The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  Gabe and Henry were quite the pair, driving around town in the old Chevy truck — Gabe with his long limbs folded uncomfortably inside the cab and Henry in the passenger seat, often patting his ears rhythmically with his hands.

  On the way back from one particular outing, Gabe glanced over at Henry, who sat on the ripped upholstery drawing on a thick pad of paper with waxy crayons. Henry’s drawings were hardly the scribbled circles and oblong squares typical of the creations he’d made just the day before. Gabe pulled into the driveway and leaned toward Henry. Being careful not to touch him, he asked, “What do you got there, Henry?”

  Henry lifted his head and tossed the drawing pad and crayons to the side. Without a word, he jumped out of the truck and trotted up the stairs to the house.

  Henry had drawn a detailed map of the neighborhood, complete with road signs and house numbers.

  Later, after everyone was asleep, Gabe walked into Viviane’s room and laid the drawing on her bed.

  My mother pulled the cord to the lamp near her head, blinking in the light, and stared unseeing at the drawing on her bed. “What is this?”

  Gabe was pacing the room. “It’s Henry’s.”

  Viviane picked up the drawing and looked at it: the house on the hill at the top of Pinnacle Lane, the bakery, the school, the accurate house numbers and road names, all ending at the newly constructed police station up on Phinney Ridge. Viviane shook her head.

  “He drew it,” Gabe explained.

  “What? No. That’s impossible.” Viviane dropped the paper to the floor.

  Gabe picked it up and looked at her until she exhaled, looking strange and defeated. “This is a good thing, Vivi. Now we know there’s something going on in there; we just need to find a way to reach it.”

  Viviane leaned toward the lamp again and pulled the cord, leaving Gabe in the dark but for the silvery light from the moon shining on Viviane’s pillow. “Amazing handwriting, don’t you agree?” she finally said.

  “Yes. Amazing.”

  “Did you see that L? Impressive. I certainly don’t make my L’s anything like that.”

  “No, me neither.”

  Afterward, Gabe retreated downstairs to his room. He climbed into his own bed, and both he and Viviane imagined the other was asleep while they worried the night away on their own separate floors.

  Gabe woke before dawn the next morning to the sound of the coffee machine percolating on the kitchen counter. Viviane was an awful insomniac. Gabe wondered if anyone else knew this about her, that while the rest of the house slept, she often spent her nights staring at the dark sky through the kitchen window. He often considered joining her. Maybe he’d finally say the right thing. Maybe he’d make her laugh. And then maybe they’d share a real conversation, something so much more than the kind of exchanges necessary between two people sharing the same living space: Could you get more milk? Or No, go ahead — you can use the bathroom first. Maybe, but Gabe was willing to admit this wouldn’t be that day. Instead, he took a quick shower and made his way into the yard to watch the sun rise by himself.

  At first Gabe thought he was looking at nothing more than one of the low white blooms of the peony bush. That is, until he saw a pink nose attached to it. Gabe walked across the yard, scooped the little thing up, and brought it inside. He washed the dirt from its paws in the kitchen sink and was petting it in puzzlement when Viviane walked up from the basement, carrying a basket of freshly laundered clothes.

  “What is that?” Viviane asked, pausing at the kitchen sink.

  “I believe it’s a dog.”

  “Oh.”

  No more than seven inches long, the dog was nothing more than a pup with oversize paws and a growling belly. Viviane filled a bowl with the cream from the top of the milk bottle and placed it on the floor. They stood and watched as the dog lapped it up.

  Viviane stayed in the kitchen with the dog long after Gabe left to attend to a broken gate in Marigold Pie’s yard. The dog finished the cream and slid across the linoleum as it sniffed along the bottom edge of the refrigerator.

  Years earlier Jack Griffith’s final kiss had burned a strawberry-colored butterfly into the back of Viviane’s neck. Only after applying multitudes of rose oil to the spot did it slowly fade to a dark beige mark that itched when she was nervous. She was scratching that spot when she heard the sound of shuffling feet coming from outside the kitchen.

  Viviane set a piece of toast with orange marmalade on the table for Henry. It was his usual breakfast, the only thing he would eat for his morning meal. She resisted the urge to muss his hair when he sat down.

  While he ate, Henry watched the puppy climb awkwardly into the laundry basket, rub its head against Viviane’s clean white towels, sigh contentedly, and fall into a deep puppy sleep. Cautiously Henry got up from the table. Then, awkwardly folding his oversize teenage limbs beneath him, Henry sat down beside the puppy in the laundry basket. Henry reached over and ran a finger down the puppy’s back and circled the goldenrod spot on its side. The puppy opened an eye. Henry closed one of his own. The puppy scratched its ear. Henry scratched his. Henry yawned. The puppy yawned, making a squeaky noise. That prompted Henry to fall over onto the floor, where he laughed silently. After he recovered, Henry took a deep breath and declared, “Trouver!”

  At that, Viviane dropped the bowl she’d been holding to the floor. Amid the shattering porcelain, she said, “Well, yes.” And whether it was a declaration meant for Henry, the dog, or perhaps a little of both, from then on the dog was known as Trouver, the French word meaning “to find.”

  Emilienne wasn’t entirely correct in asserting that Henry solely understood one language over another; it was that he favored certain words from each. For example, Henry preferred when someone offered to help him with his moufles, not his mittens; made him petit pois, not peas, for dinner; and served pamplemousse rather than grapefruit for lunch. He liked when Emilienne used the word impeccable instead of clean and was partial to a cup and spoon over a fork, knife, or plate. He liked driftwood, trifle, and cavernous and later would hate the word pubic, and prefer mamelon to nipple.

  Henry went on to communicate in other unique ways. Good was caramel, and bad was fumigate. He called Gabe cedar, which we attributed to the way Gabe’s hands smelled after a day in his woodshop. I was pinna, the Latin word for feather. Our mother, étoile de mer, which was French for starfish. No one could explain that one.

  THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky.

  Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe.

  The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop.

  Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite.

  Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips.

  The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: li
ke the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm.

  But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

  On the last day it had rained — a seemingly normal day in February as it turned out — Emilienne got up, as she did every other morning, at exactly four o’clock. She looked out at the dark, wet sky and sighed. She pulled her boots from the mudroom and wrapped a rain bonnet around her hair, musing that it was something old ladies did. Because of the rain, it took Emilienne longer than usual to reach the bakery’s door. Wilhelmina was already waiting for her when she arrived. Penelope too.

  After the war, Emilienne had found herself competing with the growing availability of prepackaged treats — Jell-O instant pudding, Minute Tapioca, Reddi-Wip — not to mention the return of sliced bread. In desperation, she’d brought out her French maman’s recipes and replaced the jars of preserves and slabs of salted meat she’d sold during the Depression with mousse au chocolat, feuilletage, and poire belle-Hélène. In 1951 she purchased an old Divco truck once used to deliver milk and had Gabe paint Emilienne’s Bakery in elaborate script across its side. She continued to use the old-fashioned brick oven, insisting that it was the brick that gave her bread its distinctive flavor. She ignored Wilhelmina’s claim that a newer metal oven wouldn’t make a lick of difference. The success of the bakery grew.

  When Penelope Cooper was hired, she was just a young mother with very little baking experience, but the bakery needed the help and she needed the work. After so many years of working as a pair, it took a while for the two older women to get used to their new team of three. In time the three women could perform their morning schedule flawlessly; without words or even gestures, they knew what was needed. Hiring Penelope Cooper also proved to be a wise business decision. No man within walking distance could resist a daily dose of the blond woman’s infectious laugh. When they bought a box of chocolate éclairs for their wives, they fantasized about licking a swipe of custard from the crease between Penelope’s lovely breasts, of hand-feeding her every creamy morsel.

  After stomping the water from her boots on that last rainy day of February 1959, Emilienne moved to the back to roll out the cheese rolls and knot the brioche, to shape the sourdough loaves and baguettes. Penelope mixed the dough for the scones and whole-grain breads. By seven AM, the specials of the day were written on the blackboard behind the counter, the smudges wiped clean from the windows, and the first loaves of the day rising in their bread pans. With a razor blade, Emilienne scored each one, listening for the audible sigh that came with each slice, as if the bread had been holding its breath. Emilienne slid the loaves into the oven, then sprayed the hot oven bricks with water to create the steam that helped form a perfect crust on each loaf.

  Once the display cases were lined with paper doilies, and the breads and pastries put out for sale, Emilienne left Penelope to mind the front counter and joined Wilhelmina in the back, who was busily preparing le dessert du jour. Wilhelmina pulled out a flour sifter, a mixing bowl, and a baking pan. She quickly whipped up batter for a chocolate cake, poured it into the pan, and stuck it in the oven, where it would bake until perfect, the knife coming out clean on the first try.

  The secret to a good chocolate cake had nothing to do with the actual cake. No, the secret was in the icing, and caramel frosting was Emilienne’s specialty. It was the cream, the cream that could make it too heavy or too thin. With just the right amount of cream, she could make the frosting so enticing, so divinely rich and sweet, that it caused people to laugh out loud with just one lick off a finger.

  On that last day of rain, while the chocolate cake was baking, Emilienne was pouring the cream for the caramel frosting with one hand and whisking with the other when she heard the jangle of the bells on the door. Marigold Pie had come into the shop for one of her regular penitential visits.

  A devout member of the Lutheran church, Marigold Pie was always the first to dutifully welcome new neighbors. When the Lavenders moved onto Pinnacle Lane (before the whispers of witch followed my grandmother wherever she went), it was practical Marigold Pie who helped the baker’s young wife get rid of the fire ants in the pantry and remove the hornet’s nest from the porch eaves. In church Marigold read along from her red leather Bible with the weekly Scripture passages, and for longer than anyone could remember, she had been in charge of the confirmation classes. Helpful, capable, but hardly known for being personable, she objected to interfaith marriage, coffee stains on white gloves, and any form of appetite, food-related or otherwise. Fellow parishioners used to joke that Marigold slept in a position that vaguely emulated the Crucifixion. And they were right.

  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.