The Butterfly Sister

by Amy Gail Hansen

  I only look fine.

  “Please stay,” Heidi begged. “Please? I was so looking forward to this weekend. We were going to order pepperoni and green pepper pizza and watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s and eat thin mints from the freezer. I had to hunt down a Girl Scout for those, and it wasn’t easy. It isn’t the cookie-selling season, you know.”

  I smiled at Heidi’s list of our favorite things, her diligent preparation for my arrival. She had tried so hard, put forth a grand effort to welcome me back to campus, back to her life. How could I leave? And why should I? It’s a coincidence, I thought. What happened to smart, sweet Julie Farris had nothing to do with me.

  “Pizza and thin mints, huh?” I pretended to mull things over. “Okay, I’ll stay.”

  Heidi hugged me again. “Let me get your name tag.”

  She headed to the table, and I followed. I watched her snatch a white peel-back name tag from a sea of identical stickers, and place it on my shirt.

  Looking down, I saw my name in italicized Garamond and my class year, even though I hadn’t technically graduated. “Why do we have to wear name tags?” I asked.

  “President Monroe says it makes you feel important and welcome.” She smoothed the curled-up corners of my tag. “And if you feel important and welcome, you’ll have a great time. And if you have a great time, then you’re more likely to give. It’s all about donations.”

  I pressed the tag again after Heidi did, thinking it was pointless. Everybody already knew who I was: that girl who tried to kill herself. And now, the one who did it last year.

  I noticed my font color was different than the others. “Why is mine green?”

  “They’re color coded depending on your major. Just another way to make you feel extra special.” She winked. “It’s also how we gauge the number of people sitting in on any given class this afternoon. The professors like to know what to expect as far as handouts and such.”

  “Sit in?”

  “Don’t you remember? How the alums used to sit in on a class Reunion weekend for old times’ sake? It hasn’t been so long for you, but the people who graduated twenty years ago get a real kick out of it.” She took the clipboard back from her coworker and scanned it. “Looks like your options are English Lit with Suter or American Lit with Barnard.”

  My stomach flipped. Mark’s here. In the building. Mere feet away.

  I opened my mouth to say I wanted to skip the whole sitting-in-on-a-class experience when someone interrupted us:

  “Did I just hear my name? Is that why my ears are ringing?”

  I turned to see a woman wearing an A-line royal blue housedress, a belt cinching her thin waist. A messy knot kept her blond hair—an inch of brown at the roots—from her face.

  “Professor Barnard,” Heidi said. “Ruby, this is Virginia Barnard. She’s new this year to Tarble. She teaches American Literature, Feminist Theory, and Women’s Gender Studies.”

  “Good memory.” The professor extended her hand but suddenly drew it back, wiping what looked like chalk dust onto her skirt. She held her hand out a second time. “Virginia Barnard,” she repeated. “Assistant Professor of English. And you’re . . .” She read my name tag. “Ruby Rousseau. Great alliteration.”

  We locked eyes, and I found the woman sophisticated and charming and warm. And immediately familiar, like a cousin I hadn’t seen in a while but could never forget. She seemed to be in her midthirties, younger than most Tarble professors. She had taut cheekbones and a defined chin. Her eyebrows were thicker, a shade darker than the roots of her hair. To me, the overall effect was dramatic. Striking. Her lips were the color of raspberry juice not Max Factor. Her outfit—she’d paired the housedress with boots and clunky earrings carved of mahogany—seemed to suggest she was a bohemian, the kind of woman who dishes out fortunes and guidance from her hut at the edge of the village.

  “I see you recently graduated,” Professor Barnard said, squinting at my name tag.

  I eyed the class year on the tag, a blatant lie. “Oh. Yes. I guess I did.”

  Heidi saved me from further embarrassment. “I was just telling Ruby about her class options this afternoon.”

  The professor smiled. “Well, I would be honored to have you in my class today. We were supposed to discuss Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but I have something else up my sleeve. Don’t let me influence your decision, though,” she went on. “I’ve heard Mark Suter is excellent. Did you have him while you were a student here?”

  I nodded, willing my blood not to flush my cheeks at the mention of his name.

  “Is he as good as they say?” she asked.

  My cheeks grew hot anyway. My throat dry. “He’s all right,” I managed to say. “But your class sounds fun. American Lit?”

  “Yes. I could really use your insights. How are you at poetry?”

  “Writing or reading?”

  “Analyzing,” she said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Heidi interjected. “She’s being modest.”

  “Modesty is a very desirable quality,” the professor said. “Walk with me?”

  I looked to Heidi.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I have to work this table for another hour yet.”

  Exchanging casual conversation, Professor Barnard and I climbed the spiral staircase of Langley Hall to the second floor, room L219, the same classroom where I’d taken senior seminar with Mark. With a gentle but sturdy hand, she guided me into the classroom and told me to find an open seat while she emptied her messenger bag at the front desk.

  I took the seat closest to the door and watched others file into the room, noting which students were old and which were new. The heavyset woman wearing a bright red, never-washed Tarble sweatshirt had, quite obviously, just come from the campus bookstore.

  The last to enter were three girls, each carrying a picket sign at her side. They propped the signs—black marker on cardboard, nailed to wooden stakes—upside down against the classroom wall. The one I could read said SILENCE IS CONSENT in bold block letters.

  Silence is shame, I thought.

  Professor Barnard rushed to speak to the tallest of the three, the one wearing her blond hair in low-lying pigtails, the one still carrying a bullhorn.

  “Tia,” she said. “You’re excused today. Why aren’t you still in the grove?”

  Tia blew a strand of hair from her eyes, but it fell back to the exact same spot. “President Monroe threatened to call the cops. And my parents said I can’t get arrested again.”

  A ponytailed girl in the second row interrupted their private conversation. “I can’t believe you went out there today,” she said. “Have you no heart? No compassion? No decency?”

  Tia scowled. “Julie wouldn’t want us to give up the cause on her account.”

  Julie. My ears perked.

  “It’s also futile,” the girl shot back. “Nothing’s going to change. We all know the board’s already made up their minds. Why do you still go out there?”

  “Because silence is consent.” A spray of angry spit flew from Tia’s mouth. “They want to push us out, our customs and our way of life, by admitting men to Tarble. If we are silent, we condone their actions. And like the ancient matriarchies, we will vanish. Our legacy will be lost forever.”

  “But it isn’t our legacy,” the ponytailed girl countered. “It’s the legacy of the women who attended Tarble a century ago, when there were no other educational options for women. Girls today don’t need an all-women’s college to succeed in the so-called man’s world. Women are doctors and lawyers and scientists. They’re leaders. I mean, look at Hillary Clinton.”

  “She went to Wellesley,” Tia noted.

  The girl belabored a sigh. “Fine, but we chose to go here, over coed schools that would have accepted us as equals to male students.”

  “Equals?” Tia blurted. “You’re in La La Land, Becca.”

  “No, you are, if you think Tarble can survive in the twenty-first century
without admitting men.”

  “Ladies, enough,” Professor Barnard interrupted, moving between the two girls. “Take a breath. Take your seats.”

  While the girls reluctantly settled, the professor approached the board. I listened fondly to the sound of chalk gliding against its matte black surface. Room L219 was one of the few classrooms at Tarble that still housed an actual chalkboard. The others had been renovated with whiteboards and stripped of all romanticism, in my opinion. Professor Barnard took her time writing the words I Shall Not Care in a curvy script. She underlined the title twice before turning to face us.

  “Are you familiar with Sara Teasdale?” she asked the class.

  Of course I knew Sara Teasdale. The American poet committed suicide in 1933. Like myself and Sylvia Plath, she overdosed on sleeping pills.

  After a few head nods and shrugs, the professor went on. “Teasdale was a very popular poet in the early 1900s. Critics loved her; so did the public. But later the critics, especially feminists, discarded her work. They found her too polite and timid.” She grabbed a stack of papers from her desk then and began handing them out, licking her finger intermittently to grip the pages, like most teachers do.

  Becca’s hand shot into the air. “I thought we were discussing Common Sense today.”

  Professor Barnard gave the girl a sly smile. “This is more relevant,” was all she said.

  It was liberal arts at its best. Students had come to class expecting a lecture on Paine’s Common Sense, and here that subject had been scrapped on a whim. Looking back on my own college experience at Tarble, I could not count the number of times the class agenda changed on the caprice of one of my professors. If the sun was shining on a surprisingly warm spring day, we had class on the school lawn. If something major happened in the news, we discussed the event at hand and not the pages of Chaucer we’d stayed up until two in the morning to read.

  Once the handouts circulated, the professor’s eyes bounced around the room. “Now, would one of our brave alums like to take a stab at reading this?”

  The heavyset woman cowered in her desk.

  The professor’s eyes met mine. “Ruby?”

  I looked down at the paper, sensing the students’ eyes upon me, waiting for me to speak. The black words sprung from the bright white page as I read:

  When I am dead and over me bright April

  Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,

  Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted,

  I shall not care.

  I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful,

  When rain bends down the bough,

  And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted

  Than you are now.

  Tia spoke first. “It’s a suicide note,” she said.

  Professor Barnard leaned against the edge of her desk. “What makes you say that?”

  “Her word choice, When I am dead and Over me. I imagine a cemetery plot on a rainy spring day. I mean, where else would you be dead with a tree hanging over you?”

  “What about the rest of you? Is it a suicide note?”

  No one responded.

  “Well?” the professor prompted.

  Becca raised her hand again, and the professor called on her, seemingly annoyed by the formality. The girl twisted in her desk to address the majority of the room.

  “I think I speak for the entire class when I say this conversation is uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s inappropriate, considering . . . what happened.”

  The room erupted in head turns and sideway glances.

  “Considering what happened, it’s completely appropriate,” Professor Barnard countered. “I know everyone, including the administration, wants to pretend nothing happened last night. In fact, I’ve been instructed not to talk about it with you, to teach class with a huge elephant in the room. Reunion weekend is supposed to be fun. And we can’t have fun if we live in reality, can we? But the fact is, a girl almost died last night. She almost took her own life. And it’s all any of us are thinking about today. You want Common Sense, Becca? It’s only common sense that we process our thoughts and feelings. And what better way to do that than reading poetry?” She cleared her throat. “So, I’ll ask the question again. Do you think Teasdale’s poem is a suicide note?”

  Several students squirmed in their desks, me included.

  “No,” Becca finally answered.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a fantasy. She’s only imagining what it would be like if she were dead.”

  “If that’s the case, she would have said if,” Tia argued. “And she said when.”

  Becca pondered this. “But she doesn’t sound depressed. She sounds angry. She wants revenge. She doesn’t want to die; she just wants to make him feel bad for how he treated her. She wants him to suffer. She wants him to kneel beside her tombstone broken-hearted.”

  “He?” The professor crossed her arms. “Why do you assume it’s a man? She could be talking about a woman. Her mother, her sister, her friend?”

  Becca shook her head. “She’s too angry. A woman can’t make another woman that angry. Only a man has the power to bring out such feelings of dejection.”

  “Oh really? What if she’s a lesbian?” Tia asked.

  Becca rolled her eyes. “Was she?”

  “Not that we know of,” the professor interjected. “She married a man, but later they divorced.”

  “Okay, to be politically correct, let me rephrase,” Becca went on. “I’m talking about romantic love. That’s the kind of love that makes us most vulnerable, the kind that makes us angry and vengeful. And since we know she was heterosexual, I’m going to presume the you in the poem is a man.”

  “Fair enough,” the professor noted. “Now let’s hear from the rest of you. Is Becca right? Does the author seem angry? And is romantic love the only possible source of such anger?”

  “She’s definitely angry,” one student said. “She wants to be more silent and cold-hearted.”

  “I don’t see anger,” another student said. “I see . . .”

  “Resignation.”

  I hadn’t meant to join the discussion. The word slipped from my mouth.

  Professor Barnard walked toward my desk with an outstretched hand. “Can you elaborate, Ruby? Read the poem again. Where do you see resignation?”

  My eyes dropped to the page. “In the word peace,” I said. “She wants peace. Peace of mind. Peace of heart. Like the bough of the tree, weighted down by rain, she wants to succumb. She wants to be numb. She wants to give up. She doesn’t want to care anymore. I shall not care. I don’t think she’s angry. Maybe at herself, but not at him. She’s defeated. She wants to escape the pain he inflicted on her, and the only way to do that is . . .” I looked up at the rest of the class and swallowed. “To die.”

  The professor flashed me an earnest smile. “Well put.”

  While the conversation endured—several other students voiced their opinions on Teasdale’s poem—I zoned out, my thoughts drowning out their voices. My hands shook in the aftermath of what I’d said, the snapshot of my soul I’d shared with perfect strangers.

  “It isn’t a suicide note,” the professor divulged once the discussion died down. “Teasdale did commit suicide, but she published the poem long before she took her own life. I think we can all agree, however, that there’s a good amount of foreshadowing in her writing.”

  “How did she do it?” one student asked the professor.

  “Sleeping pills.”

  “Isn’t that what Julie took?” another student asked.

  “It was Motrin,” Becca said.

  “Tylenol,” Tia corrected.

  “I heard she drank a whole bottle of Jim Beam too,” one of the other protesters added.

  I sat in awe of how quickly the conversation had turned to gossip, how eagerly the students discussed Julie’s near suicide once Professor Barnard gave them permission to do so.

  “My roommate said a girl tried to kill herself
last year too,” a student in the back row announced. “Maybe it’s a copycat thing.”

  My chest knotted. They were talking about me, right in front of me, without even knowing it. I looked to Professor Barnard, hoping she would silence them, but she just stood there with her arms crossed, watching the conversation unravel.

  “Maybe it’s good Tarble is going coed,” Becca said. “There’s too much estrogen clogging the air. Maybe that’s the cause of this whole epidemic, why so many Tarble girls keep trying to off themselves.”

  “Two girls is not an epidemic,” Tia argued.

  “Well how many does it take before we admit there’s a problem?” Becca asked the entire class. “Three? Four? Ten?”

  Another student was about to answer Becca’s question when Professor Barnard spoke.

  “While I think it’s healthy to discuss this issue, I also think candor is paramount,” she said, returning to her desk. She pulled out a creaky top drawer, retrieving a stack of blue books from it. “Perhaps a writing exercise is in order.”

  Professor Barnard’s assignment was simple: write your interpretation of Teasdale’s poem. If you want to explore tangents, like suicide as a Tarble epidemic, or reflect on a time you felt desperate enough to take your own life, feel free. There are no rules, she said.

  Just write.

  As soon as she finished her instructions, a hush fell over the class as the girls buckled down to work. Professor Barnard soon approached me with a blue book in one hand and a black pen in the other. She placed the two items on my desk.

  “You want me to do the assignment?”

  “I promise I won’t grade you.”

  I looked to the door. The heavyset woman wearing the Tarble sweatshirt was leaving. “Isn’t this my cue to go?”

  She sat in the empty desk beside mine, like a waitress sometimes sits with you in the booth while taking your order, and pointed to the blue book. “Would it hurt? To give it a shot?”

  I considered the assignment. “Yes.”

  “That’s called risk, Ruby. And writing without risk is not writing at all.”