by Barry Rachin
Nicholas shrugged. He wasn’t quite sure what to say - or feel. “All that money in mutual funds and you can’t afford a sleep sofa?”
“It’s a studio apartment,” Mary Beth quipped. “Where the hell am I going to put a sleep sofa? On the goddamn fire escape?” All bitterness dissipated; the spell was broken. They went into the building.
The apartment was, indeed, quite small. A room with a bay window that fronted on a gentrified, tree-lined street served as a combination living room-bedroom. A tidy kitchenette and bathroom were connected at the far end. The furnishings were meager - a twin bed with a maple headboard, two end tables and a cheap stereo – vintage, Salvation Army decor. Despite the monkish austerity, the apartment had a cozy, lived-in feel. Nicholas went into the bathroom and threw cold water on his face. When he came out of the bathroom, Mary Beth said, “We’ll get something to eat and then feed Elliot.”
“Who’s Elliot?”
“She grabbed her keys and headed for the door. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
Most of the artsy college types had cleared out for the summer leaving a mishmash of locals and diehard, summer students. A saxophonist with a goatee and dark sunglasses was playing Up Jumped Spring in a breathy legato at the corner of Thayer Street; a hat with dollar bills lay at his feet. In his sister’s presence, Nicholas had always felt a sense of reverence bordering on the mystical. At first, he associated the feeling with her athletic success, but, following the injury, realized that he had always felt that way. He experienced it now sitting opposite her in the restaurant. “Do you miss running?” As soon as he spoke, Nicholas realized the blunt foolishness of his remark.
Mary Beth’s head was cocked to one side. She was still listening to the saxophonist in the street. The player ran a series of dissonant, polytonal progressions then deftly modulated into another bebop tune. “I still compete, after a fashion. At night, in my dreams, I run a mean quarter mile. And that’s without the rigors of daily training!” Glancing up, she saw that Nicholas was flustered, his lips moving inaudibly. “The best kept secret in track and field,” she continued impassively. “is that East Rutherford was my high water mark. It was a fluke; nothing more. I peaked and was already past my prime.”
“You had some good races after that,” Nicholas protested.
Mary Beth’s features dissolved in a dark smile. “Half the races I never even placed, and in the few that I did, I was too far off the winning time to be considered competitive.” She put her hand under his chin and lifted his face so their eyes met. “It’s over, Nicky. Except in my dreams, I don’t run anymore.”
Walking back to the apartment, Mary Beth detoured through a park. She knelt down beside a scruffy plant with a thick stem and wide oval leaves. Withdrawing a jackknife from her pocket, she cut the stem, and a viscous, opalescent liquid resembling Elmer’s Glue bubbled out, staining her fingertips white. “Milkweed,” Mary Beth replied in response to Nicholas’ probing eyes. She put the jackknife away and they retraced their steps.
On the porch in the rear of the apartment, was a cardboard box. The sides had been cut away and replaced with a screen mesh. Inside was a caterpillar, its bulbous body ringed with yellow and black stripes. “You raise caterpillars?”
“Butterflies,” Mary Beth clarified, lifting the top of the box. “Monarchs. The caterpillars are just a means to an end.” She removed a wilted stem - most of the leaves had been chewed away to nothing - and lowered the fresh offering into a container of water wedged at the bottom of the box. She pivoted the plant so several leaves from an adjacent stem were touching - a bridge from one diminished food source to the next. Replacing the cover, they went back into the apartment.
“Where did you find your little friend?” Nicholas asked.
“In the same park where we got the milkweed. Two, white eggs, no bigger than a grain of salt, were stuck to the underside of a leaf.” She went into the bathroom. When she emerged, Mary Beth was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. “There’s a second caterpillar; it’s already in a cocoon and should be emerging soon. Perhaps you’ll get to see it before you go.”
She handed him the air mattress and Nicholas began inflating it with a bicycle pump. The sun having gone down, the heat in the cramped apartment was finally beginning to abate. Only now when she removed the cotton bathrobe, could Nicholas see his sister’s left leg. The deformity wasn’t as bad as he feared. Some tissue missing, the lower portion below the knee twisted, ever-so-slightly, out of alignment. “What’s the purpose,” he asked “of raising butterflies?”
Mary Beth was smoothing her brown hair with a rather expensive-looking, ivory-handled brush. The brush and butterflies appeared the only extravagances she allowed herself. “Marauding insects and harsh weather often destroy the eggs. Raising them in captivity helps even the odds they’ll survive to adulthood and reproduce.” She pulled the brush through her hair, the bristles tugging the tight curls to full length before springing back to hug her scalp. “There’s even a wasp that bores tiny holes in the monarch cocoons, injecting her own eggs in the growing host. The eggs eventually hatched and devoured the half-formed butterfly. When the cocoon split apart, the wrong insect, depending on your point of view, emerges.”
The mattress fully inflated, Nicholas laid it on the floor next to his sister's bed. She got some sheets and a light blanket. “I doubt you’ll need that,” she said pointing to the blanket.
“No, I shouldn’t think so.” Nicholas went into the bathroom, showered and changed into his pajamas.
“Anything else I can get you?”
He lay down on the thin mattress. It was surprisingly comfortable. “No I’m fine.”
Mary Beth flicked out the light and rolled over on her side away from him.
Despite the muggy, midsummer weather, the tiny apartment was reasonably airy. An occasional car passed in the street, accompanied by the incessant drone of crickets. The studio apartment felt infinitely comfortable; it offered safe passage through the predicament of present uncertainties. Stripped of all worldly luxuries and material excesses, except for an ivory-handled brush, it helped ‘even the odds’. “A mausoleum,” Nicholas said without prefacing the remark, as though in response to a conversation already in progress. “Mom made a goddamn shrine of your bedroom.”
Mary Beth groaned and lay flat on her back. “She put all your medals and trophies on a shelf,” Nicholas confided. “Even had the snapshot of you with Doina Melinte blown up and hung on the wall. It’s so God-awful morbid!”
Mary Beth stretched her hand over the edge of the bed until it came to rest on his face. The feathery touch went through his body like a benediction. “She can’t help it.” The hand brushed him a second time and disappeared. Shortly, he heard his sister's regular breathing. She was sound asleep.
Tell me what to do to make your pain go away.
In late March, the day Nicholas visited Mary Beth’s room and found her lying on the bed with hands sandwiched between her thighs, his best intentions counted for nothing. All his furtive prayers produced no benefit. During those sullen, wintry days, he could do no more to help his sister than his mother with her blustery chatter. Now this pilgrimage to Providence - but for what purpose? A social visit? An act of atonement for having done so little at a time when so much was required? Before dozing off, a phantasmagoric image flitted across Nicholas’ fading consciousness. He saw Elliot rear up vertically, while gripping the milkweed stem with the rear portion of his body. Like an automated, spring-loaded mechanism, the caterpillar launched his jaws kamikaze-style at the leathery leaf, hardly bothering to masticate the soggy pulp before swallowing. Chop. Chop. Chop. The attack was grim, relentless.
In the morning Mary Beth showed Nicholas the chrysalis. Mint green and wrinkled like a bloated raisin, the cocoon hung by a single thread in the topmost corner of the butterfly box. Elliot had shifted from the shriveled milkweed stalk to the fresh offering and was weaving and bobbing at the meaty leaf like an overweight, punch-drunk
fighter. The caterpillar had grown noticeably overnight. “The larvae feed on the milkweed plants and produce a bitter alkaloid that’s distasteful to other birds and predators. Each fall the butterflies migrate south to Florida and Mexico.”
“Here’s the tricky part.” She replaced the lid, taking special care not to jostle the green sack. “The slightest trauma and the butterfly emerges deformed.”
“Deformed,” he said, wondering if she caught the implicit irony. “How long do they live?”
“Two years.”
At ten o’clock there was a knock at the door. A young woman with blonde hair and dishwater-blue eyes stood in the doorway. Mary Beth brought her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and handed her a manila folder from which the woman removed a pamphlet slightly larger than a small book. The pages were wrapped in a stiff, expensive looking covering - eggshell white with flecks of blue and reddish purple. A single strand of crimson floss ran through the spine holding the contents intact. “Shall we say 200 copies?” The blonde woman seemed pleased.
“I’ll have them ready in a week.”
“About the price,... ”
“I quoted you a fair price,” Mary Beth parried the remark deftly. “My costs are the same no matter whose poetry I bind.”
“Two hundred copies,” the blonde repeated without further quibbling and went out the door into the bright, morning light. Mary Beth made a note on a slip of paper and placed it, along with the manila folder, in a drawer. Later that morning at a graphic arts store near the municipal court building, she purchased supplies for the blonde woman’s pamphlets. On the ride home, she stopped at a bridal boutique on Wickendon Street. The owner had sold two satin, wedding albums over the weekend and placed an order for several more.
After lunch they assembled 50 of the pamphlets. Using a paper cutter, Mary Beth showed Nicholas how to trim the decorative coverings to size. “The unusual blue and purple flecks are seed husks tossed into the mush before the paper is cold-pressed to its proper thickness and left to dry.”
Running a length of linen thread through a ball of beeswax, she demonstrated how to sew the booklet signatures together, pushing the needle through the paper from the innermost fold to the back. Mary Beth creased the individual pages with a bone folder and collated while Nicholas used a carpenter’s awl to punch holes in the spine. By three in the afternoon a hefty pile of poetry was scattered over the length of the table. “Enough for today,” Mary Beth announced throwing the bone folder aside.
Later that night, Nicholas said, “If you’d tripled the price, the woman would have placed the order.”
It was almost midnight and pitch dark; the crickets were in rare form. “Yes, I suppose so.” Mary Beth giggled at the queer notion, her soft, musical laughter rolling out of her throat and resonating in the blackened corners of the tidy room. A group of Brown students returning from the last show at the Avon Cinema passed by their window, hooting and jeering. They were intoxicated - not with liquor, but the warm weather and their own, unquenchable youth.
“Mother has her birds to look after,” Nicholas said, “and you have Elliot.”
By now the Brown students had disappeared down the street, their joyful exuberance swallowed up by the rowdy crickets and steamy, night air. “Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” his sister murmured. ‘Looking out for each other, evening the odds.”
“I’m going to tell Mom to dismantle the shrine,” Nicholas said, the last, few words catching awkwardly in his throat. “And I’ll explain that the deep sea diver remark was a figurative slip of the tongue.”
“Yes, do that.”
“The picture with you and Doina will go up in the attic.”
“Or, preferably, out with the trash,” She was leaning far over the side of the bed. Though he could not see his sister’s face in the darkness, Nicholas could feel her warm breath on his cheek. “What I’m doing her in this apartment,...it’s not a life,” Mary Beth whispered. “It’s only a beginning and nothing more.” There was a long silence. “A person must start somewhere.”
In the morning before leaving, Mary Beth said, “Mom’s birthday is next month. I thought I’d surprise her and come up to Boston for a week. Is there anything she could use?”
“She dropped her binoculars last week and cracked the lens.” Mrs. Holyfield owned an Eagle Optics model featuring nitrogen purged fogproofing.
“Say no more!”
Nicholas went out onto the porch to say goodbye to Elliot. A gooey puddle stained the lower left-hand corner of the butterfly box - an afterbirth of sorts. The cocoon was in tatters and an orange and black monarch, its moist, newly-formed wings closed together, was resting on the topmost leaf. Oblivious to everything, Elliot continued his eating frenzy.
Mary Beth removed the lid and placed her hand under the butterfly’s slender legs. “Problem is, we don’t know how long he’s been free of the cocoon. Once the wings dry he’ll have the urge to fly, so we need to get him out of the box.” The insect stumbled onto an outstretched finger. She lifted him gently from the enclosure and went down the backstairs into the sun-drenched yard.
“Did you want to hold him?”
Nicholas shook his head. He was too shocked by the transformation. The butterfly, which was easily three times the length of the wispy chrysalis, flexed its moist wings several times, laying them flat on a horizontal plane. Another five minutes passed. The insect hardly moved as the wings gradually dried and stiffened. Suddenly, in a frenetic burst, it flew straight up in the air and was gone from sight.
“If you come again,” Mary Beth flashed her low-keyed, convoluted smile, “I can’t promise such a spectacular ending to your stay.”
Nicholas had a dream.
He was in the mountains west of Mexico City. The trees were painted reddish brown with millions of monarchs. Shimmering showers, molten firestorms of burnt umber and black. His head rocked forward, eyes opened. Just as abruptly, the millennial dream came to an abrupt end. Nicholas had dozed off on the black woman’s fleshy shoulder. “Excuse me.”
“You looked so tired, I didn’t have the heart to wake you,” she said. The gold-capped tooth caught a burst of noonday sunlight and flamed in her mouth like spontaneous combustion.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “My sister raises monarch butterflies.” He told her about Elliot and the butterfly they released earlier in the day. The bus passed through Sharon and Canton on the Massachusetts south shore. The Blue Hills loomed into sight. Another half hour and they would be entering downtown Boston. Nicholas couldn’t stop talking about the butterflies. The black woman was an eager listener. She shook her head, asked intelligent and thoughtful questions and even laughed when he described how the newly hatched insect rested quietly on Mary Beth’s finger. “Well, imagine that!”
“The longest recorded flight for a tagged adult is eighteen hundred miles from Ontario to the American Southwest.”
“Eighteen hundred miles!” The black woman exclaimed, stunned by the improbable statistic. “Wherever did you learn such a thing?”
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Gandhi’s Goat
A line ad appeared in the classified section of the San Francisco Gazette: Night clerk wanted for small motel. Mission District. Inquire in person. A half dozen applicants interviewed for the position. I was the third choice and only got the job by default when the others decided not to accept. “What sort of a night are we having?” asked Mr. Chowdhary, the manager and owner of the Bay View Motel. A stocky man, his coffee-colored skin was pock marked below bushy eyebrows.
“Three-quarters full with two reservations pending.” I had been there a month already, checking in the late arrivals and showing the guests to their rooms. When a lodger needed extra towels or a light bulb changed, I doubled as room service. If the motel filled up - which hardly ever happened - I turned on the 'no vacancy' sign and usually had little else to do but answer phones.
“Good! Very go
od, indeed!” The more guests, the friendlier and more expansive Mr. Chowdhary’s mood.
Behind the front desk of the Bay View Motel was a large, rectangular box sectioned off into twenty four smaller slots for spare keys and mail. A water cooler stood near the door along with a display rack stuffed with brochures describing tourist attractions in the Bay Area. A bronze statue of an Indian goddess rested on an end table in the far corner of the room. Three feet tall, the statue depicted a well-endowed, Indian woman perched in a lotus position; the goddess had three separate sets of arms and a coil of venomous snakes writhing on her forehead. The faint smell of incense - patchouli or sandalwood - emanated from the spot where the statue stood.
“After college, what will you do?” Mr. Chowdhary asked.
I had mentioned that I was taking courses at the local community college. “Haven't decided yet.”
“Not to worry. In time, everything will become clear.” Mr. Chowdhary raised his voice several decibels and waved a finger in the air. “My son, Subir - for years, he drifted about aimlessly from one job to the next. A regular job gypsy!” Mr. Chowdhary grinned at his clever choice of words. “Now he works for the Bay Commission. Decent pay, good benefits. Such a lucky man! “He rubbed his pock-marked chin. “And my oldest daughter, Bidyut, is married. Her husband’s in textiles.” Mr. Chowdhary smiled even more broadly showing his straight, white teeth. Thinking about his successful children made him very happy. “And, of course, you’ve met my other daughter, Terry.”
“The girl who works here,” I replied.
Mr. Chowdhary’s smile faded rather abruptly. “I love all my children equally, but that one - she will send both her parents to an early grave.”
One of the guests, a late arrival, came into the lobby. He checked in and went off in search of his room, dragging a medium-size Pullman down the corridor. “My wife’s people,” he continued, “came from Cochin. The city is slightly inland from the Malabar Coast. There has always been a large, Christian community in south-western India since as far back as the first century. My dear wife is a devout Catholic. After giving the two other children traditional names, she decided to name our youngest daughter after Saint Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus.”
