The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  “Mom,” I said. I ran my fingertips over the fraying cloth of the chair seat, where the wood below began to curl into plumes. “There is something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Anything,” my mother said, taking my hand. “Please, honey. Nothing would make me happier.”

  “It is going to sound strange.”

  “I’m all about the strangeness,” she said, bobbing her head. “You know that.”

  “But I think my mind is okay,” I said.

  Her eyes were so intent on mine, so glued. “Listen, Francie. Listen. You are the most stable person I know. You don’t have what I have. Mine was a problem at birth, my mother talked about it from birth! You know they bumped me on the table, right? You were such a capable baby. You crawled at seven months old. It was amazing. I’m sure you’re okay.”

  Then I lost my nerve. I made up some story about a guy I liked at school, in a nonexistent chem class, basing him on the man whom I talked with sometimes at the local library who was at least ten years older, likely gay, and had a way of crunching the hair on his head while searching for books that I found appealing. She went on for twenty minutes about birth control, and once back in Burbank, I received several letters in envelopes half-licked containing stuffed pages of articles about different brands of condoms, miraculously delivered by the mail carrier. We veered in the conversation and talked more about Edward, and the entertainment schedule, and when a breeze swelled through the window screen, she pulled her scarf more closely around her shoulders, a giant paisley patterned piece of cloth she said she’d gotten as a gift from Aunt Minn. “Will you take a photo to show her?” she asked, and we asked the nurse, who took many: of her, of me, of her and me, of both of us wrapped in the scarf together, and when we were done and back in the same green silk chairs, and I perceived another opening in the conversation, I tried again.

  “When you smashed your hand,” I said, squeezing her good one, beneath the oil-shaped cliffs, to the sound of silverware clattering and the wheeling of the table-setting cart as the staff prepared lunch in the dining area, “I went to stay two nights with the babysitter before I took the train to Aunt Minnie and Uncle Stan’s.”

  “God bless that babysitter,” my mother said. “She saved me. I was barely able to think then, Francie. Did you know? I was tied to the bed. All I did was yell about seeing you.”

  “And she had a lamp in her living room,” I said. “Of butterflies.”

  “How lovely,” my mother said, nodding and nodding. Her eyes were damp, and she seemed to want to affirm everything before it even left my mouth. “I always loved her jewelry. She seemed very thoughtful with her selections.”

  “On the morning I was leaving, I saw something.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was a butterfly,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, pressing my hand. “How pretty that sounds. A lamp of butterflies.”

  “Except this was a real butterfly,” I said. “It had fallen into a glass of water.”

  Her eyes, still so focused on mine. In the background, the same man with the knuckles and vibrato, Edward, had returned to the piano to play some light medleys, and I vaguely recognized a classic rock song about taking off a load. There was some stirring outside the living room area as residents rose from their seats to walk to the dining room, toward the growing aroma of what smelled like chili. My mother was blinking at me, with her warm doggish eyes, and broken lashes, one bent and high on her cheek, her coarse and generous beauty, and her throat rose and fell with a swallow and I could see, suddenly, obviously, how wrong it was to tell her. I had, for years, taken that care to avoid telling Aunt Minn anything about the butterfly, or the beetle, not wanting to burden her, or frighten her, but wasn’t it far worse to choose the person whose lines between mind and world were already frail?

  “How sad,” my mother said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was dead.”

  “How sad,” she said again, and her gaze began to scatter.

  “It was the same color and pattern as the ones on the lampshade,” I said, pushing on anyway. “And, it was floating in the water, directly below the lampshade.”

  “My goodness.”

  “And the babysitter’s windows were closed.”

  “What a clever butterfly, wasn’t it, to find a small space to fly in.”

  “I did not see any small spaces.”

  “Portland is known for its butterflies.”

  “The coloring was just like the ones on the lamp,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “There were real butterflies on the lamp?”

  “No. There were pictures of butterflies on the lamp.”

  “It was a picture floating in the water?”

  “No. It was a real butterfly floating in the water glass.”

  She tugged at the scarf to wrap it around herself more tightly. It was really an enormous scarf, nearly the size of a twin bedsheet. I had no idea where my aunt had found it.

  “What a very odd coincidence,” she said, brightly. “What did the babysitter say?”

  “I didn’t show her.”

  She shifted in her chair.

  “Why not then? Why not show her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Did you take a picture?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have it here?”

  “I drank it,” I said.

  “This was how many years ago? You didn’t show Shrina?”

  “No,” I said. “I swallowed it down with the glass of water, and then she took me to the train.”

  “Who else did you tell?”

  “You are the first person I’m telling.”

  It was like lightly unhooking a necklace, the one that held her thinking together. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And she wasn’t the first I had told, not at all; I had told Vicky the whole story of spotting and drinking the butterfly in the water glass many, many times over. I had shown Vicky the beetle from my purple knapsack when she was four years old, in a beam of sunlight in her room, like a talisman dredged from the river of a dreamworld. Months before this visit, I had even told a random and handsome young man at a long bus stop wait one afternoon about how that same dead beetle had first been on a paper, and then had rested on my palms on the train, telling the story slowly, in a spooky voice, before we headed over the hill into Hollywood to attend a Halloween parade. He had listened with focused eyes, tilting in, tapping his knee, and had he not terrified me with his attentiveness, I might have walked to the parade alongside, and told him more. But for whatever reason, that day, I wanted to amplify a pressure on my mother, and I wanted her to think it was all hers, and as soon as I had her alone I couldn’t help myself. I paused in my chair. The storm clouds in the painting glowed with a steely intensity. My mother pulled the scarf around her body even tighter, as she had done with the excess crocheted July blankets years earlier, always wrapping herself in things, swaddling herself, and then, as she waited for me to continue, she somehow began inching her wrapped tight body up the high back of the green chair.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything—”

  “Of course you should tell me,” my mother said, rising up the back of the chair.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “I’m honored,” she said, edging her body higher as if it was the only possible exit from the conversation.

  “Are you okay? Nurse?” I said.

  “I—” my mother said.

  “Nurse!” I said, and my mother bent herself over the back of the chair and tipped her whole body over. She fell to the floor and banged her shoulder and the side of her head as I rushed around, and the nurse across the room who was still doing paperwork at the same teak desk ran over. We helped my mother up and she wasn’t bleeding, just dazed, a little shaken,
and when the nurse asked what happened, what was wrong, my mother said nothing, nothing, but her hands now emerging from the wrap of the scarf were beginning to spring around in that rabbity way I knew so well but hadn’t seen in years. “Stay back,” the nurse told me, harsh, and she helped my mother to her feet and let my mother lean hard on her arm and led her to the room she shared with someone else, someone powerfully old, so faded and bony she barely registered in the blankets. I asked if I should still stay for lunch, if my mother was going to be able to have lunch, or what I should do, and the nurse shook her head, not looking at me, mumbling something to the floor, about how lunch wasn’t going to happen; she asked me not to go too close to say goodbye, but just to wave from the doorway supervised as my mother lay tucked in bed with her hair spread over the pillow like a child from another century. My mother had a glass of water at her bedside with a pill bottle, a framed school photo of me, and a classic lampshade of pure white, and I—waving from the doorway, shaking with guilt and meanness and now a desperate desire to leave, still felt a great pitch of relief that the only thing that could fall into her water off her lampshade would be white light, the emptiness of white light. “I’m so sorry,” I told a different nurse, who walked me past the dining hall with its clinking of forks and light chatter, out to the front of the facility where she stood with me on the brick steps looking at the full speckled world, humid and touched with purple and orange, bounty from the months of rain. “She’ll be okay,” said the nurse, “we’ll take good care of her. When’s your flight?” “Not for four hours,” I said. “I—” “Honey,” said the nurse, gently, patting my shoulder, “go early.”

  8

  I think of this now from the balcony of my apartment in the depths of the San Fernando Valley, where I live on the third floor of a sand-colored stucco building about a ten-minute bus ride from my aunt and uncle’s home. I have lived here, in this particular apartment, for three years, and have stayed in Los Angeles for nearly twenty.

  One afternoon many months ago, on a day of nothing notable except a certain familiar emptiness rolling out at its edges inside me, after walking home at dusk from my managerial job at the framing store down the street which I had taken because it was maybe of interest to me, business, although I disliked the place and the hours and the act of constant framing, I’d settled on the balcony, eating a bag of potato chips, gazing at a couple of leafy orange trees, remnants of a bygone grove. For whatever reason, something was unusually quiet inside me that day, looking out, as if some new space had opened up for a moment, like a rotating door revealing its slim aperture of access to the outside, and through this opening an image had slid into my head steady and true of what it had been like on the playground in Portland, at Lewis and Clark Elementary, those many years ago. There I was, eight years old, standing by myself in the middle of the playground, totally still with the windy air, the diamond-patterned fence, the melting cracker taste in my mouth. Tracking. How the other kids running around thought I was still frozen from some long-past game of tag, and on the way back to class, had swatted my shoulder to unfreeze me.

  From the balcony, I could see someone walk out of a store, and someone walk into a store, and cars pulling away from the metered curb, and new cars gliding into place. My apartment was near the corner, so my scope of view included pedestrians stepping into their cars on Chandler, and a glimpse of Victory Boulevard and all the commercial activity there. It was a cloudy afternoon in July, and the blasting heat of summer had not yet fully baked the valley into brown, so the hills still showed swaths of rolling green patched with bands of blazing yellow. I ate my bag of potato chips and sat next to the small succulent plant in its terra-cotta pot left behind by a previous tenant, and for a moment felt myself living inside both times at once. Why had the memory risen up right then? I did not know.

  It was, overall, a scattered time in my life. I was twenty-six years old. I went to my framing job nearly every day and stood behind the counter and took orders and offered opinions on metal versus wood. I filled up my Friday and Saturday nights with activities initiated by others. I attended a few dinners in which I and another person eyed each other as potential mates, after a recent breakup with a fellow whom my aunt and Vicky had asked about almost constantly with delighted winks in their voices, but other than my continued weekend outings to yard sales to hunt for items to sell online, it all felt like further performances of participation, just as I had experienced in the third-grade classroom, sitting at a table and talking and joking with the other students as if I were there. I inhabited none of it, and the sensation I was recalling right then on the balcony, the memory of standing still and paying attention until that hand arrived on my shoulder, of the girl calling, “Francie’s frozen again!” and all the kids laughing—this memory evoked something different, something else, like catching a whiff of a fragrant long-ago scent from a far-off and regal country. I hadn’t even minded being teased about standing so still like a lump; it had been sweet, the teasing. It had never stopped me.

  On the balcony, a breeze blew over my face, and cars stopped at the red light, and then moved forward at the green light, and the memory of the playground began to slip, the hand releasing my shoulder, freeze tag over, body disappearing into time.

  Then I went inside, and threw out the potato chip bag, and made some plans for the weekend, and forgot again.

  9

  The next thing that happened, a few days later, was an almost overwhelming desire to rearrange the items on my balcony, and build myself a tent.

  It hadn’t started as an idea about a tent; I’d had the thought about the playground while on the balcony, and although the details of it didn’t fully stick, something of its impression remained, of a different kind of pace, and with that, I canceled a few of my nighttime plans, seeing how it felt to let the evenings unfurl, time rushing into the corners. From my apartment, I could hear that traffic rushing along on Victory and cars driving to and fro on Chandler as I sat in my living room, and as a kind of vague tribute to that younger self, without planning what I was doing, closed my eyes and tried to listen to the cars, to feel my feet on the carpet. To smell, and cough from, the faint sprinkling of dust from the ceiling fan whirring above. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing, and when I opened my eyes the walls seemed far away, almost impossibly far, stretching beyond me, and the lines around myself looser, in a bad way, not like it had been on the playground at all. I stood and began to move around the apartment, sorting through the mail. I did not, I thought, tossing ads, opening bills, affixing stamps, piling catalogues, belong so well to the middles of rooms. I snacked on some tortilla chips. I cleaned the tub.

  Still, something seemed to be shifting, bubbling beneath, and as I went about my daily routines, memories of that transition in my life, the time from when my mother smashed her hand until I arrived at the doorstep in Burbank, California, were seeming to hover near me, operating as a kind of shimmering peripheral haze. I could feel the memories there, wanting my attention, but I did not know what to do with them. I considered calling up my mother to talk to her about what she recalled of that particular time, but it certainly hadn’t worked well before, and she’d already been having a rough week; at our weekly Sunday phone call it had been hard to understand her, her words scrambled, sentences in code. This happened sometimes, had its own kind of rhythm, and Aunt Minn had been talking extensively with the doctors, and my mother was trying another new medication, and the last thing she needed, truly the last-last thing, was a call from her daughter wanting details about her hospital visit almost twenty years ago while I went on again about butterflies dropping from lampshades. I attended my yard sales. I canceled more plans. I told Vicky on the phone that she was always welcome to come over, but that she would be the main exception because something in my schedule, or my daily structure, was changing, though I could not fully pinpoint what; “a kind of going under,” I said, flicking rubber bands against the kit
chen counter, so many rubber bands from the grocery store, in a little red and green pile. Vicky was tapping away on her computer as we talked, and said fine, and that she was used to me doing curious and inexplicable things anyway, and then informed me that two of the boys in her senior class had literally grown a head taller over the past month of summer when she saw them recently at a party. “Science fiction,” she said, chewing on something. “Happening right here.” She asked if I could help her with her college essay, which I said I’d be glad to do, which was true, and when we hung up, in addition to everything else, the specter of her college departure now hung over the rooms. She would be leaving in about a year. She would likely choose to live somewhere else. I had been in one family shape that had gone through dramatic change so long ago, and I knew the feel of it, could smell the transition, cucumber and trash, from a far distance.

  That evening, with nothing left to do, and all my packaging tasks completed, I went online and looked up all the yard sales I could find for the next couple of weeks, cross-checking with the Metro site, figuring out the ones closest to easily accessible bus routes to see if by attending more I could make enough money to quit the framing job and do object sales full-time. With Vicky’s help, earlier in the year I’d opened a shop online, where I uploaded the photos of all I’d found at the yard sales, and the store itself was doing surprisingly well—I had a number of designated shoppers who checked inventory regularly, and a high star count. The month previous, I’d been able to cover my rent and most of my food and utility bills with the profits. For whatever reason, I seemed to have a modest talent for selecting objects from piles of clutter that, once cleaned, other people might want to buy more than all the other objects speckling the world, competing for their wallets. I scheduled my weekend accordingly: four sales on Saturday, three on Sunday that I could fit in before the weekly dinner at my aunt and uncle’s home after which we would speak to my mother again and see how she was doing. I looked out the window. In the evening lamplight, a neighbor across the street was hauling a box from a furniture store out of the trunk of her car and into her home. She had family members lugging additional boxes with her. It was a thing of many parts. A bed frame? A dresser? Regardless, it meant something else, some reject, might be on her curb soon. I would surely keep an eye out.