Opal laughs. “I was talking to Ella Mae Smith the other day—she’s a retired geography teacher?—and she said, ‘I’ve got twelve great-great-grandchildren, and when we get together I say, “Law me, look what I started!”’” Opal mimics Ella Mae Smith, giving her a mindless, chirpy tone of voice. “Why, I’d have to use quadratic equations to count up all the people that woman has caused,” she goes on. “All with a streak of her petty narrow-mindedness in them. I don’t call that a contribution to the world.” Opal laughs and sips from her glass of schnapps. “What about you, Jenny? Are you ever going to get married?”
“Marriage is outdated. I don’t know anybody who’s married and happy.”
Opal names three schoolteachers she has known who have been married for decades.
“But are they really happy?”
“Oh, foot, Jenny! What you’re saying is why are you not married and why are you not happy. What’s wrong with little Randy Newcomb? Isn’t that funny? I always think of him as little Randy.”
“Show me those quilts again, Aunt Opal.”
“I’ll show you the crazies but not the one you keep after me about.”
“O.K., show me the crazies.”
Upstairs, her aunt lays crazy quilts on the bed. They are bright-colored patches of soft velvet and plaids and prints stitched together with silky embroidery. Several pieces have initials embroidered on them. The haphazard shapes make Jenny imagine odd, twisted lives represented in these quilts.
She says, “Mom gave me a quilt once, but I didn’t appreciate the value of it and I washed it until it fell apart.”
“I’ll give you one of these crazies when you stop moving around,” Opal says. “You couldn’t fit it in that backpack of yours.” She polishes her glasses thoughtfully. “Do you know what those quilts mean to me?”
“No, what?”
“A lot of desperate old women ruining their eyes. Do you know what I think I’ll do?”
“No, what?”
“I think I’ll take up aerobic dancing. Or maybe I’ll learn to ride a motorcycle. I try to be modern.”
“You’re funny, Aunt Opal. You’re hilarious.”
“Am I gorgeous, too?”
“Adorable,” says Jenny.
After her niece leaves, Opal hums a tune and dances a stiff little jig. She nestles among her books and punches her remote-control paddle. Years ago, she was allowed to paddle students who misbehaved. She used a wooden paddle from a butter churn, with holes drilled in it. The holes made a satisfying sting. On TV, a 1950s convertible is out of gas. This is one of her favorites. It has an adorable couple in it. The girl is wearing bobby socks and saddle oxfords, and the boy has on a basketball jacket. They look the way children looked before the hippie element took over. But the boy begins growing cat whiskers and big cat ears, and then his face gets furry and leathery, while the girl screams bloody murder. Opal sips some peppermint and watches his face change. The red and gold of his basketball jacket are the Hopewell school colors. He chases the girl. Now he has grown long claws.
The boy is dancing energetically with a bunch of ghouls who have escaped from their coffins. Then Vincent Price starts talking in the background. The girl is very frightened. The ghouls are so old and ugly. That’s how kids see us, Opal thinks. She loves this story. She even loves the credits—scary music by Elmer Bernstein. This is a story with a meaning. It suggests all the feelings of terror and horror that must be hidden inside young people. And inside, deep down, there really are monsters. An old person waits, a nearly dead body that can still dance.
Opal pours another drink. She feels relaxed, her joints loose like a dancer’s now.
Jenny is so nosy. Her questions are so blunt. Did Opal ever have a crush on a student? Only once or twice. She was in her twenties then, and it seemed scandalous. Nothing happened—just daydreams. When she was thirty, she had another attachment to a boy, and it seemed all right then, but it was worse again at thirty-five, when another pretty boy stayed after class to talk. After that, she kept her distance.
But Opal is not wholly without experience. There have been men, over the years, though nothing like the casual affairs Jenny has had. Opal remembers a certain motel room in Nashville. She was only forty. The man drove a gray Chrysler Imperial. When she was telling about him to a friend, who was sworn to secrecy, she called him “Imperial,” in a joking way. She went with him because she knew he would take her somewhere, in such a fine car, and they would sleep together. She always remembered how clean and empty the room was, how devoid of history and association. In the mirror, she saw a scared woman with a pasty face and a shrimpy little man who needed a shave. In the morning he went out somewhere and brought back coffee and orange juice. They had bought some doughnuts at the new doughnut shop in town before they left. While he was out, she made up the bed and put her things in her bag, to make it as neat as if she had never been there. She was fully dressed when he returned, with her garter belt and stockings on, and when they finished the doughnuts she cleaned up all the paper and the cups and wiped the crumbs from the table by the bed. He said, “Come with me and I’ll take you to Idaho.” “Why Idaho?” she wanted to know, but his answer was vague. Idaho sounded cold, and she didn’t want to tell him how she disliked his scratchy whiskers and the hard, powdery doughnuts. It seemed unkind of her, but if he had been nicer-looking, without such a demanding dark beard, she might have gone with him to Idaho in that shining Imperial. She hadn’t even given him a chance, she thought later. She had been so scared. If anyone from school had seen her at that motel, she could have lost her job. “I need a woman,” he had said. “A woman like you.”
On a hot Saturday afternoon, with rain threatening, Jenny sits under a tent on a folding chair while Randy auctions off four hundred acres of woods on Lake Barkley. He had a road bulldozed into the property, and he divided it up into lots. The lakefront lots are going for as much as two thousand an acre, and the others are bringing up to a thousand. Randy has several assistants with him, and there is even a concession stand, offering hot dogs and cold drinks.
In the middle of the auction, they wait for a thundershower to pass. Sitting in her folding chair under a canopy reminds Jenny of graveside services. As soon as the rain slacks up, the auction continues. In his cowboy hat and blue blazer, Randy struts around with a microphone as proudly as a banty rooster. With his folksy chatter, he knows exactly how to work the crowd. “Y’all get yourselves a cold drink and relax now and just imagine the fishing you’ll do in this dreamland. This land is good for vacation, second home, investment—heck, you can just park here in your camper and live. It’s going to be paradise when that marina gets built on the lake there and we get some lots cleared.”
The four-hundred-acre tract looks like a wilderness. Jenny loves the way the sun splashes on the water after the rain, and the way it comes through the trees, hitting the flickering leaves like lights on a disco ball. A marina here seems farfetched. She could pitch a tent here until she could afford to buy a used trailer. She could swim at dawn, the way she did on a camping trip out West, long ago. All of a sudden, she finds herself bidding on a lot.
The bidding passes four hundred, and she sails on, bidding against a man from Missouri who tells the people around him that he’s looking for a place to retire.
“Sold to the young lady with the backpack,” Randy says when she bids six hundred. He gives her a crestfallen look, and she feels embarrassed.
As she waits for Randy to wind up his business after the auction, Jenny locates her acre from the map of the plots of land. It is along a gravel road and marked off with stakes tied with hot-pink survey tape. It is a small section of the woods—her block on the quilt, she thinks. These are her trees. The vines and underbrush are thick and spotted with raindrops. She notices a windfall leaning on a maple, like a lover dying in its arms. Maples are strong, she thinks, but she feels like getting an ax and chopping that windfall down, to save the maple. In the distance, the whining of a speedboat
cuts into the day.
They meet afterward at Randy’s van, his mobile real-estate office, with a little shingled roof raised in the center to look rustic. It looks like an outhouse on wheels. A painted message on the side says, “REALITY IS REAL ESTATE.” As Randy plows through the mud on the new road, Jenny apologizes. Buying the lot was like laughing at the statue at the wrong moment—something he would take the wrong way, an insult to his attentions.
“I can’t reach you,” he says. “You say you want to live out in the wilderness and grow your own vegetables, but you act like you’re somewhere in outer space. You can’t grow vegetables in outer space. You can’t even grow them in the woods unless you clear some ground.”
“I’m looking for a place to land.”
“What do I have to do to get through to you?”
“I don’t know. I need more time.”
He turns onto the highway, patterned with muddy tire tracks from the cars at the auction. “I said I’d wait, so I guess I’ll have to,” he says, flashing his Dennis Quaid smile. “You take as long as you want to, then. I learned my lesson with Barbara. You’ve got to be understanding with the women. That’s the key to a successful relationship.” Frowning, he slams his hand on the steering wheel. “That’s what they tell me, anyhow.”
Jenny is having coffee with Opal. She arrived unexpectedly. It’s very early. She looks as though she has been up all night.
“Please show me your quilts,” Jenny says. “I don’t mean your crazy quilts. I want to see that special quilt. Mom said it had the family tree.”
Opal spills coffee in her saucer. “What is wrong with young people today?” she asks.
“I want to know why it’s called a burial quilt,” Jenny says. “Are you planning to be buried in it?”
Opal wishes she had a shot of peppermint in her coffee. It sounds like a delicious idea. She starts toward the den with the coffee cup rattling in its saucer, and she splatters drops on the rug. Never mind it now, she thinks, turning back.
“It’s just a family history,” she says.
“Why’s it called a burial quilt?” Jenny asks.
Jenny’s face is pale. She has blue pouches under her eyes and blue eye shadow on her eyelids.
“See that closet in the hall?” Opal says. “Get a chair and we’ll get the quilt down.”
Jenny stands on a kitchen chair and removes the quilt from beneath several others. It’s wrapped in blue plastic and Jenny hugs it closely as she steps down with it.
They spread it out on the couch, and the blue plastic floats off somewhere. Jenny looks like someone in love as she gazes at the quilt. “It’s gorgeous,” she murmurs. “How beautiful.”
“Shoot!” says Opal. “It’s ugly as homemade sin.”
Jenny runs her fingers over the rough textures of the quilt. The quilt is dark and somber. The backing is a heavy gray gabardine, and the nine-inch-square blocks are pieced of smaller blocks of varying shades of gray and brown and black. They are wools, apparently made from men’s winter suits. On each block is an appliquéd off-white tombstone—a comical shape, like Casper the ghost. Each tombstone has a name and date on it.
Jenny recognizes some of the names. Myrtle Williams. Voris Williams. Thelma Lee Freeman. The oldest gravestone is “Eulalee Freeman 1857–1900.” The shape of the quilt is irregular, a rectangle with a clumsy foot sticking out from one corner. The quilt is knotted with yarn, and the edging is open, for more blocks to be added.
“Eulalee’s daughter started it,” says Opal. “But that thing has been carried through this family like a plague. Did you ever see such horrible old dark colors? I pieced on it some when I was younger, but it was too depressing. I think some of the kinfolks must have died without a square, so there may be several to catch up on.”
“I’ll do it,” says Jenny. “I could learn to quilt.”
“Traditionally, the quilt stops when the family name stops,” Opal says. “And since my parents didn’t have a boy, that was the end of the Freeman line on this particular branch of the tree. So the last old maids finish the quilt.” She lets out a wild cackle. “Theoretically, a quilt like this could keep going till doomsday.”
“Do you care if I have this quilt?” asks Jenny.
“What would you do with it? It’s too ugly to put on a bed and too morbid to work on.”
“I think it’s kind of neat,” says Jenny. She strokes the rough tweed. Already it is starting to decay, and it has moth holes. Jenny feels tears start to drip down her face.
“Don’t you go putting my name on that thing,” her aunt says.
Jenny has taken the quilt to her apartment. She explained that she is going to study the family tree, or that she is going to finish the quilt. If she’s smart, Opal thinks, she will let Randy Newcomb auction it off. The way Jenny took it, cramming it into the blue plastic, was like snatching something that was free. Opal feels relieved, as though she has pushed the burden of that ratty old quilt onto her niece. All those miserable, cranky women, straining their eyes, stitching on those dark scraps of material.
For a long time, Jenny wouldn’t tell why she was crying, and when she started to tell, Opal was uncomfortable, afraid she’d be required to tell something comparable of her own, but as she listened she found herself caught up in Jenny’s story. Jenny said it was a man. That was always the case, Opal thought. It was five years earlier. A man Jenny knew in a place by the sea. Opal imagined seagulls, pretty sand. There were no palm trees. It was up North. The young man worked with Jenny in a restaurant with glass walls facing the ocean. They waited on tables and collected enough tips to take a trip together near the end of the summer. Jenny made it sound like an idyllic time, waiting on tables by the sea. She started crying again when she told about the trip, but the trip sounded nice. Opal listened hungrily, imagining the young man, thinking that he would have had handsome, smooth cheeks, and hair that fell attractively over his forehead. He would have had good manners, being a waiter. Jenny and the man, whose name was Jim, flew to Denver, Colorado, and they rented a car and drove around out West. They visited the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and other places Opal had heard about. They grilled salmon on the beach, on another ocean. They camped out in the redwoods, trees so big they hid the sky. Jenny described all these scenes, and the man sounded like a good man. His brother had died in Vietnam and he felt guilty that he had been the one spared, because his brother was a swimmer and could have gone to the Olympics. Jim wasn’t athletic. He had a bad knee and hammertoes. He slept fitfully in the tent, and Jenny said soothing things to him, and she cared about him, but by the time they had curved northward and over to Yellowstone the trip was becoming unpleasant. The romance wore off. She loved him, but she couldn’t deal with his needs. One of the last nights they spent together, it rained all night long. He told her not to touch the tent material, because somehow the pressure of a finger on the nylon would make it start to leak at that spot. Lying there in the rain, Jenny couldn’t resist touching a spot where water was collecting in a little sag in the top of the tent. The drip started then, and it grew worse, until they got so wet they had to get in the car. Not long afterward, when they ran short of money, they parted. Jenny got a job in Denver. She never saw him again.
Opal listened eagerly to the details about grilling the fish together, about the zip-together sleeping bags and setting up the tent and washing themselves in the cold stream. But when Jenny brought the story up to the present, Opal was not prepared. She felt she had been dunked in the cold water and left gasping. Jenny said she had heard a couple of times through a mutual friend that Jim had spent some time in Mexico. And then, she said, this week she had begun thinking about him, because of all the trees at the lake, and she had an overwhelming desire to see him again. She had been unfair, she knew now. She telephoned the friend, who had worked with them in the restaurant by the sea. He hadn’t known where to locate her, he said, and so he couldn’t tell her that Jim had been killed in Colorado over a year ago. His four-wheel
-drive had plunged off a mountain curve.
“I feel some trick has been played on me. It seems so unreal.” Jenny tugged at the old quilt, and her eyes darkened. “I was in Colorado, and I didn’t even know he was there. If I still knew him, I would know how to mourn, but now I don’t know how. And it was over a year ago. So I don’t know what to feel.”
“Don’t look back, hon,” Opal said, hugging her niece closely. But she was shaking, and Jenny shook with her.
Opal makes herself a snack, thinking it will pick up her strength. She is very tired. On the tray, she places an apple and a paring knife and some milk and cookies. She touches the remote-control button, and the picture blossoms. She was wise to buy a large TV, the one listed as the best in the consumer magazine. The color needs a little adjustment, though. She eases up the volume and starts peeling the apple. She has a little bump on one knuckle. In the old days, people would take the family Bible and bust a cyst like that with it. Just slam it hard.
On the screen, a Scoutmaster is telling a story to some Boy Scouts around a campfire. The campfire is only a fireplace, with electric logs. Opal loses track of time, and the songs flow together. A woman is lying on her stomach on a car hood in a desert full of gas pumps. TV sets crash. Smoke emerges from an eyeball. A page of sky turns like a page in a book. Then, at a desk in a classroom, a cocky blond kid with a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his T-shirt is singing about a sexy girl with a tattoo on her back who is sitting on a commode and smoking a cigarette. In the classroom, all the kids are gyrating and snapping their fingers to wild music. The teacher at the blackboard with her white hair in a bun looks disapproving, but the kids in the class don’t know what’s on her mind. The teacher is thinking about how, when the bell rings, she will hit the road to Nashville.
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