The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  “It’s fresh,” he finally said. “It crosses curriculum with psychology and history. I’d expect that from a grad student or faculty member, not an undergrad. Tell me, other than an appreciation for Woolf’s writing, what was your inspiration?” His fingers curled and waved, as if he was literally, physically trying to pull information from me. “Did you read about this somewhere? Say, in a literary journal?”

  The idea had come to me over the summer, when I found myself rereading most of Woolf’s books before gravitating toward the works of Plath and Gilman. I was well into a book of Anne Sexton’s poetry when I realized the common thread of suicide. Were my summer reading choices indicative of something macabre? I’d wondered. An obsession with death since my father’s passing? An attraction to melancholy?

  “My inspiration was originality,” I said instead. “I didn’t want to choose something domestic like Austen or something pretentious like The Wasteland. I didn’t want to be like the other girls in your class.”

  His eyes shot to mine. “You could never be like the other girls.”

  I looked down at my feet, where my toes curled inside my boots. I sensed him studying me long and hard, like a fire he wanted to contain.

  “You’re not from the Midwest, are you?” he asked.

  I looked up. “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s something ‘otherworldly’ about you. Your attitude, the way you think. It’s refreshing. And your accent . . . I noticed you don’t always pronounce the r at the end of certain words. And with a last name like Rousseau, well, I’m thinking French Canadian?”

  I smiled. It wasn’t the first time someone up north had tried to pinpoint my accent and failed. Because that singsong twang—how folks from Mississippi or Alabama talk—was absent from my dialect, people never guessed I was from the South.

  “I’m from Louisiana,” I said. “New Orleans to be exact.”

  “That’s it.” He tapped the desktop in defeat. “Of course, it’s New Orleans. I should have known. I got my bachelor’s at Tulane, you know. Best four years of my life.”

  “Really? My parents went to UNO.”

  He nodded, then looked past me, as if recalling his own coed memories. “New Orleans,” he mused. “What a sultry, sinful city.”

  “Have you been back? Since you graduated?”

  “No, but I’m actually flying down there in a few weeks for a symposium at Tulane. That’s the kind of thing you have to do to get tenure around here,” he added as an aside. “Attend symposiums, serve on panels, publish papers. And interestingly, this symposium pertains to your thesis. Gender and Creativity is the topic. Any chance you’re visiting Mom and Dad at that time? You could be my guest.”

  I gushed at the idea, that I attend a real symposium—something I’d heard of but never experienced—at Professor Suter’s side. But I hadn’t been to New Orleans in almost a year, since we buried my father two days after Christmas, and my mother relocated to the Midwest to assure I’d finish school. I didn’t think I could go back. New Orleans—once the magical setting of my charmed childhood—had morphed into a fractured backdrop for nightmares.

  “We don’t live there anymore,” I said. “Home for me now is Oak Park, Illinois.”

  “That’s too bad.” He flashed his killer grin once more. “For you and for me.”

  He’s flirting, I thought. Is he? Isn’t he?

  “So you approve?” I asked, trying to keep my blushing at bay. “Of my thesis?”

  “Absolutely.” He raised a finger. “But I do have one caveat. It sounds like you’ll be analyzing several sources. Not only Woolf’s essay, but also Plath’s The Bell Jar and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper?”

  I nodded.

  “It may prove to be too much, even for a student of your caliber.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “No doubt you can. But still, you’re young. It’s your last year at Tarble. You don’t want to give up your social life, do you? Leave your boyfriend up to his own devices on Friday nights?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Good. Because you’ll be busy reading and researching. Bouncing ideas off of me. In fact . . .” He eyed his watch. “Let’s say we get out of here. Grab a coffee. Discuss this more in depth.”

  I pointed to the hall lobby. “You mean at the bookstore?”

  He scrounged his lips. “I don’t drink that stuff. I was thinking that quaint coffee shop in downtown Racine.”

  He held my gaze a moment, intently, as if assessing my very character.

  “Shall we?”

  He insisted on two things, that I call him Mark and that I ride in his Jeep to Racine. From Kenosha, it was a scenic drive north on Sheridan Drive, during which we swapped vignettes about New Orleans, from roast beef po’boys—the blessed union of hot gravy beef and cold lettuce and tomato on crusty French bread—to Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote and William Faulkner, authors who once called the Crescent City home.

  Inside the coffee shop, I tried ordering a regular drip coffee but he objected, saying I had to have a latte. I didn’t object to his suggestion or the fact he paid. It was the courteous thing to do, even if he was my teacher.

  “Tell me,” he said, once we were seated at a table near the back. It was more like a TV tray pretending to be a table and so cozy, I felt his pant leg skim mine underneath. “What happens to Ruby Rousseau after she graduates from Tarble?”

  I wiped my lips of vanilla-infused foam and grinned at his playful use of the third person. “Graduate School. I already applied to Iowa.”

  “Ah, yes, the infamous Writers’ Workshop,” he said. “A solid choice. If you want to stay a bit closer to home, though, I could pull some strings for you at Northwestern. I did my graduate work there.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Consider it done.” He sipped his latte. “And after graduate school, where do you want to teach?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to teach. I’m going to write.” I watched him smirk with skepticism. “I know, I know. I’m breaking the circle of literary life: you study English or literature or creative writing and then you teach it to some poor soul who studies it only to teach it to someone else. No offense.”

  “None taken. Poor soul,” he mused. “I like that.” He leaned into me then, his voice soft and secretive. “You know why I do this?”

  His question was hypothetical, but I shook my head no all the same, adamantly, as if he’d asked me whether I knew about carburetors. It was a sudden, nervous reaction. I had never seen my teacher so close, had never been under the trance of his blue eyes for so long,

  “Because I love words. Always have, ever since I was a kid.”

  “You knew you wanted to be an English teacher, even then?”

  “No, like every other boy my age I wanted to play Major League Baseball. But I broke my hand pitching in the All-Star game and spent the remainder of the summer reading Lord of the Flies and The Other Side of the Mountain, and I got hooked.” His words came out soft and warm, like flannel sheets fresh from the dryer. “I’m a teacher because I want to infect others with that passion, foster an appreciation for syntax and metaphor and poetic prose. It’s often a thankless job, but I think it’s worth the sacrifice.”

  “Sacrifice? But you’re Mark Suter.” I raised my voice over the loud, sudden shushing of the espresso machine. “We sacrifice for you. We stay up all hours taking notes on Milton or Yeats, so that if you happen to call our name during class, we’ll have the answer you want, an answer that will please you.”

  “What I meant is, I’m not always writing as much as I should, publishing as much as the college would like. My time goes first to shaping the brilliant minds of tomorrow.” He paused then and frowned, checking his watch with a sigh.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My student. Madeline. I was supposed to look at her essay again.”

  Disappointment crept up my throat. “Should we go back?”

&nbs
p; He seemed to consider this option, then shook his head. “I can look at it later, right?” he asked, as if trying to convince even himself of the fact.

  “Right.”

  “Right,” he repeated. “See, Ruby? Teaching is a sacrifice at times.” He downed the rest of his latte like a shot of gin. “And between you and me, it’s practically destroyed my marriage.”

  Marriage. My classmates often debated Mark Suter’s status. It was something my best friend and roommate, Heidi Callahan, and I had discussed in the dark at 2:00 A.M. when we couldn’t fall asleep. He never wore a wedding ring.

  I stole a peek at his left hand then and saw only a bare, manly knuckle; thick skin dusted with fine hair.

  “Meryl, my wife, teaches math at Georgetown,” he went on. “I’m right brain, and she’s left. I’m the gas, and she’s the brakes. We’re proof that opposites attract, but don’t endure.”

  “Are you separated?” I asked.

  “We see each other once a month. She comes here one month. I go to D.C. the next. It’s an arrangement of sorts.”

  “I’ve heard of those.” I straightened my back so as not to slouch. “Couples who live and work in different cities.”

  “Meryl hates the Midwest. But it’s home for me. I didn’t fully understand that until my mom died.”

  “Your mom died?”

  He nodded. “Cancer.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I swallowed the small lump forming in my throat, hoping to relieve the sudden stinging in the corners of my eyes. But it remained, and I dabbed my eyes with my coffee-stained napkin, trying to control a full-fledged outburst.

  Mark laid his hand on top of mine then, his meaty and warm fingers curled slightly over the edges, blanketing my skin. “You okay?”

  I shook my head yes, and then no, when more tears—fat droplets of salty sorrow—fell down my cheeks. “My dad died too,” I divulged. “Last year.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “No, nothing like that. It was an accident. A car accident,” I lied.

  Mark sighed through his nose, the kind of empathetic breath that connotes sadness and anger and frustration all at once. “What was his name?”

  His question took me off guard, because my friends—back home in New Orleans or at Tarble—never asked follow-up questions when I mentioned my father’s passing. They either stared at me as if I had crawfish crawling out of my ears or changed the subject. I knew it wasn’t because they didn’t care; they just didn’t know what to say, how to navigate the rocky terrain of death. But here was Professor Suter—Mark—asking the most intimate of follow-up questions. He wanted to know my father’s name; he wanted to know what people called him.

  “Julian,” I said.

  “Julian,” he repeated slowly, like the final sip of wine from a centuries old bottle. “And what was he like?”

  “Passionate. Strong-willed. A history buff. He was an antiques dealer. He was the one who introduced me to writers like Woolf and Thoreau and the Brontës. He’d bring home musty, yellowed copies of books from his store, the bindings always ornate and gold etched. He cared more about the past than the future. Tradition and history and family—those are the things he valued. So he couldn’t fathom why I wanted to go to Tarble, in Wisconsin of all places. Where it snows. Where they eat brats and beer and cheese. Where Mardi Gras isn’t a real holiday, a day you get off school and work.”

  “I gather he didn’t approve of your choice?”

  “People who were born and raised in New Orleans don’t leave,” I explained. “They just don’t. The only time we ever left for longer than a week’s vacation was when Katrina hit, and only because they mandated the evacuation. When I told my dad I wanted to go to Tarble, he said we had good schools in New Orleans. Tulane and Loyola and UNO. The only thing he liked about Tarble was that it was all-girl.”

  “He was protective, huh? Gave your boyfriends the third degree?”

  I laughed. “The third degree? Try the tenth. If he’d owned a shotgun, he would have sat out on the porch with it cocked and loaded at curfew.”

  Mark finally lifted his hand from mine, and my fingers immediately sensed the absence.

  “You’re smiling now,” he said.

  And I was. With just a few, simple questions, Mark had made me remember my father—who he was down to his very core—and not his death.

  “What about your mom?” I asked in turn. “What was her name? What was she like?”

  “Cassandra, but everyone called her Cassie. She was a writer. A lover of literature and books, like us. She was a single mom but saved enough money from working two jobs to buy herself this little cabin in the woods. She would go there, sometimes all day, and write.”

  “A cabin in the woods?” I hugged my coffee mug. “How idyllic.”

  “Yes, it’s very Henry David Thoreau. But my brother and I didn’t see it that way at the time. We were jealous of it, as much as you can be jealous of a place. We used to call it Cassie’s Cabin. We’d ride our bikes there and play games to see who could come the closest without getting caught. Funny, it always looked brown from far away, but close up, you could see it used to be white. The paint had chipped. Anyway . . .”

  I saw pain cross his eyes, and I reached for his hand just as he had mine, then immediately retracted it. There were boundaries I dared not cross, however enticing, however magnetic.

  “Looking back, I was just a kid,” he went on. “I didn’t get it then. I didn’t understand she needed to have a place to think, to write. If she didn’t, she probably would have gone crazy. Resented us. It’s like Virginia Woolf said, isn’t it? She needed a room of her own.”

  I admired Mark’s sensitivity toward his mom, a woman conflicted with both a mother’s heart and a writer’s mind.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “To the cabin?”

  “She sold it. I guess once my brother and I moved out of the house, she didn’t need it anymore. But in a crazy case of good timing, it was for sale when I moved back. So I bought it. I live there now.”

  I imagined Mark scraping old paint and rolling out a fresh coat of white. I saw him hammering floorboards and sweeping cobwebs from corners. I saw him eating dinner alone.

  “Meryl didn’t come with you?” I asked.

  “She’d just gotten department chair. How could I ask her to give that up?”

  It was clear he hadn’t asked, nor had his wife offered. Instinctually, I reached again to pat the top of his hand, but he flipped his wrist, and soon my palm fell inside of his. He brought my hand toward him an inch or two. My heart thumped in my ear.

  He’s married, I reminded myself. No. Separated.

  “Ruby.” He stared back at me with intense eyes; his mouth parted in a half-smile. “Is that your birthstone?”

  “No, my dad came up with it,” I said. “My hair was bright red when I was born.”

  He studied me. “Doesn’t Rousseau mean . . .”

  “—A red-haired person.”

  “Then you’re a real redundancy, Ruby Rousseau.” His tongue seemed to revel in the alliteration. “Tell me more. Tell me more about you.”

  My breath tangled in my chest. “What do you want to know?”

  “Right now? This minute?” He strengthened his grip on my hand. “Are you hungry?”

  It was close to midnight when Mark pulled his Jeep onto the red bridge at the edge of campus and parked under tree branch shadows. Tipsy from three glasses of wine, despite the filet mignon and au gratin potatoes I ate during our three-hour dinner, I didn’t care where he dropped me off. But Mark said the bridge was the safest place. And it would be the safest place next time.

  Next time.

  His fingers soon went to my hair; he combed through it several times to expose my neck fully. A prickling thrill swept down the backs of my arms at the drunken thought he had fangs, and I might succumb to his paranormal powers right there in his car. But he didn’t bite me. Instead, he tucked his hand into the crook of my inner thigh, and leaned in to
press his lips to mine. And in that moment, kissing him, every muscle in my body simultaneously contracted and relaxed. It was like bungee jumping and meditating at the same time. I felt something I hadn’t felt since my father died.

  I felt alive.

  He pulled back from my mouth but still kept his face close to mine. “I don’t know how to do this,” he whispered.

  “I think you’re doing just fine.”

  He laughed. “Thanks. But I meant us. I’ve never been in this situation before, wanting something so badly, so powerfully, something other people won’t understand. I know I should walk away. But I can’t. Because you’re it. Beautiful. Intelligent. Creative. But if anyone were to find out . . .”

  “—No one will find out.”

  “We need to be discreet.”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” I vowed.

  He kissed me again, this time harder and deeper. A promise.

  We said good-bye, and I walked back to my dorm room numb to the autumn evening chill, my mind floating, my thigh still warm from his touch, my lips fat and tingling. Heidi was still awake when I opened the door.

  “Finally,” she said, leaping from her bed. “I was about to put out an APB. Where the hell were you?”

  I immediately stood behind my dresser and began changing. “Oh . . . I was studying. My thesis.” I winced when I realized I’d left my backpack in Mark’s Jeep. Would she notice I didn’t have it?

  “The library closes at ten,” she said, peeking around the corner of my dresser, oblivious that I was standing in my bra. We always undressed in front of each other.

  I finally made eye contact. “I went to the diner.”

  “I was starving,” she cried. “I would have gone with you.”

  “Sorry, but I thought it would be fun to go by myself.” I grabbed my pajamas from the dresser drawer. “You know, be that mysterious woman alone in the corner booth.”

  Heidi shook her head at me in jest. “You are such a nerdy English major.”

  “Are you still working on something?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately.” She sighed. “Are you going to stay up too?”