The Beautiful Anthology (16 page)

They didn’t do much, but they were endlessly entertaining. Leaves disappeared from the tips to the petioles in minute bites. Their little faces bobbed as they chewed, nodding with determination, maybe even contentment. Once all the green had been chewed from respective stems, they’d march their plump feet down the stalk and reach out above the ground in search of the next stash of food. Sometimes, they attached under a large leaf, panting, if caterpillars can pant, as if exhausted from their activities. This subtle repetitive motion is what wriggled them free from old skins. Their skins fell in crunched, tight coils shaped like tiny misshapen rings. If touched or stroked, they flinched. Minutely huggable as they appeared, the caterpillars wished to be left alone.

Approximately ten days after their arrival in our garden, Fatter Cater vanished. Cater went about its business unaware or unconcerned. I, however, was not nonchalant. Todd received an e-mail update that the bigger one was missing. I wondered if Fatter Cater had become a bird’s bitter breakfast or a cat’s plaything. Although I didn’t know how many days elapsed between hatching and pupa stage (about two weeks, incidentally), I thought Fatter Cater seemed rather large and likely ready to begin its next phase.

I went back outside in search of Fatter Cater. It wasn’t built for walking, and I didn’t think it could get that far too fast, what with leaves, sticks, plants, and a stray brick or two in the way. With soft stealthy steps of which a ninja would have been proud, I crept around the milkweed and nearby herbs. I shifted my focus as best I could – even a striped caterpillar had the power of camouflage in its defense – and looked for movement rather than color.

There, in the parsley thicket, was the intrepid Fatter Cater. “Where are you going?” I asked it. “Shouldn’t you stay near your plant?”

No doubt, Fatter Cater’s mysterious biological clock had ticked into adolescence. Lucky for it, a time to be spent cocooned and asleep. I coaxed it onto a twig and relocated it under a gnawed milkweed. Visions of green bejeweled chrysalises dangled across my mind’s eye. I coveted one of my very own.

I didn’t feel right about placing it in a glass container to wait out its emergence. I had no qualms, at the moment, about closing it off around the milkweed. How does one contain a caterpillar?

Veil netting. I had plenty of it.

Past the butterfly garden and plum tree was a struggling young persimmon which had survived neglect and Hurricane Katrina. It grew the tenderest pastel green leaves that became darker and larger by the week yet remained just as succulent. Something feasted on it every night, threatened its survival. One night before bed, Todd and I went outside to see if we could identify the insect that left delicate chomp marks on the leaves. We swept a branch with a flashlight’s beam. June bugs.

“What’s that clicking sound?” Todd asked.

I leaned in to watch one nibble-nibble and heard its tiny mandibles clack against each other. The sight and sound was sort of funny, sort of horrifying. I picked the June bugs off with my hands and dropped them on the ground. One or two buzzed by and missed their landings. Dinner had some luck involved. The following day, I bought five yards of veil netting to cover the persimmon and several young shrubs that showed signs of June bug bites.

So it was the persimmon’s netting that I borrowed to trap Fatter Cater and Cater. I angled a few dead branches to provide places on which they could latch. I draped the netting over the milkweed, branches, and several herbs and held it down with old bricks. They weren’t going anywhere.

Curious about this stage in their growth, I went online to learn more. What I discovered made me go back outside and free them.

When a monarch caterpillar is ready to pupate, it will walk several yards away from its host plant. It will seek a sheltered area to anchor itself and enshroud within a chrysalis. Monarch caterpillars have been doing that for thousands of years, long before humans had glass jars and curious intentions.

Fatter Cater was only doing what Nature willed, what its nature knew to do. As much as I wanted to watch it transform in real time before my eyes – no photos, no time-lapse video – I knew I had to respect its instinct. I had to let it go.

Fatter Cater was gone by the next morning, Cater two days later. Although I circled the yard and peered into bushes and under eaves, I found no sign of them.

The next summer we planted three more milkweeds. Clusters of red-orange nectar-filled goblets grew on the tips of the spindly green stalks. A monarch appeared once in a while but never a playful group dizzy with life.

There was hope, though.

One July afternoon, I stepped outside for a short break. The summer had been dry and hot, too brutal to bother with a garden that was, as intended, taking care of itself. I lingered to inspect aphids, yellow and gooey among one group of milkweed blossoms. A half-grown caterpillar twitched its antenna at me. Nearby, a smaller one rested under a flawless leaf. And farther down, another … until I checked every plant and counted nineteen caterpillars from the newly hatched, small as a thistle seed to the nearly grown.

They ate. They grew. They disappeared. Not one stayed close enough to honor me with a view of its metamorphosis, its secret brilliant breath into flight.

Milkweed is perennial. It will return year after year until the plants exhaust themselves. Our yard is part of the monarch’s flight path, their genetic memory. They’ll be back, too.

With each butterfly’s arrival, there’s a chance for me to be the adult incarnation of the little girl in the picture book I once loved.

STEPHANIE ST. JOHN

BELLY UP

My whole life, I’ve had a belly.

There’s a picture of me as a baby on the changing table; there I am, Popeye and her belly. Another photograph shows me at age four at the pool. You can see it in our photo album: me, a twopiece, and my rolls of belly (I haven’t worn a bikini since).

In middle school, I learned to suck it in. I had to, because back then, we wore designer jeans so tight you needed pliers to zip them. (They needed to have that painted-on look, that nothing-comes-between-me-and-my-Calvins look.) Don’t get me wrong – just because I managed to pour myself into my Sassons does not mean I was ever tiny. But the Buddha remained hidden.

I come from a long line of baby-making, D-cup, wide-hipped, short n’ curvy ladies. But unlike my predecessors, whose paradigm of feminine form was Marilyn Monroe’s hourglass, I was competing with Charlie’s Angels.

Plus, back then, it wasn’t exactly easy to diet. There were no Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Pilates and yoga were not ubiquitous. There were no abs – eight-minute or otherwise. All we had to work with was Tab, Sweet’N Low, Alba shakes, Weight Watchers pizza, Dexatrim, cigarettes, and good old-fashioned starvation.

But anorexia was not appealing to me. My mother had an eating disorder, and she wound up rotting her teeth, losing her hair, and messing up her eyes. My teeth, hair, and eyes are my good features. I didn’t want to kill the belly at their expense. Yet my attitude toward the Buddha changed. Instead of a soft friend that gave me comfort, my belly became my enemy.

The night before I lost my virginity, I took a hand mirror to my bed to see what the best angle would be for “doing it” – the flattest-stomach angle. (Can you guess what the best position was?) Belly as Enemy became a mind-set that continued for the next twenty years – until the day I read the magic word on the home pregnancy test that I carried into the bedroom in our tiny New York apartment that fateful morning.

We’re going to have a baby! Inside me was a swelling. And a sense of deep inner relaxation.

Suddenly, I found myself rubbing my hands across my belly. It was going to get big. I was going to get big. My flattish (but never all the way flat) belly was now, gasp, too small!

I wanted it big. For the first time, I wanted strangers to notice my belly; I wanted it to be seen and felt. I wanted it to be filled with nourishing food that would give my growing baby a smart brain and a perfectly-fused-together spine. I was suddenly aware that everything I breathed, drank, and ate would go directly to my amazing pod inside. Five apples and a jar of peanut butter? To the baby! A pint of mint chocolate chip Häagen-Dazs? Hey, it’s what the baby wants!

A friend of mine, who’d already had her two children and proclaimed her done-ness, gave me an overflowing bin of maternity clothes at the start of my second trimester. I opened that bin unaware of the treasures that lay waiting inside. After sifting through several cute shirts and a scarily large bathing suit, the most amazing creation I had ever seen landed across my lap: the maternity jean. Lordy lord! Where that cold metal zipper and dauntingly thick button once dug into my skin was the most glorious thing I’d ever seen: a big blue band of stretch fabric, to give room for and cradle my ever-expanding belly. How had I not known of such a thing before? No wonder pregnant ladies are glowing; they’re finally relaxed! They’re finally allowed to stop sucking in their guts and let that Buddha breathe!

My face was lean, my chin was single, my caloric intake went right to the baby … ahhh. Unlike the other moms in my prenatal yoga class, I didn’t worry about gaining weight. They would talk of doctors who scolded them for eating too much cheese. My midwife knew better. She was trying to keep me relaxed and happy so that when I went into labor, I’d just push my little guy right out (and that’s a whole other story; oy). Besides, these were petite women, not hip to the Way of the Belly. They already worried about how their bodies would look after pregnancy. I was too happy being allowed to have a big belly to care about later. Breastfeeding burns five hundred calories a day! I wore maternity jeans and ate whatever I wanted and didn’t gain anything but baby.

Pregnancy had provided me with an unexpected benefit: belly freedom. Six years later, with a Lego-obsessed six-year-old son and a four-year- old daughter who talks back and grazes like a farm animal, I am proud to say that I no longer wear anything maternity. But I did for a while, probably more than what is condoned in certain social circles. (It’s a great day when you are the giver of the bin to another newly pregnant lady who has yet to discover the wonder of the maternity jean.)

I still have my belly, just as I did before. I’ve daydreamed about getting a tummy tuck. It’s tempting. If I had the money, maybe I would. But I don’t want to die getting a cosmetic elective surgery. How horrible would that be, to die because you can’t accept yourself, because your hotness is (literally) a matter of life and death? Sorry, too much to live for. And while I recovered, I wouldn’t be able to pick up my kids and go sledding with them and roll all over the floor with them for months. Months are the equivalent of years to the kids. So I daydream about my tummy tuck until more important things tug at my sleeve, interrupt my sleep, and demand my soft-bellied love and attention.

RICH FERGUSON

NO ANIMALS OR INSECTS WERE TORTURED OR KILLED IN THE MAKING OF THIS POEM

What I want: to crank creation’s contrast knob to fully illuminate what’s right about the world.

I wanna be Faith’s strung-out junkie. My dreaming veins singing a better tomorrow.

What I don’t want: to be dust, rust. Roadtripping with demons – Oblivion or bust.

Don’t wanna be that one suicide bullet locked and loaded in the chamber of grief’s gun. Don’t wanna be your blood-lusting grave, your ghost-moan grave, your any kinda grave.

What I want: to spend time in your joy’s city. I’ll sweep the streets, round up criminals, direct traffic – anything and everything to keep your bliss vibrant and alive.

I wanna radioactivate, self-immolate. Burn away all poverty, fear, and sickness to fuel the fire of our well-being.

Don’t wanna be an inert gas in the Idiotic Table of Elements. Wanna be a full-on kick in the balls to ignorance.

Never wanna torture or kill any animals or insects in the making of these words, these beliefs, no matter how low I may get between thought, between breath, between life and death.