The Butterfly Lampshade

by Aimee Bender

  The steward found me outside the bathroom and asked if I was okay, said I looked pale, and he told me if I wanted to rest I could always return to the sleeper. Or rest in my chair. He was not tired. He would be near. Was there anything about that paper he’d lifted out? he asked. Did I, was it the paper you think the woman was looking for last night? I didn’t reply, but he looked away, his eyebrows pulling in, pained, and as gently and kindly as he could he said that he didn’t think the woman would be out and about late in the night looking for my homework. “I just don’t think that was the paper she meant,” he said. “I’m sorry.” The train moved through a tunnel, darkening. It was difficult right then for the steward to meet my eyes, but not for me to stay with his; I had him in my sights by then, his adulthood and reasoning, noting that well-worn gap between us, the “someone” blanket gap, between the world of rational thinkers and the rest. He was a man who went to graduate school and attended libraries and read about whales. I felt a kind of power over him then, and told him yes, it was a good idea, that I would go to the sleeper for a little while, and I walked down the rows of cars with the knapsack close on my back, train car windows exposing daylight again, him following quietly behind me so as not to disturb me with his presence.

  * * *

  —

  The light in the sleeper was a raw afternoon yellow, the curtain still pulled. I lay down on the cot and listened to the train move below me for a while. I had a task to do, and I was carrying it in my mind as surely as if it were a solid thing, but for now I was waiting. As if on schedule, the tears surged up, and I cried them out into the same rough gray woolen blanket to get them out of the way. The nurse’s concerned voice on the phone. My mother unable to talk. A woman laughing outside the sleeper door about cubicles. Some kid feet running. I can’t do it, I thought to myself, wiping my eyes, knowing I would do it. I sat up on the cot and pulled the knapsack into my lap. I did not want to see it first; I wanted my hand to see it first, so I closed my eyes. The dark, as before, helped me: the dark where I felt myself more clearly, the dark of my bedroom with no night-light. My heart started beating in my throat, and I groped over the knapsack to find the zipper of the small pocket, used the metal tab to split the fabric open, and reached my hand inside.

  Next door, the steward, most likely, was back on his own cot, reading his book. I could almost feel him quietly reading, studying, the other people on the train, the train arriving at Union Station in seven more hours, soon to pass through the golden-blue radiance of San Luis Obispo and the massive sea-bathed rocks of Morro Bay, which I would see once I was back in my seat, dazed, eyes glued to the window. My hand moved around in the pocket, reaching slowly to the bottom, progressing past the pens and their smooth slim plastic cylinders, past a couple pen caps, separated from the pen bodies, down to the crevices of canvas. The canvas had a fraying sewn hem rimming the edge of the pocket, and my fingers started at the far corner and moved along the border, and it did not take long to make contact. The thing was solid, and delicate, and unmoving. I touched the shape of it, an oval, sticks protruding from the sides. Felt the smoothness of its backside, and the extended stag antlers. A beetle. What seemed to be a dead beetle. I lifted it out by the end of one of its legs and placed it into my palm, and with eyes still closed, for a while just sat there with it resting in my hand.

  It isn’t easy to name what I felt; as a child, I was immersed in feeling without name, and in the memory tent, trying to capture it, the best word I could summon up for myself was resigned. It was here. It was asserting its presence entirely. I could feel its small weight and deadness in my hand. It was a thing, now. It could not be denied. When I finally opened my eyes, it was by then an afterthought, only to add color. I had run my fingers over it for many minutes and knew its shape and size well. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and in the now grayish light of the sleeper car, it looked only black, though years later, when I would show it to Vicky, dazzling sun streaming in from my bedroom window from a cloudless valley sky, the daylight and angle revealed a dark red shimmer glow, and she, crouched by my side, four or five years old, had gasped at its beauty.

  I held it for some time, then put it back into my small knapsack pocket and zipped it closed.

  53

  We tried my mother at the pay phone in Santa Barbara, and at the pay phone in Oxnard, but each time the nurse said she was either seeing the doctor or resting. The steward’s cell phone did not work well on the train due to his payment plan, and the train itself at that time had spotty reception. “Tell her it’s Francie,” I told the nurse, and she said she understood the importance, but that she was reporting the truth. “She might be out on the floor in the late afternoon,” she said, scratching a pen against something hard. “Try again then. There’s a better chance then.”

  We were closing in on Southern California by this point, and the steward and I spent the rest of the trip largely in our seats before the big city entered our view. He continued to read his books, and to give my mind a break from the shock of the butterfly and now the beetle, the inert feeling of the beetle body and its delicate legs split at the joint still a vivid ghost memory on the palm of my hand, I went through the different puzzles in my word search book again. I tried to fill in any of the leftover clues on crosswords I hadn’t been able to figure out, which was most of them. I found the wrong items in a park scene, including a teacup in a tree. I made a puppy’s face by linking a series of dots. With every scratch of the pencil, the odor of pale brown newsprint released to the air, and later, even a whiff of those newsprint game books found at stations of any kind would raise up in me a vicious wave of nausea. It was becoming, to me, the precise smell of dislocation. When I raised my head to look outside the window, the ocean had grown lighter, a frothy blue, and the houses out the other side were larger, whiter, more imposingly moneyed. The steward and I ventured to the snack car to have cheese puffs and grape juice, and the steward pointed out the slow black curve of a dolphin fin rising from the surface of rolling waves. Riders exited, and new people came on at Ventura with their bags and purses to find and settle into seats.

  I was back in my spot, looking out the window, glad that the older woman who had been sitting near me trying to chat me up with polite, concerned questions had disembarked, and the steward was working his pencil over a yellow legal pad with an elbow lodged in an open book to hold the page, when a man in a black suit walked through the doors at the far end of our train car.

  He was a striking man. Tall, with slick black hair just visible under a hat, acne-scarred skin, a prominent nose, and the suit. It was hard not to take notice of him. He looked a lot like the male version of the woman who had knocked on my door the night before. My memory of him, up until now, had been vague, but in the tent, he was sharp, and clear.

  He passed through the length of the car and came to a stop at our end, where he turned on his heel and faced me.

  “Tickets,” he said, standing at the edge of the seat next to mine.

  I pointed across the aisle to the steward, who rummaged in his pocket. “You’re not the usual ticket-taker,” he said.

  “No,” said the man.

  Silence stretched between the three of us. Our tickets were wedged up on the metal ridge above the seats, anyway—we’d had to show them only the first day, upon settling in, and every successive pass-through our usual ticket-taker gave us a knowing nod as he walked by.

  “I already gave them to the conductor,” said the steward, patting his jacket. “I just realized.”

  The man stood there. His shoes shone; his eyebrows rested thick and sturdy against a pale, sweatless forehead.

  “Tickets,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the steward. “We have no tickets.”

  The man rotated to face me again, and behind him, I could see the steward rise from his seat with his long brittle arms and legs to scuttle over to my side of the aisle
to be my protector. But I had not been afraid of the woman, and I was not afraid of this man, this lunkish man who kept repeating himself. I was interested. He reminded me of something.

  He turned his strong dark eyes back on me.

  “Tickets,” he said.

  “We already gave them away,” I said.

  “Tickets,” he said, and behind the darkness in his gaze I could now glimpse a small measure of pleading.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, but something was shifting in my perception of what was happening, and it was so slippery I could barely grasp it, but I could, I could catch a tiny hold on a string coming out of the moment, to pull it in, to see. Based on where he was standing, and his suit, and his formality, he seemed to be making a request for our tickets; that is what usually happened on a train. He was performing all of those functions, albeit wrongly. But as I was sitting there, I understood, in a most basic way, that he was actually asking us for his. That we were a source for him, that he was looking to us to supply him. I had no tickets, and I was neither conductor nor ticket booth, but in order to do something, I reached down into the purple drawstring bag at my feet, into the larger pocket. Near the top were some ripped pieces of paper left over from drawings I had started the day before and quickly grown tired of, and I pulled one of them out and tore the paper into two jaggedy rectangles, folding down the rough edges. The tall man watched me do the work. He watched with a great care and focus. I remember feeling then, in the depth of his watching, that without knowing what I looked like, he had been searching specifically for me. I took a pencil and wrote TICKET in capitals on one piece of paper, and TICKET in capitals on the next, thickening the letters by going over them a few times. Behind the word, a whorl of crayon movement and parts of bird wings and cat heads.

  “Here,” I said. I handed the pieces of paper over to the man.

  The steward was perched on the armrest of the seat across from me, poised for any quick action. But the tall man moved slowly. He straightened up to his full height and his dark eyes scanned the papers I had given him. He looked at them for what seemed to be a long time, deeply searching them with his gaze, before tucking them both into the front pocket of his suit jacket. He bowed a little to me, and then walked directly to the door that separated the cars, pressed the rectangular button to open, and exited.

  The steward went to the door and watched through the small window. After a few minutes, he returned to tell me the man had walked through the entire subsequent car and gone through the door at that end as well.

  “Well!” said the steward, sitting fully back into a seat. A light sheen of sweat framed his brow. “Well done. That was a little strange, huh? Do you think it was related to the other night? Who was that man?”

  I closed my drawstring bag. Stored the pencil back inside the word search book.

  “He wanted tickets,” I said.

  “But was there something off about him? He looked so put together.”

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I said.

  “I’ll wait at the door.” The steward returned to the window between cars. “No sign of him. You’re good.”

  Like the previous night with the woman visitor, the steward worrying in the doorframe, I felt, for a second, the strain of him there, this protective, good steward, shepherding me.

  “He was not off,” I said. “He was on.”

  I used the bathroom, and then did something I had not done in the two days of the trip so far, which was to, by my own volition, go up and down our train car. As I walked the carpeted row I saw for the first time the other people also traveling with us in their seats, doing their reading or typing or sleeping, and the various shades and shapes of hair and skin and shoes and hands and phones and the wavy stripes of blue and brown landscape rushing past as we moved inland. The steward watched me carefully. I went to the end and rose on my tiptoes and also looked myself through the window separating the cars.

  “I’d like to go look for him,” I said, turning to the steward.

  “The man? That strange man?”

  “Please.”

  Together, we wended through the chain of cars, me leading the way through each metal segment, including the dining car, which was empty of people and table dressings in between meals, and the first-class car with its red seats and pointy-toed shoes, and the movie car with the uplifted televisions that were hard to see with the bands of daylight moving into the room even under and around the pulled shades. We walked until we reached the front of the train, with the conductor in his sunglasses leaning back in some kind of special chair, talking to a customer, and when the man with the suit and hat was not to be found, we turned around and tailed the train all the way to its other end, bumping and jiggling along the route the whole time.

  “He must be in the bathroom,” said the steward, once we’d reached the end.

  I nodded, but only as an actor nods on a stage according to script, because I knew, and I imagined in some way the steward knew, that the man in the suit, like the woman in the suit, was gone.

  54

  For the last portion of the ride, the steward and I went to the Sightseer Lounge to watch the city rising and squaring itself before us. Through the patches of fresh air coming in from the intermediary gaps, we could smell the grime and exhaust while glimpsing miniature cars on freeways in winding, glittering lines. We were only one stop from downtown Los Angeles by now and while angling in from the valley glimpsed in the far distance the rise of apartment buildings and the graffiti of indecipherable spiky letters scratched on walls, and skyscrapers off to the east that rose silver into a strobe-lit sky. Honking bleats, and the shifting black dots of birds.

  The final stop before Union Station was Burbank. At the pay phone, the nurse connected me directly to my mother.

  “Honey,” my mother said. Her voice sounded thin, tremulous. “Where are you?”

  “Burbank.” I gripped the receiver.

  “They said you’re taking the train?”

  “I’m in Burbank,” I said, reading the large white plastic letters on the gray archway in front of me.

  “You’re off the train?”

  “Not yet. We’re taking it to the end so it isn’t rushed.”

  “Francie. It’s so good to hear you. When I’m better, we’ll go to Disneyland together. I’ll come right down and see you, okay? I’ll get well, and when I’m really good you’ll come back here to be with me again and we’ll play cards all day and have ice cream every meal. Okay?”

  The steward was standing under one of the gray archways, watching the planes taking off in unusually sharp angles from the nearby airport.

  “Your aunt is a wonderful person,” my mother said, after the loud rumble of plane passed. “You’ll be in very good hands.” She started to cry.

  The wind passed through the station to ruffle the meadow grasses over by the rail lines.

  “There’s a dining car,” I said.

  “On the train?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the food good?”

  “The food is fine.”

  “Who are you with?”

  “A man.”

  “Uncle Stan?”

  “No. A stranger man.”

  “Not Aunt Minn?”

  “Aunt Minn had the baby.”

  “Of course. Of course she did. Please, Francie. What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s being nice to you? All the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he nearby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you put him on the phone?” The tears were streaking down her face; I could picture them clearly from the way she was sniffing. An assortment of machines beeped behind her. Above us, another plane rose noisily, and I wa
ved at the steward, who came over and took the phone from my hands. “She’s crying,” I said. He hunched close to the receiver like Uncle Stan had, so long ago on the steps of the elementary school, and in a low but audible voice the steward also reported information about my eating and sleeping and how I was doing well in spite of the circumstances. I heard him explaining how he was a second cousin on Uncle Stan’s side, and a graduate student on a break from classes. “She’s very capable,” he said.

  The conductor poked his head out of the front car and waved us on. “Pulling anchor in one minute!” he called. The steward said goodbye to my mother, and I followed him back on. From our train car, portions of the airport were visible—large hangars, vast and flat parking lots for planes of all sizes, the misspelled sign I would read so many times in my future at the 165 bus stop down Vanowen stating passanger pickup. Cement blocks by the side of the road sheltered by waving stalks of grass.

  “Union Station!” said the conductor, plucking our paper tickets from the seats.