Fiction

This blog is under construction. I meant to paste some of my previously published work here but my electronic copies have been destroyed. Now I will have to retype them 😦

Here goes: “Chocolate Flower” was my very first published piece in the USA. It appeared in Driftwood Review #7 (2003).

CHOCOLATE FLOWER

This part of Michigan reminds her of home: Flanders, Belgium, a patchwork of grasslands and fields of wheat, potatoes, and sugar beets. Rows of poplars, beech trees, and oaks casting long shadows on country roads. Willow trees that droop near the edges of languid streams. Breweries and church steeples; sleepy villages and thriving market towns. Brussels–a mere thirty miles away–could just as well have been on another planet.
Perhaps I’m idealizing it now, she thinks, the Flanders of my childhood. It has been twelve years since Sandra and her husband left Europe. They have just moved into a new house and she is starting a garden, her first. In front they have a lawn and some foundation bushes, like everybody else. But the backyard is all hers, to do with as she pleases. For days now she’s been consulting manuals, seed catalogs, and gardening magazines, and still she is none the wiser.
“I’m going to the nursery,” she tells her husband, who is slumped on the couch watching a sportscast. His name is Willem but in this country he likes to be called Bill.
“Did you make a list?”
“No, I just want to get inspiration.”
He shakes his head.

It’s Saturday afternoon and the parking lot is nearly full. Sandra passes single people, couples, families returning to their cars, pushing carts that spill over with cascading petunia baskets and blazing geraniums. They all have the same eager look on their faces, as if they can’t wait to get home and start planting.
The nursery is huge. She never knew there were so many varieties of growing things. And yet, to her surprise, a lot of the plants call out to her like old friends.
“I’ve seen you before,” she says to the cerulean spiderwort; and “Oh, there you are!” to the black-eyed Susan.
She remembers the name she heard for this flower in her childhood: “flaminganten, bearing the colors of the Flemish nationalists’ flag, yellow and black,” she hears her grandmother say. Grandmother used to be a teacher.

The year she turned seven, Sandra’s parents had started a new business. That summer they had sent her to stay with her maternal grandmother Celeste and her grandfather Gregoire, a retired railway official whose back-to-nature philosophy was ahead of its time.
Grandpa was her hero. He smoked cigars. He took care of the vegetable patch at the back of the house, the chicken coop, and the rabbit hutches. He kept racing pigeons in the attic. Some days he went to town and came back only at dinner time. In the evenings he usually read books on the medicinal use of plants, making notes in his tidy office hand. On the weekend he sometimes took her out for ice cream; and at bedtime, if she had been extra, extra good, he carried her to her bedroom in his arms, as if she were a baby.
“Gregoire, you’ll spoil the child rotten,” Celeste would grumble.
Grandmother ran a tight ship: breakfast at eight, lunch at noon, Sandra’s bedtime at seven, even if the sun was still in the sky. She spent all her spare time in the garden, watering, weeding, and deadheading, then contemplating the fruits of her labor from the porch bench. The little girl tagged along.
“See that plant with the spotted leaves that has both pink and blue flowers?” Grandmother said, “They call it lungwort; its Latin name is pulmonaria. Some believe it can make sick people better.”
Sandra listened and nodded, asking a question from time to time.
“Grandma, what is that chocolate flower?”
“Oh, that!” Celeste said, “The villagers call it ‘chimney sweep’. I forget its real name, remind me to look it up tonight.”
She broke off a flowering twig from the bush and gave it to her granddaughter to smell. It was woodsy, spicy and sweet, with a bitter undertone. Sandra never saw it anywhere else.
To the right of the driveway there was a row of mountain ash trees with clusters of orange berries that Sandra’s father came to harvest every year for the birds he kept in his aviary. the lawn was edged with fragrant rose bushes, from which Grandmother cut saucer-sized flowers for the dinner table. As a child, Sandra had fallen in love with the velvet texture of their petals, the multitude of colors and scents.
“This one smells like marmalade!” she remembers exclaiming. Sh didn’t understand why the grownups laughed.

Sandra realizes she’s standing in front of a display of hybrid tea roses. The sun is beating down on her head and shoulders. She’s tempted to put on her sunglasses, but they would interfere with the colors of the flowers. I should have worn my sun hat, she thinks, as she picks up a deep-orange-red Dolly Parton rose and puts it in her shopping cart, It smells like freshly cooked berry jam.
To the left of her grandparents’ driveway was a perennial garden bordered by an irregular hedge of shrubs and trees, including one that produced hazelnuts in the fall. Sandra remembers how the filberts looked like little brown heads in green caps, and how they tasted like milk before they were ripe. She makes a mental note to look for a hazelnut tree.
After Grandfather’s death, Celeste became a little odd. She told her son-in-law, Celeste’s father, to chop down several mature trees in her garden, which he did, though reluctantly. She also paid a farmer to plow the front lawn and plant the scene of devastation with leeks.
“Why waste good land on plain grass?” she said. “At least I can cook soup from the leeks.”

“Why don’t you go to the backyard and pick us some berries for dessert? Be sure to get only the ripe ones,” Grandmother Celeste said.
When Celeste’s friends came to visit, she would send Sandra on little errands or encourage her to have a tea party with her dolls on the the lawn, out of earshot but within sight of the porch.
“Little girls have big ears,” Sandra heard her say to Madame Cara, a white-haired, aristocratic Dutchwoman who drove a VW Beetle, and Janine, a wrinkled farmer’s wife who’d walked over from her house, almost a mile away. Different as they appeared, all three shared a passion for gardening. They liked to inspect each other’s gardens and comment, “I think your hostas are getting too much sun, dear.”
Sometimes they talked of other things.
“…and she said to him, ‘Adrian, that little boy looks so much like you. Are you sure he’s no relation?’ Little did she know…”
Or, “She had such a hard time of it; it took nineteen hours and she lost so much blood…”
“Are you still there?” Grandmother said. “This is grownup talk. Run along now!”

Celeste and her visitors looked up when they heard the sound of someone pushing a bicycle onto the gravel of the driveway. A windblown peasant woman was approaching from the roadside, a shabby carpetbag hanging from the handlebars of her heavy black bike.
Her eyes swept over the three women and came to rest on Celeste.
“Are you the lady of the house, the one they call the schoolmistress?”
“I am.”
“Ah, Madame, my name is Rosalie. I have heard people praise your garden in my village, five miles down the road, and as gardening is my life, I thought I’d come and meet you.” There was a slight tremor in her voice as she spoke, which made the other women eye her with curiosity.
“Well, Madame,” Celeste said, “since you have come so far on your bicycle, and against the wind, too, I’ll be happy to give you a tour.”
As the four of them walked around the garden, Rosalie went into raptures over every plant.
“My, oh, my! What a gorgeous fuchsia you have there! That is the tallest one I have ever seen, for sure! Those petals, what an unusual shape–and that purple is so incredibly deep!”
“It’s hardy, too,” Celeste said. “It comes back every year, no matter how cold the winter has been.”
“Madame, I have never seen anything like it! Do you think I could bother you for a little cutting?”
“Why not? I’m not sure it will grow from a cutting, but since my plant is so prolific, I’ll give you as many as you’d like, with pleasure.”
“Thank you, Madame, from the bottom of my heart!”
“Oh, it is nothing, really!”

Rosalie began to turn up every three or four days, each time staying for coffee and departing with exactly one cutting in her carpet bag.
“My husband is never home,” she confided, “and when he is, he’s up in the loft with his homing pigeons.”
“Mine is like that, too,” Celeste sympathized. “And those disgusting cigars. Men are useless; everybody knows that.”
“But my son,” Rosalie said, “my little Ronnie, he is such a comfort to me.”
“She passed around the frayed photograph of a scrawny kid with a short haircut that mercilessly exposed his cabbage ears. Even Sandra was invited to have a look.
“Don’t you think he’s handsome?” Rosalie asked her. “He’s in the military now,” she added with unmistakable pride.
“I do think she’s rather eccentric,” said Madame Cara after Rosalie had left.
“if you ask me, she’s weird,” said Janine.
“I feel sorry for her,” Celeste said, “It’s obvious she doesn’t have much of a life.”

That day Sandra was making a daisy chain on the porch steps when Rosalie came. Grandmother turned to her guest with a welcoming smile. When she noticed the expression on Rosalie’s face, she swallowed the greeting she was about to utter. Rosalie was trying to say something, opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to make a sound. Grandmother extended her hand and said, “Rosalie, you scare me. What is it?”
“It’s Ronnie…” Rosalie said in a low voice. “He came home with a terrible headache, so terrible… He said, ‘Mama, I can’t take it!’ He held his head under the cold water tap but that did not make it better. And he laid himself down and never got up again. An aneurysm, the doctor called it. Did you ever hear such a thing?”

Is this really how it happened? Sandra wonders. It was all so long ago. Why did Rosalie come in person? Didn’t she have a phone? How soon after Ronnie’s death did this visit take place?
Sandra watches again how–without a word–her grandmother takes Rosalie by the elbow and walks her up the garden path, to the little shrub with pale green leaves and dark brown flowers. How she breaks off a sprig of the flowers and folds Rosalie’s fingers around it.
“Smell this!” she says, “It’s called ‘chimney sweep’. It’s what Gregoire used to seduce me. He came riding his horse by my father’s kitchen garden when I was gathering string beans for dinner, and pulled a flower just like this one out of his pocket. ‘Ever seen this before, Mademoiselle?’ Those were the first words he spoke to me. Men are so useless, really, so useless.”
“Why?” Sandra wanted to know, “Tell me why?”
She’d know better than to ask. The shared misery hung almost palpable in the air.
Many years later, on the day of Gregoire’s funeral, Celeste had said to her, “If you knew what he was like, you wouldn’t cry your eyes out over him. He was seeing another woman. He never gave her up, the tart,” Sandra had never heard the word used in this sense but she understood. The rage in her grandmother’s voice was like a slap in the face. How she had hated her then. That night she dreamed of her grandfather offering a chocolate flower to a faceless woman.

“Can I help you find something?” An anorexic girl in green overalls with dyed-black hair and a little silver ring in her eyebrow looks at Sandra with some concern.
“Yes…no…in fact, yes,” she hears herself say. “I don’t know what it’s called in English, but the flowers are sort of chocolate-colored.”

***