Delicacy of words

Wallflowers
Eliza Robertson
Bloomsbury
2015, pp 294, Rs 480

These delicately crafted stories probe the human capacity to cope with loss and reach out for intimacy. The rich, vivid images range from beautiful to eerie and beyond. Nature can be magnificent. Voluptuous but subtle reminders of its creepy and sinister aspects lurk around the corner. When rain falls, “fat toads fall from the sky and fill the hanging geranium pots.”

The outside world reflects the inner mindscape through “ripe, photosynthetic bathrooms” and songs whose “notes screamed all at once like a raven’s shriek and surging water and the whine of a jade knife against cedar.” The recurrent themes of sorrow and loss are reflected through characters teetering on the verge of disaster, or trying to find their feet in the wake of an emotional tsunami. Their deepest sorrows and fears are too complex to be expressed in a straightforward narration. The nuances and significance are gradually brought out in painful bits with the help of opulent images. In ‘Who Will Water the Wallflowers?’, a young girl cat-sits for a neighbour, while a torrential downpour “spills down the runnel of the road the pavement worn by all-season tires, roller blades, the cloven hoofs of mule deer.

The water searches for hold in ground softer than cement, in the mossy ditches, and farther, the woods, in hot sinks of soil where thousands of eyeless creatures rise to sip at the roots of trees.” Soon, a flash flood will inundate her peaceful community, washing away her neighbours and her mother, as she tries to cross the street to reach her child. In ‘Worried Woman’s Guide’, Bea is recovering from a physically and emotionally devastating mastectomy. The overripe artichokes in her garden mirror her own physical and mental state. “Jumbo globes the colour of lizard bellies bobbed off the stalks like street lamps… The flesh would be stringier than floss if she didn’t pick them by tomorrow. Time passes like molasses when you’re bedridden… Now her sill was bare save for a line of nine avocado pits.”

The predicaments of these characters can touch readers to the core. In ‘Where Have you Fallen, Have You fallen?’, a young girl has to rebuild her life “notch to groove, vertebra by vertebra” after losing her brother and mother in a boating accident. She trades her terrible secret with a new friend while catching slugs. “The boy pinched another slug from the chips… A pearly string of slime linked it to the ground… ‘My mom and brother died,’ she said. ‘On that fishing boat.’…The silence stretched as the boy bent low to peer again under the peony leaves.”

‘Ship’s Log’ is about a little boy coping with the loss of a loving grandfather. He whimsically digs a pit in the garden along with his grandmother, imagining that it will be a tunnel to China. “In China, the sea is made from tea… Most of the South China Sea (near Hong Kong) tastes like jasmine, but the Gulf of Tonkin is rosehip, and the Bay of Bengal, chai.” These quirky  descriptions gradually reveal the child’s loneliness, and his shock and fear as he realises that his dear grandmother is not waking up.

In ‘Roadnotes’, a young woman undertakes a road trip through the North American countryside. In letters to her estranged brother, she shares views of “three sunflower fields with flowers oily and yellow and spread-eagled beneath the sun, and then I passed a field of dead sunflowers, their heads bowed to the dirt like burned-out street lamps.” In her mother’s car trunk, she finds beloved objects of their shared childhood in a dysfunctional family, and begins to understand the imperfect mother.

In some stories, redemption comes after sadness and loss. ‘Slimebank Taxonomy’ is a beautiful story of a single mother with postpartum depression, who learns to love her baby again. “The tears gathered in the dips beneath her eyes, and Gin watched how the lines graphed the curve of her cheek, eye to nose to lip. How they dripped off her chin and seeped white as radio static into the cotton collar of her nightgown.”

The author introduces interesting stylistic angles to these stories. ‘Thoughts, Hints, and Anecdotes’ resembles a Victorian style etiquette manual, where marital abuse shows through recipes and advice on a lady’s deportment. ‘Missing Tiger’, ‘Camels Found Alive’ is a quirky story about a young man who runs off with someone else’s pregnant girlfriend.

In a world where “the excavators (look) like moon diggers or lunar trenchers, though the way they clang their necks in the mud they look like bathing birds”, or where the pregnant lover’s belly “sits on her hips like a freshly domed igloo… (where) invisible children sleighed over her pelvis and added fistfuls more snow, packing the ice smooth with seal-mitted palms”, the elaborate imagery can overwhelm. At points, all the characters seem to perceive and describe their world in similar ways. The lines distinguishing the characters’ personalities can blur, and merge with the author’s own voice.