Butter Laocoon
At her little retirement party Cecilia McGill was all smiles. Her sister, Carol, brought a pecan pie with a crumble crust and her best friend and ex-roommate from college, Bethany, gave her an embroidered pillow and green and blue and green afghan she made over the summer. It was October and the air was dry and the crickets waned in the evening. Cecilia felt as if everything was in transition into some concluding period of her life.
She felt healthy and happy and fine, but then suddenly antiquarian and brittle. Several friends from the office were nice enough to make the drive across Kittletown to her house nestled back in the woods near Hazel Creek. Thirty-two years of government service (accountant for the Department of Sanitation)—time for something different. Time to do the dawdling things she liked most of all. Time to immerse herself in little activities. All the walks and books she ignored for years; now she could catch up. Anything but stare at the computer screen e-mailing invoices and constructing spread sheets. However, mostly Cecilia had a plan.
She could taste the salty butter on her lips, feel its cool surfaces.
During the last year of her government job Cecilia began thinking ahead. She invested in an out-building near the old mill and gutted it. She purchased the walk-in refrigerators on auction and had them installed by the Miller Brothers, her ex-husband’s old go-tos. The sculptures were more difficult, because most artists had no way of preserving them after the state fair or harvest festival or local event that called for their handiwork. Even the most talented lacked large-scale refrigeration. This is why the sculptors created most of their works in winter. By spring, knowing that the temperatures would soon be over forty, families began using the art for other purposes—cakes, bread, sautéing. Utility ruled. Use it or lose it.
Cecilia was realistic. She knew it was a wacky idea, but as far as she knew, there was no other Butter Sculpture Museum in the country. It would be a complete novelty. As a result, she would have zero competition and unlimited freedom. Having already purchased the building outright, her only real overhead would be utilities, plus perhaps an employee, if she could afford one. She thought this thing through.
Cecilia commissioned an artsy-but-sensible wooden sign for the museum with curlicues and flourishes. The sculptures trickled in and she had them tastefully installed with wooden bases, several in each refrigerated unit. Cecilia was particularly delighted she was able to land Butter Marilyn Monroe—one of the very first butter sculptures that she fell in love with as a young girl. She rounded it out with Butter Monkeys Swinging from the Tree, Butter Pope Francis, Butter Seven Dwarves, Butter Poodle, Butter Titanic, Butter Farrah Fawcett (complete with butter bangs) and the coup de grace, Butter George W. Bush Leg-Wrestling Butter Donald Trump. She had a feeling that one would pull in the crowds. Not huge crowds, she knew, but some crowds. After Cecilia arranged placards next to each sculpture identifying title and artist, all she had to do was open up the doors, relax and collect the five-dollar entry fee (flat—no discount to senior citizens or minors) and close up after all visitors left. The best part: not a single sculpture was overtly expensive—the delivery fee was as much as the sculpture itself in most cases. The artists exclaimed they were stunned that she was supporting them.
At the grand opening twenty Kittletowners showed up and drank glasses of Bordeaux and ate from the small plates and toasted the new museum (on her dime). This was good PR, she thought, and the Kittletown Weekly showed up and covered the event and ran a nice little piece in the Arts and Style section. That was a comfort to Cecilia. This was not a big risk for her, she knew; she could always resell the out-building, even for a profit. Mostly, the Butter Sculpture Museum was an investment of time and energy. She had faith in her town. It was artsy—much funkier than people realized. Many houses featured paintings in the lobby or ironwork sculptures in the backyard or at bare minimum they did it up for the holidays. Though Kittletown had a streak of aesthetic conservativism (the historic district, for instance), over the past several decades Cecilia noticed an opening up, a kind of renaissance (though was there an original artistic movement to re-enervate?). Now there were a few galleries, rogue mosaics and murals in back alleys. There was talk of sculptures in Marxin Park. She believed in her hometown and its people, even though perhaps this, at times, left her looking like a fool. She loved it there, despite or perhaps because of its quaintness. Cecilia possessed a certain faith in humanity, usually. She knew they would appreciate what Cecilia loved—the carefully wrought butter creations made by the best butter sculptors in the world.
When Cecilia gave (very occasional) tours of her museum she made sure to mention the time she spent creating her own masterpiece, The Butter Laocoon. This was after many lesser creations, she admitted. However, unfortunately, The Butter Laocoon was long ago melted, she admitted. All that was left were several photographs of the creation. She displayed these proudly, though quietly, near the restroom. Cecilia happily explained the process—building the framework and then slathering it with butter soaked in ice water and using a putty knife, tallow tools, and a shoehorn to make the figure. For the finer points Cecilia explained that she had a favorite fingernail clipper that she only used for butter sculpture—nothing else. She had to keep her hands cold—that was the hard part. She used dishwashing gloves, often. Sometimes she wrapped her fingers in plastic baggies inside the dishwashing gloves.
The few children whose parents brought them to the building were very curious at the process, and this made Cecilia wonder if she shouldn’t create a “hands on” station where children could make their own butter sculpture. That might be a draw. The problem, however, was that the station would have to be inside one of the refrigeration units and she wasn’t sure if children, or their parents, would want to be so cold for that long.
Her version of Laocoon was a direct imitation of the Greek Laocoon and His Sons, with nearly, Cecilia hoped, as much detail. The hours she spent refining the lines in the Laocoon’s furrowed brow and his eyebrows and the difficulty of the winding serpents and the feet of the sons, moments before they are fatally bitten. Butter sculpture is perhaps the most underrated genre—it should be considered high art, like marble sculpture, but unfortunately it is too often confined to carnivals and fairgrounds. It was the material, the ephemeral, edible material. Cecilia documented the form well with her photography, but nothing could quite capture the presence of the original. All those pounds of butter, all that time—now simply another two-dimensional image, a fading image at that.
After several months the museum attendance could only manage to pull in a few people a day. It was distressing to Cecilia, even though she knew she wasn’t in it for the money. She did want to show off these beautiful artistic creations to visitors, however. She wanted to educate, to inspire the future butter sculptors of the world. She feared her work was for naught. “Sugar,” she said. “Sugar.” Cecilia closed the museum for several days for construction and added a wall of historical insight. On various butter yellow panels Cecilia explained the interesting history of butter sculpture. It began, the panels stated, with Tibetan Buddhists and their tradition of carving yak butter for the New Year. How unlikely a genesis story. The peak of the butter sculpture in popular culture, perhaps, was the Renaissance. When Pope Pius the V commissioned Bartolomeo Scappi to carve nine scenes out of food—three of the nine were carved out of butter—an elephant, a Moor on a camel and Hercules fighting a lion. Fancy banquet centerpieces were all the rage and a butter sculptor then could perhaps make a living on his art alone. The Prince of Wales was depicted in two butter sculptures and latter butter sculptures became a staple of state fairs everywhere. Famously, Caroline Shawk Brooks created a relief butter sculpture called Dreaming Iolanthe—the butter sculpture equivalent of The Mona Lisa.
When Cecilia reopened the Butter Sculpture Museum she directed both paying customers to the butter sculpture history. Two, there were only two.
She talked to her cousin Al that morning about ways in which to improve attendance. Al the salesman of the family. Al the man with a plan. Even though Al was in prison for eighteen months for public masturbation—an egregiously long time, in Cecilia’s view—he knew all about the Internet and social media and how to best spread the word about this and that. Cecilia had no idea.
“Can I hire you to assist me? I really could use it.”
“Forget that. I will help you for free. Would you just mind if I just slept in the lobby there?” Al explained that his landlord was in the process of evicting him and he hadn’t been able to set up an alternative situation yet.
Cecilia knew he just momentarily forgot where he was—that could happen to anyone. He imagined he was in a film, he explained, a kind of erotic 3-D production where the actresses were right there swooshing by and he just couldn’t help himself. He meant no harm at all.
Al created a Facebook page and Twitter and Instagram accounts, and he began posting images of the museum and of several butter sculptures— “but don’t give it all away,” Cecilia pleaded. “I want them to come physically to the museum, not see it all on their computer. Just a teaser.”
“Fair enough.”
Al read on Yelp that some attendees found the museum to be too cold, overly dispassionate—like a freezer. They noted that they understood the difficult mechanics; it just made for a difficult experience.
“Give it some time,” Al said. “They will visit. They will be here. Look at how great this place is.”
And then, one day, a school bus arrived out of the blue—thirty-five children and three adult chaperones. There was no warning.
“We have been eyeballing this little trip for a long time,” one of the teachers said. She explained that they were on their way to Mount Piney, two hours west.
Cecilia offered a free tour, but the chaperones mentioned they just hoped the children could see the sculptures—their time was limited. Still, Cecilia celebrated that night with a glass of pinot grigio. She watered the plants and snuggled with her three cats and fed her hamster and slept well. She felt wanted and needed. This retirement thing took some getting used to—she knew that.
For weeks after that, hardly a single person visited the museum. By the third week after the school bus drop-in, Cecilia checked the ledger and only nine visitors came by, and one was her aunt and another was her aunt’s friend and two were her neighbors. This was not looking good. It was July though, so perhaps everyone was on vacation. Perhaps it was just a lull. That could be it. However, the electric bill was six hundred dollars, and the water bill was two hundred. Though the entrance fees helped, it was certainly a losing proposition. Not enough incoming, too much outgoing.
“We need to ramp up the promotional efforts,” she told Al. They hit the streets one Sunday, canvassing local neighborhoods. A few people expressed interest. That was better than nothing.
But Cecilia could see it: the museum was dying a slow death. By August, the average number of attendees was five a week. By September it was four a week. This was frustrating. Cecilia thought by September people would be in the educational spirit again, ready to learn something new. But they weren’t knocking on her door. “Butter sculpture is misunderstood,” Cecilia told one visitor, apropos of nothing. “It’s a real art, as legitimate as marble sculpture really, if you think about it. Perhaps even more difficult. Nobody cares. Nobody knows a fourth of what goes into top-tier butter sculpturing. Sugar! Instead, everybody knows about Tiger Woods and Tom Brady. And when have they made a decent butter sculpture? Never, not that I know of.”
When the guest eyeballed Al, he shrugged in partial sympathy.
By October Cecilia celebrated the one-year anniversary of her retirement, and she also knew that the Butter Sculpture Museum was over. Perhaps if it could be relocated to New York or Chicago she’d have a chance, but in a town with a population under 10,000, it wasn’t going to happen. Or perhaps if she had a degree in marketing and could find a way to entice every person in Kittletown to attend, maybe then she would have a chance. She was okay with the decision, as difficult as it was. She gave it the old college try.
The next day she let Al know, and by that point he had found a permanent efficiency—so there was no guilt there. There were only three visitors that week.
On Sat., October 17th Cecilia taped the unfortunate announcement of closure on the door of the museum. She turned off the refrigeration units, locked the doors and drove home.
In the morning, she returned to the museum and puddles of butter were everywhere, and all that remained of the sculptures were the wood skeletons. She should have resold the sculptures, she knew, but she was done with the hassle. She had zero desire to even cogitate about it any longer. She found the name of a cleaning company—and told them that there were some larger items. “Feel free to charge me extra for hauling them away or call a junk company. I don’t care,” she said. By the end of the week, she had the out-building cleaned out, minus the sign, which remained. A week later the building was listed for sale. A month later it was sold and two months after that converted to an antique store.
Cecilia found ways to entertain herself on her new smart phone. She played Words With Friends with Kelvin from Savannah, Georgia. She had never met Kelvin but he seemed like a spirited guy and his lexicon was impressive. She was considering starting another game—this time with a woman named Vickie from Florida. If the excitement doesn’t work out, she thought, there were other slower activities to occupy time. She could read magazines, piece together jig-saw puzzles.
© Nathan Leslie
Nathan Leslie won the 2019 Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize for fiction for his collection of short stories, Hurry Up and Relax. He is the author of fourteen books including Invisible Hand, A Fly in the Ointment (2023), Sibs, and The Tall Tale of Tommy Twice. His latest novel is Van Boyle, published this fall. He is also the author of a collection of poems, Night Sweat.
The Loch Raven Review 