The Girl Who Threw Butterflies Read online

  For my sister, Sue Cochrane

  Acknowledgments

  For support during the writing of this book, I am grateful to Canisius College. For certain facts and lore pertaining to the knuckleball, I am indebted to Ben McGrath's essay “Project Knuckleball,” which appeared in the New Yorker. Thank you to those who read and commented on the manuscript: Ron and Marlys Ousky, Jack Williams, Mary Cochrane, Sue Cochrane, and Lon Otto. Special thanks to my wonderfully insightful editor, Erin Clarke, and to the amazing Jay Mandel and Charlotte Wasserstein. And heartfelt thanks, finally, always and all ways, to Mary, Sam, and Henry, the home team.

  CONTENTS

  1. A HEARTBREAKING DREAM ABOUT TOAST

  2. SOME SERIOUS JUNK

  3. HER STUPID PLAN

  4. WELCOME TO BASEBALL

  5. GEOGRAPHY LESSON

  6. IT COMES FROM A COCOON

  7. HARDBALL

  8. THE ART OF GRAFFITI

  9. SECRET SOCIETY

  10. A ZEN THING

  11. GLOW-IN-THE-DARK STARS

  12. ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EYES

  13. TEAM PLAYER

  14. A LINK IN THE CHAIN

  15. MOLLY STIRS IT UP

  16. MOLLY'S GRIP

  17. SIGNS

  18. GAME DAY

  19. GIMME SOME

  20. KEEPING SCORE

  21. WILD IN A NEW WAY

  22. YES CRAZY

  23. MOONLIGHT

  In preagricultural societies, powerful butterfly

  goddesses represented the closely linked forces of

  death and regeneration in the world.

  —Butterflies of the East Coast: An Observer's Guide,

  Rick Cech and Guy Tudor

  I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I

  sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of

  intricate enchantment and deception.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov's Butterflies

  Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly

  with hiccups across the street into your neighbor's mailbox.

  —Willie Stargell, Pittsburgh Pirates

  1. A HEARTBREAKING DREAM ABOUT TOAST

  n Monday, after band rehearsal and intramurals, when Molly got home from school, her mother was sitting at the kitchen table going through the day's mail. It was after six, daylight saving time now, and still light, thank god. Even in Buffalo, the snowiest, grayest place on earth, spring eventually came.

  Her mother had changed from her work clothes into her white designer sweats, matching pants and top with padded shoulders, which made her look to Molly like a fencer—all she needed was a little red heart.

  She had cable news playing low on the countertop portable, a bottle of water and a pile of catalogs in front of her. It was what her mother did after work. Her ritual unwinding. She'd page through the glossy daily stack of cata-logs one by one, turning the pages mechanically, looking irritated, angry even, fierce lines on her forehead. It seemed mysterious to Molly. Was her mother mad at Eddie Bauer? At Pottery Barn and Talbots? Dissatisfied with L.L.Bean's selection of boots and raingear, with Williams-Sonoma's pots and pans? It didn't make any sense. Her mother occasionally bought stuff, blouses and sweaters usually, always the same color, teal, which was weird enough—how much teal-colored clothing do you need, really?

  As far as Molly could tell, her mother almost always returned whatever she bought. The UPS guy brought packages, and her mother opened them, unpinned and unfolded and held things up, sometimes tried them on. But then she'd usually just reassemble the packages and re address them. She drove them around in her car for a few days and eventually dropped them off at the post office. To Molly, it seemed like a lot of work. Why subject yourself to such misery? What was the point?

  Molly had learned not to interrupt her. Her mother was in some distant, ticked-off, unreachable place—the Planet of Inexplicable Exasperation. Molly put down her backpack and saxophone case, grabbed an apple from the fridge, sat down, and waited. There was nothing that looked like dinner happening anywhere in the kitchen. Why bother cooking for just the two of us? her mother had gotten into the habit of asking. Sometimes, with her dad at work, they used to make dinner together, Molly and her mother. They used to wash and chop vegetables and talk and even joke a little. Molly liked it—it was like their own little cooking show. But no more, not for a long time. That show got canceled. Nowadays they mostly ordered out, subs or Chinese, pizza and wings. Molly missed her dad's cooking. He had only a handful of meals, spaghetti and stir-fry and omelets and meat loaf, that was his rotation, nothing fancy, but always tasty.

  On television the square-headed security czar seemed to be changing the threat level while baseball scores crawled across the bottom of the screen. The Cubs had beaten the Pirates, 12–1, which pleased Molly, because it would have pleased her father. They were his team. He'd grown up listening to their games on the radio. The Cubs were lovable losers. They hadn't won the World Series for something like a hundred years. No matter. Her dad had always paid attention to the scores, and now, out of habit, Molly couldn't help but do the same.

  “So how was your day?” her mother asked, her eyes still scanning the Sharper Image catalog in front of her—ionizing air cleaners, massage chairs, turbo-groomers.

  “Fine,” Molly said. Most days this was the right answer. It meant that she had negotiated another day without disaster, steered her little boat through the rocky waters of eighth grade without capsizing. She hadn't failed anything, she hadn't been given detention. In the past ten hours she'd done nothing to ruffle her mother's sense of well-being.

  “What about rehearsal?” her mother asked. Sometimes she wanted more. What her English teacher called “sup-porting detail.” She needed to “show” not “tell” her mother about the fineness of her day. Specifics. Molly would offer up something, a success, a little academic triumph she'd been saving—”You know that social studies test I was studying for? I got a ninety-eight!”

  This was just what her mother wanted: evidence that Molly was a Good Kid on the Right Path, a girl making Smart Choices, the daughter of a Good Mother. Yes, her father had died six months ago—exactly six months ago; today was the anniversary, the fourth of April. But she was doing fine, she was resilient. Molly understood her part in this story perfectly: She was the brave-hearted poster girl, Miss Difficulty Overcome.

  “We're playing a movie medley for the pops concert,” Molly said. “Star Wars, The Pink Panther. I might get a solo.”

  “That's great,” her mother said.

  “And I lent Ryan Vogel my last reed. I need to get some more.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  What Molly didn't tell her mother was that Ryan, the other tenor player, who had toxic BO and dog breath, who was a volcano of rude eruptions and nasty remarks, had pointed toward her case with his own last, wrecked, saliva-covered reed and grunted something—she'd recognized only “gimme.” She'd tossed him her entire pack and hoped he'd leave her alone. There was nothing nice about the transaction; it felt like a holdup, a mugging.

  “Very nice of me,” Molly said, and smiled a dopey, mock-charming smile. She framed her face with her fingers and tilted her head. “I'm a very nice person.”

  There was so much she couldn't tell her mother. How, for example, she had dreamed about her father again the night before. It was nothing especially dreamlike, nothing weird or unusual, nothing symbolic. On the contrary, it was beautifully ordinary. Her dad, sitting across from her at the kitchen table, spreading jam on a piece of toast, wearing his favorite plaid shirt, frayed at the collar, his weekend shirt.

  In the dream her dad smiled, a little
sadly, maybe, as if he knew something she didn't, and handed her a plate with the toast on it, two slices, strawberry jam, cut diagonally, and it looked perfect, the most delicious thing imaginable. She could smell that warm-toast smell, even in her dream, the best, coziest smell in the world. And when she was wrenched out of her dream and back into the world—her mother rapping on her bedroom door as she walked by, “Six-thirty, Molly, time to get up”—it was terrible, like an-other death, just as cruel.

  What would be the point? Maybe her mother had her own dreams. In the past six months, Molly had come to understand that the most important stuff, what was closest to the bone, was just what you never talked about. There were no words for it. A heartbreaking dream about toast. The trivial and silly is what you spend your day chattering about. You could ask your friends how they liked your hair, but you could never ask them what you really wanted to know: Is there hope for me, yes or no?

  “So this week is softball tryouts, right?” her mother said. “Wednesday. You ready?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I don't know’?”

  Her mother didn't really like sports. She didn't play any-thing herself—she sometimes went to a gym, but that was work, not play—and she didn't watch. On Sundays during football season, when everyone in Buffalo was glued to their televisions watching the Bills, her mother liked to go grocery shopping. And then talk about it: how deserted the store was, how the chip and the soda aisles looked as if they'd been ransacked. It seemed like a kind of bragging, an announcement of her moral superiority. She was above professional football.

  Baseball belonged to Molly and her dad. When they used to watch a game together, her mother rarely joined them, not even for the World Series. She'd pull some work papers from her briefcase or start on some slightly disagree-able household chore. “You two enjoy yourselves,” she'd say, and then go off to not enjoy herself.

  “I'm thinking I might not play this year,” Molly said.

  “But you love to play ball!”

  Her mother never seemed to get it. What she and her father watched on television was baseball. Not softball. When they used to play catch in the backyard, it was with a baseball, not a softball. She was not a tomboy, just a girl who liked baseball. To Molly, a softball just didn't feel right. It was too big to grip properly. It was too light, weirdly in-substantial. Softballs reminded her of the oversized, mushy balls they used in elementary gym class, “kittenballs,” their teacher called them.

  She'd played softball last year, was something of a star because she could hit and catch and throw hard. They put her at third base because she had a good arm, a strong over-hand throw—she couldn't get the hang of a softball pitcher's peculiar underhand delivery—and was able to fire it across the diamond to first with something on it. They won some of their games. She had some friends on the team: Tess Warren, who played shortstop, a very good athlete, and funny, too—she could imitate most of their teachers and sometimes would shout encouragement to teammates from the bench in their voices—and Ruth Schwab, their redheaded pitcher, a lefty, whom Molly called “Ace.”

  But her most vivid memory of the season was from late in their last game. They were in the field. There was a girl in left field moving in some odd rhythm. It was Lucinda Baxter. First one foot came forward, then the other. She was leaning forward intently, her arms swinging rhythmically at her sides. Finally, Molly realized what was going on: The left fielder was tap-dancing! Molly was at third, working her gum, thinking about guarding the line late in the game, and her teammate was practicing a dance routine.

  She didn't really dislike softball; she just wasn't all that interested. There was something second-class about it, for sure: people said “girls’ softball,” but nobody said “men's base-ball.” The roundhouse windup, the kneepads, the cheers and chants from the bench, like playground jump-rope songs. It seemed, well, a little girlish, fine if that was the sort of thing you went in for. But it didn't have much to do with the game she and her dad watched—the distances and pro-portions were off, the uniforms and dress not quite right, everything a few degrees off. It was like baseball translated into some foreign language.

  Molly almost felt bad about it, her preference for base-ball, as if she might be guilty of being insufficiently committed to the idea of girl power, Mia Hamm, gender equality, and all that. Which had nothing to do with it. She just happened to like baseball better, that's all.

  But to her mother, baseball, softball—it was all the same, a senselessly complicated game with balls and bats.

  “It would be good for you,” her mother said. “Fresh air, exercise, time with your friends, all that.”

  Her mother wanted Molly involved in after-school activities so Molly would be accounted for until after the workday was done. Her mother wanted her constantly busy, active, achieving. Maybe she believed that if Molly's schedule was sufficiently jammed, there would be no time to be sad.

  So then, this is where it started: Molly said out loud what she was thinking. Normally, she'd keep it to herself. She'd arrange her face appropriately, say the right nice things, and find some subversive way to do what she wanted. She might “forget” the day of softball tryouts, say, discover a sudden pressing need for extra after-school help in math that particular day. She knew very well how to get her way, quietly. She could be a good-girl guerrilla.

  But not this time. It wasn't a decision, really; it was some kind of accident. Like dropping something, like trip-ping. Her lips betrayed her.

  “It would be good for you,” Molly told her mother.

  Now, suddenly, Molly had her mother's undivided attention. She looked up from her catalog. Now she was all ears. “What?” she said. “What did you say?”

  “What works for you—that's what we're talking about, aren't we?” Molly said. Her voice didn't sound nice. “Your schedule, what makes you happy. It doesn't matter what I want.”

  “I see,” her mother said. This was mother-composed, mother-above-it-all, businesslike mother. During the day, she did things on the telephone, in meetings, at the computer. She worked for a bank but never touched money. She solved problems for customers, except that her customers weren't real people, not the folks you see lined up waiting for the next available teller. They were corporate clients, never an old lady with a social security check to cash, not a kid with a pile of first-communion or graduation checks. They were businesses in other states, more people in offices who did things on the telephone, in meetings, at the computer. Now she was going to solve Molly.

  “Are you concerned about your schoolwork, too much homework?”

  “No.”

  “Is it the competition? Are you worried about making the team? Do you not like the coaches?”

  “You haven't got a clue, Mom,” Molly said.

  “So give me a clue. Tell me why you don't want to play,” she said. “Explain it to me.”

  “I don't want to,” Molly said. “Because I don't want to.” Her mother looked pained. “What am I supposed to do—make you a spread sheet, put my reasons in a PowerPoint presentation? If I made you a pie chart, would you leave me alone?”

  “You played last year and you loved it,” her mother said.

  “How would you know?” Molly was cooked now, she knew that. She'd passed the point of no return. “Did you come to any of my games? Do you even know what position I played?”

  It didn't get any better after that. Molly said some things she knew she would regret but, feeling inflamed, in the altered state of anger, she said them anyway. Her mother lost her executive cool pretty quickly after that. She used the word “ungrateful” and the phrase “the thanks I get.” This signaled that the discussion was over; there would be no more back-and-forth. What would follow was a monologue and then, most likely, tears.

  Her mother looked angry and tired, her body tight with tension. She looked like she needed to spend some time in one of those massage chairs she'd been studying in the catalog, a lot of time. Molly f
elt sorry for her. She had a tough job and a not-so-nice daughter, and on top of that, now she was a single parent. It wasn't what she'd signed up for either. But Molly felt sorry for herself, too.

  Molly stood up. Enough. Later, they would make up, apologize, agree to forget all about it, promise to do better next time. Molly knew what to say to make it happen. But not now. She didn't feel up to it. Now she just wanted to be alone.

  2. SOME SERIOUS JUNK

  n the garage Molly found the baseball gear stowed under the lawn sprinkler and garden hose in a big plastic trunk. She lifted the top—it was a little like a treasure chest—and there were baseballs, softballs, three bats, batting gloves, a rubber home plate and a set of bases, her glove, and her dad's. Now, for the first time, his glove seemed like something from the distant past, an earlier era, another life. It looked sad and lifeless.

  It was a big floppy piece of worn leather, a Wilson A2000 model, the best ever, he used to say, which had been, believe it or not, a wedding present from Molly's mother. Her dad told the story again and again. Molly never minded; she liked to hear it again and again. She liked thinking about her parents as young and romantic. They met in an English class at a college in Wisconsin; they fell in love and got married right after graduation. He gave her a fancy watch, and she, knowing that he was crazy about baseball, a hardcore fan since he was a little kid, gave him a glove. Molly could imagine the exchange: her dad with his little jewel box, her mother with a big box, their mutual delight. He'd never had a nice glove, and she wanted him to have the best. It was huge. It didn't catch balls; it swallowed them whole. It was a big leather Venus flytrap.

  Molly felt afraid to touch it. It didn't seem like one of his possessions—it seemed like him.

  She grabbed her own beat-up glove and slipped it on. Now, when her whole life didn't seem to fit right—like a new pair of shoes that pinched, everything too tight or too loose, a blister forming—now her well-worn baseball glove was a small comfort. Over the years it had been molded to the shape of her hand. It was as soft and familiar and accepting as a teddy bear. It was one thing that fit perfectly.