A Life in the Day of a Butterfly

One metaphor for our emergence from childhood is the narrative of the butterfly, whose transformation is mythic. In the South, our own transformations into maturity can include realizing that not everyone can show their true vibrant colors, and that not everyone wants to. In this essay, a multifaceted narrative set in Louisiana carries us through one writer’s experiences with transformation, which led her to new beliefs about what life can be.

A Life in the Day of a Butterfly
by Margaret Donovan Bauer

In memory of Randy

The caterpillar-to-butterfly kit I received in the mail in the 1970s was either a 4-H project or a compromise (or consolation prize) for a little girl who loved animals, but whose parents decided she had enough furry ones that required costly food and veterinarian visits, poop-scooping and cage-cleaning.

Mom and I, mostly Mom, put together the “cage,” comprised of clear cellophane (with punctured airholes) within a cardboard frame, and I started feeding the black caterpillars, smaller in girth than a standard straw, nothing like the finger-width green caterpillars outside that we dreaded accidentally stepping on, as they left a nasty, burn strip on the bottom of your foot that stung painfully and then itched like crazy as it healed. I believe I brought grass or some other green in from outside to feed these little strips of brown.

A few weeks passed (what is time to a kid-it seemed like months, but middle-aged me looked it up: mere weeks, tops), and the tiny caterpillars disappeared into tiny cocoons. More endless weeks of waiting (about two, according to Google), but eventually they emerged, not as the colorful butterflies pictured on the packaging, similar to those I would see among Mom’s roses outside. Rather, the dusty-winged creatures looked like the plain, ordinary moths that throw themselves against porch lights in the evening and against the window outside my bedside lamp’s enticement. I remember my disappointment when dull moths, not bright butterflies emerged from the cocoons. Regardless, I fed my moths by dripping sugar water from an eye dropper onto absorbent white stick pieces, something like cut up pipe-cleaners.

More disappointment: just a day or so after the metamorphosis, I walked in my room to find that my cat Blackie had knocked the box down to the floor. The cellophane moth box was hanging high enough from the ceiling that we thought it was safe from Blackie, but apparently, she had jumped from my dresser across my narrow room, easily tearing open the flimsy box while pulling it down. After her attack, Blackie evidently found the insects that had teased her with their seemingly unreachable motion not worth eating (and Blackie ate anything). With the winged remains among the detritus on the floor, we could not console ourselves with the possibility that they escaped and found their way outside, the way that Dad made Mom tell us our other cat had run away rather than report that he had been hit by a car.

I remember perceiving that Mom was much more upset than I over the deaths of the moths. All that dedication and anticipation wasted. I’m so sorry, Margie. But I felt worse for her, to be so disappointed for me. It’s okay, Mom, I reassured her. I wanted to point out in consolation: it was a rip-off anyway. Remember the pictures on the packaging? Vibrant, multi-colored butterflies, not dull brown moths. But I wasn’t sure such a reminder would comfort her, so I just repeated, I’m okay.

Largely to comfort my mother, I captured a butterfly to fill my empty cellophane cage, which I taped back together and tied up higher still, stepping up onto a stool on top of the trunk to feed the simple syrup for a day or two to the bright orangey-yellow and black beauty. But ultimately, I felt sorry for the creature and released it again among the roses it could blend into when predators like Blackie came around.

***

Today, a moth conjures up the nearly fifty-year-old memory of the disappointing metamorphosis, which in turn, for whatever reason, related to the caterpillar to butterfly (moth) metamorphosis metaphor, triggers another memory: the day I got my braces off, during my sophomore year of high school.

I hadn’t minded wearing braces. They covered the “buck teeth” that had embarrassed me since the sixth grade. My first boyfriend, in fifth grade, also had buck teeth, so I’d not been self-conscious about mine with him. But he had moved away, and my sixth-grade boyfriend used to like a girl with a straight-toothed smile. As puberty kicked in, so too did self-consciousness. I welcomed covering my crooked teeth with silver bands.

In the interim between sixth and tenth grades, several of us wore braces, and by high school, we were reaching the time to have them removed, for which occasions one of our teachers had developed a ritual. Seeing that the absence excuse handed to him indicated a visit to the orthodontist for the braces’ removal, Mr. Robichaux would look up at the student and say, “Smile,” and then, “Turn around and show those beautiful teeth to the class.” I can still see my best friend Sherry’s perfect smile as she turned around and flashed her teeth at us, hamming it up to mask her embarrassment over having the whole class invited to stare at her.

I enjoyed the Civics class I took with Mr. Robichaux-as my classmates knew him. He would always be Randy to me since his family lived across the street from mine. I knew him long before he was hired at my high school to teach Art-and Civics because there were not enough Art classes for a full-time job. I remember him from back when he would visit from college when I was just starting elementary school, riding the bus to and from with his younger siblings and my older sister. He liked to visit my artistic mom during his weekends home and once gave her a desk set he’d carved cardinals into, then painted and varnished. Containers sized for pens and paperclips, stamps and notepads, the Old America blue paint distressed, making the pieces appropriate for my mother’s antique desk. I don’t know what brought him back to live in our hometown in his late twenties. An artist, he probably needed a job-and did not need a teaching degree to be on the faculty at our Catholic school.

As noted, he had to teach Civics as well as Art. Kind of like my frustrated-artist mom-needlepointing, quilting, making curtains and upholstering furniture, eventually sewing prom dresses-she wouldn’t actually paint until she was well into her forties, her children in college. I did not inherit my mother’s artistic talents and had no interest in taking Randy’s Art class. But I loved his Civics class, where discussions were allowed to include arguing with him. At home, we were not encouraged to watch the news with our father at night, much less question him about government policy.

On the day in 1978 when I returned to school after that long-anticipated trip to the orthodontist to remove my braces, I worried more about Randy than about myself. He was in for a disappointment.

I could relate.

When the orthodontist finished removing the bands from my teeth, and I looked at myself in his mirror, I did not see the new, perfect-toothed smile my classmates had flashed to the class upon Randy’s directive. I still had the chipped front tooth from when I fell onto a boat railing after waking up from a nap on the way back from a long day’s outing and, groggy, lost my footing. On that occasion, too, what I remember most is my mother’s dismay as my dentist, a friend of the family, tried to comfort her. Wasn’t this a baby tooth? he asked as she picked up a shard from the boat’s deck. I don’t remember if I was in pain, if I cried. I assume so. I only remember Mom kneeling next to me, holding a white sliver and looking into my mouth. No, she reminded the family friend, sounding angry. He should have known; he was our dentist. This is a permanent tooth.

Besides the chipped front tooth, which made the other front tooth look too large, now so perfectly aligned next to its shortened mate, the teeth on either side of my two front teeth were spindly, leaving gaps between them and the front teeth and eye teeth. Removing my braces revealed that although my teeth were now in line, the front two no longer sticking out, they were still far from perfect, with their unevenness and spaces.

Returning to Civics class after my trip to the orthodontist and the disappointing, but at least semi-private unveiling there, I must have tried to distract Randy from his usual ritual, intuiting that he was going to be embarrassed for demanding a smile once he saw how cracked my new smile was. This particular caterpillar had not returned to his class a butterfly, but a moth. A skilled teacher by this time, Randy dismissed my efforts to distract him as easily as if I were trying to direct him off subject to avoid a quiz. He insisted upon the smile, albeit briefly. I flashed a sardonic but open-mouthed smile at him, my back to the class, and saw, reflected in his face, a look that confirmed my worst fear about my post-braces appearance. He quickly masked his reaction, but that made me feel even worse, as I knew that the mask covered pity as well as dismay. Ironically, I felt sorrier for him than for myself. He didn’t know he was going to humiliate me, and he certainly hadn’t intended to. Did he direct me to turn and smile for the class, as he’d done my classmates? I doubt it. Did they notice the change from his usual routine? In hindsight, likely not, but that didn’t help my humiliation.

A year later, once I was done with wearing a retainer, that same dentist who’d tried to comfort my distraught mother back when I had just broken my still-new tooth, crowned my front teeth, both the broken one and its mate, to make certain they matched. He also capped the two stubs, turning them into normal-sized teeth. I was thrilled by my junior year school picture and gave a copy to the dentist for Christmas, right there in our den, as he was now dating my mother-there having been lots of metamorphoses going on in those years. And I gave him a big, genuine smile, telling him it was the first school picture I liked.

It was the start of our strong relationship. He also didn’t mind my mom’s decision to go back to college, to art school, which my father had discouraged, as we might need her at home-even when we were all in school.

***

Several years later but before he was forty, poor Randy/Mr. Robichaux would die in New Orleans, the victim of a violent holdup during Mardi Gras. He’d moved to the city, most likely, so he could remove the mask he’d had to wear regularly in our tiny town in the 1970s. In New Orleans, he could live as who he was: a gay artist (who no longer also had to teach Civics). Sadly, he did not get to enjoy life without that mask for very long before an armed mugger ended his life. How sad to realize that for most of his life he lived under cover.

I think of how, for short a time, I held my hand over my mouth when I talked or smiled close-lipped for photographs. That was not me. I’m a person who speaks out and smiles broadly. In those years, too, I tried to pretend I was like all the other girls, then young women I knew, who accepted the expectations for girls in this small community: marriage right after college, motherhood soon thereafter. Like Randy, I had to leave home to live my truest self. Outspoken girls who laugh loudly raise eyebrows there, not unlike effeminate, artistic men who don’t have girlfriends or wives.

So now these many, many years later, I watch the butterflies among my own flowers, for I did inherit my mother’s love of flowers, if not her artistic talent. Sometimes I look in the mirror and see the almost-sixty-year-old face looking back, and I don’t recognize myself behind the wrinkles. But in photographs, there I am, with a wide smile and very straight, proportional teeth.

Margaret Donovan Bauer grew up on a bayou in south Louisiana and now writes on a river in eastern North Carolina. She is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and a Distinguished Professor of Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. After three decades of publishing books and articles about Southern writers, she is publishing essays and working on a memoir about growing up in the South.

Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on August 18, 2023.