'My Life So Far'

My Life So Far

Chapter One: Butterfly

Stay near me — do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy! — William Wordsworth, "To a Butterfly"

I sat cross-legged on the floor of the tiny home I'd created out of cardboard boxes. The walls were so high that all I could see if I looked up was the white-painted tongue-and-groove ceiling of the glassed-in porch so common in Connecticut in the 1940s. The porch ran the entire length of the house and smelled of mildew. Light from the windows bounced off the ceiling down to where I sat, so I didn't need a lamp as I worked on the saddle. I was eleven years old.

It was an English saddle, my half sister Pan's, from the time before she'd gotten married, sold her horse, and moved to New York City — from the time when we still believed things would work out all right. I held the saddle on my lap, rubbing saddle soap into the beautiful, rich leather, over and over … Make it better. I know I can make it better. The smell of saddle soap was comforting. So was the smallness of my home. This was a place where I could be sure of things. No one was allowed in here but me — not my brother, Peter, not anyone. Everything was always arranged just so — the saddle, the soap, the soft rags folded carefully, and my book of John Masefield poems. Neatness was important …something to count on.

Mother was home for a while and if I leaned forward ever so slightly, I could look out my "door" down the length of the porch, to where she sat at an oilcloth-covered table on which stood a Mason jar. A butterfly would be beating its wings frantically against the glass walls of the jar, and I could see my mother pick up a cotton ball with tweezers, dip it into a bottle of ether, unscrew the top of the jar, and carefully drop in the ether-soaked ball. After a minute, I could see the butterfly's wings begin to slow their mad fluttering, until gradually they would stop moving altogether. Peace. A whiff of ether drifted down to where I sat, making me think of the dentist. I knew just what the butterfly felt, because whenever I went to have my braces tightened, the nurse would put a mask over my nose and tell me to breathe deeply. In no time the edges of my body would begin to disappear. Sound would come to me from far away and I would feel a wonderful, cosmic abandon as I fell backward down a dark hole, like Alice to Wonderland. Oh, I wished that I could make that sensation last forever. I didn't feel sorry at all for the butterfly.

After a while, mother would unscrew the lid; gently remove the butterfly with the long tweezers; carefully, lovingly, pierce its body with a pin; and mount it on a white board on the wall above the table. There were at least a dozen of them up there, different kinds of swallowtails, a southern dogface, a red admiral, a clouded sulphur, and a monarch. I never could decide which one was my favorite.

Once she took me with her to a meadow full of wildflowers and tall grasses where she went to catch her butterflies. There was still an abundance of wild places — swamps, unexplored forests, and meadows — in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the 1940s. I watched as she moved through the grass — her blond, sun-blushed hair blowing in the wind — swooping down with her green net, then flipping the net quickly to close off the butterfly's escape route. I would help her get it safely into a jar and quickly screw the top on.

It puzzled me a little why Mother had decided to take up butterfly collecting. I don't remember her ever doing this when we lived in California. I was the one fascinated with butterflies. I was always painting pictures of them. When I was ten, right before we'd moved from California, I gave my father a drawing for his birthday. "Butterflies by Jane Fonda" was written up in the right-hand corner, and then two rows of them with their names written underneath in my tight, straight-upand- down-careful-not-to-reveal-anything handwriting. My letter said:

May 19, 1948.
Dear Dad,
I did not trace these drawings of butterflies. I hope you had a happy birthday. I heard you on the Bing Crosby program. Every two days I will send you another picture of butterflies. Love, Jane.

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