A History of Butterflies

My mother chose my name out of a baby book. She says it chose her. She reminds me: I was going to be named Victoria. Victoria is the Roman goddess of victory. It is also the female version of the name Victor. That is what I could have been, the female Victor. The baby book told Mom that Vanessa meant butterfly in Greek. She says that name felt softer than Victoria, that it felt like it was my name even before I was born. She chose Vanessa instead. Or it chose her.

***

I am 31 years old and driving to Lake Eerie on a Saturday afternoon when I learn scientists are still figuring out exactly how a caterpillar crawls into its chrysalis shell and reappears five weeks later as a butterfly. On the Radiolab program, a museum employee slices open a chrysalis, where the host expects to see a caterpillar sprouting a wing. Inside, there is nothing but a pale yellow liquid. The caterpillar’s muscles have broken down, skin ruptured, proteins melted. Enzymes called forth by the creature have torn through tissues it no longer wants. The museum employee takes the chrysalis between his fingers, and squeezes. It pops, liquid oozes, and fades. The radio host is astonished. The business of breaking from one’s own body to survive is one of those things you think you’ve always known, a fact so pressed into the natural order of things, that you know its words until you go to find its words.

***

I am 29 years old when Mom first gives me the warning. I am getting ready for a date, this time at a comedy club in Richmond. It is promising. He practices yoga. Mom, she yells this warning when I am puckered in the bathroom. My sister places red velvet on my lips and from the kitchen, Mom calls out: remember to take it slower. Don’t tell him your life story. Don’t expect him to understand, because they won’t. 

The red spills over my lips, lips that still remember the taste of the fiance I left six months before, the taste of the last boy a week ago who disappeared in the night, the taste of the whiskey from this morning. I look up into my sister’s green eyes, and wonder if it was when he looked in her eyes that my fiance decided to come toward my sister that night in the bar. Maybe it was when he watched her dance. Maybe it was when he saw her drunk, grieving a marriage. I wonder if I will ever be able to look at her again and not think of him. I wonder if he thinks of this, if he ever thought of this, that I would keep looking into her eyes. I think of the deer out in the fields behind this house, eating grass inside the dark. 

Now, my sister says. Roll. 

I roll my lips, the sky of red spreading to my creases, sending a reddish light over my face. That night, I put my red to too many glasses of white wine. I hear Mom’s warning in my head. I dissolve regardless.

***

Can a mother’s warning come in a name? Aristotle gave the butterfly another word: psyche, the Greek word for soul. For the Aztecs, the butterflies were the souls of the dead. The day the monarch butterflies migrate to the town in Mexico is known as The Day of the Dead. In 1600’s Ireland, killing a white butterfly was prohibited since it was thought to be the soul of a dead child. But Psyche, Mom, was also the lover of Eros. Psyche completed the impossible tasks to win Eros’ love. She entered the Underworld for this god of love. She nearly died for love. What does it mean, Mom, if my name confuses love and death? What if it binds them together?

***

I am standing in front of the mirror in the morning. The light is soft, coming off my mother’s grass fields like flowing, white bed sheets. The dogs’ barks are distant, and I know they are yelping at the horse’s hoofs. The bathroom, it is quiet. This is not the light for this face. The cheeks, sallow, greyish, are a nightclub, cigarette and stained sheets. The eyes are hotel rooms, the bed of a truck, the floor of a barnhouse. Across the bridge of its nose, the freckles from a day in the sun have disappeared. I try to wash my face, plunging my eyes beneath the faucet, running a hand over them, clean. The eyes. I stare at them, water running down my cheeks. I stare at them for too long. The eyes are no longer blue. My mother’s blue is gone. My blue is gone. Something inside me has eaten it. 

Vanessa, I whisper to it. 

Vanessa isn’t here, it answers back. 

***

Naturalists from the 1600’s thought the caterpillar died inside its shell, and the butterfly formed from the death cloth, Matthew Cobb, a biologist and historian, says on the radio program. This created a problem for Christians, who had already grafted a metaphor for the ascent into heaven onto the process of metamorphosis. If the butterfly is a separate creature, who only used the caterpillar’s death shell in order to fly, can the butterfly experience the heaven originally meant for the caterpillar? No, they decided. Some part of the caterpillar must remain in order for it to count as salvation. You can’t get to heaven if you come away clean. Something must carry through, or be carried through. They want evidence of that lowly, crawling creature you were before. A bruise, a scar, an autopsy, a grave, a statement, a witness, a name.

***

I am sitting in the library, headphones on in a tiny cubicle. It is the middle of a weekday, but I am flanked by occupied desks. My workstation has small walls around the screen, and if I lean in far enough, the old woman’s face to the left and the man’s face to the right disappear. I can feel like I am in between those walls too. I should be writing the blog post, but I can’t look away from the live stream of the hearing. She has been called to testify. I press my hands to the headphones just as a senator asks her how she is so sure that it was him. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford says, the same way I’m sure I’m talking to you right now. It is a call, so I respond. Yes, I whisper. She goes on: the neurotransmitter epinephrine codes memories into the hippocampus, and so the trauma-related experience is locked there. She is building now. Yes, I say again, barely hushed. There are some things her body shed, the time, the date. There are others it did not. Others it would not. They call her the perfect witness.  

***

Martha Weiss, an associate professor of biology at Georgetown University, tried an experiment. She tells the Radiolab host that she placed caterpillars into a box, and gassed them with an odor they dislike, something like nail polish remover. Each time they were subjected to the scent, she zapped them for about 10 seconds. She did this over and over again. Odor. Zap. Odor. Zap. The caterpillars learned to head in the opposite direction each time they caught a whiff of the scent, Weiss said. Then she waited until the creature transformed. And when butterflies emerged, she exposed them to the same odor. They drew away from it, more than the other butterflies who had never endured the zapping. There, next to some sinew and nerve and muscle, was the memory that carried through.

***

Dr. Ford needs a second front door. I need a wall on my back.

***

In the American colonies, some said butterflies were witches who transformed into the fluttering creatures at night to steal the neighbor’s milk. 

***

I am sitting in the tub when Mom finds me. The water grew cold, so I’ve let it drain. I am sitting in the center, naked, my legs curled up to my chest, hugging my knees. The walls around me curve, slick and white. She asks me where the test is. I tell her, and she looks at the result. I tell her I do not deserve to be a mother. I can’t even do the right math when I switch pills. If you really think that, she says, then I shouldn’t have been a mother either. We stare at each other. 

I ask her if I should keep it. I don’t ask her where I went when my body conceived. I don’t ask her if it’s possible to conjure a child from loneliness. My mother’s sadness, my grandmother’s sadness, my great-grandmother’s sadness, runs in my veins.

 ***

When my sisters and I were young, one of our favorite books was the “Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar.” My sister required the person reading the book to turn each page as slowly as possible, to whisper in her ear, where is that hungry caterpillar? The white sheet of the page perpendicular like a sail, she’d slap the page down then slap the picture of the creature, announcing its presence to the room. We loved watching the caterpillar grow and grow, gorging on all the wrong foods until it found its correct food. And our parents loved to pat our bulging bellies after we ate, and with each separate pat say, one. hungry. caterpillar. We became so big that they put us in gymnastics to slim us down. When we entered school, we learned the caterpillar’s gorging wasn’t gluttony. It was survival. Once it became a butterfly, the creature became a mating machine. It loses its mouth, grows a straw in its place and subsists on a liquid diet of sugary nectar and rotten fruit juices. Those old reserves of protein taken by the crawling, hungry mouth sustain it. Its body knew it would always be devoured, emptied, by them, by itself. The body, it remembered the word home. 

 ***

Mom sits with me in the office, and explains to the doctor that I’d like the pill instead. I take it the next morning, just after waking. When it leaves me, I sit on the bathroom floor, empty. I see it only briefly as my mother carries it away in a white washcloth, cupping it in her hands. It is a white, transparent cluster of cells, like the head of a tiny jellyfish. I say, I’m sorry. She whispers something to it, and leaves.

***

When I google my name, only the websites with the word “baby” in them mention a Greek butterfly origin. Babyology.com. Babyknows.com. It’s not entirely clear where they got the idea that Vanessa means butterfly in Greek. It is clear men forged the name. The poet Jonathan Swift created it to conceal the identity of his lover, Esther Vanhomrigh, in his work. He took “Van” from Vanhomrigh’s last name and added “Essa,” a nickname for Esther. After 17 years, Swift left Esther for another woman. His neglect, she said, made her live a life like a languishing death.

Once the word formed, it took on its own story. In 1807, Johan Christian Fabricius adopted the name Vanessa for a genus of butterfly. Was it simply carrying forward? Or did it find its way back? Did it remember?

***

My mom could have chosen any name in the baby book, but she chose mine. 

***

A lot of other moms chose this name too. The year I was born, it was the 41st most popular name for baby girls. So maybe I’d just like to think that the name chose my mother, and I chose her. Maybe I learned too early that my name means butterfly, and built myself around the creature. Maybe this is why to ask my mother what other name I could have been is a scary question. It means I must think what person I would be just a few lines down in the baby book. I must think what a Victoria me would have been. A Victoria Vanessa: her tongue, less flutter-fly, more guillotine. Her feet, fastened to the ground. Her salvation, never a question. A female victor is hard to imagine. It is harder to think she is a choice. 

So maybe I need this breakage, these newer lives on top of older lives, stacked like membrane, like muscle, like memory, to carry my name. Maybe it’s easier to think that my mother would always give me a warning, the warning sound in my head again when my niece puts on her first coat of pale blue eyeshadow. Maybe it is nice to think that the flight is always the end of the story, if the other endings don’t become you first. Is it possible to grow into one’s name? Is it possible to wrap a metaphor around oneself, until its walls are tight? When I got a tattoo of a butterfly at 19, was it the same as making a wish? What if a name is just another word for hope? 

***

The radio program continues: Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch microscopist from the 1600’s, once cut open a caterpillar in front of a crowd. It was not a crowd of scientists. He was in Paris, and this crowd wore wigs and stockings. They were there to be entertained. He sliced a long line along the caterpillar’s back, and peeled back the skin, exposing the inside of the lifeless body. The audience was startled. Inside the caterpillar, at the stage just before it crawls into its shell, were some of the structures of the butterfly. Its wings, its antennae, and even its legs, already formed. They are thin, frail, and transparent, but they are there, hidden, curled, at the far edge of the creature. Its future self, carried, inside. 

***

What if a name is just another word for home?

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Vanessa Remmers is a former journalist who is now working to tell her own stories. You can find more of her work on Twitter @RemmersVanessa or at vanessaremmers.journoportfolio.com