The Butterfly Garden

by Mary Campisi

Samantha Steward’s voice reached them a full five seconds before Jenny spotted her. Even the sound of country western music on the outdoor speakers couldn’t diminish the woman’s distinctive shrill.

  “Grace!” she called again.

  Jenny looked left, spotted her, gold hoops dangling as she made her way toward Grace. “You look wonderful!” She leaned over and kissed the air near Grace’s cheek.

  “Thank you,” Grace said, running a hand over the back of her head. Once, twice, three times.

  “I mean it,” Samantha said, her white smile gleaming between bright red lips. “Even with the new ‘do,’” she gestured to Grace’s scarf-covered head, “you look just great.”

  Grace nodded, her lips turning up in a faint smile.

  “Jenny, nice to see you again. Been planting any more flowers?” Samantha brushed back a lock of hair, black and shiny, like the glossy finish on a photograph. Jenny imagined she thought of her entire world as gloss, while everyone else was only matte.

  Jenny pasted a half-smile on her face and said, “Not yet, but I will be.” She cocked her head to one side and tapped a finger against her chin. “I’ve talked Grace into something more… daring. More artistic.” There, put that in your silk Armani’s. “I’m thinking of poppies,” she said. “Lots of them, kind of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape.”

  “Poppies?”

  Grace nudged Jenny’s ankle with the toe of her sandal. “Jenny still thinks she’s in California,” she said with a short laugh. “Bigger, bolder, better, that’s her motto.” She turned to Jenny, eyes narrowed with a look that said Jenny should have shut up ten sentences ago.

  Well, someone needed to put this woman in her place. Jenny knew she could do it and why not? It wasn’t like Samantha Steward could ostracize her from her bridge club or anything. Jenny had nothing to lose and the rest of the women on this street had everything to gain. Like individuality, for starters. She glanced at the woman’s painted red nails. She’d probably been the type in high school who said yes to the blonde with the tight pink sweater and no to the brunette with the double chin and cat-eye glasses. Jenny pictured it all, in minute detail, the hopeful face of that pathetic young girl with glasses and a few extra pounds, desperate to belong, to fuse, to join, willing to do homework favors, write extra papers, carry books. Anything to be part of a bigger whole…to be accepted. Jenny had seen it in high school and she saw it now, fifteen years later.

  “Oh, Gracie, Samantha’s got style,” she said, pointing to the woman’s matching sweater and shorts. White linen with a thin stripe of blue. Ralph Lauren? Or maybe, Liz? “I bet she knows what I’m talking about.” Jenny leaned over and whispered in Samantha’s ear. “It’s all about art. Bold. Vibrant. Painting a canvas that stretches the senses.” Jenny laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder, a conspiratorial pretense and said. “You know what I mean.”

  Samantha Steward cleared her throat twice and murmured a polite “Of course.”

  “Poppies. Stretching across America.” She winked and held her arms wide, enjoying the bewilderment on the woman’s perfectly sculpted features. “Think of it. From Grace to you.” Jenny swung her arms wider in the air. “To the postman in Des Moines, to the retired schoolteacher in Scottsdale, to the dance instructor in Reno, to…me.”

  The woman nodded her dark head and worked a closed-mouth, half-smile onto her red lips.

  “If it were me, I’d set the trend, get out of the box, make a statement.” Jenny leaned toward her and said in a low voice, “You know everyone will follow your example, Samantha. You’re a leader.”

  The woman’s smile spread. “Poppies,” she repeated.

  Jenny nodded a silent yes and said, “Poppies.”

  Samantha Steward smoothed her perfect hair and glanced at the gold watch on her left hand. “Oh, my, I almost forgot, it’s my turn to serve. If you’ll excuse me?”

  “Certainly,” Jenny said, but the woman was already moving away from them, on rather quick feet, it seemed. “Bitch,” Jenny muttered.

  “Jenny, I swear, if you ever pull something like that again, I’ll never forgive you.” Grace’s voice was low, hard, very serious.

  “She’s a manipulator, Grace, and I don’t like her. I figured all that out five minutes after our very first conversation. What I want to know is why you give her a second thought?”

  “You can’t just be rude to everyone you don’t like.”

  Jenny raised a brow. “Rude? Was I rude?”

  “You were playing with her, trying to make her look like a fool.”

  “No, I was trying to teach her a lesson in humility. I want to see her dig up all those flowers in her yard and plant a sea of poppies.” Jenny smiled, picturing the woman with garden gloves and matching trowel, royal blue or maybe sunshine yellow, crawling around with sweat trickling down her neck, the sun beating on her shiny head, and the whole neighborhood staring after her.

  “Why?” Grace asked. “What does it matter to you? Why can’t you just ignore her?”

  “Because I don’t like what she’s saying beneath the words coming out of her mouth. It’s like she really thinks she’s better than everybody else.”

  “Samantha’s just,” Grace paused and took a deep breath, “just Samantha. Most of us ignore her comments.”

  “I think you should all tell her to take her red lips and kiss off.”

  “It’s not that easy, Jenny. You can’t say that to everybody who annoys you.” She shook her head and frowned. “But right now, it’s awfully tempting.”

  Jenny stared at her. “Are you talking about me?”

  Grace didn’t answer.

  “What? What did I do? I was only trying to stick up for you.”

  Grace shook her head again and turned away, heading toward a group of people to the left of them.

  What? Jenny watched her disappear from view. What?

  20

  For the next twenty minutes, Grace engaged in a serious conversation with two men, scholarly-looking types with close-cropped beards and white polo shirts, and a woman who looked like the men, minus the beard.

  Fine. Grace wanted to ignore her. Absolutely fine. Jenny sipped a beer and took in the crowd. There were clusters of men and women, a kaleidoscope of color and motion, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, usually all four in succession. Children covered every inch of green space, chomping hot dogs, spitting out watermelon seeds, hot, sweaty bodies, hair sticking straight up or out, braids undone, pigtails crooked, bangs smashed down. When the ground proved no more conquest, they took to the air, some hoisting their tanned bodies to the top of the jungle gym with a sturdy, yellow rope, bony legs pushing off wooden supports for strength. Others chose the easier way to their “heavenly retreat” by using one of two side ladders or crawling up the attached sliding board.

  Grace and Jenny had had a swing set when they were kids. It was metal, red and white, with two swings, a mini sliding board and a glider. Jenny used to pump that glider, pump it hard, until the white poles jumped out of the grass and wobbled back and forth in choppy skips, threatening to tip them over. She loved making the swing set “walk.” Faster, harder, higher, she’d laugh and shriek in equal amounts delight and fear.

  Grace, unfortunately, had never shared her enthusiasm. She’d clutched the bar of the glider, knuckles white, eyes wide, mouth open, knees clamped together. When Jenny’s legs gave out and the poles stopped jumping, the glider would slide to a stop, and that’s when Grace came to life, yelling at Jenny, telling her what a dangerous thing she’d done and how they both could’ve been hurt and maybe even broken their arm like Tommy Latser did at school. After a while she refused to go on the swing unless Jenny promised not to make it “walk.” And no matter how Jenny tried to tell her that the whole fun of it was making it do things it didn’t usually do, wasn’t supposed to do, and how it turned her insides jiggly-jumpy and stole her breath with one giant jump, it didn’t matter. Grace didn’t care. She said she didn’t need to feel that way, didn’t want to
lose her breath or her brains. She said there were rules for playing on a swing set and Jenny should learn them. Rules were important, she’d said. There were rules for everything and six years old was old enough for Jenny to start understanding some of them.

  Well, Jenny hadn’t done a very good job of following rules back then and it looked like she still struggled with the concept, at least where it pertained to unspoken expectations from a neighborhood busybody.

  A blur of hot pink in sandals and matching scrunchie tore through her absent-minded nostalgia. The blur chased another fast-moving object, a boy in khaki shorts and a blue shirt. They sped along the outskirts of the crowd, heading in the direction of the front yard. Two seconds later, they were gone, swallowed up by a flowering hydrangea and an oversized boxwood. The pink swirl was Natalie, the khaki-blue, Jenny didn’t know.

  Where was the rest of the Freeze Tag brigade? Weren’t there supposed to be more…four, six, seven? She spotted Danielle hoisting herself up on a big rope. She obviously wasn’t part of the game. There were a lot of other bodies, dressed in summer yellows, greens, and reds, climbing, sliding, swinging, jumping, and digging. But running, flat out, arms extended, legs flying?

  No. Jenny glanced at the spot where she’d last seen Natalie. Men and women gathered in small clusters, sticking together like giant popcorn balls, exchanging gooey bits of information, sweet and sickening at the same time, with an aftermath of tidbits that stuck in their brain long after the last kernel was flossed away.

  Where was Natalie?

  Jenny made her way to the side of the house, past the conversation about Jessica’s swimming classes and Michael’s thumbsucking, and the “hee-hee” panting in the last stage of labor, and the shocking cerulean blue of the pregnancy test. Morning sickness, night sickness, linea negra, hemorrhoids. She moved faster, excusing herself with a slight shrug of shoulders and an innocent smile. A man with a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt and ten strands of slicked-back brown hair blocked Jenny’s exit from the suburban fantasia that occupied the Montgomerys’ backyard. He held a beer in his right hand and waved a cigar in his left, complaining about the “shitty” return he got on his investments last year. Too heavy in the European market, he said. Too much foreign stuff. The woman, a thirty-something, bottled redhead with pancake makeup that didn’t hide the pockmarks dotting her cheeks, nodded and sipped from her plastic glass. She had that glassy-eyed stare that said she had no idea what he was talking about and no desire to find out.

  With effort, Jenny worked her way around the man and broke out into the open, on the other side, where a world existed apart from pacifiers and IRAs. She passed a few stragglers, mother, father, two children, carrying covered dishes and diaper bags. The young boy, a towhead with a buzz cut, dragged a plastic bat behind him, scraping the lime-green tip along the sidewalk. His sister, at least Jenny assumed it was his sister because she had the same white-blonde hair, bounced a red ball several paces behind the rest of the family. When they passed Jenny, they smiled, exchanging a stranger’s niceties.

  Where was Natalie? Jenny reached the front of the house, called her name. “Natalie?” Nothing. No Natalie and no speed demon. “Natalie?” She spoke louder this time, with more urgency, but the child didn’t respond. Had she left the yard, gone to the boy’s house? Jenny sucked in a deep breath, clenched her jaw, unclenched her jaw. Should she tell Laura, ask her if she knew where Natalie might be? Or should she…What? What should she do?

  “Natalie!” She should try to find her. No sense in alarming the rest of the neighborhood because her five-year-old niece had decided to chase a boy and had disappeared. Natalie could have circled around to the backyard by now. What did Jenny know, anyway? She was probably the only childless person in that group. What did someone who’d never been a parent really know about the intricacies of the family obedience system? Maybe kids were allowed to roam around during neighborhood parties, go to each other’s houses, use their bathrooms, try out their colored antibacterial soaps. Maybe Jenny was being paranoid, envisioning child snatchers hiding behind sugary smiles and the thick oak trees crowding the tree lawns, just waiting for some unsuspecting five-year-old to race by so he could scoop her up. Maybe she’d seen too many horror movies. Maybe her imagination was too wild, too twisted.

  “Natalie!” She also could have slipped into Laura’s house and was at this very minute sticking her finger into a big bowl of whipped topping. Jenny bounded up the front steps. Or, she might be stuffing her face with potato chips, dipping half the chip into a bowl of French onion dip. Jenny opened the door and slipped inside, breathing in the aroma of fresh-baked biscuits and hoping she’d find Natalie munching one at the kitchen table, crumbs stuck to both sides of her mouth. But when she reached the kitchen, she found nothing but ten bags of chips on the almond Formica countertop and two trays of biscuits cooling on square wire racks.

  “Natalie?” Damn, where was she?

  A growl came from nearby.

  “Natalie?”

  Another rumble, like a warring animal…from under the kitchen table. Jenny lifted the gold plastic tablecloth designed with red delicious apples along the edges, and peeked underneath.

  “Natalie!”

  She was huddled up, knees tucked under her chin, bare arms wrapped around bruised shins. “She’s not a monster.” It came out more hiss than word.

  Jenny knelt on the floor, scooted toward her niece, and placed a hand on her knee. “Who, honey? Who’s not a monster?”

  “And she does not look like a buzzard. Jerry Lenning looks like a buzzard!”

  Oh. So Natalie hadn’t been playing Freeze Tag. She’d been after the speed demon. But why? And what would she have done if she’d caught him? Punch him in the nose? The shins? The gut? Had she caught him? It was hard to picture Natalie doing any of those things until Jenny looked at her, crouched low, thin-lipped, white-knuckled, and breathing hard. Then, she could see her niece pummeling the poor kid, splitting his lip open, maybe even giving him a black eye.

  But who had Jerry Lenning called a monster and a buzzard? Who had she been trying to protect? A sickening sensation gurgled in the pit of her stomach, worked into a boil, spilled like toxic froth, burning a hole right through the lining, right through sense and decency and countless blind efforts to protect the girls. The painful, searing truth was that they could not be protected, not from a young boy’s cruel words or an adult’s raised brow.

  Children could be cruel, adults could be cruel, life could be cruel.

  So this is what it felt like to be a parent.

  Jenny pushed back a strand of hair from Natalie’s cheek. “Tell me what happened, honey.”

  Natalie’s bottom lip quivered, straightened, quivered again. “He said Mommy looked like a buzzard.”

  Jenny moved closer and hoisted her onto her lap. “That wasn’t a very nice thing for him to say.” Natalie buried her head against Jenny’s chest, arms clinging around her aunt’s middle, knees bent to her chin. They clung to each other under the Montgomery table with its apple- coated plastic covering, a safe haven, shielding them from the outside world and all of its injustices. For the briefest of seconds, Jenny almost felt as if she could protect her.

  “He’s mean and I hate him!” Natalie’s words came out muffled against Jenny’s shirt.

  Jenny stroked her back, pulled her closer. “I know you want to hate him because he said something that hurt you. But don’t, Natalie. Don’t hate him. It will only make you feel bad.” She planted a soft kiss on top of her niece’s head.

  “I already feel bad.” She sniffed. “And mad.”

  “But you’ll feel worse.”

  Another sniff. “Mommy’s not a buzzard,” she said. “She’s not.” Her voice trembled, faded. “She’s not. She’s not.” The same words, over and over, more tenacious than a prizefighter battling the final round, bloody but not broken, until at last, the words stopped, her breathing quieted, and she slept.

  * * *

  Sleep had a
lways been one of Jenny’s greatest pleasures. There was something about the way twilight wrapped itself around her half-conscious being, pulled her under, transported her away to another place, another time, another life. She’d always prided herself in possessing the innate ability to close her eyes and drift off, no matter the situation or surroundings. Cars, trains, buses, planes, hotels, villas, condos, elevators. Yes, elevators, if there were more than fifteen floors and she’d passed the third stage of exhaustion. But usually, she just closed her eyes and floated into that other world, the one with no deadlines, no expectations, no ulterior motives. And every smile was a real one, and words were commitments that didn’t require legal documentation to enforce or interpret.

  And life was good, without the hassles, or deceptions.

  But not last night; last night sleep wouldn’t come. Not with a temple massage, not with thirty pages of Thoreau’s Walden, not with side one of Mozart for Meditation, or side two, either. The lavender and chamomile body lotion didn’t work, nor did the serenity candle burning on her nightstand. She knew the reason, knew it before she looked at the clock for the sixth time. A deeper, darker vision had control last night, running through her mind, disrupting conscious thought. Nothing would take away the sight of Natalie crouched under Laura’s kitchen table, fierce warrior come to do battle for her mother. And when the fight had drained from her small body, she’d curled up and fallen into an exhausted sleep, her fingers clutching Jenny’s shirt. That was the dark vision that imprinted itself on Jenny’s memory, wiping out any hope for a peaceful night of ordinary slumber.

  At 4:15 a.m., Jenny got up, threw on her UCLA sweatshirt, and followed the tiny ray from the nightlight down the hall, into the kitchen. The light was still on over the stove, a habit Grace carried from their childhood. Some things never changed, whether they knew it or not…whether they admitted it or not. Jenny could still remember their mother closing up the house at night, turning off every light, except the one over the stove. That stayed on for their father, whose job as a second-shift foreman at Webber’s Tool & Die kept him out until midnight. The light was his beacon, his guide to safe harbor, his path home.