A pretty kitchen, but I’ve never seen it before. I guess that’s the way things happen in dreams.
It’s dark outside, late. I’m surprised to hear the bell because I’m not expecting anyone, but I’m not afraid to open the door, so I leave what I’m doing to answer it. And when I do, it’s my dad! He’s just standing there and he looks great. I’m so happy to see him. I say, “Dad, what are you doing here?” But he just smiles and doesn’t say anything. So I wait.
After a while he gets this look on his face. He’s sad. Disappointed. I can tell he wants something but I don’t know what. He’s looking at me and there are tears in his eyes and then I feel sad, too. Finally, he turns and walks away. It’s so dark that he just disappears.
I wish I knew what he wanted.
Could my life be any stranger?
On the one hand, things are better than they’ve ever been. I love my job. I love the people I work with and the feeling that, for the first time in my life, I’m actually good at something. I love my friends and this town. We’re safe here.
The kids are happy. We live in a nice apartment with quilts on the bed and crayoned drawings hanging from magnets on the refrigerator door. Other people might think it’s boring, but I love the routine and rhythm of our days.
After work, I pick the kids up from day care and they jabber the whole way home. They are allowed to watch one video while I cook dinner. We eat sitting together at the table. After the dishes are done we make popcorn and eat it at the kitchen table while we play Candy Land. Bethany and I let Bobby win. At bedtime I tuck them in with a story and a kiss. Then I go into the living room and pull up a chair next to the round wooden quilting frame Evelyn let me borrow.
The quilt top is finished. The quilt circle will sew on the binding together, but I wanted to do the quilting myself and by hand. The house block I made, the white clapboard cottage with its blue wide-eyed windows and garden of cheerful flowers, marks the center of the quilt. The other four blocks, made by Abigail, Margot, Evelyn, and Liza, stand at each corner like mismatched sentries on a guard, points on a compass, fixed and immovable. I sit in silence, rocking my sewing needle up and down, up and down, up and down in a smooth, even rhythm as steady and comforting as the sound of a beating heart, pausing only occasionally to check my stitches and see how I have progressed, or to rethread the needle and begin again. When it is time for bed, I turn out the lights and stop to linger by the door of my children’s bedroom, opening it quietly and peering in at their peaceful, sleeping faces and thinking, “It doesn’t get better than this.”
And on the other hand, in three weeks all of that, everything I hold dear today, could be taken from me; this life I love could collapse like a column of ash.
Bobby does this thing that cracks me up. Whenever something is going to happen that he doesn’t like, say I tell him that it’s time to turn off the television and take his bath, he covers his eyes with his hands and yells, “You can’t see me! You can’t see me!”
He’s so cute! He actually believes that if I’m invisible to him, then he’s invisible to me. Of course, it doesn’t work. No matter how tightly he shuts his eyes or how loudly he yells, “You can’t see me!” the TV still gets turned off, the bathtub still gets filled, the clock still strikes eight, and the day ends.
Hiding from your fears doesn’t make them disappear.
Bobby doesn’t know that yet, but he will. You don’t have to be a lot older than four to realize this. Still, sometimes we regress. Like Bethany did on that day she refused to get out of bed. Or like me, clinging to the topmost branches of the tree, hoping the shadow of leaves would conceal me from the world. Or my mother, losing herself in books, booze, and the arms of another man.
I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot lately—more than I ever did when she was alive. Dreams of my father permeate my nights, but the days belong to my mother. During the final, hushed hour of the day as I sit before the quilting frame, putting my needle steadily through its paces, physically engaged but mentally free to float on the wind of memory, I cannot help but think of her. I never wanted to be like her, swore I never would be, but it hasn’t worked out that way.
My mother never volunteered much about her past, but in her own way, in fragments of sentences that trailed off into nothingness, italicized with sighs, and shrugs, and the set of her shoulders, she sketched a smudged outline of her early life for me, hints of her history, clues to a puzzle I didn’t care enough to solve, not then. I feel bad about that. Now I wonder if, in her own way, she was trying to connect with me, or perhaps to warn me? I don’t know. But I was too wrapped up in myself to notice. In my close little world there was room for me and for Daddy; no others need apply. Yes, I was a child and sometimes that is the way children are, but I wish…I wish I had heard her. I wish I had been better.
If I had, things might have been different for all of us.
It’s too late to change what has been. But is it too late to change what will be? To change myself? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m trying.
Using imagination, experience, and what maturity I have, I try to color in the lines of that smudged outline. I conjure my mother’s face, her eyes hollow and longing, her long, thin body, curved in on itself, tucked tight into the sharp right angle of the sofa corner, protected on two sides and with her knees drawn in and up. Or sometimes I see her standing, arms hugging her shoulders, staring out the window with the stagnant, gray streetscape before her and all her dreams behind, wondering how she ended up there, trapped in a life that was, for her, worse than the one she’d thought she was escaping.
She didn’t understand, but I do. I think I do.
My mother was born poor and bright. She once told me that she knew how to read by the time she was four and that no one taught her how. She said it plain, a fact with no pride attached, just laid it out like bait, waiting to see if I’d take it and ask the next question. I didn’t.
If I had, I imagine she’d have told me the story of the house she grew up in, far and away up a hollow, off a dirt road, miles away from the small cluster of buildings they called “town,” where her family carried on what little trade they did, miles more from a library. But she loved to read and when she exhausted the tiny collection of worn volumes at her school, she found a box of used paperback books for sale at the general store in town. She saved her nickels and dimes and quarters to buy them one by one until the woman behind the counter took pity and told her to go ahead and take the whole box. She carried the heavy box up the road to a shortcut through the woods, over rocks and under brush, sweating and flushed because it was summer and hot and the best day of her life.
Maybe that’s how it happened and maybe not. There is no one left to tell me, but this is how I’ve pieced it together in my mind. Some things I know for sure. My mother was poor and brighter than those around her, bright enough to be dissatisfied, bright enough to know there was a world beyond the boundaries set by birth. She was certain that somewhere down the road there was a better life. There had to be. After all, she’d read about it in books, so it must be true.
And maybe, if she’d liked books about girls who have adventures and make their own way, maybe if she’d read about Jo March, or Scarlett O’Hara, or even Stephanie Plum, things might have worked out differently for her. You can find plucky, independent heroines in every genre. Why didn’t she? Instead, she gravitated toward the heroine whose every dream and desire was fulfilled by attaching herself to a man who gave her life the storybook ending she didn’t know how to write for herself, and so that’s what she set her mind on—finding the man who would give her the life she wanted.
She left school at fifteen, took a job in the general store, and saved enough money to buy a new dress and a bus ticket to White Sulphur Springs, where she’d heard there was a fancy resort that rich people went to on vacation. She got a job serving bread and rolls in the dining room and smiled sweetly at every eligible-looking man she served, and even some of the ineligible-looking one
s, hoping they’d notice her, but they never did, not unless they wanted another roll.
But one day, one of them did smile back: my father. If she’d have been there longer maybe she’d have realized that he didn’t belong in that place, or noticed that the suit he wore was secondhand and his best shoes were worn down at the heel, and realized he couldn’t have been paying that bill on his own steam. But she was too inexperienced and too giddy with success to realize. So when he came again the next night, she smiled with her eyes open wide to let him know she was interested, available, and open to anything that was on his mind, anything at all.
That’s enough. I have to stop here.
It’s hard to think about my own parents like this. There was no love lost between my mother and me, but I wish there had been. It’s hard to think of her as being so cheaply had, so conniving. It’s even harder to think of the daddy I thought hung the moon for me alone as taking advantage of a young woman, even one who was so willing to be taken advantage of. And it is hard to understand that what I considered the best years of my life, living with the daddy I adored in the house that was no better or worse than those of the other families with a man in the mill, was my mother’s own private hell.
Why did it have to be like that? If she had only read different books. If she had only had other dreams. If he had only eaten his roll and listened to the voice in his head that told him the girl was too young. If he had only kept his room key in his pocket instead of slipping it into hers. If only she had learned to appreciate what he was instead of resenting what he wasn’t. If only he had pulled me off that pedestal he’d placed me on as a means of punishing her. If only they could have talked it out. If only he had made me stand on my own two feet. If she could only have loved me.
Then I might have seen where she made her wrong turn, instead of repeating her mistakes. Maybe I’d have learned to rely on myself and had a little faith in my own abilities. Maybe I’d have understood that I even had some abilities to put faith in, instead of waiting for twenty-six years and the gift of a woman named Evelyn to let me in on the secret. Maybe I’d have listened to my instincts, looked harder at Hodge, asked more questions, seen the evidence that was right in front of my face. Then maybe I’d have asked myself that most important question, “Do I love him?” Because I see now that the answer was no.
I didn’t want to be like my mother, so cheaply had, so I made him wait a while for what he wanted, telling myself his patience proved he cared about me. And when I ceded to him those things he most desired, the things he’d known would be his eventually—my body, my will, my utter dependence upon him—I told myself it was love. But it wasn’t. It never was. I didn’t love him; I needed him. I believed that then.
I don’t anymore.
If only one of two hundred different lies had been rejected or recognized, I might have figured that out a long time ago. But there is no end to “if only,” unless you decide to end it yourself. I have.
It’s hard to think about my parents the way I have, to delve deeper than the childish, stereotypical roles I’d cast them in—saint and sinner, hero and harlot, villain and victim—and try to look at them with the eyes of a woman instead of a child and to see them for what they were: two flawed, imperfect beings who could have done a million things differently and didn’t. Yes, there were reasons and history and circumstances, but in the end they lived the lives they chose for themselves.
It is harder still to look at myself and see that I have done exactly the same stupid, stupid, stupid thing. Hardest of all is to forgive. I do. I have. I think I have.
But, some mornings I wake up and there it is again, like those mushrooms that grow in the damp, dark spots of your lawn. You pull on the stems and throw them away but when you go out the next day, there they are again, resentments like fungus, just as ugly and persistent as that word sounds. I guess this takes a while, but I’m not giving up.
I want to see things—my parents, my past, myself—for what they really are, the truth of it, not the almost version.
People act like little kids sometimes, hiding their eyes and refusing to see. Maybe, if you only do it once in a while, it’s okay. But I’ve made a career of it. Not anymore. I’m ready to grow up. From here on out, whatever happens, good or bad, I’m facing it with my eyes open.
31
Evelyn Dixon
Labor Day has come and gone. The tourists have gone home. What a relief.
Don’t get me wrong. I like tourists and I depend on them, like every other business owner in New Bern. When they return for the fall foliage season near the end of September I’ll be happy to see them again, but it’s been a long, crazy summer. I need some time to catch my breath.
This year the tourists will return a week earlier than usual, for Quilt Pink Day. When I went to the monthly meeting of the New Bern Business Association, I was greeted by a round of applause. The innkeepers report that they are one hundred percent booked for that weekend, with extensive waiting lists. The restaurant owners, including Charlie, say that their reservation books are full for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. But if anyone deserves to be applauded, it’s Mary Dell. After all, if she weren’t coming I know we wouldn’t be anticipating crowds like this. Still, it’s nice that people are so excited.
Now that I’m not trying to carry the load on my own, I’m starting to get excited myself. That is, until I start to think about actually having to get in front of a television camera; then I start to feel sick to my stomach. But I’ve decided to pull a Scarlett O’Hara on that subject; I’ll think about that tomorrow.
The exciting part is that we are going to be able to raise a ton of money to find a cure for breast cancer and that thousands upon thousands of people are going to learn about prevention and early treatment of the disease. We’ve already filmed the segment with my breast surgeon, Dr. Finney. I only had to be on camera for a second to introduce her, so that wasn’t too bad. The rest of the tape is the doctor using a model to show women how to perform a self-exam and encouraging them to try it on themselves, right at that moment, while watching the program.
Dale showed me the edited tape and it gave me goose bumps. With so many thousands of women watching, many of them are going to follow the doctor’s advice and a small percentage of them are going to find a lump. That will be a terrifying moment for them, I know. I hate to think about that moment of shock when their tentative fingers find the lump. My eyes tear up as I imagine the mounting panic of a woman who has no connection to me except that she is about to embark on that journey called cancer that no one ever wants to make. I don’t know these women nor do I know where their journeys will lead, but for some of them, that show, the sound of Dr. Finney’s gentle voice guiding them through the steps of self-examination, may be the lifeline they didn’t know they needed. Think about that. This show will save someone’s life!
That’s the exciting part.
If this helps the cause of commerce in New Bern—great. I’m happy to be of assistance. And I’m very grateful that all this publicity has turned my shop’s accounting ink from red to black, and that I’m able to support myself and provide good jobs to more people in New Bern, especially Ivy and the other women from the Stanton Center. But that’s not why I decided to risk humiliating myself on national television. I did it for the chance to help save a life.
Somewhere during this insane summer, between the never-ending stream of customers, Ivy’s divorce, Charlie’s insistence that we find more couple time, Franklin’s heart attack, and getting smacked on the editorial page of the Herald, I lost sight of that.
Years ago, Charlie asked me what my vision was for Cobbled Court Quilts; why I tried to make my living as a quilt shop owner when there were about two hundred easier, more certain ways to make money? I didn’t have to think long before finding my answer. When I took an accidental turn into the alley that led to Cobbled Court and spied the ruin of a building that would eventually house my shop, I envisioned something more than just a pl
ace to buy fabric or give sewing classes. I envisioned a community; a place where all kinds of quilters, novice to expert and everyone in between, could join for conversation, companionship, support, self-expression, growth, and healing in whatever measure they needed it.
That was my dream, and it’s all come true. And when the cameras roll on Saturday at noon, a little over two weeks from now, the Cobbled Court Quilts community will expand beyond even my wildest dreams, reaching out to thousands of people who have never set foot through our doors and probably never will. Fantastic!
But tonight, Friday night, is about community with a small c. Our small circle is coming together to finish a quilt for the one who needs it most right now—Ivy. During this wild ride of a summer, we’ve missed a few meetings. Things haven’t always worked out the way we planned and, as the days wind down to Ivy’s court date, we’re more and more aware that it could happen again. I keep praying for a miracle. I think we all are, but miracles don’t always appear on demand. I suppose that’s what makes them miraculous.
So, in the absence of miracles that appear on cue, we do what we can—we come around our friend, flanking her on every side, encouraging her and letting her know through our words, our laughter, our presence, and the gift of a quilt, that no matter what comes, she isn’t alone.
We sat facing each other, Ivy and Liza on one long side of the quilt, Margot and Abigail on the two short ends, with me on the other long side, as we prepared to sew the binding on Ivy’s quilt.
“It’s like a little village!” Margot squealed, then pointed to the green medallion. “Look at that! Ivy’s house even has a little appliquéd pail and shovel by the sandbox. Isn’t that the cutest thing? And the flowers! They’re all made with buttons and ribbon. So sweet!”
A Thread of Truth Page 26
