Ванесса Диффенбау - The Language of Flowers

At the end of the day, just as I had transferred the display flowers from the window to the walk-in, the front door opened. A woman stood alone, looking confused in the empty space.

“Can I help you?” I asked, feeling impatient and ready to leave.

“Are you Victoria?”

I nodded.

“Earl sent me. He asked me to tell you he needs more of the same, exactly the same.” She handed me thirty dollars. “He said to keep the change.”

I placed the money on the counter and went into the walk-in, not sure if we had enough spider mums. I laughed aloud when I saw the giant bunch I had purchased that morning. What remained of the periwinkle sat forgotten on the floor, where I had left it the week before. Renata hadn’t watered the plant, and it was dry but not dead.

“Why didn’t Earl come?” I asked as I began the arrangement.

The woman’s eyes flitted between my work and the window. She had the energy of a trapped bird.

“He wanted me to meet you.”

I didn’t say anything, and didn’t look up. In my peripheral vision I could see her pull at the roots of her burgundy-brown hair, the color covering what was probably speckled gray.

“He thought you might be able to make me a bouquet—something special.”

“For what reason?” I asked.

She paused, looking out the window again. “I’m single but don’t want to be.”

I looked around. My success with Earl had made me confident. She needed red roses and lilac, I decided, neither of which I had purchased. I tended to avoid them. “Next Saturday,” I said. “Can you come back?”

She nodded. “Lord knows I can wait,” she said, rolling her eyes. She watched my fingers fly in circles around the mums in silence. When she walked out the door ten minutes later, she seemed lighter, jogging up the block toward Earl’s like a much younger woman.

I rode the bus to Main Library the next morning and waited on the steps until it opened. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. Books on the language of flowers were on the top floor, wedged between the Victorian poets and an extensive gardening collection. There were more than I had expected. They ranged from ancient, crumbling hardcovers like the one I carried to illustrated paperbacks that seemed to have come from antique coffee tables. All the volumes had one thing in common—they looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. Elizabeth had told me the language of flowers was once common knowledge, and it always amazed me that it had retreated into the virtual unknown. I stacked as many books as I could carry onto trembling arms.

At the nearest table I opened a leather-bound volume, its once-gilded title faded to a scattering of gold dust. The card in the inside pocket had last been stamped before I was born. The book contained a complete history of the language of flowers. It began with the original flower dictionary published in nineteenth-century France and included a long list of the royalty who had courted with the language, giving detailed descriptions of the bouquets they traded. I skimmed to the end of the book, which listed a brief dictionary of flowers. White poplar was not included.

I scanned a half-dozen more books, my anxiety growing with each volume. I was afraid to know the stranger’s response but even more afraid that I wouldn’t find the definition and would never know what he was trying to say. After twenty minutes of searching, I finally found what I was looking for, a single line between plum and poppy. Poplar, white. Time . I exhaled, relieved but also confused.

Closing the book, I pressed my head against its cool cover. Time, as a response to presumption, was more abstract than I had hoped. Time will tell? Give me time? His response was unspecific; he had clearly not learned from Elizabeth. I opened another book and then another, hoping for an extended definition of the white poplar, but a search of the entire collection did not yield a second reference. I was not surprised. It didn’t seem that poplar, a tree, would be a plant of choice for romantic communication. There was nothing wistful about the passing of sticks or long strips of bark.

I was about to re-shelve the books when a pocket-sized volume caught my eye. The cover was illustrated with drawings of flowers in a grid of small squares, the definition in tiny print below each image. In the bottom row were delicately rendered drawings of roses in every hue. Under the faded yellow rose was the word jealousy .

Had it been any other flower, I might not have noticed the discrepancy. But I had never forgotten the sorrow that passed over Elizabeth’s face when she gestured to her yellow rosebushes or the thoroughness with which she snipped every young bud in the spring, leaving them to shrivel in a pile by the garden fence. Replacing infidelity with jealousy—this changed the meaning entirely. One was an action, the other only an emotion. Opening the small book, I scanned the pages, then set it down and opened another.

Hours passed as I took in hundreds of pages of new information. I sat frozen, only the pages of the books turning. Looking up flowers one at a time, I cross-referenced everything I had memorized with the dictionaries stacked on the table.

It wasn’t long before I knew. Elizabeth had been as wrong about the language of flowers as she had been about me.

On the front steps, Elizabeth sat, soaking her foot in a pan of water. From where I stood at the bus stop, she looked small, her exposed ankles pale.

She looked up as I approached her, and I felt a rush of nerves—she wasn’t done with me, this I knew. That morning, Elizabeth’s shriek, followed by the loud thump of a wooden heel hitting the linoleum floor, had announced her discovery of the cactus spines. I’d risen, dressed, and raced downstairs, but by the time I entered the kitchen, she was already seated at the table, calmly eating her oatmeal. She didn’t look up when I walked into the room, didn’t say anything when I sat down at the table.

Her lack of reaction made me furious. What are you going to do with me? I’d screamed, and Elizabeth’s response had floored me. Cactus, she told me, her eyes taunting, meant ardent love , and though her shoes might never recover, she did appreciate the sentiment. I shook my head wildly, but Elizabeth reminded me of what she had explained in her garden, that each flower has only one meaning, to avoid confusion. I’d picked up my backpack and started to the door, but Elizabeth was behind me, a bouquet pressed to the back of my neck. Don’t you want to see my response? she asked. I spun around to face the tiny purple petals. Heliotrope , she said. Devoted affection .

I hadn’t paused for breath, and what came out next was a fiery whisper.

Cactus means I hate you , I’d said, slamming the door in her face.

Now a full day of school had passed, and my anger had faded into something close to regret. But Elizabeth smiled when she saw me, her expression welcoming, as if she had completely forgotten my declaration of hatred only hours earlier.

“How was your first day of school?” she asked.

“Awful,” I said. I took the stairs two at a time, my legs stretching their full length as I attempted to pass Elizabeth, but her bony fingers flew out and closed around my ankle.

“Sit,” she said. Her tight grasp thwarted my attempt at escape. I turned and sat on the step below her to avoid her eyes, but she pulled me up by the collar until I faced her.

“Better,” she said, then handed me a plate of sliced pear and a muffin. “Now eat. I have a job for you that may take all afternoon, so you’ll start as soon as you’ve finished this.”