Marigold and the Historian
Part Two
In which Giselle and Marigold discuss an uncomfortable topic, Tommy Martin talks about kazoos, and Marigold and Henry meet one another formally.
Living with Giselle required a little bit of technique and a whole hell of a lot of patience. If you were to count all the years that we spent sneaking out and returning home before dawn and combine them with the countless sleepovers and camping trips that our parents had actually approved of, enough years would accumulate to qualify us as siblings. I could predict each incoming wave of eccentrics like a chief meteorologist. I could tell whether she was crying for attention, slap happy with exhaustion or about to go on an hour-long rant about discount yarn or what happened last Saturday on A Prairie Home Companion. Perhaps even before Giselle, herself could form those impending tangents.
Why, I even knew the exact duration of time that she took in the bathroom taming her only somewhat "naturally curly hair" and about every secret salon visit to get a semi-perm. This happened every four months and was, more or less, a back-alley transaction. She would tie on a headscarf, sneak into the salon through the back door and have the procedure done in the waxing room, so that nobody else would see. I would occasionally have the pleasure of going to the ATM and driving the getaway car, rendering Giselle, myself and her hair stylist the only people in Waterford who knew that her hair required additional work to get its famous bounce and shine.
I could handle all of this and so much more. Giselle could handle me, too. She deciphered what was happening the very instant that we embraced at the airport and was anything but afraid to make light of my severance from Portland. She even trilled a joyful "put a hummingbird on it" as she slapped the passenger seat in her minivan, inviting me to join her. I didn't mind such jargon. She teased me about the espresso beans, praised the fact that I still wore deodorant, criticized how I had infused said deodorant with one drop patchouli/one drop sandalwood and from there, she tiptoed into uncomfortable territory.
"I'm gonna need to fatten you up, girlfriend!" She reached for my wrist as I connected my phone to the auxiliary cord. "Those arms of yours look even noodlier than they did the last time that I saw you!"
"Noodlier, Zippy? Is that even a word?" Smugness was my only defense in this situation. She had gone straight for the jugular and I knew that there would be no living with her until we got past this hurdle.
"I've seen precooked pieces of angel hair pasta that were bulkier than all of your appendages combined!" Giselle raved, "Please tell me that you've had something other than coffee today."
I sunk down in my seat and looked at the landscape. It was still golden, with splotches of dusky blue bleeding through the sunset like a time lapsed watercolor painting that covered both sky and earth. "I had peanuts."
Giselle wrinkled her nose and merged onto the interstate. "You know why they call them peanuts, right? It goes back to the days of old when people said things like, "My Pa is making peanuts working for that bank!" or "Do you know how much money teachers make on an annual basis- peanuts! You follow?"
"Yes, yes," I quietly fantasized about opening my door, rolling across the road and into the ravine, "peanuts mean 'nothing'. Even though they have enough sodium in them to give a small child a stroke."
Her nose and mouth twisted sideways again, an indication of deep thought, "You haven't gone all veggin' on me, have you?"
"Veggin'?"
"You know, veggin'. It's all the rage in those hip Northwestern cities. Where everything is plant-based-this and tofu-that, soybeans ahoy and kale all the way?!"
I halted my hunt through the embarrassingly large collection of swing albums in my music library and laughed. "Oh, vegan! No."
"That's good. Because Frenchie's is having a 'bring your bestie, get a free burger' special tonight and you are my bestie and are in serious need of putting some meat on your bones."
She meant well, of course. In case you are wondering, I did have the stupid hamburger and I did keep it down. If there was a downside to living with Giselle, a real downside, it would be how conscious she remained of my challenging relationship with food. It was on again, off again, touch and go, and so complex that I refused to define it. All that I knew was that what began as body image anxiety in my early teenage years, turned dangerously habitual as I neared adulthood. Giselle, on the other hand, worked from a very specific definition for what it was. She was the anxious one now, I merely lived with a scale around my waist and a nameless demon on my back. Lived. As though it was the most natural thing in the world.
I only bring it up because her concern would come to blatantly contrast with his reaction. He was not indifferent in the slightest. Misinformed, perhaps? Confused, certainly. His frustration towards me and why I was the way I was would undermine the life that Henry and I made. This was among other incompatibilities, of course. It was no coincidence that the tension between Giselle and I over the matter was present on the night that we had our first real conversation.
She caught me in the lady's room at Coffee n' San-tea, ill and dizzy as ever. This was at a very definitive time in my life where the very smell of food made me nauseated. There were even times when the friendly aroma of coffee beans had the same effect. It was her birthday and all that I could do was cry because I felt like such a burden. She was kind to me and less judgmental than she had been over the few weeks that we had spent living in the same space. We sat in our favorite armchairs and I kept my head on her shoulder, trembling and waiting for my strength to return. The first fifteen minutes or so after purging were always the worst. This was another pattern that Giselle understood.
"Jake is looking over here," she warned, moving a card table between us and breaking apart the pieces of a puzzle that a customer had solved earlier that day. Coffee n' San-tea was always famous for its board games and related frivolities. "I can't keep covering for you, Mare. And I can't-" Someone tapped on my shoulder. Before I turned to see who was there, I thanked them for relieving me of the discomfort. Giselle gave a distressful, "Oh, man!" And hummed a tune that I just barely recognized as the theme music that plays every time The Geek comes on screen in the movie, Sixteen Candles.
"Marigold Casey," Tommy Martin lisped, sounding just about as suave as a borderline pubescent boy possibly can. He grinned at me, flashing a row of shiny braces that were not present the last time that I had seen him (and that made Giselle's musical prelude fit the situation beautifully). "You'd better be sticking around here for good this time. I love the other ladies, but they are not of your caliber." I traced his line of vision to where Tristan Stone was huddled over a table on the outside patio. The chances of Tommy making any sort of overture to Tristan or any of the other girls in Waterford without either peeing his pants or being tragically humiliated were miniscule at best.
He liked me because I was nice to him and condoned his strangeness when no one else would. Somewhere down the line, I suspected that he misinterpreted my kindness as flirting. Maintaining a distance was the best that I could do, but that was easier said than done. He came from one of the largest families in town. Come to think of it, just about every other business in Waterford was owned by a Martin. Coffee n' San-tea, included. "I have a little somethin'-somethin' for you," Tommy crooned. As he reached into his jacket pocket, several fistfuls of freshly made spitballs rolled out. Then a slingshot, a straw and one of those bouncy rainbow balls that can be found at a quarter machine near you.
"Surely you mean Giselle," I interjected as a miniature nerf gun joined the spitballs on the floor, "it is her birthday, after all." A smile was the best that I could give him. I still felt lightheaded, but Tommy did not see that. He was blinded by his nerves.
"Giselle doesn't like…" he reached deeper into his pocket, pulling out a tangle of yo-yo strings and several fuzz-covered sticky hands (another quarter machine specialty).
"Boy, you could find the portal to Narnia in there, couldn't you?" I said, gently. I was about to help the poor kid in his hunt when his face lit up. He had found it, whatever it was.
"Close your eyes and hold out your hanny!" I glanced over at Giselle. It was up to her to wedge him away if he tried any funny business. I followed his instructions exactly and he plopped not one, but two gifts in my hand. "We learned how to make those in art class!" He told me, bursting with pride. "Can you believe how cool our teacher is? We got to make our own kazoos!"
"Wow," I moved the metal object into a beam of light. It was actually very impressive. I could see where he had hammered the pieces together and the lines that he had painted by hand. "I can't accept this, Tommy. You're the kazoo master!"
"I was. Until…" he lowered his head and pointed to his braces. "It's time for me to retire and pass along the craft to someone that I trust and who won't let me down. I choose you, Pikachu. Yes, I do. Use it well. The kazoo is a truly beautiful instrument."
Believe it or not, this wasn't even his most peculiar statement of his affection for me. Nor was it the first time that he tried to give me a kazoo. He had invited me, on several occasions, to join a small kazoo orchestra that he was trying to put together and even asked me to sign a petition to make it an official instrument in his school's band. I stood up and gave him a two-second long side-hug. "You're a sweet kid, you know that? Now what is, oh god." The second gift was even funnier than the first. I covered my mouth, but a laugh escaped, regardless. "Hooked on Yodeling: The Very Best of Kerry Christensen. Uhm… why?"
"Now that my orthodontist has robbed me of my dream of becoming a kazoo artist, I'm considering taking up yodeling! Listen to the track called 'The Chicken Yodel'. It will change your entire outlook on life, Marigold Casey."
Giselle and I exchanged looks and I thanked Tommy with yet another awkward hug. The festivities, namely a roast for Giselle, were about to begin and Tommy skipped off to raise hell in the front row of kitchen chairs that had been placed around a very unstable looking plywood platform. I had prepared a poem, but the two of us stuck to the back of the room for most of the evening. Most of the insults that were flung at Giselle targeted her recent brush with the law. To make a long story short, she systematically stole craft sticks from the school that she was teaching art classes at. My poem only touched on the scandal.
She was called to mingle with a teacher friend and I remained in my armchair. Everybody was having cake and I had convinced Tess, the owner of the café, that I only required a glass of ice water. Giselle, yet again, could read me like a book, even from across the room. She looked concerned, but her stance and stride told me that she was about to raise hell either to me or to my brother. Catching her best friend in the process of throwing up her lunch earlier and refusing any sort of sustenance for the rest of the day was cause for concern. Reaching out for help was more than justified.
We were watching one another so intensely, wondering what the other might do when a familiar stranger passed between us. He looked at Giselle, then at me with a faint air of familiarity and crossed to where she stood. I had no idea what he had said to her, but she didn't seem to like it. Her hand molded into a fist and as instantaneously as a flash of lightning, she struck the poor fellow across the nose and continued her route through the crowd to where my brother stood.
Normally, I would have intervened and spent my time coming up with some sort of excuse for why I was refusing food. I would have convinced Jake that I was under the weather or stressed about the interview that I had scheduled with Waterford High's own Principal Ballard regarding the future of the Casey Schoolhouse. I had options. But gaining a doubletake at that man, that man that I had sworn I'd seen before, with his tweed jacket, cowlicked hair and perfect posture- it was to him that my attention swayed.
"What seems to be the trouble, Sir?" I asked, holding my arms across my chest, defensively. "You must have done something to set Zippy off like that!" His body was bent slightly at the waist, but he did not hunch. He was otherwise straight as a pin.
"I complimented her on her jacket," he gurgled. Bubbles of blood popped up between his fingers. "And she broke my damned nose!"
That voice, rich with intellect and wit, was undeniably British and without a doubt, belonged to the man who had spoken no more than two words to me at CHS and left a deep impression on my heart. "Would you like a handkerchief?" I asked, to no avail. He removed one from his breast pocket right as the offer was made. "A glass of water? A slice of cake?" His eyebrow arched, and I was smitten. "A fleet of comfort dogs?"
"Sorry?" The hanky was immediately soiled. His eyes dropped to the floor and he gasped upon the realization that he was bleeding all over my flats and tights. "Good gracious, Miss! I am so terribly sorry!" I took him by the hand, unshaken by the blood and showed him where the restroom was. Despite the goriness of this fiasco, our location went unnoticed by Jake and Giselle. Being with him was, for the time being, the perfect means of escape. "You really don't have to do all of this for me," he insisted as I dabbed at his unbroken albeit badly beaten nose. "Miss?"
"Marigold," I wasn't sure if he was asking for my name, but I was willing to give it to him, nonetheless. "My name is Marigold."
"Marigold," his blue eyes glistened from over the top of the wadded paper towels. "It suits you." Enchantment and perhaps even a hint of surprise took over his handsome features. "Marigold. A little yellow flower. My, how lovely…"
