LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vicki Rakowski
When I run through the alley, pebbles and broken pieces of glass pop and crunch underneath my shoes. I decide that I have to pick the little violets, even though Gran has told me that they don’t stand up to being picked. They are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months, especially the way they grow out of piles of weeds. Although it has been spring for a while, these violets tell me that it is true spring. The air is still bitter, coming at me in icy rushes, the sun is still yellow instead of gold, but the earth is heating up. When I crouch down at the big scruffy patch of green behind the Pechereks’ garage, a gust of warmth shoots up the sleeves of my coat. Summer will be here soon. I gather a bunch of the violets in my fist, and I know that by the time I get home, they will probably be wilted. But I will take one of Pop’s shot glasses and fill it with the tiny flowers. Sometimes they make it.
* * *
Gran and I can take the shortcut down the alley to get to Cermak Avenue, where we shop for everything. The bus could take us to Vesecky’s Bakery, but Pop already bought the morning goodies, kolachy for me and him, butter horns for my Mom and Aunt Andie, and a Danish for Gran. She eats these early in the morning, before the others wake up, even before the sun pops up over the roofs of the houses across the street. The goodies sit on the kitchen table in a white cardboard box. If the box sits there until afternoon, the pastries inside will make greasy shadows on the outside walls. There’s plenty to do all day long, people to get off to work, rugs to vacuum, laundry to wash, beds and food to make, and Gran has to run around like crazy. In the morning she is still. She sits at the table and takes her Danish from the box. One morning I see her close her eyes when she bites into it. She breaks off pieces and dunks them into her coffee, and says she doesn’t care about the family history of diabetes.
Today we have to go to the shoe repair place, and the butcher. No bus today. I love when Gran takes me on the Pace bus. We lie and say I’m seven, so I can ride free, even though I’ve been eight for a while. We laughed so hard we cried the first time we did it, but we couldn’t make a sound, “so the bus driver does not catch on,” Gran said. We stuffed our fists into our mouths and shook. The old woman sitting at the back with us just shook her head. “You keep me young, Franny,” Gran had said, when we finally got off at Winston Plaza. “You never leave me, huh?” I said I wouldn’t.
We leave through the back door and go through our small yard to the alley. It’s a nice day, and Gran leaves her sweater at home. I wear sandals and shorts. It’s early, but the sun is heating up everything – “It’s a scorcher today, already I know it,” Gran says. She pulls the collapsible shopping cart behind her, and it hits every pothole in our path, little and big.
I see that the phlox has bloomed overnight, and think about Jimmy Kwiatkowski, and what he told me a few days ago. I bumped into him at the milk store, where I went to pick up lettuce for dinner and he was buying candy. He’s our neighbor about five doors down, so we walked back home together. On the way, he pointed to a cluster of phlox growing at the entrance to the alley. He stopped and looked at me, right in the eyes, and said, “Bees go to the phlox to make honey. There’s a trick. Pull out one of the flowers and try not to rip it. Put the stem in your mouth and you get to taste the honey before anybody else.”
Jimmy is older than me by more than two years, and I think he might be lying. But the way he looked me in the eyes, maybe like it was just the two of us left on the planet. I run ahead of Gran to a springy bunch of phlox growing through the links of the fence in the McCormacks’ yard. I pull one of the light pink flowers from the plant. It rests on my palm like a feather.
Before it blows away, I put it between my lips like a straw and suck. A small, sweet drop flies from the stem, onto the center of my tongue.
“Franny, what are you doing?” Gran comes up behind me.
The flower is still in my mouth, caught between my lips like a cigarette. I tell her about Jimmy’s story, looking at her wrinkles pinch harder around her mouth while I talk.
“It’s true,” I tell her. The flower is crumpled in my sweaty hand.
“Boys know where to find honey,” she says, and motions for me to walk on. “Don’t forget it.”
* * *
My mother and I live with Pop and Gran, her parents. My Dad is in the army. Dad isn’t just in the army, but gone, but I’m not supposed to tell people that. He and Mom are actually split up. Mom and I share her old bedroom, where she keeps pictures in her bureau at the foot of the bed. They’re mostly of the three of us, in the apartment we had by Salerno’s Pizza, just five or so blocks from Gran’s house.
One day Mom and I are walking Pop’s mutt George around the street, and she points to a cluster of blue spiky flowers growing near the curb. “You know the name?” she asks, looking at me. Our eyes are the same, dark blue almonds, and sometimes it surprises me to look right into them.
“Are they a kind of daisy?” I study the flowers, at how they practically grow out of cement.
“Didn’t Gran ever tell you that old story? It’s a Bavarian folk tale, her favorite from the old country. Andie and I must’ve heard it about a thousand times growing up.” She puts her hand on my shoulder, stopping to look both ways, and we cross the street, heading back home.
“A girl and boy love each other but are separated by a war. The boy is sent off to fight, and when the girl hears he’s lost, she starts to wander the roads to find him, but can’t. Her tears drop down to the path to make those little blue flowers. Cornflowers. That’s why they only grow on the side of the road.” Mom hands me the leash and puts both of her hands in her pockets. With her left hand, she pulls out an envelope. Earlier, after we had clipped on George’s leash and were heading past the coffee table, Mom saw the pale green envelope on top of the mail stack. She tucked it away before I could look at it. Now she is fanning herself with it, and running the edge across her puckered upper lip. The side with the writing is away from me.
When we reach the steps of our little brick house, Mom asks me to take George inside, and change his water. She sits down on the second-to-last step, and I hear her tear open the flap.
When I change the dog’s water in the kitchen, I wonder why water gets colored blue. It’s no color at all. I think about the cornflower, and all of a sudden it hits me that this is what Crayola’s “cornflower” crayon comes from. I use it on eyes, oceans, and tears.
* * *
Dad comes back, just for a talk, but I won’t get to see him – it will be too late. “Just coffee, Ma,” Mom tells Gran. She puts on mascara and fluffs out her brown hair in our bedroom mirror.
“This is what you told me last time. Next thing I know, you are married to that nut.” Her voice sounds like a cough, and she leans against the doorway, like a roadblock.
“Ma.” They look at the foot of the bed, where I’m sitting Indian-style. I pretend to be busy reading my book.
“I’ll be back after dinner, not too late, but don’t wait up for me.”
“Don’t act foolish, Rita.” Gran sits down on the bureau to watch her finish getting dressed. She coughs hard when Mom puts on a button-down red blouse. I turn my page.
Mom sighs and buttons herself up. She smoothes her black skirt and steps into her heels. She spins to face me, like she just remembered me, like I surprised her. She bends a little and takes my chin in her hand, to look at me better. She holds me like that for a long time, and finally mashes her cheek against mine.
After she’s gone, Gran and I sit there quietly, still sniffing her perfume in the air. Pop passes by the door and pokes his head into the room. “What we have here is a mess, my dear,” he says to Gran. He turns to me and says, “If there’s one thing the Germans hate, it’s a mess.”
“Will you shut up, you dumb Pole?” Her eyebrows are pinched together, but when they look at each other, they smile. I know this is a kind of love.
That night Mom doesn’t get home in time for tuck in. She doesn’t come home until three in the morning, and I pretend to sleep when she creeps into the room and gets into her nightgown. When she crawls into the bed it scares me to realize how mad I am. I could kick her. I could put my elbow in her stomach, and pretend that it is just a sleep jolt. She brushes my hair back from my forehead and kisses me, and, as she hugs me to her, I realize that she smells different.
In the morning I sleep late, and don’t wake up as she dresses for work. It isn’t until she sits on the bed that my eyes open, and I see her in her dark green work dress, with her hair pinned up, that I know where I am. I have been dreaming.
Her smile is bright, and she leans in, asking, “What’s the story, Morning Glory?”
“No story,” I say, and roll over to face the wall.
* * *
Clover doesn’t look like much, especially from far away. That’s what I’m thinking about when Dad and I walk toward the el stop at the end of the block. They grow in weedy clouds all along the side of the station and up close, the little purple flowers look like thorns. But clover isn’t what it seems, I think. Dad and I are having one of our days together, which are special, because they can only happen when he is on leave. Last time we went to Chinatown, and he bought me dim sum, and a little pot-bellied statue. Today, we’ll go to the Aquarium, and maybe the Field Museum. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been there,” Dad says.
I don’t remember us ever going there, but I don’t say anything. I am starting to learn that you have to protect people sometimes by not saying what you think. Andie was the one who saw me to the door. Mom was at work, Pop was out in the garage, trying to fix the blender, and Gran wouldn’t come out of the kitchen. Before the doorbell rang, Andie said that she thinks Dad is a selfish asshole, but when she opened the door for him, she just smiled and told us to have fun. Dad took my hand, not knowing that this morning Gran and Mom fought or what Andie thought of him, and we started our day.
We don’t say much as we walk down the street, passing the houses I know by heart. We’re both wearing red shirts, by accident, and when I look at him, I see that only my eyes are my mother’s, everything else belongs to him. Our blond hair is dark, but shines in the sun, we both have deep summer tans, because it’s almost August. The day is breezy and the tall trees above us are bending like crazy.
When we reach the station, Dad hands me a token for the man in the booth. When we reach the window, the man in the booth squints, and says, “Tim, you son of a bitch! When’d you get back in town?”
Dad grins and I notice that he is handsome. “How’re you doing, Rick? Let’s see. I was discharged about, oh, three weeks ago. This is my kid, Franny.” Dad puts his hand on my shoulder, guiding me toward the booth.
“Nice to meet you, Fran. Ever go by Frances?” He leans forward on his stool to get a better look at me.
“No.” I edge away from the booth. The man’s face is ugly, full of pimples, and he has a kind but scratchy voice. Stopping there to talk to him makes me nervous, like we won’t get to have a day together after all if we stop for one second. Maybe Gran will come huffing down the block and pull me back home.
“Aw, too bad, that was my mother’s name,” he says, and turns back to Dad, losing interest in me.
The two men start talking about a buddy from the old neighborhood who died, and I wander by the side of the yellow-tiled building. Up close, the clover are actually made up of little tube-like petals, all reaching for the center of the flower, in a little pointed globe. They’re lighter purple at the bottom, and get darker purple as they reach the top. I pick one and it smells like water. Like Lake Michigan.
I do remember one old trip with my Dad. I was younger, still young enough to ride on his shoulders. We transferred to the Blue Line, where the train runs in the middle of the expressway. You have to walk down a long ramp to reach the platform. Dad put me on his shoulders and we took long fast steps down the slope. I watched cars streaming by from the windows of the ramp walls, and looked down at Dad’s hair as we sank lower and lower. When we finally reached the platform, I still stayed on his shoulders, staring at a man sitting on the bench to our right, watching him peel an orange. The scent rose up to me and stayed in my nose until we got on our train, and headed for the lake.
Dad had ideas that nobody else did. Even though it was only the beginning of April, and we could still see our breath in the air, we went to Oak Street Beach. We put our feet in the freezing cold water for a few seconds, and reached in the water for small rocks and looked for beach glass. Later Dad brought me back to Gran and Pop’s. We rang the bell, and Gran let me in through the screen, taking the little bag full of treasure and tucking it in her apron. She gave Dad a short wave and spoke to herself in German as she brushed sand off of my pants and jacket. I was scared then, because of the look on Dad’s face – it was like a crash, a bad end to a nice day. I hadn’t understood how quickly good things can end.
Now I watch as he and the man talk, and wonder about the same thing. There is a change coming, and it has to do with coffee and being discharged, and Mom and me, and Gran, but I don’t know what it will be. This is like clover, more than it looks.
Dad and the man finally finish talking, and the guy lets us through the turnstile for free, waving away our tokens. Dad pulls me to him by putting his arm around my shoulders. We take a few bumping steps, but finally walk on the same beat.
“People say we look like each other. Do you think it’s true?” he says, looking down at me.
It feels funny, like a test, or maybe like a contract. “Yeah,” I say. I look up at him.
“Me too. Nobody can say you’re not my girl, Fran.” And we walk to a spot on the platform, craning our necks to look for our train.
* * *
Mom and Gran are fighting. We’ve gone to look at apartments on the near north side for the three of us – Mom, Dad and me. I will get my own bedroom for the first time, and Mom promises a big white day bed, and a matching bureau of my own. The landlord has left us in the second-floor apartment of his two flat so we can think about it. Gran tells Mom what a mistake it all is.
“You are a damn fool if you do this, Rita. A fool. Is that what you want?” Gran digs through her black purse for Kleenex, and comes up with one fuzzy, crumpled tissue.
“I need to make my own decisions now, Ma.” Mom stands with her arms crossed, looking at the wooden buttons on Gran’s sweater. We had a sudden temperature drop. Real fall will be here soon.
“And this is why you’re moving so far away?” Gran sniffles, and her voice quivers. I walk to the side of the apartment, to the windows that look down over the gangway. Behind me, Gran and Mom keep up their fight. I open the old wooden window and lift the screen to poke my head out. There is an old plant of climbing roses on the side of the building. Underneath it I can see the top of a trellis, but the bush has practically taken it over. The roses are clinging to the light brown bricks, working their way up to me. The flowers themselves are small, the size of quarters, and are dying down, wilting on top of themselves. They’ll die out and new ones will come back in a week. We have some like this in our yard at home. Gran makes little pillows and stuffs them with the dried-out leaves, which we keep in our drawers. This place isn’t so different, it’s still the same roses.
I’ll tell her that when Mom goes to talk to the landlord. I know she will cry. But I will try to find a way to say to her that things won’t be so bad, that someday this place will be home, too.
Vicki Rakowski lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Language of Flowers” is her first published work of fiction in a national literary magazine.