Written by Nina Silver – Preface – The Aztecs believed that butterflies are the souls of our ancestors coming down to earth to be with us. I read that a few years after my father died. It gave me a start and then I smiled. I remembered an incident that happened a week after he died. Do I dare admit it?

I took a walk to the cul de sac on the street I was living on at the time. I stood there looking at the undeveloped land. It was still a forest, and I was just enjoying the peace and serenity of the moment. I was thinking of how my father would have enjoyed such a moment and how he and my mother had passed this love of nature and beauty on to me. I wished he was with me.

A huge Monarch butterfly fluttered over and landed on my shoulder. I held my breath. “Dad?” I said. Then I laughed at myself. I hadn´t read about the Aztecs yet, which is why it gave me a start when I did read it. It brought to mind the memory of that butterfly on my shoulder and my father, but it also brought back the memory of Alice and the butterflies of Mexico.

June, 1961
Dear Diary,
We are in our new house in Queens, NY, a suburb of New York City. I still miss Mexico terribly. My father says I´m a fish out of water here. He´s right. But I do love my new bedroom. I have pale blue wallpaper with white embossed roses here and there. It makes me think of a pale blue round box of bath powder with a big white powder puff in it. It makes me feel romantic! I´m stretched out on my bed doing homework and thinking of boys.

Actually, I’m writing in you and thinking of boys, I´m supposed to be doing homework. I hate it here. My mother is whacko and menopausal. She rants and raves day and night. My father is at work all day. It´s my job to keep her calm all day until he comes home. Than he takes over. I don´t hate her. I just can´t stand her. I understand there´s something really wrong and I feel her pain. But it doesn´t make it any easier to live with her. My older sister, married and living in the city, isn´t as forgiving as I. She calls her: “Our Lady of Perpetual Agony.” I love it! You have to laugh. It´s the only way.

The new public high school here is a little better than school was in NYC this past year. It´s newer and modern. The kids here are richer. That´s the only difference. They´re just as mean and cliquey and shallow. They think I´m a freak, a geek, retarded; all because I lived in another country and I am not exactly like them. Thank God! Oh yes, let´s not forget all the weight I put on recently. I´m a FAT freak, retarded blob! My mother says I look like a pigeon. Short and busty. Thanks Mom. It´s her way of trying to get me to lose weight. Otherwise everything is fine!

I do have something to look forward to. In a few weeks I´m graduating high school and then I´m outta here! I´ll be going away to college! Everything will be perfect there! There I won´t be the only NEW one. Every freshman coming in will be new and from some other part of the country. They´ll be looking to connect and make new friends. I´ll have a leg up. I know what it is to be transplanted to a new place. It doesn´t scare me.

I feel so dumb here. The other day I got on a bus, I didn´t know where to put my money or that it had to be exact change. Then I had to read each and every coin to know how much it was. I dropped my money and it rolled all over the bus. An entire busload of people were staring at me! And I don´t look or sound like a foreigner, if I did, people on the bus would at least realize why I had to read the money. They must have been sure I was retarded.

Mom has done a wonderful job of decorating this house. I love my room. I love Alice´s room. She has beautiful pale blue wallpaper, like mine, but instead of roses there is a spray of white butterflies here and there. Sweet, precious Alice. Oh! My poor baby sister Alice!”

I shut my diary and sat up. It suddenly struck me so strongly that Alice, who was seven years old, was having a hard time with the move as well, and was in for another terrible change. I was leaving. I would be off to college and Alice would be left behind with looney-tunes, our mother. Poor baby. So sweet and caring.

I remembered the time I found a goldfish wrapped in cotton in her underwear drawer. She had taken him out of his fish bowl. She thought he was cold. She was about three years old. Or, more recently, I remembered the time our mother was in one of her rants. She would pace around the house ranting and raving for hours, literally from morning ´til night. This time, one tiny little part of her rant was “I haven´t bought myself a new dress in five years!” Alice and I would shut ourselves in our rooms, and wait for the tantrum to pass.

This time, Alice took my hand and led me into her room. She timidly asked me if I would help her count the money in her piggy bank. “I want to buy Mommy a dress.” she whispered. I knew a new dress wasn´t the problem, but I proceeded to help her count her money so she would feel better. Our mother burst into the room. “Oh! So now you´re gonna turn her against me the same way Judy (my older sister) turned you against me!?” she screamed at me. I calmly and quietly told my mother what we were doing because Alice wanted to buy her a dress. That shocked her out of the tantrum. Alice burst into tears. In slow motion, my mother sat down in a rocking chair and took Alice on her lap and rocked her.
Too much pain in that house.

And now I would be leaving for college. What could I do? I had to go on with my life. But Alice! I hadn´t paid much attention to the struggle she was having.
“I´ve been pretty wrapped up in myself.” I thought.
For some reason, that day my heart broke for her. I was realizing that she was feeling about as good about herself and how people in New York saw her, as I was. NOT GOOD. In fact, when my Mother took her to register for school they tested her. My mother said they asked questions that a child from another country could not know.

Alice couldn´t do the math because she didn´t know that a nickel is five cents, or a dime is ten cents or a quarter, twenty-five cents. Just as an American child new to Mexico, wouldn´t know that five cents (centavos) there is called a “quinto.”

And even though she could hear our mother say it was unfair, she had to feel the same way I felt when the principal of a private school, Dalton, told my parents (in front of me) that I wasn´t “Dalton material.” Probably because I didn´t know that Times Square was a place, not part of a math problem. Damn! I should have asked him if he knew what Insurgentes was! It´s an Avenue in Mexico City. I´m sure he couldn´t even pronounce it.

As I sat there mulling over all of this, something told me: ‘Your sister needs you. Go to your sister. She´s in her bedroom. Go!’ I got up and walked to Alice´s bedroom and knocked on the door.
“Come in.” Alice said. She was on her bed, leaning on a powder blue cushion with three white butterflies embroidered on it. She was coloring in a coloring book. A chapter book was on her night table. I sat down at the foot of her bed.
“How´re you doing?” I asked.
“I´m o.k.” She didn´t look o.k. I looked around, stared at the pretty butterfly wallpaper for a full minute. And then, I remembered.

I remembered a sunny, crisp fall day at the American School in Mexico City. I´m in my high school classroom, which was the third and top floor of the high school building. I´m leaning back on my chair, watching the clock as the teacher drones on. Suddenly someone points to the windowed wall that overlooks the high school soccer field and says:
“Look! Over there!”

It´s a grassy, dandelion dotted field, part of the huge campus of the American School that houses four buildings: High School/Jr. High, Elementary/Kindergarten, Cafeteria and the Library. On the horizon you can see Popocatepetl and Ixtazihuatl (Popo and Itzy), the two famous snow-capped volcanoes that have their own Aztec legend. You can count on them. They´re always there, watching over Mexico City and the American School. The sky is bright blue with snowy white clouds and the leaves are changing color. Mexico City in the 1950´s.

Someone else says: “Oh, how adorable!”

There on the soccer field is five year old Alice. Blonde curls, big brown eyes and red-rosy cheeks with two big dimples when she smiles. She´s holding a huge butterfly net attached to a very long pole. She´s flying and stumbling across the soccer field, chasing little white butterflies to her hearts delight! She´s running and laughing, then falling and getting up again and starting over.
Every so often she catches one and then ever so gently she sets it free. It´s hard to tell who´s having more fun, Alice or the butterflies!?

“Can´t catch a butterfly!” they seem to be saying. When she stops running to catch her breath, they stop and hover around her. Then off they all go again. By now the whole classroom is at the windowed wall.

“Who is that child and what is she doing here?” The teacher asked.
“That´s my sister” I explained with pride, “She goes to the kindergarten here. Her
teacher must have let her out to play in the kindergarten schoolyard and probably doesn´t realize how far she´s drifted off!”
My teacher excused me from class so I could walk Alice back to the kindergarten.
She wanted to be sure that Alice wasn´t lost. She wasn´t lost.
“I´m just chasing butterflies!” she said, “I like them.”

From that day on it would happen every so often for the rest of the school year. My classroom got so used to seeing Alice out there chasing butterflies, they didn´t even look up. Everyone knew that she was safe and knew her way back.

I stopped staring at the wallpaper and looked at Alice.
“I love your wallpaper,” I said.
“I do too.”
“You know”, I said, “it´s no accident that this butterfly wallpaper wound up in your bedroom.”
“Really”?
“Really! Remember when you were in kindergarten, how you used to love to chase
butterflies and how even when you got bigger, on the first day of butterfly season you would go look for them on the soccer field? “
“I do remember that!” she said with wonder. Either she was surprised that I remembered or she was surprised to remember something that had happened so long ago. When you´re seven years old, five years old is a very long time ago.
“Well! I said, “They went looking for you!”
Alice sat up straight from coloring, smiled a little crooked smile and positioned herself against her pillows to get ready for a story.

I told her a story about how the butterflies went looking for her at the American School in Mexico. When they saw she wasn´t there, they figured out how they could find out where she moved to. They hovered outside the principal´s office window and listened. It worked. They heard the principal tell the school secretary Alice´s new address so school records could be sent.

“When they heard that you had moved to New York, well that was too far away for those little white butterflies to fly to. They knew you must be homesick and they wanted to cheer you up. In fact, their New York cousins sent them a message via thinklish or butterfly telepathy (Alice giggled). Here´s what they said about you:
“Sad and sighs, sad and sighs. Sometimes rubs her eyes and cries. Doesn´t know how or where to go-go. Wishes she was home in Mexico-co.”

Alice´s chin trembled. I don´t like it here!” she said. “Everyone is mean and they think I´m from outer space!”
“They´re not mean.” I said. “They just aren´t sure how to make friends with you because you have had different experiences then they have. Show them that you´re fun to know. Laugh with them when you make a mistake. See the humor in it. Honestly, make one good friend and New York will feel like home.”

I said to myself: “Good stuff, maybe l should take my own advice.”

“So anyway, the butterflies came up with a plan. Using thinklish, they sent thoughts to an artist in Mexico to paint a beautiful butterfly design. In fact they posed for him. Then using thinklish again, they put the idea in his head to sell the design to an American wallpaper company. THEN, they put the idea in our mother´s head to get butterfly wallpaper for you! Sure enough, she picked out the paper they had posed for! Believe me, it was no easy trick for them to get her to pick the right one! Finally she picked the right one and ordered 12 rolls of wallpaper for your bedroom!”

“So, you see, they wanted you to have this beautiful wallpaper, and it was hard work for them to make it happen! They wanted you to have a little piece of home with you so you would never feel lonely or strange again.”

Then Alice, with big teary eyes, smiled that big dimpled smile again, on those flushed, red-rosy cheeks. She threw her arms around me right there, sitting on her bed, and we both hugged really tight for very long. We hugged and rocked and we both felt so much better. In fact, from that day on everything really started to get better for both of us!

Soon Alice had three best friends, and a cat named Pancha. She had a love for reading. Her teachers loved her. She had her own library card and could walk to the library by herself. It made her feel independent and grown up. I went off to college and made wonderful friends and sent her a funny stuffed animal that she loved. I didn´t send her letters; I should have. I regret that I didn´t make myself more available to her when I went away to college. But at least I took time out that day I told her the butterfly story.

I like to think that having a little piece of ‘home’ in her room gave her comfort and the courage to get on with her life. Heck, even a goldfish needs some seaweed when you put him in a new fish bowl.

So, when I read about the Aztecs I just had to wonder. There have been a few butterflies in my life! Do I believe those butterflies were the souls of our ancestors, coming down to play with Alice when she was a tiny tot and then coming to her aid (and mine?) in New York? Or was that the soul of my father sharing a moment with me that day at the cul de sac? Nah! Sheer whimsy. But…really, who´s to say?