The Language of Flowers

I had been suspended for five days for my attack on the school bus driver, and for the first time in my life, I was not miserable. Home with Elizabeth, I didn’t need anyone else. Every day I followed behind as she managed the harvest, steering workers toward ripe vines and away from grapes that needed another day in the sun, another two. She popped grapes into her own mouth and then into mine, spewing numbers that correlated to the ripeness: 74/6, 73/7, and 75/6. This, she would say, when we located a ripe bunch, is what you need to remember. This exact flavor—the sugars at seventy-five, the tannins at seven. This is a perfectly ripe wine grape, which neither machine nor amateur can identify. By the end of the week, I had chewed and spit grapes from nearly every plant, and the numbers began to come to me almost before the grapes entered my mouth, as if my tongue was simply reading them like the number on a postage stamp.

The soup began to simmer, and Elizabeth stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “And wash up. The soup’s hot.”

At the table, Elizabeth set out two bowls and loaves of bread as big as cantaloupes. I tore the bread in half, scooping out the soft, white middle and dipping it in the steaming broth.

“I had a friend, once,” Elizabeth said. “My sister was my friend. I had my sister and my work and my first love, and there was nothing else in the world I wanted. Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. So I focused every waking moment on running a successful business, on growing the most sought-after wine grapes in the region. The goal I set was so ambitious, and took so much time, that I didn’t have even a minute to think about everything I’d lost.”

Taking me in, I understood, had changed that. I was a constant reminder of family, of love, and I wondered if she regretted her decision.

“Victoria,” Elizabeth asked abruptly. “Are you happy here?”

I nodded, my heartbeat suddenly racing. No one had ever asked me a question like that without immediately following with something like, because if you were happy, if you had the sense to know that you were lucky to be here, you wouldn’t act like such an ungrateful little brat. But Elizabeth’s smile, when it finally came, was only relieved. “Good,” she said. “Because I’m happy you’re here. In fact, I’m not looking forward to you going back to school tomorrow. It’s been nice having you home; you’ve opened up a little. For the first time, you’ve seemed interested in something, and while I admit I’m a bit jealous of the grapes, it does bring me joy to see you engaging in the world.”

“I hate school,” I said. Just uttering the word made my soup bubble up at the back of my throat, a sick, nauseous feeling.

“Do you really hate school? Because I know you don’t hate to learn.”

“I really hate it.” I swallowed once, and then told her what they called me, told her it was just like every school I’d ever been to, that I was singled out, labeled, watched, and never taught.

Elizabeth took her last bite of bread, and then carried her bowl to the sink.

“We’ll withdraw you tomorrow, then. I can teach you more here than you’ll ever learn in that school. And if you ask me, you’ve suffered enough for one lifetime.” She came back to the table, retrieved my bowl, and refilled it to the brim.

My relief was so expansive I finished the second bowl, and then a third. Still, an internal lightness threatened to lift me off the chair and throw me, spinning, up the stairs and into bed.

7.

My photographs were awful. They were so bad I blamed the one-hour photo lab where I had them printed and took the negatives to a specialty store. The sign in front boasted that they printed only the work of professionals. It took them three days to make the prints, and when I picked them up, they were just as bad. Worse, even. My mistakes were more pronounced, the blurry green-and-white blobs more defined within the muddy background. I threw the photos into the gutter and sat down on the curb outside the photography store, defeated.

“Experimenting with abstraction?” I turned. A young woman stood behind me, looking at the photographs littering the street. She wore an apron and smoked a cigarette. The ash floated down around the photos. I wished they would catch fire and burn.

“No,” I said. “Experimenting with failure.”

“New camera?” she asked.

“No, new to photography.”

“What do you need to know?”

I picked one of the prints up out of the street and handed it to her. “Everything,” I said.