The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” he said. I looked at the stove. Nothing was cooking except the rice. “You want a tour?”

  I shrugged but stood up.

  “This is the kitchen.” The cupboards were painted a pale green, the countertops gray Formica with silver trim. He didn’t appear to own a cutting board, and the counters were dented and scraped from slicing. There was an antique white-and-chrome gas stove with a folding shelf, and on the shelf sat a row of empty green glass vases and a single wooden spoon. The spoon had a white sticker with a faded price on its tip, leading me to think it had either never been used or never been washed. Either way, I was not particularly anxious to sample his cooking.

  In the corner of the room was a black metal staircase, spiraling through a small square hole. Grant began to climb, and I followed him up. The second floor contained a living room big enough for only an orange velour love seat and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. An open door led to a white tile bathroom with a claw-foot tub. There was no television and no stereo. I didn’t even see a telephone.

  Grant stepped back onto the staircase and led me to the third floor, which was covered wall to wall with a thick foam mattress. Crumbling foam was visible where the sheets had peeled away from the edges. Clothes sat in piles in two corners, one folded, the other not. Where there should have been pillows, there were stacks of books.

  “My bedroom,” Grant said.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked.

  “In the middle. Closer to the books than the clothes, usually.” He climbed across the foam mattress and switched off the reading lamp. I held on to the banister and climbed back down into the kitchen.

  “Nice,” I said. “Quiet.”

  “I like it that way. I can forget where I am, you know?” I did know. In Grant’s water tower, settled in the absence of all things automatic and digital, it was easy to forget not just the location but also the decade.

  “My roommate’s punk band practices all night in the downstairs of our apartment,” I said.

  “That sounds awful.”

  “It is.”

  He walked over to the counter and spooned hot, soggy rice into large ceramic soup bowls. He handed me a bowl and a spoon. We began to eat. The rice warmed my mouth, throat, and stomach. It was much better than I had expected.

  “No phone?” I asked, looking around. I’d thought I was the only young person in the modern world not attached to a communication device. Grant shook his head no. I continued: “No other family?”

  Grant shook his head again. “My father left before I was born, went back to London. I’ve never met him. When my mother died, she left me the land and the flowers, nothing else.” He took another bite of rice.

  “Do you miss her?” I asked.

  Grant poured on more soy sauce. “Sometimes. I miss her as she was when I was a child, when she cooked dinner every night and packed my lunches with sandwiches and edible flowers. But toward the end of her life, she began to confuse me with my father. She’d go into a rage and throw me out of the house. Then, when she realized what she’d done, she would apologize with flowers.”

  “Is that why you live here?”

  Grant nodded. “And I’ve always liked being alone. No one can understand that.” I understood.

  He finished his rice and helped himself to another bowl, then reached for mine and filled it up as well. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  Grant got up to wash his dish and set it upside down on a metal drying rack. I washed my own and did the same. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “The film?” I grabbed the camera from where he had hung it on a hook and handed it to him. “I don’t know how to release it.”

  He rewound the camera and unloaded the film. I pocketed it.

  “Thanks.”

  We climbed into Grant’s truck and started down the road. We were halfway back to the city when I remembered Annemarie’s request. I sucked in my breath.

  “What?” he asked.

  “The jonquil. I forgot.”

  “I planted it while you were in the rose garden. It’s in a paper box in the greenhouse—the bulbs require darkness until the foliage starts to grow. You can check on them next Saturday.”

  Next Saturday. As if we had a standing date. I watched Grant drive, his profile hard and unsmiling. I would check on them next Saturday. It was a simple statement but one that changed everything as completely as the discovery of the yellow rose.

  Jealousy, infidelity. Solitude, friendship.

  6.

  It was dark out by the time I came in for dinner. The house was bright, and inside the frame of the open door, Elizabeth sat alone at the kitchen table. She had made chicken soup—the smell had reached me in the vines, the scent a physical draw—and she sat hunched over her bowl, as if studying her reflection in the broth.

  “Why don’t you have any friends?” I asked.

  The words escaped without premeditation. For a week I’d watched Elizabeth manage the harvest with a heavy, dejected quality, and the image of her sitting at the kitchen table, alone and so obviously lonely, pushed the words right out of me.

  Elizabeth looked over to where I stood. Quietly, she stood up, dumping the contents of her bowl back into the soup pot. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire beneath it.

  She turned to me. “Well, why don’t you?”

  “I don’t want any,” I said. Besides Perla, the only children I knew were from my class at school. They called me orphan girl, and it had gotten so that I doubted even my teacher remembered my real name.

  “Why not?” Elizabeth pressed.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my voice growing defensive. But I did know.

  I had been suspended for five days for my attack on the school bus driver, and for the first time in my life, I was not miserable. Home with Elizabeth, I didn’t need anyone else. Every day I followed behind as she managed the harvest, steering workers toward ripe vines and away from grapes that needed another day in the sun, another two. She popped grapes into her own mouth and then into mine, spewing numbers that correlated to the ripeness: 74/6, 73/7, and 75/6. This, she would say, when we located a ripe bunch, is what you need to remember. This exact flavor—the sugars at seventy-five, the tannins at seven. This is a perfectly ripe wine grape, which neither machine nor amateur can identify. By the end of the week, I had chewed and spit grapes from nearly every plant, and the numbers began to come to me almost before the grapes entered my mouth, as if my tongue was simply reading them like the number on a postage stamp.

  The soup began to simmer, and Elizabeth stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “And wash up. The soup’s hot.”

  At the table, Elizabeth set out two bowls and loaves of bread as big as cantaloupes. I tore the bread in half, scooping out the soft, white middle and dipping it in the steaming broth.

  “I had a friend, once,” Elizabeth said. “My sister was my friend. I had my sister and my work and my first love, and there was nothing else in the world I wanted. Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. So I focused every waking moment on running a successful business, on growing the most sought-after wine grapes in the region. The goal I set was so ambitious, and took so much time, that I didn’t have even a minute to think about everything I’d lost.”

  Taking me in, I understood, had changed that. I was a constant reminder of family, of love, and I wondered if she regretted her decision.

  “Victoria,” Elizabeth asked abruptly. “Are you happy here?”

  I nodded, my heartbeat suddenly racing. No one had ever asked me a question like that without immediately following with something like, because if you were happy, if you had the sense to know that you were lucky to be here, you wouldn’t act like such an ungrateful little brat. But Elizabeth’s smile, when it finally came, was only relieved. “Good,” she said. “Because I’m happy you’re here. In fact, I’m not looking forward to you going back to school tomorrow. I
t’s been nice having you home; you’ve opened up a little. For the first time, you’ve seemed interested in something, and while I admit I’m a bit jealous of the grapes, it does bring me joy to see you engaging in the world.”

  “I hate school,” I said. Just uttering the word made my soup bubble up at the back of my throat, a sick, nauseous feeling.

  “Do you really hate school? Because I know you don’t hate to learn.”

  “I really hate it.” I swallowed once, and then told her what they called me, told her it was just like every school I’d ever been to, that I was singled out, labeled, watched, and never taught.

  Elizabeth took her last bite of bread, and then carried her bowl to the sink.

  “We’ll withdraw you tomorrow, then. I can teach you more here than you’ll ever learn in that school. And if you ask me, you’ve suffered enough for one lifetime.” She came back to the table, retrieved my bowl, and refilled it to the brim.

  My relief was so expansive I finished the second bowl, and then a third. Still, an internal lightness threatened to lift me off the chair and throw me, spinning, up the stairs and into bed.

  7.

  My photographs were awful. They were so bad I blamed the one-hour photo lab where I had them printed and took the negatives to a specialty store. The sign in front boasted that they printed only the work of professionals. It took them three days to make the prints, and when I picked them up, they were just as bad. Worse, even. My mistakes were more pronounced, the blurry green-and-white blobs more defined within the muddy background. I threw the photos into the gutter and sat down on the curb outside the photography store, defeated.

  “Experimenting with abstraction?” I turned. A young woman stood behind me, looking at the photographs littering the street. She wore an apron and smoked a cigarette. The ash floated down around the photos. I wished they would catch fire and burn.

  “No,” I said. “Experimenting with failure.”

  “New camera?” she asked.

  “No, new to photography.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  I picked one of the prints up out of the street and handed it to her. “Everything,” I said.

  She stepped on her cigarette and considered the print. “I think it’s a film-speed issue,” she said, motioning for me to follow her inside. She led me to the film display, pointing out numbers on the corners of the boxes I hadn’t even noticed. The shutter speed was too slow, she explained, and the film speed a poor match for the low light of late afternoon. I wrote everything she said down on the back of the prints and shoved the stack into my back pocket.

  I was anxious to get off work the following Saturday. The store was empty; we didn’t have a wedding. Renata was doing paperwork and didn’t look up from her desk all morning. When I tired of waiting for her to release me, I stood close to her desk and tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

  “All right, go,” she said, waving me away. I turned and was halfway out the door when I heard her add, “And don’t come back tomorrow, or next week, or the week after.”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “You’ve worked twice as many hours as I’ve paid you for, you must know that.” I hadn’t been keeping track. It wasn’t as if I could have gotten another job even if I’d wanted to. I had no high school diploma, no college degree, and no skills. I assumed Renata understood this and worked me as she wished. I didn’t feel resentful.

  “So?”

  “Take a few weeks off. Stop in the Sunday after next and I’ll pay you as if you’d worked—I owe you the money. I’ll need you again around Christmas, and I have two weddings on New Year’s Day.” She handed me an envelope of cash, the one she should have given me the following day. I put it in my backpack.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

  Grant was in the parking lot of the market when I arrived, loading up a bucket of unsold flowers. I approached and held up the blurry photos, spread out like a fan. “Now you want a lesson?” he asked, amused.

  “No.” I climbed inside his truck.

  He shook his head. “Chinese or Thai?”

  I was reading the notes I had scratched on the back of the embarrassing prints and didn’t answer. When he stopped for Thai, I waited in the car.

  “Something spicy,” I called through the open window. “With shrimp.”

  I had purchased ten rolls of color film, all different speeds. I would start with 100 in the bright afternoon light and work my way to 800 just after sunset. Grant sat on the picnic table with a book, glancing in my direction every few pages. I barely moved from a low crouch between two white rosebushes. All the flowers were open; in another week, the roses would be gone. As I had the week before, I numbered all my photographs and noted every angle and setting. I was determined to get it right.

  When the darkness was nearly complete, I put away my camera. Grant no longer sat at the picnic table. Light shone from the windows of the water tower through a thick layer of steam. Grant was cooking, and I was starving. I gathered all ten rolls of film into my backpack and walked into the kitchen.

  “Hungry?” He watched me zip up my backpack and inhale deeply.

  “Are you really asking me that?”

  Grant smiled. I walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. It was empty except for yogurt and a gallon of orange juice. I picked up the orange juice and drank it out of the container.

  “Make yourself at home.”

  “Thanks.” I took another swig and sat down at the table. “What’re you making?”

  He pointed to six empty cans of beef ravioli. I made a face.

  “You want to cook?” he asked.

  “I don’t cook. Group homes have cooks, and since then, I’ve eaten out.”

  “You’ve always lived in group homes?”

  “Since Elizabeth’s. Before that I lived with lots of different people. Some were good cooks,” I said, “others weren’t.”

  He studied me as if he wanted to know more, but I didn’t elaborate. We sat down with bowls of ravioli. Outside, it had started to rain again, a pounding rain that threatened to turn the dirt roads into rivers.

  When we finished eating, Grant washed his dish and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table, waiting for him to come back down and drive me home, but he didn’t. I drank more orange juice and looked out the window. When I grew hungry again, I searched the cupboard until I found an unopened package of cookies and ate every one. Grant still did not return. I put on a pot of tea and stood over it, warming my hands on the open blue flame. The kettle began to whistle.

  Filling two mugs, I pulled tea bags from a box on the counter and climbed the stairs.

  Grant was sitting on the orange love seat on the second floor, a book open on his lap. I handed him a mug and sat down on the floor in front of the bookshelf. The room was so small that even though I sat as far away from him as possible, he could have touched my knee with his toes by stretching his legs. I turned to the bookshelf. On the bottom was a stack of oversized books: gardening manuals, mostly, interspersed with biology and botany textbooks.

  “Biology?” I asked, picking one up and opening it to a scientific drawing of a heart.

  “I took a class at a community college. After my mother died, I thought briefly of selling the farm and going to college. But I dropped out of the class halfway through. I didn’t like the lecture halls. Too many people, and not enough flowers.”

  A thick blue vein curved out of the heart. I traced it with my finger and looked up at Grant. “What’re you reading?”

  “Gertrude Stein.”

  I shook my head. I’d never heard of her.

  “The poet?” he asked. “You know, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?”

  I shook my head again.

  “During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her,” Grant said. “She’d spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort.”
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  “What does she mean, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’?” I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.

  “That things just are what they are,” he said.

  “ ‘A rose is a rose.’ ”

  “ ‘Is a rose,’ ” he finished, smiling faintly.

  I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. “Except when it’s yellow,” I said. “Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying.”

  “That’s what I’ve always thought,” said Grant. “But I’m giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.” He turned back to his book.

  I pulled another book off the shelf, higher up. It was a thin volume of poetry. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had read most of her work in my early teens, when I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers, and read everything I could get my hands on. The pages of the book were earmarked with notes scribbled in the margins. The poem I opened to was eleven verses, all beginning with the words Love me. I was surprised. I had read the poem, I was sure, but didn’t remember the dozens of references to love, only the references to flowers. I replaced the book and withdrew another, and then another. All the while, Grant sat, silently turning pages. I looked at my watch. Ten past ten.

  Grant looked up. He checked his own watch and then looked out the window. It was still raining. “You want to go home?”

  The roads were wet; the drive would be slow. I would get soaked in the two blocks between Bloom and the blue room, and Natalya’s band would be practicing. Renata did not expect me at work the following day. No, I realized, I did not particularly want to go home.

  “Do I have another choice?” I asked. “I’m not sleeping here with you.”

  “I won’t stay here. You can have my bed. Or sleep on the couch. Or wherever.”