Three Stories

Cemetery Flowers

Her bedroom faced the reverse side of a cemetery, so that, sitting on the edge of her bed, looking out the bedroom window, I watched the corner of the cemetery where wreaths and wilted flowers and other spent offerings were discarded in three blue trash bins. The flowers were tossed at the bins and often there were piles of flowers fallen on the street and flowers poking from the open mouths of the bins. Sometimes while I was sitting there, I watched people passing the bins, noticing the flowers—many of which were not so wilted. Once I saw a man bend and pick up four or five of them, arranging a nice bouquet in his fist before walking off. I imagined him taking the flowers home to his wife, or maybe taking them to a woman who was not his wife, a woman to whom he would give the flowers and say something like, “I was thinking of you.” And though he would not tell her where the flowers had come from, it would be true, of course, that seeing the flowers, he had thought of her.

Dissatisfaction

Standing on the back porch, overlooking the yard where the child was playing with rocks in cups, she held her face taut in a moment of indecision.

“Why is it I have the feeling things are not really happening?” she sometimes asked. Tequila and coconut water was all we ever drank anymore and it was all that was left in the cabinet beneath the hanging tapestry. We had once, years before, ambitiously designated this cabinet our cellarette.

When I told her the story about the American filmmaker, she scoffed. He had been interviewed on a French television program, and during the interview he struggled to articulate the reason why he maintained an aversion to certain combinations of color—for example, blue and green—when nature had filled everything around him with combinations of blues and greens.

“It’s simple,” she said, sipping her tequila. “He doesn’t know what he wants, and he is hoping that his desire will reveal itself if he insults everything he already has.” Meanwhile, in the yard, the child was filling his pockets with sand. Somewhere beyond the fence that encircled the yard, a man was shouting about mattresses. In the neighbor’s house, a ten-year-old boy was flipping nervously through the pages of a magazine. Elsewhere a woman skinning potatoes was sucking blood from her finger, where the peeler cut her knuckle. The child walked unsteadily through the yard to the porch and found me. I placed my hand on his back to settle him. Not knowing how to whisper properly, he pressed his mouth hard against my ear and spoke a muffled sound into the side of my head. His hot breath and his flattened nose conveyed well enough what I couldn’t make out in his words.

Green Grapes

And then it all made sense on the afternoon of Pearl Harbor Day, as I watched her sitting in the bay window eating a cluster of green grapes. She plucked each grape from the cluster and held it between two fingers and bit it like an apple, taking two or sometimes three bites of each grape. She held the half-bitten remains near her lips as she chewed what was in her mouth and swallowed. She sat with her legs crossed at the knee, teetering on the edge of the narrow window seat with the light from the window bright against the side of her face. I had been told sometime before that the masseter muscle in the jaw was the strongest muscle in the human body and the muscle most capable of force. When she turned to look at me where I was sitting and watching her, I saw in her happy eyes how truly drunk she was and I imagined how sweet the grapes must taste.