The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb Page B

asked.
    â€œI was out,” I told her, surprised that she talked. I was feeling too much mota, and way strange. I wanted to go to that room where I slept.
    â€œI wish I were too,” she said.
    That sounded like her, the mom I knew from before. The one who never sat around and watched TV. Or drank beer—there was a beer bottle next to her. That was crazy. My mom didn’t drink beer, I think especially because it was fattening.
    â€œI’m bored,” she said.
    The phone was next to the beer bottle, the cord across the rug of the living room. She’d had one put in so she could have her own phone and number and then she got the long cord so she could move around with it. I knew about this because, unlike a few, this was one of their arguments that was easy to follow. They were having these other kinds of raising-the-voice-a-little-bit discussions that weren’t, if you asked me, much about what they were talking about.

    â€œWhat do you watch?” she asked, meaning the TV. “I’m trying to like TV.” She was serious even. “Can you put it on something you like and come sit with me?” She’d had her head on the arm of the couch, laying down, but now she sat up.
    I walked closer and turned so I could see the television, but I didn’t want to sit. “I don’t watch anything regular. I don’t really watch that much.” At this moment, all mota high, it was impossible for me: TV was crazy! The noises! The light! The
normal
people in it were like nobody in a real world, the one I walked around in.
    â€œYou don’t like the TV in your room?”
    â€œSure, it’s okay,” I said.
    â€œYou never had one before.”
    I nodded.
    â€œYou don’t like it though?”
    â€œI guess it’s pretty good to have in there,” I said. “I guess I don’t always want to watch.” I was wanting to leave. I wasn’t going to try to explain to her how I listen to the radio and watch the lights and look for colors and get squares and circles and stars and my own planets and moons and suns, and all that, right into my head, especially since I was messed up good and this was really hard because the TV was fucking crazy light and sound.
    â€œYou want me to make him get you a better one?”
    â€œTV?”
    â€œSí, m’ijo, a better TV.”
    I was so messed up it almost seemed like what she was saying was because I’d been smoking out. “No, I don’t need a new TV set. Thanks though.”
    There was a fat, tall gray space here. I was trying to think of the right way to go away without making her ask me what was up or wrong or whatever, when what came up was that it was her too, that she went some places by herself too.

    Then she just talked, broke into what I was thinking to myself and into what was playing on the TV. “I’m sorry,” she said.
    It sounded like it had an echo, like she was talking from a television. I didn’t know what to say, what I should say, what she meant, nothing.
    The silence became a fog.
    â€œThere’s nothing ever good on,” she said finally.
    Her voice this time was like sunlight, and right then I thought of her that way: as a sun. She was the sun, and so much was winter, cloudy, dark, all moonless.
    â€œAt first I didn’t mind,” she said. “All I had to do was change the channel.”
    â€œMaybe you can call somebody instead,” I suggested, looking at the phone. “You like to talk.”
    She looked at me. I think she realized I’d heard her talk on the phone. I didn’t mean it that way, and I didn’t want her to know.
    â€œI was thinking of Ceci,” I said. “Don’t you wonder how she is?” I wondered about her, if my mom ever talked to her. She never talked about her, I never asked. I don’t know why I was bringing this up, and now. It just came out of me.
    The TV made all the noise for a little