WHY CAN'T I CRY? (Part 3 : Buttercup)
Petunia is dead. Daffodil is dead.
Thinking about Daffy and her 'sex positive' feminism, I thought about one other friend of sorts from those days when it didn't take a whole lot to think someone was a friend, a victim : Buttercup.
She sat near me in biology II class. She was a sweet little butterball - yes, sorry, it's true - with sparkly blue eyes and a simple goodness to her. While, perhaps oddly, I don't recall being in any academic high school class with Petunia or Daffodil (other than the previously mentioned wood shop), which makes me wonder if they were perhaps not in College Prep like me, but in secretarial, or general studies or, well, some form of tech school instead of high school***, Buttercup was for sure as least as smart as me or she would not have been in that class sitting next to me.
I got a B without studying because I never studied. I remember only one incident in that class, a lecture about protein. I pulled my hairbrush from my purse, harvested some of my hair out of it, and threw the hair into some solution that the teacher had. The solution and the hair all turned bright yellow. ... Wow! *****
Buttercup and me weren't especially chatty in class. Rather, we had empathy. We were bored and sulked together.
But whatever empathy there was as we got through biology class together wasn't enough. Because of what happened sometime that spring as the earth warmed after the thaw and we finished tests that proved that we listened to the lectures and planned to get the hell out of there for the summer. Buttercup came back for junior year quietly pregnant.
Actually, there were pregnant girls everywhere. It seemed there was a pregnant girl on every street. Girls that were careless students were pregnant. Girls that were good students were pregnant. Usually they dropped out of school, or were sent away, or sometimes parents would arrange abortions. If you were as observant and listened well like me you would know:
There was the poor stuttering girl who took six months to afford a trip out of state on a Greyhound bus, a girl who had probably been raped by an old man, to have an abortion all alone. There were rumors that she was into witchcraft.
There was the clever girl who managed to fool her mother long enough that her mother could not insist she have an abortion. She told me what she'd done, her mother suspecting and demanding proof she was not, what proof she had given, and how angry her mother was with her and how the baby had been taken away from her, how much she wanted to keep it, how depressed she felt. She kept her head down on the desktop and failed to do her homework.
My mother must have gotten wind of the way things were though she was not part of the gossip network. (The Avon Lady, the biggest gossip there was, my mother would not even buy from.) One day I came home from school and as I passed her on my way to my room she said, "Don't be bringing any babies home for me to raise. You get pregnant, you'll pack your bags and move out."
She had not spent five minutes talking to me about the so called facts of life.
Buttercup, like many of us, had nothing to do and nowhere to go when we were not in school. For boys who were interested, talented - skilled, and had a modicum of financial sponsorship, there were sports. Other than volleyball, which was certainly not for everyone, there were no sports for girls who had not made it onto Drill Team or Cheerleading, neither of which were actually considered sports.
So, like anyone bored and broke might, Buttercup had made the most of her surroundings. Buttercup had taken a walk in the woods with a boy. It might have been into a hollow. It might have been near the dump. It might have been in a colonial era ruin or one of the old Underground Railroad houses, or near the closed mines. And the boy was black and Buttercup was white.
Her parents had not sent her away. She still took the orange school bus to school. She had special permission to use the girls bathroom whenever she wanted or needed to and to skip out of any classes if she felt sick. Her natural plumpness hid her pregnancy for some time, and then, I'd find her posing, looking out over the football field, into the yonder, watching for hawks that might circle, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the day that she would split in two.
The sparkle in her blue eyes was out. She had taken up smoking and no one told her not to. She lingered in the girls bathroom, smoking. She would smile my way and I'd say hello. But I knew and she knew I knew. Without ever saying a word.
Christmas came. School Break. Back to school in January, sitting in study hall, some snotty girls came over to my table just to tell me that they had heard that Buttercup, hollowed out, had an abortion. An abortion was barely legal and was considered horrible sin. This was a condemnation. Especially for a Roman Catholic.
She was sitting by herself across the room.
I found myself hurling words back at them, "You had better not let Buttercup hear you say that. It would really hurt her!"
They scurried away.
All was not well. Buttercup's parents had conspired with a doctor to have her induced early and she gave birth to a premie before the New Year. She came back to school in a state of shock, new to every form of pain and without any sense of a future. They had the newborn taken away before she could hold it. She wasn't speaking to me or not speaking to me. Was it a girl or boy? She was less likely to talk than ever. And it seemed as if from then on, absolutely no one was supposed to talk about it.
In recent years, with an emphasis on adopted children and birth parents finding each other, I've thought of Buttercup, wondering if her child survived into adulthood and had ever tried to find her, and what that could've meant to her.
I'd seen her once since high school. I'd gone to a flea market at an old drive-in theater and had seen her with her parents, trailing after them like a duckling. She walked by me, smoking. We made eye contact and smiled mutually, but she we didn't find each other after that to ask how's life?
And so, yes I did, I looked up Buttercup on the Internet, just as I had Petunia, and Daffodil.
Buttercup had also died. Cancer.
She had died a few years ago and if you read that obituary, you would know she was a maiden. Her obituary mentioned no husband, no children, only that she was a sports fan and that she had worked the same job - a little job - her entire adult life. I couldn't imagine how it had been for all those years, getting up Monday through Friday and going to the very same company and the very same job, in the very same town, until you died. I also knew that kind of loyalty to a company or a company to an employee was not something most people experienced - not anymore! What was it like to actually live close to where you went to high school for the rest of your life? Because when I was in high school I was raring to get out of there and once I graduated I never looked back. School was just something I had to do. I'd never ever even, though all those forced pep rallies, learned the school song. What was it like to continue to live with one's parents as an adult in the same house one had always lived in? Had she ever moved out? And then maybe moved back in?
I wondered if Buttercup had ever had a real love affair, if her family had ever forgiven her, if she was burdened by what had happened when she was sixteen for the rest of her life. Had I secretly had greater expectations of her?
Buttercup, and all those pregnant girls, had effected me profoundly. Without saying a word they had spoken to me far more than my mother ever had. I knew I could not become one of them, not only because of the threat my mother had made that one day when I came home from school, but because I myself could not cope with anything to do with unplanned pregnancy. I would never have wanted to have to choose nor would I have wanted to have no choice in the matter.
And when I think back to those days, when a girl had to sneak for contraception, when a teacher could loose her job for telling girls about using condoms to avoid unwanted pregnancy, when abortion cost way more than most girls earned as minimum wage workers - a time I'd hoped was left in the ignorant past - that girls and women in some states have had the choice taken from them, angers and upsets me.
But as the new year began, as I learned that I'd outlived three women who had been my life young, who had influenced my way of thinking, my way of being, for better or worse, I also thought about how one never knows what challenges one will experience alive.
Oh Petunia, Daffodil, and Buttercup!
Damn it!
C 2026 Christine Trzyna
***Or many accelerated program, but then almost all the students who were in that program were going to college on scholarships.
Just a note. Based on some research into Petunia's four marriages and divorces before she died at 40, it would seem she got over her racism.
***** I also learned that the biology teacher had also recently died. He'd had a teaching career of about three decades and then had a second career. I didn't recognize him in the photo that had been posted.
