Land of Flowers, Land of Light

Anthony Varallo

Editor’s note: This story is an excerpt from the new novel The Lines (University of Iowa Press).

What the mother tells the children is that they will be spending two weeks at Gumma’s house. In Florida. Just the two of them. Without her. “But how will we get to Florida?” the boy asks.

“Duh,” the girl says. “In a plane.”

“But,” the boy says, “by ourselves?”

“So? It’s no big deal,” the girl says, even though she’s sort of lying, because she too cannot imagine getting on a plane with her brother and ascending into the sky. Might as well launch the two of them to the moon.

“Your grandmother will meet you at the airport,” the mother explains. “And the stewardesses know you’re traveling without an adult. They’ll keep an eye on you and make sure you get to where you’re going.” The mother tries to appear cheery, but the children detect a whiff of unease nonetheless. “Who knows,” she continues, “it might even be kind of fun?”

“I won’t go!” the boy cries.

“Don’t be a baby,” the girl says. Then, “I’ll protect you.”

But on the day of the flight, the girl seems as nervous as the boy is. Their mother waits with them at the gate and even accompanies them down the jetway, where a smiling stewardess introduces herself as Joann and promptly gifts them each with captain’s wings, a model plane, and an airplane activity book she knows they’re going to love. “Now tell Mom you love her and that Joann is going to take great care of you, okay?” Joann says.

“We love you,” the boy says.

“Bye, Mom,” the girl says.

The mother holds them tight. Cries a little. Says she loves them. Makes them promise to call her when they get there.

“We promise,” the girl says.

“Joann is going to take great care of us,” the boy says, and everyone laughs, except the boy, who sometimes doesn’t get what people think is funny.

But the boy is right: Joann does take great care of them. Joann brings them snacks and drinks. Joann replaces a dull crayon with a brighter one. She can also explain everything, which is sort of nice. When the plane dips, Joann says, “That’s just light chop,” and when the plane seems to be bouncing on a diving board, Joann says, “Just means we’re winning the battle with good ol’ gravity!” And when the captain announces he’s going to leave the fasten seat belt light on for the remainder of the flight, Joann says, “Just a precaution, but let me know if you need me to walk you to the bathroom, okay?” The children pour ginger ale over ice cubes the shape of broken teeth. Ginger ale is a treat for the children, who prefer cola, but up here, at thirty-thousand feet, ginger ale is the sudden drink of choice, the one Joann recommends, the one nearly all the passengers seem to be drinking too. If only we flew around on planes all day, the girl thinks, Canada Dry would eclipse Coca-cola.

When the plane arrives, Joann accompanies them to the gate. “Now, what does your grandma look like?” she asks.

The girl scans the group of people standing in the waiting area, one heartfelt reunion yielding to the next, and says, “We don’t know.” Joann laughs, says, “Well, I’m sure your grandma will know what you two sweethearts look like.”

“We never see her,” the boy says.

“Well, that will make her so happy to see you then, I bet.”

“She calls us on the phone,” the boy says.

“Of course,” Joann says. “That’s what people do when they miss someone. Reach out and touch them, right?” Joann turns a cheerleader smile on them, but the children glimpse the fear at its edges: the crowd is already starting to disperse, and Gumma is nowhere in sight. “Why don’t we put our belongings over here,” Joann says, motioning them toward a kiosk, “and I’ll make a quick phone call, okay?” While Joann speaks in whispers to another employee, the boy searches the thinning crowd, not so much for Gumma, but for anyone who might return the world to the one he knows, but the airport isn’t like the world he knows, the boy is starting to learn, since it is fitted out with people pulling longhandled suitcases, the suitcase wheels spinning noisily across escalators that have forgotten to escalate, and transports people from one side of the boy’s vision to the other. The boy’s first truth about airports: someone, somewhere, is always running at full speed, at all times. Just turn your head to find the next one.

A few minutes later, Joann tells them she’s sorry, she has to leave, but the other woman at the kiosk will take them to a special place where they can wait for their grandmother. “I’m so sad to say goodbye,”

Joann says, “but I know you two will have a wonderful time with your grandma.” And the children are about to say goodbye too when Gumma materializes from wherever Gumma was, face red from exertion, breath heaving in her chest, and addresses not the children, who recognize her now from the last time they saw her—gumma is Gumma is Gumma, the girl thinks—but Joann.

“They told me gate 38, so I go to gate 38,” Gumma says, “and then they say, ‘Oh, it’s not gate 38 anymore, it’s gate 14,’ but when I get to 14, they say, ‘Go back to 38,’ and then 38 says they don’t know which gate it is anymore. You want to talk about a runaround? This is a runaround. That’s what I told the girl. I said, ‘This is a real runaround, you know that?’”

Joann says she apologizes for the inconvenience; she knows how frustrating gate changes can be—

“They ought to tell you if they’re going to change it! I said that to the girl. I said, ‘You could have told us you were going to change it instead of making everyone run around like this!’ I said, ‘I’m the customer. Don’t you care about the customer?’ I said, ‘Whatever happened to customer service?’”

Joann says they try to do everything they can to notify travelers about gate changes; she’s sorry about the grandmother’s ordeal.

“I said, ‘Whatever happed to the customer always being right?’ I said, ‘Remember that?’ Well, she didn’t have anything to say about that. She just says, ‘If you’d like to speak to my supervisor, I can call her.’ And I said, ‘I don’t have time to speak to your supervisor!’ I said, ‘I’ve got two little grandchildren waiting for me! They’re visiting me, and I’m supposed to pick them up, and now I’ve spent all this time arguing with you, all because you couldn’t tell people you were going to give us a runaround.’ I said, ‘Who knows where my grandkids are?’ I said, ‘Probably scared to death.’ I said, ‘You can tell your supervisor that.’ Well, she didn’t like me saying that, I could tell. Wouldn’t even look at me. Just picked up the phone and pretended like she was talking to somebody, but I could tell there was nobody on the line. I said to her, I said, ‘Tell your supervisor I said howdy,’ and then I just got the hell out of there.” Joann says she’s sorry, but she has to go now.

“Customer service is something you people need to learn something about,” Gumma says. “That’s for sure.”

But Joann just smiles, gives the children a quick hug, and hurries off to the jetway. The children watch her go.

“I see your mother forgot to get haircuts for you two,” Gumma says.

Florida, first impressions: the heat! The way it arrests you from all sides, even from below, making socks obsolete, your feet strapped within a flip-flop, already slick with sweat the moment you fetch Gumma’s mail from a mailbox shaped like a lighthouse. Palm trees, swaying limply in the infrequent breeze. The way sand gets between your toes even before you arrive at the beach. Thunderstorms so loud they rattle light fixtures, table lamps, silverware sheltering in a drawer. Driveways paved with crushed shells. The incredible variety of things that come in pink or turquoise—sofas, for example. Houses, for another. Seagulls following you for no real reason. The way your clothes smell like suntan lotion no matter how many times Gumma makes you put them through the wash. Sand in the washing machine. Sand in the dryer. Sand in the shower. Heat lightning.

A brown gecko riding the hood of the car, clinging to its shadow.

On the children’s second day at Gumma’s, Gumma takes them to a barber shop. “Imagine your mother sending you two down here with long hair hanging in your faces. Ridiculous.”

“But my hair is supposed to be long,” the girl protests. “That’s the way I like it.”

“Well,” Gumma says, “maybe just a trim for you, girlie. But for this young man,” she turns to the backseat where the boy is accompanying several stacks of magazines and newspapers to the salon, “for this young man, we’re getting the works.”

The works: a mustachioed barber instructs the boy to put his head down and works clippers through his spray-wet hair. Asks Gumma if he wants these sideburns trimmed up. Hands the boy a mirror the shape of a ping-pong paddle, says, “Here comes a ladykiller,” and then liberates the boy from a black cape. The boy looks in the mirror. The barber powders the stranger there, works a talcum brush behind his now too large ears.

The girl gets a one-inch trim she claims is too short and later gives in to the humiliation of crying, but only in bed when no one else is around, so it hardly even counts as crying at all.

In the evenings, Gumma takes the children for a ride in her golf cart. The cart has two pedals, one ignition switch, and a fat steering wheel impaled on a black stick. A child’s car. An implied automobile. The girl likes to sit up front with Gumma, the thrill of what’s to come, while the boy prefers the back bench, where what’s to come yields to what’s already passed. Gumma drives with one hand on the wheel, the other cradles a plastic tumbler: a margarita—two teeny-tiny glasses of green

mix, two teeny-tiny glasses of the clear stuff, topped with enough ice to make your hand go nearly numb—the girl is getting good at making Gumma’s margarita, Gumma says. When they pass over speed bumps, the ice shifts within the tumbler.

Gumma drives them to a lake, a swimming pool, a tennis court, another lake, and a footbridge barely wider than the width of the cart, all without comment. They pass into an adjoining neighborhood, one with bigger houses spaced farther apart than the ones in Gumma’s development. Here, large mossy trees trouble the sidewalks with thick roots. Carports yield to garages. Sprinklers, hidden within dense grass, tend yards whose edges are as stark and defined as the borders on a map. Gumma slows the cart before a house with a long driveway, pulls up to the curb. A newspaper, bundled with a red rubber band, rests on the driveway. Gumma turns to the boy and says, “Well, go get it.” “The newspaper?”

“The newspaper.”

“Why?”

“A friend of mine asked me to pick it up for them,” Gumma says. “Why?”

“Because,” Gumma says.

“You shouldn’t steal,” the girl says.

Gumma takes a sip from the tumbler. “Shouldn’t do lots of things.” “Fine,” the girl says. “But if anyone catches us, I’m going to say it was your idea.”

Gumma smiles. “Good plan,” she says.

“There’s no law against picking up a newspaper,” the boy says, turning to Gumma for support, but Gumma only motions him toward the driveway, chews a large ice cube, swallows it, and says, “Try running.” The boy runs. As he does at the next house and the house after that. Three houses, three newspapers. The girl folds her arms across her chest and says she never wants to ride in the golf cart again. By the fourth house, the boy and Gumma have gotten the routine down to where Gumma only has to slow the cart without stopping. The boy pumps his arms for what seems the first time. Turns out, that’s the secret of how to run faster: you’ve got to pump your arms. The boy runs, laughs.

By the end of their first week at Gumma’s, bedtime has sort of disappeared altogether. Yes, the children can go to bed if they want, and yes, there’s a bed for each of them, and yes, they know that’s what they probably should do, but why go to bed when you can stay up late and watch grown-up TV in Gumma’s living room? Shows where someone often ends up standing in a bedroom doorway witnessing something they’re

not supposed to witness; the camera zooms in, to capture their surprise. Shows without children in them. Shows where, at any moment, someone might call someone else a son of a bitch or shoot someone in the chest, an exit wound blooming across a wall. The children fall asleep on the sofa, the floor.

Mornings, their grandmother’s coffee maker clears its throat, rouses them from dull dreams.

Their father calls. How are they? They are fine, they say. The girl is on the bedroom phone; the boy is on the kitchen line. How’s Florida? Florida is also fine. Hot, but fine. Well, their father says, there’s no getting around that. True, they agree. And how is Gumma? She’s fine too, the boy says. She’s right here, do you want to talk to her? No, that’s okay, the father says. I want to talk to you two. Oh, the children say. Tell me something you did today, their father says.

“We rode in a golf cart,” the boy volunteers. “Real fast.”

“Oh?” their father says. “Is that right?” But the children can tell he isn’t really paying attention. The way his voice gets, like it’s trying to climb a high step.

“Gumma lets him drive,” the girl says.

“Does she? Well, how about that.”

“I can reach the pedals,” the boy says.

“Can not,” the girl says. “Gumma has to help him.”

“Can too!”

“Can not!”

“Can too!”

“Guys,” their father says, “cool it. Let’s have a nice conversation, okay? Does that sound okay to you two?”

“Okay,” the children say.

“Good. That’s better. Now let’s get back to our nice conversation.” “Okay.”

The children have never talked to their father across state lines before. Is there any end to separation’s offer of the unprecedented? No, the girl decides later that evening, when she expertly twists a lime into Gumma’s margarita. No, there is not.

The boy’s feet do reach the golf cart’s pedals; he has to sit at the edge of the seat and stretch his legs, uncomfortable, but worth it. In this manner, he tours Gumma’s neighborhood. The feeling of driving! The boy navigates bike paths and cul-de-sacs, crosses the footbridge that yields to the neighborhood golf course, and then circles the course, presses the pedal, lets the wind take his hair. There’s a hill near the