Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  One of the baggage guys walks around the counter to pick up her suitcase. He places it on the scale, and then he tapes a bright purple fragile sticker over the zipper. He carries the bag to the conveyor and seems to keep his back to me.

  The other man looks at me, waiting, and shakes his head. “There’s nothing anyone can say that will make this feel better, and nothing but time can heal your pain.”

  I nod and wipe the tears off my cheeks, my hands on my jeans. “Thanks,” I say and add, of course, “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  ACCORDING TO MY mother’s diary, Grandma didn’t tell her we were leaving the state until a week before we planned to be gone.*3

  Don died in May. His funeral was held at the Catholic church where Eileen and I attended school. My teacher, Sister Pauline, escorted me from class to the service, though I had to beg to leave school early to attend the viewing and burial in Boynton Beach. One of Don’s sons and his wife agreed to chaperone me.

  We arrived at the memorial home after Grandma, who was crying when we walked through the door. She rushed over to me and grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the casket, where Don lay. She started talking about a pillow, red and shaped like a heart, that she had bought for my sister and me and tucked inside his casket. Before everyone arrived, the pillow had fallen out of the casket and onto the floor. “It’s a sign,” she said, through tears. “We always said, whoever went first, we would send the other a sign that we had made it to the other side.”

  I stared at the pillow, nestled back in the casket, and wondered if it was a different kind of sign. A sign that my sister and I did not hold the place in Don’s heart that he held in ours.

  The evidence wouldn’t support my fear. Before Don died, he bought my grandmother a new car—a teal Ford Escort—and two life insurance policies, one for my sister and one for me. When we were old enough to attend college, he said, we could cash them out. The life insurance policies weren’t big—worth a couple thousand dollars each—but, with his sons’ permission, he left everything he had to my grandmother and us.

  Months later, Grandma decided we would leave Florida and move to Pennsylvania to live with her daughter, our aunt Ella. Grandma didn’t want to raise us girls alone. But she warned me not to tell anyone we were leaving, for reasons I still don’t understand. My father was in jail, and my mother had no power to stop her. According to the state, we were my grandmother’s children.

  In September, my aunt and uncle arrived in Florida to help us pack everything we could into our uncle’s van.

  As they worked, I lingered near the flower beds at the edge of our porch. I noticed a vine creeping across the ground that I had never noticed before. I kneeled down and found a watermelon the size of an egg hidden under the roses. The seed from one of Don’s watermelons must have taken root in the compost we spread that spring. I fought the urge to pocket the little watermelon, to bring it with me—to hold something of Don’s close until the end.

  I have no memory of our last visit with my mother and Tony—only the short note in her diary marking the day.*4 And then a week later, we were off to Pennsylvania. We left Don’s roses on his grave.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I LAND in Boston, I catch a cab back to my apartment in Dorchester. I told the hospice worker that I would be available after five, and I don’t want to risk my phone’s spotty reception on the T. There aren’t any messages waiting for me. But as soon as I tuck my luggage into the trunk and give the driver directions, I call the hospital to see how she is doing.

  “Your mother has passed,” the hospice worker tells me. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  I hang up the phone and sink down into the black leather seats and watch the tops of the city’s gray buildings rush past beneath an orange-tinged sky. My mother died, and I had been somewhere up there. I never even kissed her goodbye.

  *1  October 31, 1995. “…they enjoyed it just as much as we both did.”

  *2  April 16, 1995. Easter. “Spent my afternoon with my girls! 2½ hours!”

  *3  September 21, 1996. “Danielle & Eileen stopped by w/ Grandma to tell me they are living to Penn State!”

  *4  September 27, 1996. “Danielle & Eileen are leaving this day to Penn!”

  it was my fault but also

  THE APARTMENT IS dark and empty when I make it home from the airport. I lean my mother’s suitcase against the coffee table in the living room and collapse onto my roommate’s vintage orange couch. My cat, Little Foot, appears in front of me with a raspy squeak and bumps her butt against my leg.

  “Did you miss me?” I ask her out loud. I pull an Arby’s sandwich I bought at the airport out of my bag.

  Little Foot sits on her haunches and pricks my knee with her paws.

  “Put your little feet down,” I scold, but I rip off a small piece of roast beef and set it on the floor. She hoovers it up. Between my own bites, I feed her another piece, then another. “Arby’s is good, huh?” I laugh.

  It feels strange to laugh. Strange to sit in a room that is not connected to my mother. Stranger to think of the hospital, which feels less real than this sandwich and this cat.

  “Time for bed,” I say, balling the foil in my hand. She sniffs persistently at my hands, but she knows these words. She follows me upstairs, to the small room we share, and I close us in for the night. I leave my mother’s suitcase in the middle of the living room, where it will remain untouched for weeks.

  * * *

  —

  I FIRST MOVED to Boston in 2009. Nathan, my ex-boyfriend from my freshman year of college, had been accepted to a graduate program and needed a roommate, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to escape my family. We moved a few days after the new year.

  I spent the first six months jobless, burning through the money I saved working for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. I played World of Warcraft, and survived on Pepsi and turkey and cheese on plain bagels. I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t even bother unpacking—I just climbed over my piles of cardboard boxes into bed each night.

  When my money ran out, I responded to Craigslist ads until I found a job at a local thrift store. I lived a small life. I went to work—first as a sales associate, then as a keyholder, and then as a salaried employee in the supply department, sorting and pricing bales of used and vintage clothing. Then I went home and played videogames with a rotating roster of Internet boys.

  Two years later, I applied for a master’s program in library and information science. I didn’t have any experience in libraries or archives, but I needed a change and, I reasoned, loved books. I learned—or tried to learn—the standards of archival arrangement and description, which are guided by the principle of respect de fonds, or provenance: the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object. According to archival standards, records should be maintained in their original order, if such order exists. But during my short life as an archival assistant in libraries and archives across Greater Boston, I often struggled with this most basic principle. I received entire collections in disintegrating paper grocery bags. I shuffled through mountains of paper scraps and newspaper clippings that resisted meaningful arrangement or description and, tired of labeling folders “Miscellaneous,” I wanted to throw away much of what I was told to preserve. I was, I came to believe, a failure of an archivist.

  * * *

  —

  WEEKS AFTER MY mother dies, one of my roommates moves her suitcase from its position by the coffee table to the corner of the living room. I know I should move it out of the common area, but I am not sure, yet, what to do with everything inside. My sister was supposed to visit. We were supposed to go through our mother’s things together.

  I bump into a roommate, Marie, making coffee in the morning before work. We rarely see each other. She is working
overtime at the thrift store, taking graduate classes in publishing at Emerson, and filming a movie with her boyfriend and some of his friends. And I am a ghost, an unseen presence in the house: a shutting door, a creaking floorboard, a weeping in the middle of the night.

  She asks if I am heading to work, and I say yes.

  “Cool,” she says, her eyes smiling through her bangs. “We can ride the train together.”

  After breakfast, we walk two blocks to Ashmont Station. The autumn wind is cold and sharp. She asks me how things are as she burrows her face into the wool of her thick gray scarf.

  “I don’t know,” I say, balling my fists inside the pockets of my coat.

  Marie and I met the summer after my freshman year of college. Her father had just died. She transferred from Oberlin to Shippensburg, the little state school in Pennsylvania where her parents both taught English and where I, coincidentally, earned my bachelor’s degree. But we didn’t meet at school—we met through our boyfriends, who played a weekly D&D campaign with their group of high school friends. Marie and I weren’t invited to play, but we talked a lot that summer, while a family of meerkats lived their dramatic little lives on TV. When the school year began, I introduced her to my tight circle of friends, and we stayed close for two years. But I broke our friendship. I moved to Boston to cut ties with my family and, in the process, cut ties with everyone else. After years of silence, it was difficult to begin talking again.

  Inside the station, she grabs a copy of the Metro, and I follow her through the turnstiles and onto the subway platform. “I had a fight with my sister,” I say, finally. “We haven’t talked since.”

  “About what?”

  “My mother’s ashes.”

  In the days and weeks after my mother died, I didn’t do any of the things a good daughter should do. I didn’t write an obituary. I didn’t arrange a funeral or memorial service. I tried to call my mother’s family, but the only number I could find—the number for my aunt, my mother’s sister—was a dead line. I could not afford to bury or cremate my mother, but I was told to submit a notarized letter to the county describing her situation. “Include she was homeless and an alcoholic,” the caseworker said, implying it would help. The county paid for my mother’s cremation, and the crematorium held my mother’s ashes while I tried to reach my sister; I wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with our mother’s ashes.

  She stopped responding to my calls and my texts and my Facebook messages. In the silence, I scrolled through her Facebook page, largely abandoned except for the few photos she posted over her last year traveling: She sits on a sidewalk and holds a clever cardboard sign asking for money. In another, her road dog, Monster, licks her face. She holds her phone at arm’s length and squints into the sun with the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico behind her. She shaves her hair into a mohawk and collects new tattoos: three thin lines on her bottom lip and three dots on her chin; the letters D O G S written on the backs of the fingers of her left hand; a lizard on the cartilage of an ear. The ear and the tattoo were later mangled when, drunk or high, she tried to steal a bone from the mouth of a dog with her own teeth. The dog snapped and caught her left ear; with its teeth or its paw, it tore the skin beneath her left eye. The day our mother died, Eileen posted a photo I took of our mother cleaning my kitchen in Pennsylvania, from when our mother visited to attend my college graduation. Then my sister posted nothing.

  When the crematorium grew impatient with my delays, I told them I didn’t want my mother’s ashes. I couldn’t imagine her at rest in an urn on my shelf. Boston was too cold and too dark and too far from the home my mother had made in South Florida. After a week, they offered to scatter her ashes in the ocean, to send me the GPS coordinates after it was done. I told them that sounded fine.

  “You did what?” Eileen screamed, weeks later, when she found out. “You believed them? They’re probably just going to dump her in the garbage somewhere.”

  “So what?” I said, hearing how cold and unflinching my own voice sounded. It isn’t her, I wanted to say. It isn’t our mother. But she hung up.

  I tell Marie she wouldn’t answer my calls. “What was I supposed to do?” I ask Marie. “I had to make the decisions by myself.”

  “That’s unfair,” Marie agrees.

  We lapse into silence again. When the train pulls into the station, we claim two seats in a corner of the front car, and Marie opens the Metro to the crossword and scratches answers inside the little squares.

  I stare through the opposite window. I am an empty vessel. The ashy walls of the tunnels and the bare branches of November’s trees pour in.

  “Is your sister still coming to see you?” Marie asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “She was supposed to help me go through our mom’s things. But I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore.”

  “Would you like me to help you?”

  “Yes,” I say, closing my eyes against tears. “I’d really appreciate that.”

  * * *

  —

  MARIE AND I meet in the living room a few days later. I set a bundle of the sage I found in my mother’s suitcase inside an abalone shell and strike a match. I have “borrowed” a records box from work and bought a stack of acid-free manila folders. I feel prepared.

  I give Marie a shoebox of my mother’s photographs, and I start digging through my mother’s papers. I sort through my mother’s opened and unopened mail. I throw out any form letters and junk mail but keep the rest: bills from hospitals, notifications from labor agencies, and letters from her family. I am surprised—but maybe shouldn’t be—that my mother kept every letter my sister or I sent: commercial and handmade cards, with notes that grew longer as I grew up. I stopped sending her letters after the eighth grade.

  I find letters from my mother’s family on the reservation, most of which are at least a decade old. The letters are addressed to “Tweety” or “Tweetie,” the nickname my mother had, she told us, ever since she was a little girl in a yellow dress. One of my mother’s cousins affectionately calls us, her daughters, “the little tweets.”

  Marie organizes my mother’s photographs by the people in them. She tries to separate the photos of my sisters and me, but we sometimes look too much alike.

  “Who’s Boo-Boo-Loo?” she asks from the couch.

  I would not have known if I had not read an entry from her diary earlier, one in which she describes me: Bo-Bo walking around the house saying “ma-ma.” “I think that’s what she called us when we were little,” I say.

  Marie laughs. “The envelope on these pictures just says ‘BuBuLoo.’ ”

  I take the envelope she offers and shuffle through pictures of a little girl that could be any of my sisters. My mother wears a turquoise shirt. The girl has cake all over her hands; my mother, her face. I don’t recognize the room—not the furniture or the photos on the walls. This must be my mother’s third daughter, one of my half sisters, the one born after Eileen and I moved with our grandmother to Pennsylvania. “It’s Alexandra,” I say, handing the stack of photographs back.

  Marie hands me another photo: an eighties-style glamour shot of a man in a cowboy hat with a thick brown mustache and sultry eyes. Another photo: a woman in a leopard-print dress, who poses suggestively on a bed surrounded by stark white walls. “What are these?” we laugh.

  My mother lived entire lives apart from mine. I am tempted to erase the questions and unknowns from my mother’s life—to simplify the arrangement—but what kind of archivist would I be?

  By the end of the night, I arrange my mother’s papers and photographs into a series of labeled manila folders: Diaries, Work, Medical, Correspondence, and Photographs.

  I arrange my mother’s diaries, which she kept in appointment books, by date. The oldest diary is from 1987, the year after I was born. It is different from the others, which are cheaper a
nd spiral-bound. The hard cover is puffy with gilded trim, and it is titled Adventure: The Art of Living Dangerously. In the pages between each month, the editor, Richard Frisbie, curates stories and illustrations of world-traveling adventurers like Teddy Roosevelt, Kilton Stewart, and Naomi Uemura. There is no indication my mother read the stories—the pages are crisp, absent underlining or other marginalia—but they provide a charming, if not simple, frame. “Every day used to be an adventure in staying alive,” Frisbie writes in his introduction to the book. “Although circumstances have changed over the past few thousand years, we still have the reflexes of a species used to living on the edge of danger.” Frisbie writes about men and women trying to survive extremes of weather and circumstance. They battle ice and snow, shark and bear and crocodile.

  In 1987, my mother describes finding me crying in my crib, my father drunk at a friend’s. She describes a conversation with my grandmother, in which my mother agrees to quit her job to take care of me. She writes about my father’s struggle to find and keep a job. She tallies the weeks and months of his sobriety—on April 2, she records: “3 months and 2 weeks.” And then nothing. The tally ends.*1

  I turn the pages slowly. Read most but not all of the entries aloud. I trace my fingers over my mother’s careful cursive, over the destruction that unfolds.*2