Vanessa Diffenbaugh: The Language of Flowers

Renata turned to go, and I followed.

“What was that, Victoria?” Renata asked when we were out of earshot. I shrugged and kept walking. Renata glanced back at the booth, then at me, then again at the booth, her eyes puzzled.

“I need periwinkle,” I said, changing the subject. “They won’t sell it cut. It’s a groundcover.”

“I know periwinkle,” she said, nodding to a back wall, where plants sat in buckets, their roots intact. She handed me a wad of cash and didn’t ask any more questions.

Renata and I worked frantically throughout the morning. The wedding was in Palo Alto, a wealthy suburb thirty-five miles south of the city, and Renata had to take two trips to deliver all the flowers. She took the first half of the arrangements while I worked on the second. While she was gone I kept the door closed and locked, the light off in the showroom. Customers lined up outside, awaiting her return. I was content in the dark solitude.

When she returned I was busy examining my work—pinching pollen and trimming an occasional awkward leaf with sharp scissors. Renata glanced at my bouquets and nodded to the stream of people behind her.

“I’ll start the bridal party; you take over the shop.” She handed me a laminated price list and a small gold key to the cash register. “And don’t think for a second I don’t know how much is in there.”

Earl was already at the counter, waving to me. I walked over to where he stood.

“For my wife,” he said. “Didn’t Renata tell you? I only have a few minutes, and I want you to pick out something that will make her happy.”

“Happy?” I asked, looking around the room at the available flowers. I felt disappointed. “Is that as specific as you can be?”

Earl tilted his head and was thoughtful for a moment. “You know, now that I think about it, she’s never really been a happy woman.” He laughed to himself. “But she was passionate. And smart. And interested. She always had an opinion, even about things she knew nothing about. I miss that.”

It was the request for which I had prepared. “I understand,” I said, setting to work. I pinched tendrils of periwinkle at the roots until they hung in long, limp strands, and grabbed a dozen bright white spider mums. I wrapped the periwinkle tightly around the base of the mums like a ribbon and used florist’s wire to create loose curlicues of the leafy groundcover around a multilayered explosion of mums. The effect was like fireworks, dizzying and grand.

“Well, that will deserve a response of some kind,” Earl said as I handed over the flowers. He passed me a flat twenty. “Keep the change, sweetheart.” I consulted the price list Renata had given me and put the twenty in the drawer, withdrawing a five-dollar bill for myself.

“Thanks,” I said.

“See you next week,” called Earl.

“Maybe,” I said, but he had already gone out the door, slamming it closed behind him.

The store was abuzz, and I turned my attention to the next person in line. I wrapped roses, orchids, mums of every color, and handed bouquets to couples, elderly women, and teens sent on errands. While I worked I thought about Earl’s wife, tried to bring forth an image of the once-passionate woman: her tired, withdrawn, unsuspecting face. Would she react to the wild bouquet of mums and periwinkle, truth and tender recollections ? I felt sure she would, and imagined the relief and gratitude on Earl’s face as he boiled water for tea, provoking the opinionated woman he had missed into a discussion of politics or poetry. The image quickened my fingers and lightened my steps as I worked.

Just as the shop emptied, Renata finished the bridal party.

“Load up the truck,” she ordered. I transported armfuls as quickly as I could. It was almost two. Renata climbed behind the wheel, directing me to keep the shop open until she returned in an hour.

The delivery took much longer than Renata had expected. At half past five she stormed into Bloom, spewing anger over boutonnieres and bow ties. I kept quiet, waiting for her to pay me so that I could leave. I’d worked twelve and a half hours without a break, and I was looking forward to a locked room and possibly even a bath. But Renata didn’t reach into her purse.

When her frustrated monologue ended, she opened the cash register, thumbing through wrinkled bills, checks, and receipts. “I don’t have enough cash,” she said. “I’ll stop at the bank on the way to dinner. Come with me. We’ll talk business.”

I would rather have taken her money and fled into the night, but I followed her outside anyway, aware of the precariousness of my position.

“Mexican food?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She turned toward the Mission. “You aren’t much of a talker, are you?” Renata asked.

I shook my head.

“At first I thought you just weren’t a morning person,” she said. “My nieces and nephews, don’t try before noon, but after that just pray for a moment of silence.”

She glanced at me as if she was waiting for a response.

“Oh,” I said.

She laughed. “I have twelve nieces and nephews, but I rarely see them. I know I’m supposed to make an effort, but I don’t.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “I love them, but I can only handle them in small doses. My mother always jokes that I didn’t inherit her maternal gene.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know, that bit of biology that makes women coo when they see a baby on the street. I’ve never had that.”

Renata parked in front of a taqueria, and two women fussed over a stroller by the door as if to prove her point. “Go order anything you want,” she said. “I’ll pay when I get back from the bank.”

Renata and I ate until eight p.m. It was enough time for her to eat a taco and drink three large Diet Cokes, and for me to eat a chicken burrito, two cheese enchiladas, a side of guacamole, and three baskets of chips. Renata watched me eat, a satisfied smile flicking across her face. She filled the silence between us with stories of her childhood in Russia, describing a flock of siblings traveling across the ocean to America.

When I finished eating, I leaned back, feeling the heaviness of the food in my body. I had forgotten how much I could consume, and also the complete paralysis that accompanied my overeating.

“So, what’s your secret?” Renata asked.

I squinted my eyes in question, tightened my shoulders.

“To staying thin?” she asked. “When you eat like that?”

It’s simple , I thought. Be broke, friendless, and homeless. Spend weeks eating other people’s leftovers, or nothing at all .

“Diet Coke,” she said, filling the silence as if she didn’t want to hear my answer, or already knew it. “That’s my secret. Caffeine and empty calories. Another reason I never wanted children. What kind of baby would develop on that?”

“A hungry one,” I said.

Renata smiled. “I saw you out there today, working with Earl. He left pleased. And he’ll come back, I imagine, week after week, looking for you.” Would I be there? I wondered. Is this Renata’s way of offering me a permanent job?

“That’s how I built my business,” she said. “Knowing what my customers wanted even before they did. Anticipating it. Wrapping up flowers before they came in, guessing the days they’d be in a hurry, the days they’d want to browse, talk. I think you have it in you, that kind of intuition, if you want it.”

“I do,” I said quickly. “Want it.”

I remembered Meredith’s words then— “You have to want it”— at The Gathering House and hundreds of times before. You have to want to be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, she had told me, again and again. I hadn’t wanted any of those things, and none of Meredith’s promises, threats, or bribes had altered my conviction. But suddenly I knew I wanted to be a florist. I wanted to spend my life choosing flowers for perfect strangers, my days steadily alternating between the chill of the walk-in and the snap of the register.