How to Make an American Quilt Page 5

  Hy wanted to cry because she knew that what he described was how she would feel about him after he died—that she would live the rest of her life able to feel him, his presence in her life, but not touch him.

  “Do you want me to adjust your feet?” she asked. James nodded.

  “So irritating,” he whispered.

  Then she was startled by the sound of Glady Joe entering the room. Hy thought her sister looked like a woman with a purpose, and was suddenly afraid.

  She watched Glady Joe lean into James to kiss him and receive a kiss. She saw her settle on the bed beside him. “My favorite,” he said when she handed Hy a spoon for the ice cream. They began to chat easily, and Hy felt, was almost certain, that something had changed within her sister. It was as if something had been resolved or a fight resulted in a draw.

  Earlier, when James had asked Hy if she missed him, she wanted to say, I’ve been missing you for months, and christ, life without you is so hard and empty and I have done a terrible thing, which is to take my sister’s husband. I claimed him. I took him because you were being taken and no one asked me, so I took Arthur, unasked, and I know I’ll never recover from the love I feel for you. I wish that I could talk to Glady Joe. I wish I could ask her why our lives are so brief when we still have so much love for each other. Sometimes I envy those old married couples who never talk or touch and really don’t care much for each other’s company, because I know they won’t feel this severing, this unhappiness. It seems that our love should sustain us, instead of killing me, which is all loving you is doing for me now. Glady Joe once told me that we seek people we love in this life so after death we can be transformed into a surge of light and attract to us other particles of light, which are the essence of those people we loved on earth.

  But Hy said nothing; says nothing—not to James or to Glady Joe, who is eating ice cream, leisurely, unhurried. Who, in return, says nothing to Hy of any significance, nor to James.

  INSTRUCTIONS NO. 2

  If you quilt alone, choose your subject carefully. Expect to live with it for approximately two years, depending on the simplicity or complexity of the work. The fairly intricate quilt will contain, roughly, thirty-five pieces per block. Perhaps a thousand pieces in the finished quilt. Shake your head in amazement at the occasional quilt that boasts thousands of pieces. Puzzle out the fact that a single woman could hold all those pieces together without misplacing, losing, or mistaking a piece. Understand that she must be someone of extraordinary strength and organization and discipline. Someone who is a stranger to the false step in life; someone a mother would admire. Question whether you would share your mother’s admiration.

  The 1933 Sears, Roebuck Quilt Contest boasted an accumulated cash prize of $7,500; $1,200 for the first-prize winner alone. Manna in the thirties. Shoes for the children. Rent paid up; food to eat. Pressure off your husband for a few months, only until the country turns that fabled corner and rights itself. Read where the judges received 24,878 entries. Do a quick calculation of time and cloth pieces. Understand the sum to be breathtaking: hundreds of years of time spent quilting millions of pieces. How to keep it all in order. Under control.

  It is not simply the color and design, but the intricate stitch-work involved. Miles of small, perfect stitches, uniform, each as the smallest link in the overall pattern of beauty and grace. All hand-sewn, with the Singer machine idle by the wall. You know quilters. Boggles the mind. Forces you to sit down at your kitchen table, eyes closed, hand to your forehead, crushed under the weight of all those numbers.

  Send away for a quilt kit from Good Housekeeping. Something with a complete scene as opposed to a repeating pattern. Perhaps a large house set back on grassy acreage. Fill it with children and a husband. Close your eyes and imagine the smells of cooked food wafting from the kitchen. Roast chicken and rosemary potatoes. Chocolate cake for dessert. A canary in the window that sings on command. The trees in the garden are lemon, peach, and orange. Bicycles near the garage; workshed containing your husband’s tools and workbench. Clouds in the blue sky (be sure to place extra stuffing in the clouds for effect); eating outside at the redwood table. We all love each other.

  Or picture a body of deep-blue water in the South Pacific. The figure of a woman poised to dive from a small cliff fringed by a rain forest. The palm frond made from embroidery silk, the water of satin. Yours and your lover’s skin brown from the sun. The scenic, pictorial quilt is finite, contained.

  You prefer it.

  Contemplate crumpling the paper pattern of the pictorial quilt. A pattern, by its very nature, should repeat. It is your nature as well. To do as your mother did. As much as you hate it, as much as it grieves you.

  The scenic pattern is the great dream; the repeating pattern a nod to reality. Your life. Everyone’s life. Which brings you to the Crazy Quilt and its lack of order, its randomness, its shrouded personal meanings. Differentiated from a quilt with one theme; this other quilt that requires many hands, many meanings juxtaposed with each other.

  Experience discomfort at the thought.

  Consider the Crazy Quilt. Deplore its lack of skill and finesse. Express this idea to the women in your quilting circle. Say those words: lack of skill and finesse. Explain that this nineteenth-century fad is not translatable to the twentieth century. Insist that you are all modern women who control their lives and are not, in turn, controlled by them. Glower from your chair when someone laughs at what you have just said. Calls you silly; even though the tone is affectionate, you still feel put out. Concede the project.

  Hold your secret regarding this quilt. What upsets you. What puts you out. Your inner conflict regarding the vagaries of control.

  Read The Story of O. Convince yourself that it was, in fact, written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman. Feel shame and pleasure at being forced to read it in the utmost privacy of your life. Wish you could talk to one of the other women about it. But you cannot. Dare not mention it; deny all knowledge of it should anyone else bring it up, even in a casual way. It is a novel of choices in a world of limited choices. On one level. You understand that concept. Remind yourself that, of course, her story is pure pornography.

  The cradle quilt is a quilt reduced to infant or child proportions. The theme should reflect the child’s immediate world: bow ties, balloons, trucks, buttons, lambs, and shoes. Incorporate an image a child can unconsciously think about; influence your child’s dream state. Design a body of water. Surround it with rocks and trees. A bird or two would add “movement.” Clouds fill the sky in great white billows. Again, puff them up with extra stuffing lodged between the appliqué and quilt top. Give them dimension. Get across an idea of summer.

  Follow your parents’ footsteps. This is what quilting is about: something handed down—skill, the work itself. Hold it in your hand. Fondle it. Know in your heart that you long to rebel; look for ways in which you are different from your mother; know that you see her in yourself at your worst times. Laugh as you contemplate the concept of free will, individuality.

  Now think about the perfect marriage or the ideal lover union. It is as uncommon as any wondrous thing. Yet everyone expects to find it in her life, thinks it will happen (just a matter of time), feels entitled. Sit with the other women and express confusion as to why a mutual friend, so deserving of love, is living without it. Think of a million reasons as to why this is so, except the true reason, which is that it is an unusual and singular thing, having nothing to do with personality or worth. If it was so commonplace why would artists find themselves obsessed by it, churning out sad paintings and torch songs?

  As the twentieth century draws to a close, heads shake at the high divorce rate, the brutalization of the love affair, left in neglect or disarray. Leave that old lover. Move on. Take the A train. But in the dark of your room you may be moved to admit to yourself that you only thought you fell out of love or grew tired of it (grew tired of a small miracle of the heart?), when in reality you may not have felt love at all,
but something entirely different. Once you love, you cannot take it back, cannot undo it; what you felt may have changed, shifted slightly, yet still remains love. You still feel—though very small—the not-altogether unpleasant shock of soul recognition for that person. To your dismay. To your embarrassment. This, you keep to yourself.

  Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons: They never truly loved each other or they love each other still.

  sophia darling

  When Preston Richards first lays eyes on Sophia Darling, his future bride, this is what he sees: a young girl of seventeen walking purposefully toward a ladder leading to a high dive at the public swimming pool. He watches her move on her heels with an awkward grace, sounds of wet slapping flesh on the concrete, since she only recently emerged from the water. He notes the way she spreads her hands and flattens her dark, wet hair against her nicely shaped skull, then moves quickly downward to tug at the legs of her swimsuit; then back to her face as she clips the tip of her nose between her fingers, removing any lingering drops.

  She is entirely unaware of these minor adjustments, ignorant of the ritual she performs each time she leaves the water and prepares to dive, but Preston Richards has watched her for three dives now and can discern the emerging patterns of motion.

  He admires the tensile beauty of her long thighs, the flex of the muscle as she balances her body, her toes gripping the edge of the board—all concentration and potential motion. Her arms are suspended for a moment straight out in front, away from her chest, frozen; then, as if some inner mechanism clicks, she strikes her hands out to the sides (like wings) then up, and in one smooth movement, she is airborne.

  The pool is located in a town called Grasse, just north of Bakersfield proper. Today it is so hot, at least 99 degrees, though everyone is guessing in the lower numbers. This is how it is in these summer farmlands with the inhabitants wanting to believe that the day is not as unbearable as it feels. As if temperature is only a state of mind that can be controlled and willed to obey by holding a good thought.

  Preston ceases to be aware of the noisy swimming-pool chatter, punctuated by the splashing and quarreling of children—the establishment of water-game rules or a child with closed eyes swimming blindly toward the other children, calling “Marco” as they answer “Polo.”

  Or the young mothers, their bodies teetering between that young-girl softness and womanly weight gain, talking and confiding among themselves. All of this falls away from Preston’s consciousness as he watches Sophia fall into the water.

  Preston Richards is like many of the men here today, men who work in town and who have stopped by on their lunch hour for a fast dip in the pool, just to take the edge off this thick heat. Preston himself has stepped away from his office—where he has been recording the results of the many soil samples he has collected for the company that is employing him for the summer—to try and cool his body in this sweltering weather. To his good fortune, he finds himself observing this slim, muscular young woman and wanting nothing more than to place his mouth upon her body, maybe sink his teeth into that powerful thigh.

  Sophia Darling positions herself on the tip of the diving board, turns her back to the pool, freezes, then leaps. She twists in the air as Preston feels something within his chest rent ever so slightly. So astonished is he at this sudden weakness of his inner fiber, that he momentarily loses his concentration on the diving girl.

  His hand involuntarily moves to his smooth chest.

  Heartburn? Heatstroke? He tells himself that he should jump back into the pool, bring his body temperature down a notch. This tearing in his chest is curious because it makes him feel vulnerable, mortal, and he does not know why since it is probably the result of this hellish day or something he should not have eaten. He forgets Sophia (though years later he will say, “You jumped from a great height and flew into my heart”), pushes himself off his towel, and stands by the edge of the pool. As he hesitates, Sophia appears at his feet, her hands placed firmly on the concrete, pulls her body out of the water as it forms a clear, shining shell encasing her face and figure. She is at my feet. She is rising to meet me.

  Without thinking, Preston crouches, hooks his hands beneath her arms, and lifts her high above the water’s surface so that her hands lose their pavement anchor, her face startled and dripping. How heavy she is, Preston marvels. So slim but how very strong and weighted. And for a split second they are face-to-face.

  Then her body twists free, sending Sophia to the concrete with a thump to her backside, her feet still playing in the water.

  Preston wanted to pull her right up to his mouth, fresh from the water, to kiss her and kiss her with no thought of anything but the taste of chlorine on her lips, and all this because she leapt from a nine-foot-high dive and flew straight into his heart.

  SOPHIA SITS at the poolside, says, “Well!” then nothing.

  Preston shyly drops beside her, apologizing, then, “I’m Preston Richards,” extends his hand, so recently supporting her weight.

  “Sophia,” she answers, head tilted to one side, her gray eyes narrowing slightly as she looks over at him.

  “Sophia what?”

  “Darling,” she says then, “why are you blushing?” because Preston has nervously dropped his gaze, glances down at his hands.

  “I don’t blush,” he says finally.

  “Then,” she says, her feet gently kicking under the water as she leans back on her elbows, “you are acting as if you should be.”

  This makes him laugh, says, “Actually, you are right. You made me shy for a minute there.”

  “Why?” She looks genuinely curious, as if she is about to discover something new about herself. Her wide smile reveals a gap between her upper front teeth. Though her eyes are squinting against the sunlight, she does not turn her face away from Preston’s.

  “Because I thought you called me darling,” he tells her.

  “Oh, god no,” she laughs, closing her eyes and shifting her face toward the sun. “Oh, no, no. My last name. It’s Darling. Like the family in Peter Pan.” Her back arches, forces her belly upward, her head falling back so that her dark hair, in separate dripping clumps, almost touches the ground.

  “Sophia Darling,” Preston repeats to himself, barely audible, then louder, “I like that. I like that very much.”

  Sophia brings her head back up, the stomach tucks back in, and she is sitting, making whirlpools with her feet, hands folded in her lap. “Do you now,” she says.

  “When we are married, we will break tradition so you can keep your perfect name.”

  Her feet stop moving; in fact her entire body freezes. It is possible that she is hard put to even draw a breath. Preston recognizes this posture: It is identical to the moment when she stands poised on the diving board, before her body takes flight.

  SOPHIA DARLING says to Preston Richards: What I like about diving is the feeling of falling. Of the water rushing toward you and there is nothing to be done about it. You cannot alter your course once you jump from the board; you will land—without a doubt—it is only up to you whether it will be a smooth or rough landing. She thinks for a minute. I guess you could say it combines certainty and the unexpected, she adds.

  Preston wants to know if she dives competitively, “in school,” for example, but Sophia shakes her head and answers, No, I just do it for myself. And when he inquires as to what she would like to do with the rest of her life, she says, smiling, “Marry you, I guess.”

  In that case, he says, matching her smile (already a little smitten with the space between her teeth), I better ask you out.

  “A COLLEGE MAN,” said Sophia’s mother with relish when Sophia told her about Preston Richards. “I’ve always wanted a college man. But listen, sweetheart, let him do all the talking. Men love a good listener; it makes them feel important and smart. Be bright, but not too bright, and let him see that you are a young lady, a girl to be respected.” She paused as if trying to remember something. “Follo
w his lead or, at least, give the appearance of following his lead. Just to be on the safe side—men are funny that way.”

  “I’m not marrying him,” said Sophia. “He’s only taking me out.”

  “You never know if he is The One.”

  “Mother,” sighed Sophia.

  “You know I love you but you are not pretty enough to be on your own in this world,” and before Sophia could open her mouth, her mother placed her hand in the air like a crossing guard stopping traffic: “I know whereof I speak.”

  At other times she said things like: Sophia sweetheart, marriage is a difficult undertaking at best and the secret is to please your husband and be there for your children. Do not wander from the path you have chosen.

  Or: Rule the house with a velvet glove that serves to hide your will. Make your husband respect you.

  And: All else is failure.

  Mrs. Darling’s love-advice often left her daughter ill tempered and suspicious and lusting after rebellion. More often than not, her mother’s words forced Sophia from the house to the quarry reservoir, where she swam with fierce, cutting strokes. How could she make her mother understand that she might not want to “settle down” or that she felt a keen pleasure in the pure and unadorned sense of being alone? Then there were the days, trapped in the house with her mother’s loneliness, that made Sophia wild to be married, to belong to someone. To love and be loved. And so afraid that it might never happen to her at all.

  HER OWN FATHER was long gone, having deserted Sophia and her mother during the Great Depression. She wonders what their lives would have been like had he not left. Whenever she asked her mother, “Why isn’t Daddy here with us?” her mother would study her cuticles or brush imaginary wrinkles from her skirt and say, “Because I did not heed my own advice, the advice I give you.” But Sophia remained suspicious, unconvinced that this was the path to being a successful woman—a wife—for how could a man desire such behavior from his girl? But then, one could ask, How could he not want someone so compliant? But she does not want to be like her mother, a woman who misplaces men.