How to Make an American Quilt Read online

  It is unlikely that he would have thought to return to Grasse once he went to college if he did not know and feel a strong attraction for Glady Joe Rubens. The older half of the Flower Girls, as they were often called.

  He once asked Glady Joe if she wanted to live somewhere else, almost certain her answer would be something like “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” only she surprised him by saying, “Actually, I like living someplace where I don’t feel quite comfortable or welcome because it goads me into traveling or reading. I guess you could say that Grasse brings out the urge to ‘quest’ in me. I’m not sure I’d have that if I lived elsewhere. Any other place I may love,” she said. “I might become happy and complacent and altogether content and then where would I be?” She laid her hand flat on her chest. “I ask you, what sort of life would that be?” She struck him as so mysterious, this mix of autodidacticism and small-town loyalty. He thought if he could come to understand her that he could come to understand himself; the key to her was the key to him.

  When they had slept together a few times during a six-month period, Arthur knew he loved her. Glady Joe was not the most artful girl he had ever been intimate with (not that there had been so many, he had to admit), and there were times when the result was more frustration than satisfaction. It was evident that she was trying to please him, but there was something withholding about her when they made love. Sometimes he fought with her. And Glady Joe would look at him with a confused, open look as if she did not know exactly what she had done but it must have been something awful or he wouldn’t be so angry. Then he would take her in his arms and apologize. She said to him, “I don’t think you understand the risk I take for you.”

  If I marry her, he thought, she will change. It wasn’t as if every time they were together it was bad; maybe it was a matter of security regarding her own future.

  Hy stirs in her sleep. Arthur wonders if she always looked this peaceful when she slept. Glady Joe never did. She was serious when awake and serious when she slept. As if she could just not stop thinking about and mulling over and considering and examining the various angles of her day, her life, her children, her marriage—who knew which thought kept her so preoccupied even in slumber.

  Hy sleeps like a woman satisfied. Her limbs are loose and generous, expansively stretched. Hy sleeps as if she is casually reaching for something, while Glady Joe looks as if she already has that thing but is puzzling out the way in which to keep it with her always.

  Hy at fifty has the bloom of young womanhood off her face, but she has another, equally attractive, quality.

  Arthur feels compelled to kiss her mouth. As he bends toward her, barely touching her lips, she awakens, slides her arms around his neck, and pulls him close.

  Of course, he thinks, she smells nothing like Glady Joe’s garden scent of cut grass, flora, earth, and sky, but physically he can almost convince himself that he holds Glady Joe in his arms, so similar are their figures and lengths when held under his own body. The worn touch of the blanket against the backs of his hands as he laces his fingers through Hy’s damp, messy hair reminds him of Glady Joe; her voice, deepened by love, sounds like Glady Joe. It was Glady Joe who complemented the rhythm of his lovemaking, held her cheek to his. The fullness of Hy’s breasts and the spread of her hips recall Glady Joe. If he closes his eyes against the heat of the day beneath the golden oak, he can almost convince himself that it is his wife he holds in his arms.

  After, seated beside each other, content, Arthur leans over to kiss Hy’s throat and, working his way up to her ear, takes her dangling earring in his mouth, pulls it off. “What?” says Hy, tugging her naked earlobe between thumb and forefinger. Arthur opens his mouth, presenting the sparkling object on the soft red cushion of his tongue, as if it were a valuable gift borne up from his heart and not something so recently attached to her person.

  THE FIRST THING that strikes Glady Joe when she sees Hy and Arthur that evening is the powerful smell of Hy’s perfume in the house. It seems to drift and settle about the furniture, underneath chairs, relax in the corners of the rooms.

  “Naturally, James asked after you,” Glady Joe says, haltingly because she couldn’t seem to concentrate, “hopes you are all right. I didn’t say anything, really, just that you had to scoot out of town for something.” Glady Joe’s words drift off as she tries to focus on the distraction of her sister’s scent. It is as if Hy’s perfume has shape-shifted and is now a fourth entity in the room; as if the musk has somehow become personified. Glady Joe tells herself it is because Hy sits in such close proximity to her. But as she looks at her she sees that Hy’s lips are slightly parted, as if to make a statement or form a question or speak along on top of Glady Joe’s words. Hy’s body leans forward, drawn to her sister, her hair out of place from the windy drive home. “Really,” continues Glady Joe, “it wasn’t that easy, explaining your departure. I thought I could say anything and James would accept it.”

  Hy reclines back in her chair, the tension gone slack for a moment. “Now why, Glady Joe, would you think that?”

  Glady Joe cannot answer; her sister’s musky scent feels like an oppressive weight on her chest, a pressure on her heart.

  “For chrissake,” Hy continues, “he’s only sick, not stupid.” A sound emits from her throat, somewhere between growl and chuckle—“Only far-gone cancer patients have the luxury of being so drugged that they don’t even know what year it is.” She begins to cry softly. “My James doesn’t even have that. My James.”

  Glady Joe is moved to take Hy in her arms and comfort her, but she stops, finds herself snapping instead, “Perhaps you made that mistake when you took off down the road with my husband.” She is as shocked by what she has just said as she was to find herself unable to hold her weeping sister. At the mention of the word husband, Arthur suddenly comes to life in the room, where he is sitting some distance away from the sisters. Glady Joe finds it peculiar that Arthur appears to be linked with Hy and not herself. She shakes her head, until something else occurs to her. Rising from the chair, she stalks over to where he sits, grabs his arm, and thrusts it under her nose.

  “Glady Joe,” he says with an embarrassed, irritated laugh and tries to pull his arm away, though his wife will have none of that. Leaning into him, she sniffs him arm to shoulder, shoulder to hair. Holding herself tall, she contemptuously tosses his arm back at him, backs away from both Arthur and Hy, her eyes beginning to fill.

  “I have to go and think for a minute,” she says.

  “Honey,” says Arthur, extending his hand, which repulses Glady Joe, causes her to react as if it were some sort of danger to her, some sort of weapon—“it’s not,” he says—but Glady Joe raises her own hand and cries, “Shut up—not a word—not if you care for me at all,” and leaves the room, only later that night recalling the last thing she saw before she left was Hy’s hand at her throat and her odd look of satisfaction and regret.

  IMMEDIATELY after Glady Joe’s realization in the living room, she found she could not tolerate being near Arthur; it was as if no amount of scrubbing could wrest Hy’s musky odor from his skin. At first, Glady Joe thought it must be because he was still seeing her sister and the smell was being renewed regularly, but when he demanded that she “stop punishing” him, she knew that it was a onetime thing. Still, Glady Joe’s head was full of it.

  Oh, Arthur was brimming over with remorse that night—not actually denying what had happened—it would be too insulting to her if he had—but sidestepping the encounter entirely. It is so difficult to make apologies and promises (“I swear, this will never happen again”) when the act itself—the transgression—cannot even be broached.

  “Can’t I come in? Can’t we work this out?” he said as he stood in her bedroom doorway that night.

  “Don’t come in here, Arthur. I’m afraid of what I might do.” And when he did not leave, but remained there, silent, she said, “Are you stupid? Can’t you see that I don’t want you here?” She said “I don�
��t want you here” slowly, carefully, as if she were talking to a lesser or very young person.

  “Glady—” he began, which caused her to turn and hurl a heavy silver-backed hand mirror at him.

  “Whore!” she screamed. “Slut!” She cleared her vanity table of atomizer bottles, makeup jars, an inlaid rosewood box he had given her for their second Christmas. He dodged the beautiful box, which broke its spine against the wall behind him.

  “Have you gone crazy?” he demanded as she circled the room, searching for more missiles to launch. She would not be quieted; her only answer to any of his questions, genuine or rhetorical, was the sailing through the air of some object. “Do you want to kill me?” he hissed, as if he did not want to disturb Anna sleeping downstairs. Glady Joe, amused by this silly notion of silence, dropped her hand, which held a small porcelain bowl, ready to hurl, and said, “Yes, actually, I do.” Then threw the dish at him anyway.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” he began to repeat. “I don’t know…I can’t say…,” speaking in phrases and not sentences, and, as he began to cry, his shoulders heaving, standing still in the doorway, she said, “I hate you.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER he took a new tack, appealing to her sense of reason. “Our marriage,” he said. “You know how it’s been with us.” And used words like “lonely” or “a man’s needs” and “be fair.”

  To which Glady Joe shot back, “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends.”

  “Friends don’t betray each other,” she screamed, scanning the living room for something to throw.

  AFTER REMORSE AND REASON came pragmatism, mentioning their long marriage and what it meant.

  “You have changed what it meant. You promised, you promised to cherish me.” She turned from him, her hip pressed against the kitchen sink, watching out the window, and said quietly, “Fuck what it meant.”

  He brought her flowers, armloads of gladiolus, which she left to dry out on the dining-room table saying, “These aren’t my favorite flowers.” And when he looked confused, she reminded him, “These are your favorite flowers. We are not the same person. Don’t mix me up with you.”

  ONCE HE TOOK THE OFFENSIVE, accusing Glady Joe of “denying him,” forcing him toward “another woman,” which made her squeeze her eyes shut, the red rising to her face, saying, “Hy is not another woman—she is my sister.”

  “Don’t you see?” he asked.

  “See what?”

  “It was the closest I could get to you.”

  Which registered somehow with Glady Joe, quieted her. Made her so silent it was frightening.

  “WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” says Arthur to Glady Joe as she stands atop a small ladder in the laundry room, “is why you have never blamed Hy.”

  “What makes you think I don’t?” She does not look at her husband, who leans against the wall with crossed arms, watching her painstakingly apply fragments of porcelain to the walls in intricate patterns.

  “Because you still talk to her.”

  “I still talk to you, too.” Glady Joe, unhappy with the shape of this particular piece, exchanges it in her box for another. Soon she will run out of shards from this broken bowl and will have to find something else—maybe those remnants from the vase she broke the second night of her fury at Arthur.

  “This is really creepy, you know,” says Arthur, jerking his chin in the direction of the wall that Glady Joe is decorating. “Couldn’t you just toss that stuff out? Couldn’t you just let Anna get rid of it?”

  “Arthur,” sighs Glady Joe, then repeats “Arthur,” but says nothing more to him. She wants to say, Arthur, I am not the kind of person who throws away something because it is broken. I would not waste what could still be of use. (Quilts are comprised of spare time as well as excess material.)

  She applies more glue to the back of a piece of glass, affixes it to the wall. Since she began this project, a week after the throwing frenzy, she has felt a sense of purpose and calm, as if this is the only way she can somehow go on with her life—transforming these pieces of junk, swept up from her bedroom and bathroom floors, into art. Anna whistled at the extent of the damage done over a couple of days. She bent over to clean up the mess that had once been figurines, vases, small dishes and bowls, picture frames, boxes, even the tiny clay animals Francie and Kayo had made in grade school—all of which had been laid to waste—these shattered markers of the Cleary marriage; their life together as one.

  THE WALLS BEGAN to look like three-dimensional Persian rugs. It took a good length of time to complete the laundry room, and Glady Joe ran out of materials. So she turned to bright bits of glass, beads, shells. Pieces of tile. Then made her move to the back den. She had not intended to go this far; actually, she did not know what to expect when she began the project, she only knew that it helped to hold her fractured life together. She was careful to close the door when the quilting circle met at her house. The women of the circle could sense a coolness between Hy and Glady Joe, but they thought it had something to do with James’s illness and his nearness to death. If that can’t affect your personality, they reasoned, nothing can.

  When Hy visits, she stands outside the doors of these rooms, usually in a stance of her arms holding each other, in an embrace of self. She rarely says anything directly about the rooms—though Glady Joe occasionally wishes she would so she could lash out something hurtful at her, about her being responsible, and so on—instead, she takes on an air of concession.

  Once Hy said, “It’s just that the effect is so—” She searched for the correct word. “So what?” demanded Glady Joe. “I don’t know,” said Hy, “busy or aggressive or…I don’t know.” Dropped her eyes to the floor.

  YEARS LATER, this is what Glady Joe will tell Finn as she walks beside her on the campus of the midwestern college Finn attends, while Hy naps in the soon-to-be-vacated apartment. Finn had just completed her spring term when her grandmother and great aunt decided to visit. And, of course, there is the little matter of their pot supply.

  Glady Joe is explaining what happened, all those years ago, when Finn’s grandfather was dying and Glady Joe was crazy from betrayal and looking for blood.

  “I decided,” she says, “to go to the hospital and tell James about Hy and Arthur. May he rest in peace. I thought, I’ll bring him ice cream—his favorite, pralines and cream, and he will look up, happy to see me, trusting (no one should be so trusting, I thought), and I will sit on the bed, take his still good hand…no, I will stand at the foot and look him in the eye…no, better to pull up a chair and say something like, ‘James, you and I are so much alike. Foolish and trusting. I always liked you tremendously and I think my sister was fortunate to have you for a husband’—I thought, oh, god, what if he whispers in that difficult way of his that he loves Hy too?—‘but here’s the thing—she isn’t worthy of you. She cannot be trusted not to hurt those who trust her. I know she’s a goddamn “people person,” but maybe all that means is that you see them as some sort of highly evolved pets that you can love or abandon as you desire. She abandoned you, James. We are so joined by her; she abandoned us both.’ ”

  “Jesus, Aunt Glady,” says Finn.

  “I thought, Let the man die enlightened. Let him carry this burden of knowledge beside me. I was crazy, Finn—I would’ve done anything.

  “But when I got to the hospital, with the pralines and cream, I looked in to see Hy curled in bed beside James—they really did adore one another, you know, your grandparents—she was stroking his cheek and whispering, ‘You were always so clean-shaven during our marriage, so properly groomed, but I rather like you like this. So bohemian. I always thought you had the itch to be bohemian.’

  “James’s words were soft because the disease affected his lung and throat muscles. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I heard him say.

  “ ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever be sorry. It is pointless. I don’t want to talk about regret. I want to tell you how I love you.’ And I got to t
hinking of something I read somewhere which said that, after everything in our lives—after all we do or say or hope for—all that will be left finally, is love.

  “There I was, eavesdropping in the hall, only partially recovered from what had happened between Hy and Arthur, still a little crazy—but I knew I could not do it. I could not. I came to hate myself for thinking that I could. I came to understand that betrayal cuts both ways. It would not have changed anything and, besides, I thought of what Hy was going through and the loss she was feeling and how I felt when I found out about her and Arthur and the loss I felt. And then there is the matter of blood.

  “I stepped away from the door and walked down the corridor, even though the ice cream was melting. I needed to collect myself. Then I went back to his room, where we all ate from the carton, Hy spooning it into James’s mouth since he could not do it for himself. I thought about family. I thought about forgiveness.”

  Glady Joe asks Finn if they can rest for a moment.

  Sure, she tells her, knowing that she needs to ask about staying with them for the summer, something that she only this moment decided to do. Finds a bench where they can sit.

  ALL THIS HAPPENED two weeks before James Dodd passed away. Before Glady Joe came into the room with the melting ice cream, James said to Hy, “Miss me?”

  “Terribly,” she answered.

  “The hell of it,” he said slowly, with great effort, “is that when you touch me like this, I can’t touch you back. I can feel you but I can’t touch you.” He was exhausted by what he had just said.