Look at Flower Read online

  She gives her head a shake. “It’s amazing out there. I see it and I don’t believe it. People coming from all over to San Francisco, and somehow they all end up with places to stay and enough to eat, even though they have no money.” Shakes her head again. “Never seen anything like it. Even I’m helping out.”

  “Maybe I’ll come over again,” I say tentatively, but Kay reaches right out and takes my hand and says, “Anytime, child. My . . . my hose is always yours.”

  Well, that was nice. I like older people as a rule, and Kay, though she seems a little prickly, I know she’s a sweetie underneath.

  And now here’s Flower heading down Stanyan back to Haight Street. The sun’s setting off in the west, I can look that way and see it, this big blobbing orange ball at the end of the world, and I just get the best feeling. It’s like everything really is possible. That this crazy life we’re all flocking to San Francisco to invent out of nothing but our energy and our imagination is all going to work out. That the stunning dream itself is coming true!

  - - - - -

  When I get to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, I can’t go any farther up the hill ’cuz there’s police tape sealing off the whole block. Dozens of hippies and some shop-owner types are milling around. I push through wide shoulders and get to the front of the tape, where there’s a blue-uniformed cop.

  “I’m crashing up there,” I say, pointing up Ashbury toward 710. “Can I get through?”

  “Sorry, girly, nobody’s getting past.”

  “Why not?”

  “Police business.”

  “It’s not the Dead house, is it?”

  “The what?” This cop’s got a wide, moony face and a pudgy nose. He stands with his chin jutting out, and I realize I’m not going to get anything out of him.

  I turn around, and there’s my friend Harley.

  “Hey, Flower,” he said. “How’s it hangin’, babe?”

  I haven’t seen Harley in a couple days. He was my first friend in the Haight, another runaway like me. Harley says he’s nineteen and, as I said, he loves motorcycles; his own Harley’s the only thing he owns. He’s been wheeling the bike into Golden Gate Park at night and sleeping in a sleeping bag next to it.

  “Hey, Harl.”

  Harley reaches out and pets Toto, who as usual is tucked into my shirt. His hand is curiously close to my breasts. “So what’s going on over there?” I say.

  “Stabbing. Some dude got it right there on the corner. Not sure why.”

  A guy next to us says, “Drug deal gone bad.”

  Both Harley and I nod. There are a lot of drugs floating around the Haight, needless to say.

  “I’ve been crashing up the street there, at the Dead house. That’s where my stuff is.”

  “I don’t think they’re letting people through anytime soon,” the guy next to us said. “See those dudes over there in the suits. They’re detectives. They’re going up and down the street. Been doing that for an hour; looks like they got hours more.”

  We all look at the suited guys—odd to see men in suits in this part of town—poking around; and then I see a chalk mark on the sidewalk, and a ribbon of dried rust-red running to the curb.

  I shudder; a clamminess comes over me just like that. I whisper to myself, “Damn.”

  Harley takes his hand off Toto and puts it on my shoulder. “So where you gonna sleep tonight, Flower?” There’s something in his eyes.

  I give my head a quick turn, to shake off the creepy feeling. “You’re still in the park?”

  He brightens. “It’s nice and peaceful there. Nobody bugs me.”

  I shake my head. “No, can’t do it.”

  “Aw, come on, Flower, it’ll be cool.”

  I shake my head harder. Harley’s been kind of after me since we hooked up, but I’m just not gonna do that—not with him, not now. So I’m thinking fast. All I got back at the Dead house is my bag with some underwear and a couple changes of clothes and my books; I could go pick it up tomorrow. Would Kay’s offer still hold? I don’t see why not.

  When I knock on her door, she seems a little surprised to see me, but when I explain about the stabbing and the police, she puts her hand on my shoulder and walks me downstairs. The guest room she takes me to is large, with a double bed and a bathroom right next to it.

  “I have to go out soon, to a political meeting,” she says. “You’ll be all right here, Lucinda?”

  I’m a little surprised to hear my full name. There’s also a tone to her voice that says, Can I trust you here alone? I smile and say, “Toto and me are pretty tired, Kay. We’ll just get some dinner, and if it’s O.K., maybe I’ll borrow a book and go to bed.”

  That pleases her. “Well, if you’re awake when I get back, come up for some hot chocolate.”

  “That sounds great,” I say, and I’m flooded again with warm feelings. It’s like I’ve fallen into this nice home, so much nicer than mine back in Bend. I mean, hot chocolate before bed! We haven’t done that since I was a girl. Before the coldness began. And even then we didn’t do it very often.

  “I’ll come knock when I’m home,” Kay says. “And if you hear anyone else, don’t worry. I have a couple of students living with me on the second floor.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say. And I am. I pull a book of short stories down from Kay’s bookshelf, and Toto sticks his head into my armpit, the way he likes to do, and I read until I doze off. I never hear any of the students come home, or even Kay’s knock. I’m out till morning.

  - - - - -

  Kay has a high, chalky-white forehead, deeply rouged cheeks, a swooping, slightly humped nose, pretty, full lipsticky lips a little too low on her face, and a regal air like she was once someone’s true princess; you just know she could feel the pea under a hundred mattresses. And her hair! It’s a sealike foam of gray, whipped with air—every time I look close at it, I think of spun silver cotton candy.

  When I ask, Kay tells me she has four grown children, and a lot of grandchildren, but none of them live anywhere close. She misses them, she says softly, but they come to visit when they can. I say that sounds nice. She gives a little nod, then says sort of to herself, “They’re pretty busy, though.” A tight smile, the center of her lips bowing like a heart. “Looks like I raised busy children.”

  We’ve become quite chatty. I’ve been here three days so far—I went to the Dead house and got my stuff the next day; Jerry was there, and he gave me a warm kiss on my forehead, bidding me swift and good fortune—and the thing is, I feel I’m doing Kay a favor as much as she’s doing me one. We’ve become quite the pals. She likes to take a walk through the park early in the morning, before she starts writing, and she gets Toto and me up, and we head out with her. Getting up this early reminds me of the farm, and I find I like it; the dawn scattering its wavy yellow light through tree leaves, the way the air crisps, the blue-white thinness of the sky. I find myself taking funny giant steps ahead of Kay, then back, prancing around knees high like the drum majorette back in high school, then leaping and twirling like the cheerleaders. (All the while Kay keeps Toto on the leash.) It’s not wild dancing like swinging hands over my head in the Panhandle, but I like it just as well. It’s my private dance—my “morning stomp,” Kay calls it, and it seems to amuse her, too.

  Kay likes to have afternoon tea; she lived for a while in England during the war. And I’m starting to love a lot of her old-fashioned habits. While we sip the scented tea from the dainty cups (reminds me of playing dollhouse), we talk a lot, about all kinds of things, but more and more about her adventures in Paris in the ’20s. She was just a girl, she tells me, but older than me—and in another country, another world. The people there were the most amazing, brilliant people she’d ever known; and except for maybe a couple of them, they were . . . not . . . pretending. (I get it; just roll my eyes.) One afternoon she mentions more of her Paris friends besides Ernest Hemingway like Scottie Fitzgerald and Jimmy Joyce. I remember them from my secret reading-under-the-blanket
days, though most of ’em wrote big crazy books I couldn’t find any way into.

  That Kay’s a writer herself sinks in, and that seems to make her keep wanting to know more about me. How much is there to know? I’m just a stupid seventeen-year-old runaway with a little dog I carry with me everywhere. I had a stupid, uptight life in a small town in Oregon, and I learned stupid stuff in high school till I couldn’t even bother to finish my senior year and came down here to glorious San Francisco. Kay loves it that I love to read books, but why wouldn’t she? That still doesn’t explain why she wants to know all about my family.

  I won’t tell her. I just want to put all that behind me. But . . . she keeps at me. She got my last name out of me, Evans, and the location of our farm, and she keeps wanting to know what it was that made me leave home. What about your older brother, Kevin, and the younger one, Doree? How do they get along with your parents? (Better.) How do you feel about them? (They’re O.K., I guess.) What do you mean, there was this “icy tension” in the house when you were growing up? (There just was.) Can you describe it more? When did it start? How?

  Sometimes I get the crazy idea she wants to write a novel about me.

  And sometimes I start talking.

  “I remember it clearly, but I never understood it,” I say. We’re eating something she calls crumpets, which are these rock-shaped baked things that taste like pressed wood. “I mean, they’re grown-ups, so who knows why they do anything they do. But everything seemed fine, I mean, it was boring, but it was O.K. But then, well, seemed like nobody was talking to each other.” I shrug.

  “Nothing happened?”

  I shake my head. “Not that I know.”

  “Your father—did he leave the house at all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like take unexpected trips?”

  I cast my memory back, then say, “Where would he go? He was a farmer.”

  She looks at me with her intense green eyes, surrounded by her whipped-high corona of gray hair.

  “Any unexpected time away . . . nights he didn’t come home?”

  I shake my head. “Not my dad.”

  “How about your mother?”

  “My mother!” I give a tight laugh. A picture of Mom comes to me, her steel-gray hair, the bun in the back tight as a knot in a rope, her flinty eyes, her uplifted chin. Her gray clothes, always ironed tight as a drum. “She’s the most properest woman you can imagine.”

  “Lucinda, grammar!” she starts to say, then shakes her head and goes on, “So they were just home all the time?”

  I shrug, cast my memory back. Everything was pretty much always the same, so predictable. “They had their socials,” I tell Kay. “Went to the Pentecostal an awful lot, at least Mom did. It seemed like Dad totally stopped. Mostly, they were busy, chores to be done.” I keep shrugging. “I was just a kid back then—”

  “And you’re not now?” Her silver eyebrows fly up.

  I give my head a shake. “I don’t know what I am.”

  “You don’t like talking about this?”

  I lean back, take a sip of the tea. She’s gotten me to like it with milk, like the English do. “Would you?”

  “I just want to understand you better, Cynda. It’s just my way.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “There’s always a reason” she says, “for everything.” She pauses a second as that thought settles in, and then she’s off again. “So, tell me just what happened when you felt things change—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Details,” she says. The way her nose goes up, it’s like she’s started breathing fire. “Details!”

  - - - - -

  What can i remember? Our farmhouse was taut with secrets, things never said—dared not thought. But still things worked. Mom always kept fresh-cut flowers on the dining table, then she didn’t. Dad always carefully took off his boots outside and only walked in his stocking feet inside the house, then he marched in his shoes across the living room carpet after feeding the pigs, and Mom didn’t say a word, just looked at him so hard I thought they’d both explode. Our television privileges, pathetic anyway, were revoked. We screamed (maybe I was the loudest), “But we didn’t do anything!” Dad wouldn’t listen. Mom was always upstairs. No Ben Casey. No Gunsmoke. No Twilight Zone. Not even Ed Sullivan.

  Kevin grew a basketball at the end of his fingers; he was always off playing. Doree disappeared into her dolls. When I could, I would sneak into my parents’ room to see what I could find. On the dresser were pictures of Jesus, and there seemed to be more and more of them. In the hamper were only my mother’s stiff clothes and iron-clad underwear, nothing from my father. How could that be? In the back of a drawer was a picture frame with the glass busted out of it and a torn picture, of just my mother and her sister, my Aunt Maude, inside. There were new bottles of pills on top of my mother’s dresser. . . .

  “Something happened—” Kay interrupts me. She snaps her long, bony fingers at me. “Come on, Lucinda, remember!”

  I feel myself clench down inside. “There’s nothing to—”

  “There has to be something.” Kay’s standing now, pacing back and forth. Her tall curls of silver hair float across the room like froth on a wave. She has the highest forehead and a sharp nose, and it’s like she’s a ship just plowing ahead. “Remember!”

  “I can’t think of—” But then I stop. Something clicks, a picture floats back up in my mind.

  “What?” Kay breathes.

  “Well, it was later, things were so quiet and tense, but then there was a scene—”

  “Between them?”

  I nod. “It was like it all came to a head. Dad was doing the bills, and Mom came in and she was holding something. . . .” I pause, it’s all hazy. I was down on the floor reading, Kevin was cleaning out a carburetor with a wire brush, Doree was cutting up paper dolls; and there Mom was, standing with something rolled up in her hand. I exhale. “I think it was a magazine—”

  “A magazine?” Kay goes, her voice rising. Intense curiosity is blooming off her skin, a red flush. “What do you mean?”

  “She had it—I can see her now with it, it’s rolled up tight in her hand. She’s waving it at my father—”

  “What kind of magazine?” Kay’s brow tightens.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it a big one, like Life?”

  I shake my head.

  “Time? Newsweek? Sports Illustrated?”

  “We never subscribed to any magazines that I can—

  “Then why would your mother be upset about a magazine? What could it possibly—” Kay catches her breath, stops pacing. She’s giving me hawk eyes down her long fluted nose. “Tell me, what was your father doing while your mother was waving the magazine at him?”

  I close my eyes, try to bring it back. “He’s just standing there. He’s—”

  “Lucinda, look more closely. Details!”

  “I’m trying.” I gulp a breath. All this is hugely upsetting to me, though I’m not sure why. “Dad’s just standing there, and he’s got his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders are kinda slumped, and Mom’s slapping the magazine against her hand, and he’s looking—he’s like a dog being whipped.”

  Kay raises her imperious chin. “What is your mom saying?”

  “She’s—” I shudder, then shake my head. “She’s not saying a word, just waving the rolled-up magazine back and forth with this look—this look of fury on her face.”

  Kay nods, then says softly, “Let’s think about the magazine. What can you remember about that? It’s in color, right, bright, gaudy colors? With pictures—lots of pictures?”

  She’s seeing something in her writer’s eye, and I try to see it, too. I close my eyes. Mostly I see my mother’s enraged eyes. The magazine, it’s just a blur there in the air, the way she’s . . . but then I can see it more clearly. “There’s no cover on it,” I say softly, “and the pages inside are . . . they’re all like torn up. I can remem
ber the way they’re whistling in the—”

  “Your mother,” Kay interrupts. She’s jabbing the palm of her left hand with the pointer finger of her right. “She has to be saying something.”

  “I can’t—” I shake my head. “Kay, they just sent us to bed.”

  “No yelling?”

  “That wasn’t her way. She was—” I close my eyes, and I remember Mom, tight and cold and imperious. “I don’t know—”

  “Lucinda, more,” Kay says softly, a whisper. Her cheeks stay flushed. “I need more.”

  I shake my head. “It was, the way she looked, it was like he . . . he was simply a dog—not even that.”

  Kay lifts her bumped nose, glares down it at me again; and for a second I see my mother there, that coolness, distance. But I also feel my own wheels spinning up, thoughts, ideas, possibilities. . . .

  “Kay, what do you think happened?” I say this so low I’m not even sure I’m speaking.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kay?” There has to be something grown-up here, something she sees that I don’t. “Kay, what is it?”

  She takes a minute, then shakes her head. “I wasn’t there, Lucinda. There’s nothing I can know for sure.”

  That’s when I lose it. “Kay, something happened. They’re my parents, my whole family! From that night on nothing was ever the same.” I’m breathing hard, loud. “If you have any fucking idea—”

  “Lucinda!”

  I pull back. I know that Kay hates it when I curse. She says I’m like a little sailor. Thing is, when she says that, I usually flush with pride, but not today.

  “It was just a magazine,” I say. “A stupid rolled-up, tattered old magazine.”

  Kay gives me this look of dire pity, and I kind of shrink up inside.

  “It’s all right, dear,” she says finally. “Grown-ups have their . . . well.” She reaches over and takes my shoulders, then pulls me to her. I smell her rose and iris perfume, a whole flower garden of it, rising off her white, chalky old-lady skin. I also feel her thin, bony hands holding me, pulling me to her. It’s so long since my mother or father held me like that, like they needed me as much as I needed them; and though I hesitate a moment, that’s all it is, a moment. A second later I’m swarming within her embrace, doing my damnedest to simply drown myself in it.