Butterfly in the Snow

By Mary Lynne Arthur

Jessie has always been a
pilgrim.  It’s just that directions have
not always been so clear.  At first she
thought the destination lay in society’s council.style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  Her dresses must be ever clean, her manners
strictly controlled.  But even with the
best of intentions, a road that narrow cannot contain the romanticism of youth,
the pain of a mother’s love, the restlessness of a creative mind and the
ultimate longing for something a bit deeper.

Meet a woman striving for
spirituality in a world of laundry and bills, where grief and heartache drop in
unannounced and society’s myth of perfection shatters under the stress of
common circumstance.  The demons she
battles are as familiar as a meddling mother-in-law or dominating husband, as
exotic as vague prophecy or ancient curse, and as immobilizing as national
terror.  Fortunately, hers is also a
world of unlikely angels, where a tea-sipping Navy wife, a piano teacher in a
rocking chair or even an ex-Nazi official might help light the way.

This woman’s story makes it clear
that the spiritual path does not have to lead through a chapel or temple, or up
to the Himalayas. 
For today’s seeker, it’s time to improvise.style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  Jessie is a female Siddhartha of a modern
world, where enlightenment is as unpredictable as love and life in a
fast-changing world of travel and technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9781418455286

Mary Lynne Arthur

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Latin America, this daughter of a mid-westerner and a Puerto Rican born mother considers herself a product of two cultures.  Fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and English, a professional actress at the age of 15, she majored in broadcasting at the University of Texas.  She married an American and along with her husband and children moved to Brazil in 1962. She began the study of metaphysics in her youth and has since continued to explore the works of transcendentalists and mystics of various faiths throughout the ages.  Her writings reflect the experiences of a woman attempting to apply such written wisdom to ordinary life as an encouragement to others to continue the spiritual search no matter how often they appear to fail. 

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A Butterfly in the Snow

"This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit, When we become the unfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure

and knowledge of every thing in them,

shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?

And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond." ( Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass)

Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, part everything you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches as you look into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes. The edges of the circle disappear, and what is in it is no longer contained at all. The light expands and covers everything, extending to infinity forever shining and with no break or limit anywhere. With it is everything is joined in perfect continuity. Nor is it possible to imagine that anything could be outside, for there is nowhere that this light is not… (A Course in Miracles, text. P. 417)

A moon hangs on its side with the Big Dipper below, as though a cluster of heavenly lights had been tossed into the cobalt suede of night by a gambling moon. Vast in infinity and full of lights across a satin sea, all of heaven is present as Jessie waters her garden and reflects on her past life. A comet, no bigger than a great fruit, spins past her celestial garden where weeds dare not sprout and blooms never fade. This is the after-life and the before-life.

This is a waiting station where souls pass through agelessness without judgment. This is where they come to rest between lifetimes; it is here they stand before physicality and wait at the door of experience where life forms out of the un-manifest. To this place come those travelers in eternity who are recalling their True Identity. Vestiges of personality cling to each as few relinquish the ego. This ego remains intact after physical death, though altered from a previous life, having left behind some of its dream of hell. From here one continues evolution and breaks the bonds of Karma forged in and by the experience of life in matter. Atonement is found in the present, beyond the fog of past or future and free of time itself.

This State is called Heaven and everyone comes here, though some recognize not that Heaven is both here and there—in the world and after the world. It had always been within them—not just before birth, not only after birth, not only after death.

There are no lost souls in the Creation where there are no boundaries. Planets roll together like berries in a cherry pie. Constellations meet no borders and stars blink at every passerby. Some here know Who They are and how They are part of the Whole, while others, though surrounded by limitless splendor, remain in fear and guilt they had encountered while in their dream of life. They judge themselves, for no other here judges them. Most while they were in the world had amnesia and had forgotten their divinity. They had lived, almost unanimously, by a stress edict, as had all the exiles from Paradise. In Heaven there is no time to measure, only Love, only forgiveness. That old life was a fable; it was Jessie’s fable. It had seemed so real to her and so painful that she had wished to end the role of Jessica Church. Images now filed past behind a curtain below her and she watched this fiction review over a corner of the moon.

Jessica (her most recent life’s name) recalled those days hours and years of a life that had passed in an instant of a measureless now. On earth below things were measured by seconds, years, seasons and centuries.

Iron tips pressed against Jessie’s diaphragm as she leaned over a black iron rail in Brooklyn early one September evening. The sun dropped low over Manhattan’s skyline as crickets declared the advance of autumn’s Solstice. Daylight hours shortened after a long, dry summer, but no one seemed to mind the end of such a hot one. All welcomed October’s breath, though it meant the end of summer’s spin. Wrought iron daggers poked through Jessie’s shirt, but she felt nothing. She strained to breathe exhaust—her lungs burned and her eyes watered. Below her, traffic reeled by under Brooklyn’s Heights River Promenade. Trucks, convertibles, sport utility vehicles and taxis rolled on toward different destinations in the last whiff of rush hour. Crickets chimed in a patch of Brooklyn where trees, weeds and bits of grass grew together between concrete, brick and steel in an overture to autumn. Many colored buildings stared out over the river and the city yawned. Everything and everyone had a place to be in time and space; busy on their way. Everyone but Jessie seemed to belong to someone or someplace. Dogs led their people by a leash.

She wondered if she would feel the pain of impact or the crush of rubber, metal and asphalt on tissue. She wondered how long it would hurt. Certainly less than my little life in this body, Jessie thought. There were other ways; less painful, but this seemed to Jessie the most certain way to end the farce of her life. She always could try the Brooklyn Bridge. The fall, she figured, would render her unconscious before her body reached water. That’s an option. I wouldn’t get my dress dirty that way—just wet.

It had always been important when she was a child that she not dirty her Sunday best. Nor, for that matter, her pinafores when she was five and six, nor the silk file dress she wore to church after her twelfth birthday until the day her breasts ripened and her legs grew longer. In a flash she went from scrawny child to plump adolescent. (Too many milkshakes on that last trip to the U.S.) Her mother had purchased the dark green dress at a department store in downtown Mexico City called El Palacio de Hierro. (The Iron Palace). It was a grand store with a grand name that sold dresses to little princesses. She was dressed as such and expected to behave accordingly. This meant she must walk about daintily and never eat anything that dripped. She was glad to outgrow that dress she wore the spring just before her grandmother died. It only reminded her of her last visit with her grandmother. She missed her scent of English Lavender and the safety of her warm embrace. She wondered what had happened to the green dress or even if it still existed at all, perhaps as a rag in someone’s kitchen? A rag, just a rag like this body will be—a dirty rag on a white kitchen floor or on black asphalt!

I was never allowed to make mistakes when I was a girl. Her mother declared as she rubbed the green dress with lighter fluid she used to spot clean just about everything. Jessie, by legacy and tradition, would not be excused from any soiling—not then and not now. By now she felt she had stained her whole life with the shades of failure. Now she might stain the street below.

What of the drivers in the vehicles? How would they maneuver after impact? Would her dive cause them to swerve in an attempt to miss the ill fated? She had to stop rehearsing consequences. She pressed her palms on wrought iron and felt pre-autumn air lift her hair like a flag while a glowing vessel crossed the River and cued the darkness to fall.

She had walked that afternoon. It was her daily meditation and exercise. She thought about this town called Brooklyn Heights. It was here George Washington had at one time stood against the British and here a local woman sought to sabotage his mission of freedom.

Five turns on the Promenade measured to be about the three miles of daily exercise Jessie allotted for weight control. She had walked passed individuals and groups, catching fragments of their lives in a collage of sights and sounds. A man on a bench wailed out his song as he took swigs from a bottle in a paper bag. Oh don’t leave till I say so…don’t leave me till I tell you to go…

Jessie didn’t recognize the tune, nor was she familiar with the lyrics. This was a man’s private dirge of sorrow and loneliness. He howled off key as his head rolled back and he sang to the river, to the sky and to someone only he could see—perhaps a long lost love.

Three young women spoke as they strolled by.

She’s that dangerous kind of woman, if you know what I mean…, said one."Yeah… I’ll bet that she never eats Spaghettios!

What do Spaghettios have to do with character anyway?

It means she’d rather not eat than open a can of food, for God’s sake! It means she probably doesn’t cook, gets carryout and dusts her kitchen. It means she probably picks from the ‘A la Carte part of the menu…Jeeees!"

Why is that dangerous?

Because it’s too easy for her; there’s no struggle over pots and pans, no serving others and because she makes no effort; because she can’t be bothered and well… because you can’t trust a woman who is too selfish to cook! Because she’ll probably never gain weight and because she will always be attractive. She’s a bad example and men are perversely drawn to women that can manipulate them. That is why she is dangerous. The woman tugged on her oh-so-tight-jeans as they crawled up the crack between her buttocks. She obviously did eat everything and had probably gained the weight she condemned another for not gaining. Jessie bet that her husband or boyfriend had left her for a slimmer dangerous kind. The three rambled on as they passed her and the sounds of their conversation suddenly blended with another.

Two friends sat on a bench as one of them leaned forward and threw crumbs at a cluster of pigeons. One of the birds followed Jessie’s passing figure for a few steps but changed its direction and lunged for a large piece of bread. She didn’t focus on the women but instead the pigeon’s waddle and bobbing neck. A bird was a peaceful choice. It couldn’t argue or judge or invalidate. It had its own pigeon life to think about. The conversation set the backdrop to a reality of pigeons, dogs on leashes and singing drunken men.

He told her he was moving to Tulsa. Don’t think she wants to go though.

My God, how can she do that? He’s really so special!

A dog lifted his hind leg and watered a large trash receptacle. Another someone had recently dropped an ice cream cone on the sidewalk. It melted slowly—chocolate and vanilla veins merged into a bi-colored stream, running along the trenches of a six-sided cement tile. Jessie walked past a man with a camera and hoped that he had not photographed her. She heard a whirring sound. Maybe he got her. Maybe he hadn’t. It might well be the last picture of her, snatched by a snapping turtle with a camera in hand. This would be the before of the before and after death shots. Now you see me intact—now you don’t, the caption read in her mind like a ghoulish anecdote—a note in a coroner’s file somewhere or a scene from a police drama on TV. Would this be my 15 minutes of infamy? I may be slightly noteworthy after all!

A couple embraced openly on a bench as The Statue of Liberty searched the sea. Perhaps Lady Liberty had greeted their ancestors a generation before.

A muffled thump preceded a squirrel’s scramble back up a tree after a fall equal to at least ten times its length. It disappeared in pursuit of another squirrel. This was the basic ritual of sex. The perpetuity of a species depended upon the persistence of the squirrel to insure generations of squirrel babies. Jessie was certain that squirrels ran straight into the wheels of death under passing autos while chasing other squirrels. So many died to make more to live who in turn would also die for more to live and so on.

Dried foliage crunched under her shoes. It had been a thirsty summer. The leaves on trees had turned and twisted into frowns, emptied of moisture like forgotten socks on a clothesline. Fall colors would be absent this autumn because of the draught. Nature’s transformation was arrested in a sepia design of brown on brown. Jessie heard the early whisper of crickets signal the end of summer. It didn’t matter to them that the rain had forgotten to fall. She wondered if rain would come soon. Soon it wouldn’t impact her. How can I be so selfish? Jessie thought as she found another corner of darkness in her mind.

She looked down on the pattern of cement paving on the Promenade. Her feet no longer fit within a boundary of one tile as they had when she was a child. Perhaps that might be the measure of her life—the dimension of her sixty years within six sides.

Her life no longer fit within boundaries of her present circumstances. So much loss had become too great to bear—so great that she couldn’t imagine more. She hoped everyone would forgive her. Now, psychically split, her life had fewer working parts than an old car in a junkyard. She believed she had lost everything: one child, one husband by death, another through divorce, her father, her last job and now, her health. A mysterious condition called fibromyalgia made every day a challenge. It was a phantom illness with no known cause or cure that resulted in constant pain and profound fatigue. She felt no need to blame anyone for her choices nor her losses nor her illness. Perhaps the map of her life was all stored in the very cells of her body. She did not wish to consider herself a victim of life nor could she tolerate the possibility that she might become a burden to someone. Perhaps her fate was written in her DNA.

Jessie felt she had always been valued for whatever asset she possessed at any given time, and those seemed to diminish with each year. Did others see the attrition of her assets from a floundering career to the thinning of her hair, from her decreased energy level to a thickened waistline, from societal withdrawal to her slightly sagging breasts and the faint yellowing of her teeth? She supposed that she was now less useful to her family and society. She could no longer clean the whole house, do three loads of laundry and prepare dinner for six all in one day as she had for so many years. Although her family undoubtedly loved her, it seemed to her that their love remained conditioned on her value as a housekeeper or a breadwinner or as an object of physical beauty, and sagging breasts were not appealing. This was the way of the world that measured by monetary or utilitarian standards topped with a dollop of sentimentalism. She might end up in an old people’s home where her children would come to visit just to make certain her socks matched. Worse yet, might she even join the homeless?

Well you know what they say, beggars can’t be choosers. Her mother had cautioned her recently, as though to prepare her for an inevitable life of predictable destitution because she had no fiscal value to society. She could only choose how she would play out this little span on a planet called Earth, now somewhat impoverished by the predestination of causal events. Jessie’s thoughts meandered with rapid-fire precision like truth-seeking missiles through the contradictions of her life and what she perceived to be the rubble of failed missions.

She had written a book about the family—bites of lives—a sort of dynastic ragout. It was a testament of her love of family and its traditions written through the dark days of her father’s failing health as a literary monument to his life, that of other family members both living and dead, and especially to the Hispanic influences of her childhood. Every page represented days in the lives of those who had lived the story, eked out through a huge emotional catharsis that made Jessie’s own life livable. It became more than just literary therapy; it was a creative, hemorrhagic outpouring of love, of grief, of rage and finally, of veiled triumph. In these pages Jessie found her core and her reason to have lived to tell the stories contained within. The seeds of her atonement lived in its pages and were a summation beyond words and phrases, recorded in eternity. For should these pages be lost to the world, their substance was encrypted in the eternity of her spirit, and that was far beyond any chronologically diminished value. If she were published, perhaps her family would read it. Her fear was not that they would not read it but that they would, even finding yet something else to criticize. What would she do if they didn’t ask about it, give them an autographed copy and hope they would? Did it matter if they did, or was value found in the creative event of writing enough in itself, undiminished by the indifference of others? I’ll read it when it’s published, her mother promised, waiting in the wings for a daughter’s public victory.

She hadn’t stayed married nor had she been a huge business success. Did her family judge her for the lost years with no visible successes?

You were born under a ‘bad sign’, a friend of her mother’s had said, quoting an acquaintance that had commented on Jessie’s misfortune in the early months after her birth. I feel sorry for your little girl—she was born under a bad sign… the woman noted. Her mother knew little about astrology past a daily column in the newspaper. She only knew that a recent President of the U.S. was also a Leo, and she didn’t like him too much. Did that mean that if he was flawed, perhaps her daughter was too? Jessie never asked about the correlation, but she guessed. After all, she had been reminded since she could recall that she was just like some person her family criticized. To be just like someone was seldom a compliment.

She had had a purpose while her father was alive. She had been useful during those months he lay in a hospital bed in the living room. She had been available almost on demand. Now it seemed she had outlived her utility. Her value did not balance out in the equation of the harsh measurement of her own self-assessed inventory. There were a few hugs or kisses now and an occasional, though dutiful, thank you. But this was to be expected as the family mourned her father’s passing. They were lost in grief and could think of nothing else. She wondered whether or not she would be missed a little at Christmas when it came time to wrap presents. It had always been her job. Everyone liked the curly bows.

Jessie wondered whether she had ever really loved. Had not all her studies of mysticism and metaphysics told her that the love of the world was not really love at all; that it was, for the most part, just another series of special relationships—excluding, not including, both conditional and limited. Her father had loved her and she did believe that much—now he was gone. The scroll of pluses and minuses passed through Jessie’s mind in a chaotic and disorderly review of her life.

You were a surprise, her mother said, noting that Jessie was born during the depression. She had been conceived during her parent’s visit to her grandfather’s farm in Indiana. There was only one bathroom and her grandfather was in that bathroom at a crucial moment.

I had the worst case of prickly heat from breast feeding you! The joy of Jessie’s birth was somehow lost in thermal sabotage, but surely she must have given some joy. Do I look for rejection? Do I ask for it? She wished so to tap into that time, just for an instant, just to see the gladness she brought to someone, to the gentle and forgotten touch of her mother as she suckled at her breast. If I only could go back to that exquisite moment and feel that tenderness again! She yearned, knowing that healing rested in gentleness.

You are the best cook south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Her former business partner had told her. He wanted to finance a small restaurant with her as chief cook. Although the restaurant plan never materialized, her partner managed with every compliment to profit from another home-cooked meal. The more she cooked the more she was praised and the more he ate the better she felt. It was an even exchange: she cooked and he praised. Now she faced all those dirty dishes of her life from all the dinners and she could no longer drift on the energy of past tributes.

You are always dressed to perfection. You look like you just stepped out of a fashion magazine! A friend commented just before Jessie dropped a blob of salad dressing on her white linen skirt, sabotaging her own chic.

Why did you marry Mommy? Her oldest daughter once asked her first husband.

Because she was pretty. The reply did not include an and I loved her. Once again her usefulness seemed to depend on an asset or material value. Beauty was valuable to the young man just as long as she remained a young woman. And then that young man died.

There are no victims, Jessie so yearned to believe these words so that she could claim some responsibility for her life, but how could she have made so many colossal mistakes, allowing others to determine the list of her merits? She recalled how her husband had coveted their babies’ access to breast-feeding. Perhaps breastfeeding had canceled out the she was pretty because it was both functional and exclusive. After all, being pretty only counted when one had direct and immediate access to the source. I still have my grievances, she thought, I still have not forgiven.

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors… Have I truly forgiven those for whom I worked and those that never paid me the money I earned? Have I forgiven my deceased in-laws who decided that my dead baby would be donated to science after three days of living? Have others really forgiven me? Why do I continue in the same behavior patterns of error and repentance? Wasn’t it necessary to acknowledge these errors within and reform too? Have I really given up judgments? Don’t I still feel wronged?

Jessie had meditated, read scores of books on spirituality, attended retreats and lectures, had been told that things did not measure attainment, and she prayed for illumination—she begged, pleaded and beseeched God for a sign. As huntress of her own withinness she had been relentless. She believed that her only true goal was God realization—the same realization of which mystics spoke, but she also wondered if she truly desired the unconditional awareness of the presence of God. She supposed she would have the answer to these questions and would not be conflicted if her motives were unconditional. Since conflict had been a constant in her recent experience, she knew that she had not reached the necessary detachment of un-conditionality.

Had her mother not said that beggars can’t be choosers, as though woman did not deserve a better experience—a phenomenal opinion common to many women of her mother’s generation? Men truly mattered in that world, and a woman’s purpose was secondary to that of a man’s.

If there was a beginning to a trail of failures, she believed it began when little Roger was born. He had been named for only twenty-four hours, and then his name was dropped as though cast in a ballot box for someone else to read and count after an election day was already over. Someone had decided that this baby was not really a person at all unless it survived surgery. Baby Fox was Baby Fox until his heart stopped. Then baby Fox became an it, a laboratory experiment—it with a small i. Might it still be in a jar in some laboratory? She imagined a small creature with her features floating around in formaldehyde, stored away in a dusty corner of a laboratory.

Her in-laws had denied her access to her first child. A compassionate nurse had rolled her down the hospital halls so that she could peek through a thick glass window into a glass-encased incubator where a tiny baby boy lay connected to wires and tubes. This little body had grown within her, tucked away in her womb next to her heart. Now he lay in a box of glass, isolated in a world of giants. He died four days later. Jessie was excluded from any decisions concerning a funeral or burial.

The box-makers had decided his fate. The box-makers told her husband what he must do. He agreed. No one had asked her opinion. She guessed that if she had forgiven them she would have released the aching memory as iron bars pressed at her rib cage. The baby’s father, her first husband, had died as well and she could no longer ask him how he had felt. In reflecting on her own self-absorption of those days, she recalled the words of a contemporary mystic, Joel Goldsmith. Men are too selfish. On the whole, they are too occupied and concerned with their own interests to be wholly unselfish in their attitude toward the world.

In her moments of silence and meditation when stillness evaded her, she wondered at the simplicity of the quiet and how it eluded her and wished to be free of the noises of busyness. She wished for a recess under a weeping willow tree that had grown in her grandmother’s yard. She wished for a sprinkler in a summer garden, grass curling under her toes, the hum of tiny insects in the perfumed breeze from her grandmother’s rose-garden. Where was the hand that might stop the madness, the running and the crashing? Blood coursed through her veins as it rushed against corridors of arteries, swirling around muscle, bone and tissue, and her scars wept. The noise of her life drowned out the soft coo of a dove, the rush of leaves at her feet, or the hushed intimacy of a lover’s kiss.

And now, in this place of clashing dreams and unsung hymns, Jessie recognized the methods of a world at large—a societal and religious form of organized thought designed to insulate and divert people from the awesome struggle and perils of transformation that had begun to work on her. Keep them busy on the Internet was its motto. She had been driven to the edge of a precipice on the verge of madness where Truth required a decision.

Yes, it was really true that one’s life passed in review in the moments before death, and the choice was either to believe the charade to be real or to see beyond perception. It did not feel like her life any longer. She didn’t even know if this was her life at all, so detached and distant she was from her own psychic pain. Some alter-self had lived the up side of duality and all the good times. The days of taffeta and tool and crinoline petticoats were pictures of another life. The picture had seemed real years ago. The present images of lack and fear were replaced with yet more scenes in different forms. Beauty danced next to danger as each exchanged partners in that dance of duality. For her now the recall was both chaotic and random, like the cars and trucks and litter that swirled below her on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

On the spiritual way, many come to barren places—the desert, the wilderness—and believe that God has forsaken them. Often it appears as if Christ had forsaken them. Then it is that the spiritual seeker must remember that he had not yet attained, that what he believed to be the full realization of Truth, the Christ, or God, was not the fullness of the Spirit. These wilderness experiences reveal that he must still press on, for when the Light is fully come, ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.’ Remember that discords and inharmonies are apparent only to human sense. Spiritual vision sees through—to Reality.

God evolved the world and all that is therein. What we behold through sense is not that world, but the false and finite concept of the world of God’s creating. Rising in consciousness, we begin to perceive the spiritual universe and something of its purpose. (Joel S. Goldsmith: The Infinite Way)

CHAPTER 2

Weather forecasters warned of an approaching hurricane, estimated to arrive in Norfolk the morning of September 29, 1958. A vaporous shroud cloaked Jessica’s head under a steamy mantle; its heavy breath smothering the Tidewater area of Southern Virginia in humidity. An air-conditioner hummed constantly in the bedroom window of the two-bedroom apartment Jessica and Roger Fox called home.

Meals were simple when Roger was away at sea. Jessie lived on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, grapes, peaches, iron pills, a vitamin supplement and her favorite treat, a nightly dish of butter pecan ice cream. She finished the last spoonful of her creamy desert sitting on a black and silver brocade sofa she had temporarily covered with a towel. At least the ugly fabric was stain-proof, however hot and scratchy it might be.

…They dined on mince and slices of quince that they ate with a runcible spoon, and hand in hand, by the edge of the sand they danced by the light of the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon… Hmmm…I wonder what runcible means, Jessie wondered as she savored the butter-flavored cream, reflecting on the poem she had learned as a child. She recited the lines to the walls. Oh, the owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat… I wonder if Roger caught a glimpse of the beautiful pea-green boat while at sea. She laughed out loud. Boy, guess I’m a bit goofy and certainly very pregnant. That’s what solitude will do for you!" She announced to the walls, the furniture and Roger’s empty chair. Yet, she added, being alone is not all that bad, and ice cream makes such good company! It doesn’t talk back or tell me not to eat it although it can tip the scales. The scales to which she referred were those in the obstetrician’s office. She was due for an exam the next day. He’ll check my weight and this dish full of comfort might add some ounces. Oh well, I’m close to the end now. She had gained just seventeen pounds in eight months of pregnancy, allowing her an additional five-pound margin of gain for the ninth month. Now she might add a tablespoon or two to the heap of butter pecan comfort. I’ve earned it, she reasoned, it’s my reward for being so good, eating all the right foods while Roger is away and I don’t have to cook all those fattening dishes for him every night. That’s the only good part of being alone! I can eat what I want when I want.

Thin was vital to the self-image of a woman of these 1950’s. One day she would certainly return to her pre-pregnant status to be sufficiently sexy for her husband. Nature assures the baby will take its nutrition from your system first. You will not harm this child by eating a smart, low calorie diet. We don’t want you to gain too much weight because you have a very small frame. Gain no more than two to three pounds each month. That will cap out at about an eighteen to twenty-one pound total for the entire nine months of your pregnancy. The doctor flicked at the pencil he held between expertly manicured fingers as he checked the figures a nurse had written down on Jessie’s chart, noting that she had gained just over four pounds in the past month.

There’s nothing to be alarmed about, he assured her after the routine monthly exam, "although you are retaining quite a bit of fluid, not too alarming but noteworthy. Just watch the salt intake and all those fatty foods. Oh, and remember to take your vitamins; especially the iron supplement."

Yes, iron, that binding but essential mineral component. Jessie sighed, recalling her last visit. During this, her ninth month, she was scheduled for weekly visits to his office. She scooped a large mouthful of smooth, buttered cream and nuts from the bowl into her mouth. Ice cream and television brought temporary solace on a private, pregnant evening in early autumn. Black and white pictures flashed across the small screen of the television Roger bought her for their six-month wedding anniversary. Content with the ice cream and television and even with her doctor, she noticed how scratchy and hot the sofa was, even with the towel. She wished they had purchased the blue floral cotton twill covered model they had seen at Penny’s. It’s too feminine, too fussy! It looks like it belongs in the living room of some little old lady’s cottage with doilies everywhere and lavender in the air! Roger wouldn’t be convinced. So maybe we can have one when we’re both old and wizened, and Roger grows mellow with age, Jessie told herself, imagining Roger’s wavy, black hair touched with gently streaked gray strands. She couldn’t recall whose idea it had been to go with the garish black and silver. It was modern, after all, even if it did look like it belonged in a brothel, not in Jessie’s living room. If Roger had chosen it, she would not have objected, so wanting to keep peace. This was an uneasy feeling she had when she challenged his will and he got angry, as had her father when she challenged his authority. I’m probably too willful for a girl as someone said once. It was, after all the nineteen-fifties and the television show Father Knows Best modeled the perfect American family tradition. The theme was true to its title. Jessie wanted harmony and harmony had a condition: she must accept what Roger wanted. Peace was worthy of compromise.

I’ll make a slipcover for this thing! She promised herself as she waddled off the sofa, belly first, carrying her empty dish to the kitchen as she headed for the back door and down the steps to the back yard. A stiff breeze had begun to stir the leaves on a scrawny maple tree, turning them upside down—early signs of an approaching storm. The storm would cool things down.

She had been constipated for three weeks from all the iron pills she had to take, but she hoped that the fruit she ate religiously might help. Constipation is a condition of the latter stages of pregnancy, her mother had informed her making a list of all the unpleasantness Jessie might experience while pregnant. Jessie’s life was a salt-free, season-less wasteland of bland food but for the grapes, peaches and butter pecan. Still, with all her precautions her feet swelled anyway, her ankles no longer visible. Her legs went straight from knee to foot in a uniform cylinder of one diameter. Piano legs. I have piano legs and balloon toes, she mused as she looked down at the puffy toes on her swollen feet as she reclined on a plastic and aluminum lounge in the back yard of the apartment building where she lived with Roger. Children played in a parking lot—oblivious to the heat, lost in some climate-less adventure. In a few weeks she would be able to see her toes again, even able to polish her toenails. Her puffy phalanges peeked out from under the mound of her inflated belly.

Roger teased her about her pinkies. They look like peanuts He remarked laughing at the tiny deformities. How do you paint that little toenail anyway? It’s hardly visible. I can’t even give myself a pedicure now! Jessie sighed, longing for the day when she might reach her toes again. When she stood, her feet and her strange little toes disappeared below the rise of her abdomen, and when she walked they jiggled. She felt the jiggle with every step. She was all belly and jelly feet. The baby was due in four weeks. Jessie, comfortless (but for the butter pecan) and alone, hummed to herself and to the baby in her womb on this early autumn afternoon.

Oh won’t you go to sleep my little Buckaroo… Jessie sang to the infant in her womb. I wonder if he can hear me.

Insects circled her head, buzzing a hymn to a summer’s passing hours. A pool of perspiration formed below her breasts, trickling down her belly onto the elastic band of her maternity shorts. She tucked her blouse under her breasts catching the moisture at the rise of her abdomen. It was late September when shortened days and twilight breezes stirred the trees as they had begun to do this evening. She longed for cool weather and a change. It will be cool soon, and I won’t be pregnant forever!

Roger had just been called back to his ship in preparation for an imminent hurricane. All ships docked at Norfolk’s naval base were required to leave port when a storm threatened. So now she had two options; she could lie on the sofa near the bedroom air-conditioner and watch Wuthering Heights on TV or go to a movie theater. Do I really feel like lifting this bloated body and sliding my fat feet into the only shoes that still fit, just to go to a movie? The winds had begun to pick up a bit whispering no to her silent question. The storm might bring heavy rains and lightening. She’d best stay home this night. Besides, it had been years since she had seen Sir Lawrence Olivier in this very sad movie classic. She wondered if she did not enjoy crying just a little bit. I’ll feel better after a good cry, she told herself. I feel so alone now. Alone… She rolled the word around… Lonely… The two companion adjectives spoke authentically. There was liberation in a good cry; it made her feel genuine and present in the power of her surrender to the fates.

Other Navy wives from the ship got together frequently for tea and bridge to fill in the time their husbands were at sea. At twenty, Jessie felt like a kid at her mother’s tea party—out of place in a world of grown-up women all dressed in Villager-like summer dresses. They look frumpy, she mused, all but Nancy.

You are just a child yourself, dear. ‘Bare foot and pregnant’, a pun for certain but sooooo true! The woman snorted, laughing into her napkin as though to catch her hilarity. My heavens, you are so young and so pregnant! she added, grinning condescendingly. Jessie noted that the woman had no children of her own.

Mrs. Executive Officer had given a tea for the ship’s officers’ wives just days before while the ship was off the coast of the Carolinas playing war games. None wore the mandatory white gloves to a tea party this summer because it was just too hot for gloves, and for the most part carried them along in observance of style and tradition.

Jessie’s friend Nancy Stevens was her only contemporary. Nancy was twenty-two, carried her gloves on the handle of her purse, was enviably skinny and could eat what ever she pleased. She headed straight for a huge cake that lay covered in dripping chocolate icing and topped with whipped cream.

Would you like a piece of cake? The hostess hissed on the c in the word piece through the gap in her front teeth. Jessie caught a glimpse of Nancy as her friend winced, knotting her mouth in a perfect oval. Nancy sat on the opposite side of the room very close to the cake and behind Mrs. Executive Officer who missed the grimace and chattered on. Nancy winced again, this time blatantly crossing her eyes. No one but Jessie noticed. Jessie suppressed a giggle. Nancy eyed the cake.

On the other hand, you probably shouldn’t have cake. You shouldn’t eat sugary, fattening foods. The woman snorted again as she gave herself an extra large slice of cake after serving every guest but Jessie.

"I will have a piece of cake, thank you." Jessie defiantly arose from her chair. Cake wouldn’t hurt her. What hurt her was the separation wrought by sea duty and Roger’s absence.

How far along are you now? The Executive Officer’s wife was wearing a red and white checked dress. Like something out of Alice in Wonderland, a tablecloth with a head enthroned on a white velvet chair as she fanned herself with a large Chinese silk fan, Mrs. Executive Officer continued her interrogation.

Off with her head! Jessie imagined the queen firing at her. Why doesn’t she just answer all her own questions? After all, she seems to know what’s best for me! Perspiration formed at the nape of the inquisitor’s neck. Jessie eyed the tiny pool. Would it overflow onto the tablecloth or, worse yet, onto the white velvet?

Tell me, my dear, how much weight have you gained this ssssummer? She hissed again, no longer a queen but a sweaty snake in a tablecloth. You look as though you are about to pop!

Jessie weighed one hundred and twenty-two pounds and could hardly admit it to herself. Her normal pre-pregnancy weight was around one hundred and five. When she stepped on the scales in the doctor’s office she decided it didn’t count if she didn’t look at the scales. She would be indifferent to opinion—even to her own definition of fat. The word bloated came to mind. I’m just swollen and it’s temporary, she thought.

You musst be clossse to delivery. The woman reached over and patted Jessie’s belly with quick, sharp pats. That’s for good luck, you know.

Nancy knotted her mouth again, her eyes rolling back. She had chocolate icing on her lips. Jessie repressed a giggle. She would be polite and adhere to Navy social rules. It was truly rude to laugh and she’d probably wet her pants anyway, so she feigned a sneeze, covering her mouth with a lipstick stained napkin. She arose, smoothing out her sailor-collared maternity blouse with both hands. The wrinkles remained.

Where is the lady’s room? I must excuse myself. The baby pressed down on her bladder and pushed up under her rib cage.

"Of course, my dear, it’s down at the end of