Читать книгу The Butterfly House - Marcia Preston, Marcia Preston - Страница 11

Shady River, 1978

In our teens, Cincy and I invented a game that began, “If your father were here …” The scenarios started realistically, but quickly progressed into wild fictions full of money and adventure.

“If your father were here,” I told her, “he wouldn’t let you date Stan Stenson even if he asked, because of that motorcycle.”

“Well, if your father were here,” she countered, “he wouldn’t let you stay after school supposedly working on your science project with Petey Small. He’d ride up to the school on his white horse and throw you across the saddle and carry you away….”

Each new layer outdid the last, until finally our fathers metamorphosed into fantasy lovers. “But he isn’t your father at all, see,

he’s this warrior from the next village who’s loved you from afar….”And we were swept away into nonsense and laughter.

It was a surefire method for cheering ourselves up.

Cincy’s favorite fantasy was one about a fellow I’d named Lionel, who was involved in international espionage but returned to her, his one true love, for fixes of wild lovemaking before disappearing again into the mist along the river. Cincy made me tell this one over and over, adding her own creative twists. Whenever we saw a handsome stranger, she’d dig her elbow into my ribs and choke out, “It’s Lionel, come to take me away!”

“Take me, too!” I’d whisper.

But nobody ever did. Instead we went to school, and to her house afterward. Cincy grouched about her homework; I whined about the contact lenses I couldn’t afford. I’d convinced myself that my life would blossom if only I could get rid of my glasses.

“If your father were here,” Cincy scolded, “he’d tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are.” Then she shrugged, grinning. “But he’d buy you the contacts anyway.”

Sometimes, when I was alone, fragments of my missing father rose in my consciousness like a chronic toothache. The memory hurt only when I returned to it, touching my tongue to the aching spot to probe the pain. By the time I reached puberty, I was accomplished at this. Whenever I wanted to pity or punish myself, whenever I longed for the drama and sweet suffering that defines adolescence, I called up the mystery of my father’s desertion.

Sometimes, to punish both of us, perhaps, I asked my mother about him.

How had they met? Did I look like him? What was their life like before I was born? She gave short, offhand answers with a nonchalance I knew she didn’t feel.

I saw fine lines etch the pouches beneath my mother’s eyes, and watched her jawline melt into middle age. In rare teenage moments when I felt giddy and invincible, the sudden contrast to my mother’s life impaled me with guilt. I tried to imagine cleaning other people’s hotel rooms day after day, coming home to a daughter and nothing else.

“Why don’t you and Ying Su take off to Portland for the weekend?” I urged her. “Go shopping, go to the movies.” Ying Su worked with her at the inn.

“Maybe sometime I’ll do that,” Mom said, but she never went. I even suggested she flirt with the hotel manager, invite him to Portland.

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”

“So what?”

She gave me one of those mother looks and changed the subject.

When my questions about my father got too pointed, Mom claimed ignorance. She didn’t know where he lived now. She didn’t know where he worked. No, he never sent money; she didn’t want him to.

Once, though, she found an old snapshot of the three of us. “I’d forgotten about this,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “Keep it, if you like.”

The blurry images of a young couple and their shapeless, androgynous baby fascinated me. I resented that she’d kept the picture from me all these years.

In the photo, my father’s hair looked dark, much darker than mine. He wore glasses like me and behind their rims I could see bushy eyebrows that explained why mine required continual tweezing. The faces in the photo were small and partly shaded. Even when Cincy and I examined it with a magnifying glass, lying in her bed on a summer night in our baggy T-shirts, I couldn’t be sure of the color of my father’s eyes or the shape of his nose.

“He’s handsome,” Cincy pronounced.

I couldn’t see it. “You’re just being polite.”

She punched my arm. “Don’t you dare accuse me of such a thing.”

I laid the photo on the nightstand and switched off the light. Cincy’s room, built partly into the mountain, had no windows, so when the light went off it was like a cave. If we left the door open, a faint rectangle of moonlight from the living room windows relieved the blackness, but that night the door was closed so our talking wouldn’t keep Lenora awake.

It was well after midnight. We’d gone swimming at the new municipal pool all afternoon, and I’d cleaned Mom’s house in town before going. My muscles felt tired and my skin pleasantly sunburned.

“I’m going to be sore tomorrow,” I said, stretching my legs out on the cool sheets.

“Whereabouts? I’ll give you a rub down.”

She sat beside me in the darkness, massaging my shoulders and back while I groaned my appreciation, or giggled when she hit a ticklish spot. Then she rubbed my feet and calves.

“You should be a professional masseuse,” I told her sleepily. “You could work at one of those ritzy spas giving massages to rich people and getting hundred-dollar tips.”

“No way,” she said, her voice deep and laughing in the humid darkness. “I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you.”

“Not even Stan Stenson?”

“Well …”

Our freshman year, Cincy blossomed into a long-legged beauty. She had the black satin hair and dark eyes of her Cherokee ancestry, with high cheekbones and Lenora’s small mouth and slender nose.

Despite her looks, she wasn’t the least conceited. She talked to everybody, even the nerds and thugs most kids shunned as if they had VD. Social distinctions didn’t exist for Cincy. I considered it one of her best qualities, recognizing in myself a reticence toward people who were outwardly as uneasy in the world as I felt but kept hidden. I’d look at one of those kids and think there, but for the grace of Cincy, go I.

As it was, I merged with the great gray middle class of students, accepted because I was decently groomed and a friend of Cincy’s, respected and suspected because I was smart. Boys talked to me, but they didn’t flirt. Girls talked to me, but they didn’t confide.

Most of the time I was satisfied with that. I had Cincy, after all. My only other friend—besides Petey Small, my science buddy—was the athletic, red-haired Samantha. Like me, Sam existed mostly in her own world, where sports filled her brain space the way science did mine.

Samantha talked Cincy into running track. If our small school was weak on academics, it was huge when it came to sports. Sam said Cincy was a natural athlete. Her long legs pumping around the cinder oval that ringed the football field reminded me of waves on the ocean, rhythmic and tireless, though I’d seen the ocean only on TV. My own legs were far too short for speed. At five-two, I refused desserts, fighting the natural resemblance to a pear that defined my mother’s figure.

Cincy ran, but she didn’t care about running. Coach Hastings said she could have won any of the long-distance events if only she would concentrate. He put her in sprints, which he said were better matched to her short attention span, and when she won without half trying, he just shook his head. “She’s amazing,” he said to me once. “I love to watch her run.”

She didn’t care about her studies, either. In fact, aside from hanging out with me, only one thing interested Cincy. While I was preoccupied with books and butterflies and the gray dread of going home at night, Cincy’s curiosity turned to boys. How could it not? Whenever she walked down the hall at school, their adolescent lust followed her like a cloud of gnats.

Sometimes she seemed oblivious to their attention, and other times she’d flirt outrageously. Usually she just got that knowing smile—the one I’d first seen in the lunchroom during second grade—and gave me a wink.

I grinned back. “There’s a mean streak in you, Cynthia Jaines. I like that.”

One guy after another began to walk or bike up the hill to Rockhaven, and Cincy would go off with him to a football game or a movie at the Mount Hood Theater. The movie house was the only entertainment in town during cold weather. Cincy and I spent a lot of Sunday afternoons at the Mount Hood, with our feet sticking to the floor and the aroma of stale butter prickling our noses.

If a boy had asked me out, which none did, I knew Ruth would say fourteen was too young to date. But Cincy never asked Lenora’s permission, she just floated away with a jaunty wave. The first time Cincy left on a car date with a guy who was sixteen, Lenora frowned in silence, and I foresaw trouble in paradise.

I’d always envied Cincy and Lenora’s easy relationship. Lenora believed in letting Cincy make her own decisions. They were on the same team, she said, partners. Whereas Ruth and I were perpetual adversaries. My mom criticized everything I did, it seemed to me. But in truth, our arguments traced directly or indirectly to two sources: her drinking, or her resentment of my friendship with Lenora and Cincy.

I suppose the friction that developed between the Jaines women was inevitable. But I knew nothing then about adolescent psychology; what I saw was the crumbling of an ideal. And with so few ideals to believe in, the loss made my stomach hurt. Without being asked, I tried to mediate by voicing the worries I read on Lenora’s silent face.

“Cincy, Danny Soames is too old for you,” I told her as she stood in front of the warped, full-length mirror on her closet door drawing dark red on her lips. “And too fast.”

Cincy cocked her head and undid one more button on the front of her blouse—a sort of barometer of how much she liked each boy she dated. Her hair shone like glass.

The red lines widened into a smile. “You think he’ll take me into the woods and have his way with me?”

“If he did, what would you do about it?”

“Well, Grandma, I’d poke out his eyes and kick him in the balls, just like you taught me.”

“Get real. He’s on the football team. If he decides to rape you, you’re dead meat.”

“I think the expression is hot, red meat.”

“Yuck! Cincy!”

She laughed. “Stop worrying, Rapunzel. I can handle Danny Soames.”

“Oh, yeah. He’d love for you to handle him.”

In the mirror, Cincy’s eyebrows wiggled up and down.

“Aren’t you going to brush your teeth?” I reminded.

“Naw. Kisses don’t taste right when your mouth’s too clean.”

We laughed it off, but secretly I wondered if it were true. I had no way of knowing.

“If your father were here,” I said, “he’d meet Danny on the front porch with a shotgun.”

She dropped her lipstick into a tiny shoulder bag and snapped it shut. “Well, he isn’t here. But I’ll tell Danny that if he lays an unwanted hand on me, you’ll hunt him down and see that he makes an honest woman of me.”

“Making you honest is too big a job for anyone, let alone a jockhead.”

Cincy smiled and shot me the bird.

I watched them drive away in Danny’s dad’s new Chevrolet, feeling that I’d failed as a parent.

That semester my science teacher, Mr. Jenkins, directed us to choose a research project. For me there was no question about a subject. I consulted Lenora, and she handed me an issue of Nature magazine with an article about Old World swallowtail butterflies. One of them was Pharmacophagus antenor, found only on the island of Madagascar off the southeast coast of Africa. It was the only African swallowtail known to feed on pipevine, and its evolution was speculated to reveal links to the age when the earth’s plates shifted and separated to create the continents.

In the photos, the antenor’s black wings appeared delicate and narrow. The forewings were marked with white spherical spots that melded along the bottom of the hindwings into rounded crescent-shapes of pale yellow to red-orange. The antenor had a wingspan of five to six inches and a life cycle virtually undocumented by science.

“This is neat,” I said, returning the magazine, “but I don’t see how I could make a science project out of it.”

Lenora sat on a tall stool on the sunporch, methodically examining the leaves of a willow branch for eggs. The porch was warm with rare November sunlight, and butterflies fluttered overhead. Most species couldn’t fly unless the temperature was near eighty.

“Remember Zoroaster, the Morpho rhetenor?” she asked.

I recalled the iridescent blue beauty Cincy had introduced to me on my first visit.

“It was from French Guiana in South America,” she said. “That red-and-black one up there,” she pointed, “is from Asia.”

I looked up, nodding, but I still didn’t get it.

“How would you like to be the first American ever to raise a generation of Pharmacophagus antenor and document its complete life cycle?”

The light came on. “You could get one of those?”

Her eyes sparkled. “The university research facility obtains lepidoptera specimens from approved foreign sources under a special permit for scientific study. That’s what the quarantine area is for,” she said, nodding toward the one end of the porch sealed off by a glass door. “I have an acquaintance in Florida that I met at a conference who’s offered to fund research to investigate the relationship of that species to other members of the swallowtail family.”

I loved it when she talked like a scientist to me. Ever since I’d learned she did actual scientific research on her sunporch, I’d spent more and more time there. And made straight A’s in science class. I knew her income depended on grant money from various sources.

“You could be my research assistant,” she said. “I want to put the immatures—caterpillars and pupae—under the dissection microscope and compare them to some specimens we could get on loan from Sarasota or maybe Yale.”

“Far out,” I whispered. And it was—far out of my limited range of understanding about her work. But I understood quite clearly that she was offering to include me, to share with me the mysteries of the butterflies. My chest inflated to the point of exploding. “How long would it take to get them? I’m supposed to do the project this semester.”

“It might take a while,” she admitted. “Only eggs or pupae can be transported successfully, and we’ll need to import the Madagascar variety of pipevine, too. I’ll see if the university has a contact in Madagascar, and tell them it’s a rush so that our research will be ahead of Britain’s. That always pulls their chain. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture might give them trouble about importing the plants.”

“Couldn’t the caterpillars eat American pipevine?” “Maybe, but not the first generation. Later on, if we get a second generation going, we could see if the larvae will adapt to the pipevine that grows farther south in the States. Or maybe try the ginger plant we have locally that’s related to pipevine.” “So if the government vetoes the plants, the project is off?” Her eyes took on a devilish light. “Not necessarily. There are other ways. In France you can buy lepidoptera eggs, pupae, even food plants—cash and carry. Smuggle them through Customs in your handbag, if you’ve got the nerve.”

My eyes widened. “Have you ever done that?” She pursed her lips like a kiss. “I’m not at liberty to say.” My grin stretched so wide Lenora laughed at me. I was practically hopping. “This is so cool! Can you call the university now?” “Shouldn’t you talk it over with your teacher first? Better find out if he’s willing to be patient, in case your project doesn’t get moving until the semester’s nearly over. And there’s always a risk that the specimens will die without reproducing.”

I waved it off. “I can talk Mr. Jenkins into it. No problem. I’m his star pupil.”

She smiled, approving my rash confidence. “If we can nurse a few through the pupal stage and get the adults to lay eggs on domestic pipevine or ginger, though, it’s possible we could keep the generations going indefinitely.”

Her voice held genuine excitement, and I let myself believe that part of it was because we’d be working together. I ran to bring her the phone, nearly tripping over its twenty-foot cord, so she could call her friends at UO.

On a Saturday morning, the two of us drove to a forested valley in the Cascades in search of wild ginger. Lenora wanted to begin cultivating it on the sunporch so we’d have a supply at hand. She thought we could buy pipevine at a nursery in Portland.