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birchkillchronicles · 2 years

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Getting to Marigold

Chapter One

Mushroom, Raw Umber, Tobacco

A mole’s nest.

A dark, stuffy mole’s nest.

That’s what Bernie’s bedroom is, sniffed Jeanie Dinmont.

A dark, stuffy mole’s nest where—for the last fourteen years!—my daughter has chosen to burrow her silly head.

Gazing around the offending room, Jeanie was stumped.

Why, she wondered for the trillionth time, had Bernie—back when she was a cantankerous sixteen-year-old—cruelly demanded that they chuck the lovely ivory-and-cream French Provincial décor—with pops of cherry-blossom-pink!—which her mom had so lovingly designed?

And for what?

For the Gothic-Victorian-techno mishmash of her current dismal lair?

What a waste of effort! Jeanie had mourned at the time. And, frankly, she hadn’t seen the need to let Bernie have her own selfish adolescent way. In her opinion, the sweetly feminine bedroom had been perfect for a young lady of tender years and, at the time, she’d wished that her daughter would just leave it alone.

Yes, well…

As Jeanie’s mother would say, ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’

The hollow-eyed teen had moped and sighed and sulked and pined, until—bowing to her best friend Sylvie’s parenting advice—Jeanie had yielded to Bernie’s unfathomable desire to transition her room into a ‘more grown-up space.’

Still—loathe to give up all aesthetic control—Jeanie had energetically counselled her daughter on how to curate her attic retreat.

“Now, kidlet—with these small windows and sloping ceilings,” she’d cautioned, “you’ll want to keep everything light. A neutral palette is the ticket here. So, if I were you, I’d switch out those ivory pieces with a blond Danish-modern suite. And then freshen up that matte cream wall paint with a semi-gloss buttermilk hue...”

But had her daughter listened?

Nope.

Not a chance.

Stubbornly insisting on her own dour notions for the space, Bernie had pushed her perplexed mother to repaint and then cram far too much dark-walnut furniture against stodgy mushroom-gray walls.

Next—during an increasingly rare mother-and-daughter shopping jaunt to Sears—the cranky teen had opted for equally bleak soft furnishings.

Then, she’d staged a weekend hunger strike—which her scrawny body could barely abide—in order to gain a plush area rug in a regrettable shade of raw umber.

And, to complete the desecration, she’d insisted that her pleasant sitting area be transformed into a video gaming lounge!

So, now, an olive-drab duvet smothered the heavy Victorian double bed. A battleship-grey slipcover obscured what had once been a delicate ladderback desk chair. And over Bernie’s flat television screen lurked ugly posters featuring the sombre wizards, pointy-eared boys and snarling white wolves from her ghastly video games.

The window treatments were no better.

Inky-black roller shades masked every pane. And tobacco-brown curtains shrouded each implacable shade so that Bernie could never be startled awake by even the slightest stray hint of rosy dawn.

No sunlight. No birdsong. No air…

Gee whiz, grimaced Jeanie. I’d go mad if—even for a single night!—I had to endure this frumpy old nest. Let alone for the past fourteen years…

Still—once she’d let Sylvie persuade her to allow the gawky girl dress her third-storey refuge to her own leaden taste—Jeanie had to concede that her best friend had been right.

Concede that Sylvie had understood far better how to assuage the pain of Bernie’s murky adolescence and her ensuing prickly twenties than Jeanie had ever wanted to.

Concede that Sylvie—a seasoned campaigner in the teenage wars with her flamboyant son, Nick—had been entirely correct when she’d warned Jeanie to forfeit the small battles to Bernie and save her energy for the big conflicts to come.

Yes, but—

Where was Sylvie now?

Gone.

Gone forever…

And that, decided Jeanie—vigorously refusing to be slurped into an insidious bog of regret—that abandonment, no matter how involuntary, certainly meant that now—right now!—Jeanie was allowed to decide for herself that enough was enough!

With her usual deliberate stride, she wooshed across the deep-piled rug to the window, threw back the heavy curtains, snapped up the roller shade and wrenched open the double hung window.

A waft of mid-July heat met the chill of the air-conditioning and died on the sill.

“Jessica Bernadette Todd!” she carolled in her cheeriest voice. “Rise and shine!”

Beneath the heavy duvet, a slight figure stirred. Then, an unaccountably tidy head of dark-brown hair turned to reveal hazel-grey eyes peering dully out of a small pale-white face.

“Mom.”

With that single word, Bernie neatly expressed everything she wanted to say.

Don’t fool around with my window. Leave me alone. Go away.

Jeanie decided to ignore it all.

“The day’s a-wasting!” she chirped. “It’s time to greet the sun!”

Her beloved kidlet—never ‘Jessica’ since that September afternoon when she’d announced that, with three other Jessicas in her fifth grade class, she would henceforth be known as ‘Bernie’—dropped a limp hand over to her bedside table to consult her phone.

“Mom.”

It’s only nine-thirty on a Sunday morning. Close my drapes. Leave me alone.

Bernie’s pallid face swivelled inexorably back towards the wall.

Jeanie decided to ignore that too.

Leaving the window wide open, she nipped over to her daughter. Tugging off the unspeakable duvet to reveal Bernie’s frail powder-blue flannel-wrapped back, she plopped herself down on the bedside for a bracing chat.

“Look, Bernie—” Jeanie began. “If our loopy-neighbour-from-three-doors-down, Lindy Styre, can get over herself long enough to write a summer play, you can get over yourself long enough to get up and go see it.”

Bernie’s hibernation remained undisturbed.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, kidlet!” Jeanie continued, relentlessly. “According to the radio, Loopy Lindy’s done such a cracker-jack job, her theatre group’s gone and scheduled a whole extra matinee in the Glebe today! Now, the show starts at one. And I know that—if you stop for breakfast—it’ll take you at least an hour to get up and out. So, I thought that, after you’ve had your shower and got dressed, we’d hike over to Starbucks for our coffee and then trot across the Bank Street Bridge. Once we’re in the Glebe, we’ll pick up a snack—and then window-shop our way up to the park—”

Heaving a deep-dark sigh, Bernie flopped back over to confront her intolerably perky parent. “Mom. There was a headline in the Old Ottawa South paper that said Excursion Theatre’s coming to Windsor Park in early August. Why can’t we go then? It’s not as if this matinee’s a case of now-or-never.”

Delighted with this multi-sentence response, Jeanie seized upon her daughter’s argument with gusto. “See? You’re planning to go see Loopy Lindy’s play. Why not take advantage of this lovely golden day? That August date could be rained out and then we’d miss everything!”

“Mom—”

“So why not sling our folding chairs over our shoulders and march on down through the Glebe? We’ll buy fresh bagels, and it’ll be so much fun—!”

“Mom—” groaned Bernie, attempting to retreat beneath her bedclothes once more.

But Jeanie had scented victory in her daughter’s former lengthy reply.

“Oh no, you don’t!” she laughed, wrestling the awful duvet from Bernie’s feeble grasp and tossing it to the floor. “We’re overdue for a Girls Day Out! So, get cracking, kidlet! And I’ll go rustle up those chairs…”

Filled with happy purpose, Jeanie scampered down two flights of stairs to her blond maple kitchen. There, her husband, Donald Todd—an unpretentious man in his late sixties who’d recently retired from the Federal civil service—sat on a caramel-leather-upholstered stool at the pink-granite-topped kitchen island. He was just as fair-skinned as Bernie and three inches shorter than his long-limbed wife of almost forty-two years. And, as he sipped his second cup of coffee, he was puzzling through the cryptic crossword from yesterday morning’s paper.

Always the intellectual, thought Jeanie, indulgently. Can’t simply do the regular crossword like the rest of us mortals…

Don had popped his golf shirt collar up on one side, so Jeanie straightened it out for him. Then, planting an airy kiss on his greying temple, she offered, coyly, “You’ll be glad to hear that your devoted wife and darling daughter won’t be underfoot for most of the day.”

“But I’ll miss you both so sadly,” returned Don, evenly. Without even a glance his wife’s way, he filled a long word into his puzzle grid.

“We’re having a Girls Day Out. No men allowed!” Jeanie brightly informed him as she disappeared into their recently refreshed mudroom. There, she pulled a couple of bagged folding chairs out of the closet and leant them against the wall. Now, she thought with satisfaction, those will be close at hand...

Returning to the kitchen, she double-checked that the box for today’s date on the Inuit art wall calendar was empty. She wanted to fill it in with the lively acronym ‘GDO!’ But where was the pen that ought to be laying on the shelf nearby?

“Don,” she asked, “have you seen the calendar pen?”

“Mmm…what?”

“The calendar pen. The one that we always leave here on the shelf.”

The pen wasn’t on the counter. It hadn’t been knocked to the floor. So where was the calendar pen?

Had somebody moved it on purpose?

Jeanie felt a buzz of frustration arise in her mind.

“Not this one, is it?” Still concentrating on his crossword, Don waved the pen he was using at her. “I found it over there somewhere.”

Jeanie’s mouth pursed in to a strained smile.

“You know, Don,” she admonished her husband, as if spelling out an indisputable fact to a little child, “you should leave the calendar pen where it belongs. Then—whenever we need it—we won’t have to search all over the house.”

“Sorry, dear.” Don kept reading his puzzle clues and, again, didn’t bother to look up at his wife.

“And I know that you don’t mean to be careless. But it doesn’t take much to throw everything into disarray.” Jeanie didn’t like to be a nag. And since it was only about a month ago that Don had reluctantly retired from the long days of his government career, he could be forgiven for not being on board with her household routines. But there was a limit to her patience. “If you start picking up stuff at random and just using it for whatever, pretty soon the whole system will be in a shambles.”

Don nodded thoughtfully and wrote another answer. “As soon as I’m finished, I’ll put it back,” he said. And—although her fingers itched to grab the pen out of his selfish hand—from long experience with her husband’s talent for sly evasion, Jeanie knew that she had to be content with that.

Restlessly, she surveyed the kitchen. What other mischief had Don been up to? There weren’t any of his used breakfast dishes cluttering up the counter or the sink, so she unobtrusively checked in the dishwasher to see if he’d put them away correctly.

Aha! Don’s cereal bowl was in the appropriate slot on the bottom rack. But he’d stuck his juice glass in the widest row of the upper…

Juice glasses go in the narrow outer row, frowned Jeanie. Any fool should know that.

With an air of great tolerance, she lifted the offending glass and placed it in its proper spot. Then she snapped the dishwasher closed and, with a pen selected out of her cache in her kitchen junk drawer, wrote ‘GDO!’ in today’s calendar box.

With her good mood restored, Jeanie placed the substitute pen on the designated shelf and turned to Don with an unfeigned smile. “Don’t you wonder where your girls are going?”

Don glanced up briefly from his puzzle and took a swig of coffee. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll eventually tell me,” he said.

“We’re off to see that play that Lindy Styre wrote.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s got great reviews, and they’re doing a matinee today in the Glebe. So, Bernie and I thought we’d give it a peek.”

“Great.” Don’s slate-blue eyes drifted back to his crossword.

“It’s supposed to be really funny.”

“No doubt.” He picked up the ex-calendar pen again and wrote.

“But you can’t come with us—”

“Mm-hm…”

“—because we’re having an exclusive Girls Day Out!”

His brow wrinkled in deep thought, Don looked up and past his wife to stare vaguely at a spot over the kitchen stove. So, giving him up as a bad job, Jeanie retrieved her phone from its charging bay to check for messages she might have missed while she was upstairs rousing Bernie.

There was nothing too important. Just a reminder from the clinic about Jeanie’s follow-up mammogram. And a text from her former boss, Roberta Tsang.

Nearly twenty years ago, Roberta had hired Jeanie as a part-time receptionist at her Bank Street interior design company. And, now, she was asking whether Jeanie would like to come bargain hunting at the Westboro garage sale next Sunday?

Jeanie deftly texted Roberta that she’d ‘love to go pickin’!’ and ‘how ’bout lunch too?’ And then stuck the details of the medical appointment into her phone calendar.

‘Done like dinner,’ as Sylvie would have said.

‘All good and proper!’ as Jeanie’s mother would amend.

Pocketing her phone, Jeanie ran up the back stairs to refresh her lipstick in her marbled en-suite bathroom. Once there, however, she paused to admire her newly-dyed hairdo in the vanity mirror.

Keenly aware that her aging Clear Spring complexion now benefitted greatly when she lightened her colour palette to a Pastel Spring’s lower intensity hues, she’d instructed her stylist to tone her hair down to a soft-honey tint. She wasn’t ready to go grey, she’d explained. But she certainly didn’t want to look like one of those desperate ladies in their early sixties who try to offset their wrinkles with a brash shade of copper or platinum blonde…

Then again, Jeanie was a realist, and she wasn’t going to hide from the fact that she was getting old. Yet, even with their fortieth anniversary in the rear-view mirror—and a year’s hiatus during her health scare—she and Don were still having it off a couple of times a month.

I might be vintage, Jeanie reminded the smiling woman in the mirror as she lightly touched up her coral lip gloss, but I sure ain’t antique!

As usual, Jeanie had dressed very carefully this morning and, assessing her appearance in the mirror on the back of her bedroom door, she was quite pleased. She hadn’t painted too much tawny colour on her cheeks, and she liked the nice summery effect of the plain gold hoops in her ears. Her flowery aqua cotton top bloused enough to disguise any imbalance in the size of her breasts and, with a nod to her mature status, she’d opted for a pair of faded denim-blue shorts which left only a tasteful stretch of her long legs bare. And—playing peek-a-boo with her neatly coral-polished toes—sprightly new espadrille sandals completed her flawless attire.

“You look like a million dollars!” she told her beaming reflection and giggled when it responded with a duck-lipped super-model pose.

Next, knowing that—even at the best of times—Bernie never moved fast in the morning, Jeanie detoured for a few minutes to her craft room, which was located across the hall from the guest bedroom on the second-floor. She wanted to finish cutting and filing a couple of articles from her favourite women’s magazine.

Of course, Jeanie knew very well that this was the age of the computer. But, in some fundamental way, she preferred winnowing real pages to simply downloading images from a screen. And she wasn’t about to give up her favourite hobby just because it wasn’t modern…

In fact—through years of careful scrutiny of homemaker’s magazines—Jeanie had assembled a tangible ‘vision’ of what her family’s life should ideally be. And via scrapbooks, files and inspiration boards, she continued to pursue that vision with passion and zest.

Now, donning her reading glasses, Jeanie flipped merrily through the latest issue’s glossy pages. She clipped illustrated instructions on how to host a gingham-themed summer picnic. And then a page of chowder recipes with both seafood and vegetarian options. She usually filed the ‘Simple Sewing Crafts’ feature, as well as the fantasy vacation pages, so she plied her scissors there too. Then, making sure that the paper remained uncreased, she stashed the articles into appropriately multi-colour-labeled folders, ready to be pasted into one of the many tidy scrapbooks that lined her craft room shelves.

Gratified with this bit of orderly housekeeping, Jeanie skipped up to the third floor to monitor her daughter’s progress. But—

There wasn’t any.

Or, at least to Jeanie’s mind, there hadn’t been.

Perhaps, in Bernie’s opinion, there had.

The window was once more firmly shut. The inky-black roller shade was pulled down and the tobacco-brown curtains had been yanked across. The olive-drab duvet had been restored. And it was painfully obvious from the bedclothes’ unruffled façade that the small silent bulge beneath hadn’t moved since Bernie had rearranged her mole’s nest back to her own heavy dark taste.

Wordlessly Jeanie stood and stared dumbfounded at her daughter’s dead heap. She felt like she’d been slapped in the face with a wet fish…

And then blistering incredulity replaced her initial shock.

How could any kid of mine, gasped Jeanie’s mind, so brutally reject my efforts to engage her in the wonderful al fresco pleasures of life? Haven’t I tried beyond hope to understand her ridiculous reserve? Haven’t I given her the benefit of my sunny philosophy every single day?

So, why this obstinate refusal to participate in a cheery Girls Day Out?

As my mother would say—'What’s the worst that can happen? What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, girl.’

So, get out there in the fresh air and have a ball!

It all seemed so easy to Jeanie. But then again—as she was the first to admit—tolerating the personal quirks of her deeply loved but totally mystifying kidlet had always been the major challenge in her life.

Jeanie had miscarried multiple times before Bernie had finally been born, and the doctors had decreed that she’d have no more kids. So, there went her plan to have a troupe of children skipping through the halls of the three-storey, two staircase, six-bedroom, white elephant of an Edwardian red-brick house that she and Don had optimistically purchased in Old Ottawa South.

Then, Bernie had been a difficult, hyper-sensitive baby, hard to put to sleep and often screaming with colic. And—long past the ‘making shy’ stage—her finicky daughter had strenuously objected to strangers. So, Jeanie’d had to shelve her new scheme of housing international university students too.

No matter, she’d rationalized, and industriously repurposed the four superfluous bedrooms instead. On the second floor, she’d allocated a study for Don and a craft room for herself. And, in the two bedrooms on the third, she’d set up a box room for storage and—in the larger one—a quaint gabled playroom for her only child.

But then it had turned out that Bernie’s immune system had been massively unforgiving of even hypoallergenic pets. Reluctantly, Jeanie’d had to re-home their Labradoodle dog and Balinese cat. And, for the last twenty-eight years, the only animals in their home had been the mindless goldfish swimming endlessly around their bowl in Don’s study.

So, no brothers or sisters or boarders. And not even a furry pet…

With puberty, of course, Bernie had insisted on moving her bedroom up to the third floor. And—remembering her own dramatic middle school years—Jeanie had indulged her twelve-year-old kidlet’s sudden need for privacy. Efficiently, she’d hired a builder to tear down the wall of small attic box room and install another full bathroom for Bernie’s exclusive use. And then she’d happily decorated her daughter’s new en-suite bedroom and sitting area in that delightfully feminine ivory-cream-and-pink colour scheme.

Next, the generous walk-in closet in Bernie’s former second floor bedroom had been renovated to become Jeanie’s and Don’s en-suite bath. And—after purchasing an antique birdseye-maple bedroom set which included a spacious wardrobe—Jeanie had refurnished the remaining space for the use of overnight guests.

But then, as an ungrateful older teen, Bernie had stubbornly chosen that woeful attic décor. And—all the way through her Carleton University days and right into her nerdy government computer system analyst career—she’d persistently ignored her mom’s every encouragement to brighten it up.

Unfortunately, to Jeanie’s mind, thirty-year-old Bernie seemed to be stuck in a teenage funk. And—equally unfortunately—the end of their tense mother-daughter journey seemed to be nowhere in sight.

Which was because—as far as Jeanie knew—her persnickety kidlet had never led a normal social life. No gang of gal pals, no best friend and not even a whiff of romance had given a dash of spice to her daughter’s achromatic existence. Day in and day out, she’d simply slunk off to class or to work. Or sat at a computer. Or stared at a phone…

And when, a couple of years ago—at Jeanie’s urging—Don had offered to help with a substantial down payment, Bernie had balked at moving into her own place.

So, it had become increasingly obvious to Jeanie and Don that their daughter wasn’t planning to decamp anywhere else anytime soon.

Holy doodle, grimaced Jeanie. Imagine a thirty-year-old woman deliberately living at home with her aging parents. Still single and perfectly content to be buried alive in her dark, stuffy mole’s nest—

That was Bernie in a teacup!

And now, Jeanie realized, bitterly, the world’s most exasperating daughter wasn’t even going to disturb her self-centred agenda to venture forth on a rare Girls Day Out with her long-suffering mom!

Swiftly, Jeanie’s incredulity morphed into fury. And—aware that she was on the edge of saying or doing something unforgiveable—she abruptly spun on her heel and swept down the back stairs to the kitchen where Don still struggled with his puzzle.

“Bernie’s not coming!” she snapped. “Your daughter won’t even get up out of bed!”

“She won’t?” returned Don without looking up from his crossword. “What a surprise.” With a grunt of pleasure, he filled in one of the last two answers and, surveying the final clue, nonchalantly offered a helpful suggestion. “Maybe you could call somebody else to go with you. Probably Sylvie—oh, dear god, Jeanie, I’m so sorry—!” Too late Don realized his indefensible mistake and, red-faced, sprang up from his stool to give his wife his full attention. “Jeanie, I didn’t mean to—!”

But there was really no excuse.

“She can’t be bothered—and you don’t mean to—! That’s the story of my life!” snarled Jeanie, snatching her light summer tote bag from its peg. “But don’t let it bug you, Don! Sylvie may be gone. But I’m not beaten yet! I’m going to Lindy’s play—all by myself!”

Helpless with guilt, Don shrank back on his stool.

And, ditching her miserable husband, Jeanie stomped into the mudroom, seized her folding chair and slammed through the side door to face the pitiless hot and sunny world.

Alone.

#original novel #interior design #grief/mourning #satire #family #parenting #home lifestyle #theatre #family reunion #1920s #summer theatre #best friends #gettingtomarigold

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