Vanessa Diffenbaugh: The Language of Flowers

There was a mumbling of happy birthdays, and two girls exchanged eyebrow-arched glances.

“Alexis was evicted last week,” Eve said. “You get her room.” She turned as if to take me there, and I followed her down a dark, carpeted hall to an open doorway. Slipping inside, I closed the door and turned the lock behind me.

The room was bright white. It smelled like fresh paint, and the walls, when I touched them, were tacky. The painter had been sloppy. The carpet, once white like the walls but now mottled from use, was streaked with paint near the baseboard. I wished the painter had kept going, painted the entire carpet, the single mattress, and the dark wood nightstand. The white was clean and new, and I liked that it had belonged to no one before me.

From the hall, Meredith called me. She knocked, and knocked again. I set my heavy box down in the middle of the room. Pulling out my clothes, I piled them onto the closet floor and stacked my books on the nightstand. When the box was empty, I ripped it into strips to cover the bare mattress and lay down on top. Light streamed through a small window and reflected off the walls, warming the exposed skin on my face, neck, and hands. The window was south-facing, I noticed, good for orchids and bulbs.

“Victoria?” Meredith called again. “I need to know your plan. Just tell me your plan and I’ll leave you alone.”

I closed my eyes, ignoring the sound of her knuckles against the wood. Finally, she stopped knocking.

When I opened my eyes, an envelope lay on the carpet near the door. Inside, there was a twenty-dollar bill and a note that read: Buy food and find a job .

Meredith’s twenty-dollar bill bought five gallons of whole milk. Every morning for a week I made my purchase at the corner store, drinking the creamy liquid slowly throughout the day as I wandered from city parks to schoolyards, identifying the local plants. Having never lived so near the ocean, I expected the landscape to be unfamiliar. I expected the dense morning fog, hovering only inches from the soil, would cultivate an array of vegetation I had never before seen. But except for wide mounds of aloe near the water’s edge, tall red flowers reaching for the sky, I found a surprising lack of newness. The same foreign plants I’d seen in gardens and nurseries all over the Bay Area—lantana, bougainvillea, potato vine, and nasturtium—dominated the neighborhood. Only the scale was different. Wrapped in the opaque moisture of the coast, plants grew bigger, brighter, and wilder, eclipsing low fences and garden sheds.

When I finished a gallon of milk I would return home, cut the jug in half with a kitchen knife, and wait for night. The soil in the next-door neighbor’s flower bed was dark and rich, and I transferred it into my improvised flowerpots with a soupspoon. Poking holes in the bottoms of the jugs, I set them in the center of my bedroom floor, where they would get direct sun for only a few hours in the late mornings.

I would look for a job; I knew I needed to. But for the first time in my life I had my own bedroom with a locking door, and no one telling me where to be or what to do. Before I started searching for work, I’d decided, I would grow a garden.

By the end of my first week I had created fourteen flowerpots and surveyed a sixteen-block radius for my options. Focusing on fall-blooming flowers, I uprooted whole plants from front yards, community gardens, and playgrounds. Usually I walked home, my hands cradling muddy root balls, but on more than one occasion I ended up lost, or too far from The Gathering House. On these days I would sneak onto a crowded bus through the back door, push my way onto a seat, and ride until the neighborhood became familiar. Back in my room, I spread out the shocked roots gently, covered them with the nutrient-rich soil, and watered deeply. The milk jugs drained right onto the carpet, and as the days passed, weeds began to sprout from the worn fiber. I hovered, watchful, plucking the invasive species almost before they could push their way out of the darkness.

Meredith checked in on me weekly. The judge had declared her my permanent connection , because emancipation legislation required a connection and they couldn’t dig anyone else out of my file. I did my best to avoid her. When I returned from my walks, I surveyed The Gathering House from the corner, walking up the front steps only when her white car wasn’t parked in the driveway. Eventually she divined my tactic, and in early September I unlocked the front door to find her sitting at the dining room table.

“Where’s your car?” I demanded.

“Parked around the block,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in over a month, so I figured you must be avoiding me. Is there a reason?”

“No reason.” I walked to the table and pushed someone’s dirty dishes out of the way. Sitting down, I placed fistfuls of lavender—which I had uprooted from a front yard in Pacific Heights—on the scratched wood between us. “Lavender,” I said, handing her a sprig. Mistrust .

Meredith spun the sprig between her thumb and forefinger and set it down, uninterested. “Job?” she asked.

“What job?”

“Do you have one?”

“Why would I have one?”

Meredith sighed. She picked up the lavender I’d given her and launched it, tip first, in my direction. It nose-dived like a poorly constructed paper airplane. Snatching it off the table, I smoothed its ruffled petals with a careful thumb.

“You would have one,” Meredith said, “because you’ve looked for one, and applied, and been hired. Because if you don’t, you’ll be out on the street in six weeks, and there won’t be anyone opening their door for you on a cold night.”

I looked to the front door, wondering how much longer until she’d leave.

“You have to want it,” Meredith said. “I can only do so much. At the end of the day, you have to want it.”

Want what? I always wondered when she said this. I wanted Meredith to leave. I wanted to drink the milk on the top shelf of the refrigerator labeled LORRAINE and add the empty jug to the collection in my room. I wanted to plant the lavender near my pillow and go to sleep inhaling the cool, dry scent.

Meredith stood. “I’ll be back next week when you least expect me, and I want to see a thick stack of job applications in your backpack.” She paused at the door. “It’ll be hard for me to put you out on the street, but you should know that I’ll do it.”

I did not believe it would be hard.

I walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer, poking through egg rolls and frostbitten corn dogs until I heard the front door close.

I spent my final weeks at The Gathering House transplanting my bedroom garden into McKinley Square, a small city park at the top of Potrero Hill. I’d found it while pacing the streets for help-wanted signs, and been distracted by the park’s perfect combination of sun, shade, solitude, and safety. Potrero Hill was one of the warmest neighborhoods in the city, and the park was located at a peak, with a clear view in every direction. A small, sandy play structure sat in the middle of a manicured square of lawn, but behind the lawn the park became forested and steep, tumbling downhill in a tangle of shrubs overlooking San Francisco General Hospital and a brewery. Instead of continuing my job search, I’d transported my jugs one at a time to the secluded spot. I chose the location for each planting thoughtfully—shade-loving plants under tall trees, those desiring sun a dozen yards down the hill, out of the shadows.

The morning of my eviction I awoke before dawn. My room was empty, the floor still damp and dirty in patches where the milk jugs had been. My imminent homelessness had not been a conscious decision; yet, rising to dress on the morning I was to be turned out onto the street, I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. Where I had expected fear, or anger, I was filled with nervous anticipation, the feeling similar to what I’d experienced as a young girl, on the eve of each new adoptive placement. Now, as an adult, my hopes for the future were simple: I wanted to be alone, and to be surrounded by flowers. It seemed, finally, that I might get exactly what I wanted.