The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(36)

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 br?lée, 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.