How to Make an American Quilt Read online

  But Anna said to her daughter, “You don’t know everything,” and came and did the laundry until Glady Joe was up and around again. Not before Anna stood nose to nose with Hy and said, “If you hate these rooms, you have only yourself to blame.” Then went about her work.

  ARTHUR CLEARY, Glady Joe’s husband, died a few years after Hy’s beloved James passed on. Glady Joe seemed scarcely to grieve at all, which unnerved many of the quilters. “So life goes on,” was all Glady Joe said, and Anna would defend her, quietly saying, “No one knows how another person feels in private.” Everyone in the circle suspected that Anna knew something the rest of them did not. Hy was protective and nervous around her sister, though they could still be seen walking around Grasse together or sitting on the porch during the long summer afternoons, undone by the heat and drinking iced whiskey drinks.

  Glady Joe and Arthur Cleary had more of a truce than a marriage; somewhere in the seasonless landscape of their middle age they finally came to the conclusion that they were never meant to be lovers, despite the warmth of their friendship. For so long they kept a polite, kind distance from one another, trying and failing at physical intimacy, never quite making contact. It was as if they were stranded in a foreign country and not only were ignorant of the local language, but spoke different dialects of their own, native language. Using the same words, but ascribing different meanings.

  There was no thought of divorce because, well, they rather liked each other. And there were the children to consider (evidence that they had really, really tried, hadn’t they?). Frankly, their marriage took on a curious permutation following this discovery of their sad incompatibility, and it drew them closer. They simply shifted their expectations, made them more manageable or “realistic,” as Glady Joe liked to say. They were almost always seen together and were socially popular because other married couples found it so inexplicably pleasant to be around them, to bask in the genuine affection and camaraderie of their company.

  They would arrive at someone’s house, sit close to each other on the sofa; sometimes share a gin and tonic rather than have drinks of their own. People remarked that if only they could have a marriage like the Clearys’ they would gladly sacrifice some small thing. Just to see what it felt like, being married to someone of whom you were so wonderfully fond.

  Late at night, Glady Joe and Arthur laughed at the remarks made by their friends earlier in the evening. “Do you really think they would want to be so like us if they knew the truth about our lives?” asked Arthur.

  “ ‘Be careful what you wish for’—that’s the saying, isn’t it?” Glady Joe said with a smile as she removed the small amount of makeup she wore for these evenings together.

  “Well, yes,” said Arthur, running his hands through his still-thick hair. Sometimes—it almost felt like unholy vanity—he stared for long periods of time in the mirror, coming away with a sense of his own attractiveness: his figure broader than in his youth and certainly the slack of his jawline a product of his years, his hands not too terribly spotted, but the face still nice-looking, still curiously “boyish.” I’ve seen women looking at me, he comments to himself.

  Arthur rose, taking his loafers in hand, and padded in his stocking feet toward the door, toward his bedroom. (“It’s because of the snoring,” they explain to anyone rude enough to ask; “I don’t have to tell you,” Glady Joe adds.) “Well, well,” he said, kissed his wife good-night, added, “In case you have a heart attack before we next meet.” Arthur and Glady Joe used to say that jokingly to each other in the early years of their marriage, instead of saying “Hey, where’s my kiss?” or “Didn’t you forget something?” The black humor of it appealed to them, but now that they were older, it often startled Glady Joe—both to hear it and to say it to Arthur.

  “Sweetie,” said Glady Joe, looking up at Arthur from her vanity, her hand lingering in his for a long moment. She looked into his face and was unexpectedly saddened by the thought of a life without him.

  DESPITE THEIR ARRANGEMENT, Arthur still has flashes of desire for his wife. He thought it would pass entirely with the passing of his youth, that he would cease to want to hold her close or would be content with an affectionate but sexless friendship, that he would no longer want to give her pleasure. Oh, most of the time he was in agreement that theirs was an association of comrades and not lovers, but there were still those times when he would laugh at some funny thing she said to their friends or inadvertently funny thing she said to their children; or see her in those crappy gardening clothes that carried the subtle scent of cow dung, yanking weeds or tilling the soil; or maybe it would hit him as he watched her dressing for an evening out, anointing the hollow between her breasts with Shalimar before dropping her dress over her head (careful not to muss her hair), turning her back to him, saying, “Sweetie, come zip me up.”

  The unfairness of his desire for her was that it would assail him at any random moment. Arthur punched his pillow and tossed in bed; he could not get comfortable or stop remembering the smell of Shalimar, so named for the garden at Taj Mahal—one lovesick husband’s monument to his absent wife.

  ARTHUR DROVE HY to the hospital. James Dodd, her much adored husband, was ill with a wasting disease. First, he was confined to a wheelchair, joking and putting others at ease by explaining that it was “just a temporary thing,” which it wasn’t. He said it was “fairly easy to adjust to,” which it wasn’t. Especially in a place like Grasse, small and nonprogressive, the handicap reforms still away in the future. James told their friends that “these wheels make it easier for me to chase Hy around the house.” Hy and James could be seen moving down Main Street, shopping or going for milk shakes. Sometimes Hy walked by his side; other times they stopped in the park, with Hy sitting on his lap, sucking the ice cream through a straw, her arm around his neck. During holidays they decorated his chair with silk maple leaves in autumn colors or skeletons or black cats or streamers of green crepe paper and holiday wreaths.

  At New Year’s, they invited Glady Joe and Arthur Cleary, Corrina and Jack Amurri, Dean and Em Reed, and the Richardses for a fancy sit-down dinner. “I requested that it be sit-down,” said James. For dessert, they served something called swan dreams, which consisted of meringue “swans” swimming in a dish of liquid, buttery custard and sprinkled with gold glitter (some of which was shining in unexpected glints off the Dodds’ happy faces).

  But all this was before James was hospitalized. His disease remained quiet during the fall and winter holidays, then, as if it made its own New Year’s resolution, continued its course in January, and James began to lose the use of his left hand. The worst aspect of this illness, besides the obvious fatal one, was that it systematically rendered his body useless, yet all his nerve endings remained intact and sensitive. He could feel but he could not move.

  It was not long before he was confined to his bed and sometimes, as Hy sat close to him or lay beside him, she could hear him crying. “Hy,” he wept, “I’m not ready—it’s over too soon.” Other days: “Jesus, I’m only fifty-two,” a statement that struck her as both accusation and prayer. Hy refused to cry (in fact, her sorrow seemed to her so profound that it was deeper than tears), though Em Reed, one of the quilters, told her that if she didn’t express her sadness it would make her “sick inside.”

  Now it was the beginning of an extremely hot summer, with people walking around Grasse and Bakersfield saying things like, “Yes, but it’s a dry heat,” as if that were supposed to make it somehow more bearable. Arthur would drive over to Hy’s to find her at the curb like a child awaiting her mother or a playmate, her skirt pulled modestly around her ankles, her expression distracted and somehow sweet. He told her, “Just wait inside where it’s cool—I’ll come and get you,” but she would shake her head and tell him, “I’m too restless to wait.” Which struck Arthur as decidedly illogical, but he said nothing.

  Sometimes, as he sat beside her in the car, he would marvel at how alike she and Glady Joe were, physically.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could almost mistake one for the other, but looked at straight on, he could see that Hy took a little more care with her appearance, was without the more conservative aspects of Glady Joe, was slightly more stylish. They seemed to be aging in exactly the same way and at roughly the same rate, their figures subtly thickening around the middle, their legs still “good.”

  Hy carried the scent of musk, moistened and released by her perspiration. The air-conditioning dried and cooled her perfumed skin, which Arthur admitted he found seductive. Which led to shame and guilt.

  But he began to live for the days they spent driving to the hospital, her musky odor filling the car.

  Hy hummed along with the radio, sometimes singing in a high voice that occasionally found its key, then promptly lost it. Songs with words like “till then, my darling, until then” or about “someone’s laugh that is the same” or watching out the window as she sang about “the thrill of being sheltered in your arms.”

  “Don’t they break your heart?” Arthur blurted out one day, listening to yet another toneless rendition of yet another torch song.

  “Yes,” she said, “as a matter of fact they do.”

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Hy sits near the window watching James sleep. He breathes loudly, with difficulty, and she wracks her brain to locate the genesis of the place where she now finds herself. When did these troubles begin? The doctors themselves have no understanding of this illness, though they have seen it before. They asked, Have you ever been to a South Sea island? Had a blood transfusion? Swam freely in an area of questionable purity? Any family history of muscle or nerve disorders? Lived in any exotic locales?

  Only here, she answered, in Grasse, this California farm belt. She resisted the impulse to add, But I’ve always felt so out of place here, as if this were the location most foreign to my life. The strangest place I could have chosen.

  Well, said the doctors, what about pesticides?

  At which point she informed them that her husband was not now and never was a farmer; he was a man of finance.

  Ah huh, they said.

  She wanted to say, James and I thought of living elsewhere, places we visited, and fed each other strange culinary delicacies made from the organ meat of animals or almost unpronounceable leafy vegetables and herbs—unusual mixes of sweet and bitter with nuts and white roots. We sat in an English café, outside, only to be told later that it was a “pub garden.” James passed wine from his mouth into mine. Christ, what awful wine the English drink. We were told not to drink our beer cold, but warm. In the Middle East we were kept from entering sacred monuments because our legs were bare; in Rome, we were again kept out because our shoulders and my head were uncovered. In northern Africa we smiled freely at strangers, only to be scolded in their native tongue at our American rudeness.

  Still, we promised ourselves that we would return and live abroad, perhaps Europe or Africa, but we never did. We were so out of sync with the local customs, like drinking cold beer in England or not understanding the language in Morocco, that we thought, if we are going to be outsiders, then why not just settle down at home, in Grasse?

  Hy smiles to herself as she recalls how she and James would discuss the local occurrences in Grasse or Bakersfield, with all the wonder of itinerant travelers who were only passing through and happened to find themselves here.

  Hy brushes her hair from her forehead, catches a whiff of her perfume as it passes her face. James sighs in his sleep; his “good” hand moves at his side. He is nothing, she thinks, but a prisoner awaiting his own death. She has to lean close to him these days in order to hear him speak.

  Suddenly, she jumps up from her chair. In the middle of all her drifting and meandering thoughts came this one: I want him to die. I want this to be over and done with, and she is even more surprised to realize that this declaration is not accompanied by compassion but by anger and impatience. She grabs her purse and rushes from the room. She cannot even kiss James goodbye; she does not have the right to stay in this room or touch him. She needs to be touched.

  IN THE HALLWAY she tries to get Glady Joe on the phone, but there is no answer and she ends up calling Arthur’s office. He says, Of course I’ll come and get you. Say, you aren’t…James hasn’t…

  No, no, says Hy. Just come.

  She yanks the car door open before Arthur has brought the car to a complete stop and hurls herself into the seat. Crosses her arms like an unhappy, disappointed teenager, then begins to weep with loud, unrestrained sobs and tears that seem to fall two at a time from each eye (eyes like Glady Joe’s, thinks Arthur, eyes like my wife’s). Her foot bangs against the underside of the glove compartment and she commands Arthur to “drive out of town and let me out.”

  “Hy,” says Arthur, “let me take you home.”

  “No,” she screams, “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.”

  Arthur quickly cranks the wheel and heads toward the outskirts. He silently curses Glady Joe; they had an arrangement—Glady Joe would pick Hy up from the hospital—yet here he was.

  “And don’t even think about stopping until we are a million billion miles from here. Until we’re out in the middle of goddamn nowhere.”

  “Hy,” Arthur begins.

  “Don’t even try,” she whispers hoarsely, “don’t even try to comfort me or understand me or anything with me. Do it and I’ll hate you until I die. I promise. I will despise you.”

  They find themselves on Highway 99, passing towns so small they are scarcely towns, and acres of fields, some planted soon to be harvested, some fallow. Hy’s mascara stains her cheeks, leaves long rivulets of black from her eyes to her jawline. “Stop,” she orders, as they reach a town called Sula that boasts a general store, coffee shop, gas station, and some sorry-looking rental cabins. As she reaches for the door handle to get out, Arthur puts his hand on her arm in restraint. Her head snaps toward him (he could swear her teeth were bared), with feral eyes and jaw muscles working, clenching and unclenching.

  Arthur quickly releases her arm, as if shocked by electricity. “I was only going to say that you might want to check your face before you go in.” He is angry now. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

  Hy flips down the sun visor and begins fixing her face in the mirror.

  “I’m sorry that James is sick, Hy. I know it’s terrible, but you aren’t the only one who is losing somebody. You aren’t the only one who suffers.”

  Spitting on a tissue, Hy scrubs the black trails of her tears. She keeps her eye on her reflection and says nothing to Arthur.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do. I don’t know what to say.” He looks at his watch. “Look, I have to call Glady Joe,” and storms out of the car.

  HE RETURNS to find Hy drinking a soda from the bottle, eyes free of makeup traces and closed. She hands him the bottle and he, too, takes a long swallow. “Arthur,” she says as her head falls back against the top of the car seat, “I’m so very tired.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “Can we just lie down somewhere? Before we go back? If I could just get some sleep somewhere for a few minutes, I’ll be fine. I’ll be okay.”

  Arthur turns the key in the ignition and tells her to “relax—by the time we reach home, you’ll have had a nice nap,” but Hy shakes her head. “No,” she tells him, “I can’t sleep at home. I can’t rest knowing we are heading back. Ah, find me a great, shady tree and leave me there. Just for a few minutes.” She closes her eyes as he slowly pulls the car back to the road.

  IT’S LUCKY that he and Glady Joe always keep that ratty old blanket in the trunk of the car. It looks even more pathetic lying underneath Hy, who is sleeping as if drugged: motionless, careless. Arthur lies beside her, looking up into the branches of this golden oak. They are in the middle of an isolated cluster of oaks that he located near the highway on the side of a grassy, sloping hill. Away from the sounds of traffic. Perspiration beads on Hy’s forehead, wets the base of her throat, and intensifies her heavy perfumed odor, wh
ich is noticeable even outdoors. It is so goddamn hot and still. He wishes he had thought to buy another drink and contemplates leaving her there while he makes his way back to Sula for another soda. He’d be gone only a few minutes, but what if she awakened and found herself alone? The picture of Hy as she looks when she waits for him on the curb in front of her house crosses his mind and he imagines her waking up, her face flushed from sleep and heat, whimpering because he is gone and she doesn’t know where. He knows she would cry a child’s sad cry of abandonment and not a grown woman’s anxious sob.

  Arthur’s hands feel sticky from the heat. Glady Joe promised to check in on James tonight and asked if he and Hy were coming back later or what. Did they want to stay north for the night? But he said, No, no, they’d be back. As soon as he calmed her down.

  He leans back on his elbows, bored with watching the oak leaves, dappled with sky. He turns back to Hy. Funny how she is a more dolled-up version of Glady Joe. Even stranger that neither sister impressed him as being raised in a small agricultural town like Grasse; they each carried some other quality associated with old money or extensive travel, or possessed some gene of refinement. Yes. The Refinement Gene. Maybe it is the clear beauty of their skin or their choice of clothing or the fact that their father is not a farmer.

  Now Arthur is lost in the memory of Glady Joe and how pretty and smart she was when he first found her. A little too serious, he supposed, and not conventionally pretty (though he thought her beautiful). And she was fairly well read for never having been to college. Of course, he was a college graduate, but that was more his parents’ doing than his own. Still, he was grateful. What caught his eye in regard to Glady Joe was her love of Jane Eyre. He loved Jane Eyre too. Such great friends from the start, drawn to each other by a shared love of reading and ideas, and soon he forgave his parents for moving them to this godforsaken town outside Bakersfield so late in his teenage years, because Grasse gave him Glady Joe.