Boyd held the door like a gentleman and he looked good in his work clothes, that nasty Graziano Redi Mix t-shirt he had on which Marnie still loved to take off, maybe more than ever before. When they passed the dooryard into Dysart’s, Boyd removed his Fuck Biden cap. Marnie was no lefty, but still, manners. Marnie’s Ma was a stickler for manners, Maine manners.
“Two’a you, Mar?” asked the waitress, and the way she pulled Marnie’s name like taffy made it sound like she was asking Ma.
“Nope! Well, yup, but not Boyd. Just me waiting on Ma.”
“I’ll tell Randy to get her eggs running.”
“Thanks, Lace.”
“Betcha.”
As she negotiated the maze of sticky tables, Marnie tallied how much time she’d given Dysart’s, how many years total of the forty some God had so far granted. Lots of Friday nights and Saturday mornings. Birthday parties until Daddy died too young. She even gifted her virginity to Boyd in the bathroom!
Bangor was her residence, but Dysart’s was home.
Within the smell they walked, a thin vapor well known to Marnie, as was her favorite spot beside the window-
But someone was sitting there already, a man alone. He wasn’t black but he was dark, as if he lived nearer the sun than others, with hair on the backs of his hands which further darkened him. The ear Marnie should have been seeing, his right, was gone, a flat graft of flesh in its stead. He peered through spectacles at the refueling trucks, behemoths miraging in a heathaze of their own making. The coagulated syrup trapping this man’s triple stack jogged Marnie’s memory of joke vomit she swiped from the Buy & Sell in her youth only to catch a smack from Ma because manners were paramount, Marnie, and a thing like that was just plain rude and so was-
“Staring.”
Marnie jumped in her skin.
“You’re staring, dearie.”
Ma had slunk in at some point silent as sin, locked and loaded, but Marnie could not take her eyes off the man from away, the rippling meat of his lost appendage, the way it seemed to wink-
“Southpaw.”
Boyd’s deep voice, that old nickname, they reeled her back in, and Marnie transferred her intense gaze to him, held onto him with it.
“Hey, you OK?” he asked, fishing for truth in the green puddle of Marnie’s irises.
“I’m good, babe.”
“Uncivil is what you are,” added Ma. “Sit already, my plantars are mad this morning.”
Boyd pulled a chair for his wife. The stranger sat stonelike as Phil Collins sang about the air tonight oh Lord.
“Not pulling my chair, I see, Boyd.”
“Only got one set of arms, Adelle.”
Lace returned smiling with hot coffee and cold OJ.
“Well, I oughta get the hammer down and go.” Boyd knelt to get a better look at Marnie and his big head obstructed her view of the odd man. “You sure you OK?” He lit his palm on her tummy and the scar there always seemed to disappear when he did.
“Promise.”
Boyd planted a kiss upon Marnie’s crown and strands of graying hair clung to his stubble.
“A reminder that we are not in your bedroom,” Ma rasped.
“Pancakes, Mar?” asked Lace, and the heavy clop of Boyd’s boots got lighter as he receded.
“Please and thanks, hon-”
“She can have mine,” offered the dusky diner. He tipped his plate to display pancakes circular still save for a triangular slice near the bottom and the arrangement was akin to symbols magic or mathematic. His Adam’s apple worked the muscles of his throat like a critter trying to crawl out of some burrow. “And bring me the check.” Marnie imagined Boyd’s mortar mixer, all those pebbles exploding. This man spoke like he was spitting gravel.
Ma scoffed and got to her feet. “Believe I’ll have a smoke. Back soon, dearie.”
“A foul habit,” said the man.
“OK, Mr. Here’s My Eaten Food. Elbows, Marnie.”
Ma swiped at Marnie’s elbow with her fist and sent it skittering. The rapid violence jostled Marnie’s head from its palmed pedestal and her clicking teeth ripped the lining of her lip.
“Umm… so flapjacks for you, Mar, and your eggs are cooking, Mrs. Michaux.”
“Fine,” said Ma with a backward toss of her hand.
Marnie swallowed some blood and decided to scroll Facebook.
“Don’t behave like an ostrich.”
Marnie looked up from her phone squinting. “Are you talking to me?”
He imitated Marnie’s hunched pose and articulated his thumb north to south as if scrolling.
“Mister, would you say that to me if my husband were here? Don’t behave like an ostrich?”
“Him with the expletive stitched on his hat.”
“Yeah, him.”
“Perhaps in not so brusque a fashion. Do you know, miss, I saw the most wonderful thing yesterday.”
Getting sick the way Marnie had gotten sick either softened a person or deadened them for life so Marnie breathed and decided to engage because it was nice being nice even if this guy was being a jerk. “Oh, yeah?”
“A payphone in a blueberry field. A payphone… in a blueberry field!”
“Copeland Hill’s what you saw. Somebody dumped it there and there it’s stayed.”
“Ah, you’re familiar with this area, eh? I’ve never been to Bangor.”
“And I’ve never left.”
“My, my.”
Marnie sipped some juice and waves of pulp skirted a sprouting canker sore. “Used to trick or treat up by Stephen King’s house, got candy right from his hands. This was probably around Cujo, Christine. But he doesn’t stay in town much anymore, they’re down Lovell nowadays or Florida.”
“Whose house?” Maybe he didn’t hear, what with the one ear and all.
“Stephen King!” repeated Marnie a tad louder.
“Well, I can’t say I’m aware of the gentleman but there’s no need to be impolite, is there? My name is Givargis. Victor.”
The backwards recitation of “Givargis. Victor” almost erased the embarrassment of his prior comment from Marnie’s mortified conscience. Thank gosh Ma was busy with her cigarette.
“Victor Givargis,” said Marnie, an oral loop de loop. “Well, that’s a name that ought to be on a b-”
The man at Marnie’s usual table eating her usual breakfast produced a rectangle and flicked it her way.
“-usiness card.”
The thing slid to a perfect stop beside Marnie’s mug of joe as if it had always been there.
“It’s just… it’s just your name.”
“In case I forget it.”
“What do you mean f-”
“Based on the brightness of your skin, Marnie, you have never borne babies.”
A chill stung her then, like Marnie was showing him everything she owned and Givargis was seeing each tidbit.
“The way skin sits on a face is very important and a happening as traumatic as childbirth loosens certain sinews in mortals. Your skin still sits snug and tells me much.”
And Givargis grinned as Marnie saw, there on his pointy chin, a roving third eye.
“Be not afraid,” he said, the caution not a comfort in any way because it was delivered via sudden mouths impossible. Marnie had stumbled through similar deliria during the worst of her illness but never thought she’d encounter wild visions again.
She shut her eyes hard, just the two she had, and opened them.
“So whom to blame for this barrenness, you or the husband?” asked a regular Givargis as Lace dropped off his check, slipping in the impertinent inquiry just as he slipped a twenty into the tattered billfold. “Keep the change,” said he, “but do tell your cook to refrain from salting the pancakes. A pinch or two, perhaps, but I feel as if he suffered a stroke at the griddle and simply got stuck. I’m unsure if such human breakfast is a Bangor eccentricity or a phenomena local only to Dysart’s but-”
Marnie stood before she knew she was doing it and moved like the high school hurdler she used to be. Peeling scabbed wounds first followed by scaring the shit out of her and capping it off by insulting not just Bangor but Dysart’s.
Victor Givargis maybe needed an etiquette lesson, a masterclass in Maine manners.
She snatched the cash from Lace and tucked it into his breast pocket before seizing plate and cutlery. The cancer that had robbed Marnie of motherhood? She always pictured it like this man: quiet, smarmy, cuntish. A little bastard.
Looming over Givargis, Marnie sliced into the pancakes and devoured them, masticating with abandon, sloshing the mess in her noisy mouth while Phil Collins went nuts on the drums. A dollop of chewed matter plopped onto Givargis and slid down his mangled ear. “This is a red letter day for Bangor, folks, mark it!” Marnie shoved another forkful into her maw and sucked the slop through her teeth. “The finest jacks ever flapped here at Dysart’s, I can tell you that free of charge and anyone who doesn’t think so is a goddamn moron! Now get off my table, Givargis, you son of a bitch, and-”
Wallops on her scalp, rings banging her skull.
“Marnie Michaux!”
Marnie’s larynx closed, a flutter that briefly stole her oxygen. Ma’s fury always elicited such a startled reaction.
“Now just what in the hell are you doing? Did I bring you up to be a spectacle like this? To shame your Daddy’s name?” Ma punctuated her verbal blows with physical ones. “We wouldn’t want you to lose any of your bad habits now, would we, God forgive me but sometimes I say thank you to Him for not making me a grandmother and barring you from mothe-”
Ma abruptly choked on her shouting, barks tinged by tar and nicotine, and a darkness spread across her slacks as she pissed herself. Marnie caught her mother’s flailing frame and watched as seisms smoothed and folded that face of wrinkles.
“Marnie.”
A chorus from behind. There were nowhere near that many people in Dysart’s, let alone huddled close by Marnie’s back.
“Marnie, attend me.”
Her mother’s thundering frame still abreast, Marnie turned, as did her mind.
“Be not afraid.” This phrase repeated, yet how could she be anything but? Givargis had gone from an asshole to… to-
“Yes.” He was transformed entirely except for that gnarly gristle on the side of his head.
“Punishment, I’m afraid,” Givargis confessed.
“For what?” asked Marnie just barely.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
But Marnie reckoned she might.
Givargis glided forward on legs that were fast fusing into an organic wheel while his many sets of arms danced to private music. A fiery star rolling across formica.
“Your mother’s life or a new one?”
Everything around Marnie had faded to black and the sole source of illumination came from Givargis, brilliant beams spilling like rain out of the gyrating angel.
“Be quick, Marnie. Your mother’s life or a new one.”
Marnie looked down at her convulsing Ma and felt the sharp sting of every slap.
“So be it,” Givargis decreed, and the world as Marnie knew it returned in waves.
Someone screamed for an ambulance as Givargis helped Marnie stand amidst a maelstrom of movement.
“Congratulations,” he said before walking away. This close, Marnie picked up scents of lavender and jasmine from his exiting wake.
“What do I tell Boyd?”
Again that robust polyphony, clear and loud in spite of his lengthening distance.
“Tell him your mother’s dead and that he should come pick you up.”
By the time Givargis’s multitude had finished advising Marnie, he was in the parking lot, a shape unfurling and evaporating into the shimmer of a blue morning.
Uncharted warmth swirled inside Marnie and while this newness nourished her, it also sapped the last of her strength, so she sagged onto the chair of her go-to table and roughed a napkin across her syrupy mouth and with shaking fingers Marnie grasped the coffee mug and drank and drank and drank.
Those pancakes were so fucking salty.
— Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery during his late teens, literature and movies were the vying forces of his life. Naz graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and now works as an author and filmmaker. Find him at www.arjoyan.com and on Twitter @RobertArjoyan