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: like 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 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.
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.