Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

  I realize I have forgotten that Marie is here, a silent spectator to time before memory. I close the book and rub the pad of my finger against its hard edge, as I would my childhood blanket. “It makes me feel sorry for her,” I say.

  Marie nods. Her silence: an invitation to talk.

  But it’s late. The windows dark. “I’m tired,” I say instead, sliding the diary between the neatly labeled folders inside the box. The diary’s dimensions are too large for its own folder. I press the lid down over the top.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN A PERSON dies, the ch’į´įdii is the thing left behind, like a ghost. The ch’į´įdii carries the residue of every wrong thing the person was unable to bring into balance or harmony in life. The ch’į´įdii haunts a deceased person’s bones and possessions, exits the body with their last breath. Contact with the ch’į´įdii can cause illness, a “ghost sickness,” which manifests physically and mentally through symptoms you might recognize as grief.

  I am not trying to learn how to grieve my mother; I have been grieving her absence my entire life. I am ghost-sick. Possessed.

  *1  July 27, 1987. “He got mad and wanted to fight the world.”

  *2  August 19, 1987. In red ink: “I started drinking about noon that day and by 4:30 & 5:00 P.M. I was will on my way to a blackout. We at the time we went to a Chinese Restaurant and I sure started a fight with Mike and it got worst by the time we got home. I said things that I haven’t said to Evelyn and also don’t really remember but any was up at 10:30 and sure felt terrible but also knew it was my fault but also that Mike should have not hit me.”

  TITLE: Application for employment with the City of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  DATE: 1985 March 27

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: job applications

  DESCRIPTION: Third page of a partially completed job application from Lee’s job search in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in early 1985. The document is creased and stained. In blue ink, distinct from the black ink Lee used, someone has scribbled in the blank spaces. I wonder if it might have been me, as a girl.

  TITLE: “I Love My DoG”

  DATE: undated

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: construction paper

  DESCRIPTION: Illustrated four-page booklet titled I Love My DoG by Lee’s daughter, me. It is drawn on construction paper with black marker and crayon and bound with cellophane tape. I draw my sister and me with matching blond hair, pink shirts, and purple skirts; the girls in the book do not resemble us at all. And we never owned a DoG.

  TITLE: A letter from Danielle Geller to Laureen “Tweety” Lee written on Lisa Frank paper.

  DATE: undated

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: personal correspondence

  DESCRIPTION: I wrote a letter to my mother on one of my favorite pieces of Lisa Frank stationery, a three-by-six-inch sheet with a mottled brown horse tucked inside a cloud. A rainbow arcs off the edge of the page, and I darken the borders of the clouds with my thick black marker. I place a Lisa Frank sticker in one corner: a purple kitten reaching for a psychedelic angelfish too big for its goldfish bowl. The letter is creased in the middle from being folded inside a matching envelope, though it was never mailed. It was written when we still lived in Florida and likely hand delivered.

  TITLE: Alexandra Alvarez is held in the air.

  DATE: 1999 November 24

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs

  DESCRIPTION: Someone holds my sister Alexandra high in the air. This photograph is part of a series of photographs developed at Winn-Dixie. The envelope is labeled “Little Bit.”

  TITLE: Laureen “Tweety” Lee and Alexandra sit together on the floor.

  DATE: 1999 November 24

  TYPE OF RESOURCE: color photographs

  DESCRIPTION: Alexandra—“Boo Boo” or “BuBuLoo”—leans against Lee, who is seated beside a white crib. From the other photographs in the series, I know my sister wears a shirt with the Puerto Rican flag and a pair of mock Tims. My mother balances Alexandra’s Elmo hat on her head. A bottle of Bud rests on the floor. This photograph is part of a series of photographs developed at Winn-Dixie. The envelope is labeled “Little Bit.”

  II

  But it’s no good to talk of the dead. It brings them back, I have heard. From wherever they are, they hear their once-name. They see a small spot in this world for them, and some will try to wriggle their way back to it, like shimmying into old snakeskin.

  —Natanya Ann Pulley, “The Way of Wounds”

  A FEW DAYS after Marie and I went through my mother’s things, my grandmother called to tell me my sister turned herself in, to serve a years-old warrant issued after Eileen broke probation in our small Pennsylvanian town. Grandma said she would spend at least eight months in YCP, York County Prison, and she gave me my sister’s inmate number to write her letters.

  When we first moved to Pennsylvania, we wrote letters to our parents because our father was in jail again—too-frequent DUIs—and, in those days of exorbitant long-distance charges, our mother rarely called. In my mother’s papers, I find the letters I wrote to her. I tell her about the first time we saw snow. The single sentence makes me remember, clearly, the flurries that dissolved on the warm surface of the grocery store’s parking lot and the way Grandma laughed at our overexcitement. In my letters to my mother, I tell her I miss her and complain about my sister, “the brat.” I tell her about our new pet, a parakeet named Ripple, who we teach to say “pretty bird.” I tell her the names of the girls at school, which all end in i or y, and complain about how hard it is to make new friends.

  My mother never wrote back—or, if she did, Grandma didn’t give me her letters.

  My father’s letters arrived in envelopes stamped with red warnings: THIS CORRESPONDENCE ORIGINATES FROM A CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION. Grandma bought me a scrapbook and a package of photo-mounting corners, and each time I received a letter from my father, I carefully pressed it onto a new page.

  With the money we sent him, my father bought a pad of drawing paper and colored pencils, and every few weeks, he sent us a new work of art. Most of his drawings featured Garfield in striped prison regalia, with a ball and chain attached to his back paw. (“You ever heard of a pet rock?” he jokes.) Garfield plotted escape and tried to order pizzas to the jail while the guards were asleep. My father sold the letterhead to other inmates for commissary money so he could buy coffee and cigarettes. I sometimes wonder how many kids and how many girlfriends might have received letters with my father’s drawings, and if they saved those letters, too.

  My sister’s letters arrived stamped with similar warnings. Beginning in middle school, she was sent to juvenile recovery centers, foster care, and boot camp. She spent six months in juvenile detention. This would be her second time serving at YCP.

  People—friends, teachers, counselors, my own family—often asked how my sister and I turned out so differently. I used to say I didn’t know.

  Another likely story.

  BEFORE DON DIED, we used to visit our aunt Ella in central Pennsylvania every summer. We all piled into Don’s van and followed I-95 north, and each time we crossed a state border, Eileen would ask, “Are we in Georgia yet?” We would all laugh because Georgia was the first state out of Florida and because there was nothing exciting about Georgia, but she never failed to ask. To pass the time, we played the alphabet game and the license plate game and sang the old folk songs Grandma’s grandpa used to sing. We colored to the sound of Don’s fishing poles rattling above our heads, and I sucked on pretzel sticks, which Grandma said would settle my stomach, riled by the motion of the van.

  We stayed with our aunt in her house in Red Lion, the old cigar town where she lived with her husband and teenage son. We often stayed for weeks, and Grandma enrolled us in swimming lessons at the local high school and summer programs i
n a park at the top of the hill. We played with my aunt’s dogs, Shadow and Rufus, in their huge backyard, and I woke up early every morning to watch the songbirds breakfasting at my aunt’s feeders: finches and cardinals and chickadees, whose names I learned from the colorful chart stuck to her fridge. My aunt taught me how to sit still with a peanut between two fingers; how to wait, with quiet attention, for a blue jay or squirrel or chipmunk to accept it from my hand. Don and Grandma sometimes left us with our aunt to visit Don’s family in Ohio or to travel alone. One year, they took a cruise to Alaska and brought back photographs of bears and moose and killer whales. Another year, they brought us miniature Navajo sandpaintings: I received a painting of a sun shield—“by Teresa” written in pencil on the back.

  After Don died and we moved to Pennsylvania for good, we lived in one half of my aunt’s duplex. Eileen and I shared a bedroom, my aunt’s old sewing room, which narrowly fit a bunk bed and a small writing desk.

  We joined the swimming team, and every day after school, I walked to the high school for practice. The chlorine bleached my hair gold and split it at the ends. I won second- and first-place ribbons for the fifty- and hundred-meter freestyles at local swim meets. At the championship meet at the end of the season, I swam in a solo freestyle race and as anchor for our relay team, but when I dove into the water for the solo race, I failed to tuck my chin properly and my goggles slipped down my face. My goggles dragged around my neck and I couldn’t breathe, not because of the goggles but because I panicked. My feet touched the bottom of the pool, and I glanced up at my coach, Wanda, who crab-stepped along the edge and shouted encouraging words I couldn’t understand. I dove forward and barely finished in last place.

  Wanda met me at the end of the race and wrapped me in a towel after I climbed out of the water. I cried as she led me back to my grandmother, who asked Wanda what happened. “I think she had a panic attack,” Wanda said.

  In the spring, my aunt gave me free rein over the flower beds in front of our half of the house. Grandma must have asked. I scattered cosmos seeds near the porch and planted pansies and petunias along the sidewalk. For Mother’s Day, Ella took me to the garden store, and we bought her a pink azalea bush, which we planted near the end of the walk. Don once told me that talking to plants helped them grow, and I spent long afternoons lying on my stomach whispering compliments to my flowers and stroking the soft faces of their petals.

  That spring, my uncle George took us to see the Canada goslings at Lake Redman. He gave us cracked corn to throw into the grass. George reminded me of Don—the way he quietly puttered around his shed or in the cluttered basement below the house on the weekends, when he wasn’t working at the M&M-Mars factory in Elizabethtown. I watched him from an upstairs window or a seat on the stairs, unsure of how to get close. When my cousin, my aunt’s daughter, found out George had taken us to the lake, she demanded to know why he hadn’t taken her kids, his own grandkids, to the lake as well. George stopped trying to interact with us girls.

  By the end of the summer, the cosmos had grown nearly as tall as me. They brought cabbage white and swallowtail butterflies to the yard.

  My father was released from jail, and a few months later, he migrated north. He no longer had a driver’s license—the courts stripped him of his permanently—but his friend Danny offered to drive him to Pennsylvania. They loaded Danny’s van with anything worth selling and stopped at flea markets along the way. When their van finally pulled up in front of our aunt’s house and he stepped onto the curb, Eileen and I barreled into his legs and wrapped our arms around his waist, and he squeezed us hard and tight.

  Sometime in the days that followed, he convinced our grandmother to let us live with him again. He had been sober for a year, even though most of that time had passed in jail or recovery centers.

  We had already been planning to move. Living with our aunt had begun to feel crowded, and I had gone with Grandma to see two apartment units, one in Red Lion and one in Yoe, an even smaller neighboring town that sat in the valley between two monstrous hills. We would need to change schools again, but Grandma liked the apartment in Yoe because it had fewer stairs. But instead of moving with Grandma, my father took over the lease of the apartment in Yoe.

  My sister and I moved in with him in the fall. The leaves of the maple tree in our front yard were shockingly pink. The cigar factory at the end of the street made the morning air smell like the cured tobacco my father rolled in his cigarettes. He found a job as an electrician for a company just around the corner from our apartment; they built portable office trailers for construction sites, which they parked in a gravel lot just up the hill.

  And after my father found work, he sent for his girlfriend, Fran.

  Fran had been homeless when he met her, sitting on a street corner with a sign begging for money: GOD BLESS. As I would come to learn from the stories she told me, Fran left home when her young marriage turned violent. She lived on the streets and slept in the woods, or under people’s houses with the snakes and the spiders. She bathed in creeks, even in Florida, even after an alligator surfaced directly beside her and sent her screaming and naked into the woods.

  Grandma helped Fran find work washing dishes part-time at a local fried chicken restaurant. But not long after she started working, she quit or was fired for disrupting the customers with her too-loud laughter, the shade of her warmth. So Fran stayed home. She cooked and she cleaned and, even though my father was supposed to be sober, she drove him back and forth to the beer store after he finished work. He didn’t even bother stocking the fridge. He just set the case of Natty Ice beside the couch and opened beer after beer after beer.

  My father liked to have an audience when he drank, and I was his captive. He played Pink Floyd and Styx albums on repeat. He complained about his boss, the government, the state, while Fran boredly sipped on her beer or slipped into the kitchen to fix dinner.

  My father told me Grandma was the drunk in the family. She shot a hole in the wall with his father’s rifle and threw his Christmas tree out the living room window. He said they had to hog-tie her on the bed until the police came.

  My father told me Grandma made him wear a button-down shirt and tie to school every day, which was why he was bullied. The other kids ran his tie up the flagpole.

  My father told me he possessed some degree of genius, and his math teacher begged him to finish high school. But my father couldn’t bear the torment the other kids caused him, so he quit.

  My father told me, “Ignorance is bliss.”

  My father told me he killed a man—looked him in the eyes and shot him in the head. But when I asked Grandma about the shooting, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “He didn’t kill anybody. He just shot the guy in the leg.”

  My father told me he was kicked out of the marines because he refused to kill a man for his country. He said he jumped onto his commanding officer’s desk and threatened him with a knife.

  My father couldn’t recognize his own contradictions.

  My father told me he met a Shaolin priest on the beach after he left the marines. The priest invited him back to his temple. “Do you know what he said?” my father asked, and when I shook my head, he answered, “You’re not ready yet.”

  The Shaolin priest stories were some of his favorites to tell.

  My father called himself “Michael the Archangel.” All heaven and earth were set against him.

  My father told me that I was the only one who might come to understand him, but I was too young to cleave fact from fiction; my father’s fantasies from reality. I was too young to understand what my father wanted or needed from me. All I learned was that it was best to stay quiet, to wait for some future state of readiness that I had not yet attained.

  I can remember my sister sitting there with me, cross-legged on the living room floor. But Eileen was not quiet or patient, and she hated Fran, who had stepped into the shadow o
f our mother. More and more, Eileen spent time away from the apartment with the families of her friends.

  * * *

  —

  WHETHER THROUGH TIME or proximity, I became more comfortable with Fran than I ever was with my mother. We spent hours together on the couch watching Jerry Springer and Xena: Warrior Princess before my father came home from work. I remember watching Black Beauty with Fran, and when Ginger died, the white stripe of her muzzle barely visible from underneath the black tarp that covered her broken body, we held each other and sobbed.

  Fran was the first person I told when I got my period. I was eleven, but unalarmed—my fifth-grade health class had covered the basics. But finding the blood that morning, I remembered a scene from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, a show I’d watched with Grandma in Florida. “I’m bleeding,” Dr. Quinn’s daughter wailed to her mother, as if she were dying. From my spot in front of the television, I couldn’t imagine what had made her so upset. There was no open wound, no blood seeping from viscera.

  “Why is she crying?” I asked Grandma. “It’s just blood.”

  “You’ll know when you’re older” was all she said.

  I was determined to be stoic, to avoid a scene. I wouldn’t cry. I waited until Fran was watching TV—bent forward, elbows propped on knees. During a commercial break, I tossed four easy words across the couch: “I got my period.”

  “Okay,” she said, without a glance.

  When my father came home that night, she asked him for money to buy me pads.

  “What does she need pads for?” he barked. “Just show her how to roll up some toilet paper.”