The Neighbor Who Gave Me Flowers

Published in “Oasis” 1995

            A year after Doug and I bought our house, I was walking down Fifth Street.  The night was brisk and still: no wind, no cars, no people.  It was as silent as the inside of an eight ball.  You often get nights like this on the northern prairie, but you aren’t always aware of them.  There was just enough moon out to show there was land, and the land looked as if it could extend forever.  I know flatness bothers some people–it makes them feel lost, that there is no end and they’re never to going finish or get anywhere soon.  There’s no place to hide.  To me flatness is openness.  It means opportunity.  Most visitors will dismiss the northern prairies as wheat and weeds, missing the bigger picture.  I feel sorry for them, that they can’t see the subtler things, things that might be little, but things that are important all the same.  You have to be careful here.

            So I was out walking, without a hat, the mid-February cold penetrating right down to my skull. I was worried about getting frostbite on my ears, but I snuck up to my neighbors’ front picture window anyway, and I peeked in.  They had the same Bob Dylan poster tacked on their wall that we have on ours, except that ours is in the kitchen.  Big Ears was slumped on a spongy couch, drinking beer, staring comatose at the TV.  I thought about what I was going to say, something like: “Thanks for the cheese curls and beer.”  Or, “Thank you sincerely for your kind­ness,” but it sounded so corny and silly that I rapped against the window instead, pretending to be a squirrel.  Then I hid.

            For that first year that we had the house, nearly every morning at five, Big Ears would be outside, gunning his Oldsmo­bile.  Without the cottonwood there, the glare from the Oldsmo­bile’s headlights comes right in through our bedroom window.  Their lemon-yellow heap, which they park beneath our pine tree, the best tree on our lot now, never starts first try, so Big Ears is out there for fifteen minutes. 

            Doug, my husband, has to be at Emerson’s Meat Market by seven.  He works twelve hour days so he can buy a new car, and he needs his sleep.  He stands in front of the bedroom window (if I stand up with him, on my tiptoes, I can see right into their kitchen) and shakes his fist out at the glaring lights, but I’m sure they never see us.  Even though he has a thin chest–Doug is asthmatic–his arms are thick and strong, from cutting through flesh all day. 

            “Dammit,” Doug says.  “What the hell is wrong with those guys?  That’s what happens when you get transients in the neigh­borhood.” 

            Out of their pickup they get the jumper cables, and Big Ears generally connects them wrong.  You’d think that coming from Michigan they’d know more about cars.  Then Toothpick Legs, he comes out in an army supply trench coat and blanket like some chief.  The dawn is lit up with sparks and punctuated with Tooth­pick Legs’ screams: “Are you trying to kill me?  I said wait.  Wait!”

            Doug lies down, molds the pillow around his head and mut­ters: “Go ahead, kill him.  Maybe I’d be able to sleep past five.”

            Then the Oldsmobile dies, and it starts all over.

            We moved out of the trailer court because we wanted space and privacy.  Who can sleep at night with some guy yelling at his girlfriend?  With some jaded mother slapping her kids around?  I was so excited about owning a house, and owning land, that last spring (our first spring in our house) I planted a huge vegetable garden: tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans.  I’m not a flower planter; Doug and I think flowers are too frivolous, too fragile for the northern prairie’s climate.  We’d always had vegetable gardens in Darvy, big ones that my father used his tractor and cultivator on, so I knew what I was doing.  I planted the seeds at the proper depth, and I watered and hoed.  Everything died.  That wasn’t all: that spring I also found out we had bought a house next door to Big Ears and Toothpick Legs.  Who would ever have thought of checking out the neighbors after all the problems we’d had?  We initially bought house because of its huge cotton­wood.  It’s limbs had stretched from one end of our house to the other, like a mother, opening her arms wide for her children. 

            Big Ear’s real name is Sebastian. 

            “Sebastian–another beer!  Hey!  Did you hear me?”  That’s the neighbors’ buddies: dark sunglasses, helmetesque stringy hair, cutoffs, basketball stomachs and white skinny legs covered with mosquito bites and scabs.  Leg acne, Doug calls it.

            “They’re disgusting slobs,” Doug says.  Doug changes his shirt at least twice a day.  Every morning, and it doesn’t matter if we’re visiting relatives in Darvy, he washes his feet in the tub.  

            “They’re also transients,” he says, looking suspiciously at their big cars and those Michigan license plates.  “They’ll work a year or two, then they’ll be gone.  And they drink all the time.” 

            Doug had spent his life getting away from lazy people who played black jack and drank so much that Mondays they rarely made it to work.  That’s why we left Darvy.  “Inbred and without ambition,” Doug says.  “You and I, Rachel: we’re different.  We’re going to do more with our lives.”  Doug didn’t want any­thing to do with that other kind of person.  And now look who lived next door.

            That summer I got pregnant and I quit work at the grocery store.  It had taken me five years to get pregnant, and now, we wanted to do everything right.  We didn’t want any harm to come to the baby.  We knew this baby was going to change our lives, and we were both ready for this change. 

            When I got bored of shopping and watching TV, I started driving around.  I found out that Sebastian worked at the conven­ience store off of Highway 94.  Sebastian’s store gets a lot of cosmopolitan-type customers: small families from the big cities out East driving to Yellowstone or Glacier.  Toothpick Legs works at the convenience store near the Missouri River.  That store has a camper dump, and sells expensive bait to the tourists.  Their friend with the North Dakota plates, I later gleaned, was the regional manager, and he could be found at stores all over the city.  The convenience stores have infested our small city like the prairie dogs have infested the wheat fields.

            When not working or sleeping off a hangover, Sebastian and Toothpick Legs would be in their kitchen, hunkered over, guzzling beer and slapping down cards so hard their kitchen table would wobble. 

            After cleaning the house (Doug has a thing about cleanli­ness), I would be in the bedroom resting, and their voices would come in through my window, and it was as if we are all in the same room.

            “Anything happen at work today?” Toothpicks Legs would say.

            “What?”

            Toothpick Legs would raise his voice: “I said: anything happen at work today?” 

            “One real nice looker.”

            “Yeah?”

            “What?”

            “You, Sebastian, have a hearing problem.”

            “What?”

            Toothpick Legs would be just about screaming.  “Who was at the store?” 

            “Red mini-skirt.  This red eyeshadow, black hair.  It was becoming though.  Black midriff.  Breasts like. . .”  They would start whispering, as if they knew I was listening.

            “My God,” Toothpick Legs would say.  “Then what did you do?”

            “What could I do?  Her husband was there.  But she had class.  And she was right there in front of me.  This far away.  She smelled wonderful.  Like soap.”

            “You, Sebastian, watch too much TV.”

            Two or three swigs and they’d crunch their Old Milwaukee cans.  They’d shake their heads, slap down more cards, change the radio station and get another beer.  Most mornings I would find their beer cans in our backyard, near the swingset.  The swingset has two metal seats that are slanted so steeply they’re almost impossible to use.  The metal is a speckled green and red rust, but it was a freebie along with the half-filled sandbox from the previous owners.  Doug keeps meaning to take the swingset away.  I tell him it doesn’t bother me.

            Once Sebastian put up a sign on their crabgrass and dust front lawn.  It said: “Camper For Sale–$200.”  An eggshell camper, white and baby blue exterior.  I walked past it several times.  From the end of their dirt driveway, I made out a stove, a bench, and a bed and a fridge as big as a full grocery bag.  A camper for two, maybe three.  It must have been thirty years old, as old as me, but for two-hundred dollars!  Everybody here has campers.  I had been wanting to go to the Badlands for the week­end, and with a camper we could go in style.  Doug believes tents are dirty.  “How can you possibly stay clean in a tent?” he says.  The tourist hotels are too expensive.

            I was walking toward the camper, prepared to bargain, when I suddenly felt shy and scurried home.

            The next week I popped in Sebastian’s convenience store.  Although I was pregnant, it wasn’t yet visible.  I was wearing my best jeans.  Doug says they fit me like a glove; if they fit, wear them, is our motto.  We have other mottoes too: Try, try, try again; Laugh and the world laughs with you; and Cry and you cry alone.  Remember the Alamo!  Sebastian’s pin-prick eyes examined me through his amber aviator glasses, maybe thinking he knew me.  But we kept to our house, and he and Toothpick legs kept to theirs.  Then he sees so many people in a day.  How could he possibly remember them all?  

            During that time that I was pregnant, I thought a lot about our cottonwood.  In winter, although it had no leaves, it pro­tected us from the Canadian Northwesterlies.  In spring and summer, robins used to stand on the branches, near the tree’s insides, and peep.  They had decided our cottonwood was the last majestic tree on the prairie; it was their stronghold, and they meant to keep it. 

            In September the leaves would clap against one another making music when a breeze came by: stop and go, a rustle, a full tree patter, then a crescendo of rustles.  It was a pure, sooth­ing music you could listen to day and night.  There was something concentrated and powerful in those leaves, but you had to pay attention, to know it was there.  Life is subtle, sometimes tenuous on the northern prairies. 

            That tree was so loaded with life.  It would make me laugh: I too, had felt full of life, brimming over, like a soda poured on ice-cream.  But these feelings came too early, like my con­tractions.   

            When the leaves just started turning golden, I knew our tree would look like something from a fairy tale.  But then I noticed, and this I did not want to admit, that about half of the cotton­wood had no leaves, or the leaves were shriveled.  I examined the cottonwood everyday, looking for signs of green.  But the branches were dry.  When you snapped them, they weren’t moist inside.

            Shortly after my discovery, Doug and I were outside barbecu­ing ribs, and he looked at the tree and said: “It’s dead.  No two ways about it.  It’s dead.”

            “Look at the leaves over here, Doug,” I said, grabbing his arm in a persistent way.  “You can’t find healthier leaves this side of the Missouri.  Maybe this part of the tree is dormant.  It’s recovering from something.”  That even sounded good to me.

            “I can tell when something’s dead.”  He went back to the grill and turned the ribs.  He cooked all our meat thoroughly.  He didn’t like the sight of blood; it reminded him too much of his job.  His job makes him an authority on what’s dead, so I respected his opinion.  “It’s dead,” he said.  “Believe me.  It’s dead.”  

            I called the city wildlife services and they sent out a forester.

            “Could be that blight from Minnesota or Wisconsin,” the forester said.  “Even as far away as Michigan.”

            Michigan, I thought.

            The city forester looked like he knew a lot about trees.  He was lean, and his face was sunburnt and his hair was whiter than the cotton that the tree shed. 

            “You could prune it back, and it would take a couple of years to know if it would make it, but in the meantime,” and he paused and looked at the stubby pines Doug had planted, “it would look funny.  In fact, it would probably always look funny.”  Then he took a sample of a dead branch and a sample of a live one which he sent off to a university.

            Whereas I sit around daydreaming, in states of indecision, Doug gets things done.  In this way we complement each other.  In retrospect, I probably should have fought Doug harder, but I was still so happy about the house, and being pregnant, that I didn’t want anything–not even the smallest thing–to come between us.

            The next week four men came out.  My best jeans, the tight ones, were drying on line near the tree.  I let them hang there.  Using one arm each, the men moved the swingset.  They brought out their power saws.  In two hours they had the tree down.  I stood at the back door the whole time watching them with their ropes and saws, hearing the drop of heavy branches: thump, thump, thump. like bodies falling.  I watched hundreds of leaves, some still green, flutter to the ground.  It was the leaves that hurt, the fact that they were still green.  I wanted to go out and tell them to stop, that it was a mistake, that the cottonwood, at least some part of it, was still alive.  As they pushed and pulled I imagined the tree aching.  It took another three hours to cut it up and haul it off.  Where were they taking it?  What happens to diseased trees?  When only a few inches of trunk remained, they brought in a trunk-eating machine. 

            After they left I went outside to investigate.  There were two small piles of fresh shavings, and moist dirt raked into it.  I knelt down and felt the dirt.  Then I felt sick, as if some­thing inside of me had died.  Leaves and twigs made a trail from where the cottonwood had been to where the men had parked their trucks.  That too, would be gone: blown into nothing by the wind.  Dust to dust.  I shuddered, thinking that maybe they had taken out the roots too, although I knew this was impossible: the roots were too expansive; you’d have to dig up the whole house to get to them.  Still, no one would ever guess that a great cottonwood had stood here.  No one but me would remember it. 

            In early February, not quite a year after we bought the house, a terrible cold front blew in.  Thirty below for days and the wind blowing cars off roads.  The air was so icy and dry it couldn’t snow.  It hurt your lungs to breath.  The naked sun made your eyes ache.  The snow on the ground was dirty, and old.  I have always had uneasy feeling about February.  February three years ago Doug had broke his arm playing ice hockey.  February was when my uncle, who farmed up north, drowned himself.  I should not have been getting contractions for another month, but suddenly I was in the hospital with Doug beside me, squeezing my hand as if he believed that would expedite my labor.  Things happened too slowly, then too quickly because when the doctor asked me if I wanted to hold my baby, I told him no. 

            “Look,” the doctor said gently, holding up the baby.  He was used to holding up babies, but not this kind. 

            Doug couldn’t look; he could barely talk, and he left.

            The baby, a girl, was just like a doll, except her eyes were closed.  She didn’t cry.  There was nothing wrong with her, except that she was stillborn. 

            “The cord’s twisted.”  The doctor couldn’t come right out and say: you killed your baby, but this was what I thought back then, that I killed my baby.

            He held the baby out once more, then he took her away. 

            Only after the baby was gone, did it become clear that I’d made a big mistake, one of the big ones of my life.  I wanted to ask for her back, but what if they said no?  What if they had already done to her what they do with such babies?  Right then I decided I wasn’t going to make any more mistakes.   

            When they stopped giving me tranquilizers, I told our rela­tives: “Go home.  Go back to Darvy.  Leave me alone.  I need to think.”  I didn’t have the energy to explain or defend myself.    For Doug, especially, this had been torture.  This event was out of his realm.  I didn’t want anybody telling me what I should do or how I should feel; I certainly did not want the hocus-pocus stuff about God and faith and destiny.  “Save it for somebody else.  Share it with them,” I told my relatives.  Because it wasn’t worth it to talk anymore; there just wasn’t anything else to say.

            At first no one wanted to leave, but I made it clear if they didn’t leave, then I would.  “Doug,” I said quietly, “Go back to Darvy.  Take them with you.”  I only asked him once, and he left.

            In retrospect, it was partly my hormones going crazy.  My breasts were impacted with milk, so some part of my body still thought there was a baby.  My thoughts were not consistent.  I brooded over the occasional Diet Coke I’d had, and how I had salted my corn at lunch.  When night fell and I was alone, I worried about the baby appearing before me, so I slept with a light on.  

            For a week I got up and drank so much coffee I don’t know how I slept, but I slept, and I slept a lot.  After the coffee I walked to my convenience store, and it didn’t matter if the wind chill was 60 below; I went to make sure I could still go out.  Death was hovering around me, waiting.

            Once, in an act of great courage, I gathered up the sheets–I was sweating a lot–and went to the laundromat.  As I listened to the mothers scream at their children, I came close to tears.  Back home, I slept.  Everyday I slept and I slept all afternoon, until evening.  Then I sat on our new rocker and I stared at the Oldsmobile, which sat immobile beneath a street light.  I was staring into the twilight as it became night, staring inside and outside, trying to find what I had missed, what had eluded me.  For sure there was something for me to learn, and I had to learn it before this time of my life passed.              After several days of my routine–and who knew when it was going to end?–I woke up from a nap and found a note from a delivery service saying they had left flowers for me next door.          Sebastian answered the door.  There was a fine orange dust on his upper lip, just below his mustache.  Right away he gave me flowers, red roses.  The flowers were alive, and I considered leaving them with Sebastian because I had so little skill with living things, but I did not think he would understand, and I could not explain.  The flowers made me feel discombobulated–like being in a new apartment and being unsure of where to put things.  Today should be my birthday, I thought, or I should be going out to dinner. 

            “Something bad?”  Sebastian looked down at the floor.  He was flustered, unused to talking to women.

            I nodded because I had a hard time talking.  Having not talked in days, I wasn’t sure I even had a voice.  A small card, impaled on a clear plastic pitchfork said, in black cursive writing, Doug’s writing: “Can I come home?”

            “I’m sorry.  Here.”  He pulled out a chair for me.  Some­thing from the floor stuck to my shoes.  When I sat down the table wobbled, even more than ours.  The kitchen smelled like cheese-curls and beer.  I was right about that: Sebastian offered me a beer and indicated a bowl of cheese-curls.  It didn’t look like they had much other food.  The cheese-curls were stale, but I hadn’t eaten in days and they tasted surprisingly good with the cold beer.

            His kitchen was an exact duplicate of ours: the white hasti­ly painted cupboards, the hummocky linoleum floor, the plastic on the windows.  It struck me then that all houses in our neighborhood were built from exactly the same plan.  A track house.  I felt cheated, but more than that, humiliated.

            Sniffing back my tears, I drank the beer.  Sebastian drank his too, looking away whenever I started to raise my head.  This was the first time I had seen Sebastian up close and he didn’t look like the disgusting slob Doug had made him out to be.  He looked younger too.  When he took off his aviator glasses to rub his eyes I saw how soft his eyes were.  I hoped he had a girl­friend, a person who would not take unnecessary advantage of his good nature. 

            Then to my surprise, I said: “You need a block heater in your car.  You plug it in at night and it keeps the oil hot.  Then your car starts in up the morning.  Even when it’s thirty below.”

            “Huh?”  He looked around, startled, as if he didn’t believe the voice came from me.

            “You probably don’t have them in Michigan.  They’re about fifty dollars.”

            “Block heaters?” he said, so I could tell he could hear me. 

            “Any mechanic can install one.  Doug–he’s my husband–might even put one in for you.” 

            He nodded.

            “You don’t have big ears,” I said. 

            “Big ears?”

            I smiled, just a little.

            When I finished the beer he offered me another, but I shook my head no.  I had already said enough, and I was feeling low again.  As I was getting up to leave, he said, “Wait.”

            He went into the closet, and in our house this is where we keep our mop and vacuum cleaner, and brought out an industrial-sized bag of cheese-curls.  No labels on the bag.  It stood from the floor to my waist.

            “Here.”  Sebastian held out the bag.  Then he put two cold Old Milwaukees in my coat pockets, gave me my flowers, and opened the door.

            That night, I sat on my rocker eating the cheese-curls and drinking the beer.  I put the roses on the windowsill where I could see them.  There, I fell asleep, a deep sleep, and I woke up with the sun, and proceeded out to the grave.  I took a flower with me.  At first I got nervous, thinking that it was the ceme­tery near the strip mall.  It was all concrete, no trees.  But it wasn’t that one.  The one we put the baby in was remote.  There was a barn in the distance.  And there were some trees. 

            The grave was in the baby section and I found it easily as it had no snow on it.  It was as big as two sheets of notebook paper.  The ground was frozen, and I could tell they’d had a hard time digging.  I don’t know how they did it.  It was very cold that morning, and my breath moved away from me like whispers.  I knelt down in the snow and laid down the rose.  The grave was filled with clods of dirt, hard as rocks.  It came to me that I could easily remove the clods; they probably didn’t need to put babies six feet down.  And there was no one around: no one but me and the wind and the snow, but I let it go.