Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  Colvin studied her, and kept his face impassively benign. Then he said that of course he couldn’t tell for sure without examining her but it sounded as if she had what was known as duplex vagina, which, although it was exceptional, quite rare in fact, didn’t mean she was a freak or anything, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. Colvin told her of some other known cases of duplex vaginae in faraway places like Rhode Island and North Dakota, and that while offhand he didn’t know of another case of it in Arkansas, there was bound to be a few he didn’t know about. He said he hoped that after she got to know him better, as her teacher for Psychology as well as the school physician, she might feel comfortable enough to permit him to have a look and determine if she had a true duplex vagina, that is, two of them, or only a septate vagina, that is, one of them with a kind of partition dividing it into two parts. The latter condition was fairly common, and even more common was the condition of having a double uterus. Colvin felt it was premature to discuss with her her sexual life, if any, or the possibility that when she became a mother she might have to have a Caesarean, so he did not mention these things. He simply said, “I’m right sorry there aint nothin I could do to help your condition.” Except, he said to himself, introduce ye to a feller who’s probably dyin to meet ye,

  “I aint worried,” Oona said. “They don’t pain me none. But will they keep me from being on the basketball team?”

  “Only in the sense that they mean you’re a female, and the basketball team is for males.”

  “Huh?” she said. “But there’s a girls’ team too, aint they?”

  Sure enough, he discovered after checking with Jossie Conklin on the matter, there were going to be teams for both boys and girls, and he was expected to coach both. “I thought you knew that,” Jossie said. While he was at it, he asked Jossie, since she was supposedly a math expert or at least the math teacher, to calculate the odds against a person with X condition, one out of five million, being found in the same place and same time as a person with Y condition, one of three million. Jossie did a lot of figuring, and even used her adding machine, but finally announced that the odds were incalculable. In other words, it was impossible.

  It was almost time for noon dinner before Tenny finally came to see him. He was thrilled to see that she had not cut her hair, nor was she wearing face paint, and her dress, which obviously was a cast-off of Venda’s, still came down to her ankles. She seemed kind of pale, though, and thin. “Tenny!” he said.

  “Colvin!” she said, closing the door behind her, then she leapt into his arms. “I’ve missed ye so!” They had a long kiss, and she commenced rubbing her body all over his, especially in the areas where the legs end, then she tried to pull him down to the sofa. He resisted, protesting that there were other students outside the door waiting for his attention. “I’m a-perishin for ye!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have you inside me, right now!”

  “But Tenny,” he said. That was all he knew to say, which perhaps was enough, the way he said it, to try to let her know that although he himself had an enormous erection at this moment which he would dearly enjoy sliding into her, they were going to have to learn restraint and discretion and patience if they were successfully to manage their romance. “Later maybe we can steal a moment,” he tried to console her, “but right now all I’m supposed to do is examine ye. Has anything been a-troublin ye?” He automatically asked his routine question, then said, “I wish we could talk for hours, but this is a real busy day for me. So why don’t ye jist talk and tell me everything while I do an examination on ye?”

  So Tenny talked constantly while he gave her as thorough a physical examination as his instruments would permit. She said she had nothing whatever wrong with her. He found that hard to swallow in view of her long-standing hypochondria. She said that she was so happy that school was starting up again, so she would not only get to see Colvin in his office, like now, but also she was going to take Psychology! “Do ye think I’d have any aptitude for that subject?” she asked.

  “Tenny, the subject of psychology ort to have been named after you,” he said truthfully, not meaning to imply that there was anything wrong with her mental processes or her motives or her behavior.

  She was also going to “go out” for the girls’ basketball team, so she could be with Colvin during even more of the precious Fridays, and she hoped that when they took long trips to the places where they would play games against distant teams, she could ride beside him in whatever conveyance was used. Possibly even, if any of those games involved going to other towns that could not be returned from in the same day, and they had to spend the night, they might even contrive some way to spend the whole night together, ever now and then, because she had thought about this quite a lot with both her heart and her head as well as her twitchet, and she had decided that they were going to have to find a way to hook up their sexual links not just once but many, many times repeatedly in the same night…or day, or whenever. “Remember,” she said, “‘we have got to find a way.’ That’s our motto.” It might even be possible for them to sneak off sometimes to Venda’s house in Jasper, when Venda and Russ were at the school. Yes, Tenny was doing all right, living at Venda’s house. At least she didn’t mind it too much. It was a roof over her head. From the beginning, Tenny had been required to do most of the cooking and housecleaning, but she didn’t mind. One of the first big jobs Venda had given her involved sorting and straightening the pantry. Venda’s pantry had been a terrible mess, everything all jumbled together as if any time Venda had been to the store she had just thrown her groceries all of a heap into the pantry. There were bags of dried beans that had got all mixed up with bags of dried corn, and Tenny had been required practically to sort all those seeds, one by one, and it had taken forever, and the only thing that preserved her sanity was the memory of the time she had watched a bunch of ants carrying little grains of sand diligently and patiently to build their ant heap, and she had sought to do her sorting with the same mindless persistence. Tenny wondered if Venda had just given her such a tough job in an effort to part her from her senses, and, having failed, had given her the next tough job, which involved…But Tenny understood that Colvin had other students waiting for their medical examinations, and she had better save the rest of the story for later.

  Colvin was greatly disturbed. Not over the tasks that Venda had been giving Tenny, although that was disturbing enough. What was more disturbing, for now, was what his examination of Tenny revealed. At first, he couldn’t believe it, because he’d so thoroughly examined Tenny in the past without ever finding anything whatever wrong with her that it was hard now to accept that there might actually be something wrong with her. He wondered at the irony of the transposition: as long as she was a chronic complaining hypochondriac, she was safe, invulnerable, and absolutely healthy; but once she abandoned her hypochondria and claimed to be “just fine,” she was actually sick. His hand on her chest detected fremitus. His stethoscope found a vesicular murmur. Her pulse was rapid. Her skin was not dry, but clammy, beaded with sweat as it had been that morning in the Commercial Hotel. He asked her to cough, and collected on the end of a tongue depressor an expectoration that was greenish, muco-purulent. He debated with himself whether to tell Tenny of his suspicions, and decided against it “Tenny,” he said, “I’ll see you in Psych class, and again at Basketball, but right after that I’d like you to come back here to my office for just a minute so I can give you another test.”

  “Could we take more than just a minute?” she asked. “Couldn’t we take long enough to see if that sofa is good for anything besides lying on with lollipops?”

  He laughed, as if that might dispel his anxiety. “We’ll see,” he said, and kissed her again and sent her on her way, asking her to take it easy.

  Then he visited Jossie’s office yet again and inquired into the possibility of having a student-messenger with a horse ride into Jasper and pick up some stuff at Arbaugh’s Rexall, and he wrote and signed and sealed into a
n envelope a note from his prescription pad to R.C. Arbaugh, requesting a vial of tuberculin. The note said that just in case they were out of stock, kindly send somebody to Harrison to get it right away, and hang the expense.

  His mind was not on the subject as he went to face his Psychology class. He had read enough of the Colvin textbook, and he had a fair idea of what he wanted to say, but his concern over Tenny’s condition seized his mind and would not let him think of anything else. He had distracting problems finding the meeting place of the Psych class: for some reason it had been scheduled to meet in the gym, the new, long, low barnlike building of fieldstone that completed the triangle of main buildings on the campus. The pupils were not sitting at desks but just around on the floor. At least he had been provided with a portable blackboard, and he wrote his name on it, as if there were anybody (there wasn’t) who didn’t know it. Jossie Conklin had not yet arrived with an armload of the textbooks.

  “Wal, my friends,” he started off, “I hope we’re gonna have a heap of fun in here. But I ort to tell ye, right off, that what we learn in here aint really necessary. You can live without it. It won’t make you rich, and it likely won’t make you happy neither. So what’s the point in messin around with it? Unlike other subjects you’re taking, it caint be put to much practical use. It won’t teach ye how to speak proper. It won’t help ye to do sums. Some of y’uns remember I taught a course last year in hygiene, which at least showed everbody how to take care of theirselfs and keep healthy. Wal, this here that we’re gonna do might or might not give ye some sort of mental comfort, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. It might help ye understand better how your mind works. It might help ye to get along better with yore feller man. I can’t guarantee none of that. But I can guarantee that if you pay attention, and put your heart into it, it will shore enough give ye somethin to think about!”

  He plunged right in, with Prof. Colvin’s first subject, Consciousness, and managed to keep them paying attention for half an hour’s worth of talk about how imagination is necessary to consciousness, and the different levels of consciousness (which he diagrammed on the blackboard) and how each of them affects our conduct. His lecture was hampered by his thoughts of Tenny and her condition. She was right there on the floor, not next to her husband but not far from him, and she was looking up at him with adoration, and also with a look of expectation, as if he might be about to explain the meaning of life.

  Seeking to demonstrate the distinction between consciousness in full control and consciousness when it is reflexive or instinctive, Colvin noticed that there was a basketball lying on the edge of the court. He picked it up. It was the first time he had ever handled one. He bounced it. It sprang free from his control, but he chased it down and recaptured it. “Now if I was to try to make this thing go through that hoop,” he declared, “trying with all my might to make it go in, the chances are I’d shorely miss.” He propelled the ball upward, and, sure enough, it did not even come close to reaching the hoop, falling short by a couple of feet or more. “See?” he said, chasing down the bouncing ball again. “But if I had learned not to let my consciousness interfere with my instinctive tossing of the ball toward the hoop, there’s a fair chance I might get it in.” He shut off his mind and tossed the ball again, and it rose in a long smooth arc and went cleanly through the net. It may have been an accident, or beginner’s luck, but the students gasped, and then applauded, and several of them hollered things like, “Dandy shot, Coach!”

  “Now you may be wondering, aint it a contradiction to try to consciously be instinctive? That will be the subject of our next meeting, and here’s your homework.” He wrote on the blackboard a list of questions he had made up for them to answer, such as, “List several examples of instinctive behavior you’ve observed in yourself.” He wrote down the page numbers, 1–23, for them to study in the Colvin text.

  Finally, he asked, “Any questions?”

  One boy raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Coach. When is our first game?”

  “Game?” Colvin said. He glanced at Tenny, as if her facial expression might give him some clue, but she seemed merely to be awaiting his answer to the question. He realized that perhaps the students expected him to enliven the dull classes with some games. It oughtn’t to be too awfully hard for him to make up a few, although Prof. Colvin didn’t really get into the matter of play and Hall’s theory of games until the second chapter. “Wal, week after next, I reckon,” he said. “I ort to be able to have some games ready for y’uns by then.”

  A girl raised her hand and asked, “Don’t we need some special shoes?”

  Colvin thought that was a funny, if irrelevant question, and he laughed. “Heck, you can go barefoot for all I care!” he said. The students looked at each other, and Colvin sensed that they might have been disappointed in his answer. “I mean,” he said, “wear jist whatever kind of shoe you want.” He dismissed them.

  Several of the students lingered after class to fool around with the basketball, trying to put it through the hoop, and he was pleased to see that they were attempting “lab sessions” with his talk about instinctive behavior. But he needed that basketball for his next hour, so he reluctantly expropriated it from them.

  Most all of these students, however, were also going to be in Basketball, which, he discovered, was not meeting here in the gym where there were several hooped baskets available, but up on the second floor of the main building, where his hygiene class had met. When he got to the assigned room he discovered that every seat in the room was filled, kids were sitting on the floor and standing against the walls, and there was a big crowd outside the door who couldn’t get in. This potential audience included most of the faculty as well, and Colvin was dismayed at the realization that there might be not only girls’ and boys’ teams but also a faculty team that he would have to coach. Jossie came up to him and asked, “Would you mind if we moved to the auditorium?” Then she added, “I didn’t even try to bring the textbooks, because there simply aren’t enough to go around.” Feeling already dazed with his agitation over Tenny’s condition, and the experience of having just conducted a class, Colvin wondered if he had perhaps misunderstood Jossie previously: maybe there was supposed to be a textbook for Basketball. He certainly hoped so, because he needed one. All he had was a five-cent Little Blue Book from Haldeman-Julius, Fundamentals and Rules of Basket Ball, which just scratched the surface and left him uncertain about the distinction between a forward and a guard.

  The group nearly filled the auditorium, which at least had a couple of basketball hoops attached to the sides of the stage, which had been the basketball court before the gym was built. He was both pleased and intimidated to see that so many people were interested in basketball. He noticed that even Venda was present, and he waved at her. He was too self-conscious to climb up on the stage where the basketball hoops were, so he decided to save that for later. He just stood in front of the first row, holding his basketball in one arm, and looked out over the crowd until he spotted Tenny, and he smiled at her, hoping the sight of her would give him encouragement, but on the contrary it simply reminded him that he was going to be distracted throughout Basketball by the thought of the results of the tuberculin test he would have to give her. He cleared his throat, and had a panicky thought that he might never again have the beginner’s luck shooting the basketball that he had had in Psych class, so maybe he had better not even try. “Wal, howdy, folks,” he began, and amended that to “Ladies and gentleman” to include his colleagues. He really didn’t know what to say next, and a long moment of painful silence drifted by, until he thought to break the ice with a little chitchat. “Aint it a beautiful day, though? It don’t look to rain anytime soon, and I kinder like this airish weather myself after that hot summer we had. How is everbody feelin? I hope you’re feelin fine. I’m feelin just fine myself.” All of them were smiling pleasantly as if all of them were feeling fine too except that they were a little impatient for him to get down to business.

&nbs
p; One thing that Colvin knew for certain about Basketball was that the entire object of all of that running back and forth and trying to get the ball through the hoop and steadily piling up point after point was to win. Winning was everything. “We’re going to win! This is all about winning!” he said to them suddenly, and with such enthusiasm that his audience broke into spontaneous cheering. “Aint nobody ever gonna beat us! We will be the champ-peens of the whole country!”

  Now there were two things that had to be talked about in the very beginning, and he might as well get them out of the way as quickly as possible. The first one was a bit of a problem. He had hoped that he might be meeting the boys’ teams and the girls’ teams separately, because this was a matter that couldn’t comfortably be discussed in mixed company, but since everybody was here together, he might as well try to make the best of it He needed to discuss the absolute necessity, from the physician’s point of view as well as simply a matter of personal well-being, that each of the boys—including the two males on the faculty—obtain and always wear a good-fitting athletic supporter. “Call ’em jock straps or whatever,” he said, “they serve an important function which it ort not be too difficult for you to figure out. So I expect to see each of you fellers with one the next time we meet. As for you gals…” and he went on to discuss the need for them each to own and wear a good-fitting brassiere. It ought not be necessary to call attention to the fact that all the running and jumping of basketball would make their bosoms bounce up and down like mad if they didn’t have a good brassiere to hold ’em down. These here new Jazz Age fads, with boyish high-hemmed dresses and bobbed hair and what-all, might be okay just to be seen in, but apparently there was a new fad to de-emphasize the bosom by not wearing no brassiere at all, and that simply would not do, as far as we here are concerned.

  “Okay? So the next important item we have to discuss is: what are we going to call ourselves? We need a mascot name. And it ought to be original and distinctive, not just something commonplace like Tigers or Lions or Bears or Bulldogs or whatever. Any suggestions?”