Marigold Memories

Marigold Memories

One glance at the small bouquet of golden marigolds on the entryway table and I find it hard to breathe, my chest tightening against my will. I make an excuse and escape to the powder room. Staring into the vanity mirror I see the golden flecks in my green eyes staring back at me.

I’m disgusted with myself, letting a forty-year-old memory get the better of me. I pull in a slow breath through my nose and exhale slowly. You’re being ridiculous. Pull yourself together, Sheryl and get back out there. Suck it up, Buttercup.

I take a seat on the closed toilet lid and involuntarily relive one summer day in the sixth grade…

Bradley set the Atari controller down on the floor and turned towards me. “Hey, let’s go to your house. I’m tired of this game.”

I smirked at him. “You’re just tired of getting beat!”

“Yeah, me too,” Curt chimed in, laying his controller next to Bradley’s.

We’d been playing Pong for over an hour, and I was getting a little bored myself. “Okay, but I don’t have anything fun at my house. Let’s go to your house, Curt.” My stomach churned knowing that the rule was no boys in the house when my parents weren’t home.

Curt shook his head and looked at me with pleading eyes. “Come on, Sheryl, my dad’s home and he doesn’t want me hanging around. Let’s go to your house.”

They were both staring at me, waiting for a response. The word “no” was not in my vocabulary. My parents had made sure of that. So, I caved. “Okay, but I’m telling ya there’s nothin’ to do there.”

It’s not that I didn’t trust them. Bradley had been my best friend for over three years, having lived across the street from me since the third grade. He was a little on the heavy side, with straight, baby-fine, brown hair that fell to the tops of his shoulders. I was always envious of the texture of his hair. I was a tow-head blonde, but instead of baby soft hair mine was coarse, and with an unfortunate cowlick at the center of my bangs.

During the summers we hung out nearly every day, playing in the street. We rode our bikes all over creation. At least twice a week, we rode to the gas station at the top of our very steep hill, our pockets heavy with change, to buy candy from the vending machine. We took turns in each other’s driveways, shooting baskets and playing HORSE. We’d played so many games of one-on-one basketball that we no longer kept score or cared who won. That was probably because Bradley never won and getting beaten by a girl who was one year younger than you, wasn’t something that you wanted to keep track of.

“Let me tell my mom where we’re going,” Bradley said as he turned and left the room. His mom didn’t work outside the home, so we spent a lot of time hanging out at his house.

I held out a sliver of hope that maybe she might nix the idea outright, no discussion. But, if he did tell her where we were going, she didn’t object because he was back in less than a minute, ready to go.

He pushed open the front door. “Let’s make like a plane and jet!” I followed, reluctantly, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t going to get caught breaking the rules.

Curt followed me out the door. He lived three blocks away, which seemed like a long way at the time. He was a nice kid, but I always had the impression that life wasn’t all that good for him. Still, forty years later, I can’t pinpoint why my young mind thought so, but my impression proved to be spot on. Curt barely made it through high school, having fallen in with a rougher crowd.

I pulled the string with the house key out from under my shirt and unlocked the front door, shoving my fear aside. Even though I knew I’d be dead meat if my dad found out, I couldn’t say no without sounding like a baby. Plus, I was afraid they’d be mad at me. So, I caved. “We can’t stay long. I’m not supposed to have friends over.”

As soon as we climbed the stairs, Curt headed for the living room and Bradley followed me into the kitchen. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I told you I don’t have anything fun. You have all the cool stuff. I don’t know why you wanted to come here anyway.”

I grabbed a handful of iced oatmeal cookies from our cowboy cookie jar when Curt yelled from the living room, “Hey, you have an 8-track! Let’s listen to some music!”

I headed into the living room, with Bradley trailing behind me. Even though it was a bright summer day, the room was dim because of the filmy sheers which shrouded the large front windows.

Curt was pawing through the stack of tapes. “It’s all country crap,” he said.

“We don’t have any good music. My dad listens to country.” I was getting exasperated. They weren’t listening to me. There was NOTHING to do at my house.

Bradley must have sensed my irritation because he offered a suggestion. “We could watch Gilligan’s Island. It starts in a few minutes.”

I set the cookies in a pile on our amber glass coffee table and plopped down on our plain, brown sofa. I was embarrassed that I had nothing fun to do. Bradley sat beside me and grabbed a cookie. He took a bite and looked at me. “Can we watch tv?”

“Sure, but you can’t stay too long. If my dad catches us here you better start running, and I recommend a zig-zag pattern.” I was joking, kind of, but inside my stomach churned. My father was strict and even as a sixth grader corporal punishment was still regularly doled out by a substantial wooden paddle which hung on a nail at the back of the coat closet.

I sat at one end of the sofa and pulled a pillow onto my lap, hiding my edginess. It was white with a bouquet of gold marigold stitched in the center of it. My mom had handstitched two pillows, one for each end of the sofa. The other was fiery orange marigolds, like a summer sunset.

Waiting for Gilligan’s Island to start, I traced my finger over the thick stitching, and played with the yellow poplin ruffle. Curt sat on the love seat perpendicular to the sofa and Bradley sat beside me, both devouring the pile of cookies.

Wiping the crumbs from his mouth, Curt asked, “Got anything to drink?”

I nodded. “Yeah, there’s some soda in the fridge.” I worried that my dad would notice three missing sodas and question me, but I wasn’t going to say no. I would sound ridiculous, paranoid. My dad was always suspicious, imagining deception when there was none. He had a calculating mind.

Curt left for the kitchen and returned with three cans of Cragmont Sparkling Punch soda, my favorite. He handed a can to both Bradley and me and sat on the floor by my feet, his back against the love seat. It seemed like an odd place to sit when there was a perfectly comfortable seat he could use. We sipped our sodas in silence, waiting for the program to start. My stomach felt funny, sitting alone with them in my house until Curt let out a belch that sounded like it had started in his toes and built momentum as it climbed out his throat.

I burst out laughing. “Oh, my gawd, Curt! You’re such a pig!” I shoved his shoulder, pushing him over onto the shag carpet, nearly spilling his drink.

Then Bradley let one rip as well, adding to the adolescent atmosphere. “Brad? Seriously!” I looked at him, incredulous. It’s not that they never burped around me, but it was like dueling burps, in stereo. I remember the laughter we shared as they volleyed belches back and forth like a volleyball. I didn’t join in. My parents had taught me better. Burping and farting in the presence of others was taboo in my house. When it came to body excretion, we pretended they never happened.

When the Gilligan’s Island theme song came on, we set our drinks on the coffee table and sang along, not missing a word. During the song, Bradley rested his hand on my thigh making my body tingle in alarm. Besides the bumps and shoves when we played one-on-one hoops in our driveways, he’d never really touched me before. At the same time, Curt leaned against my shin and rested his elbow on my knee.

If Bradley had a crush on me, I wasn’t aware of it, but he did name his Irish Setter puppy Cher. I’m not sure how he spelled it, but I always assumed it was Cher, not Sher. It couldn’t have been more than a month after he got her that she was hit and killed crossing the street between our houses. It happened after dinner one evening. Bradley had been playing in his front yard with her when I came out of my house and called her, clapping my hands and yelling, “Come here, girl!” I hadn’t seen the car racing up the blind hill. I hadn’t looked. She died in Bradley’s arms, as we kneeled at the side of the road facing each other. The guilt lingers still. I don’t remember ever talking about it with him.

With his hand on my thigh, my mind started to float away, my thoughts numbing, as if Novacain had been poured in my ear. I stared at the tv, frozen, refusing to look left or right, convincing myself that I was overreacting, it was just an innocent touch. For the past few years, I’d become adept at drifting away. I did it whenever my dad invaded my body with his, whether I was showering, sleeping, or just watching tv. He demanded compliance and my faked enjoyment. It was either float away or suffer the emotional trauma of being trapped, with no chance of escape. It felt claustrophobic.

Then, when he was finished with me, I could drift back and go on with my life, leaving my violation and betrayal in another realm. It was self-preservation. Don’t resist, go along, drift away. Don’t struggle, that only prolongs the degradation. Disconnect. Go away.

So, that afternoon, for the next thirty minutes, Skipper, Marianne, and Gilligan chatted in the background while I drifted away to my own deserted island, clutching the marigold pillow as my best friends stretched me out on the sofa and violated my body with their fingers and mouths. I stared at the ceiling, clutching the pillow to my chest, imagining myself traipsing through a field of marigolds.

I don’t recall how the afternoon ended. I was somewhere else at the time. Suddenly, I was alone in the living room, lethargically pulling on my underwear and shorts, wondering what had happened…how I could have let it happen. Like an out of focus picture, the details were fuzzy then and now.

Now here I am, forty years later, in a friend’s powder room, triggered by a bouquet of happy little marigolds. I’m not there long when I join my friends in the kitchen, a survivor’s smile on my face, wondering how many of these amazing women have hidden triggers, invisible to everyone else but them.

“Everything okay, Sher?” I look up to find my friend smiling at me, her eyes round with concern.

“Uh, huh. I’m good.” They’d never understand that marigolds make me sad.