MARIGOLD AND ROSE
Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V. Rose didn’t care for books. She particularly disliked books of the kind Marigold was presently reading, in which animals substituted for people. Rose was a social being. Rose liked activities in which people figured. Like baths. She liked being soaped all over by Mother or Father and then being rinsed until she was spotless. Usually something would be exclaimed on. Her silky skin. Her beautiful eyes with their dark lashes. But to be left out as she was now, to be unnecessary—this she did not like. I am not just spotless, she thought to herself. I am also stripeless.
Marigold was still reading. Of course she wasn’t reading; neither of the twins could read; they were babies. But we have inner lives, Rose thought.
Marigold was writing a book. That she couldn’t read was an impediment. Nevertheless, the book was forming in her head. The words would come later. The book had people in it but it also had animals. All books, Marigold felt, should have animals; people were not enough.
Marigold knew this was utterly alien to her sister, just as Rose’s eager sociability and curiosity, her calm self-confidence, were alien to Marigold herself. This must be why they were twins. Together they included everything.
I will put that in my book, Marigold thought, when things did not go well for her.
She felt she would never be perfect as Rose was. Who’s my good baby, Mother would say at mealtime. Rose could drink out of a cup. For the most part, Rose was the answer. Next to Marigold’s name there were a lot of needs improvement boxes checked. Marigold was not good at the cup. Milk spurted out of her mouth all over her bib.
Books did not judge you, Marigold thought, perhaps because they were full of animals. She knew from the dog, animals did not judge you.
Rose missed her sister. Marigold was there in the playpen but Marigold was not there. These were hard times; Rose was lonely. She understood that Marigold was resourceful and she was not. She was a good baby but she was not resourceful.
Soon it would be naptime. Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow. We needed rain, people said. But no one said we needed snow.
At the other end of time your official life began, which meant it would one day end. This came to Marigold in a flash. I will be grown up, she thought, and then I will be dead. I miss my sister, Rose would say. I must write her a letter.
You have become quite a letter writer, Marigold would tell her. And she would smile in her little room. And Rose, so far away, would see that smile in her mind’s eye. Being gregarious, as she was, didn’t preclude having a mind. Marigold had explained it.
You must learn to trust people, Rose would say. The more you trust, the more you can afford to lose. You must swell the ranks, she said.
Turn the page, she thought in the playpen. Turn the page. She could see the zebra, striped as it always was. How dull, she thought. And Marigold turned the page, not because Rose told her but because she wanted to.
SHARING WITH BUNNIES
Before the bunnies came there was a beautiful garden filled with all manner of flowering things. The things were all white; Mother was not prone to color. White tulips underplanted with Virginia bluebells. It was spring. Summer was different; there was not enough sun once the trees leafed out. The garden relied on nasturtiums, which Mother and Father ate. It was strange to see the grilled fish with nasturtium butter melting over it. The twins only knew because Mother told them.
But once you try, Mother said, the taste is magic. The twins knew what magic was. It made the sun rise. Now they knew it had a taste, which was the taste of flowers. But only this particular flower. Others you must stay far away from. This seemed very confusing. Best, Marigold thought, to stay far away from the garden lest you get too close to something dangerous blooming.
Mother and the twins were sitting on the blue blanket. The twins thought Mother was lovely. She had enough hair so it went in many directions when the wind blew. Father was splendid. You are lucky girls, Mother said, to have a handsome father; you should try your best to look like him. She said nothing about herself. People with good manners didn’t talk about their own attributes. This was called blowing a horn.
Mother had paused in her weeding. She was sitting with the twins on the blue blanket that was kept in the shed for exactly this purpose. Nostalgically the twins had their heads in her lap. The heads bumped from time to time. Long ago—this is what they remembered.
It was a beautiful day. Mother had said so. Father was off counting things.
Mother did not spend a lot of time on the blanket; she was energetic and purposeful. This must be why she had twins, Marigold thought, instead of a regular baby. It was known Father had wanted a goldfish. The twins watched from the blanket. It was still safe there; they couldn’t as yet crawl.
In their different ways they loved this period. It was possible still to feel safe. They didn’t know this was what they felt until the feeling disappeared, though initially they were distracted, like all babies, by feelings of triumph. First crawling, then walking and climbing, then talking. Their clothes stopped fitting. Pajamas with feet were no longer appropriate. Infinite possibility—something they both felt. Then an absence or loss. Safety, which had disappeared. But all this was still to come.
Meanwhile, the nasturtiums were gone. If you strained your eyes you could see the beheaded stems. But the riot of color was nowhere to be seen. Rose and Marigold didn’t know this; they had never seen a riot of color. This would have been their first.
Mother was kneeling down, then standing up. Mother was struggling, Rose could see, to master her distress. She is trying to be calm for us, Rose thought, so we will be calm. Marigold, she thought, is prone to agitation. Take a leaf from my book, Rose thought, though she couldn’t say so.
Mother was walking the garden, taking note of the bald places. The twins waited for her on the blanket. Rabbits, she said, when she sat down at last. They are in a book, Marigold thought, but they were called bunnies. That must be their name for children. And she longed, once again, for adulthood with its vast cargo of words.
Mother sat on the blanket. She will talk to us about sharing, Marigold thought. Mother was committed to sharing, as she told the twins. The twins didn’t like to share. They each wanted everything all the time. It was the same with Mother. She didn’t want to share the garden with the bunnies, but she knew she must even if the reason wasn’t completely clear. Nevertheless, she put wire cages over the few surviving nasturtiums.
Time to go in the house, Mother said. The sun was setting. It was going to be a beautiful summer day once, and now it had been a beautiful summer day, so it was time to go home.
The twins were in the playpen, smelling the warm smells of inside the house. Father was coming home. Drums in the twins’ hearts. He would pick them up, each one in turn, and lift them high into the air.
We are thriving, Rose thought; Rose was sensitive to the moment. And Marigold thought this was true, she who took the long view.
MARIGOLD’S DREAM
Marigold was dreaming the dream she dreamed. She was a single baby; Rose was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had decided not to be born. Beautiful Rose, lovable Rose. Because if she had been born she would surely have belonged to someone, surely Mother and Father. She was the sort of baby people would rush to claim and then hurry home with before the other parents could see her.
Marigold was not that sort of baby. Marigold was difficult. Well, life was difficult, she thought.
Life was difficult: finally you figured out how to climb the stairs. Unimaginably high, those stairs. Each stair came up to her waist. She would lean with her two arms on top of the stair, and then with great effort hoist herself up on her hands and knees. And then have to stand up and repeat the whole thing. I learned, Marigold thought, and then I fell to the bottom. Rose was looking down at me.
But that was not in the dream. Sunlight was in the dream. And that successful feeling that in Marigold’s waking life eluded her. Then how did she know how to feel it in her dream? And she could talk: that she remembered.
Meanwhile the dream, which should have continued pleasantly, was beginning to be permeated with misery and fear. She must have done something to Rose to make her not be. And it was true: she had hit Rose; once she stuck her finger almost in Rose’s eye. Rose often hit Marigold and stuck her fingers wherever they could go. But that Rose would have these dreams was impossible.
Whenever Marigold looked, there she was, sleeping soundly in her crib, often smiling in her sleep. I must have inherited Jewish guilt, Marigold thought. It was inherited from Father. Father had the full complement of Jewish guilt though he was only half Jewish. At least this was what he said.
Then it was morning. All in all, Marigold was glad of morning. Rose was making a lot of noise. Really all the noise; Marigold smiled at Mother when Mother arrived. And later she ate her oatmeal from a spoon. She even held the spoon like a real person and not a baby.
Mother and Father understood that Marigold envied Rose. (Poor little Rose, thought Mother. Poor little Marigold, thought Father.) But Rose adored her sister. People have pets they love, but Rose had Marigold.
And while it was true there was a little condescension in these feelings, possibly even pity, it was also true that under this there was a deep regard, an admiration for a being felt in some way to be superior. At least less diffuse (as social beings are diffuse). As though the sweet puppy had become the service animal, or even the Seeing Eye dog, on whom life depended. There was in Rose, despite her obvious beauty and great charm, a deep vein of humility, born, she later felt, of her love for her sister, a reverence slightly touched with awe, as though to Rose Marigold was a kind of prophet or holy figure.
Marigold, she saw, was dreaming her dream. She had pulled off all her blankets. And Rose felt a painful wish to restore the blankets and stroke her sister’s damp hair, but of course this was impossible, owing to the bars of the crib.
THE CHILDHOOD OF MOTHER
Marigold’s book had a name; it was called The Childhood of Mother.
About this subject, little was known. But a book had to have a name, just as Rose and Marigold had to have names before anything could happen to them.
Rose was perennial. This meant she was always there, in her one place, just getting bigger, whereas Marigold was annual. You seed yourself, Mother said; this seemed to her a cheerful fact. But Marigold did not think it was cheerful. For one thing, it meant she was homeless, never knowing where she would be from one year to the next, maybe another garden entirely, without Mother and Father to carry her around when she was tired. You are a multitude; Mother said this also. It meant that though you might have one rose in your garden (what a marvelous rose, people would say), you would never have one marigold. I cannot think, Marigold thought, why they would have done this to me.
Who am I, she thought to herself. Or really, which am I of the hundreds in the original packet. This was not a question Rose would ever need to ask. But it explained the book: Marigold needed something that stood for herself as Rose stood for Rose.
How little we know, Marigold thought. It was known that Mother was once a little child and Grandmother was her mother. Before that she was a baby, though not so little as the twins were. The twins were really one baby divided by two. I am half a baby, Marigold thought. I am the brain and Rose is the heart. Or was it the other way? Father had also been a baby though he was always a boy. Other Grandmother was his mother. Other Grandmother lived far away; the twins did not know her.
Who took care of us, Marigold thought, if Mother was a baby? But the twins couldn’t as yet ask questions. They had to take what they could pick up, like pigeons in the public park. Still, Mother was what Marigold knew best, aside from Rose. But she couldn’t name the book The Childhood of Rose because Rose hadn’t had a childhood.
How little we know, Marigold thought again. She decided she would say what the twins did and then she would change their names to Mother. You can’t do that, thought Rose. You should only tell a true story. It is true, Marigold thought; it just isn’t real.
But the book was very slow because the twins didn’t do anything. They lay in their cribs, behind bars like criminals. Sometimes they went to the park. They liked the infant swings. They liked the slide too, but only if Father kept them sitting up, one hand on their backs and one hand on their fronts. But the sliding the twins did. They also used real spoons. They could both drink out of cups. They could crawl and stand up if they had something to hold on to. Rose could say “bear.” Would people who could read be interested in this?
Mother and Father, Marigold thought. They would be interested.
And Rose thought, Not if you change our names.
It was hard to see into Rose’s mind, or hear what went on there. Marigold could hear her own thoughts without any trouble, but she heard nothing from Rose’s head, not even when their heads were close. Maybe because of the hair, she thought. Or maybe Rose was hard to hear because she had no turbulence.
So it was strange that Rose talked first. Never jump to conclusions, Mother said. This meant you never knew what would happen. Mother thought this made life interesting. Father didn’t say what he thought. You had to watch to know. He’s like me, Marigold thought.
Rose was watching her sister. What an odd little thing she is, Rose thought. All her energy is in her head. And then she thought, I have known her since before she was born. And because she was worldly, it worried her to think what other people would make of Marigold. And then, because she was like her name, steadfast and true, she united herself with her sister, as though they were a single story to which Mother and Father were just witnesses.
Copyright © 2022 by Louise Glück
