that guitar, finding infinite melodies with the five chords she knew.

  “No, girls,” Dad replied, without looking up. “I can’t. Not yet.”

  The song ended for the second time. Amid the silence that filled the living room, Iris heard the wind whistle through the needles of the cacti outside.

  Mom kissed Dad on the cheek.

  “Maybe we should get to bed,” she said. “You’re tired from your trip to the town, and you have to work early tomorrow.”

  But Dad asked the twins to put the song back on. They cheered and began dancing again as soon as the music started. Iris urged her partner to start moving again. Their parents were persuaded to rejoin the dance as well. Dad intoned the lyrics very close to Mom’s lips.

  “And any place I’m with you feels like home.”

  Iris’s gaze returned to the name engraved on the guitar. She thought about the other wood that Dad had carved with the same name a little over a year ago: the cross driven into the ground behind the house. She imagined her big sister on the other side of the window of that very living room, under the rocks, among the cacti, observing from the darkness the orangey light coming from the house that had been her home, unable now to join in a family dance or to play her guitar. Iris’s eyes filled with tears.

  “I miss her, too,” Melissa said. With a finger, she wiped away her sister’s tears.

  They danced in each other’s arms until the song ended.

  At dawn, the cacti’s shadows were so long they looked like hands dragging along the ground, eager to touch the horizon. Leaning against the doorjamb, Rose observed the display of colors with which the desert welcomed the sun.

  “I’ll never get tired of looking at this landscape,” she said to her husband.

  “Right now I don’t have time to look at anything.”

  He zipped the gas station coveralls up to the top with a tug. Rose used a hand to smooth down the material on the front, the embroidered badge that said ELMER. She covered the last two letters to read the name as she often said it.

  “I did warn you last night, Elm. You should’ve gone to bed earlier.”

  Rose rubbed her eyes. She gathered her hair in a ponytail that she held in place with her hand, waiting for the morning air to cool her neck. She let it fall, having felt no improvement. Even at dawn, the breeze was weak and warm.

  “What’s the point of all of this if I can’t enjoy them when I get home?” he asked.

  Rose waited until he was within reach to answer his question in the way it deserved: with a kiss, her hand against a jaw that was rougher than the sandpaper he kept in his toolbox. The ceiling creaked over their heads from the girls’ movements. Rose recognized Melissa’s dragging footsteps. She must have woken sad again. She also identified Iris’s. She always walked on tiptoes as if she could take flight at any moment. The twins’ gallop thundered toward the stairs.

  “They’ve caught you,” she warned Elmer with her lips against his.

  He tried to escape in time, but the little girls reached him as if they’d tobogganed down the stairs.
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  “You’re going already, Daddy?”

  “You’re going already, Daddy?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Rose opened the screen door and invited the three of them out to put on their morning performance, the one in which Elmer struggled to the truck with a girl hanging on to each leg. She watched them from the handrail on the porch. Elmer advanced like an astronaut exploring a planet with stronger gravity than Earth’s.

  “We love you so much, Daddy.”

  “We love you so much, Daddy.”

  He pretended to cut his throat with his fingers, complaining at the nuisance, but Rose knew that he enjoyed their morning routine.

  “Ugh, they stink of gas,” Dahlia said about the coveralls.

  “I like the smell.” Daisy pressed her nose against the material and breathed in.

  “You can’t like it, because I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe you can’t not like it because I do like it.”

  The twins got into one of the arguments that started every time they differed on something, be it which of their three dresses they were going to wear on a given day, the age at which they planned to get married, or whether they liked the smell of gasoline. As was always the case with these disputes, neither managed to convince the other.

  “When’re you back, Daddy?” they asked, synchronizing again as if the argument had never happened.

  “You know when. When the sun’s disappearing over there.”

  He gestured in the rough direction of where the sun went down at that time of year. Rose watched the shadow of her husband’s arm join those of the cacti, another hand eager to touch the horizon.

  “Oh no, that’s forever.”

  “Oh no, that’s forever.”

  They hugged him more tightly. He looked to Rose for help.

  “Come on, girls, he has to go now,” she called from the porch.

  The hinges on the screen door squeaked behind her, and Iris and Melissa arrived beside her. They leaned on the handrail.

  Iris was holding her new book with a finger between pages, marking the place where she’d stopped reading. “There go the girls, facing up to the personal tragedy that afflicts them each morning,” she said.

  Elmer resorted to tickling them to get them to let go of him.

  “Come on. I have to rush off, and Mom’s calling you.” His voice reached the porch loud and clear. “Don’t make things difficult on the last day of class.”

  Rose let her shoulders drop, fearing Melissa’s reaction to those words. She’d wanted to give her the news herself, at breakfast.

  The twins magnified the information by leaping with joy. “Last day of class!” they yelled in unison.

  “Is that true?” Melissa asked, her voice as weak as the morning breeze.

  Rose nodded with a sigh.

  Melissa slammed the door as she went back into the house. The bang caught the attention of Elmer and the little girls, who interrupted their celebration.

  “Didn’t she know?” he asked from where he stood near the truck.

  Rose shook her head, crossing her arms. Elmer shrugged an apology but took advantage of the twins’ distraction to climb into the pickup. Daisy and Dahlia returned to the porch, escaping the dust cloud the truck created.

  “It’s the last day of class! We’re hungry!”

  “It’s the last day of class! We’re hungry!”

  They ran to the kitchen as if they could make breakfast themselves. Rose took Iris by the hand, and they followed the girls in. They found them in the kitchen, sitting on the floor near the refrigerator. Their eyes were fixed on each other as they repeated gestures in a learned sequence. One raised her eyebrows, so did the other. Dahlia stuck out her tongue, Daisy stuck out her tongue. They filled their cheeks with air at the same time and emptied them with two-handed slaps.

  Iris interrupted the performance by holding her book between them. She told them to get up. Then she took four bowls from a cupboard to serve breakfast.

  Melissa was sitting at the table. She was looking out the window with her head resting on a hand, her eyes lost in the distance. “When were you planning on telling me?” she asked.

  “When you stop making such a fuss about it.”

  A tear slid down Melissa’s cheek, then down her forearm, until it reached the tabletop. With her thumb, she was stroking one of her rocks, as if it really were alive. Rose put a hand over her daughter’s.

  “It’s just three months,” she said. “You’ll be starting another term in no time, and then Socorro will come every day, like she always does. You’ll be free to enjoy the summer. Don’t you want that?”

  Melissa shook her head, pursing her lips. Rose looked to Iris for support.

  “Don’t look so desolate, it’s no big deal. It’s as if you were Fantine in Les Misérables.” Iris served her sister a bowl of cereal. “If our teacher was a good-looking guy, I’d understand you, share in your sorrow, but Socorro’s an old woman and we won’t miss much if we don’t see her for a while.”

  Melissa clicked her tongue. Rose knew how much it upset her when Iris tried to solve her problems by imposing her approach to life on her, especially since Iris reduced everything to matters of love.

  “She’s someone from outside,” Melissa said. “Pretty much the only person we speak to. I like her, and I’ll miss her all summer. If you don’t get it, then leave me in peace.” She turned her attention outside, sniffing.

  Rose was touched by the way Melissa frowned, as if she’d spent her entire life trying to decipher the meaning of the landscape that was her home, trying to accept it but unable to do so. She knew that many children go through a phase when they rebel against their world, their home, their family, but there was something deeper in her daughter’s longing.

  And she didn’t like it.

  It scared her.

  “We have Dad’s workmate’s son’s birthday in August,” Rose said to try to console her. “We’ll go visit them like we always do.”

  Melissa gave her an incredulous look, a look that said she didn’t know her daughter very well if she thought their annual visit to a family that didn’t speak English was any consolation.

  “A boy as alone as we are.” Melissa dried her nose with the back of her hand. “And he’s weird.”

  She offered some cornflakes to her stone with eyes. She crushed the cereal against the painted-on mouth, as if the rock were munching it.

  “How old’s that boy now?” Iris asked.

  “I don’t know, eleven. Twelve.”

  “No good to me, then.”

  Rose tried to cuff Iris for the inappropriate remark, but Iris evaded her with a smile. She sat the twins at the table and served them milk.

  The little girls whispered to each other.

  “We’re really happy that Socorro won’t be coming anymore,” they said at the same time, “so we don’t have to hide.”

  Melissa dropped her spoon against the rim of her bowl, expressing her anger.

  “Of course you want her to come, because you don’t have to hide,” Dahlia said.

  “But we don’t want to hide,” Daisy added.

  Melissa rebuffed their comments with a deep sigh.

  “So, who’s hiding today?” Rose asked the twins.

  They each indicated the other.

  “It’s Dahlia’s turn,” Iris pointed out.

  “And Dahlia is . . .” Rose waved a straight finger between them, as if trying to figure out which of the two was Dahlia. In reality, she could tell them apart even from behind, but she liked to reward the effort the girls made to look the same for four hours a day. “Is it you?”

  She pointed at the wrong twin on purpose. They laughed, delighted to have created the confusion.

  “No, Mommy, that’s Dahlia.” Daisy directed her mother’s finger toward her sister.

  “It’s you? Really? It’s getting harder and harder to tell you apart,” Rose said. “So you’re hiding today, and Da
isy’s staying here for the class. Then you’ll tell your sister everything you learn from the teacher, won’t you?”

  “Yes, Mommy, as always.”

  “Yes, Mommy, as always.”

  The weary tone in the girls’ words made Melissa smile. “You girls really do like teasing your mother, don’t you?”

  The twins laughed with their spoons in their mouths, spattering each other with milk.

  Iris brought two cups of coffee. She left one on the table, and the other one she drank standing next to the window, her book under her arm. Rose took a sip of coffee, observing her two eldest daughters. They were both looking at the same landscape but seemed in different worlds.

  As soon as Dahlia had finished her last spoonful of cereal, Rose urged her to get up. “Come on, Socorro’s about to arrive. And the rest of you, start getting your books out.”

  Melissa stood and took three books from the shelf.

  “But we won’t have a lesson, will we?” asked Iris. “Seeing as it’s the end of the term.”

  Melissa dropped the books on the table: one on economics, another on natural sciences, and the one handwriting book the twins took turns with.

  “We won’t, will we, Mom?” Iris persisted.

  Rose was already leaving the kitchen and didn’t respond. She climbed the stairs, guiding Dahlia by the hand. They went into the bedroom she shared with Daisy.

  “Will we really not have to hide anymore tomorrow?” the girl asked.

  “Well, until next term.”

  “Whew, that’s foreeever.”

  She drew out the word for as long as she could, as if the summer really was eternal. She ran excitedly to the window and breathed in the air from outside.

  “I love summer, Mommy. It’s when the cactuses are prettiest. With all those white flowers. I’m going to pick them all. I’m going to spend the entire summer picking flowers.”

  “Well, I don’t know how you’ll manage that. The cactuses only flower this month.”

  “Just one month?” Dahlia looked serious, as if deliberating how she would deal with the setback. “Then I’ll collect all of them in a month. And I’m going to make myself a dress with them. And one for you. And one for Daisy. One for Iris. And one for Melissa. Maybe it’ll cheer her up. And I want to make another one for Edelweiss as well. We’re all going to look so pretty in white. Well, not Edelweiss. But I can leave them on top of her grave and—”