Yellow Butterfly Dress
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.
~ Pavel Friedman
Dedicated to Pavel Friedman, who was born in Prague on January 7, 1921,
and deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942.
He died in Auschwitz on September 29, 1944.
My sister was born in December.
I was six years old. And by the summer
when our 1950s apartment was stifling and my
father was weary from work and heat,
my mother sent him on vacation
to the Catskill Mountains. It didn’t matter that she
needed a rest from an infant
and a soon-to-be second-grader.
She sent my dad.
He took me with him.
We went to a place far from the city,
where the blaze of summer bounced
off the lake and hit the tree tops;
The Pine Tree Country Club,
a small, run-down hotel,
composed of a gaggle of little bungalows,
each with a sagging wooden, cracked-paint porch,
and its very own wasps’ nest glued under the eaves.
There was also an old casino.
Each pair of bungalow couples shared a bathroom.
There was an old black-and-white television in the casino
and movies were projected on a screen at night.
My father got me a T-shirt; it was white and had
the emblem of a pine tree, raised in faux, dark green velvet
and the words Pine Tree Country Club.
It was itchy as all hell.
I had bad allergies:
Each morning my father opened a fragile clear capsule
and spilled teeny little pink and white pills into a spoon
and then onto my tongue.
We sat by the lake in Adirondack chairs that had probably been there
as long as the hotel—from the twenties or thirties.
Perhaps this had once been
a classy retreat for wealthy city dwellers.
But now the working class was here,
sitting by the lake, for a week or two;
then it was back to reality.
My father was a laborer; he packed and lifted huge boxes of
raincoats and shipped them for the Neptune Raincoat Company
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, grunting in the heat in
his undershirt in a warehouse.
But here, by the lake, he was king in his untucked tropical shirt
with the large green leaf pattern.
The lady next door tried in vain to braid my hair to my specifications,
and I protested to my father who shushed me as
we slammed the door of the bungalow. We woke the wasps
who were angered and swarmed over my father;
one managed to get a good bite of his bald head.
My father didn’t want to show me he was in pain, but
I sensed it. Someone told him to put mud on it.
We went to the lake where the previous day he hid a
garter snake in his tropical shirt pocket and it peed
a yellow puddle of fear. This time it was my father’s turn to be
scared, but I helped him by putting a mud pie on his head.
During our week at the lake,
I learned how to play “Chopsticks” on the tinny old casino piano.
I climbed up on a huge, cracked red leather-topped bar stool
and asked the bartender for a ginger ale.
I sat on the toilet and watched Cookie, my pet fly,
crawl up my arm.
It was the country,
this was my version of nature.
One morning, I put on my yellow sundress and after breakfast
we went to the lake. The sun was bright,
the sky intensely blue and cloudless,
minnows bubbled to the top of the murky green water.
I sat in the large lake chair, my legs straight out, and watched
one, two, three, seven, eleven yellow butterflies
flutter onto my dress and latch on; fifteen, twenty-two; my
dress was calling to them, like guiding them to a runway
at an airport; thirty-four, thirty-five …
I was covered in butterflies; small, silky, stubborn, baby-skinned
little creatures that refused to let go when I tried to brush them off
with shrieks and jumps and shakes.
I was terrified.
I never knew the intensity
of such intimacy before.
I was so lucky.