by Aimee Bender
So, I saw it, and at first it was just itself, just the glass of water with a dead butterfly in it, an image suspended and unconnected to anything else, until my mind remembered where it had seen such a butterfly before, found the link, and linked it.
Until the most predictable and unthinkable thing in the world was to tilt my head, and look at the shade.
34
My mother’s head did graze a table the moment after her birth, due to an unexpected tripping, and although the doctors assured them that the baby was fine, and although our family does have genetic links to illnesses of the mind (a great uncle, a second cousin), that bump, and the metered gulping cry afterward, the splotch of wet red on the skull of an infant, is what my grandmother saw as the source of her firstborn’s illness which began rising to the surface as early as four years old. She preferred to think of it as world-imposed rather than cellular, and every year at Christmastime, she sent that doctor a bottle of poison. “You could get in a lot of legal trouble for that, you know,” Aunt Minn told her, on a visit for Grandma’s sixty-fifth birthday, the memory surfacing in the tent one morning out of my usual framework of times, rising up like a piece of furniture spit from the ocean, the tangible details of all of us sitting on the shaggy brown living room carpet together, radio tuned to the oldies station, wrapping holiday gifts for other people since Grandma didn’t like being the center of celebration. I didn’t particularly want to court this memory, but there it was, in full form, Mom in a corner, turquoise skirt hitched around her thighs, painstakingly folding shining metallic paper around a box of chocolates for the mail carrier. “Oh,” Grandma said to Aunt Minn in a knowing voice, “he understands.” She stood to go run cold water over a pot of hard-boiling eggs, moving with deliberation due to a formerly shattered hip, and we all stopped to watch as she left the room.
This would not turn out to be a particularly good visit. It would also be, for a brief moment, glorious. I could feel the pieces of it starting to take shape inside me, shifting in the tent as the memory expanded and sharpened, projecting myself back in that room, its gift-filled den, and while the adults finished ripping off pieces of tape, and wrapping, and Grandma and Aunt Minn peeled eggshells in the kitchen, I toured the perimeter in my mind and in the room, peering at the framed photographs on the walls. There was Mom as a baby, with her healed skull, crawling. There was Minnie beaming in a puffy pink parka. Grandma holding a stick with a marshmallow on it. Grandpa driving his favorite banana yellow car. At the time of that visit, my grandparents still lived in the same house the girls had grown up in, ten miles west of Corvallis, across the road from a fragrant copse of evergreens, and in those early photos, those very young snapshots, it is difficult to tell the daughters apart. They wave their posey arms, smile their teeth at the camera in front of the pale blue clapboard house with a large, untamed yard, a tangle of trees and creek dogwood my mother had described to me on the drive down as one of the safe places of her childhood, where she could find hiding spots under the curls of ferns and rest for long periods of time. “I’ll give you a tour,” she told me as we veered toward the exit ramp. “The yard part is peaceful.”
The house itself, she explained, had frightened her. The walls were too whispery, the rules unclear. Grandma was always expecting things but nothing was stated outright, so my mother felt herself constantly failing and never understanding why. She heard voices in the plaster muttering that she was a bad person. She dreamt of claws ripping at her face. At night, Minnie often climbed into her bed to nestle her body against my mother’s, to press a warm young relief into her, but my mother would still cry, and pull at her head, and it was at three-year-old Minn’s suggestion that they drag Mom’s mattress to the middle of the room, as far from the walls as possible. Later, they hauled the mattress outside, to the backyard, under the starry limitlessness of night sky, with a waterproof cover, and as an adolescent, my mother brought her boyfriends right to this mattress, during school hours or after. She had told me all this during the drive south on the highway, spilling out details, the scent of cold fir wafting in through the broken back window, morning sky clouds bundled on the horizon, but as we slowed down and moved through the residential streets, she began trailing off her sentences, and by the time she pulled the car to her parents’ curb, she was silent. “I’ll tell you more another time,” she murmured, switching off the ignition. Years later, it was Minn who filled in more, the recessed lights in her living room dimmed to yellow coves so we didn’t have to look too closely at one another, me asking on one of our sofa evenings after Vicky’s bedtime what it had been like with the mattress, my aunt choosing her words slowly, carefully, explaining in a weighted voice that for understandable reasons my mother seemed to trust her body most below her head, and sometimes had sat around the backyard on that mattress nude, beautiful, supine, with her breasts open to the air, just like, said Minn, the woman in the painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe had stepped right out of the frame and into their yard. “She was so intimidating,” Minn said, shaking her head, “and so in her own world,” staring past the living room’s walls; “I had to leave my art history class when that painting came up on a slide. I could not even bear to look at it. Do you know it?” “No.” “Maybe for the best.” Grandma and Grandpa, she told me, installed a black shade on the curtain that looked out onto the backyard and when Mom would come home with a companion, they just pulled the shade and turned up the TV. She was on the birth control pill as soon as possible, and they always left out a full container of condoms. “Is this too much to hear?” Aunt Minn had asked me, her voice low, glancing over. I was an adolescent myself by then, and much of the listening had been managed by the absorbing parallel activity of running the fringe of her embroidered couch pillows over the palm of my hand, trying to snag the individual strings onto my life and love lines. I shook my head. I had, in general, no functional gauge about what might constitute too much or not enough.
At Grandma’s birthday weekend, my mother and I visited the rooms of the house, and found the mattress still in the backyard, leaning against a gardening hut, circled by vines, traversed by squirrels. We stood on the porch and looked at it together like tourists at a museum. I asked her if her parents had ever forced her to sleep inside. “No,” she said, thoughtfully, picking damp leaves woven into the trellis. “Only on rainy days. That was good of them, wasn’t it? They knew I was more stable on that mattress than hardly anywhere else. It was the mattress, or me clawing at my head.” She stroked my hair. “Not that you should ever do such a thing, little Francie,” she said. “You have so many more choices than I did.”
I rested my head on her hip. This was a few months before our own impending split, and my mother had been, for the last year or so, on that newly titrated and wonderful cocktail of meds that had seemed to put her in order in a way I hadn’t remembered happening before, like she had been decluttered internally. Weeks earlier, for Alberta’s eighth birthday, we had ventured together to Goodwill and picked out a fresh-looking purple-eyed doll and she had helped me wrap it with sheets of unused golden tissue paper and clear tape and even an eyelet ribbon. While sitting by the fireplace, before Grandpa put her through his usual job grilling, she had laughed at her father’s jokes with a lightness and appropriate timing that had made everyone’s face lift. It had not been an entirely tense morning. It had started out like a balloon. At one point earlier, after wrapping all the gifts and peeling all the eggs, a pregnant Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan had, perhaps in response to the sweet calm in the air and some tune they recognized on the radio, moved close together, and began a modest two-step around the living room, him humming in a robust bass no one had ever heard before, her mouth soft with happy embarrassment. They had just found out the fetus was a girl. Their trying had lasted years, including regular calls to Portland with Minn weeping on the other side from the miscarriages, and my mother’s voice dropping to low, and my mother sitting by the phone after hanging up looking
quietly at the wall for a while, and how good it felt from the satellite of my room to hear her effectively soothe someone else. Around my grandparents’ living room my aunt and uncle swayed, fizzing with joy, to a meld of big band pomp and sports announcer chat in the next room, my aunt’s face quiet and glowing, and for a moment then I wished they were my parents and I that baby, which I felt uneasy remembering, because, in a way, it came true; when they’d finished dancing and went to get glasses of water, laughing, I’d walked over to where my mother was sitting on the brick step among all the wrapped presents and took her hand. She rested her cheek on my hand, tears glittering in her eyes.
I picked up the red cellophaned bottle of poison. “Will he drink it?”
She wiped her eyes and said no, no, that Grandma didn’t even always send it, that it was a kind of deal between the doctor and my grandmother. “Probably he just puts it under his sink,” she said, “for rats.” She took the bottle from me and pointed out the label under the red cellophane with its stark white skull and crossbones. “The label is very clear, see?” she said. “It’s only the cellophane that’s confusing.”
Minn came over to us with her glass of sparkling water, flushed and lovely from the dance, shrugging on the yellow cardigan that I would come to know as her favorite. Mom’s hand reached out to ask for a sip, and Minn gave her the glass, returning to the kitchen to pour a herself a new one.
“Looks like egg salad on pumpernickel for lunch,” she said, walking back. “And pickles. And watermelon.”
“The usual.”
“Plus a new pepper mill.”
“Ma got a pepper mill?”
“Isn’t that funny? A nice one too.”
Uncle Stan took a sip from Minn’s glass and went over to help prep the meal. The remaining adults continued their discussion of Grandma and her purchasing habits, and how many minutes were best for hard-boiling.
“Can I?” I pointed to my aunt’s water. She handed me the glass for a sip, then took it back for herself.
“Twelve minutes,” Uncle Stan called from the kitchen. “I swear by twelve on the dot!”
“Aunt Minn?”
“That is,” he continued, breaking open an ice tray, “if you like your yolk just a touch golden…”
Minn glanced down at me. “Francie?”
“You gave Mom your water glass.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“I have another!” she said, raising hers.
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“Why give Mom her own?”
Her eyebrows folded in. “Do you want a water?”
“No.”
Minn touched my shoulder, confused. Mom stood near us, in between conversations, half listening to Uncle Stan’s chat with Grandpa in the kitchen about his favorite basketball stars as they stirred tinkling ice into the pitcher.
“She’s not catching,” I said.
Over on the shelf, the big band radio announcer introduced a new song, and the speaker erupted with an assembly of trumpets. “Oh,” Minn said, “of course. It’s not that.”
“Not what?” asked my mother, tuning in.
Minn opened up her position to include my mother, reaching out an arm to pull her close. She made some humming sounds of appreciation since they hadn’t seen each other in a little while, touching the iridescent tips of my mother’s shell earrings, both of them swaying above me, Minn stick-like, the swell of her belly precise through her gray tunic, my mother with her auburn hair full and gleaming, in her voluminous sea-colored skirt, steadier than usual, but still edgy, aware.
“Aunt Minn,” I said again.
In the other room, someone ran the faucet, and Grandpa laughed about the demise of a certain team.
“Francie?”
I tried to keep my voice soft. “Then take a sip of her drink.”
My aunt turned her head, just barely, as if to hear me better.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Lunch!” called Grandma from the kitchen.
“Prove it,” I whispered.
“Family lunchtime!” sang Grandpa, heading to the table.
Uncle Stan began walking to the table, holding the pitcher of iced tea, and Aunt Minn straightened up, away from me. All of a sudden, everything about her looked tired. I wondered, for a second, if I’d hit her by accident. She stretched out a hand slowly, as if to reach for my mother’s glass, but my mother had already left by then, heading to the table with her own water glass, sitting down in what she said was her usual chair. “Come along, Francie!” she called. “Daughter of mine. Come along, come sit next to your cuckoo lady mama.”
From the kitchen counter, Grandma and Uncle Stan were now bringing out the large tray of triangle sandwiches, the plates of black olives and pickles, and the bowl of small dark pink gibbous moon spheres made by the scooper Grandma had bought thirty years ago and had used to excavate hundreds of melons. Minn, who now seemed a little dazed, moved to the table enclosed by her yellow wool and firm brown buttons. “Delicious!” said Uncle Stan to the air, settling the melon bowl at his elbow. Mom blew her nose into a napkin. “I have a sore throat,” she said, out of nowhere, pushing her water glass out of Minn’s reach. “Keep that baby well!” she said. I had no idea if she had heard any of our earlier conversation. I was watching from the living room area, but I hadn’t joined them yet, was still hovering in the space now cleared of the people, the wood-paneled walls plastered with those photographs, the piles of shiny gifts on the floor. Something felt unfinished; something else, it seemed to me, needed to happen, so at the brick ledge, on an impulse, I grabbed the tall poison bottle in its bright red cellophane wrapper. It was heavy, and tall, and felt good in my hands, so I brought it to the family table, where I pushed aside the plate of pickles and placed it neatly in the center of the lace tablecloth.
“Ah, of course!” said Grandma. “The centerpiece!” She reached behind her to a shelf and presented a small ivory-colored ceramic vase filled with pink buds. “I picked these this morning—”
“This,” I said, my hand on the bottle.
“Oh, Francie, honey,” said Mom, touching my arm. “That’s not really a good choice for a centerpiece.”
“It’s the centerpiece,” I said.
“Francie,” said Grandma.
“I can’t see anyone,” said Grandpa, behind the flare of transparent red.
“Grandpa,” I said, “will you please pass the olives?”
“Francie,” said my mother.
The table grew quiet. Grandma pushed her little vase of flowers forward. They were the buds of camelias, like wrapped pink fists. The poison bottle, in its dress of red cellophane, dwarfed it entirely.
“We can’t have a bottle of poison as a centerpiece,” Grandma said, firmly. She raised herself taller and made a sure gesture for me to lift up the bottle and remove it. Everyone else waited. Grandma was without rival the family’s authority figure, and she had been nothing but genial the whole visit so far, sitting with me in the guest room with a carved wooden box, showing me her costume jewelry and letting me wear a pair of green beaded clip-ons, even swaying to the big band songs, but now her face shut down. My mother’s body shrank in her seat, and even Grandpa made himself smaller, readying for the yell, but nothing about my grandmother bothered me. Her arrows had no home inside me. I was, instead, admiring how the sunlight streaming through the red cellophane turned parts of the tablecloth into stained glass.
“Why not?” I said. “If it’s a holiday gift?”
“Francie!” my grandmother boomed.
Aunt Minn began to rise in her spot, readying to intervene, to perform her usual smoothing, but I kept my hand resting on the poison bottle as lightly as if on the shoulder of a friend, and turned my face toward my grandmother’s. For whatever reason, somet
hing about it all seemed to slow everyone down, and I do remember clearly how the air around us seemed to lengthen and stretch, then, the various people I was related to stopping to watch, and listen. Which was fine with me. Which was better. Grandma’s face was reddening, and I could see the severity set in on her mouth, the her that had once, after a particularly difficult night, lost her temper and told my mother that if she didn’t start behaving better she might take her to the daughter store and exchange her for another model, a story that had made my mother hysterical with fear, that she told me sometimes at bedtime assuring me that there was absolutely no such store but if there ever was she would always buy me at the daughter store, always the same me, no matter the price, never to worry, and there, in her dining room, the aroma of apple pie releasing into the kitchen, the place from which we would drive home that evening to avoid having to spend the night, I felt what I can only call a great mildness overtake me. As I would do with my uncle months later, to ensure I would not set foot upon an airplane, I fixed my eyes right on my grandmother’s face as a simple expression of will. I could hold that kind of gaze without blinking for long periods of time. It was not an angry gaze, not at all. It held the placidity that comes from total assurance of winning.
My aunt told me later that she felt a chill at that moment, a physical cooling in the room even tucked inside her yellow woolen cardigan, and she had grabbed my mother’s hand and kissed its back several times, as if there was some goodbye about to happen, some essential parting of ways. Uncle Stan sipped his water and fell into a coughing fit, and ice clinked in the pitcher of tea. Later, on the drive home, my mother had said that what I was describing to her as mildness was only the slimmest cover over which was a vast and roiling unknown. “We weren’t sure what you would do,” she said, shaking her head. “It was scary.” I looked out the car window at the rows of pine forests in shadowy formation, their dark forms. “I just wanted the centerpiece,” I said. “Would you have opened the bottle?” she asked. “The poison bottle? No. I just wanted it on the table.” “Why?” “Why did I want it on the table?” “Yes.” “I don’t know.” In the dining room, Grandma had held my stare for a minute or so, her own eyes defiant, nostrils flared, but then she shook her head with a dismissive grunt and took her seat at the head of the table. She grabbed two triangle sandwiches and poured herself tea from the pitcher and for a few minutes spoke, in muttery clipped tones, only to Grandpa. Uncle Stan began passing the primary tray around, and as everyone began to eat and talk, the meal resumed its usual tone; Grandpa interrogated Mom about her job options, and all returned to their roles.