The Flowers

by Dagoberto Gilb

“What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She went over to the front window too and started squinting out there. “Did you take his trash out?”

  All she had to do was look.

  She started seeing what was going on outside. “It was about aquel hombre, wasn’t it?”

  They were still out there, and the hood of the T-Bird was up, though they weren’t even near to looking inside. “I dunno, Mom, okay?” I took the long way around her for the bedroom. I was mad at her. I don’t think I’d ever been so mad at her before. No, I didn’t really like this husband of hers—the Cloyd, the Hernández twins were calling him, a lumpy wad that held it together—but that wasn’t it, because I didn’t care about him no more, bad or good. And even though I knew it was his decision about Goof, I blamed her and her only. I wasn’t gonna say nothing about it unless one of them brought it up. What for? I wanted to show God how I was a man, not him and not her. But yeah I was so mad at her for letting him get away with it. I mean, I could understand why a dog shouldn’t live inside an apartment with no yard, but couldn’t she at least fight this dude a little about it? If she didn’t care how I felt, didn’t she care any about Goof? Didn’t she even miss Goofy a little? Didn’t she think I would?

  For a while my room was being neat. That could be because I didn’t have so much to mess up. My mom never picked up after me at home, before we moved here, except maybe once every few months, if somebody was gonna be coming over. For a minute she did almost every day. She even made my bed. I didn’t think it was for good reasons. More some game. I don’t think she was too happy. I was sure she would want to bust anytime. It’s how she was. I put my blanket—that’s what I slept with, a blanket, no sheet, and it was the same blanket I used at home, which she’d folded and left at the foot of the bed—under my head instead of the pillow, and I watched the ceiling instead of the television. And I listened. When I didn’t hear my mom or them, I just listened harder. The curtains were closed, but the window wasn’t. I heard the yelling from upstairs. Once I got used to it, I didn’t have to listen harder, it just got louder. I wasn’t sure if I couldn’t make it out because it was in Spanish, or I wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyways, even if it were in English. I used to feel better about talking Spanish. My mom used to speak it a lot more, and I used to hang out with my grandma, who didn’t speak English, and I could talk with my primos who lived there with my tíos, but that all stopped once Grandma died. I never saw my cousins no more after that either. And then my mom only talked Spanish when she had to, which mostly she didn’t have to, or maybe to say something to me in my ear when people were around. So I never spoke it either, never really tried. But I still could understand it, mostly, so I was listening.

  The Spanish came from where that girl lived, in #4, which was a two-bedroom. I’d seen her like twice, and one time was while I was sweeping and I saw them around the TV. I saw her through the screen and window so good it was like she leaked through the mesh. She looked back at me too. Since I never saw her where I went to school, I thought she might go to St. Xavier’s. I was sure she was my age, or close. She had a baby brother or sister who cried. Her family practically never went out, and she didn’t either, not even when they went grocery shopping. Her parents both worked at night, swing shift, and they always went together.

  The loud male voice up there, almost always yelling, didn’t really stop, just went from closer to farther away, but a radio came on, and it was steady, and though it wasn’t on very loud, it covered up the man’s voice, her dad. She was listening to the same station I liked, the hits station, so I like listened to it with her and imagined her listening next to me. I liked her. She would like me, she had to. She was really pretty. Uu-ee pretty, made my stomach do circles. Like I said, I saw her twice, and that one time I knew she saw me back.

  “You just check her shit out,” one of the twins said. We were walking the tracks, going home slow, avoiding the worst grease puddles, kicking dented cans and throwing dirty rocks at them, seeing who could keep themselves balanced on top of the rail longest. “Look her up, look her down. Nod your head like a brother, like bad, you know?” He nodded his head slow, bobbing his head to the right, squinting his eyes, even though he had his glasses on.

  The other twin was polishing his glasses with the bottom of his white shirt. They both wore the same short-sleeve white shirts, no tails, ironed too, almost every day. It was almost like they had a Catholic uniform, but the color of the slacks changed, and the pants didn’t always match each other in style but the shoes were shined, both pairs black wingtips.

  “I think I’d be getting more worked up for la güera, bro,” he said.

  “Who you talking about?” his brother asked.

  “La blondie,” he said, “who lives right upstairs from este Sonny. Remember he told us?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right!” his brother said, like it was all as easy as that, and then he turned to me. “You see her again yet?”

  They made me laugh all the time because they talked so smart but they were so fucking stupid. They knew as much about sex as they did these girls in the apartment building. I couldn’t believe I told them anything.

  Like, for instance, about the nudie magazine I ripped off from the mailbox. It’s because it came in a brown wrapper and I thought I would, you know, take it. It was sitting there, and nobody was around. The label was addressed to the man in #2, a one-bedroom. He was Ben and he lived with Gina and they pretended to be married and Cloyd told my mom he knew they were only shacking up. Cloyd didn’t care because they paid the rent on time and had professional jobs—he wore a suit and tie and left early. They were like “with it” people and, curtains always closed, they were either at work or closed up in there watching or listening to a complicated music system and a big television connected to it—I saw the TV one time because I passed by when their front door was open. If they were home, you could hear one or the other. So yeah, really I already knew who the magazine belonged to when I was bagging it. It was that I was supposed to take out the pile of throwaway ads no one ever wanted that the mailman put there for everyone. And the magazine in the wrapper could look like trash, because of that brown wrapper. That’s what I would’ve said if someone saw me take it. That I threw it away. Both the twins were so impressed with my story they could barely shake their heads. Like doing shit like this was so dangerous. They both thought what I did was way fucking wild.

  I was taking off the screens and cleaning them with a stiff brush and putting them back. It was the latest job Cloyd said I should do. So far it was easy, even on the second floor, because they were at eye level, but I hadn’t been to the backside of the building yet. I would have to get those screens high up from a ladder. It was the thing I was asked to do this week. Cloyd was even saying—though not exactly, I admit it—that maybe I’d be paid something when I got it all done. I wanted him to, but the thing was it wasn’t about money for me. Or only. He didn’t have to know I didn’t mind doing it anyways.

  “Hey, cutie boy! You trying to sneak in on me while I’m in the shower?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said.

  Cindy was standing there with a towel wrapped around her, her hair and shoulders dripping wet. I was brushing the screen of #3 from her window. She’d pulled back her curtains to talk to me; then she drew them wider with the cord. The glass pane was already slid all the way open. She was smiling a lot.

  The towel wrapped around her was short and her thighs, which I could see a lot of, were still drippy wet too, but I was too uncomfortable to look too long. I took the screen, which had been leaning against the stucco wall, into my free hand, and pulled it up next to me.

  “I’m probably supposed to tell you before I take the screen off. It’s that I’m cleaning them.” I showed her the brush in my other hand.

  “I see that now. I was hoping you were just going to come in and say hi to me.”

  I laughed kind of a nervous ha-ha-ha.

  “Do you wa
nt a coke?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you have to come in,” she said, turning away from the window and opening the door.

  She walked toward her kitchen. I watched her moving away, shower water dribbling down her legs, and then go into the refrigerator and bend down some and get me a soda. I was still standing outside, the screen in one hand and the brush in the other.

  “You can come inside and you can even sit down,” she said. Then she smiled sexy at me again. She popped the can for me and put it on the built-in breakfast counter. “I’m gonna go dry off and put something on.”

  I went over to where she left the coke. She didn’t shut the bedroom door all the way, and from where I was I could see where she was. I didn’t think I should let myself find out more, and I didn’t either.

  “Go sit down and make yourself at home,” she said from the bedroom.

  The couch was this old one, both too saggy and too hard at the same time. I might not have noticed that if I hadn’t been living in Cloyd’s. His furniture felt brand new, even when it wasn’t. Maybe old enough but never sat on. The cushions were hard in some better way. Our old furniture at home was about halfway between his and hers. Which meant her stuff was really gacho, really raggy and stained. I sat on the front edge of the couch and sipped.

  She came out barefoot, in shorts with a drawstring and a white blouse. She was still not completely dried off, and she was taking the towel and rubbing her hair in it with both hands. I liked her hands and the way the light shined against the nail polish on the tips of her fingers.

  She sat down on a stuffed chair that maybe went with the couch. The material on the set was worn, but at least there were no tears, though it seemed like it could rip any second, and I didn’t want to be the one who did it. The TV set was the only thing brand new.

  “It’s nice to have someone here,” she said. “I never get any company.” She put the towel down. “Nobody except my sister. She comes over, sometimes a lot, sometimes less. Lately it’s less because she’s mad at me. I don’t have any friends, not one!”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I almost thought of telling her that the only friends I had since we moved were the twins.

  “It all depends on whether or not she has a job,” she said, “or, if she does, what shift it is.”

  “You’re married though, right? That’s not alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, like, he’s around then.”

  “When he’s around,” she said with a little nastiness.

  “He’s not here a lot?” I asked. I don’t think I had seen him, but I did hear him. Since they were directly upstairs, you knew when he was there. We probably didn’t hear her so much because, like now, she went around barefoot.

  “He’s here when he’s not out.”

  “At work?”

  “Well, yeah. But lots when he’s out with his friends and drinking and who knows. He’s here when he wants something, like sex, or to sleep, or to eat, or to drink, or to have more sex with me once in a while.”

  “What’s he do?” There was something about the look in the apartment, the smell, something.

  “For work?” She smiled right at me.

  “Well … yeah.”

  “He sorts the packages for the brown trucks.”

  “Yeah?” It seemed like memorized.

  “Oh yeah, right,” she said sarcastically. She got up and got herself a soda and opened it. She plopped back down on the chair. The towel was hanging over the back and she rested against it like it wasn’t there. “He started as a driver. But he said he had to run so much. Which at first he liked. But then it started making him too tired for when he got off, and then he hurt his foot. So they transferred him to the other department.” She drank. She drank a couple swallows more. “I hate him.”

  That made me laugh. It just caught me that way, because she didn’t mean it to be funny. She liked it that I laughed, though, you could tell.

  “I do! I hate him!”

  That’s when I noticed she still hadn’t dried herself completely under her white blouse. She was so wet in this one spot, and I could see how it curved down and up, where her nipple pushed out.

  “You don’t hate him,” I said.

  She glared. “How old are you?”

  I told her I was sixteen, even though I wasn’t.

  “I’m not even nineteen yet,” she said, “not for another month, and I feel like an old married lady.”

  I almost said how I thought she seemed older than that. “I guess that is pretty young to be all married.”

  “You seem older and more mature than that to me too,” she said. “Or you’re just so cute.” She was smiling when she said that, flirty.

  I felt good about my lie.

  “I had to get married,” she went on.

  I was still wondering why she was teasing me about being big and strong. Like maybe instead of meaning it, she didn’t. I wondered what her husband was like.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what happened to the baby? Everyone else does.”

  Even if I had thought of it, I couldn’t because I wasn’t going as fast as she was.

  “I had a late miscarriage.”

  “Sorry.” It’s all I could say.

  “He got me pregnant again eight months ago,” she said, and she paused there and sat up in the chair, “but this time I went and had an abortion.”

  It seemed like she was talking to herself more than to me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, if I needed to say anything.

  “You’re not against abortion, are you?”

  How would I know? What did I know? I knew what it was, heard all about it, but, you know, what could I say?

  “I’m glad I did it,” she went on. She put her coke down beside the chair.

  I sat there, fidgety now, mostly done with the soda, nothing to say.

  “Maybe,” I started, trying to think of something, “maybe your husband was glad too.” Did that even sound right? I didn’t know what I was saying. I was just saying anything.

  “My husband?” she said. Her eyes were seeing some wall I couldn’t. “My husband.” She pronounced her words like she was practicing English.

  “I thought you said you were married,” I explained. I looked away, thinking I’d go back outside to what I was supposed to.

  “No, you didn’t say anything wrong. Just when you say it, you, it sounds different to me.” She was looking at me. She looked at me like a girl would a guy. Before she wasn’t really looking at me, and now she was. “His name’s Tino.”

  “Oh, all right. That’s who I meant. That’s who I was talking about.”

  “He is my husband,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “It sounded funny to me. Like I was listening to someone talk about my mom, not me.”

  I nodded like I understood.

  “My mom had a few husbands.”

  “Okay, yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean, I do see how you’d think that.”

  “Your mom and Mr. Longpre. …”

  “Yeah,” I said. I stood up. I didn’t want to be talking about that shit with her. I had the empty can in my hand. “Should I throw this away?”

  “Why don’t you have another one?”

  “I’m full,” I said.

  “What a butt you are,” she said. She stood up too. “I thought you’d like my company.” She took the empty to the kitchen and tossed it.

  “I do,” I said. I was getting a little confused.

  “But you don’t like me.”

  I was maybe gonna stay longer, but right then her telephone rang, and when she picked it up she said hi to I guessed Tino. I listened for a few until it felt fucked up to, and then I went back outside to the screen and brush. It wasn’t much of a job to clean them, just a puff of brown dust jumping off. Didn’t take very long to do both of hers, and when I slid them back into the brackets that held them, she was still on the phone, cuddling against it like it was a soft kitt
y, her knees up, touching her toes. I liked her toes.

  The television cartoons were so loud in #4 that you’d think the curtains should be flapping in the sound waves. I knew she was there, but I didn’t imagine how close to me on the other side of the dirty screen she’d be until she was inches from my face.

  “I’m supposed to take this off because I’m gonna clean it,” I said in English. I showed her the brush.

  Her little brother, diaper and no T-shirt, wobbled over and stood behind her.

  “Go watch the teetee,” she told him in Spanish. He didn’t. “Go go, Angelito, go on!” she told him again. This time he turned back and flopped down about a foot from it, as though if he didn’t get so close he wouldn’t hear it, blasting loud as it was.

  “So it’s okay I take this screen off?” I asked her. I said screen in English because I didn’t know what the word was in Spanish. I didn’t even know if she answered because I was completely distracted. I was seeing her but I was also seeing someone somewhere else. It was like when I shut my eyes and it was that dreamlight and colors that flew off that darkness, and so this was not doing what I was doing even as I was doing it. Strands of her long hair—black as in the best night, the same best black in her eyes—stuck to the edges of those eyes that weren’t only hers either.

  I did take off that screen, and she went on standing on the inside, watching me brush the dirt off. I couldn’t say if she said anything. She might have, and I would’ve wanted to answer things back. I must have because I realized we were talking.

  “Nica,” she said.

  That was her telling me her name, and it made me kind of remember where I was and what I was doing.

  “Nica?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Nica.”

  “I’m Sonny.”

  “Sonny,” she said, thinking. She’d said it a little different. Like it was two names combined, son and nee. “It’s a good name.”

  It made me happy she thought my name was good, and I probably would’ve smiled right at her, but I wasn’t able to look up, so I smiled at her dress. It looked soft like cotton, the color of beach shells, and it was wrinkled like the crinkly paper they draped from ceilings at a school party. It had a blue drawstring tied around her waist. Nobody wore a dress like that. It made her seem like a movie Indian.