30 On Conservation
All day long Abbott and his wife have been arguing. By evening there is a fragile truce. The daughter has been put to bed, though her singing and babbling are audible on the staticky monitor. “I forgot to even ask you about the butterflies,” Abbott’s wife says, conciliatory in word if not tone. They are together in the family room, a designation they actually use. They are sitting as far apart as possible on the devastated couch, purchased at a furniture warehouse years ago, when Abbott was in graduate school, and now draped like a corpse by a mail-order cover. Besides Abbott’s cocktail, the couch is the only adult item in the family room, which this and every evening looks as though robbers have ransacked it in an urgent search for a small and valuable item. Books, toys, coins, buttons, beads, and costume jewelry lie strewn across the stained carpeting. It’s almost impossible not to fight with your life partner in this room. Abbott’s wife has asked, sort of, about Abbott’s trip to the butterfly conservatory, an outing he took this morning with their daughter but did not discuss afterward with his wife because she was too busy reminding him of things about which he did not need to be reminded. Today was Abbott’s first trip to the butterfly conservatory. His wife has been twice before with their daughter, and she has reported that the conservatory is “neat” and “kind of peaceful,” that it’s “an interesting place in the middle of nowhere.” One response to his wife’s inquiry is that the butterfly conservatory is a hideous travesty, a transparent example of everything that is wrong with everything. The twelve-dollar admission, accepted joylessly by a woman talking on the telephone to someone she clearly does not want in her life anymore; the cruel trap of the overstocked gift shop, selling stuffed butterflies, real butterflies, butterfly magnets and puzzles, butterfly nightlights and kites, along with entire aisles of bright toys thematically irrelevant but wildly attractive to children; the children; the lucrative imprisonment of thousands of butterflies, not to mention finches, turtles, lizards, fish, and a parrot, ostensibly in the name of appreciation and education; the heat, as one might find in a small bathroom after a long hot shower; the horrific music — hyperactive, flute-driven renditions of “Edelweiss” and “On Broadway,” engineered to overpower visitors and create in them a stupor that might be mistaken for relaxation; the weird smell; the cafeteria with its dumb food names; the fellow adult patrons, all behaving as though they have never before encountered a flying insect; the pervasive sense of animal dirtiness; the chipper, ecologically ignorant staff members, who are in all seriousness referred to as flight attendants, and who spend their days trying to get children to pet a sleepy lizard — Abbott ponders this truce-obliterating response. It would no doubt feel good to take a big swing. But the truth is, he had a pretty good time at the conservatory. There were so many butterflies. Some landed on people’s hands or shoulders. The large proboscises were easy to see. Butterflies are astonishing when you look at them, and when else would you ever look at them? The flight attendants had helpfully led Abbott and his daughter to a mounted board of cocoons, where they saw butterflies emerging, drying their wings, then flying off into the world, or at least into the hot dome. Abbott had never seen his daughter so engaged, so stimulated. He knows that the conservatory is, in addition to a hideous travesty, something like a spiritual center, operated by a dedicated team of citizen-workers. Who else cares about butterflies? Who else would attempt to mend their broken wings with a special wing glue? The pop of the ice in Abbott’s glass reminds him — and probably his wife — that he has not, as a courtesy, desisted or at least curtailed his drinking during her pregnancy. This is a courtesy extended by quite a few Pioneer Valley men to their pregnant soul mates. Abbott has still not said a word in response to his wife’s question, which, come to think of it, was not so much a question as a statement about forgetting to ask a question. His eyes are on a section of subtoy carpet in the shape of a rhombus. Either a rhombus or a parallelogram. He knows that any criticism of the butterfly conservatory would be a deliberate attempt to rankle his wife and renew the fight. This is what a married person can do, slander a sanctuary to provoke his beloved. But Abbott does not disparage the conservatory or its workers. His decision not to strikes him as exceedingly mature, though he knows that congratulating oneself on one’s maturity is probably immature. Also, it comes as a tremendous disappointment to Abbott that his wife cannot know his restraint. If she could know, she would be touched. But he can’t very well tell her how mature and restrained he’s acting, for the maturity and restraint would evaporate upon utterance. Abbott and his wife can hear their daughter, through the monitor, singing an Australian folk song about a swagman who drowns himself in the billabong. She’s waiting for an answer, his wife is. She’s been waiting this whole time. Abbott clenches his jaw, stares at the dirty rhombus. When it comes down to it, he cannot bring himself to say that the butterfly conservatory was amazing, or even that it was neat, even though it would be at least partially true and would help salvage the evening. This is another small failure of spirit, and he knows it. The knowing of it might make things better, but probably makes things much, much worse. “It was fine,” he says of his outing with their daughter. And then he repeats it: “It was fine.” This is either an act of aggression or diplomacy, he’s not sure which at this point. His wife is a separate person, large on the inside, capable of a very broad range of responses. She folds her thin fingers across her belly and gets ready to say something.
31 The Brave Simplicity of Truth
Death is the muse of Stupid Thoughts. Here’s one: “Maybe we’ll see some good names for the baby,” Abbott had told his wife as they parked the car by the old New England cemetery. Here’s another: Perhaps the high infant mortality rate in early America made parents more temperate in their love of children. The grass is already beginning to fade and wilt. Grasshoppers shoot from the lawn like fireworks. There, at the end of the row, is the infant son of Cotton and Euphrenia—8d must mean eight days. Out on the street, the cars move swiftly past. Meanwhile, Abbott’s daughter has found a heart-shaped headstone, and she’s racing back and forth from it to Abbott’s wife. The headstone is chipped and mossy, like a heart should be. “Touch the heart!” she yells. “Touch the heart!” Her hair is wet and curly in the heat. She has two Band-Aids on her knee. Abbott’s wife bends to read stones. She’s pregnant in a graveyard, for God’s sake. Abbott considers a satirical remark, but he keeps his mouth shut for reasons unknown to him but not unknown to James Russell Lowell, also dead. “Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire,” wrote Lowell, while alive. “There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than oak or pine.” The graves stretch for acres beneath the sun. Somewhere nearby, someone must be burning brush. Abbott bounces on the balls of his feet, twists his trunk until his vertebrae crack. He regards the narrow stretch of freshly mown grass before him. Stupidity, morbidity, irony … that leaves only gymnastics. “Honey!” he shouts at his daughter. “Honey, check out Dad.”