First it was the monarchs. I was six and thought that the world was finally right when the butterflies descended. They were melodramatic in their numbers, obscene. The air was thick with them, fanning my sun-fevered skin with their wings. Everything was at once uniformly ablaze, pulsing in the same orange and black. When I lifted an arm or kicked a leg, I could raise up a hundred flutters. But then they began to die. Our little gravel road—the one with the grassy center and two wheel ruts—became one great clot of twisted insects. The bodies of dead butterflies deflate and shrivel, their wings disintegrate from the edges in. I remember picking up a few and tossing them into the air, willing them to twitch their wings, pretending I really didn’t understand death.
Some of us are born with a great capacity for nostalgia and idealism (which are actually two breeds of the same species). I was born willing myself to unknow almost anything I learned. And what the monarchs taught me was that, truly, the right amount of melancholy for the indelible sadnesses of the world is not available to us. I shed tears, stroked some of their wings, but then I took to the cabin rather than acknowledge a slackening of my grief.
Six years later it was the frogs. Every summer a frog or two would get caught under a wheel on that gravel road leading out of our family land. Even though only a few cars go in and out every day, it was inevitable: the little road twists along the marshy shore that’s home to many deep-throated water creatures. But that summer, the summer I turned thirteen, something was different. There were never fewer than six or seven dead frogs on the road at a time. I counted them as my sister and I walked to the county dock to swim with the boys. At least two new frogs were splayed on the road every day. They were perfectly symmetrical and stiff. If my sister and I had been boys, we might have picked up the bodies with the tips of our fingers and thrown them at each other—tiny, frog-shaped Fris-bees. If they had caught a good thermal, I imagine these flattened frogs might have glided off into the bull rushes, down into the water, which would reconstitute them too late. But since we were girls, we stepped around them with our stone-callused feet.
None of the other local swimming boys ever came home with us from our daily trips to the dock. Encountering girls’ parents—particularly our suspicious, old-fashioned parents—is simply more work than most young boys care to take on without substantial rewards. And so they roared away on their three-wheelers or piled into one of the boy’s ancient pickup trucks, which no one was old enough to drive legally, and rolled back into the lives we would never quite share. The sparkling-eyed boy, however, became part of our lives. He walked back with us often, pushing his bike, my sister usually a few yards ahead of us, clarifying the pecking order. First sun and then water, wind, and then an exasperated, quick-tongued older sister, a tongue-tied, mooney younger sister, and finally a teasing, freckled boy with a crush who would, when he reached the girl’s summer cabin, move rocks, stack wood, shovel dirt, weed the garden, or help with whatever other chores her father had lined up for them while they were away. Pleasure must be earned, and he worked, laughing all the while, to be the one “good kid,” the faithful companion, the golden son-in-law, to be the boy next to the girl for the longest.
I suspect if he’d been alone on the road and encountered that clutter of dried-up frogs, he might have kicked them absentmindedly, or even put some real effort into it, found a stick and hit them like hockey pucks. But he wasn’t alone. He was with me. And I decided one day that such a holocaust could not pass unnoticed. For life to remain precious, I must have reasoned, the least scrap of it—down to these hardened slices of amphibian, their deep glugs flattened in their throats—must be mourned. I probably thought that I was a very soulful young lady; I probably hoped that everyone else would think so, too.
But in truth, I was motivated more by fear than by image. I was afraid that I actually felt nothing, that I could have gleefully kicked every single frog from one end of the road to the other just for a moment’s amusement. I was willing myself not to know what was all around me: little deaths everywhere (just look at the living branches I casually snapped on walks through the woods; the broken cedar waxwing eggs; the walleye’s mouth hooked clean through, my proud eyes). I was avoiding the knowledge that to notice any particular death more than any other is to indulge in pointless, self-serving pathos. In another time, say seventy years ago, this rage of mine to unknow what I knew would have made me an excellent German haus frau, serving up painstakingly etched eggcups and daily airing out my feather ticks, inhaling all the while the scent of scorched flesh.
Instead, with perfect repression, I told the sparkling-eyed boy that we should hold a funeral for all of these frogs. The key, I knew, was ritual. In order to be sure, sure you understand, that the stray threads of emotion and thought that made up our brains mattered, that we were not going to dissolve and become something else in moment (a flap of skin, say), that we were even alive, we needed to make our response to these frogs public, if only to each other. We needed to be appreciated. We needed a ritual. The sparkling-eyed boy could have teased me, as he often did, but he too made a decision in that moment. We would have a funeral. We probably gathered tiny flowers out of the ditches, moved with bloated stateliness, and said a few words over the frogs, having learned early that every ritual must have a script. And then we launched a little barge of the dried carcasses into the river. We sat and watched the barge drift off in the wide, almost currentless St. Mary’s River until we could no longer make out the dark spot on the water. It was thrilling and pathetic at once: two small human beings at the end of a dock, compelled by gravity, shocked to have made meaning on their own for once, shocked at how hollow it was.
We were both pretending to save our souls, pretending that we weren’t too old for this silly display, that we hadn’t already learned a different truth about death—that it’s far too easy to care not at all—and a different truth about the meaning of our lives—that we couldn’t give each other what we really wanted, no one could, not for long, anyway. And he was pretending that because he had gone along with me that I loved him best, and I was pretending that I didn’t. So there we were—a pathetic liar and her accomplice. I think I could either thank him or apologize to him for the part he played.
I don’t know which species died en masse six summers later, or six more summers after that, because I wasn’t there. What I do know is that I haven’t changed a bit. I am still willing myself to unknow what I know: people grow up; one identity disintegrates as another is forged; people don’t love each other forever; just because I write it doesn’t make it so. I am creating the most elaborate shrine to unknowing I can imagine. No, I haven’t changed a bit: here I am, a liar and her accomplice.