The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  When she’s done, she clears her plate and goes to peek at the tent on the balcony. It looks far more ragged now, several months exposed to the elements, bleached on one side to a pale yellow from the sun. She pulls the sliding door lock lever up.

  “You realize you can’t go in anymore, right?” I say.

  She turns around, surprised. “Really?”

  “I don’t even go in unless I’m staying for a little while. There’s stuff in there now.”

  “I can stay for a little while.”

  “It’s only for me, Vicky. Sorry.”

  She clicks the lock back down, tapping at the glass door with her fingernails.

  “Real stuff?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Nothing solid, no.”

  Her nails make small, irritable sounds.

  “Everything’s so locked up in here!” she says, flouncing onto the couch.

  We watch a movie on my computer, a romantic comedy about a bookstore. She asks midway, the movie paused so she can use the bathroom, if I told Jose to take the morning off. I tell her yes, and how he was surprised, how he nodded his head in what could only be called approval. “Of course he did!” she says, emerging, going to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. “No one but you thinks you’re a psycho.”

  We are both a little nervous at bedtime, even though I brushed my teeth in the same bathroom as her for at least eleven years. I know how she brushes and spits and rinses. She is, at this point, more familiar to me than my mother. She closes the bathroom door while I’m cleaning up the pizza debris in the kitchen and changes into her pajamas which have the happy/sad faces of drama on them in yellow and black given to her by an overly literal-minded aunt on Uncle Stan’s side. “They’re so overdone they’re wonderful,” she says, grinning. “Right? I’m going to wear them on the first night in the dorm and see who runs away screaming and that might be exactly who I pursue as a friend.”

  I ask her if the applications are in, and she says as of yesterday. All set, all sent. She brushes off her hands. “And what a perfect way to finish the essay.”

  “You mean sleeping over?”

  She gives me a look. Unzips her backpack, and eyes my room.

  “Okay,” she says, “so the truth is, I don’t trust you not to sneak up and lock yourself in in the middle of the night. You’ll have to take the lock off.”

  “I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

  “Oh, you’ll sleep a little.” She rummages in the main pocket. “I also brought a screwdriver,” brandishing it.

  She is so good with this stuff. She has it off in seconds. The bedroom already feels so loose to me, like it will spill all its roomness into the world, me included. With the gaping hole in the door and the lock on the floor with its surgical droppings of screws and bolts everything begins to lose a little contact with sense and reason. The monster feeling of the loft returning, those woven corner darknesses beginning to fluctuate on their own. I stare at her, glassy-eyed. She runs to the couch, tucks her screwdriver under her pillow, “Good, right? Super sharp!” and also shows me the pepper spray and how they taught her to use it in her self-defense elective: aim, spray, don’t hesitate. “I’m all set, Francie,” she says, stretching out on the couch pillows. “You just try.”

  47

  My grandmother wrote me one birthday card during my adolescence. It was the only birthday card I ever remember receiving from her, and in it she told me she had seen the doctor who’d injured my mother at a local harvest festival event for the community, and they had had a conversation about the poison bottle and she wanted me to know there were no hard feelings on the doctor’s side. In her looping old-fashioned handwriting, she wrote how she understood that possibly what I had taken issue with on her birthday event years ago was the red cellophane holiday aspect of the delivery. Was that correct? If so, she understood. She now opted to send the doctor the poison bottle directly, in a brown paper bag, and he’d said at the event that he understood the purpose of the ritual and had taken to donating it to local exterminators. She also said she was proud of my mother and how she had raised me well for many years, against so many people’s expectations and concerns, and she was pleased that my mother was playing an active role at the center (my grandmother always called Hawthorne House “the center” for unknown reasons). She, my grandmother, was not well, and did not know when or if we would see each other again, but she said it gave her relief to know that with Minnie and Stan, and later me and even Victoria, my mother would always be in capable hands if need be. She, my grandmother, was thinking more about the family as she approached the closing days of her life, and for whatever reason, she found that she often remembered that particular day of the birthday party and my choice of centerpiece.

  Happy birthday, she wrote. Here is twenty dollars. Please buy yourself something nice.

  When my grandmother died, my mother called and wept on the phone to Minn, and when Minn passed the phone to me, drifting off to some other part of the house to do her own mourning in private, I dug the card out to read my mother the part about the pride to which she listened silently. The twenty-dollar bill was still there in the fold, green, gray, worn. I was a little sad about my grandmother, who lived in my mind as a kind of rock formation, but something about the money bothered me, like a payoff of some sort, so I placed it in an envelope and mailed it to my mother a few weeks later, after the funeral, with a note scrawled saying I had found it on the pavement at the high school and right when I spotted it someone had shouted “Elaine!” across the quad, so of course I had to send it to her. I knew she would believe and appreciate the story, which was entirely invented, and the twenty-dollar bill, like the future vases and scarves of my job, was now scrubbed of its history and only cash to her. A gift from her own mother, invisible to them both.

  48

  The first night of the locked door, so many years ago, after my aunt had gone to the hardware store per my request and bought me the lock, I initially sat close to the door’s edge, talking to her. There were many fast sensations that night—the nervous feeling of door-checking, the flash of terror realizing I was stuck, the sound of my aunt’s questions and Vicky hiccuping in my uncle’s arms, but mostly, primarily, the room took shape around me. It was even better than it had been when I had control over the opening and closing of the lock myself on Taylor Street in Portland; in Burbank, the moment the door clicked shut, and the bolt engaged, objects became meaningful in their spots. Or they returned to meaning, they became, again, meaningful, when earlier they had been haphazard and without weight. With the limit of the door in place, the room became obviously where I was, and where I would then stay for the course of the next ten or so hours. In the mornings, before the task passed to Vicky, my aunt could be counted on to knock and unlock at six-thirty a.m. when I was supposed to get up, and sometimes she even did it earlier if she was awake, worrying I might be hungry, or thirsty, or lonely, or sad. She found, she told me, that the sight of the knob on its horizontal setting gave her a bad feeling, “like being on a sinking ship,” she said, one morning, in her shell-pink bathrobe, greeting me with anxious eyes. But my ship was well. At least in this way, I had found a kind of resource for myself. I left the window a crack open in case of fire, but I didn’t have any impulse to jump, and did not worry that I would fling myself out in the middle of the night. Vicky was safe as pie in her bassinet, and during the day I could even enjoy her and play with her without fear that I would kill her as soon as the grown-ups fell asleep.

  When I think back upon that transition, besides Aunt Minn’s and Uncle Stan’s kindness toward me, which was obviously very important, the door lock was the other crucial component that allowed me to adapt more or less successfully to my new life in California.

  * * *

  —

  (This was the essay I sometimes wrote in my mind as a counterpoint to Vicky’s.)

>   49

  Vicky sleeps on the couch in her usual way, neck exposed, her mouth slightly open, one leg hitched high like a leaping gazelle. I can see her through the open doorframe of my room. In my own bed, all I can think about is the action of picking up the parts of the lock and rescrewing them back into place. Those little brass screws boring into the door, into their spots. I think about it over and over again, tossing, alert, and after some hours pass, get out of bed. Everything in the apartment feels unhinged, literally, like there are no doors left either and we may as well be sleeping on the sidewalk, and the only place that beckons to me at all is the tent. To replace one formerly effective small space with another. I tiptoe past Vicky on the couch, and she shifts and mutters as I go by. “You,” she says, softly, dream-soaked. “You.” Out on the balcony, I leave the glass door open in case she needs anything, unzip the tent, climb in, pull to closed. I’ve never been in at night before, with the night traffic creating new arrangements of sound, and a faint pleasurable strand of coldness moving through the air. Lights burn in the corner from the infusion of streetlamps, and the rest of the orange of the interior canvas is darker, almost black. I am entirely awake. I return to thinking about the day of the train ride. The train ride, with its two fleeting visitors. The train ride with the kind steward taking care of me. The train ride with its vistas of edged mountains and wavy grasses and tall conifers. I feel this rush toward all of them, the babysitter, the steward, the conductor, the woman in the suit, the man in the suit, their faces vivid, even leering. The dark intensifies them, and the memories move in, close and active, like nocturnal creatures scuttling in the shadows. With Vicky’s breathing faintly audible in the living room it is all reminding me so much of being in the babysitter’s apartment that first night, her own sleep-breathing up in the loft, the night when the darkness began to fold in on itself, and silent cogs stirred in an ancient machine. It is an unmistakable echo.

  50

  We found the steward sitting at a small table with a poppy seed bagel and square of translucent brown paper and an orange juice carton. I remember he was wearing a scarlet red jacket with a small embroidered black train on the front pocket. Both the babysitter and my uncle had told me about him: “He sounds very reliable,” “He’s always been a good kid,” but I did laugh out loud when he waved us over; he had unusually long legs and a long neck with a large Adam’s apple and even an eight-year-old could tell he was awkward. I imagined my mother meeting him as she met most new adults taking care of me, babysitters, teachers, shaking his hand by embracing it with two of her own, and thanking him over and over with her aching, skitchy eyes. He greeted me warmly, and said something about my uncle, even though second cousin or not, he was just, at that point, the next in the line of adults to me, the baton passing.

  While the café radio rumbled out a song, the babysitter took out a piece of paper and the two of them huddled together, going over whatever formal details needed to be shared. I don’t remember any mention of his name. The babysitter glanced at me and then told him in a low voice that I liked oatmeal in the morning, “with brown sugar,” and that every day I cried in bursts, but that sitting by me seemed to be the best way of support. “She doesn’t sleep with a special stuffed animal or anything,” the babysitter said, “but she does like a light on.” “Any kind of light?” “I’m sure she’ll tell you,” the babysitter said, after we finished our snack and began walking toward the quay, “but she seems to prefer something dim.”

  I tripped along between the two of them. The butterfly was settling inside me, and despite the feeling that I was floating, and that the signs lining the train station could at any moment shake off their stands just like the butterfly had, as if everything—hamburger, cartoon dog, letters—might be on the verge of popping into the world, plus the insistent warm sensation despite evidence that I was bleeding out the back of my head, it was not such a bad thing to feel like an official topic of conversation, a subject to learn. Once we were boarding, I hugged the babysitter briefly, but she was already transforming into a bystander, her face mutating into foreignness, and I mounted the stairs to our train car, where the steward placed my black rolly suitcase on a high shelf, asking if I’d prefer him to sit next to me, or across. “Across,” I murmured, and he nodded with a professional briskness. In minutes, I had a row to myself, with a window to myself, and he settled his stuff across the aisle, in a quartet of chairs facing each other. Slanting rain began to fall on the glass, and I sat with the soft brown bunny whom I had grown to appreciate mostly because it was not so special, was eminently replaceable in nearly any toy store, and dug out my word search book. As the train pulled from the station, I could peripherally sense the waving hand of my beloved babysitter, her bright and sad smile, those dripping black eyes, but I would never see her again, and I knew it even if she did not, so I began putting loops around various letters into false words to make it difficult to see where the real words were so I could do the searches all over again. She was at the station; I was on the train with a stranger; my mother was somewhere in a white room surrounded by nurses. JKAKLWEL. FSTL. OPTGE.

  The conductor walked in through the electric door. “To Los Angeles Union Station,” he announced cheerfully, punching my ticket. “Sleeper will be next car down, showers too.” He had a belly like a swell of water just contained beneath the buttons of his shirt. “You traveling alone, miss?”

  “With me,” said the steward, from his spot across the aisle. “She’s with me.”

  The conductor turned. “Not sitting together?”

  “No,” said the steward. “We are not.”

  The conductor retucked his shirt into his pants. He took his time setting our tickets just right in their slots. “We’re not busy on this stretch,” he said, “but you may have to rethink that later. Looks like you have two sleepers,” he said, peering at the steward’s ticket. “Under eighteen can’t be in a sleeper alone.”

  “Of course not,” said the steward. “We will share one.”

  “And the second?”

  “Is for other things,” said the steward.

  “Like?”

  “Luggage.”

  The conductor stared at him blankly, and the steward raised his eyebrows with an imperiousness, like he always bought two of something, like it was the most normal and middle-class thing in the world to do. Finally, the conductor shrugged, muttered something about coming back by later to check, and went on to the next row.

  Once he was far down the aisle and out of hearing range, the steward leaned across. “Whatever you want to do,” he whispered, “is fine. Do you want your own sleeper?” I nodded. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll figure it out. No one’s going to check.”

  I watched his mouth, making words.

  “You won’t be scared in one by yourself?”

  “No.”

  It was the first word I’d spoken fully aloud to him, and we both could hear the rightness of it.

  * * *

  —

  Over the initial hours of the train ride, I continued my word searching, and the steward on and off read a book. Landscape filled the windows, colors rich and fertile as we traversed the center of Oregon, past trickling streams and craggy green cliffsides. We moved through the woodsy towns of Salem and Albany, with riders getting on and off, stations embellished by fine brickwork, hours later passing those billboards advertising Ashland shows that would take place on multiple stages a hundred miles west. This was a famous train ride, I would find out later. The Coast Starlight. It was on people’s lists of things to do before they died.

  As we went along, I remember a lot of looking out the window, and sometimes turning my gaze down to the puzzle book, fingers circling letters with a pen, but that was the extent of it. The steward took notes from a pile of old books that looked like they’d been left out in a beach house and ruined by the tide. He was there, and I was aware of him there, but I
neither trusted nor distrusted him; his was a largely neutral presence that did little to undo my experience of aloneness. Or, my experience of me and the butterfly, the butterfly that had pushed through the lampshade that I was now carrying inside me. Sometimes, he did glance over as if to ensure I was still in my seat, but I barely needed to use the bathroom, or stretch, and sitting very still and breathing shallowly seemed the best way not to jar myself into realizing what was happening. A small motion, as in any motion, released through me an excruciating ripple of understanding, but if I held myself stonelike I could almost keep myself from moving into the knowledge as well.

  The train honked, moved through a mountain corridor. Cheerful markers at the sides of the tracks welcomed us to the capital city of Eugene, where someone had stuck a drawing on the station sign of the state bird meadowlark flying in a burst of yellow overhead.

  We stayed at the Eugene station for longer than the other stops, and once the train resumed, the steward invited me to join him at the first announced available seating in the dining car. Together, we crossed into a train car small and elegant, with small glass holders on each table set to throw flickering candlelight onto red tablecloths. As we settled into our seats, adults, mostly women, smiled at me, asking the steward if I was his daughter, or little sister. He returned the smiles, silent. “Well, she’s a doll,” said an older woman in a patterned jacket, passing through to another table. I positioned myself on the side of the table that tracked the scenery gone by, and outside the big picture windows, golden light began to drench the landscape as the sun reached the edge of the horizon. Clinking silverware and jabbered conversation filled the car. When our food arrived, the steward and I ate quietly, as if my uncle had actually told him not to talk to me, and my mind filled with non-thoughts, with blocks of sensation, golden dusk, the sparkle on the water glass, crispy french fry smell, our chuggedy movement down the edge of the land. After dessert, two silver bowls of ice cream, the sun slipping behind the hills, the steward pulled the babysitter’s instruction paper from his jacket pocket and read what he could in the dimming pink light.