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Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded. I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, illusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now. Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of fourteen-going-on-fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard.
Memory, as the narrator says, is abstract, incomplete, and illusory. It is not a crisp snapshot of a moment that can be trusted to capture and present details accurately. Instead, it is a mishmash of half-recalled images and emotions a person felt at the time the remembered events occurred. So, memory can be misleading and yet, in just as real a way, revealing. Not only does the narrator report feeling the mélange of contradictory emotions as acutely as she did at fourteen, but these emotions are at least partly painful and oddly persistent, staying with Lizabeth even after the mental image of the marigolds fades from her mind. This may be because the marigolds, when they are lying torn by her hands around her, cause an epiphany—a sudden “light bulb moment” that helps her make sense of circumstances that had bewildered and frightened her. Lizabeth recalls the moment when a painful but necessary truth—that the father she thought invincible has sorrows she had not been able to imagine—entered her awareness and changed her forever.
And that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began. That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood. For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood.
Because “Marigolds” is a coming-of-age story, there must be a before and an after. Before, the main character was a child. After, she is a young woman. For fictional characters, the transition between before and after is usually a dramatic event and often marks the story’s climax. This is the case in “Marigolds”: a “violent, crazy act” snaps Lizabeth’s last tie to innocent, protected childhood. The narrator focuses readers’ attention on “the moment” of the change to adulthood. The events that precede that moment—the shame she felt after taunting Miss Lottie, the experience of hearing her mother comfort her sobbing father—prepare Lizabeth to face the transition out of protected childhood. Looking back, Lizabeth realizes that she reached the end of her childhood when she looked up at Miss Lottie’s stoic face. Now, as an adult, she remembers the marigolds often and “at the strangest times” because they mark the dividing line between the childhood she remembers and the aftermath of her frenzied attack on the flowers, which was the beginning of her adult life.
