The Art of Mending

by Elizabeth Berg

  She lay back down. I was marginally forgiven. “Yeah. What do boys get? They don’t get anything.”

  “Oh, of course they do.”

  “What?”

  “They get . . . blamed for the sins of their fathers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People still call men pigs, even though they’re so much better than they used to be. You know. Think how it would feel to be called that.”

  She considered this. “It’s better than cramps. I really get them bad, Mom.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I used to, too. Once, when I was your age, I got them in school and I took some Midol that a friend gave me. And I think I took too many or something, because I really flipped out.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just got . . . weird. I went in the bathroom and was sitting on the floor—I remember I was wearing my Girls’ Madrigals uniform, this awful green jumper, because we had a performance that afternoon. Anyway, I was sitting there and I was really hurting and someone went and got the nurse and I just went nuts on her. I was awful . . . wouldn’t tell her my name, wouldn’t let her help me.”

  “Why?” Hannah leaned up on an elbow, stared intently at me.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The principal came. Then the nurse called my mother and told her I was not cooperating with her, I was behaving very oddly, and I had mistreated her, and Grandma came and got me.”

  “Was she mad?”

  “No, she wasn’t mad.” I remembered her driving me home, silent. Not in anger but in a kind of complicity—she’d reached over and touched my knee, smiled. Tucked me in my bed when I got home, brought me a heating pad and a drink of blackberry brandy, which was her cure for cramps.

  Hannah lay flat, the heels of her hands pushing against the heating pad. I used to do that too—as though it would push the heat through to displace the pain. “That’s bizarre that you did that,” she said, yawning.

  “I know.”

  “Why’d you tell me that story?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. I just remembered it.”

  “Okay, I’m going back to sleep. Don’t wake me up even if I sleep till noon.” She turned away from me.

  I pulled the covers up over her shoulder. Then I lay back down and stared at the ceiling, too awake now to sleep any longer.

  It is Steve and me, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor on a sunny afternoon, our heads bent together over a game of Monopoly. We are about six and ten, happily engrossed, both of us smiling, he because he’s learning a “big kid” game, me because I am winning, no doubt—I almost never lost at Monopoly, no matter who I played. In the background, Caroline lies on the sofa in her pajamas. She has the chicken pox. She is clutching her big yellow teddy bear to her breast, craning her neck to try to see the game board. I remember that Caroline named the bear Hope, and we all thought it was so weird. Hope has the chicken pox too: red construction-paper dots, which Caroline carefully cut out and Scotch-taped onto him. While Steve and I sit playing the game with our backs to her, she takes what consolation she can from something she created. I remember her telling my mother that day that her throat hurt, the chicken pox were in her throat, and my mother telling her not to be ridiculous. Years later, when Hannah got chicken pox and I took her to the pediatrician, he looked in her throat and said, “Yup.”

  15

  “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DRIVE,” I TOLD MY MOTHER. “It’s fine for you to fly. You won’t need a car here. You don’t like to drive long distances. You don’t like to drive short distances!” Silently, I added, And I am not going to come and get you and bring you here.

  “But I’ll be there for a whole week,” she said. “And you’ll be working, and the kids are going to go back to school. . . . What if I want to go out somewhere? I don’t want to leave you without a car.”

  “You can take it anytime. I don’t really use it that much.” I didn’t want to tell her I was going to her house the day after she arrived here.

  It was a rainy Monday morning. Just before I called my mother, I spoke to Caroline and Steve, both of whom agreed to meet me at our mother’s house on Wednesday afternoon, presumably to talk about what to do with the place—Mom had always said she wouldn’t want to live there alone. Whether she still felt that way, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to ask now. Steve had been a little put out. I’d awakened him from a sound sleep, and he had been intending to go home today. But he agreed, finally, after I convinced him he might as well take care of this now instead of having to fly back later. He had also agreed to pick me up at the airport. That way I could work on him a bit before he saw Caroline.

  Thunder boomed so loudly I could feel it in my chest. The rain, coming in at an angle, fell in sheets against the windows. I couldn’t believe the storm hadn’t awakened the kids. I wanted to get off the phone—I’d heard you shouldn’t use portables in such weather. I got a brief little vision of a cartoon death, a jagged bolt of lightning coming from the phone into my brain, my hair standing on end, my eyes turned spirally, and the toes of my shoes curled up. “I’ve got to go, Mom,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I hung up the phone, went over to the coffeemaker to fill my mug, and sat at the table with Pete. “Here we go.”

  He looked up at me briefly and returned to the business section of the newspaper.

  “I feel bad leaving when school’s just starting.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Pete said. “They don’t need us anymore.”

  “Yes, they do!”

  “Not that way. Anyway, I’ll be here. And Maggie always helps.”

  I reached for the front section of the paper, scanned the headlines. “Why don’t they ever lead with good news?”

  “Because people pay more attention to bad news.”

  “No, they don’t. That’s what you always say. It isn’t true!”

  He put down the newspaper. “You want to fight, Laura? Do you need to fight?”

  I said nothing, blinked once, twice.

  “What are you so mad about?”

  “I’m not.” I started reading the paper, then stopped. “I’m not. I just . . . don’t want to do this. I want to stay home and work. I’ve got work to do. A family to care for. I want to live my own life, not try to straighten out someone else’s.”

  “She’s your sister!”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  He stared at me, half smiling, Are you kidding?

  “Well, I don’t know. She wasn’t normal. We didn’t have a sisterly relationship, you know that. She . . . come on, this is a kid who used to tell me she could talk to dead people, okay? Not for creepy fun. She meant it.”

  Pete walked over to the sink, rinsed out his cup, and put it in the dishwasher. Pointedly remained silent.

  “What?” I said, my back to him.

  “Nothing.”

  I turned around. “Pete. What?”

  “If it were Maggie having trouble . . .”

  “Yeah? What, would I go out of my way to help her? Of course! But you know what? I don’t know if I buy into the It’s your family, you’ve got to thing. Maybe sometimes you make a family out of other people.”

  Pete came over to the table and sat down again. “You may have more in common with other people, Laura. But you have your biological family for life, right or wrong.”

  “Well, I know that. But does that mean—?”

  “Yes.” He looked at his watch and got up. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Wait!”

  He turned around, a little impatient, I saw, so I said, “Never mind.” I stood at the window to watch him drive away and then I went upstairs to shower. After that, I’d go into the basement, to my sewing room, to think about color and texture and patterns that have nothing to do with personalities. Only, of course they do. I remember Anthony once asking me, when he was maybe six, “If you could u
nderstand everything about just one thing, wouldn’t you understand everything about everything? Because of how everything is all tied up together? And that’s why nobody understands anything all the way except God?”

  I TURNED ON THE FLUORESCENT OVERHEAD in my studio and looked around. What anticipatory pleasure I was enjoying already! There was my machine, recently cleaned and oiled and ready to go, all but transforming itself now into a metallic beckoning finger. There were my rotary cutters, lined up in order of size. There was the wooden multitiered riser holding all my spools of thread, over a hundred different colors, organized by hue and by type: cottons, metallics, silks, polyesters, quilting threads. I had drawers full of various notions: needles, thimbles, straight and safety pins, snaps in every size, tape measures and rulers, thin slivers of soap that I used to mark quilts, embroidery scissors, six- and eight- and ten-inch shears, a heavy silver pair of pinking shears, seam bindings and seam rippers, yards of elastics and Velcro. I had shelves of books on textiles, on buttons, on patterns, on every kind of quilt from antique Amish to contemporary, on hand and machine and sashiko quilting techniques. I even had volumes of poetry I read sometimes for a kind of oblique inspiration. I had patterns of my own design cut from sandpaper and stored carefully away in manila envelopes, endless varieties of beads and sequins, yarns and embroidery floss, fabric paint, tassels, and trims. I had graph paper and plastic templates in the shape of squares, triangles, and half circles.

  And fabric! Big square wicker baskets lined up on deep wall shelves and full of solid or printed cottons, silks, batiks, woolens, blends—you name it, I had some. One of the many reasons I liked to be in fabric stores was that I was surrounded by people who shared the same benign illness as I. Once, waiting in line to pay for a nice selection of miniature florals, I’d heard the woman ahead of me say, “I have to hurry up and get home and hide this. If my husband sees me bringing in more fabric, he’ll kill me.” “Oh, I know,” the woman she’d spoken to had answered. “I’ve been hiding mine for years. Try taking it home in a grocery bag. Just throw a box of Kotex on top and he won’t go near it.” That second woman had such a high pile of fabric in her arms she could hardly see over it. When the clerk who rang her up had asked what she was going to make with it, the woman answered with no sense of irony whatsoever, “Nothing.” I smiled at the woman behind me, who shrugged and said, “You know what they say. Whoever dies with the most fabric wins.”

  Sometimes, a dinner guest will ask to see my studio—it’s almost always a woman, although occasionally a man will want to see—and whenever they do, they stand still in appreciative wonder (the men with their hands in their pockets) and usually say just one word: Wow. It doesn’t matter if they like to sew or not, they just appreciate seeing a room so completely stocked, so richly reflective of a person’s passion. It’s similar to the way a lot of people love hardware stores. Whether you know what the things are or not, they’re all there.

  On the flannel display board, a few vintage hankies were positioned en pointe, a suggestion for a quilt to be made from them. I’d been collecting these hankies for years. Such dainty imprints of social history were recorded there: florals from the twenties and thirties, Mr. and Mrs. hankies from the forties, whimsical patterns of floating toasters and Scottie dogs from the fifties. There were leaf designs for fall, reindeer and candy canes for Christmas, flocked velvet hearts for Valentine’s Day, white-on-white embroidery with wide lace trim for weddings. One dark-red hankie had Lipstick embroidered on one corner. An ancient pale-blue one with an embroidered nosegay of violets was my favorite—I doubted I’d ever do anything but look at it. All the hankies were worn to a powderlike softness from washing, ironing, folding, holding; from tears. Sometimes I put the old hatbox I kept them in on my lap and just slowly sifted though them, looking to feel memories.

  I was anxious to begin that hankie quilt, but first I needed to finish the one I’d been commissioned to do. I’d get the borders on, sew a scattering of seed pearls across it, and back, bind, and machine-quilt it today. Tomorrow morning, on the way to pick up my mother at the airport, I would mail it in the usual way, wrapped in a silk-lined storage bag made out of scraps of fabric that were used in the quilt. Customers went crazy for those bags. Some, it was the reflexive pleasure of receiving an unexpected gift. But I thought maybe it was also because we’ve become so unused to people doing anything beyond what they’re paid to do.

  The phone rang. I let it ring a few more times, thinking it was Pete calling to say he was sorry for having been so gruff, and wanting to punish him a little in this passive-aggressive way. But it was not Pete, it was Karen Benson, with whom I had made an appointment for today and about which I had forgotten completely. She was calling to say she was going to be about forty-five minutes late; was that okay? “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll just be here, working.” After I hung up, I looked at my calendar to see what kind of quilt she had called about. I found her name next to the time she was to arrive—ten minutes from now—and beneath that I saw a note for what she wanted done: a dog quilt. For a dog? I wondered. In honor of a dog? Using dog-motif fabrics? I needed to be more thorough about taking information when I made appointments. For one thing, I liked to lay out samples of materials before people arrived.

  I got out my basket of flannels, pulled some green and brown plaids, and then went through the novelty prints in case she was a literal kind of customer. I had a cotton print that was nothing but goofy-looking cartoon dogs and one slightly more elegant one featuring hunting dogs. I was digging through my solids when I heard the back door open and Maggie calling my name.

  “Down here!” I called back, and smiled at her when she came into the studio. “Hey.”

  “Guess what I have.” She held out a bakery bag.

  “Oh, God, Maggie, I just came back from the fair. And from a funeral, where you eat even more. Because . . . you know, you can.”

  “I only got two. And they’re fat free!”

  “Really?” I asked, looking in the bag.

  “No. But I think if you tell yourself it is, your body processes it that way.”

  “No, thanks, Maggie.”

  She sat in my chair and started eating a Bismarck. “I just got in kind of a fight at the grocery store.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Okay. I’m looking for Bisquick Light, right? For this recipe I found for chicken and dumplings? And I ask the stock guy do they have it. He’s not sure. And then he says, in this really snotty tone of voice, ‘I don’t need that stuff to make pancakes.’ I say, ‘Well, I don’t either.’ He says, ‘So why do you want it?’

  “I’m thinking, What is this? and I say, ‘That is none of your business!’ He takes a look on the shelf and says, ‘There isn’t any. We’re out of it. I guess nobody can figure out how to make pancakes,’ and he walks off down the aisle. I yell after him, ‘Hey! I make my pancakes from scratch! With buttermilk!’ So here’s my question: Am I cracking up?”

  “I have Bisquick Light,” I said, laying a solid tan flannel next to a green-and-black mini-check.

  “Good. But am I? Cracking up?”

  I stopped digging through fabric to look at her. “No. You just care too much about what other people think. That’s a problem most of us have.”

  “I suppose.” She licked off her fingers, then came to stand beside me. “What are you making?”

  “I’m not sure yet. A client I’m meeting with wants a quilt having something to do with dogs.”

  “Hmmm. That could be fun.”

  “Yeah, it could.”

  “You could sew on real dog toys. Little squeaky ones.”

  I pulled out my gigantic clear-plastic box of buttons and handed it to her. “Look through here for anything having to do with dogs. In any way.”

  She rifled through the buttons while I looked at a few more fabrics, then said, “Voilà!”

  I turned around.

  “You have buttons with paw prints!”

 
; “Well, see?” I said. “That’s why I always buy anything that strikes my fancy. Whatever I get, I’ll end up using eventually. Pull them out. I’ll take them with me to Minnesota.”

  “So you’re going, huh?”

  “Yeah. I followed your advice. My mother’s coming here tomorrow. Then the next day, I’ll go there and meet with Steve and Caroline.”

  “Good.”

  “I guess. But I have to tell you, I wish I didn’t have to do it.”

  “I know. But you do have to.”

  “I’m just too busy.”

  Maggie scrunched up the bakery bag, tossed it in the trash.

  “You ate both?”

  She shrugged. “It’s your fault.”

  “Right.”

  “I want to ask you something, Laura. Don’t take this the wrong way. But do you think the reason you don’t want to go is because you’re afraid you’ll find out something you don’t want to admit about yourself?”

  “Oh, man.”

  “Okay, forget it. I dreamed I was Jenny Jones in my Maidenform bra. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I guess there might be some truth to that; that’s why I’m so jumpy about it. It’s pretty awful to think you let someone suffer and did nothing about it. Kept yourself oblivious. I read this story once about a girl who watched a bully beat up another girl. She was in a ring of kids, all of them just watching the blood, the snot—it was kind of an awful thing to read. I remember thinking, I’d never do that, I’d never just watch. Easy to make yourself a hero in the abstract, huh?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Well, it’s also hard to leap in when there’s a chance it will make the bully turn on you. And anyway, maybe you didn’t keep yourself oblivious. Maybe you truly were unaware.”

  I started pulling out pieces of fabric. A nice red. A sunny yellow. Strong colors. Primary. Clear.

  “You could put dog tags on that quilt too,” Maggie said. “You can get them made at Petco—you engrave them yourself. You could get Fido and Rex. And Spot.