Our Lady of the Lakes
Sonja Livingston
How we waited for her. How we hoped, even prayed, sometimes, to see her. But then, our greed was nothing new, especially where groceries were concerned. On shopping days, a dozen hands pawed the insides of brown paper bags, a hungry tribe touching the surface of things, blessing the potatoes with our longing, laying palms upon cartons of eggs and bags of flour—like a holiday, those shopping days to a family of seven children. The oldest or most jaded among us might make wisecracks about the generic labels or the same old sacks of rice, but it was only posturing. The giddiness infected us all, seemed to brighten the cracked kitchen linoleum and persisted beyond the unpacking of things, everything in the house becoming, for the moment, full. But even then, in the highness of those grocery days, it would have been tempting fate to expect her. It would have been wanting too much and foolish besides, because my mother usually bought off-brand, or God forbid, margarine, and so we were most often deprived of her.
Still, there were times when she’d appear in the bottom corner of a bag, hidden among canned corn or bags of puffed wheat, unexpected as a box of Pop Tarts, wondrous as sugar cereal—a package of butter with an Indian maiden kneeling in the grass, the blue of lakes and sky converging behind her, accompanied by flowers and pine trees and sometimes cows.
The design of the box changed a bit over time but the lady always wore a buckskin dress and beaded belt. Always her hair was raven and lit with a feather. Always, she held a box of sweet cream butter in her hands, offering it up with such reverence that the very idea of butter became a religious offering.
With her fair skin and rosebud mouth, she didn’t look like any Indian maiden we’d ever known, and we’d known plenty during our time on the reservation near Buffalo, large women with golden skin and smiles ten times wider than the woman kneeling in the meadow—but who could be picky where butter boxes were concerned? Maidens were big in the 70s, the culture helping itself to headbands and beadwork, but feeling progressive because, for the most part, everyone had learned not to say squaw. Other than a fascination with Mohammed Ali, the Bermuda Triangle, and the general rise in the popularity of horror films (and the related preoccupation with Ouija boards) nothing marks my childhood so much as a distorted affection for all things native.
The package was itself an artistic miracle for the way the butter the maiden held was a replica of the same carton on which she appeared, so that the entire image, maiden and lakes and pines were repeated ad infinitum; the girl and her butter box continuing forever. Still, the endless loop of butter and maiden, while captivating, was simply an added bonus; the magic of recursive packaging was not why she mattered.
The real trick was her knees. The shine of the exposed caps, the gleam of them, the way they flashed flesh and reflected light in just the right places. And more than that, the way the perfect beads of her knees provided a secret revealed only to those wise in the ways of butter packaging.
Some used a razor to cut away a square surrounding her kneecaps, a small patch of cardboard which was lifted and pasted onto the maiden’s chest. We were less brutal—not because we
were kind, but because we were children with limited access to razors, and too impatient to mess with scissors and glue. Instead, we’d slip the sticks of butter from the box as soon as we could, erupting into a fight over possession of the thin cardboard panels, eventually divvying them between the strongest siblings or cousins, then taking turns folding the package the right way, the way we’d learned to do, bringing the maiden’s knees up to her chest, the exposed kneecaps transforming into a stunning pair of breasts, the polished divots looking for all the world like perfectly bronzed nipples.
You would have thought that the secrets of the universe were being revealed for how often we bent that butter carton back and forth, hundreds of times, and as often as we could, until the crease gave way and the bottom half broke off—the maiden’s knees forever severed from the rest of her body. And it was something like magic to witness the change from butter-bearing beauty to bare-breasted woman. There was a certain thrill of turning everyday body parts into the most private body parts, and a real respect for the power of a few folds to render something as solid as butter packaging into low-grade pornography.
She was an object, Our Lady of the Lakes. Even as we coveted her image, my sisters and I knew better than to be impressed by such a Barbie doll version of a native girl (or any girl). We must have questioned the reality of someone kneeling in greenery while happily offering up her dairy and would eventually become disillusioned by the fact of women’s bodies (ankles and faces and breasts) being used to sell products since the very idea of product came into being.
Still and all, I cannot help but think of her knees (the way she knelt on them, what we did to them) every time I pass her in the grocery cooler, where all these years later, she still waits, stacked into tidy rows, smiling sweetly while holding out a box of butter and making offerings of herself for as far and as long as the eye can see.
This essay comes from Sonja Livingston’s forthcoming collection. Her memoir, Ghostbread, won the AWP Award. Essays have been honored with a Susan Atefat Prize and an Iowa Review Award. New work appears in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Arts & Letters and many others. Sonja teaches in the MFA Program in Memphis.
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