My Mama's Marigolds

Content warning: contains themes of death and terminal illness

Cheap 70’s plexiglass, fluoro-orange. A grinning font, all cap’, beams from embossed plastic: “VERY TENDER”

A palm-sized sign with a gleaming spike to puncture hunks of thick wadded meat. In the 90’s my parents—radical vegetarian activists—pricked it into wax sculptures of human meat displayed in a butcher shop window. My dad made a mould of his ass. Ha.

It was in the papers and caught all the passers-by in double takes. Now it rests with a fat glob of blue tack on my door, a precursor.

I work at a grocery store liquor shop and when I brought Dhal in for lunch (which my radical vegetarian parents taught me to cook) I made friends with a woman working hard to save up money for a holiday back home (in India with her family) and it was a sweet and friendly conversation (the kind that means you always share a genuine smile with every hello after) but when she asked about my family (which we hadn’t discussed before) she mentioned it casually (like we had) and... Look. I never lie and so I don’t know why I did, but I did. And now I’m just thinking it could be that I wouldn’t have known how to answer the question of what happened? But anyway, so…I just clammed up and lied. Said, ‘They’re good,’ and ‘they live far away.’

It takes the courage of a lion to wear your heart on your sleeve. The whole, pulsing lot of it.

To not cook off the fat, slice its tendons, shuck the bones.

Once I told a customer about my parents (rare) and he trilled, ‘ohmygoooooossshhhh me tooooooooo.’

A limp handed air slap and roll of the eyes. Under my hard-candy-shell veneer, it pricked me. Didn’t he feel the bruising and aching of a person my age with no one? No one of blood, that is.

I do have someone. My grandad.

He’s kind of become my best friend.

He’s due to die any day now.

He isn’t shy about the topic of death with me, and I can feel him ease at my ease. Like a Pringles can opening. A suck of air and release. It must be a lonely venture. Everyone around you squirming like maggots, fussing.

“TENDER: 1. showing gentleness, kindness and affection.”

My Granddad. My Normie, can swindle any smile with his charm and kindness. He’s good at laughs too—making them and having them. When my mum told him that my sister was trans, there was not a second wasted on any type of phobia. Only love.

Almost extra-terrestrial for a man of the silent generation.

“2. (of food) easy to cut or chew; not tough.”

Normie has a tumour in his throat that makes it very painful to swallow. He’s living on soups, juices, KFC gravy and mashed potato slurries.

When I was a child, we’d ‘come over’ to his house, and he’d cut spuds into thick wedges and fry them in his one-person deep fryer. We’d have them with tomato sauce and salad. He’d have it sans sauce; an Englishman. Alone, he’d have them with steak. Never with us though.

My partner has started having their meals alone, mine not being solid enough anymore: Dhal, fried rice, Tom Yum, Aloo Curry, Jambalaya, garbage plate, noodles, and all shapes and colours of pasta. Their rotation is something like hot dogs, burgers, pizza, oven chicken, sometimes pasta, bacon and eggs.

I can’t seem to eat now that it’s only for me.

Me! A glutton and life-long foodie, will starve because I can’t think of a thing, I can be bothered wrapping my lips around and chewing. My mum always imagined me marrying ‘a nice vegetarian boy’.

Through our ‘not-talking’, mum and I had agreed to keep it all from Normie.

I call him, getting off the bus from work one afternoon. The sun is shining, and I know a chat with him will only further brighten my day. We chat as we often do, but he seems in low spirits, turning down my comedic volleys.

I get home.

He loosens.

He lays out full pelt what is bothering him. He knows about mum and I’s *not-talking*.

Normie is straight terror: another dent in our busted-up lineage and clean out of time to fix it.

He bolsters his anger at me, over and over. I sob and dry scream at him— the whole, pulsing lot of it. Me against his only daughter. I am straight terror: I have no one.

We rumble and clash and yell hideously and talk over each other for the first time in our lives.

‘I don’t want you to die thinking that bad stuff about me, because it isn’t true.’

After shove and fall back, and shove, and fall back, he understands That extra-terrestrial empathy.

‘It’s only that I need to be my own person, like you have always needed, Normie. And I don’t know how to do that with mum right now. She still thinks I’m the same person as her.’

That I’m still rocking in her womb.

I promised him I’d always find my way back to my family, that it wasn’t forever and never would be.

“3. NAUTICAL (of a ship) leaning or readily inclined to roll in response to wind.”

Later, Normie and I sit in a dinky food court in my hometown sipping Laksa. He’s never heard of it before.

In Summer we go on a date to Melbourne and see a gold-class spy movie. We have bubble tea, no bubbles. He’s never heard of it before.

On his birthday, I come to his apartment with homemade Tom Kha, the big vegetable bits spooned out of his portion and into mine. He’s never heard of it before.

We sit together for hours talking over a gin. He’s heard of it before. He prefers whiskey.

‘I like to have these conversations with you before I go.’