The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (16 page)

The night before her wedding night, a young Marigold painstakingly embroidered the nuptial sheets with tiny indecipherable doves and lambs, hoping to evoke Ines del Campo, Catholic saint of betrothed couples, bodily purity, and rape victims. She was intimate with her husband only while using that sheet, revealing to him only the parts of her body necessary for such an act. They never had any children.

After her husband’s death, Marigold lived on a diet of oatmeal, which she ate raw, and tall glasses of skim milk. She never licked the spoon after making cookies or dipped her finger in the frosting of a child’s birthday cake. She weighed a whopping seventy-five pounds. She shopped for her own clothing in the children’s department at the Bon Marché downtown and weighed her shoes down with pebbles on windy days.

Emilienne considered her own shape. She’d always been tall and thought she’d grown quite nicely into her height with age. Her once-pointed chin had developed a slight roundness, and her arms had become nice and soft, which she easily maintained with the occasional cinnamon bun or sugar cookie. She wouldn’t give up that ripeness for anything, especially not Marigold’s teacake-size breasts.

My grandmother found the effect that desserts had on her neighbor highly amusing. The possibility of tempting Marigold Pie to lose control drove Emilienne to create ever-more fantastic treats for the bakery’s menu: caramelized
crème brûlée
, napoleons, apple
tartes tatins.
It was a twisted sort of habit — one she should have put an end to years ago.

On that last day it rained, Marigold came bustling into the store as usual to sniff at the trays of shell-shaped madeleines, glazed
palmiers
, and bite-size squares of cheesecake, testing her self-control. Emilienne, still mixing the bowl of frosting, watched from the back as her neighbor frowned at the gooey mounds of cinnamon rolls, defied the creamy waves atop the lemon meringue pie, and scowled at the plate of
petits fours glacés.
Always a customer favorite, each small cake was wrapped in soft green, pink, or yellow fondant and topped with a candy rose or other sugar embellishment, looking like a sweet, tasty birthday present.

Before her neighbor had a chance to object, Emilienne marched out to the front of the store and stuck the frosting-covered spoon into Marigold’s mouth.

Few people know this feeling: what it is to give in to a long-denied desire, to finally have a taste of the forbidden. After swallowing that mouthful of frosting, Marigold stumbled backward out of the store. She forgot her umbrella, which she’d left in the corner, but arrived home completely dry just the same. In a daze, Marigold walked straight to her kitchen, tracking muddy footprints across her spotless linoleum floor. She pulled out her dusty cookbooks and began marking pages of the sweets she never allowed herself to eat. Then she tied an apron around her waist and set to making a coconut cake. Later, still wearing the apron — now covered in gratings of coconut and splashes of vanilla extract — Marigold ate the cake: the whole cake, including every lick of frosting left in the mixing bowl and on her fingertips.

Over the next few weeks, Marigold Pie became Emilienne’s best customer. She was the first to arrive at the shop every morning, sometimes even before Emilienne or Wilhelmina, licking her lips in anxious anticipation for a gooey bite of
mille-feuille.
She rarely made it back home without delving into that white box, tied with string and holding so many mouthwatering treats. Her favorites were the multicolored
macarons
, so delicately crunchy on the outside, so moist and chewy on the inside. Marigold often had to buy three. The first she ate in the bakery, the round dome top still warm from the oven, the scent of rising bread in her nostrils. The second she kept for the walk back, licking the sweet filling from her fingers. The third she tried to save for later, though, more often than not, Marigold arrived home with an empty box and a very full belly.

It became clear to everyone that Marigold Pie was changing. Her cheeks were now plump and rosy. A soft roundness had developed around her middle and the backs of her arms. One morning she awoke to find that her wedding ring, which had circled the ring finger of her right hand for forty years, was too tight. She had to pull the embedded metal from her finger with a pair of pliers. Getting dressed became laborious, what with all that new weight attached to her bottom. The soft mounds of her breasts seemed to find their way out of even the highest-necked dress. Men around the neighborhood now took a second look at Marigold when she passed on the street, and several boys found they were thinking of Widow Pie when they satisfied themselves at night — not that any of them would ever have admitted to it.

Marigold, it seemed, did not intend to stop eating. By the end of April, she could no longer cross her legs or tie her shoes. Her eyes, nose, and mouth became tiny pinpricks in a mound of billowing flesh, and the tops of her arms resembled thick, red sausages. Sundays no longer found Marigold at church, perched in her usual pew with her white gloves and red leather Bible. She was quite content to spend her days in bed, balancing piles of
macarons
across her pillow, plucking them one by one from the stack, and plopping them into her insatiable mouth. Marigold’s neighbors became concerned.

The day Marigold’s sister, Iris Sorrows, came to find what had prompted the neighbors to raise the alarm, she took one look at this bloated version of her sister and stifled a short scream. Then she called her son and insisted he come stay with his aunt for a while.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she said, patting Marigold’s puffy hand. “Nathaniel can surely fix this.” Then she went to make a pot of tea, for no other reason than to keep from staring at Marigold.

Iris was quite confident that if anyone could do something about her sister, it was her son, a very pious young man. As a boy, Nathaniel’s simple “hello” prompted neighbors to blurt out long-hidden sins or to donate new clothing to the local homeless shelter. Just the sight of him crossing the street with his mother led adulterous men to become celibate and avid hunters to develop appetites satisfied only by vegetarian recipes.

Iris Sorrows and her son lived in the broken part of Seattle, far from the magnificent Catholic church in Pioneer Square. So Iris would pack sandwiches every Sunday morning and set out with her young son for the long trek to Saint James Cathedral. When they arrived, they sat on the steps outside and ate the sandwiches before venturing in for noonday Mass. Iris wasn’t Catholic, nor could she understand the Latin recited throughout the service. She claimed she took comfort in the ambience of the holy place.

This was a lie.

Iris visited the Catholic cathedral not to light a candle for a beloved or to kneel in prayer, but to stand at the foot of the Holy Mother in a corner of the church. Iris associated deeply with the tragic beauty of the statue: the weeping eyes, the open palms, the blue folds of Mary’s skirts. She searched the eyes of Mary, the Mother of God, for a recognition of the self she saw reflected in the mirror every day and ultimately convinced herself that
her
child, too, had been conceived by the seed of the Holy Spirit, and not by an evening of sinful and confusing passion with an older married friend of her parents.

Iris had Nathaniel baptized when he was five. At the time, Nathaniel mistook the baptism water for his mother’s tears. As Nathaniel grew, so did Iris’s belief that her son had been cut from the same cloth as Saint Anthony of Padua. So she made sure he received the finest Catholic education, and she kept a journal of the little miracles that occurred in his presence — for the eventuality of his nomination to sainthood.

By age twenty-nine, Nathaniel Sorrows had been rejected by three seminary schools. He continued to live with his mother and spent both his days and nights reading Scripture and preparing for the holy work his mother so firmly believed he was meant to do. He allowed himself an hour’s break at the neighboring pub each evening for a bowl of soup and a handful of table crackers.

It should be noted that Nathaniel hadn’t grown into a handsome man. Nevertheless, there was something decidedly attractive about him. Young coeds from the nearby college were drawn to his table not with the same intensity they might approach boys who were marriage material, but rather with the determination of a ranch hand about to break in their first horse. They never ended up staying at Nathaniel’s table for long. If he had been any other man, they might have handed him their phone numbers. Instead, they went back to their rooms to throw away the contraceptives locked in their armoires and to call their grandmothers on the hallway community phone.

When Nathaniel arrived at his aunt’s house on Pinnacle Lane, carrying all of his belongings in one tiny suitcase, he arrived as a man many believed had never used his hands to point his genitals toward the toilet bowl, had never glanced down the cashier’s shirt as she made change, had never become angry at a traffic light, and never wanted more than what was given to him.

When Nathaniel Sorrows arrived at the house at the base of the hill on Pinnacle Lane, he exited the taxi and glanced around at the quiet neighborhood. And what did he see, this seemingly pious man? He spotted a pair of white and brown speckled wings behind the parched lilac bush in the next yard over.

And at that moment, an entirely new and unfamiliar feeling stirred inside him.

IF MY MOTHER KEPT
a list of the reasons she confined me to the house on the hill, she’d have a length of paper that could stretch all the way down Pinnacle Lane and trail into the waters of the Puget Sound. It could choke passing sea life. It could flap in the wind like a giant white flag of surrender atop our house’s widow’s walk. To put it simply, my mother worried. She worried about our neighbors’ reactions. Would they break me with their disparaging glances, their cruel intolerance? She worried I was just like every other teenage girl, all tender heart and fragile ego. She worried I was more myth and figment than flesh and blood. She worried about my calcium levels, my protein levels, even my reading levels. She worried she couldn’t protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, pain and love.

Most especially from love.

During that spring when the rains had disappeared, Cardigan and I spent most afternoons sprawled in the browning grass in my yard, pretending to study as Cardigan beguiled me with tales of her latest beau.

By the tender age of fifteen, my best friend, Miss Cardigan Cooper, was already well versed in the complicated attributes of physical love. Jeremiah Flannery, the boy who’d once crushed a bird’s wing under his boot, was her latest acquisition.

“The poor bastard follows me everywhere.” Cardigan snorted. “And you should see the way he stares at me. I practically have to wipe the drool from his chin before I can kiss him. It’s pathetic.” She smiled wickedly. “I love it.”

I laughed as I attempted to make sense of Cardigan’s haphazard algebra notes.

That was another thing my mother worried about: my education. She modeled my daily home-schooling lessons off of Cardigan’s messy composition books.

“Is this a five or a three?” I asked.

“No idea. Looks like an
R
to me.” Cardigan arched her back like a cat and threw her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun. I rolled my eyes. It was already late April, and though finals weren’t far off, Cardigan seemed quite content to maintain her C-minus average.

On the other side of the house, my mother was on the front porch, washing the windows in soapy methodical circles, when Henry came flying around the corner and screamed, “Pinna hurt! Pinna hurt!” His eyes were wide with fear. Trouver was right behind him, barking madly.

In one fluid motion, Viviane dropped the soapy sponge, flew down the porch stairs and around to the backyard to find me, leaving Henry on the porch, pounding his ears with his open palms. As she ran, my mother thought,
This is it. This is the reason not to love. If I didn’t love, then whatever I find, no matter how awful, wouldn’t hurt.

My mother found me lazing in the grass with Cardigan. She reached down, grabbed my arm, and yanked me upright. “What happened?” she asked, frantically looking me over for signs of injury.

“Nothing,” I replied, blinking.

Viviane dropped her hands, suddenly aware of the wild beating of her heart, the labored pull of her lungs. “Are you sure?” she asked.

I exchanged a look with Cardigan. “Yeah. We’re both fine. Are you?”

My mother looked me over closely before turning away. “Sorry. I thought — never mind.” She sighed. “Do you girls need anything?” she asked as an afterthought. I shook my head.

Good
, she must have thought, and slowly made her way back to Henry, who was frantically painting a map of our neighborhood across the front porch in soapy water.

It was just after that that Cardigan and I saw a taxicab pull up to Marigold Pie’s house. A man got out and retrieved a raggedy-looking suitcase from the trunk, then gave a halfhearted wave to the cab as it pulled away. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Marigold’s visitor carried a well-used journal in his back pocket. He took the journal everywhere he went.