CONFETTI by Corinna Cook
Their ears are large
Their feet are small
They haven’t any chins at all.
But I think mice
Are rather nice.
– Unknown children’s book
Marion’s fingers are a little bit longer than warranted by such a slight body and her joints point sharply. The effect is elfin. And rather like mice, she doesn’t have any chin to speak of.
“What was the most beautiful part of your day?” she will ask you, beaming, utterly fascinated by your hesitation, your uncertainty. When you can’t think of what to say, resort to deflection: turn the question back to Marion and she will give you an immediate answer. The moment a crisp banjo string snapped under her fingers, perhaps, or the ravens’ chaotic involvement in her afternoon at the dump, or better yet, the cold pepperoni pizza a lady in green covertly shared with her upstairs in the bookstore. When all you do is blink Marion will throw the thinnest arms around your neck, calling you adorkable and nuzzling her way into a snuggle from which you won’t be able to disentangle either your limbs or your once-independent mind.
Much like a stick figure pressing onward through the squares of a cartoon, Marion walks bent too far forward at the waist. She must be nursing some protracted ailment of the lungs – perhaps her ribs are too fragile to properly house the meager collection of vital organs impossibly lodged inside her paper-thinness. Should she ever straighten her shoulders and throw back her head one can only assume her skeleton would snap dryly to pieces like uncooked spaghetti noodles. But the image may be unnecessary: recent periods of adolescent homelessness and indigence all but confirm your hunch that Marion suffers from some unmitigated pulmonary disorder which causes her to bend unthinking from the waist even as she springs from this side of the parking lot to that and back again.
But sympathy here confuses the experience at hand. When your worries go toward lung disease songbirds leapfrog in waves overhead, dizzying your eyes’ skyward glance as Marion, tugging your wrist, brightly welcomes you to the old green van. This is her new home, a whimsically decorated broken-down shell of a vehicle with a drooping mattress in back – the very first private space she has called her own. Its seats have long since been removed and the plywood floor is well-swept but there is no denying the accumulated cigarette butts lining the cracks between wood and van wall, nor the single camp pot encrusted with the remnants of some weeks-old meal given to her by a bewildered new friend taken by the notion that someone as “full of life” as Marion ought to eat something – something – her skeletal thinness is, after all, so eerie.
Marion doesn’t think to give the pot back. She hasn’t anything to cook in it and no thought of acquiring anything to cook anyway. It never occurs to her that the pot’s original owner might have a habit of cooking and eating food herself, daily even, and so might miss its protracted absence. Marion imagines many beautiful things like cavorting unicorns and tambourine-playing owls and knit caps the color of streaming sunshine, all of which translate into the trancelike guitar solos those long loose fingers of hers unhinge from whomever’s instrument she’s gotten ahold of. But she does not imagine such things as other people’s habits.
Nor does she imagine that a winter nighttime walk across town will beat the buoyancy of her mood. But it does: you will soon be driving Marion out to a bar to cheer her up. When she realizes she may lose a couple of her toes to frostbite, this is her request.
This is her request because last night she was sitting on someone’s kitchen counter listlessly flopping the phone cord back and forth. “Pain? Yeah, hurts pretty bad,” she had said into the phone. Then, “. . . can’t tell. My fingers might still be too numb. . . . No, yeah, I’ll use a fork. . . . Okay, let’s say yes I can feel my toes and yes it’s painful.”
The nurse on the other end of the line must have asked what color they were because Marion had shouted “red!” as if a right answer delivered at top volume had the potential to win her a prize. A sticky one, probably, of the sort discovered in the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks.
Well, as long as her toes aren’t grey –
“Um . . . define ‘grey,’ ” Marion had said. “I mean I guess yes. So ten grey ones.”
Well, as long as she hasn’t been rubbing them –
“I wasn’t supposed to rub them?” This one had genuinely piqued her curiosity.
Well, as long as there aren’t any blisters –
“I’d say I have quite a few blisters, shall I count?”
Well, as long as she leaves them alone and lets them pop naturally –
“Okay, but a few of them popped while I was rubbing them just now.”
There had been a scramble on the other end of the line and stern talk of infection. Marion had thanked the nurse, accepted a small stash of someone’s dog’s leftover antibiotics, had wandered out of the kitchen, and eventually left the apartment. No one was really sure afterward whether they ought to have helped her home.
The next morning she ate chocolate ice cream for breakfast in her van and now she wants to go out and because you are confounded not only by the combination of potential amputation and chocolate ice cream but even more so by your recollection that Marion looked so whitish and limp on that kitchen counter, you will not drive her to a health clinic at all, because she doesn’t feel like it, but to a bar, because she does.
Although you are driving you still see the sharp edge of the kitchen counter cutting into her soft thighs. You glance like the responsible driver you are from the double yellow line between lanes to the single white one but you mostly just see her spindly legs dangling in the air. It occurs to you that perhaps her feet never consorted much with the earth in the first place, that Marion does more floating than anything else, that she should see a doctor, that you don’t really like this bar you’re going to, that your stomach is still sour from its sudden start at the sight of those limp legs hanging off the edge of the kitchen counter, legs which just buckled beneath her when Marion tried to launch herself into the air after hanging up the phone. These are the things that will occur to you but the things you know to be reasonable sometimes lose their shape in your dealings with Marion and you will find you have no hesitation to do what she so sweetly and incomprehensibly wishes.
As you drive Marion suddenly thrills at the opportunity to play you a Patsy Cline cassette on her battery-operated tape deck. For some reason neither of you turn off the car radio. The Subaru is filled with two musics at once, discordant, disjointed, sound qualities clashing from the mismatch of the car’s speakers and those of the tape deck. Maybe you and Marion are also trying to talk to each other over Patsy and the radio and maybe not. Eventually, when for sure there is nothing, really, to say, Marion just holds your gaze with her gleeful silent smile. She is pressing you into a most distant sense of solitude.
It is fitting, then, that you are reduced to a clinging giggling mess as, arm in arm, you and Marion fuse into a single flailing wool-clad creature attempting to gain purchase on the ice-slicked incline leading to the bar’s front steps. After a minute this becomes maddening – if only that bottom step were within reach – but the innocent thwarting of simple intentions is met with as much apology as you can expect of a confetti-filled firecracker and the night leaves you to your own devices.
When you do make it inside the smoke-filled barroom you and Marion step apart. She is comfortable here. But you feel kind of like an unhitched trailer, reliant upon the motor power of another vehicle and inconvenient to tow in a crosswind. Still, you are here, and so you shed one or two outer layers to keep busy. Meaning to disguise your squeamishness about wool’s absorbtion of cigarette smoke, you toss a sweater here and a scarf there with false insouciance. Marion has already limped over to the wicker chairs in back; nearby, someone’s guitar case sits open and empty on the floor. Yellow flames leap from the grill where squealing women are flipping burgers. Someone’s dog is wandering from barstool to barstool, evidently less interested in snarfing bar snacks than in sampling crotch odors. The surprising number of empty beer pitchers sitting on all of the room’s available surfaces suggests that no one is particularly concerned with bussing the tables tonight. The talk is gruff and accusatory and careless and Marion, head bowed and rocking, eyes closed, mouth expressionless, and neck crooked at a heartwrenching angle recalling nothing less than the rigor mortis of a broken bird, plays someone’s guitar.
That is when the absence of a chin strikes you not as comely or cute but as tragic. Marion plays with the enormity of a heart that intends to spend itself hard and fast. And her chin which isn’t there has left its space to the impossible crook of her spine: from the front all you see is the rolling crown of her head and the bony ice-colored nape of her neck in the light of the bar’s neon beer signs. But her fingers are prideful of their long slenderness and eager to be gazed at. They move to be seen. They do.
Like this Marion plays folk music with a flair of the Baroque. It is not stylistic in its formality, but in its waterlike repetitions, its tumbling variations, its allegiance to a theme. She is bent and broken and entranced over an acoustic guitar that you know is filled simply with air but which appears truly to be her only anchor to these floorboards. The planks underfoot groan with the weight of everyone else’s lurching steps, yet as she plays, Marion’s physicality blends with the notes as a vapor. The music is at once flighty and fleeting and surprisingly persistent. It is made of an otherworldly plucking that pours out as if from a mass warbling contingent of frost-kissed chickadees.
The branches off of which such tiny birds flit can be as thin and slight as sticks of incense. On cue, the smoke in the bar takes on the dry scent of jasmine and ginger. You linger, somewhat disoriented, holding a couple of two-dollar mystery beers and unsure of where to set them. Marion is perched in a tree, her toes unfrozen and strong and curled around a high branch’s skyward twigs. Of course she is still embracing a guitar. Of course her thin neck still bends impossibly, all but broken before the force of her fingers’ abandon. From the ground you hear not the notes but their form, the pattern stated and restated so quickly and seamlessly as to achieve a chantlike lull, broken only with a most disconcerting chord change that does not touch the spilling pattern of sound but changes it unalterably, like light shifting over the bustling army of tiny birds whose winter lives you can’t quite fathom.
Corinna Cook’s nonfiction has appeared in Flyway.