Terra Maria Dunn

Novel Excerpt / Rough-draft

July 09

My grandmother kept a large garden full of a variety of flowers that I was not allowed to

pluck or smell or even look at. If she caught me leaning over to admire a pale pink rose she’d swat

me with the back of her bony, spider-veined arthritic hand. My grandmother did not cultivate the

roses and carnations and the dozens of other varieties of flowers for aesthetic purposes; rather, it

was her livelihood. She had a floral business and supplied bunches of arrangements for weddings

and parties. It was how she made money after her husband had the audacity to keel over from a

massive brain hemorrhage after he bumped his head on the stair banister after a drunken stumble.

If he wasn’t an alcoholic and clumsy to boot, he wouldn’t have taken that fateful fall that caused

his brain to bleed and swell within his skull. And if he wasn’t so stubborn and paranoid of the

medical profession, he might have lived (albeit with some degree of cognitive impairment) if he

sought emergency attention. At least, that’s what I heard when my mother and grandmother were

talking amongst themselves, and I seemingly oblivious in the corner, pretending to mind my own

business when in reality I had my ears attuned to every word they were speaking.

Often, my mother would drop me off at my grandmother’s house for a day or two every

week; the ostensible reason being that she had errands to run and having to tote around a whiny,

bored as fuck ten or eleven year old made the tasks she had to accomplish difficult, if not

impossible. But the real reason she dumped me off at grandma’s floral funhouse was so she could

attend the couples counseling with my father. It was her idea. She was trying to keep a marriage

that was doomed to fail from actually falling apart. Their marital union was hanging by a thin

thread that was bound to snap under the forces pulling it this way and that; my mother, trying to

turn him into the perfect husband and father, and my father meanwhile fighting to break free of her

suffocating hold on him.

“Are you and dad going to get divorced?” I asked one day while we were in the car.

“Divorce! What are you talking about? Who put that silly idea into your little head?” she asked.

She nearly drove past the Stop sign, she was so flustered. “Well, you go to counseling and--” I said,

not able to finish what I was saying because she interrupted. “For the record, your father and I are

not seeing a shrink. And even if we were, you’re a child and it’s none of your business,” she said.

I never brought it up again. After she found out I was listening in on her conversations, she was

more careful to whisper so I couldn’t hear, occasionally glancing my way to acknowledge my

presence and subsequently making a point to keep the volume down. That was the end of my

amateur espionage career. No more family gossip for the inevitable memoirs I was bound to write

when I became an adult and escaped the domestic dysfunction that characterized my formative

years and left an indelible impression that I’d later try to efface with psychotherapy and courses of

antidepressants. Now I’d have to rely solely on facial expressions without words to augment my

astute observations. I’d become an expert physiognomist, reading lines of peoples faces,

compartmentalizing every expression, every slight eyelid movement and barely perceptible twitch

of the nose, the subtle details that most people miss. While it might appear that being adept at

reading a multitude of facial expressions would be conducive for socializing, it actually proved to

be a hindrance. Every smile was a threat. The hand extended to lift me when I fell was more intent

on keeping me on the ground; I could see the disconnect, between action and intent, in the eyes of

the so-called good Samaritan. Nobody could fool me. I became well-versed in the seldom

practiced art of interpreting gesticulations, for it was actions themselves, and not necessarily

words, that spoke most intelligibly to me. I began to fear the bipedal beings, the short and tall

variety, an idiosyncratic personality trait that later on in adulthood evolved into a full-blown

phobia that would continue to mutate and render me a recluse, immured in my own home, too

afraid to venture from my insular domain.

“What are you doing just sitting there? Isn’t there some television program you want to

watch?” my grandmother asked. I was sitting on a rustic-looking metal chair that looked out of

place and would have been better suited for some Appalachian, backwater trailer park. Half of the

white paint was missing, a victim of inclement weather and a bored girl with sharp fingernails.

“Stop picking the paint off of my chair! That belonged to my mother, you know. It has sentimental

value to me,” she said, her macular degenerated eyes fixed on me, caught red-handed with flakes

of lead-paint, like a handful of confetti, in the upturned palm of my hand. She may have been

losing her sense of vision but what she had left sufficed to catch me doing things I wasn’t supposed

to.

Needless to say, trips to my grandmother’s house weren’t very pleasant. I told my mother

about the deplorable way she treated me, but she’d guilt trip me into those visits by implying that

grandma’s time on earth was running out so I should be a good girl and foster some good memories

of her before she succumbed to some disease and died. It was only a matter of time before her new

residence would be six-feet below, a marble plaque demarcating her permanent resting place

among a rolling green field of other victims of mortality. I tried to form happy memories, trailing

behind her when she pruned the shrubs and extirpated the moribund marigolds and planted new

bulbs and seeds to replace those that had withered away and would never bloom again. I asked

questions in the hopes that she would be flattered to show off her expertise of all things flowers.

“What’s this called?” I asked, pointing up toward the large, sun-like flower that towered

above me. “That is a sunflower,” she answered. Curious for more facts to add to an already

overcrowded repository of knowledge within my cerebral hemispheres, I pressed for details: I

needed to attach an exact name to the object that would be catalogued somewhere in my brain.

“It’s a sunflower!” she snapped, annoyed with my incessant questions. I wanted to know the

classification, all the way from the specific species to the general kingdom. I wasn’t satisfied with

the big picture; I needed the accompanying details. “What about these? What are these called?”

The flowers that had caught my eye were pink and heart shaped hanging pendant from its

branches. Closed, the tiny flowers resembled hearts with a white and pink teardrop-shaped petal

that extended below the heart, hence the namesake. When they bloomed, the heart seared up the

middle to form two symmetrical halves to reveal the pure white petal that had been shielded by the

delicate exterior. “Bleeding hearts,” she said. “I planted those after Martha died.” Martha was my

grandmother’s sister. They were Irish twins, born fewer than twelve months apart. They shared a

special kind of bond that two siblings, so close in age, inevitably developed. Martha was the oldest

and shortly after she let out her eardrum-bursting cry, announcing her debut in the world, another

one-celled organism took up residence in a still warm womb. Nine months later, Ursula (for that

was my grandmother’s name) was expelled from the warn-in uterus that had housed six other

siblings before her. Mother Nature, well aware that there were not enough resources to support

such proliferation, put an end to my great-grandmother’s child-bearing after Ursula was born;

hence, there were no more siblings to split the one loaf of bread with, no more unhappy tots

inheriting their elder siblings clothes that, by the time they reached the youngest, were no more

than glorified rags.

“How did she die?” I asked out of curiosity, with a serious demeanor that I hoped she

interpreted as concern for her loss. But grandmother didn’t answer me; she was caught up in her

reveries, staring up at the sky as if she were searching for a celestial sign that her sister was

watching over her. “Grandma, how did she--” I prodded. “Huh?” she seemed confused, as if she

had gone on some out-of-body trip and was now jolted by the realization that she was standing

firmly on a pile of dirt, holding an old-fashioned watering can that was tipping over, rudely

showering a plot of fire-red chrysanthemums, neighbors of the bleeding hearts, that bowed their

heads under the weight of the downpour. Given her age, her reflexes weren’t up to par so it took

her a few seconds to react, to realize what she was doing. “Look what you made me do! I’m tired of

your questions. Get out of the way. Move!” I didn’t take one step but stood where I was and

watched her go about her business, tending to some orchids that would solemnly adorn a casket or

be used as décor for a wedding.

Bleeding hearts. Planted in remembrance of a deceased sister. No one told me why or how

my aunt Martha died, nor why those particular flowers were chosen to be a living shrine to her. The

poet in me searched for metaphors behind the bleeding heart, which must have meant something.

Perhaps she died of a heart-related ailment, thus the choice of flowers. Or perhaps it was less literal

and more metaphorical, the sundered parts symbolizing the heartache when someone you love

dies. I picked a few bleeding hearts and peeled away the halves, letting them fall onto my sandaled

feet. The remains I crushed, my fist clenched to conceal the handful of heart parts. “Olivia? What

are you doing?” my grandmother asked. My parents called me Livy or Livia. To the few friends I

had, I was Olive. My grandmother insisted on calling me by my christened name. To me, it just

further demonstrated how distant we were, with her refusal to call me by the name I was familiar

with. Olivia existed only on paper in legal documents and was said by those in authoritative

positions and even then, they usually respected my request to be referred to by my preferred

appellation. For some reason, my grandmother insisted on adhering to formality, perhaps it

reinforced her notion that she was superior to me because I was a child. But I wasn’t like my

puerile peers who behaved like little monkeys, crawling across the jungle gyms and swinging on

the bars that were built for their short-term, attention-deficit amusement. Occasional temper

tantrum aside, I was, for the most part, advanced not only in intellect but in other matters as well. I

had the world figured out before I mastered cursive, that obsolete style of writing used by people

my grandmother’s age. It’s no wonder then that I was depressed and cynical before I reached the

cusp of adolescence.

“Do you hear me?” my grandmother called from a distance, supplementing her verbal

admonishments with a semaphoric wave of her hands, motioning me to come over to her. I opened

my hand; it was covered in blood. Crimson rivulets of wine-colored blood coursed down my arm.

The sight of blood usually elicited a primal scream, an instinctual reaction that must have afforded

some evolutionary advantage for it was so universal, but I was too stunned to yell. I stood there

watching the blood trail a crisscross course down my arm, pool at my elbow crease and drip-drop

like raindrops, like tears, onto the mosaic patio tiles. “Olivia--” my grandmother said, squinting

her eyes from the blinding light of the sun, a true look of concern in her eyes. Or at least, that’s

what I thought I saw. “My flowers! My god, look at the mess you’ve made!” Her thin fingers

circled around my wrist like a manacle. I swear I saw hate in those diluted blue eyes of hers. “But

my hand is--” I glanced at my injured extremity and gasped not because the gruesomeness repulsed

me, but because the blood that had covered my hand and part of my arm only a few moments ago

had disappeared. My palm was stained pink and pieces of the flowers were all that remained. “My

hand. It’s pink.” It wasn’t the first time I hallucinated. And it wasn’t the last.