Dog Flowers

by Danielle Geller

I returned from school the next day to an ambush: Grandma and Fran, sitting together at the kitchen table in tears. Fran had asked Grandma for money instead, and my carefully crafted plan unraveled. Fran jumped up from the table and wrestled me into her arms and pressed her face against my chest and sobbed, “I was the first person you told.”

  But Grandma’s gifts of pads were irregular, and Fran told me I wasn’t allowed to use her tampons, so I learned to spin toilet paper like a cocoon around the thin panty liners I scrounged from under the bathroom sink. On days when the blood flowed heaviest, I ran to the bathroom between every class, flushing and re-spinning my custom pads. It wasn’t long before I bled through my underwear, and then my jeans; it wasn’t long before the other girls noticed.

  “Hey, Smudge,” the girls started calling me between classes, in the halls, with no explanation.

  When I didn’t give them the reaction they were looking for—I was silent in my confusion—they sent a boy after me instead.

  “You know, guys aren’t really into that,” he began.

  “Into what?” I asked. The girls erupted into laughter around us.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, too guilty and embarrassed to offer an explanation. And then he took off running down the hall.

  “Can’t you afford pads?” one of the girls yelled. She had green eyes and perfectly flat-ironed hair.

  I fled to the nearest bathroom and pulled down my jeans to find a rust-colored stain just under my left butt cheek. I snuck to my locker and found a sweatshirt to tie around my waist, but the damage had already been done. “Smudge” was a name that wouldn’t wash out.

  That night, after Fran listened to me cry about the girls at school, she told me about the first time she got her period: She was sitting at her desk. She was wearing her Catholic-school uniform—a plaid jumper—and a full leg cast. The blood trickled, bright red against white, straight to the floor.

  * * *

  —

  FRAN AND I protected each other, I wanted to believe. I remember, vividly, the night Fran stood between my father and me. She cocked her fist in the air and warned my father to leave me alone.

  “I’m not hurting her,” he laughed.

  Fran drew her elbow back, as if she would drive her fist straight through him. “Leave her alone,” she said again.

  My father muttered something casual, like “All women are bitches,” our gender turned against him, but he let me retreat to my room for the rest of the night.

  I could not protect Fran from my father, but I could protect her from my sister and myself. When Eileen tried to pick fights with Fran, I fought Eileen back. When Fran cooked something I didn’t like for dinner, like Salisbury steak, I tried to hide my leftovers; I knew she would cry if she found them in the trash, so I smuggled them to school in a green lunch box instead. When Mother’s Day arrived, I mailed my mother a card, but I bought Fran potted tulips whose yellow petals were streaked with maroon, almost like tiger lilies. We planted them beside the porch, where they could return year after year.

  * * *

  —

  BUT EVEN FRAN could not always protect me from my father.

  Sometime that year, I adopted a lovebird from my best friend’s mother. I named him Berry because his red, green, and blue feathers reminded me of the colored berries in Cap’n Crunch.

  Birds weren’t meant to be stuck in a cage, my father told me. They should be free. So we left Berry’s cage door open, except at night, but clipped his wings so he couldn’t fly. He followed us around the apartment on the floor until my father accidentally stepped on his tail. His tail feathers popped off in a clump, and he disappeared beneath the hutch in the living room, and it took me an hour to coax him out again. Until his feathers grew back, Berry sat low and puffy and refused to turn his back to me, as if embarrassed by his bare, pink butt. My father, in his guilt, strung up a series of ropes so Berry could navigate around the apartment above our heads.

  One night, my father brought home a bucket of copper wire, which I helped him strip. Using the sharp edge of a wire cutter, I peeled the plastic casing off the copper in long, thin strips. Bright-eyed, Berry fetched pieces of the thin plastic to collect in the bottom of his cage, as if building a nest. My father’s eyes got darker the longer he watched Berry, the more he drank.

  “If you love something, you have to let it go,” he said, repeating a version of Kahlil Gibran’s famous quote, though I doubt he had ever read Kahlil Gibran. “If it’s yours, it will come back to you, but if it doesn’t, it never was.” The quote often preceded his argument that I should release Berry into the wild, that he was a hostage in our home.

  I tried to tell him Berry wasn’t a wild bird. That he wasn’t native to Pennsylvania. That he would die.

  My father wouldn’t listen, never listened. He coaxed Berry onto his hand and walked him to the screen door. I begged him to stop, but he tossed my bird skyward, and Berry rode a breeze into the tree in the front yard. A robin sat on the same branch. Berry trilled and bobbed forward, but the robin flew off, alarmed or confused, and left Berry calling after it.

  I wormed past my father into the yard and begged Berry to come down. He shuffled back and forth on the branch, then finally fluttered to my outstretched hand.

  “See?” my father chuckled, with a delighted grin.

  I cupped my hands around Berry as I walked back to our door and hugged him close to my chest. When my father continued to block the door with his body, the tears I had been holding escaped.

  My father made a disgusted sound in his throat. “What are you crying about?”

  “Leave her alone, Michael,” I heard Fran warn from the couch.

  “I’m not hurting her,” he scoffed, but he let me back inside.

  Once wasn’t enough. Once wasn’t proof I owned Berry’s love. The trick had to be repeated, but on a grander scale. Another evening, he packed us into the car and made Fran drive us to the grocery store, to the edge of a parking lot that overlooked a wide-open field. When I refused to get out of the car, my father grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out. I held Berry firmly in the cage of my hands.

  “Let him go,” my father said.

  “He already came back!”

  My father shook his head. “You have to let him go.”

  I was trapped between my father and the sky. I opened my hands, and Berry stretched his wings. Even though his feathers were clipped, the wind caught him like a fallen leaf, and he disappeared against the sun’s setting glare.

  At first, there was silence, but then I heard him calling for me—his cries piercing, pleading. I ran down the hill and into a tangle of summer-browned weeds. I called his name, and he repeated his high-pitched yells as I clambered up and down the hill. I found him clinging to the inner branches of a small bush. I tucked him inside my shirt and rested my hand over the small hunch of his back.

  As I walked toward the car, my father approached me cautiously.

  “I hate you,” I said, my voice flat. Then I crawled into the back of the car.

  I gave Berry back to my friend’s mother, because I knew I couldn’t trust my father with him. I knew he wouldn’t be safe if he stayed.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN FRAN DECIDED to leave us—to leave my father, my sister, and me—she made my dad buy her a bus ticket back to Florida, where she planned to live in the woods again. That life was better than the life she had with us.

  Before she left, Fran pulled me into her room and gathered me into her lap. “I’m not leaving because of you,” she said.

  “Please don’t go,” I begged, clutching the fabric of her sweatshirt.

  Fran rested her head against mine and said, in a voice stained gray with tears, “You are the only daughter I ever had.”

  Little Bit

  OUR MOTHER HAD a new baby, Alexandra, who was born in M
ay the year Fran left. She mailed us a roll of pink stickers with Alexandra’s chubby face printed inside a starry frame.*1 I pasted the stickers all over my school binders and dreamed of the little sister I would meet one day.

  Whenever Eileen or I tried to ask our mother about Alexandra, she answered evasively. “She’s got a lot going on in her little life,” my mother would say. Eileen and I understood this to mean that Alexandra, like us, had been left.

  My grandmother would tell me, years later, that our mother called to ask if she would adopt the baby after my mother and Tony split up.*2 She hoped her three daughters might be together. “I told her she was nuts,” Grandma said, laughing. “That baby wasn’t even your father’s.”

  *1  From a page titled “Project Outline” inside an old address book: “Sending Christmas cards & pictures.” Under description: “Alex & Mommy!”

  *2  Notes on the page of December 19, 1997. “Tony got home and was upset…so spent his day not eating and it was also terrible becuz he cancelled our engagement to marriage which I pissed!”

  because I’m not that kind of bitch

  THINGS WERE WORSE after Fran left. Losing his driver’s license didn’t stop my father from driving, and most nights after work, he would drag me with him to the liquor store to pick up another case of beer.

  One night, when we were halfway home, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and groaned, “I can’t drive anymore.”

  I watched him get out of the car and circle around the front to open my door. He pushed me into the driver’s seat. “Drive home,” he said, slamming the door.

  “I don’t know how.”

  My father shifted the car into drive and sighed, “The right pedal makes you go, and the left one makes you stop.”

  I sank down in the seat to press the gas pedal. I could barely see over the dashboard. I pointed my toe to press the pedal down, and the car shot forward. In a panic, I slammed my left foot onto the left pedal, and the car jerked to a halt. I could feel the tremors radiating from my stomach to my limbs, and I clutched the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking. I started crying. “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can,” he said with a smile in his voice. I knew that this wasn’t an argument I could win.

  We continued down the street like that, both of my feet pumping the pedals, the car rocking back and forth on its axles. When I finally dragged the car to a rest in front of our apartment, my father reached over and turned off the ignition. “See?” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  Another night, my father brought me to the Glad Crab, a local bar. The sign outside was dark yellow, with a fiddle-playing, dancing crab. We sat at one of the sticky tables at the edge of the small dance floor. When the waitress appeared, she looked at me with narrow eyes and told my father I couldn’t stay past nine o’clock.

  “That’s fine,” he said. He ordered a beer and a basket of fries.

  He spent his first beer rehashing the same stories I’d heard over and over and over. He complained about his boss, who he insisted was running the company into the ground.

  A band was beginning to set up.

  The waitress circled our table impatiently, but my father kept waving her off.

  “Let me call you a cab,” she offered, but my father slammed his beer on the table and crooked his finger at me to go.

  As we walked toward the door, a man in a cowboy hat, one of the men who had been setting up the stage, stepped between us. “Hey there,” he said, not to my father but to me.

  It took me a moment to recognize my old swimming coach’s husband, Coach Grimm, who coached the high school team. I had not seen either of them since we moved.

  “Let me give you a ride home,” he said.

  I led my father into the parking lot while Coach Grimm excused himself from his band. My father’s feet dragged across the gravel.

  I can’t remember the ride home or what was said. I am left only with the impression of winding roads and open fields and the moon’s white light shining inside the car.

  Night after night, we repeated the same cycles. Night after night after night. My sister and I were captive witnesses to my father’s downward spiral. He picked up the phone and called Grandma to blame her for his childhood. When she stopped answering the phone, he started calling his brothers. He hired a private investigator to try and find his first son, older than me, born during his first marriage, and on Christmas, he dialed the number of every young Michael Something he had uncovered. “I’m not your son,” these men told him, but still, my father, sobbing, tried to keep them on the line as long as he could.

  I remember, once, watching my father make my sister cry and feeling like I couldn’t watch her cry anymore. I tentatively slid an arm around her and hugged her close. “Don’t cry,” I whispered, “I love you.”

  Eileen cocked her head like a small bird and looked into my face. “You love me?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. But the expectation in her dark eyes sparked a sensation between my shoulder blades, the same panicked feeling of getting caught inside a shirt.

  “You said you loved me,” she repeated, her voice twisting the words into a taunt.

  I pulled away.

  On a day when my father started drinking early, I snapped. I screamed at him so loud my sister heard me from where she was playing at the neighbor’s house across the street. I don’t remember what he said, or what I said, or why. I ran into my bedroom and locked the door behind me.

  My father followed me down the hall. “Open the door,” he laughed, shaking the doorknob.

  We lived in a basement apartment. The window in my bedroom was up near the ceiling, but level with the ground outside. I pulled a chair by the window and climbed out. I had nowhere to go, but I ran farther up the hill, past the second row of apartment buildings, through a small patch of woods, and into the gravel lot behind my father’s construction company. I crawled under one of the office trailers to get out of the sun. I lay there for hours and ground small wells into the dirt with the edge of a rock. I wove loose nests out of weeds. I rested my chin on my forearms and watched ants feel their way over the earth. I watched green aphids, clinging to the scrubby blades of grass. I lay there long after my tears and sweat had dried; lay there long after my sister came calling for me—not daring to go home.

  * * *

  —

  MY FATHER STARTED searching singles chat rooms for a new girlfriend. He always moved quickly in love. A few months after he met Deb, a woman with her own two sons, we moved into a three-bedroom apartment just outside the city of York. Grandma took over the lease on our old apartment in Yoe.

  We had been living in the suburbs of York County all along, but before we moved to the city, neither my sister nor I had realized how segregated Pennsylvania was. In Florida, our classmates were entirely mixed, but I realized I could count the number of black and brown kids in our entire Pennsylvania school on one hand. The York city school was the complete opposite—the white kids were the minority, and my sister and I became suddenly popular. I started dating one of the more popular boys, though his popularity had been earned in part because he had failed the eighth grade and all his friends were in high school. He had been in a sports accident and had an external fixator bolted to one of his thighs. He lived in one of the apartments in our neighborhood, and at night, after dinner, he sat with me on the back steps of my apartment, his arm hooked around my shoulders. We watched the stars and taught each other the lyrics to our favorite songs: He learned the lyrics to songs by Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, and I tried—and failed—to memorize the quick lines of Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott. Some nights, we walked down the rows of apartments to his friend’s, where they smoked joints and I sat, quiet and nervous.

  I was years ahead of my classmates in school—even in math, my weakest subject. I became a kind of teacher’s helper,
correcting the other students’ work during class.

  A few weeks after we all moved in, Deb and her sons moved out.

  Deb’s oldest son was in high school. And when my father drank and picked fights with Deb, her oldest son tried to stand up to my dad. Deb’s son was tall and overweight, and it seemed like my father shouldn’t have been able to push him around, but he hadn’t grown up with violence; he didn’t want to fight. My father shoved him against the furniture and into the walls.

  The night they left, my sister and I followed them into the driveway. Deb’s sons got in the car, but before she could, my father grabbed the keys in her hand. He twisted the keys, cutting her palm, and ignored her shouts to let go.

  Eileen ran at our father and wrapped herself around his arm. “Let her go,” Eileen yelled, swinging from my father’s arm and kicking at his legs.

  My father forgot Deb. He turned around and grabbed Eileen by the throat and pinned her to the ground.

  Deb ran around the front of the car and leapt into the driver’s seat and sped down the road.

  I stood motionless but yelled at my father to stop.

  Eileen screamed and kicked and clawed at him, until my father finally let go.

  No one called the cops. Not Deb, not the neighbors, not us. We walked inside and sat around the kitchen table while my father drank another beer. He finally leveled a finger at Eileen and said, “I would never do that to your sister.”

  The next morning in homeroom, I watched one of the girls in my class suck her thumb, in front of everyone, and no one said anything. I had sucked my thumb until I was in fifth grade, when the dentist convinced Grandma to make me quit. My front teeth were shifting from the constant pressure, but she didn’t want me to get braces. They had caused one of her sons so much pain in decades past. I still had a small raised scar on the back of my thumb where the skin had split under the constant pressure of my bottom teeth. As I watched the girl in my class, I slid my thumb into my mouth. My tongue trembled as I hooked my forefinger over my nose and, quietly, started to cry.