The Language of Flowers

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

For most of a decade I’d spent every spare moment memorizing the meanings and scientific descriptions of individual flowers, but the knowledge went mostly unutilized.

I had lived in thirty-two homes that I could remember, and the one thing they all had in common was noise: buses, brakes, the rumbling of a freight train passing.

Elizabeth laughed once, a sharp exhale. “I believe you can prove everyone wrong, too, Victoria. Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.”

Arranging the flowers and wrapping them in brown paper as I had seen Renata do, I felt a buoyancy similar to what I’d felt slipping the dahlias under the bedroom doors of my housemates the morning I turned eighteen. It was a strange feeling—the excitement of a secret combined with the satisfaction of being useful.

“You know,” I said, attempting a casual, friendly tone, but feeling the words catch in my throat with emotion, “some believe lily of the valley brings a return of happiness.”

Periwinkle, I thought, tender recollections. It would be hard to make into a bouquet but not impossible. I would wrap it with something tall and sturdy-stemmed.

Would she react to the wild bouquet of mums and periwinkle, truth and tender recollections?

But suddenly I knew I wanted to be a florist. I wanted to spend my life choosing flowers for perfect strangers,

Mistletoe. I surmount all obstacles.

By Saturday I had settled on a response. Snapdragon. Presumption.

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.

“Here you are, obsessed with a romantic language—a language invented for expression between lovers—and you use it to spread animosity.”

It wasn’t as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that Earl, and then Bethany, walked home with a bouquet of flowers expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation.

I had been loyal to nothing except the language of flowers. If I started lying about it, there would be nothing left in my life that was beautiful or true.

Renata looked at us with curiosity but didn’t ask. She was the least meddlesome person I had ever met, and I felt a twinge of affection for her as I followed Grant out the door.

“Nice,” I said. “Quiet.” “I like it that way. I can forget where I am, you know?” I did know. In Grant’s water tower, settled in the absence of all things automatic and digital, it was easy to forget not just the location but also the decade.

“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.

I’d discovered the Romantic poets often referenced the language of flowers,

“You’re not the only one whose life she ruined,” he said, then walked out of the kitchen and into the night.

Looking down, she gasped and placed her hands on my stomach. I wondered how many times I would have to endure this in the coming months, from acquaintances and strangers on the street. Pregnancy seemed to remove the unspoken societal laws of personal space.

This time, there was no escape. I could not turn away, could not leave without accepting what I had done. There was only one way to the other side, and that was through the pain.

You handed me those flowers like an apology, even though you hadn’t done anything wrong, even though your bouquet was as close to perfection as I’d ever seen. I knew right then that you felt unworthy, that you believed yourself to be unforgivably flawed.”

Catherine had felt it, too. In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality.