The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  “Francie,” the babysitter said, before we arrived at our stop. She swiveled to face me. Her eyes were serious. “I’ve been thinking. I would like to send you a package in your new home. Would that be okay with you?”

  “What kind of package?”

  She let out a breath and smiled. “Well, I don’t know if a surprise would be better, but you know how you were asking about the lamp? The butterfly lamp? I was thinking a lot about it, and I would like very much to give it to you. It would make me happy to give it to you as a gift for your new home.”

  “You mean the one in the living room?”

  “Yes. The one we were talking about.”

  The bus passed my mother’s and my favorite burger joint, where my mother had called the french fries ringlets.

  “Thank you very much, Shrina,” I said. “But I don’t want it anymore.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” I said. “It should stay with you.”

  “Are you sure? You were so interested the other day, and I know I said that I wanted to keep it but—”

  “I don’t want it anymore.”

  We descended the steps of the bus and walked into the train station, stands and stalls surrounding emitting a brew of donut fry oil and magazine cover ink. The building was warm with light, and filled with people, out and about, ready to travel, and the babysitter collected my prepaid ticket at Will Call and reached for my hand, explaining how we were going to the café now to meet the steward. “Well, if you ever change your mind,” she said, squeezing.

  “Can I hold my ticket?”

  She handed it over, searching the station for the café.

  “Shrina?”

  She turned to me. “Yes?” She kept her eyes scanning as we walked, likely trying to figure out which person at the various tables was the steward—the old bearded man with the newspaper? One of the two suited men sitting and talking over a scone?

  I said it in a whisper first. The babysitter turned. She hadn’t heard the words, but something in my tone had registered, had bothered her. “What was that, Francie?”

  “There’s a bug in me,” I said, louder. I felt a wave of pure giddiness when I said it.

  She had been so consistent the whole weekend: kind, steady, pretty, upbeat, but as soon as I spoke, she tugged me over to the side by a cement pole, away from the traffic of walkers. “Hey!” she said, kneeling in front of me. Her forehead tightened. “Your mother wasn’t well when she said that, Francie. Okay? You are beautiful inside and out. Do you understand?”

  Her eyes locked on mine, searching.

  “Francie? There is nothing, nothing wrong with you.”

  I blinked back at her, at those lucent obsidian eyes.

  “Francie?”

  “Yes, Shrina.”

  “Can you tell me if you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please, Francie. What is it that you understand?”

  “That I am beautiful inside and out. You know about the bug?”

  “Your uncle mentioned it.”

  “When?”

  “When? While you were in the car, I think. He was concerned. I am too. We all care about you very much.”

  I watched the light catching on the sparkling pink rhinestones of her barrette. Commuters and travelers rushing to and fro behind her. I could still taste the tiny slags of butterfly feet as they’d dragged over my tongue.

  “Why?” I asked, after a moment.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you care about me so much?”

  Her eyebrows pinched in. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “There’s this line between us. We are connected, so we have a line of care between us.”

  “But we don’t,” I told her, holding her gaze. “I will get on the train, and I will never see you again.”

  “Oh, we will see each other again!” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

  I looked at her closely. “Shrina,” I said.

  42

  The building manager stands in the doorframe with her usual gray ponytail and floral T-shirt. She told me once that she has lived and worked here in this building for over ten years, after moving to Los Angeles years ago from Kansas to try to get a break in the movies. She makes the other part of her living doing pet portraiture.

  “I thought you’d have more stuff by now,” she says once the door is open, scanning the living room and its population of brown boxes.

  “Hi again,” she says to Vicky, who is still sitting on the floor.

  “Hi.”

  The building manager says she is sorry to interrupt, but it’s not about the balcony today; she heard something else, and she wanted to check it out with me, just find out a little bit more information if I wouldn’t mind. “It’s about Jose,” she says, raising her eyebrows brightly. I glance behind me at Vicky, who is now busily at work on a large box, wrapping the tissue paper carefully around the tall rose-swirled vase, adding the flower sticker to bind it. “Can we talk in the hall?” I ask. Vicky looks up. The building manager takes one step back. She picks at the hair at the fray of her ponytail. She’s still entirely in the apartment, and her voice is not low. “I was talking to him this morning,” she says, “and I just wanted to make sure your arrangement was all aboveboard and legal. I just don’t want any funny business in my building,” she says. “No funny business,” I say, “no funny business at all.” Behind us, Vicky crumples a tissue paper overly loudly. “He says he uses a front door key to get in?” the manager asks. Yes, I say. “And he says your bedroom is locked why? Something about sleepwalking?” I tell her that it’s just as a safety measure. That he’s up early for his work at the racetrack anyway. That right before he goes to work, he just stops by really fast to unlock. It’s probably four-thirty in the morning. No one else is up. We’ve had this setup for years, and no one has ever complained, and his wife also does it on Mondays so he can sleep in. “And you pay them?” the manager asks. I tell her we even signed a paper together in case anyone ever had any questions. I can show you, I tell her, if you want. Her eyes watch me intently, little bright drills, and behind us now is total silence. I can hear Vicky listening, can hear the shape and quality of her listening, which moves into all the space behind us, and when I turn it’s easy to track her eyes as they drift over to my bedroom door, to the lock there, which under scrutiny is clearly facing the wrong direction.

  The building manager peers past me again, into the living room. “You really don’t like furniture, do you? Is that another sleepwalking thing?”

  “Just keeping things simple.”

  “That’s one word for it.” She laughs. “Okay. That sounds okay. Just keep it all on the up-and-up.” She waves at Vicky, who is sitting surrounded by all the boxes, and barely raises a hand to wave back. The building manager closes the door. We can hear the soft padding of her footsteps down the hall and the click of her own door as it opens, and shuts.

  43

  When I turn back to the living room fully, Vicky’s eyes are still on the door, and she’s quiet. She’s stopped wrapping things, and her hands rest in her lap. She has had no idea that the practice that inspired her personal statement continued through my time at UCLA with my dorm roommate and suitemates whom I bribed with cafeteria desserts, to my previous apartment on Riverton near the airport with a different neighbor, into now. She pulls over a plastic sheet, pops a few packing bubbles with her thumb. Downstairs, on the street, someone leans long and hard on their car horn, and when the noise stops, she looks at me directly and asks, in a low voice, if it has been going on the whole time. This is how I know Jose? She’d figured the locking ended when I moved out. She is, she says, surprised. I move about the living room, making stacks, tidying up the tissue paper pile, neatening up my packing areas. The traffic flow down on the street settles into whooshes of sound, and her stillness
is frightening to me, the lack of understanding in her face, and after all the wrapping excess has been placed into its elected spots, when order has been arbitrarily imposed upon the space, I go and sit down beside her.

  In a halting voice, speaking my words to the floor, pulling at the carpet fibers, I explain that it has been going on the whole time, yes, and that I’ve never told her this before, and it may come as a shock, but that in truth, the truth is, she was the source. How it was her fontanelle that made me ask Aunt Minn for the lock in the first place, how I was so new to the house then and checking every single room for sharp tools because I was constantly imagining plunging them inside her head and destroying her brain. Kind of like the doctor did by bumping my mother against the table, I tell her, shaking my head. I suppose I wanted to do that same damage to you. I start to apologize, but by then, she is up, standing at my bedroom door, turning the knob back and forth, clicking the lock in and out, just like she used to do at home when we were standing in the hall together before bed, talking about anything, making dumb jokes about farts and monkeys, and then, out of nowhere, she bursts out laughing. “What,” I say, and she knocks on her skull. “Feel it,” she says, pressing down on her hair. “Come on, feel it! It’s fine.” She says it is all ridiculous to her because I never did anything bad like that, nothing even close, and that it is just the most obvious thing in the world to everyone else that I love her. She reaches to the floor and throws a stray sock ball at me; “God!” she says. I stand up, swaying a little. I tell her that’s true, that I do love her, but she shouldn’t take it so lightly because one never knows what one is capable of. Hadn’t anyone told her the story of the poison bottle? She tilts her head. “You mean the one where you took on Grandma like a badass?” I pick up the sock ball and place it carefully on a shelf. “Or when I sent Mom over the back of the chair?” “That was not you.” “It was partly me,” I say, “plus, there are always babies,” finally meeting her eyes. She stares at me. “What, you think you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night, break into someone’s house, and find a baby to hurt?” She spits out another laugh. I focus on the sock ball, rerolling it together. People get consumed by drives they don’t understand all the time, I tell her, quietly. There are real people who go crazy all of a sudden, like bing. Couldn’t that be me? Why wouldn’t that be me?

  She leans her head on the doorframe. She has a greenish bruise on her inner arm from the tech rehearsal for Our Town. She showed me earlier. The metal gel frame grazed her elbow.

  “You know what, Francie?” she says, and her eyes soften. “Let’s do this. I’ll come over for a sleepover. Okay? You tell Jose he has the morning off on Sunday. I have another tech in the morning but I’ll come over after and I will sleep in the living room on that horrible couch of yours and you leave your bedroom door open. We can even take the lock off. I’ll bring my pepper spray from my self-defense class, and if you turn into a zombie monster murderer, I’ll spray you down. Okay? Will you do that? Saturday afternoon. We can have dinner together too. You pay for dinner since you already feel so bad about everything. I loved that pizza last time. Get the same kind. Enough already.”

  And she sweeps out of the room as if to make an exit even though there’s nowhere else to go.

  44

  Our grandfather did sleepwalk, but he hurt himself only once. Usually, according to Grandma, he started awake and then fell back into bed, but once he did leave their bedroom and opened up the backyard door to step out onto the porch. This was the same rickety porch I would stand on with my mother years later at Grandma’s birthday event, with the gnarled wisteria branches torquing through the wooden white trellis diamonds. My mother says she remembers it well; she was out on the mattress, having recently started sleeping most nights outside, under sheets that each morning had to be hung to dry on a line after a light wetting from the dew. She stirred awake and there was a silhouette, backlit by the yellow living room light that stayed on in case she needed to use the bathroom. She flinched, frightened. “Dad?” she asked, in a wavery voice, and the figure mumbled something about how he needed to fill the car up for the drive. Moonlight shone pale beams on the grasses. “Dad,” she said, “it’s the middle of the night,” and he said that the car was low on gas and they needed it full for the trip. “What trip?” “To the zoo,” he said. They had not been to the zoo in many years. She had loved the zoo; it had been one of her favorite places. He started to walk off the porch toward the side bushes and tripped on the step and fell and twisted his ankle, and my mother called for my grandmother, and the two led him back inside, my mother nude, my grandmother in some kind of patchwork cotton nightgown. In the kitchen, my grandmother attended to the scrape on his knee and bandaged his ankle. Pain had returned him to the land of the awake, and he scratched his head and apologized and told my mother to cover herself and after a few minutes, leaned on my grandmother, who guided him back to bed. Minnie slept through it all. My mother and her body, further dispatches from Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, returned to the yard and slipped back under the sheets. In the morning, my grandfather remembered only parts of it, and he wore the bandage for a few weeks, sustaining a sprain. My mother told me she had been frightened by the surprise, but not of him, his taciturn self, his often annoyed and distant self, and always wondered instead if it had been his way of checking on her. She felt it acknowledged her mattress location as a kind of room. “He did not pick the front yard,” she said when she told me, nodding her head as if to seal in the idea. “Where the car was actually parked.” It is the main moment she retells when she says she felt a kind of love from her father.

  45

  Friday, I sit in the tent for an hour with nothing. My mind is edgy. The canvas is hot. The only memories I can summon up—birthdays, trips to Disneyland—look suspiciously like the photos I’ve seen multiple times in Aunt Minn’s carefully constructed scrapbooks. I consider canceling the weekend plan with Vicky to clear my head, claiming illness, or yard sale conflicts, but whatever reason I give she will surely smoke out; when I was in high school, she caught me in every lie I told about why I was past curfew or who I might be meeting, even if it was all motivated by Deena and her dubious online dating plans. Plus, she’s stubborn. One time, she got all her middle school classmates to write notes to Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan so she could go on the field trip to Descanso Gardens instead of her previously scheduled visit to the dentist. A few of the notes are still on the fridge, so many years later, yellowed by time: “Let V. join the botanists!” “Floral, not fluoride!” Burbank is actually named for a dentist, so it was, in its way, a layered rebellion. She went on the trip, of course; the dental appointment was not at all pressing. Later, Aunt Minn confessed to me during another one of our late-night dimmed living room glass-of-wine confession talks that she’d heard that some people received actual radio transmissions through their metallic fillings and she had wanted to go to the dentist that day to replace those in her daughter because, she told me, looking away, if Vicky ever did happen to hear voices, she wanted to be very, very clear where they were coming from.

  She and I sat together in the living room that night, in silence. Vicky went to Descanso and frolicked around the orange fences of the Japanese garden, and at a later date, had her fillings switched to composite. As did I.

  46

  On Saturday, I do my grocery shopping and then wrap packages by myself for a few hours. It was a fruitful week at the yard sales. There is a pale pink fluted-glass bowl a woman gave away for a quarter off Wilton in Hollywood because it had been tainted by the disappointment of a broken friendship, and I wash it and take all the ache away with my sponge and present it blemish-free for forty bucks to Donna in Milwaukee who gives me five stars and says my packaging is excellent. I dry-clean and fold a designer scarf and bracelet trio that belonged to a dead woman sold by her lead-eyed daughter in Woodland Hills that has changed into new silken and gold accentuators of vitality for savvy purchaser M
arine in El Cajon. An old friend from college reaches out and asks if I want to meet up for dinner and I tell her I’m busy with a difficult work project but I’d love to at a later point and ask a few things about herself and that is that.

  Vicky knocks at around four p.m., wearing some kind of red wraparound sweater that looks like a blanket that reminds me intensely of my mother’s fashion impulses. She has a small backpack on her shoulder. She helps me pack again for a little while, stuffing more bubble wrap as needed, taping the tissue paper, adding the little flower sticker again for flair. We order another pizza, as requested, and open the box on the floor, and she eats it with her legs spread wide like a dancer, sprinkling red pepper flakes I have never seen her use before, telling me about the ridiculousness of Wendell who plays Doc Gibbs and how he seems to think it’s okay to do every line the exact same way every time they run the show. “I mean, listening, right? Where is the listening?” She explains how she decided on pale blue downstage that upstage shifts to a darker burgundy. “It’s really eerie and good. They still kind of vanish into the back, but in a warmish way.” I bring her the cookies I bought earlier, her favorite, mint chocolate and cello-shaped, fanned out on a small plate, and for a fleeting second imagine myself as the babysitter, the ultimate host.