Struggleville by Amy Lane
Welcome all ye suckers, to Struggleville…. (Vigilantes of Love)
For Monica Herron, on her 40th Birthday.
There is a song by the vigilantes of love with the chorus: “Welcome all ye suckers to Struggleville.” This story is for Monica and for the rest of us, who have been there all along, and are doing just fine, thank you.
Mrs. Freeman sighed. Her seventh period Biology class at Struggleville High School was not going at all well and she knew it was because her heart wasn’t in it. With a little mental shake she pulled her mind together and began to concentrate on the anatomy of the butterfly. She threw all of her formidable enthusiasm into her work, and was suitably rewarded when a gorgeous, multi-colored butterfly coalesced from the very air around her and rose up in the still air to flit around her students. She looked around expectantly—she’d worked hard on the speech and the ideas and the research that had produced that butterfly, and was hoping to be rewarded.
Nobody was paying attention. A little line furrowed between her brows as she looked out at the blank faces surrounding her. About half were writing notes to their friends or gazing out the window or listening to radios via small, hidden, earphones, but she didn’t feel like dealing with those today. Some were taking notes— that was to be expected. Some were cross-referencing in their books to double-check the information she had given them. That, also, was to be hoped for. But nobody, it seemed, saw the wonderful, awesome, magnificent butterfly that she had slaved so long to produce, and then to offer, like a precious jewel, into his or her life.
Mrs. Freeman felt her chin wobble, and she dropped, abruptly, into the seat at her desk. It had not been a good day overall. To start with, her husband had left her. It had not been unexpected—it had not, in fact, been unwelcome, but it was still a difficult thing to deal with. Their two children were away at college, and Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman, smallish, plump-ish, plain-ish, fifty-ish, did not relish the idea of spending her remaining years with only the blank, puzzled faces in front of her for company. Of course, she acknowledged honestly, it was better than the alternative.
Her mind focused for a moment on her husband, and his demands and his anger, and, finally, on his indifference. Unbeknownst to her, the butterfly, still hovering over the classroom, began to change. With the blink of an eye, suddenly, someone was paying attention.
Andrew Herron, whose father had also left some years before, did not like the look of that butterfly. He had a lingering impression of how it had looked before it had begun to change, and he realized rather wistfully that it had been glorious, and he had missed it. Now, instead of deep, dramatic reds and yellows and purples, the butterfly had grown colder. It was icy and lime green-ish, and that sort of slate blue-ish color that formed on your windshield on very cold mornings. It reminded him of something—of someone and he didn’t like the recollection at all. He focused on that butterfly with all the intensity of a laser beam, and turned to his teacher rather accusingly.
“Change it back!” He demanded. “It was beautiful, and I want to see it again—change it back!”
And abruptly, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman was no longer sad, or disheartened, or even unhappy. Abruptly, she was angry. “What the hell do you mean, change it back?” She demanded back. “You had it! It was beautiful, and I worked hard to make it that way, and you ignored it! I worked my ass off for that damned butterfly, and you had the gall to ignore it!”
Hearing the forbidden words spoken out loud in class, several students looked around to see what the argument was about, and before their eyes, the butterfly began to change again. Now it was a lovely fire-engine red.
“But you didn’t tell us you were doing magic!” Andrew was protesting. “How are we supposed to know you were doing magic when you don’t tell us?”
A vein began to throb in Elizabeth Ann’s neck and the butterfly’s wings began to flicker in red gold, like flames. “I didn’t tell you? I didn’t tell you?” Her voice rose, and she began to address the entire class—since she had their attention and all. “What do you people think this is? A dress rehearsal for real life? Believe it or not, people, this is your one and only shot at the real thing, and if you aren’t paying attention, by God you are going to miss something!”
“But it’s hard.” A girl’s hushed voice came from the back. She had pulled the Walkman wires from her ears and was staring in astonishment at the butterfly, which was beginning to develop a white-hot body. “One minute we’re listening to a boring science class, and the next…. Wow!”
Elizabeth Ann ran her hands through her graying bun and pins flew in all directions. Her hair spread about her head like a halo, and Andrew thought he saw colors forming there as well. Rich, royal colors, like blue and purple and maroon velvet. She scrubbed her face with her hands, and it seemed some of the lines rubbed off, leaving her looking not young, but ageless and regal. However, her next words were purely Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman.
“Boring. A boring science class.” She smiled patronizingly at the girl, rather like you would at a puppy who had misbehaved. “My dear little twit, do you not have the sense that God gave you? My ‘boring science class’ spawned thatglorious butterfly. Don’t you get it? Everything--EVERYTHING is that beautiful—if you just know how to look.”
Andrew Herron was looking carefully at his science teacher now, a small line furrowed between his brows. She was beginning to look very strange, and somehow familiar, as though he’d seen all those colors forming behind her before, just as he’d seen that icy, angry butterfly before as well. His voice, when he next spoke, was careful and respectful, because that was the response that such astonishing colors elicited from thoughtful human beings.
“It’s not easy, Mrs. Freeman. Truly—there’s… there’s things in the way, you know.” He glanced around the room at his perplexed and dumb struck peers. “A lot of us… its just that, sometimes things are so hard! You get hurt and you’re afraid of getting hurt again, or your mom’s on your back about cleaning your room, or you like a girl and you want her to like you too, or your best friends getting into trouble and you can’t help… you’ve got to understand that sometimes its a struggle just to get up in the morning. Seeing things like… well, like that butterfly—unless it just stays up there and hovers, we’re trying too hard just to get by to notice.”
The butterfly’s colors toned down. Not fire-gold and hot red, but saffron and pink with a little lavender thrown in. The expression on Elizabeth Ann’s face was kind.
“Honey,” she said, “You come into this world through a long dark tunnel, being squeezed and pushed and prodded on every side. Your mother screams because you’re hurting her, and then you’re cold, and the lights too bright, and someone dangles you by the ankles and smacks your butt. Do you know why they do that, by the way?” Elizabeth Ann looked around the room, and the once blank faces were now hanging on to her every word, and shaking their heads negatively.
“They smack your but or flick your toe, or push on your chest on purpose, to make you cry. Because when you cry you breathe, and when you breathe, everybody knows you’re alive, and you’re all right.” The class nodded in awe, and Mrs. Freeman smiled a little, a sort of ‘enjoy the irony with me’ smile. “After an introduction like that, did you think life was going to be anything but a struggle?”
Andrew was alarmed to feel a lump in his throat. “If its hard…” he choked, “If it’s so goddamned hard, why do we do it?”
The butterfly softened again, looking like one of those translucent, opalescent fairy-wing streamers that you see at weddings, and it grew larger. The opalescence hovered on the edge of the other glorious colors behind the once plain little science teacher, and Elizabeth Ann moved directly to Andrew, and put a kind hand on his face. “We do it, Andrew, because if we do it well, and we pay attention, every now and then we can see… a butterfly.”
Then Elizabeth Ann blinked in wonderment, and Andrew watched, transfixed, as the butterfly moved behind her and grew and grew and grew and… merged with the woman who had been teaching him about osmosis and genetics and anatomy and chloroplasts for the last two years.
“And sometimes,” her voice went on, becoming lighter and furrier, “If we’re really good at looking for magical things like this butterfly, we can make a butterfly for other people to see…”
“And sometimes,” Andrew continued, watching Mrs. Freeman’s eyes become liquid and black and all seeing, “If you’re really good at making butterflies for other people, you can become the butterfly, can’t you?”
A small human tear dropped from the beautiful creature in front of him, and the furry, blue-black head nodded. The feeler that was touching Andrew’s face moved slowly, as though searching for and finding a sweetness it was looking for, the butterfly began to hum in happiness. With a gentle flap of her wings, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman arose into the air surrounding her seventh period science class and began to hover over her students’ heads, looking more and more glorious by the moment. She swooped and dived a little, and touched the children before her more than once, as though tasting their sweetness as well. With every touch her colors grew brighter, and when the bell rang, announcing the end of school, every student but Andrew was looking reluctantly away, because the light hurt their eyes. All were hoping that their time with the glorious creature that had been their science teacher would not end.
The bell rang, however, and Andrew, ever the gentleman, stood up and walked to the door to open it. As Mrs. Freeman flew out the door and into the sky, he bowed in respect, and the other students applauded and cheered.
(Mrs. Freeman returned the next day, dressed in a demure Navy colored suit, and nobody said a word about what had happened—although everybody in seventh period hung in rapt attention to her every word.)
But on the afternoon she flew out the window, when nobody knew if she would ever be heard from again, Andrew walked home from school after refusing a ride from his older brother. He was bemused, and very much in thought. There were two things on his mind—the first and foremost, of course, being the whereabouts of his science teacher. But Andrew was a kind boy, and not without imagination, and he had an optimistic vision of Struggleville High’s science department chair sunning her wings in Barbados with a male butterfly of equal beauty performing flights of exotic fancy in hopes of catching her attention.
The second, and perhaps the most troubling thing on Andrew Herron’s mind, was where he’d seen those colors before, because they had been glorious, and they had been empowering, but they were, strangely enough, not altogether unfamiliar. And they were, he pondered some more, for all their boldness, definitely female.
He turned the corner of his block, thinking of all the women he knew, and, being a young man, was rather depressed to find the number pretty small. His mother’s friends, of course, his aunts, his cousins, some (but not many) of the girls at school. He walked down his driveway and up the front stairs still puzzled.
“Hey, sweetie,” his mother’s voice called from the kitchen, “How was school?”
Andrew walked into the kitchen just in time to see his mother pop a piece of chocolate surreptitiously in her mouth. She was standing in front of the stove, stirring dinner, reading a book on the empowerment of women and humming to herself all at once. Above her head there radiated, ever so faintly, a surprising aura of scarlet, amethyst, emerald and sapphire, with a lustrous edging of pastels.
“Hi mom.” Andrew said, feeling a little stunned. “We learned about butterflies today.”
For Monica Herron, on her 40th Birthday.
There is a song by the vigilantes of love with the chorus: “Welcome all ye suckers to Struggleville.” This story is for Monica and for the rest of us, who have been there all along, and are doing just fine, thank you.
Mrs. Freeman sighed. Her seventh period Biology class at Struggleville High School was not going at all well and she knew it was because her heart wasn’t in it. With a little mental shake she pulled her mind together and began to concentrate on the anatomy of the butterfly. She threw all of her formidable enthusiasm into her work, and was suitably rewarded when a gorgeous, multi-colored butterfly coalesced from the very air around her and rose up in the still air to flit around her students. She looked around expectantly—she’d worked hard on the speech and the ideas and the research that had produced that butterfly, and was hoping to be rewarded.
Nobody was paying attention. A little line furrowed between her brows as she looked out at the blank faces surrounding her. About half were writing notes to their friends or gazing out the window or listening to radios via small, hidden, earphones, but she didn’t feel like dealing with those today. Some were taking notes— that was to be expected. Some were cross-referencing in their books to double-check the information she had given them. That, also, was to be hoped for. But nobody, it seemed, saw the wonderful, awesome, magnificent butterfly that she had slaved so long to produce, and then to offer, like a precious jewel, into his or her life.
Mrs. Freeman felt her chin wobble, and she dropped, abruptly, into the seat at her desk. It had not been a good day overall. To start with, her husband had left her. It had not been unexpected—it had not, in fact, been unwelcome, but it was still a difficult thing to deal with. Their two children were away at college, and Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman, smallish, plump-ish, plain-ish, fifty-ish, did not relish the idea of spending her remaining years with only the blank, puzzled faces in front of her for company. Of course, she acknowledged honestly, it was better than the alternative.
Her mind focused for a moment on her husband, and his demands and his anger, and, finally, on his indifference. Unbeknownst to her, the butterfly, still hovering over the classroom, began to change. With the blink of an eye, suddenly, someone was paying attention.
Andrew Herron, whose father had also left some years before, did not like the look of that butterfly. He had a lingering impression of how it had looked before it had begun to change, and he realized rather wistfully that it had been glorious, and he had missed it. Now, instead of deep, dramatic reds and yellows and purples, the butterfly had grown colder. It was icy and lime green-ish, and that sort of slate blue-ish color that formed on your windshield on very cold mornings. It reminded him of something—of someone and he didn’t like the recollection at all. He focused on that butterfly with all the intensity of a laser beam, and turned to his teacher rather accusingly.
“Change it back!” He demanded. “It was beautiful, and I want to see it again—change it back!”
And abruptly, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman was no longer sad, or disheartened, or even unhappy. Abruptly, she was angry. “What the hell do you mean, change it back?” She demanded back. “You had it! It was beautiful, and I worked hard to make it that way, and you ignored it! I worked my ass off for that damned butterfly, and you had the gall to ignore it!”
Hearing the forbidden words spoken out loud in class, several students looked around to see what the argument was about, and before their eyes, the butterfly began to change again. Now it was a lovely fire-engine red.
“But you didn’t tell us you were doing magic!” Andrew was protesting. “How are we supposed to know you were doing magic when you don’t tell us?”
A vein began to throb in Elizabeth Ann’s neck and the butterfly’s wings began to flicker in red gold, like flames. “I didn’t tell you? I didn’t tell you?” Her voice rose, and she began to address the entire class—since she had their attention and all. “What do you people think this is? A dress rehearsal for real life? Believe it or not, people, this is your one and only shot at the real thing, and if you aren’t paying attention, by God you are going to miss something!”
“But it’s hard.” A girl’s hushed voice came from the back. She had pulled the Walkman wires from her ears and was staring in astonishment at the butterfly, which was beginning to develop a white-hot body. “One minute we’re listening to a boring science class, and the next…. Wow!”
Elizabeth Ann ran her hands through her graying bun and pins flew in all directions. Her hair spread about her head like a halo, and Andrew thought he saw colors forming there as well. Rich, royal colors, like blue and purple and maroon velvet. She scrubbed her face with her hands, and it seemed some of the lines rubbed off, leaving her looking not young, but ageless and regal. However, her next words were purely Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman.
“Boring. A boring science class.” She smiled patronizingly at the girl, rather like you would at a puppy who had misbehaved. “My dear little twit, do you not have the sense that God gave you? My ‘boring science class’ spawned thatglorious butterfly. Don’t you get it? Everything--EVERYTHING is that beautiful—if you just know how to look.”
Andrew Herron was looking carefully at his science teacher now, a small line furrowed between his brows. She was beginning to look very strange, and somehow familiar, as though he’d seen all those colors forming behind her before, just as he’d seen that icy, angry butterfly before as well. His voice, when he next spoke, was careful and respectful, because that was the response that such astonishing colors elicited from thoughtful human beings.
“It’s not easy, Mrs. Freeman. Truly—there’s… there’s things in the way, you know.” He glanced around the room at his perplexed and dumb struck peers. “A lot of us… its just that, sometimes things are so hard! You get hurt and you’re afraid of getting hurt again, or your mom’s on your back about cleaning your room, or you like a girl and you want her to like you too, or your best friends getting into trouble and you can’t help… you’ve got to understand that sometimes its a struggle just to get up in the morning. Seeing things like… well, like that butterfly—unless it just stays up there and hovers, we’re trying too hard just to get by to notice.”
The butterfly’s colors toned down. Not fire-gold and hot red, but saffron and pink with a little lavender thrown in. The expression on Elizabeth Ann’s face was kind.
“Honey,” she said, “You come into this world through a long dark tunnel, being squeezed and pushed and prodded on every side. Your mother screams because you’re hurting her, and then you’re cold, and the lights too bright, and someone dangles you by the ankles and smacks your butt. Do you know why they do that, by the way?” Elizabeth Ann looked around the room, and the once blank faces were now hanging on to her every word, and shaking their heads negatively.
“They smack your but or flick your toe, or push on your chest on purpose, to make you cry. Because when you cry you breathe, and when you breathe, everybody knows you’re alive, and you’re all right.” The class nodded in awe, and Mrs. Freeman smiled a little, a sort of ‘enjoy the irony with me’ smile. “After an introduction like that, did you think life was going to be anything but a struggle?”
Andrew was alarmed to feel a lump in his throat. “If its hard…” he choked, “If it’s so goddamned hard, why do we do it?”
The butterfly softened again, looking like one of those translucent, opalescent fairy-wing streamers that you see at weddings, and it grew larger. The opalescence hovered on the edge of the other glorious colors behind the once plain little science teacher, and Elizabeth Ann moved directly to Andrew, and put a kind hand on his face. “We do it, Andrew, because if we do it well, and we pay attention, every now and then we can see… a butterfly.”
Then Elizabeth Ann blinked in wonderment, and Andrew watched, transfixed, as the butterfly moved behind her and grew and grew and grew and… merged with the woman who had been teaching him about osmosis and genetics and anatomy and chloroplasts for the last two years.
“And sometimes,” her voice went on, becoming lighter and furrier, “If we’re really good at looking for magical things like this butterfly, we can make a butterfly for other people to see…”
“And sometimes,” Andrew continued, watching Mrs. Freeman’s eyes become liquid and black and all seeing, “If you’re really good at making butterflies for other people, you can become the butterfly, can’t you?”
A small human tear dropped from the beautiful creature in front of him, and the furry, blue-black head nodded. The feeler that was touching Andrew’s face moved slowly, as though searching for and finding a sweetness it was looking for, the butterfly began to hum in happiness. With a gentle flap of her wings, Mrs. Elizabeth Ann Freeman arose into the air surrounding her seventh period science class and began to hover over her students’ heads, looking more and more glorious by the moment. She swooped and dived a little, and touched the children before her more than once, as though tasting their sweetness as well. With every touch her colors grew brighter, and when the bell rang, announcing the end of school, every student but Andrew was looking reluctantly away, because the light hurt their eyes. All were hoping that their time with the glorious creature that had been their science teacher would not end.
The bell rang, however, and Andrew, ever the gentleman, stood up and walked to the door to open it. As Mrs. Freeman flew out the door and into the sky, he bowed in respect, and the other students applauded and cheered.
(Mrs. Freeman returned the next day, dressed in a demure Navy colored suit, and nobody said a word about what had happened—although everybody in seventh period hung in rapt attention to her every word.)
But on the afternoon she flew out the window, when nobody knew if she would ever be heard from again, Andrew walked home from school after refusing a ride from his older brother. He was bemused, and very much in thought. There were two things on his mind—the first and foremost, of course, being the whereabouts of his science teacher. But Andrew was a kind boy, and not without imagination, and he had an optimistic vision of Struggleville High’s science department chair sunning her wings in Barbados with a male butterfly of equal beauty performing flights of exotic fancy in hopes of catching her attention.
The second, and perhaps the most troubling thing on Andrew Herron’s mind, was where he’d seen those colors before, because they had been glorious, and they had been empowering, but they were, strangely enough, not altogether unfamiliar. And they were, he pondered some more, for all their boldness, definitely female.
He turned the corner of his block, thinking of all the women he knew, and, being a young man, was rather depressed to find the number pretty small. His mother’s friends, of course, his aunts, his cousins, some (but not many) of the girls at school. He walked down his driveway and up the front stairs still puzzled.
“Hey, sweetie,” his mother’s voice called from the kitchen, “How was school?”
Andrew walked into the kitchen just in time to see his mother pop a piece of chocolate surreptitiously in her mouth. She was standing in front of the stove, stirring dinner, reading a book on the empowerment of women and humming to herself all at once. Above her head there radiated, ever so faintly, a surprising aura of scarlet, amethyst, emerald and sapphire, with a lustrous edging of pastels.
“Hi mom.” Andrew said, feeling a little stunned. “We learned about butterflies today.”
