A few years ago, after I had long since given up the one-night stand ghost, I accompanied a girlfriend to an AA party. I had a cranberry juice and seltzer and I met James. Granted, he was vouched for, meaning that if he hacked me up to pieces and stored me in Ziploc bags, we had mutual friends and somehow that meant he would never get away with it. Still, he was new to me. He suggested going to my apartment but I knew I had (a) a roommate and (b) my childhood blankey in plain sight. Plus, bringing him back to my bed made me feel like a prostitute whereas going to his place made me feel like a call girl. A nonsensical distinction that seemed important at the time. The next morning I woke to realize that not only had he put an extra blanket over me while I slept, and he’d ordered in breakfast, but he lived two apartment buildings down from me. In fact, our apartments faced out to the same courtyard and if we wanted to communicate through tin cans and string, we could have. Not only were we going to see each other again, the whole scenario stank of frequency. He was nice and clever and a generally pleasant human being who hadn’t done a single reckless thing since the day he thought he could will objects to disappear and wrapped his brother’s car around a tree.
I hadn’t factored that into the equation, James being a good person. I slouched in his kitchen chair and sighed. He poured the orange juice and coffee. There was nothing to do but eat my home fries and ask him what he did for a living. And that was the beginning of a legitimately beautiful friendship. The other day we were in SoHo, shopping for sneakers for him.
“You’ve ruined me, you know?”
“How so?”
“You were supposed to be my one-night stand. Everyone should have one and now look what you’ve done. I’m going to have to go out into the world and sleep with someone else. You’ve turned me into a strumpet.”
“Who said everyone should have a one-night stand?”
I stopped walking. Could he be right? Were all my attempts at achieving sexual normalcy for naught? It was as if he had casually mentioned the nonexistence of the tooth fairy to a kid who’s all gums. For most of the forthcoming/drunk women I’ve ever encountered, one-night stands happen in between relationships, an attempt at recharging any romantic energy or just reassuring yourself that you’re hot enough for strangers to want to touch their genitalia to yours. But I respected them. They were never filler for me. I treated them like a complete experience and what had they done but elude me? A one-night stand that plays hard to get. Fascinating.
“Maybe you’re just not a one-night kind of girl,” added James.
“Don’t look at me like that—in some cultures that’s a compliment.”
How was it possible that despite twenty-odd years of evidence to the contrary, they still struck me as sleek and glamorous and sometimes more worthwhile than a full-blown relationship? Then I remembered something I had seen when I started this ridiculous journey. I realized that if I could pan out from that picture I have—the one of the woman with the negligee and the red heels—I’d probably find her at a boyfriend’s house. Maybe she’s about to break up with him. Maybe he’s about to tell her about the affair. Maybe this is her wedding night. Maybe this is what she wears to remove hair balls from the shower drain. As long as I stayed zoomed in, I’d never know. I bent down and took my shoes off. I wanted to walk barefoot in the dewy grass with them swinging in my hand. Except we weren’t on grass. We were on Prince Street. I made it half a block before James stopped me.
“Enough,” he said, “you’re going to give yourself tetanus.”
“Alright.” I leaned on his shoulder with one hand while I put my shoes back on with the other. “But you should try it sometime. It’s not as bad as you’d think.”
SIGN LANGUAGE FOR INFIDELS
I don’t remember exactly how long I was in that tiny, overheated room. My presence there began on a road not so much paved with good intentions as sporadically littered with them. It was my first, and likely last, volunteer gig. Being blessed with one or two thoroughly selfless friends, I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person. I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice. I tip taxi drivers so poorly I’m amazed none of them have run over my foot while speeding off. Once I became so annoyed at a boyfriend’s excessive use of my overpriced shea butter–based shampoo that I went out and bought him some Prell.
“You’re so considerate,” he said.
“Yes”—I clenched my teeth—“that’s true.”
I created something called the Good Intention Construction Co., a mental exercise meant to repair and beautify an otherwise broken and bland life. It’s not a real company in the fact that it doesn’t file taxes or order binder clips and it’s entirely in my head. It’s what pops up occasionally like an appointment on an electronic calendar when I become morally lethargic. Which is often. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
What happened was that just after graduation, I and some of the people I knew were contemplating our circumstances. Our circumstances being poorly paid jobs if we worked in the arts, two hours of sleep if we worked in money, and a newfound sense of intellectual inferiority if we worked in publishing. We were disillusioned by day and deglamorized by night. Our apartments, our love lives, the bar-slash-lounges we waited on line for. They all seemed smaller than we thought they should be. Eventually it hit a saturation point, all of us standing there in our nice shoes with our full stomachs and glossy lips—all the better to complain with, my dear. We needed some perspective, or I know I did. And so I closed my eyes and went to the Good Intention Construction Co. and saw that a ticker with a single phrase ran around the building’s exterior: GO FORTH AND VOLUNTEER.
Being as selfish as I am, I wasn’t sure this was the best prescription. I closed my eyes again, hoping if I shook my head, my brain would refresh itself like an Etch A Sketch or a Magic 8 Ball. Alas, the same message popped up. But where would I volunteer? I am not globally conscious by nature, and find people who publicly strive to make the world a better place to be moderately annoying. I resent it when they laud their worthwhile hobbies over me. I resent them opening mountain climbing supply stores in urban areas. I resent them brandishing clipboards and petitions on the sidewalk and the not-kicking of puppies. I never understood it. “Do unto others” (along with “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “fresh air will do you good”) was a concept that had slid off me like water off an oil-slicked baby seal’s back. Perhaps if I had grown up among the bears in rural Alaska, living off the fat of the land, or perhaps if my parents had been activists and professors at Berkeley, I would be a better person now. But I grew up in New York. The only real do-gooder message I absorbed was “don’t keep jewelry you find in dressing rooms.”
Of course I had considered volunteering. I think that once you know what something is, you have considered it. I’m far too solipsistic not to apply myself to every scenario that crosses my path. I remember the day I found out what an enema was, what spelunking was, that Asian women plucked their underarm hair, that the Golden Gate Bridge was an iconic springboard for suicides. I immediately considered jumping off it.
I was apprehensive about becoming a do-gooder. Real do-gooding is a religion. Do-gooders live in the same places, they believe in the same things, they eat the same things as long as they are labeled with freedom (wheat is among the more oppressed grains and it’s important that we liberate it through abstinence…also lactose—Free the lactose! Free the gluten!), they shop at the same stores, and—most importantly—they believe there are things in this world far greater than themselves. Therefore, while there’s nothing technically wrong with freeze-dried maple syrup and while I understand North Face tents serve a purpose if you work for National Geographic, I have become allergic to the presence of such things where I live. Yet, despite my fears that I would cross over into the light side, never to return, a little do-gooderism called “you should try something onc
e” had stuck with me. Anyway, this was what united us, wasn’t it? The universal desire to avoid being the asshole.
I took my volunteerism as seriously as someone like myself could. I knew my motivation was rooted in boredom; I wouldn’t stick with it if it wasn’t relatively easy. This narrowed the field considerably. Clearly orcas were out of the question, as were the disabled, women in need of JCPenney suits, the ozone layer, lead-paint prevention, historical landmarks, and anything involving a ladle. I thought about it long and hard. What cause did I deem most in need of my underqualified, halfhearted, likely-to-quit-in-a-month help? It hit me. I decided I could do the most good with a finite number of endangered South American butterflies at the Museum of Natural History’s butterfly exhibit. If it was good enough for Nabokov, it was good enough for me.
So off I went, literally skipping to the museum, feeling special already as a security guard waived my admission fee and directed me to the volunteer office. I filled out a one-page application asking me my name, social security number, and address. I knew the answer to all of these questions! I was breezing through this sucker! When I got to “reason for wanting to work at the exhibit,” I lifted my pen. I had a hunch that “because I don’t want to shop for JCPenney pantsuits” was not the right answer.
I sat there in the volunteer office, unwrapping a butterscotch candy from a tray on the secretary’s desk, squeaking back and forth in my orange plastic chair. Butterflies were a specialty of mine insofar as I owned an extensive collection of butterfly stickers as a child. Also, “butterfly” was the one word I know in sign language.
I looked down at my form.
Question: Why do you see yourself volunteering at the Butterfly Exhibit?
Two full-time employees came in to the office to get coffee. They had keys and large photo IDs hanging from their necks. They talked of strip poker and Paleolithic crustaceans.
Answer: I have always had a keen interest in biology.
This is not entirely untrue. I have always had a keen interest in biology. I’ve just never been very good at it. I remember dissecting frogs at camp and being so freaked out by their clear blood I had to take a break and have a cupcake. (It was always someone’s birthday and there were always cupcakes.) Before returning to our picnic/operating table, I asked our counselor where the thirty adult dead frogs had come from. Without missing a beat, she looked me in the eye and said, “We found them that way. They were dead when we found them.” I accepted this immediately, licked the icing off my fingers, and actually forgot about this conversation for some time. Only years later, when highschoolers began dissecting fetal pigs a baker’s dozen at a time, did it occur to me that just maybe that wasn’t true.
The good news was that “biology” turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way “art history” would at the Met or “trust fund” at the MoMA. Within twenty-four hours of walking through the door, I had my first adult volunteer job. On my application, I checked off the second-to-minimum time period possible.
I refused to get an ID badge. That was a whole separate form from a whole separate office and it pushed the boundaries of my commitment. In the few months I worked there, I was encouraged to fill out the ID paperwork several times, but every time the security guards stopped me at the back entrance to ask me where I was going all I had to say was “butterflies,” show them my driver’s license, and they’d let me in. Apparently it’s only in the movies that people threaten to blow up museums and specifically the Museum of Natural History.
The museum opened the interactive butterfly exhibit in 1999. Since then it has become easily its most popular exhibit, as it is more zoolike than museumlike and provides a lively relief from the corridors of glass cases containing stuffed goats and model farm equipment. The museum itself has always been commutable from wherever I lived, by train as a child and on foot as an adult. Coming into the city for field trips, I knew about the great big whale and the dinosaurs in the lobby and the naively racist scenes of Native Americans shaking hands with English settlers on the street that would become Broadway. The exhibits, though still there, are surely products of a method of curation long since abandoned. I would speculate that the only reason they remain is that they have become a symbol of the museum itself. Its current curators must be grateful that giant swastika exhibit never quite took off.
In recent years, the huge museum banners hanging from the front entrance have reveled in the diminutive, boasting exhibitions on tree frogs and blood cells. Even the planetarium seems an attempt to capture the universe in an oversized golf ball. This, while a major celebrity narrates the story of the universe in gas and black holes, emphasizing how small we are. I now had to sit back and relax while a Hollywood star took me through a guided light show of my insignificance. I have to think the popularity of these exhibits is not disconnected from the butterflies, who have pioneered the smallness fascination at a museum that still has a tyrannosaurus skeleton in its lobby.
Picture the biggest bathroom you’ve ever seen. Now cut that in half and that’s how big the butterfly exhibit is. It is less oppressive than a sauna but hotter than anything you’d find naturally in this hemisphere. A narrow twisting path winds its way through tall moss hills covered in green plants, orchids, and the occasional dish of orange slices on which the residents land and feast and discuss the events of the day. Perhaps a close encounter with a toddler. Or being mistaken for an Asclepias syriaca. Imagine! In theory, it should be a very Zen place and indeed the space is reminiscent of what some bored billionaire might have on the balcony instead of your average Park Avenue greenhouse. But on a crowded Saturday as many as twenty-five people—all emitting their allotted degrees of body heat—are funneled through the path by four volunteers. Some visitors are elderly. Many are children. Most have a lack of “indoor voice.” All want to touch the butterflies.
There’s a lot of pointing. A festival of pointing and at very close range to other people’s eyes, given the width of the space. Also detracting from the exhibit’s potential tranquillity is the display cabinet of pinned specimens along one wall. I found this disturbing from the start. You don’t see a whole lot of stuffed polar bears in the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, for instance. And butterflies have phenomenal vision so it’s not like they can’t see the mass crucifixion in their midst. I was offended on behalf of the butterflies and thus pleased with my offense. Let the empathizing begin! This volunteering thing was working already. I am a good person, hear me give!
Once everyone is herded through, having caught glimpses of sulphurs and swallowtails, they exit into a mirrored chamber built to spot runaway butterflies. This chamber is so similar to a scene out of Outbreak that it led me to believe that the movie was more plausible than I’d previously thought and that some of these little guys could be poisonous. But I felt wimpy asking.
Eager to start my new life as someone who leads a fulfilling life, I arrived early my first day and Lindsey the Butterfly Volunteer Coordinator gave me the tour. I’m not sure what I expected of my fellow volunteers, maybe a few retired teachers and some private school kids looking to beef up their résumés for college. Lindsey was a Swarthmore grad with a BA in biology and a concentration in insects, currently in grad school for anthropology somewhere in the city. She wore a blue bandanna around her head of fine, long blond hair. Everything else about her was slightly mannish. She walked like she had a grasp on organic chemistry and you didn’t. Once I thought I saw her in Washington Square Park, out of the only element in which I had considered her. Upon closer examination I saw that not only was it a man, but a fairly unattractive one at that. I remember thinking how insulted she would be if she knew about the mix-up. The real Lindsey was kind and seemed genuinely happy to have me there despite the vast number of volunteer applicants who check “butterflies” as their chosen sector of the museum in which to volunteer.
“Do you live nearby?” she asked me. I nodded. Yes! I shouted inside. See how I have th
e makings of a punctual and educated volunteer!
“Well, then you might want to go home and change into sneakers and a darker shirt.”
I was wearing a thin white shirt, jeans, and gold pointed flats. I opted to keep what I had on. I had been known to go out into a rainstorm rather than prance back up five flights to fetch an umbrella. Surely I could handle this. But within ten minutes in the exhibit, I was conducting a wet T-shirt contest for my armpits. Plus my feet hurt. From then on, Lindsey became my guru. She gave me a packet of information that included fun facts about butterflies. It contained words I hadn’t thought of since sixth grade, like “phylum,” proper Latin butterfly names, and every Far Side cartoon ever published on our flapping friends. That packet killed a lot of romance about butterflies I didn’t know I’d had. Apparently they are the squirrels of the insect world. Gross little creatures in drag.
“You don’t have to memorize it,” she said, “but this should get you familiar with the questions people ask.”
She was right. People are shockingly uncreative. A whole animal and everyone wanted to know the same things. Even the wisecracking dads all cracked wise in the same way (see: “How much butter do the flies have to eat?”). More mainstream questions that were impossible to answer honestly: how long do butterflies live? (one week, maybe two), how do they mate? (sitting, but they’ll fuck ’n’ fly if they have to), how many kinds are in the exhibit? (um, a bunch), how do they eat? (through a straw attached to their face).
The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn’t exist, Elijah was God’s invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash.
I Was Told There'd Be Cake Page 10
