Flowers and Their Meanings | Mary-Helene Bertino

The summer my mother has hernia surgery, a tiger escapes from our tiny shore-town zoo.

I’m eighteen, wear shirts tied in the back with shoelaces, and my ringtone is “Houses of the Holy.” When I pick my mother up from the hospital, the nurses stand in a line to hug her goodbye.

“I have that effect,” she tells me.

For three months she cannot lift anything heavier than a sack of flour. My responsibilities include lowering her into and helping her out of various chairs, beds, and baths, watering her zinnias, and driving her to the town library to look for the next volume in her crime series. I’m in a new relationship with ice bags, hoses, murder, and sandwiches. Every afternoon I prepare the latter based on that day’s desires.

Her initial discomfort at accepting help quickly switches to a tendency to bark orders. “Avocado!” she yells from the bath. “Lettuce!” while I am snipping off the heads of dead zinnias. “Iceberg! Not the thin stuff.” Sometimes she demands a pickle, sometimes gets annoyed I’d even offer a pickle. Sometimes a thick layer of mayonnaise.

Each book in her murder series is titled for a letter from the alphabet. A Is for Arrest Me, B Is for Bronchitis, C Is for Come Here, Brian. The library anchors the strip mall with our Chinese food restaurant and the pharmacy, where I compare earnest sunglasses in the moon-shaped mirror while she scours the stacks.

The library usually does not have the letter she needs, and she leaves empty-handed and morose. Although each volume reintroduces every character, including the heroine, my mother insists on reading them in order. She enjoys proper procedure and doesn’t want to hear my theories about narrative memory.

Has my mother’s thought somehow freed this tiger?

One day, the library has the right volume. Rejoining me in the pharmacy, she brandishes the glossy book and declares, “H Is for Homicide!”

We drive home and I lower her into the recliner. All she wants to do is read. Still, I collect activity pamphlets from the pharmacy.

“Mah-jongg,” I say. “Mom-jong.”

She does not look up from her book. “Fools play card games.”

“The zoo?”

She flips a page. “It doesn’t even have a tiger.”

I hold up the zoo pamphlet. On the cover, a tiger roars. “Well, anyway, not a very good one. I don’t like to see them caged. Standing there. Wondering, what on earth am I doing here?”

I work in the Women’s Clothing section in Mandee’s, usually with Joan, another local girl, whose gentle voice masks an almost debilitating anxiety. Like the big-time chains, but hometown, Mandee’s jingle hopes. The store is in a converted warehouse with clumsy carpets and dividers to set off departments. Mandee from Mandee’s insists we work in teams—the home-goods team, the electronics team. Joan and I are the afternoon shift of the ready-to-wear team. During our training we learned that a greeted customer is less likely to steal. We’re supposed to say hello to everyone even if they are cutting through our section to get to Pets, even if we have already greeted them. It’s as important as checking the dressing rooms at the end of the day to make sure no one’s hiding, Mandee says. Once, Mandee says, a ready-to-wear employee startled a man who’d been sleeping there. Every night, he’d scoot in before close and wait under a display until everyone left. He’d borrow a pillow and blanket from Housewares and sleep in the dressing room for people with special needs.

“We can’t have people sleeping in ready-to-wear,” Mandee says.

During our training, Joan asked Mandee if a team could be only two people and she answered, “Can a family be two people?” which was more progressive than I anticipated from the owner of a store that had separate break rooms for men and women.

As if the tiger has heard my mother bemoan its captivity, it escapes. The newscasters make jokes. Wants to get started on its tan, getting a jump on summer sales. The timing is uncanny. Has my mother’s thought somehow freed this tiger? Joan and I watch the coverage on our phones. Kindergartens and grade schools close early. The hotline is flooded with tips. “I saw it go into the Pine Barrens,” one woman says, pointing a trembling finger off camera.

My mother ignored the hernia for three years until it grew to the size of a baseball. Whenever it emerged, she’d massage it until it receded. The final time, she lay on the couch unable to move for hours until she, on the brink of unconsciousness, relented to the pain and called me.

“S is for stubborn,” I tell her.

She says, “P is for pain-in-the-neck daughters.”

One afternoon after the tiger escapes, I’m walking a two-lane highway looking for shade and admiring the street names, thinking I’d like to live on one named Violet, when a truck slows next to me and its driver leans out the window to ask if I want to watch him masturbate. The truck seems new, oversize. The street is basted in heat. Like every other man in this salted-stiff bay town, he wears satiny basketball shorts (pushed down mid-thigh) and could be anywhere from twenty to fifty. He tugs his soft flesh, already doing it.

I rescind the step I’d taken toward him when I assumed he was asking directions or the time. The noise I make sounds like no.

“Your loss.” He pulls away.

A sprinkler gyrates across a nearby lawn. Dust pillows out from the retreating truck.

The reason I’m walking has to do with my friend’s boyfriend getting arrested. She and her two kids needed to go to the police station, where the boyfriend left their truck. My mother’s van is loaned to a friend running errands. Everyone’s car is in the wrong place. I’m walking to my friend’s house to drive her neighbor’s car to the station.

At the house, my friend’s daughters stare out the screen door like mournful, landlocked mariners. I follow their gazes down the road to where the truck slowed, beyond the erratic, dust-filled breeze, beyond the bay roiling with crabs. Whatever the boyfriend did has scared them polite. DUI, it turns out, his second or third. My friend tells me he’ll spend a few nights in jail.

I don’t know much about kids, but I know you’re supposed to protect them from adult idiocy. I twirl the neighbor’s keys and pretend to holster them on my hip like a gun. “Off we go,” I say.

The girls look at their mom to gauge whether they can laugh. Her eyes remind me of the sunbaked road I’d taken there—nowhere to hide. “I appreciate the humor,” she says. “But don’t turn him into a game. They’ll think things like this are fun.”

The boyfriend looks sheepish, like instead of going to jail he is about to ask my friend to go to prom. He holds out his hands as you’d cradle a hat, but there are just two leaping kids and an angry woman I knew in high school. I’d gotten back in touch with her in a rare gesture of nostalgic optimism I was every day regretting.

As they talk, I play a game with the girls that I call “What will you do with me?”

“Imagine I’m made out of rose petals,” I say.

“I’ll pluck you,” the oldest says, and the younger, “I’ll throw you down at a wedding.”

I hear the boyfriend say, There’s no way of knowing. Her flat reply, Yes, there is, seems to cue the sun that hurries through the window and turns everything edgeless until the room seems like a cliff I can fall from.

“Imagine I’m made out of syrup,” one of the girls says.

“I’ll put you on waffles,” the other says.

I say, “I’ll marinate kielbasa in you.”

The boyfriend drove me home once. During the ride, he pretended to hit certain people on the street then assigned himself points. Two points for an old man, three points for a VW Beetle. The sheer energy required to maintain something like that. Most people engage in games as a pleasant way to pass time, but when he dropped me at my mother’s house, he remembered the tally. They should have arrested him for that, I’m thinking, when my friend says in a big voice that she’s ready to leave.

One cricket-thick July evening, Joan finds me, folding bralettes into a pile that pleases me.

“Someone’s stuck,” she says.

“Stuck where?”

“Not where,” she says. “In.”

“Hello,” I say to a passing customer, startling her. “In what?”

“A dress, I think. One of those long ones I can never remember the name for.”

I follow her to the dressing room where a woman stands in the common area, arms up, stuck inside a yellow floral maxi dress. She waves, yelping softly.

I introduce myself and ask if she minds if I try the zipper.

“Try anything,” she says.

The zipper refuses to move, and the excess folds meant to billow are cinched around her torso and breasts. The cheap fabric won’t negotiate. The more she struggles, the more stuck she becomes.

“It’s like cloth quicksand,” Joan says.

“Ma’am, please stop moving.” I inform Joan we will have to cut the woman out and ask her to borrow a pair of shears from Garden and Home.

Joan leaves. I hear her helloing customers as she crosses the retail floor.

I guide the woman into a sitting position on the ottoman and attempt chat. She is an independent contractor working on the new resort, but they closed early because everyone is scared about the tiger, so she came in to try on what she calls “one of those flowy dresses everyone is wearing.” “They are not flattering for those of us with a chest.”

“They’re not for everyone,” I agree.

“Do you think that tiger is okay?” Her voice is tight, sad.

“Well, if it made it to the Pine Barrens, I’m sure it’s fine. Nothing gets out of there.”

“What an idiot I am.” She shakes with what I think is laughter but turns out to be crying. I place my hand near where I hope is her shoulder.

She wears beige no-show socks. The slip of the dress covers her thighs, her arms are fixed above her head. It would appear to anyone passing that I am talking to a windsock or some day lily come to life. Joan returns with the shears.

I pull the fabric away from the stuck woman’s skin and Joan cuts. The woman is silent as we slice through the dress. When we are almost finished, the zipper admits defeat and relents the rest of the way. The woman emerges and turns out to be white, middle-aged, with a wide, smooth face. After a few shaky steps around the room, she slips into her old dress, thanks us, and leaves.

We tell each other the story for the rest of the shift. How Joan found her, flailing in the room. How I made conversation while Joan got the shears. The fabric strips, peeling away.

“I thought she was going to look different,” I say. Joan nods. “Anyone could have been under there.”

A woman in the doorway holds up two pocketbooks and wants to know the difference between cognac and brown.

Joan says, “One’s darker.”

When my mother called me to admit she’d been enabling a hernia for three years, she was gasping through pain.

Everyone’s car is in the wrong place.

By the time I reached the house, she’d passed out. That was the first time I felt her cool limbs slinking away from my grip, been that close to her powdery smell. The doctors said if she’d waited any longer the hernia would have ruptured. They told me this after the surgery when my mother was safe. But during a moment at the house when she was so supremely uncarryable, I did not think I could do it. I sank to the ground with her in my arms. I knew she would die, and I was ready to shoulder that blame instead of proceeding. Her body seemed comprised of hundreds of independently operating parts. It has to end, anyway, I thought, ready to surrender to the unfairness, which would in some way be a relief. It was late afternoon. The seagulls were screaming. Who was I to deserve relief? I stumbled and pulled and dragged our way to the car. I drove and pounded the steering wheel and backhanded tears from my eyes so I could see all the way to the Regional Hospital where they removed a baseball from my mother’s stomach and I ate a wilted sandwich from the commissary and watched her dot on the electric board remain blue—in crisis, in crisis, in crisis, and just when I was convinced a doctor would appear at any moment to break the news and I was braced and taut and in agony, it changed to orange, in recovery.

I yank the heavy hose around the garden while my mother points out the thirstiest plants.

On a tall zinnia, I notice a long-limbed and delicate bug. “Look.” I point. “A praying mantis.”

“That’s your father,” my mother says. “I’d know that look of disgust anywhere. Hey, Tony.”

“Praying mantises are female,” I say, not certain.

“Not one doubt.” My mother turns the hose on him. The praying mantis moves farther up the stem like an elegant afterthought. Like he has done this with her a million times.

Later, I deliver her a veggie burger with avocado and lettuce sliced on the diagonal and instead of taking a bite she gazes at it. “Now that’s a heartbreaking sandwich,” she says.

“What makes it heartbreaking?”

She raises her arms as if in disgust. “Look at it!”

The tiger evades capture for weeks. Lore spreads. It is looking for its lover from whom it was brutally separated when it came to this town. The tiger has been heartbroken for years and this is a lover’s daring stunt to be reunited.

It is a good day for my mother and the library. She emerges with N Is for Noose and a book called Flowers and Their Meanings. She reads from it as I drive.

“‘A yellow rose means infidelity and disloyalty. A pink carnation is I will never forget you. Be mine is clover. My heart burns is cactus.’”

That night, I water the thoughts of absent friends and think, I don’t want to end up like the heroine in my mother’s murder series, perpetually surprised by her town’s crappy tendencies.

“Whoever did this must really hate women,” she says nearly every time.

If I were a writer, I’d give her an accomplice like Joan, who would say something like It’s as if you could have guessed that from literally every fucking case we’ve worked together.

It’s a good joke. I laugh while watering cure, maternal error, and no! As if to reward my clever thought, the praying mantis appears, stares at me from the side of his carapace, testing one ridiculous leg then the other. I’m not sure it’s my father, but I wouldn’t rule out that it’s someone’s.

At the end of summer, the ready-to-wear team has inventory night. Every other team goes home at close of day, but Joan and I count tanks and camis. The warehouse is dark except for our section. We finish at midnight, and Joan checks the dressing and break rooms. When she returns, she’s trembling. “There’s someone in the women’s break room. Some thing. An animal.”

I don’t know why my first thought is bat but, “Bat?” I say.

“Way bigger. It’s the lion,” she says. “Wait. What’s the one with the mane?”

I tell her lion is the one with the mane and she says then it’s the tiger.

“Tigers have stripes,” I check.

“It has stripes,” she says.

It has only been a few weeks since the woman was trapped in the dress, a calamity to which Joan also brought my attention. I’m wondering if she is manifesting these emergencies. “Joan,” I say. “Did you do ketamine in there?”

Through the closed door of the women’s break room, we hear hemming, grousing.

“Call the police,” she says. “Tell them we were doing inventory and found a tiger in the break room. Wait,” she interrupts herself. “If they come here, will they shoot her?”

“How do you know it’s a she?”

“She’s in the women’s break room,” Joan says. “At least a they.”

“What do we do if we don’t call someone?”

Joan exhales and makes a pronouncement, leaving a warehouse of silence between each word. “We could . . . go home?”

“And leave it for the morning shift?” I say. “They complain when there’s leftover folding.”

A roar from the dressing room. Joan gathers her wallet and phone into her bag as I shut off the lights.

The next morning, there is no news on any of the local channels about a tiger-related massacre. I bring two coffees to work and meet Joan in the parking lot.

Mandee’s is buzzing with early shoppers. We are silent as we walk inside to find the morning shift looking annoyed.

“The hangers were a mess when we got here,” the morning manager says. “It took an hour to untangle them!”

“Is that all?” I say, and she says, “What do you mean, is that all? Is there something else?”

“You tell us,” Joan says.

The women’s break room is in order. A few of our coworkers sit at the plastic tables eating soup.

At the end of our shift, Joan and I sit in her car. The rumbling of the dressing room walls, its bitching, the roar. “Technically, we never saw the tiger, so it may have never existed,” I say.

“It was there,” Joan insists. “I saw its paws and stripes.”

We gaze over the lot to the doors of the warehouse, sliding open to permit a family.

My mother grows stronger. She can yank the hose around the my heart burns and sincerity and will soon be ready to drive again. We celebrate her health by ordering two combination platters at the Chinese restaurant for pickup.

“Pork fried rice,” she reminds me, nervous they’ll forget.

“I told them twice,” I said.

We drive over in her boxy car. The Cadillac of go-karts.

In the vestibule of the Chinese restaurant, people read enormous menus. The man who asked if I wanted to see him masturbate eats dinner in the dining room with what looks like his family. A woman and a boy. I think of my friend’s daughters peering out from the webbed shade of the screen door. The aluminum sneeze when it snaps back, the cheap, measly circumstances that trap them.

“Wait here,” I tell my mom.

I walk into the dining room and stand above the man. Seeing me, he pales, looks around, as if expecting a surprise film crew. I try to say masturbate. I open my mouth.

The woman says, “Hon?”

“Look,” he says, as if to reason with me.

His boy squirms in his seat, but I won’t let go of anything at this table. “Dad?” The boy shares an exclamation point of a forehead with the man.

I try to say: truck. I stand over them for what feels like a long time. The family beneath me arranged in a pathetic tableau, the son looks at the man who looks at his hands. A waitress behind me holds a tray of fat-glassed waters. “Ma’am?”

In the vestibule my mother clutches our steaming bag. I check the containers.

“Pork fried rice city,” I assure her.

We stop into the pharmacy, where I try on the same sunglasses I’ve tried on all summer and my mother buys an entertainment magazine with Taylor Swift on the cover.

The face of the truck man’s wife had changed the instant I approached. She may not have known the shape, but she knew something was coming. I hope she will ask him a series of bruising questions but, knowing how things go, figure she probably won’t. Some people turn in whatever direction allows them to see what they want.

As we walk to the car, I fill my mother in on my friend’s boyfriend. How their truck has to be rigged with a court-ordered breathalyzer. How it’s a bulky, ugly device that humiliates my friend who also has to use it when she drives her girls.

The man in the truck who asked me to watch him masturbate is not the wildest part of the summer. Neither is the lady stuck in her dress or even the tiger. The wildest part is what happens when my mother and I get to the car.

We secure the takeout in the backseat and are buckling our seat belts up front when she makes an announcement: “I’m going to say something and you’re not going to like it.”

I pause, key hovering by the ignition. “Say it.”

“I don’t know why I’m supposed to care about Taylor Swift’s private life. Tell me instead about a woman struggling to work a job and raise kind kids.”

“That’s whose private life you want to know about?”

She claps to rid her hands of imaginary dust: that’s all.

The key doesn’t fit in the ignition. I try again. “This key isn’t working,” I say.

My mother pages through the magazine. “What’s wrong with it?”

I realize that the rearview mirror is positioned to a different person’s parameters at the same time my mother says, “Whose kid’s seat is that?”

In the back seat, a stuffed starfish and a discarded sippy cup.

My mother makes a second announcement: “This is not our car.” We’ve loaded our food and buckled ourselves into another person’s midsize sedan the same color and make as hers, whose owner exhibited the same trust or carelessness by not locking the doors. My mother points through the windshield to our car, a few yards away. It is startling to see the thing you think you’re sitting inside. We are laughing so hard we can barely get out and walk to the correct car. Once there, we realize we’ve forgotten the food. I return to the other car and retrieve our combination platters, trailed by the sensation of stealing.

In the correct car my mother and I thumb tears from our eyes. The key works, which makes us laugh harder. We pull out of the lot, staring at the incorrect car in wonder.

“Who was that man in the restaurant?” my mother wants to know when we get on the road.

“An old bandmate.”

“You’re not going to tell me.” She shifts to watch the passing fields and I wonder if she is angry until she says, laughing again, “So busy talking we got into the wrong car.”

At the end of the month, I will move to the city and get a job taping small pieces of paper to larger pieces of paper to be fed through an industrial printer. In a few months, I will get promoted and become the person who feeds the paper into the machine until the company goes out of business and I spend a few years working temp jobs and dating an actor who perpetually looks like he is on the verge of epiphany and will never say anything that makes me laugh. One night, disgusted by him and his friends, I’ll invent a list of grievances then stand alone in front of a mirror. “You’re a heartbreaker,” I will say, then ask myself, “How do you know?” and answer myself, “Just look at you!”

Some people turn in whatever direction allows them to see what they want.

My mother will continue to live in that house, walking two extra rooms to throw out a Q-tip and ignoring her health problems. We will see each other twice a year, not because of animosity but because of life. But driving home that night, dinner steaming in the back seat, my throat constricts when I think of leaving. I’d grown to enjoy preparing her sandwiches. Carrying her to bed, her soft hands folded around my neck as I lower her onto the sheets I laundered. Clipping the zinnia heads; relieving them of what’s not working so they can concentrate on what is.

Guiding the hose away from the fern’s tender stalks. Adding sugar water to the hummingbird feeder. Replacing flowers in the vase. Changing, opening, adding. Sacred acts I can rely on. I like that my presence adds dignity. Every morning, I open the blinds to the gulls and the bay muck, and every night the sun sets over the lawn filled with fathers.

What I like most is the moment before she opens her bedroom door, the gulls circling the sandbars, the blink and the coffee chug, the gulls and muck, the inside and out, even the fears of the crab in the shallow inlet, the understanding that everything shifts to something else until there is no more shifting. Of course, two people—one!—can be a family. What’s more surprising is that you can have a private relationship with time.

The reason the man in the truck, the stuck dress, and the tiger weren’t as wild as the wrong car is because they were acts that happened to us. Getting into the wrong car felt like something my mother and I enacted. Like we’d stumbled onto a mystery. That it turned out to be a simple mistake only made the mystery wider. But it was generated by us. Our conversation. Our love.