About Marguerite

Gail Louise Siegel

Since Robert’s wipeout—slipping on an oil patch at the Palwaukee Airport hangar into the path of her baggage truck, crushing his brittle body to dust—Marguerite hunts distraction. She compares the number of individual tissues in the plain box of Puffs (212) to the designer box (172) at the same price; how much her weight varies when she moves the scale around the bathroom floor. She’s 118 beside the sink, 121 in the center of the room, 119 next to the tub. She covets trivia to displace his wailing, the spray of blood, his limbs at those strange angles. Numbers are discrete, unanguished. But every morning after she punches in, they’re still there: the brutal skid marks from the truck’s tires, the umber stains on the concrete floor. Horror trumps minutiae every time.

Marguerite has been writhing in customer service phone-hell for an hour, livid at Macy’s. They’ve charged her twice for a purse that broke within days. First, Chiquita couldn’t reverse the charge, next Keisha kept her on hold through an entire bowl of granola, then Dennis made her repeat her complaint. When Dennis transfers her to Rhonda and Rhonda puffs out ‘hello’ as if she’s exhaling menthol lights, Marguerite wants to kick-box Rhonda right through the phone. Instead, Marguerite parrots her account number, the last four digits of her social, the date of purchase, the receipt number—all the while muttering curses. She watches a wood spider skim across the kitchen ceiling, out of her reach, while Rhonda types. Marguerite knows she’ll still be out 134 dollars at the end of the call, with a reputation for Tourette’s or consumer madness neatly misspelled into the dispute file—today and for all eternity.

It’s a trendy restaurant in a marginal spot where the designer menus are laminated so nobody can fold them up and rip them off. The pretty hostess with the lip stud and fishnet stockings issues Marguerite a pager at the door. She can now circle the rat-infested block, carefully step around the gang-bangers, and windowshop until her table is ready. Marguerite has had appointments all day: a hair cut, a mammogram, and now her lawyer wants to calm her with comfort food before they meet the attorney handling Robert’s accident. She’s in front of a used record store when the old-fashioned pager blares. Marguerite fumbles in her purse to halt the noise, while shielding her bag from the tattooed girl at her heels. The lawyer is seated when Marguerite reaches their table. Then she stands, glowing in a white suit, nearly as white as the nurse who pressed Marguerite’s breasts between plates of glass just hours before. The lawyer is bleached with power, the guardian angel of authority. Marguerite extends her hand and watches it shake as the lawyer’s reaches to meet it. She forgets about Robert’s ugly death and yearns to plead, "What about the lump? Please, tell me, what about the lump?"

Lately the weather confuses Marguerite. She walks outside into the same gray skies, the same grim mood. Is it spring or fall?

But Sunday when she leaves home shortly after sunrise on an early errand, and sees roofers working on the Whitney house—their bodies surrounded by soft haloes, like a crew of holy carpenters—she thinks ‘spring.’ Roofers are like robins, heralding a new season. She watches them fling old roof tiles onto the grass where they dapple the lawn like croutons tossed into new greens.

She puts the car in gear. Her heart lifts at a disabled Hummer at the intersection, happy to witness some justice in this world. She whizzes through the empty streets, forgetting her original errand. What had roused her from bed at dawn on a Sunday? If she pulls over for a moment, maybe it will come to her. These days she only remembers what she wants to forget.

At the corner, she turns east, to the lakeshore. The sun is already hovering above the horizon, a round yellow stare. The morning crowds, which gathered to watch it rise for their Sunday morning ritual, are folding their blankets and shouldering their backpacks. Marguerite is too late for the maximum visual pleasure of rosy paint spilling from the sky and quivering on the lake. By the time she angles the car to the curb and reaches the beach there are only stragglers.

Marguerite parks her butt on the cool sand at the water’s edge. She removes her shoes, then her socks, placing each one carefully in a shoe, as if it matters, as if they are left and right socks.

Why can she hear people best when she sees them crisply, with her glasses? But finds it easier to hear the lake with her eyes shut? Why does it help to read human lips, but not the lips, the crests, of waves? Marguerite digs her heels into the sand—so firm yet so pliant—and closes her eyes to listen.

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