Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  Copyright © 2021 by Danielle Geller

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Geller, Danielle, author.

  Title: Dog flowers : a memoir / Danielle Geller.

  Description: New York : One World, [2020].

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020006990 (print) | LCCN 2020006991 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984820396 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984820402 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Geller, Danielle. | Navajo Indians—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC E99.N3 G357 2020 (print) | LCC E99.N3 (ebook) | DDC 979.1004/97260092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020006990

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020006991

  Ebook ISBN 9781984820402

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover illustration: Mike McQuade

  Cover images: Andrew Howe/Getty Images (bird), courtesy of the author (family photograph and archive samples)

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Creator

  Part I

  and boy it just burns me up

  it was my fault but also

  Part II

  Another likely story.

  Little Bit

  because i’m not that kind of bitch

  [Apocalypse]

  [Pretty Little Thing]

  I would still now want him with me

  so I can take-care of him

  Nobody is ever

  Part III

  I woke up with a dream about me & mom & dad & Christmas and how the light of God pulling me into the life that is now teaching what I have to do.

  them supposeable being

  [Exhaustion]

  The Art of Living Dangerously

  knowing it was just another one of his lies

  Part IV

  I Love Them So!

  [Little Sheep]

  [Beauty]

  [Nursing Home]

  [I Tried to Say]

  [Little Tweets]

  [Solitary]

  still cruising

  [Cat Killer]

  [Dumpster]

  [Correspondence]

  [Changing Woman]

  [Selvage]

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Creator

  MY MOTHER SPENT the last six months of her life homeless, sleeping in a park in Lake Worth, Florida. We had not spoken to each other at all in that time. But when the hospital called to tell me she was dying, I booked a flight from Boston and arrived in Florida the next morning, too late. She would not wake the two days I sat by her side.

  My mother’s on-again, off-again lover, Dale, met me at the hospital and told me he was holding on to her things, that I could go through them and take whatever I wanted. In Dale’s closet, I found my mother’s life packed into eight suitcases, which, by the very nature of their design and state of disrepair, told the passing of time. Most were filled with clothes she had picked up at thrift stores, and that was where they would return. But in the oldest—an eighties, soft-shelled leather case with wide straps and massive buckles—I found her diaries, her photos, and the letters she kept. I found a few undeveloped disposable cameras. I found a green corduroy purse filled with dried sage bundled into smudge sticks. I found the bandanas she wore on the days she skipped washing her long black hair. I found two crooked potholders she had crocheted. I found sterling-silver-and-turquoise jewelry I set aside for my sister, Eileen, who was hitching rides on semis and freight trains across the West; she wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time.

  I gathered the pieces of my mother’s life and packed them into the newest suitcase, a navy blue carry-on, to bring home with me.

  TITLE: Laureen “Tweety” Lee holds her daughter’s hand behind their apartment in South Florida.

  DATE: 1987 July 28

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color negatives

  DESCRIPTION: My mother wears a lace-like white blouse and black short-shorts. Beside her, I look like a happy monkey-child. I am one year old. We smile for my father, who takes the photograph, which I later digitally develop from a negative strip I found in a soft paper envelope labeled “Birthday Negatives, July 28, 1987.” The plastic negatives are degrading, or perhaps the photographs were never processed correctly in the first place. The resulting photographs appear gritty and washed out.

  I

  the way her dreams must have felt

  back then,

  wide and open,

  so much space to be filled.

  —LAURA TOHE, “Sometimes She Dreams”

  and boy it just burns me up

  MY MOTHER LEFT the Navajo reservation almost as soon as she could. At nineteen, she moved to the city, as many do, to continue her education. In a brown and water-stained copy of an incomplete job application, I found evidence of these early years: From April 4, 1983, until July 1, 1984, she took classes on cultural awareness, health education, and leadership at the “Albuquerque Job Corps Center.” (“It was the best,” a woman who attended the school in the late eighties wrote in a recent Google review. “I will always remember the good times I had.”) For work experience, my mother found part-time jobs in retail at Kirtland Air Force Base; as a file clerk at the “Albuquerque Rehab. Med. Center”; and as a typist at the “New Mexico State Labor Com.,” a position she held for only a month.

  In August, my mother moved to Prescott, Arizona, and began working as a waitress at the “Palace Hotel Restaurant,” where my parents met. My father told me they met at the Hotel St. Michael, which was not true, but my father always loved the sound of his own name.

  My father worked for his brother’s computer company as a traveling technician. Those were his glittering days: He charged expensive rental cars to disposable credit cards and drove back and forth across the country. He gave the keys to his cars and hotel rooms to the homeless and traveling people he met. He dropped acid in the desert and once, he claimed, met a man entirely surrounded by a golden aura—Jesus Christ himself.

  The way my father told their story, I always believed my parents fell in love quickly. That after those early smoke-filled nights, she left with him when he returned to Florida, where I was born in the summer of 1986. But the application I found was dated March 27, 1985, a few months after she quit her job in Prescott and moved back to New Mexico. The reason given: “Looking for Another type of job.”

  When I asked my father how my mother got to Florida, he said she called him months after they first met. “I could come see you,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I CALLED Eileen to tell her our mother was dying, I wasn’t sure what words to use. I repeated the doctor’s words: Sick. Heart attack. Nonresponsive. Very, very sick.

  She asked, from a distance, what I meant.

 
Eileen and I were not good sisters to each other. We never held each other, and we didn’t end conversations with love. But in that moment, I would have given anything to take her in my arms, to give her some small comfort. “Her heart doesn’t work anymore,” I told her. “She’s not going to get better.”

  “What?” My sister’s voice edged on anger, an anger I had always feared.

  “She’s dying,” I said, simply, and then listened as her anger dropped into heavy, wracking sobs. I couldn’t take my words back, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. All I could do was listen to her cry until she finally decided to hang up.

  She called me a few hours later. Her voice sounded like smoke rising, faint and curling. She was high. She asked if I planned to go down to Florida.

  I had been sitting in front of my computer with flights mapped out, but I hadn’t been able to convince myself to buy a ticket. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.

  “Someone has to be with her,” Eileen said. She was somewhere in Montana, and she said she would try to buy a bus ticket, but she worried she wouldn’t make it to Florida in time.

  The walls of my room were painted cornflower blue.

  “I’ll go,” I promised.

  “You can’t go down there alone,” she said, but we both knew I would. “I’m sorry, Danielle,” she added, beginning to cry again. “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW MONTHS after my mother moved to South Florida, she was pregnant with me. My father claimed she could get pregnant off a toilet seat. My father’s mother convinced her to keep the baby, and she offered them a two-bedroom apartment in a building she owned on Nokomis Avenue, a chalk-white dirt road.

  Our neighbors were inconstant. My grandmother’s tenants were as poor as our neighborhood, and no one seemed to stay for long. She liked to tell the story of one of her tenants who dragged all his furniture, even the refrigerator, onto the lawn in the middle of the day. She couldn’t get a reason out of him—he talked nonsense, raving about who knew what, so she called an ambulance. Later she found out his rotting teeth were the cause of his madness, but she found the story funny and laughed each time she told it.

  I was too young to remember most of our time in that apartment, but in my mother’s things I find a soft paper envelope labeled with her neat script: “Birthday Negatives, July 28, 1987.” When the pictures were taken, I had just turned a year old. In some of the photographs, I wear a white jumper; in others, only a diaper. Over one shoulder I carry my favorite pink blanket, whose corner will rough and wear from the constant rub of a finger soothed by its exposed stitch. My mother and my father and my grandmother, Evelyn, are all here.

  The way my father tells those early years, my mother was the one who hit him. Angry-drunk, she whipped him with the cord of an alarm clock, and then she called the cops. My mother and the neighbors and I stood in our gravel driveway and watched the police chase my father down the road, around the block. The dust settled soft and white.

  The way my father tells it, my mother was wrong and the police were wrong and my memories were wrong, because I did not remember the violence the way he wanted me to. I remember my father’s shadow in the doorway in the moments before he threw my mother to the floor. The way she curled up under the kitchen table and stayed there, sobbing, even after he was gone. She told me to get rid of his beer. I pulled the chair over to the sink and dutifully poured each can down the drain.

  My mother stayed for years after that fight, after many fights, but I remember one of her early leavings. She took my sister and me to the women’s shelter at the Salvation Army. The light was all cream and yellow. We caught head lice from the shelter’s temporary beds. My grandmother convinced my mother to go back to my father, her son, the way I imagine she always did. Once home, my mother washed our long hair with the special shampoos and picked the nits off our scalps with a comb, but my father, impatient, went to the store and bought a new hair buzzer. I watched him lift the buzzer from its polystyrene cradle. I cried as he cut off all my hair.

  * * *

  —

  FLORIDA IS UNCHANGED and true to memory: fulgid sunlight and flat horizons, broken only by palm trees and scrubby pines. The parking lot at the JFK Medical Center sprawls confusingly, and I circle it twice. After I park, I follow a couple into the building, but as I step onto the sidewalk, a small bush rustles, and a curly-tailed lizard lands on the ground in front of me. I jump back, both startled and embarrassed. I caught lizards as a kid—even wore them like earrings, their small mouths clamped to my earlobes, their thin bodies wiggling against my neck—but this place, this lizard and I, have become strangers. I watch him for a breathless moment: his mouth open, his sides heaving. Then he darts across my path and disappears into another small shrub.

  I enter the lobby through a pair of tinted glass doors and approach the officer at the front desk. He positions me in front of a camera and prints my badge on a sticky label, then directs me to an elevator down the hall. Inside the elevator, I inspect the photo on the badge: a grainy shadow you might call me.

  I follow his directions out the elevator and down the hall to the critical care unit, quiet and cold. The curtain in front of my mother’s room is open. Standing beside her bed, a nurse delicately washes her face.

  I waver at the threshold, and when the nurse glances in my direction, she startles, as if I were a lizard landing on her path. “Who are you?” she asks.

  “I’m her daughter,” I say.

  The nurse frowns and shakes her head. “We were told she didn’t have any family. Nobody’s been here to see her.”

  Her words land sharp and heavy on my heart. I glance at my mother’s face, wrinkled and sun worn. Who did they imagine my mother to be? Another homeless woman, unloved and forgotten? Slowly, I walk toward her and rest my hands on the rail of her bed. “I came as soon as I could,” I say—in her defense, and mine.

  * * *

  —

  I DON’T REMEMBER when my mother left. I only remember that one day she was gone. And after she left, my sister and I stayed in the apartment on Nokomis with our father for less than a year.

  In school, I was a happy student. Each day, I left my kindergarten class during the language arts period to read with the first graders. I had a crush on a blond-haired boy named Todd. During the designated nap hour, I snuck into the play area and tried to convince my friends to join me, until the teacher moved my little yellow rug to the spot in front of her desk.

  At home, I was different. Quiet and small as a mouse. My father drank constantly with the neighbors and with his girlfriends, who rotated in and out the door.

  My father often drank to blackout. One night, I watched my sister, still in a diaper, suck on a bottle of mustard like it was a bottle of milk. His body slumped behind her on the couch. Those nights, the windows of our apartment were like black holes devouring all light. My mind was full of the scary stories my father and my uncle told, sitting in rickety lawn chairs under porchlight: stories about ghosts and werewolves and gremlins, like the ones on TV.

  My grandmother worked evenings waitressing at the Scotch ’n Sirloin, but she wrote her number on my dinosaur notepad, purple and shaped like a brontosaurus, and taped it to our fridge. Night after night, I called her at work and begged her to come get me. After work, she would pick me up and take me home, but she always left Eileen with our father because, she said, I was the one who was scared.

  A few months after my mother left, a red-haired woman moved in with her two pale-haired children, a boy and a girl. She cooked terrible food, like ground beef and green beans mixed into dry mashed potatoes, and she tried to make me eat it by calling it “Native American food.” I couldn’t remember my mother cooking anything like that. My mother made us macaroni and cheese and Hamburger Helper, straight out of the box. My father’s girlfriend forced food down my throat, and when I puked
it back onto my plate, she yelled at me and sent me to the room we now shared with her two kids.

  The four of us slept on mattresses on the floor. The boy and his sister shared one, and my sister and I shared the other, but after the lights went out, they crept under our blankets and peeled our nightgowns up and over our heads and slid their hands down. Years later, I heard my grandmother telling someone, I can’t remember who, they had been abused by their dad.

  My mother came home only once, when the red-haired woman was at work. I was home alone from school and watching TV on the couch with my tuxedo cat, Teddy, curled heavy on my chest. My father met her at the door. They tiptoed across the living room like cartoon burglars, and my mother giggled, “Don’t tell anyone we’re here, Danielly.” The bedroom door clicked down the hall.

  When my father’s girlfriend came home, she asked, “Where’s your dad?”

  I was a small, contained thing: a girl on the couch. I told her I didn’t know.

  She walked down the hall, and then everyone started yelling. My mother, clutching a T-shirt over her bare breasts, ran out the door. I jumped off the couch and followed her into the driveway; I watched her jerk the car into reverse and disappear down the road.

  In a dream that felt like that day, I followed Teddy into the empty lot across the street. The sky was loud and gray. The palmettos rattled in the wind. I sat at a wooden school desk with a white kite tied to one leg. The wind tossed the kite higher and higher, and then my father appeared with a pair of scissors and, with one snip, let it go.