Desert Flowers

by Paul Pen

  Rose covered her mouth. The grave of her eldest sister had no place on the innocent lips of such a young girl. It was against the natural order of things. She took Dahlia away from the window and pulled the curtains.

  “Nice and quiet now, until Socorro leaves.”

  The little girl held a finger to her lips. She took off her shoes to keep her feet from making noise and winked at Rose. From under one of the room’s two identical beds, she took out a piece of cardboard so wide she could barely reach both ends with outstretched arms. She placed it on the bed. It showed a drawing of a landscape similar to the one that surrounded the house: cacti, rocks, the sun, and some clouds were traced in pencil. Dahlia had already filled half of the shapes with colored beads, but there was still a lot of work to do.

  “It’s looking great,” Rose said.

  “I’ve done better ones.”

  Dahlia gestured at the dozen or so similar works of art that hung from the walls. There were pictures of animals, imaginary creatures, landscapes, and faces more or less resembling the family’s. Melissa had sketched them on pieces of cardboard of different sizes so that the twins could color them, bead by bead, during the hours they spent hiding. The ones Dahlia pointed at now were a portrait of Rose that she had yet to finish because the town had run out of the brown glass seed beads she needed for the eyes, and a smaller picture in which the word MOMMY occupied the entire surface. That one was hanging over her bed’s headboard. Daisy had another one over hers, the letters colored differently. Rose felt touched whenever she imagined the girls’ little hands applying glue to the cards, selecting the beads, and sticking them on, one after the other, to spell out the five letters that together described her most important role in life.

  “They’re my favorites, too,” she said.

  Dahlia smiled, and from the bedside table she took the orange jar that Elmer had brought her yesterday. “It’s sundown.” She pointed at the sky on the card.

  Then she asked Rose to bring her ear close so she could tell her a secret. “I’m faster than Daisy.”

  From under her sister’s bed she took out an identical drawing with fewer beads stuck to the card. “See?”

  Rose couldn’t help smiling. Dahlia returned the other picture to its place, proud that she was ahead. Then she climbed onto the bed, sat with her legs crossed in front of the desert Melissa had drawn, and extracted a first handful of orange beads.

  Rose was spellbound by the beauty she saw in her daughter.

  “You’d better watch out or Socorro will catch us,” Dahlia reproached her.

  “I’m going, I’m going.”

  She left the room and locked the door from the outside. She pictured her daughter filling the circle that would be the sun with glue, creating dusk with her hands. She could almost feel the warmth of that fictitious sun in her chest, the warmth of her girls’ love, before the fear of loss clouded everything over. It always appeared at moments of total happiness like this. She left the key in the lock and went downstairs, repeating to herself that everything was fine. With each step peace, and her smile, gradually returned.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, which served as a desk, Melissa saw Mom walk in. She was smiling the way she did when she admired the scenery from the screen door, grateful for everything. Mom tipped her head to question whether she was feeling better, and Melissa nodded, even if it wasn’t true.

  “Let’s see if the rest of you can apply yourselves like Melissa does,” she said to the others.

  Iris was leaning against the counter, engrossed in her book. She was nibbling on a cookie without taking her eyes away from the page.

  “Hey, you with the book.”

  Iris kept reading.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  Mom had to tap her twice on the shoulder to make her react.

  “What is it?”

  “What it is that you have class.”

  “There’s no class today, it’s the last day of the term,” Daisy said from under the table.

  Mom lifted the tablecloth, squatting.

  “That’s something your sister made up. You have class today like any other day”—she stood and turned to Iris—“which is why I’ll be paying her the same today as I always do.”

  “You save enough with the two-for-one deal you’ve invented.” Iris gestured at Daisy on the floor. “That poor lady has four students and thinks she only has three.”

  Mom looked serious. She took the big basket she used in the vegetable garden from a cupboard. From a drawer she pulled the gardening gloves. She found her straw hat hanging behind the door. She put it on, looking at Iris.

  “When you work and have a tough time earning money, I’m sure you’ll understand your parents. Now sit down for your lesson, please.”

  Daisy obeyed Mom’s command, too. She came out of her hiding place and sat in front of the handwriting book, opposite Melissa. She must have seen that her older sister was still sad, because she stroked her hand to comfort her. Iris sat at one end of the table. She opened the economics textbook and over its pages opened Pride and Prejudice.

  “I have to get out to the garden before the sun burns everything. Iris, you’re in charge of making sure Socorro teaches class.”

  “Look. You can tell her yourself.”

  The sand crunched under the tires of the teacher’s truck.

  “Daisy, you’re Lily now,” said Mom.

  It was the name the twins shared when Socorro was in the house. It made it easier for everyone to avoid making a mistake.

  “I know, Mommy.”

  Melissa made out the teacher’s silhouette behind the wheel. The front door opened soon after.

  “Híjole, this heat,” Socorro said as she came in.

  She wore her gray hair gathered in a bun that made her seem taller. She wore longer clothes and thicker fabrics than the temperature called for. As ever, she acknowledged Melissa first, with a wink. Melissa made herself comfortable in her chair, stretching her back. She was beginning to feel happier. Then the teacher greeted Mom.

  “Good morning, Rose. Off to the garden again? I’m so happy to see you do so well with it. I don’t know how you do it. Everything I plant dies in all this sunshine. My husband’s already told me to give up. The best place for growing chilies and cebollas is the market, he said to me the other day. Can you believe it? I must be the worst esposa in the state.”

  Socorro spoke fluent English, but she still said some words in Spanish. Sometimes she did it because she couldn’t remember the English word, but she once admitted to Melissa that her real intention was for the girls to learn a little of the language of the country where they lived. As a Mexican, she was offended by a gringo couple living here almost twenty years without teaching the language to their daughters.

  “So what’s the deal with your girls sat here looking so settled today?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “You don’t think we’re going to spend the whole time here inside on the last day of the term, do you?”

  Melissa saw Iris give Mom a smile. Their mother opened her mouth to say something, but Daisy got in ahead of her.

  “Mom says you have to teach class the same because she’s paying you the same.”

  “Oh, really? She said that?” Socorro looked at Mom. “Well, I say life’s too short. We’ve been studying all year, and it would be criminal not to go out and smell those flowers the cactuses grace us with this time of year.”

  Mom was silent while she pulled on her gardening gloves. She adjusted the material in the spaces between her fingers without speaking.

  “In any case, if your mother thinks you’ll only get value for your dinero learning a lesson from your books, I’ll teach you lesson veintitrés from this book outside.”

  She opened Melissa’s science textbook to a page that showed a diagram of a flower. Arrows indicated the scientific names of its parts. Mom glanced over it.

  “The flowers of the cardón are perfect for differentiating between these parts because they�
�re bien grandototas,” Socorro added, smiling at Melissa every time she used a Spanish word.

  “What’s a cardón?” asked Daisy.

  “Cardón is what we Mexicans call those tall cacti that surround your house,” she answered. Then she turned to Mom. “So, what do you think about a lesson in the open air?”

  Mom adjusted the last finger on the right-hand glove. “All right, you win.”

  Daisy vanished in front of Melissa. One second she was there, and the next she was running around outside, the screen door shaking in its frame. Iris closed her economics book so enthusiastically that dust was lifted from the table. She sought out Mom’s and Melissa’s eyes to gloat over her small victory. She went out onto the porch, where she was welcomed by Daisy yelling that she was going to make necklaces out of the flowers. Mom left the kitchen through the back door, the one that provided quicker access to the garden and the little chicken coop.

  Melissa didn’t move from her place at the table. She sat reading the chapter on flower reproduction, stroking her stone while she discovered that the arrows in the diagram indicated parts named stamen, pistil, calyx. Socorro sat opposite her in the chair Daisy had vacated. She placed her hand on Melissa’s to stop her from caressing the rock.

  “Do you know, there’s a trick so that you’re never sad?”

  Melissa looked at her teacher, into eyes surrounded by wrinkles so deep it seemed as if her face had survived more storms than the desert.

  “A trick?”

  “A very simple trick that anyone can do. It consists of being glad for what you’ve got instead of being unhappy about what you don’t have.”

  “That’s what Mom says.”

  “Because it’s the best way to live.”

  Melissa shrugged, unsure she was able follow the advice.

  “You’re not the only girl who lives in such an isolated place,” Socorro went on. “There’re kids in other places who have real problems, things you’ll never have to worry about.”

  “And what do I do with the things that do worry me? It worries me that you won’t be coming all summer and that I won’t see you for three months.”

  Socorro held her hand to her heart. “And you don’t know what that means to me. But you should think about whether that’s really a reason to be sad. If you use the trick I’ve given to you, you’ll stop lamenting that you won’t see me and that you don’t have any other friends, and you’ll be glad that you have two wonderful hermanas, and parents who love you very much, and a beautiful house in the wild. I, for one, would like to have a family as lovely as yours, or to still have my children at home with me. But I don’t lament it. I’m glad I have a loyal husband to keep me company. Even if he has lost hope that his wife will ever pull a cebolla from the earth.”

  Melissa forced a smile. Socorro squeezed her hand.

  “And when you really can’t bear it anymore, when you feel alone and need to speak to someone, you can ask your father to drive you to the gas station and call me whenever you like.” She opened the science book to the first page, where she’d written her number at the beginning of the term. “Or you can insist that your parents install a phone at long last. Almost everyone has one now.”

  Melissa ran a finger over the number.

  “And now, up on your feet,” Socorro said. “Let’s get outside or we’ll end up spending the whole day stuck in here.”

  Melissa closed the book with a smile and got up from the table. When she went to pick up the stone with eyes, Socorro stopped her. She gestured through the window at Iris and Daisy, engaged in a battle using fistfuls of earth.

  “You have your sisters.”

  Rose returned from the garden with the basket filled with onions, tomatoes, eggs, and chilies of various colors. She set it on the table alongside the girls’ closed books. She took off the gloves and, with them, wiped the sweat from her neck and forehead. Feathers fell to the floor. She saw Socorro and her daughters outside. As she washed the vegetables, she enjoyed the smell of life and nature that filled the kitchen every time she did this. She also cleaned the excrement from the eggs. As she sliced off a sunscalded part of the last tomato, it was just five minutes before the class would end.

  She dried her hands on her apron and, standing on tiptoe, took a jar of money from the bookcase. Iris’s books collapsed to one side on the shelf. She took a bill and the necessary coins from the container, recovered her hat from the hook on the door, and walked out to the teacher and the girls.

  “Already?” Daisy asked, the shrillness of her voice as great as her disbelief that four hours had gone by. She held a necklace made with white flowers.

  Sitting on a rock, Socorro looked at her watch, holding her wrist away from her eyes.

  “How time flies when you’re having fun, eh, Lily?” she said to Daisy. “See, Rose? It was too nice a day to be cooped up in the kitchen.”

  “Every day’s nice here. The only thing that changes is how hot it is. And I intended to use this money”—she waved the note she held in her hand—“to have my daughters learn something important. I can teach them handicrafts myself all summer.”

  “We also learned the life cycle of flowers,” Melissa said. “It was lesson twenty-three in the book.”

  “That’s right, Mommy.” Daisy came up to Rose’s legs with a flower in her hands, pointing at two different parts in the center of the flower. “This is stamens, and this is the pastel.”

  “Pistil,” Socorro corrected her.

  “Pistil,” the little girl repeated. “And I made you this necklace.”

  Rose bent down and Daisy hung from her neck a long blade of grass tied like a lasso, decorated with several flowers skewered by cactus spines. The older sisters wore similar ones.

  “Thank you very much, Daisy.” She hugged her daughter. “It’s lovely.”

  When the little girl stamped on her foot, she realized she’d gotten the name wrong. She thought of a thousand answers to the question Socorro would ask, but the teacher must not have paid attention, because she just got up from the rock and brushed the dust from her skirt and bag.

  “We may have learned a lot, but look what a state we’re in,” she said.

  Rose and the girls played along with the teacher and brushed off their own clothes.

  “And you”—Rose pointed at the plant remains on Daisy’s arms, face, and hands—“the filthiest, as always.”

  Daisy smiled, proud.

  “Go on, take her to the hose and get her washed,” she said to Iris.

  Her eldest daughter obeyed, taking Daisy by the hand.

  “No goodbye for me?” asked Socorro.

  Daisy ran to hug her teacher around the waist. “Goodbye, Socorro,” she said.

  The image sparked jealousy in Rose, who considered herself and her husband the only ones deserving of that show of affection so characteristic of the twins.

  Iris kissed the teacher on the cheek.

  “Don’t stop reading,” Socorro said. “A good collection of books can show you more than a thousand teachers ever could.”

  “I wasn’t planning to. Even if my mother thinks they make me have my head in the clouds.” Iris thanked Socorro for the advice with a spontaneous hug.

  “To the hose,” Rose said quickly, to interrupt it.

  Melissa was the last one to say goodbye. Her embrace with Socorro was so heartfelt that Rose preferred to distract herself by watching Iris untangle the hose in the distance, beside the barbecue to one side of the porch.

  “Don’t forget the trick I taught you,” Socorro said. “Be glad for what you’ve got . . .”

  “I’ll try,” said Melissa. “I hope to see you again soon.”

  Rose was annoyed that they could talk without finishing their sentences, like great friends, considering how difficult she found it to communicate with Melissa.

  “It’ll be sooner than you think. Summers fly by,” Socorro added.

  Melissa headed to the porch, leaving trails more than footsteps in the san
d. She looked down at the ground all the way there, searching for new rocks to give faces to.

  “Look out for Melissa,” the teacher said. “She’s a really smart kid, but she seems unhappy.”

  “She inherited her mother’s melancholy.” Rose didn’t need anyone to describe her daughters’ personalities to her. “She’s always been like that.”

  “Your daughter draws eyes on stones. She talks to cactuses.”

  “We’ve all had imaginary friends.”

  “At thirteen?”

  Rose handed Socorro the money for the lessons. “We have to work hard for it. That’s why I insisted you teach them a class. Don’t think I don’t like seeing my daughters enjoy themselves.”

  Socorro took her by the hands.

  “You think I don’t know that? Your love for those girls flows from every pore in your skin. You showed it when you got back on your feet the way you did after what happened with Edelweiss. For them. You faced the toughest challenge a mother can face, but you still have many to overcome. Iris is entering a . . . difficult age now.”

  The way she pronounced the word made it clear what she was referring to.

  “She’s still young for that,” said Rose.

  “Young? How old were you when you met your husband?”

  Rose didn’t answer.

  “How old?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Socorro’s eyebrows almost reached her hairline. “Your daughter’s older than that.”

  “But it was different. We lived in a city, surrounded by people.”

  “Believe me, your daughter’s desire is no different from what you felt at her age. Or what I felt when I was young, a century ago. It’s natural. Or what do you think those stamens and pistils the flowers have are for? There’s nothing wrong with your daughter’s despertar.” Though Socorro used the Spanish word, it was easy to imagine what it meant. “The problem is that she can’t meet anyone to satisfy that desire. And as pretty as she is . . .”