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The Butterfly House
“It was getting dark, so I came to pick you up,” she said. “Besides, I thought it was time I met Cynthia’s mother.”
She was using her kind voice. My muscles relaxed, but only a degree. I looked from her face to Lenora’s, then back again. “I’m spending the night, remember? You said it was okay.”
Cincy stood beside me still holding the eggs in their paper bag, a half smile on her face, her eyes curious as she watched my mother.
Mom shrugged and another mat of cinnamon hair escaped from its plastic clamp. “You must have asked me when I was half asleep.” She turned to Lenora. “Which I often am, after these ten-hour shifts. I’m supposed to get three days off that way, but they’re shorthanded at the hotel and I wind up working five or six days anyway.”
Lenora shook her head. “That’s grueling.”
“Yeah, but anything over forty hours is time and a half.” She straightened in the chair and pressed both hands to the small of her back. “Thank God I’m off tomorrow.”
“Bobbie’s welcome to stay tonight,” Lenora said. “You could sleep late.”
Mom looked at me. “Bobbie?”
I hadn’t told her my nickname and the stamp of her disapproval was clear.
“Please, can she stay?” Cincy said. “Two of our cecropia moths are supposed to hatch tomorrow.”
I knew the verdict before she answered. Begging would only bring trouble later.
“Maybe next weekend,” my mother said. “I haven’t had a Saturday off in a long time. Roberta and I need to do some shopping.”
“Of course.” Lenora’s voice was open and friendly. “But please know that Bobbie’s always welcome. Any weekend you have to work, send her up. I’m always home.”
The slightest stiffening of my mother’s neck sent me into action. “I’ll get my bag.”
I ran to Cincy’s room, snatched my pillowcase satchel from the debris on her bed and flew back to the kitchen, afraid to let something happen in my absence. Cincy stood where I’d left her, still watching my mom with intense interest. I wondered what she saw. They had met once before, at my house, but only for a few minutes when Cincy and I had gone by after school to leave Mom a note and found her home unexpectedly. That day, she’d taken off work with one of her headaches and was glad enough for us to leave her alone.
“I’ll call you tomorrow to see if they hatched,” I said to Cincy.
“Okay. If they have, maybe you can come up and see them after you get back.”
“Get back?”
Cincy looked at me. “From shopping.” Her voice sounded envious.
“Oh. Okay.”
With sudden understanding, I realized Cincy was picturing a mother-daughter day out, perhaps trying on clothes as she loved to do. I wondered if Lenora thought that, too. She gave me a smile but I couldn’t read her eyes.
On the short drive down the hill, my mother and I didn’t talk. A pale amber moon had risen in the southeast, glittering the wide surface of the Columbia as our tires rumbled onto the bridge. This bridge was the last wooden structure on the entire river, my teacher had said. I rolled down the window, but I couldn’t feel the magical pull of the river the way I did when I crossed the bridge alone. Tonight the river was only a deep-slumbering giant, distant from the lives of little girls.
Mom began to sing, her voice silvery and clear as the light off the river. “I see the moon, the moon sees me, down through the leaves of the old oak tree. Please let the light that shines on me, shine on the one I love.”
The tires rumbled off the bridge and onto the blacktop beyond. “So I guess now you’re mad at me,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I stared ahead toward the sparse lights of Shady River.
“I was lonesome for you, honey.” Her voice was soft now, conciliatory. “Seems like we’re never home at the same time. At least, not awake.”
The knot in my chest softened, but I still had nothing to say. I took in a deep breath that smelled of the river.
My mother sighed and changed tactics. “What in the world is a see-crap-ya moth?”
I burst into giggles, knowing I’d been tricked but grateful to give up the painful anger. “Not crap-ya! Cecropia. It’s a huge moth that doesn’t have a mouth. It can’t eat so it doesn’t live very long.”
I linked my thumbs and pressed the fingers of each hand together, like wings. Moonlight animated my hands with shadows. “The caterpillar spins a silk cocoon that’s brown and hairy, like a coconut. But smaller, of course. Lenora counts the days and knows when it’s supposed to hatch.”
Caught up in the mystery of metamorphosis, I watched my hands act out the drama. “When it’s ready, it gives off some kind of juice that makes a hole in the cocoon, and it crawls out. Its wings are all wet and crinkled up on its back. As they dry out they expand, like a bud opening into a flower.”
“Lenora told you all this?”
“Uh-huh. She’s seen it happen.”
“Yuk,” Mom said, and shuddered. “Sounds disgusting.”
She began to sing again. “Through thick and through thin, all out or all in, but we’ll muddle through….”
She paused, waiting for me to join in, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“To-geth-er,” she finished.
It was her traveling song. She’d sung it as we drove the miles from Atlanta to Oklahoma City, from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque, from there to Shady River. Bored on the long drives, I added my unmusical voice to her firm, resonant one, a kazoo accompanying a violin. Somewhere along the miles, listening to my mother’s voice, I came to believe that everyone in the world has at least one gift. I wondered what mine might be. Maybe I’d be a scientist, like Lenora. Once I’d caught up with my classmates, I turned out to be smart at school. Maybe I’d win the no-bell prize for science that my teacher had mentioned, though I couldn’t figure out what bells had to do with it.
Mom parked the old Ford Fairlane in the beat-out track beneath the carport. She’d stopped singing now, her mind on other diversions. I recognized that quietness.
Inside the house, I queried the darkness for Rathbone, the stray cat who’d adopted us part-time. “Kitty, kitty?”
No answer. Somehow Rathbone managed to come and go from the house as he pleased. Mom probably forgot to close one of the windows.
She switched on the small light over the kitchen stove and made bologna sandwiches, pouring milk for me, wine for her. I ate my sandwich and left the milk. She left half her sandwich but drank the wine and refilled her glass.
“Get ready for bed, honey. It’s getting late,” she said.
In my tiny bedroom, hardly larger than Cincy’s walk-in closet, I donned the oversize T-shirt I used for a nightgown, then went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth over the stained sink. When I came back to say good-night, Mom was sitting on one end of the sofa in the darkened living room, her feet curled beneath her. She offered a one-armed, halfhearted hug.
The faint disinfectant scent she always carried from her job mingled with the stronger odor of wine. I knew that, in the darkness, the wine bottle sat on the end table next to her.
“You ought to go to bed now, too,” I said, resting my head against her soft breast. “You’re always tired.”
“I will, honey. Pretty quick. Sleep tight, now.” She kissed my hair, dismissing me.
In my dream I was a cecropia larva, trapped inside my cocoon. I chewed and clawed but I couldn’t rend the tough silk fiber I’d spun around myself. I awoke in a panic, the sheet twisted around my legs. Kicking free, I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, waiting for my thudding heart to return to normal.
A dim light still glowed through the open bedroom door. I gathered up the chenille spread from the foot of my bed and carried it into the living room.
My mother was asleep on the couch, snoring lightly, the empty wine bottle on the floor beneath her outstretched arm. A shaft of moonlight whitened the hourglass-shaped scar on the inside of her arm, a mark she would never explain. Her breathing didn’t change as I covered her legs and pulled the spread up to her chin.
My feet were cold when I crawled back in bed, and the knot behind my breastbone had returned. But this time I was angry at myself. For a moment that evening, driving home with my mother and the moonlight on my hands, I’d actually believed we might go shopping tomorrow.
CHAPTER 3
Shady River, 1974
Three, six, nine, the moose drank wine,
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line.
Line broke. Monkey got choked.
All went to heaven in a little blue boat.
I was pretty good at jumping rope, Cincy was better, but Samantha never missed. Never. We had to make a new rule for her, or else it would have been her turn the entire recess. Lean and tall, with long red curls that thrashed about her head in rhythm to her pounding feet, Sam called out her own cadence without even panting. She said that after high school she was going to play ice hockey for a pro team in Canada.
Sam’s best friend was Patty Johnson. Patty had no coordination, but she had a wide, freckled face that laughed at everything, and besides, she brought the rope. The four of us met on the playground every recess of fifth grade. We’d chant the cadence, then count each rope-skip until the jumper missed—or Samantha reached a hundred. We knew half a dozen rhymes, but the moose one sounded so sophisticated and subversive it was our favorite. Years later, in college, I heard a jazz musician sing the same words and felt a thrill of kinship.
Occasionally, other girls joined us. When six or more of us stood in the circle, sounding off in unison like an army cadre, our blended voices drew a crowd of watchers. Those times were exciting, like having company. But I loved it best when it was just the four of us, carefree and comfortable together.
On the rare days I couldn’t go home with Cincy after school, my stomach began a queasy rolling as soon as the dismissal bell rang, as I wondered if my mother would be home yet, and in what condition. Usually she drank wine, which made her mellow and affectionate. If I targeted my requests for the third glass, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Waiting past the third was successful but risky; the next day she’d deny giving permission. But on the rare occasions she drank whiskey, she got mean. Later on, as a budding high school scientist, I deduced that the different effects of wine and whiskey must be psychosomatic; alcohol was alcohol once it entered the bloodstream. Probably she drank wine when she was feeling gentle and whiskey when she felt mean. But in grade school, all I knew was that the only times Mom struck me were accompanied by the yeasty aroma of bourbon.
In the seventies, nobody thought a parental palm across the mouth of a sassy child constituted child abuse. Not even the child. Nevertheless, by age ten I’d learned to search the house when she wasn’t home and pour any hard liquor down the drain. I washed away the odor with plenty of water and replaced the empty bottle where I found it, so she’d think she drank it all the night before.
I left the wine alone. She was rather cheerless when she was sober, and she worried too much.
Even the wine didn’t help during the holidays. Mom began to get irritable around Thanksgiving and by Christmas she’d progress to morose. I had one hazy memory of a merry Christmas—Mom, Dad and me beside a sparkling tree; their laughter as I careened back and forth on a spring-mounted rocking horse necklaced with a red bow. The last Christmas we spent together, I was three. Every year, when the first tinsel and fake snow appeared in department store windows, I called up that memory and turned it over and over in my mind to keep it alive.
Mom always feigned good cheer as we opened our gifts, but there was no light in her eyes and they sagged at the corners like the cushions on our secondhand sofa. The only sparkle came when she opened my handmade gift.
Since I never had money to shop, I’d continued the tradition initiated by my first grade teacher, who helped us make a felt-wrapped, glitter-spangled pencil holder from an orange juice can. Mom had made a fuss over it—after I explained what it was—and her fate was sealed. In second grade, the homeroom mother provided red-and-green strips of polyester which I dutifully wove into a pot holder, perhaps the single ugliest handicraft ever committed. In third, we framed our school photos in plaster of paris, painted gold, and in fourth grade Mr. Burns helped us tie-dye T-shirts and print them with autumn leaves. Our fifth-grade teacher, an unartistic sort, abandoned us to our own devices. I panicked.
Cincy, as usual, provided the answer. From a high shelf in her cluttered closet, she produced a sand bucket full of tiny seashells. “I picked them up at the beach one summer when Mom and I went to the ocean,” Cincy told me. She dumped them onto the bedspread, sand and all.
In her mother’s sewing box, Cincy found a gold metallic string left over from the sixties when Lenora strung love beads. Cincy often wore them to school. Digging deeper in the box, I claimed a piece of thin black cord, soft and shiny like satin. It was the perfect contrast to the delicate chalkiness of the shells.
Every day that autumn, as the afternoons shortened and the evenings chilled, we sat cross-legged on Cincy’s bed and strung the scrolled, pastel treasures into necklaces for our moms. The project went slowly. Most shells required tiny holes bored with the tip of a screw before we could string them. Lenora accepted her banishment from the room with good humor, and I saw her only when we arrived after school or when she called us out for supper. It was that December, when we were almost eleven, that Cincy told me about her father.
Accustomed to an all-female world, I hadn’t thought to wonder about the missing male in her family. At my house, fathers were a taboo subject. But one evening as we prepared to work on the shell necklaces, Cincy moved a pile of rumpled clothes on her dresser and knocked over a picture of a man in camouflage clothes.
The picture bore an inscription at the lower right: “To Lenora, with love. PFC Harley Jaines.” I picked it up. “Who’s that?”
“That’s my dad,” Cincy said matter-of-factly. “He was killed in the Vietnam war.”
The young man in the photo was dark-complexioned, and even with his military haircut, I could tell his hair was ink-black. He stood against a backdrop of foliage as dense as the wilderness on Lenora’s sunporch.
“He kind of looks like you,” I said.
“He was half Cherokee. Which makes me one-quarter.”
“How did he get killed? I mean, was he shot?”
“Nobody knows,” she said. “He was reported missing in action. His body was never found.”
She laid the picture on the bed beside us while we bored and strung the tiny shells. PFC Harley Jaines smiled up at me, proud and straight, and I wished my father had been killed in a war, instead of deserting us. I had no photo of him.
“They went to college together, in California,” Cincy told me. “Mom’s parents divorced when she was in high school, and she got a job and lived by herself. She had a scholarship for college but she had to work, too. She was a waitress in the Student Union.”
I’d never heard of a Student Union, but I could hear the echo of Lenora’s words in the story Cincy told, so I kept quiet, craving this glimpse into her past.
“My dad worked there, too,” Cincy said, “only he wasn’t my dad then. He worked in a big room where they had pool tables. He’d come over to the café and talk to Mom and drink Cokes, and they fell in love.”
In my mind, the image rose up in black and white, like an old movie. “Then what happened?”
Cincy slipped a shell on her string and reached for another. “Harley didn’t like school, so he dropped out and got a job building houses. Then he got drafted.”
“What’s drafted?”
“Called into the Army, to fight in the war. Mom didn’t believe in it—the war, I mean—and she tried to get him to run away to Canada. But he wouldn’t. He went away to get trained, then came back for three days. Then he got on a ship and went to Vietnam.” Her voice turned confidential. “She never saw him again.”
“Oooh. That’s so sad. But if she never saw him again, how—”
“Pretty soon she found out she was pregnant.” Cincy’s eyes flashed up at me, mischievously. “So guess what they’d been doing those three days!”
My face turned hot and Cincy giggled, bouncing the bed. “She wrote to him and they were going to get married when he came home. But Harley was reported missing in 1963, the year I was born.”
My mouth fell open. She seemed pleased that I was properly impressed.
She leaned forward, whispering. “I’m illegitimate. A love child. Mom says not to tell anyone because some people wouldn’t understand.”
“I’ll never tell anybody,” I promised.
“The same year I was born,” Cincy said, “Mom’s father—my grandfather—committed suicide. Shot himself right in the ear! He left her some money, so she loaded me and all her stuff in the old Volkswagen—the same one we have now—and started driving.”
I pictured the two of them, alone on the road—just like my mom and me. Only Cincy had been just a baby.
“When she came to Shady River, she bought this house with the money my grandfather left. People thought she was a war widow and they were real nice to us, so she used Harley’s last name and pretended they’d been married.”
My chest ached with a sweet, sad longing. Haltingly, I explained that my mother and I, too, had come to Shady River alone, looking for a place to settle.
Cincy grasped the parallel at once and embraced it with characteristic vocabulary. “Fate brought us both here!” she said, her dark eyes shining. “We were destined to be best friends forever.”
The power of my emotions embarrassed me, and I averted my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Forever.” And concentrated on boring a hole into the peach-colored shell in my trembling hands.
On the Thursday before Christmas we had snow. Cincy left school early to visit her grandmother in Seattle. She wouldn’t be back until Sunday, the day before Christmas Eve.
My mom had to work Saturday and Sunday, so I spent the long, gray days home alone, wrapped up in a blanket with my Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The evenings were even lonelier, with Mom at the lowest ebb of her holiday funk.
On Sunday evening Cincy phoned. “I’m back!” Her voice was bubbly, full of adventure and holiday spirit.
Mine was envious. “Did you have fun?”
“The airplane ride was cool. Grandma’s kind of a pain—she’s always nagging at Mom. But she gave me lots of stuff. Some of it’s weird, but there’s this hood with a long muffler attached, and it’s lined with fur. Wait’ll you see it.”
She paused, as if noticing my silence. “So what’ve you been doing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Is your mom home?”
I had no secrets from Cincy. “Three, six, nine …”
“Your mom drank wine,” she finished, giggling. “Good! Then she’ll let you come up! Ask her and call me back. I’ll meet you at the bridge.”
The night was crystalline, with diamond-nugget stars and a crescent moon bright enough to illuminate the snow. Bursting from the oppressive bungalow into the sharp beauty of the night,
I felt like a prisoner set free in a fantasy land. I couldn’t keep from running.
I had stuffed my pajamas in one pocket of my blue car coat and my toothbrush and hairbrush in the other. With the hood buttoned under my chin and Mom’s black boots over my ten-nies, I felt snug and insulated from the cold. The air bit my lungs as I whooped and howled huge puffs of steam toward the moon.
After a block I slowed to a walk, tired out by the extra baggage of boots and padding. On a rise I turned and looked back at the lights of the village. Red and green dotted the edges of scattered roof lines; a church steeple ascended in tiny white sparkles. All was silent. As I stood panting warm air onto tingling fingers, a carillon began its wistful chime: “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant …”
Somewhere far off a dog barked, and my vision shimmered as I turned toward the river again, my boots crunching through the snow.
The steel arches above the bridge framed it in a latticework of white. From my end, I could see Cincy entering the other, a dark red blotch against the snowy rise beyond. On the darkened hillside, Rockhaven’s sunporch glittered with holiday lights like a jewel nestled in black velvet.
“Merry Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!” Cincy shouted. Her husky voice echoed from one riverbank to the other.
I laughed aloud, delight welling up until I thought I’d explode in a shower of stars.
Neither of us ran to the center of the bridge. Instead, we paced off the distance like graduates, or soldiers bearing the casket of a fallen friend. At the center of the bridge Cincy opened her padded arms and mitten-clad hands and we bear-hugged, two snowmen giggling with the secret of life. She was wearing the fur-lined hood her grandmother had given her and she looked like a snow princess.
We turned and looked out across the slow-moving water. It was too beautiful to talk about, and too cold, so we leaned on the railing in silence.
Finally, Cincy clapped me on the back with her red wool paw. “Let’s go home before we freeze, Gwendolyn. Your teeth are chattering.”
She was always making up dramatic names to call me. “Quite so, Alexandra,” I said.
“Follow me, Rapunzel.”
“Lead on, Sarsaparilla!”
Holding our sides, we laughed and stumbled all the way up the hill to Rockhaven.
When my mother opened the tissue-wrapped box and saw the pale swirls of salmon and ivory nestled on their bed of cotton, her mouth dropped open. After so many crude and childish gifts, this one was a shock. She glanced at me quickly.
“I made it. Cincy gave me the seashells.”
Her fingers lifted the necklace slowly, touching each unique link. “It’s beautiful, Roberta! Like something from an expensive jewelry store.”
I beamed, my ego bursting. This must be what people meant when they said it was better to give than to receive.
Mom slipped the necklace over her head, lifting her frizzy hair so the shells wreathed her neck and hung down over the sweatshirt she wore for pajamas.
It was Christmas Eve, our traditional time for exchanging gifts. We had eaten supper, put on our pajamas and made hot chocolate, then come to the tree. We never did play the Santa game. After the rocking horse year, Mom always put my gifts under the tree early. Maybe our ritual let her avoid memories of Christmas mornings with my father. Whatever the reason, I liked opening gifts after dark much better than in the cold light of morning, when the tree lights looked pale and hungover.
As usual, three gifts waited under the tree for me, only one for Mom. Before we moved to Shady River, she used to get something in the mail from her sister Olivia, the only relative she ever admitted to having. But we hadn’t heard from Aunt Olivia in years.
The Christmas of the shell necklace was special for another reason, too. After I’d opened my two boxes of clothes and one containing a new mystery book, Mom told me to put on my shoes and coat.
“What for?”
She smiled and leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “You have one more present, and it was too big to get in the house.” She seemed excited while we scrambled into our wraps.
Cold wind sneaked under the tail of my nightgown, molesting my bare legs as my mother led me out through the carport to the backyard. It was a small area, unfenced, that bordered an alley used by garbage trucks. I never went out there in wintertime. In the snow-lit night I saw next to the house a large shape covered with a sheet of plastic and an old quilt. I gasped, hoping beyond hope that it was what I thought it was.
Mom helped me pull away the covering. There in the moonlight stood a bicycle. Even in the darkness I could tell it was metallic red.