The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  She is so happy. I can feel her happiness on the screen. She writes how she feels it belonged to me, felt that keenly ever since I’d left, that it had just seemed so wrong in her apartment the minute she returned from the train station that day, like this glaring error, and she had wrapped it up and kept it in the closet and held on to it through several moves just in case maybe someday I would contact her, just like I had. She would mail it to me pronto and please, please, it would be a gift. She says she is so glad I am doing well, and she is now living in Nashville but if I ever want to come out there the music and food are amazing, and it is such an up-and-coming town and she has a guest bed (“Not a loft anymore! A real room to yourself!”) and even through the type I can hear her voice lifting. She tells me she’s still a teacher but not an aide anymore, now with her own classes of high school English and choir. She also plays out on the weekends with her guitar, singer/songwriter material, but not all that much as she isn’t a young pup these days in the music world and the competition is unbelievable. She has a partner, Betsy, and they’d love to see me if and when I ever have a hankering to visit the South.

  “Thank you,” I write back. “That is so nice, thank you.”

  63

  The routine continues, I box and rebox, visit the post office, tour garage sales, get released by Jose, go see Our Town, stand and applaud. I sit in the memory tent early in the mornings but my focus feels different, looser. The canvas starts to peel again a little, on another side, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t bother me quite as much. I still zip it up, but mostly out of habit. I reply to a friend who has emailed me a couple times, telling her I’m fine, asking how she is, and on the weekend stop by the building manager’s early holiday party, which has, already, four fruitcakes, and where I sit in a chair and hear about how Jose spent the weekend tending to a horse named Kalamazoo, and also from tiny Eleanor in the pale blue turtleneck, who has lived here all her life, and remembers the orange groves, the Lockheed era, and the movie business influx for real.

  The package from Nashville arrives on a Tuesday, and I bring it inside and leave it on the floor. Since my apartment remains unfurnished, full instead of all those brown boxes ready to be stuffed and sealed and sent around the world, another brown box is nothing new, is an antelope joining its herd. I put it near the ebony side table I found at a giant moving sale in Hermosa Beach, from four houses on a block trying as a unit to raise money for the local park’s baseball team. There’s no rush, and no pressure to open it right away, and the only way it asserts its subtle presence in the room as separate from all the other work boxes is due to the babysitter’s writing of my address in an orange sparkly pen, with stars and smiley faces around my name.

  In early December, I print out my boarding pass and fly up to Portland to see my mother. I arrive around noon, and since she doesn’t have a show to prepare for, this time she takes me on a tour of her bedroom, a private room now, with her evening activity planning chart on the wall, her therapy schedule, group and individual, and framed photos of me and Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan and Vicky and Edward all over her dresser. She shows me the various bottles of her meds, and how she keeps track in small colorfully glazed ceramic bowls marked by the days of the week. She loves the scarf gift, and touches it to her cheek; she slides the earrings in immediately, little shimmers on her lobes. We have about four hours together, which we use to walk to the café down the street with the pink glass chandeliers. She will be mailing my gifts, she tells me several times, and I tell her it’s no problem, it’s my actual job to find these things. Her fingers drift up to the earrings. “Antiques,” she says, with wonder.

  My flight back is close to six p.m., and as I am getting ready to head to the airport, she threads her arm through mine and clears her throat and tells me that although she has never made it to Los Angeles as she had hoped, this visit she would like to get physically closer to where I am going, as close as she can, so she would like very much this time to accompany me to the airport. Would that be okay? Her gaze is steady. It seems to be something she has rehearsed asking. Sure, I tell her, as we walk to the bus stop together. “You can go right now?” I ask. “I can.” There are new truck restaurants across the street, selling empanadas and Thai soups. She holds her purse tight on her shoulder as we step onto the bus. I cannot remember ever being with my mother on any kind of public transportation.

  We take the bus to the Red Line, get off at the airport, and split the electric glass doors. There aren’t many places a person can go in an airport without a boarding pass, so together we wander the outskirts. Mine, the five-forty, is one of the last Portland–Burbank flights of the day. I ask my mother why she doesn’t like to fly, and she tells me it is because she had a dream once, an extremely lucid dream, of a horrifying plane crash. “I know I’m not psychic,” she says, shaking her head, “but it really spooked me.” We walk into a store and I tell her about how when I was eight, and they needed me to go to L.A., I had refused the plane, too. We are standing by a table full of airport treasures, snow globes, smoked salmon packages, baseball caps and postcards, picking up items, putting them back down. “I always thought the train was Uncle Stan’s idea!” she says, delighted. She has never heard this part of the story. She claps her hands. “I thought it was so brilliant because he wanted you to take the transition slowly.”

  I swirl snow around a tiny Portland’s downtown, and tell her no, not his, not at all. That at the time I thought out a plane would be blur, and I couldn’t even begin to handle that. She runs her fingers over the bumpy letters of the pulp book titles on the shelves. The airport is already beginning to get to me; I think I can even smell the seeping odor of the word search books in their rows over by the magazines, the extended feel of transition in every item. “When you were very little,” my mother says, taking my arm again, “I used to spin you around. You didn’t like that either.”

  “What would I do?”

  “You would cry,” she says.

  “And what would you do?”

  She looks at me with surprise. “Honey,” she says. “I would stop.”

  We stroll to the check-in area and get my boarding pass. She watches me do all the parts needed on the computer, and admires my swiftness. She will be taking the Red Line and bus back to the facility, where Edward is waiting. They’re helping host another busy night ahead, with karaoke tunes from the decades. This week will be the sixties, and she’s especially looking forward to the folk songs.

  “Do you remember,” I say as we walk to security, “when I told you about that butterfly lamp?”

  She glances to the side, watching a family manage their luggage. “Yes,” she says, warily.

  The intercom announces a flight delay at Gate 18. Not my gate. Far in the distance, we see people running somewhere, late.

  “No, don’t worry,” I say, seeing her tightening, listening, “all I wanted to tell you is that the babysitter sent it to me. That’s all. The actual lamp. I wrote her a note. She said she saved it. I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “You found her?”

  “Yeah.” We step into the security line. She told me she will stand with me all the way to the TSA guard, and then she will duck under the black elastic and exit to the bus stop.

  “What was her name again? Sheila?”

  “Shrina.”

  “She was very kind. How is she doing?”

  “Sounds like she’s doing very well. She lives in Nashville now.”

  My mother nods a few times, mostly to herself. “Good,” she says, absently. “Good.”

  “She kept it for twenty years,” I say.

  My mother touches the corner of her eye. We are only a few people from the front of the line. I ask her how the airport visit feels. If it’s doing what she’d hoped.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not sure.”

  “What did you hope?”

 
; She looks away. Beyond security, the airport widens, full of access to stores and food and seating and windows. After TSA checks me, and my carry-on, and my shoes, I will be going straight to the pretzel stand to get a sourdough pretzel and a lemonade, a plan that is starting to superimpose itself over all the other thoughts in my mind. I will sit on a chair next to strangers and scroll around on my phone.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “I’ll come back soon.”

  She waves her hands in the air. Her eyes fix on the shrinking line. “I’m glad you were able to contact the babysitter,” she says. She speaks clearly, over the tremor in her voice. “Please, thank her for me. I have always very much wanted to thank her. Will you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  She turns to me, and her eyes are bright. “Maybe,” she says, “you will have a room full of butterflies when you get home. Flying around your apartment. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  I smile at her. I have never explained to her how it works.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  The line ends. She ducks under the black elastic, and I step forward. The agent scrutinizes my face, and then hands back my boarding pass and ID.

  “Bye,” she calls, stepping away before the security guards direct her out.

  64

  Plane to rideshare to curb to door. The body moves through hundreds of miles, and it’s late by the time I get in. Put away my jacket and book, throw out my boarding pass stub, wash hands, brush teeth. The box is where I left it, and easy to slit open with a knife. I imagine my mother’s wish, the butterflies filling the room like an animated movie. Inside, the babysitter has carefully wrapped the lamp in several layers of pink tissue paper, which I unroll from the translucent plastic base and shade. She has wrapped it all with such neat corners that it brings me right back to her loft and all the things in it, the oatmeal bowls topped with brown sugar, the lemon verbena in the soap dish, the arranged fringy scarf over the TV.

  When the last piece of tissue paper falls away, the smell of dust and aging fabric fills the room. And there it is, the butterfly lamp. I have thought about it, too, in memory-form for so long that it is nothing short of bizarre to encounter in three dimensions. It is light to hold, and durable. The whole thing is also surprisingly little, and yellower, with the distinct look of the 1980s in the shapes and color scheme, something I didn’t realize at all as a child but that marks the babysitter’s age and era. I turn it around. Those familiar butterflies, so gilded and red, so slightly stylized and pretend rich-looking, and the gap in the pattern that I can find if I track very carefully.

  I spend ten or so minutes with it, but it has no more charge, or mystery, so I bring it to the corner and set it up with a red velvet background, take a few photographs. It’s online in twenty minutes, “Butterfly Lampshade from the ’80s! Excellent Condition” with a buyer by the end of the hour, Letitia in New York City. She tells me it’s so perfect and retro, and that she loves butterflies and finds their symbolism reassuring as she is moving through an important personal transition at this time.

  I mail it the following day. Five stars.

  65

  On Saturday, I get up early and take the bus to my aunt and uncle’s house. Aunt Minn is making some kind of egg and green chile dish in the kitchen, and she hoots when she sees me at the door as if I am a surprise celebrity arrival. “Come in!” she says, “what a treat!” At the kitchen counter, she asks about the visit, and I tell her about how my mother looked, and her manner, to which my aunt listens intently, whisking the eggs into a froth. As soon as I can, I head up the stairs to Vicky’s room. “You staying for breakfast?” my aunt calls, and I call back, “Sure, if there’s enough, if it’s okay?” and she makes the irritated grunt she always makes when I act like I am a guest as I have since I moved in, those twenty years ago.

  Vicky’s on her bed, in her pajamas, reading about the fine art of stage managing. She waves me in and tells me about the final performance of Our Town, and how Jordan, her assistant, forgot to bring on the desk, and so the actors had to pretend a desk but they did a really good job and no one in the audience even knew. She shows me a card she’s designing as a thank-you for the teacher, an illustration of a porch with the suggestion of something far in the distance. “What does that look like to you?” she asks, pointing at the corner, and I tell her it’s not clear, “like something is coming, but nothing ominous.” “Good,” she says, shading in the background a little more with a pencil. “That’s good.” We talk a little more about her friends at school, and when there’s a natural lull in the conversation I ask her if it would be okay if I could glance at that rose she retrieved so many years ago out of the garbage bin, the one she’d brought over a few months back to inaugurate the tent. “That is, if you don’t mind.” She gives me a look, the same kind of look that Aunt Minn just did with her voice, and reaches down to open up the drawer and lift it off its slip of satin. It is beige now, now that I let myself look more closely, barely touched with pink anymore, and it looks smaller than before, shrunken by time. Together, we touch its old and weathered petals. For a while it’s quiet, just us and the rose, and when it seems like words won’t bruise the moment, I fill her in on what I remember of the last stretch of the train ride, including the visitors in their suits, and the beetle, and the giving of the tickets. I tell her my thought about me maybe being a ticket too since I swallowed the butterfly. Then I tell her that the rose is of course hers to do with as she wants; she rescued it from the green bin, she kept it safe for many years, and if she still wants to keep it for her grandchildren, that is fine. But, I say, for whatever reason, I decided to leave the beetle years ago on a bus. Vicky raises her eyebrows, listening, silent. She runs a fingertip over a cracked petal. “So, where are you a ticket to?” she asks. I laugh a little. I tell her I have no idea. “I mean, I don’t even know if it’s the right word,” I say. “It feels kind of like a bad translation.” She looks up at me. “Translation of what?” and we laugh awkwardly together to fill the silence. “You ride the buses,” she says. “Yeah.” “Are you waiting for someone to come find you?” “No,” I say, “I don’t think so.” “You won’t go off with some stranger into another dimension, will you, Francie?” “No,” I say, “I live here now.” She shakes her head, laughing again. “You say it like you used to live somewhere else, like on some other plane,” and I smile at her. What to tell Vicky? She has lived her whole life here.

  * * *

  —

  Later, after egg soufflé, after a round of cards, I say bye and walk a few blocks to the corner to take the 183 back up Magnolia. It’s a clear winter Saturday at noon, and the San Gabriel Mountains are visible in the distance, lightly dusted with snow. The bus driver hums at the stoplights. At home, I return to my closet and pull out the purple knapsack that once held the beetle, and put it, with its old word searches and broken tape recorders, into the garbage. I go to the balcony and with hammers and a saw, disassemble the tent, carrying the canvas and the wooden beams to the trash bin downstairs.

  “Redecorating?” asks the building manager, poking her head out the window, and I tell her yes, sure, good idea.

  She’s right that without the tent, there’s a fair amount of new room on the balcony, so the next day at the supermarket, at my weekly grocery shop, I get another succulent, and on the walk home pass a yard sale I’d seen listed earlier, which has two decent-looking wicker plastic chairs and a plastic table and a seller willing to drive them over. They look nice on the balcony, facing out, the little plastic table between, so I text Vicky to invite her to come over and take a look. To say goodbye to the tent she helped build. She writes back right away, with a surprise face. You’re getting a lot done this weekend! she writes, and then tells me she’s just sitting around ruining her drawing, and that she’ll be right over.

  When she arrives, she calls out from downstairs, over by the trash bins.

  “I
’m here!” she says, standing on the bricks. “I can see it!”

  From the balcony’s edge, I can glimpse her profile peering at the tent’s deconstructed shape, orange canvas and wooden beams now stacked against spilled bags of lemon rinds and carrot peels, leaky milk cartons and a pair of old ripped black socks. She is holding a bag of cookies in her hand. She looks so young in the world, so ready to leave this city and make her own. When she runs up the stairs and into my apartment, she goes straight to the balcony and stands right where the tent was. “Don’t you miss it already?” she asks, closing her eyes. I bring out a plate for the cookies and make her some kind of juice and sparkling water concoction, and we settle into the chairs, use the table for our snacks. Cars trundle along the streets below. I tell her it’s a little too soon to tell, but my guess is that I will miss it, and also won’t, and that there will always be plenty more to remember, but that it seemed like the right time to take it down, at least for now; I did the course, I tell her: I started when my mother smashed her hand, and I ended at the doorstep in Burbank, and in that way I made the journey over again, from one family to another. I glance over at her. It’s almost evening, and the air is chilly, and she’s wrapped in a blanket, staring out at the streets, with a light dusting of cookie crumbs at the fabric’s edge. She was just that baby when I met her. She had those golden eyes, even then, and she would coo at me, and Aunt Minn told me once, in the hallway, pulling me aside, that Vicky cooed at me more than she cooed at anyone. I told Uncle Stan in the school office by the cluster of secretaries that I could not take the plane, and he’d nodded, because the world would’ve been a blur, and so he bought me a train ticket to slow it down, and in the tent, I slowed it down again. I slowed it way down. I looked at it all as slowly as I could.