A good friend would send Judy off with good wishes, fond reminiscences, and encouragement as she set forth on her challenging new path. A reasonable friend would note that Philadelphia was well within a half day’s drive of the Elm Creek Valley, making occasional visits quite likely. Unfortunately, as the farewell party approached, Gwen found herself devolving into a sad, clingy, needy friend who could almost—but not quite—wish that Judy had not been offered the dream job that was taking her away.
Worse yet, she knew this was only a warm-up for the swirl of emotions that was sure to strike her when Summer left for graduate school a few weeks later. She couldn’t be prouder of her daughter, or more certain that Summer had made the right decision when she chose the University of Chicago, but she’d had her daughter so near for so long that it was impossible to imagine her blazing a solitary trail almost six hundred miles away.
At least Gwen would have the other Elm Creek Quilters to console her in her loneliness.
“Drama queen,” she muttered, shifting in her chair and focusing her attention on the books and papers spread out on the kitchen table before her. With the fall semester approaching, she intended to make as much progress as possible on her research before classes resumed, when grading papers and preparing lectures would consume most of her work hours. Every summer began with her good intentions firmly in hand: She would teach no more than one class each week at Elm Creek Quilt Camp, direct only two evening programs a month, and devote at least four hours a day to research and writing. This summer, she had lowered her expectations earlier than usual. She had not expected the hiring of two replacement teachers to take up so much of the summer, nor had she anticipated the battering ram of office politics that had forced her to spend more time and energy defending her choice of subject—quilt history—than actually conducting her research.
After a chance conversation with Sylvia, she had discovered a new research subject perfectly suited to prove to her unenlightened department chair how socially, historically, and politically relevant traditional women’s arts truly were. Sylvia told Gwen how she and her sister had entered the Sears National Quilt Competition held at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, themed “A Century of Progress.” The Bergstrom sisters joined 25,000 quilters—which translated to roughly one of every two thousand women in the United States—in pursuit of the one-thousand-dollar prize, an enormous sum for the time. A mystery surrounded the fate of the grand-prize-winning quilt, which was presented to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after the World’s Fair and kept at the White House until it somehow disappeared. Its whereabouts were still unknown, perhaps befitting a history of the mood and values of a nation during one of its most difficult periods. If Gwen had chosen as a lens any other art form but quilting, her department chair, Bill, would have been all for it. Instead he encouraged her to forget about quilts and study architecture of the period instead.
Gwen had tenure, so she was free to disregard his advice. But word rapidly spread around the College of Liberal Arts that she cared more for her pet projects than for her status in the department. Then came the vandalism of Bonnie’s quilt shop, and Gwen’s deduction that the department chair’s son was one of the perpetrators. Now William Jr. swept floors and washed dishes at Elm Creek Quilt Camp, and Gwen was the social pariah of Kuehner Hall.
Until the furor subsided, it would not help her situation if she turned out shoddy research—and that meant squeezing every minute of work out of the day, including fitting in some reading and note-taking between the campers’ Farewell Breakfast and Judy’s farewell party. Gwen pored over her books and scrawled notes on a legal pad, occasionally glancing at the clock. No one would care if she showed up fashionably late—Bonnie had taken to doing so almost every day—but the party would be her last chance to see Judy before her departure early the next morning. Gwen also didn’t want to miss the presentation of Judy’s farewell gift, a Rose of Sharon wall hanging that Agnes had sewn, devoting months to hand appliquéing the beautiful blocks with tiny, virtually invisible stitches. Judy had seen Agnes sewing upon it all summer long, but she had no idea that the finished quilt was intended for her, nor did she know that the other Elm Creek Quilters had signed the border with heartfelt messages and wistful good-byes. Gwen rarely found herself at a loss for words, but when the time came to add her note to the quilt, she hesitated, unable to capture everything that Judy’s friendship meant to her in a few handwritten sentences. Instead she scrawled a cheerful, almost breezy phrase or two that left everything unsaid. Judy’s new friends in Philadelphia would assume she and Gwen had been only casual acquaintances, but Judy would understand.
Sighing, Gwen set her work aside and dressed for the party, but on her way back downstairs, she remembered to mark her place in her book so that she could pick up her work where she had left off. Book in hand, an intriguing phrase caught her eye, and she stood reading for a few moments, tapping the bookmark idly against the back of the chair. A footnote mentioned a book she had not come across earlier, so she uncapped her pen and added the reference to her working bibliography. Would the Waterford College Library have a copy? Gwen sat down and switched on her computer, drumming her fingers on the desk as her browser opened and connected to the Internet. After linking to the library catalog, Gwen was delighted to discover not only that the library had a copy but that it was on the shelf and the author had two other relevant works elsewhere in the stacks.
Gwen needed only a moment to decide that she could swing by the library on her way to the party and still arrive before the grill cooled. Rumor had it that Anna was preparing a sumptuous barbecue feast to be served outdoors on the veranda, so Gwen’s tardiness would hardly be as conspicuous as if they were dining indoors with white tablecloths and crystal. With all the spouses and kids milling around, no one would notice if Gwen turned up at the end of the meal.
The Waterford College campus was sparsely populated during the interim between the end of the summer session and the beginning of the fall semester, especially on weekends, so Gwen easily found a prime parking spot on Main Street, then hurried up the grassy hill crisscrossed by sidewalks to the main library entrance. Inside, a security guard nodded pleasantly when Gwen flashed her faculty ID. “We close at five today,” he said. “Summer hours.”
Gwen thanked him for the reminder, though she knew she would be en route to Elm Creek Manor long before then. She hurried past a set of glass double doors leading into a long, spacious gallery. On one wall hung several portraits of library benefactors, just opposite the exterior southern wall, composed of tinted glass windows looking out upon the grassy main quadrangle. Above, four skylights patterned squares of light on the gleaming parquet floor. The Waterford Quilting Guild held its annual quilt show in the gallery every summer, but none of the Elm Creek Quilters had submitted a quilt for the contest since Elm Creek Quilts was founded. For her part, Gwen had been too busy to make anything worthy of a competition, and she knew Summer was concerned about exposing her pieces to so much sunlight, but she didn’t know why her other friends had not participated. Years before, they had planned their show quilts a year in advance, speculated for months ahead of time about what their strongest rivals might submit, and hardly slept the night before ribbons were awarded. Could their recent indifference be yet another example of the ridiculous enmity between themselves and the local guild? It was far too easy to place the blame solely upon Diane and the former guild president, neighbors and worst enemies. The Elm Creek Quilters had been disappointed each time the guild had turned down their invitations to quilting events at the manor, but how long had it been since the Elm Creek Quilters had supported a guild activity?
As she passed the gallery on her way to the stacks, Gwen resolved to encourage her friends to enter quilts in next year’s show. The new guild president had taken a risk in coming to quilt camp to broach the idea of greater unity between their two estranged groups. Participating in their quilt show would send a clear message that the Elm Creek Quilters were eager to mend
the rift.
As Gwen searched the shelves for the book she needed, she reflected upon the courage it took to admit to wrongdoings and propose reconciliation. Someone had to take that initial step, to be the first to make amends, risking rejection and failure in the hope of achieving a greater good. Sometimes that meant entering new, unknown, and possibly unfriendly territory, as the Waterford Quilting Guild’s new president had done in coming to Elm Creek Quilt Camp. Sometimes it meant returning home.
Perhaps even greater courage was needed if home was Brown Deer, Kentucky, a small town no one but its citizens had ever heard of, where nothing ever happened but everybody knew everyone’s business.
A lifetime ago, in Gwen’s first few weeks as an elementary education major at the University of Kentucky, she had quickly fallen into the habit of telling new acquaintances that she was from Louisville. She had grown tired of admitting she was from Brown Deer, population 1,200, west of Lovely, about halfway between Kermit and Pilgrim, home to three churches and no movie theaters. Gwen had been a brainy oddball who had earned a reputation as a troublemaking nonconformist by being the only girl in school to enroll in auto shop instead of home ec and to refuse to join the Future Homemakers of America. Until coming to college, a decadent weekend meant pretending to have cramps on Sunday morning so she could sleep in instead of going to Mass with her parents. For as long as she could remember, Gwen had longed to escape that dull, stifling, provincial backwater, and pretending that she was from a city on the opposite side of the state was the first step in putting it behind her.
Exultant with her newfound freedom, she threw herself into college life, eager to try everything, anything. Passionate professors shook her slumbering social conscience awake, fellow students taught her about fighting for justice and making her voice heard, and more worldly friends invited her to expand her consciousness in ways that she never would have imagined back in Brown Deer, where sneaking nips from parents’ liquor cabinets was the dizzying height of audacity.
For her first two semesters, Gwen worked feverishly to make up for the unexpected deficiencies in her education. Although she was regarded in her hometown as the most brilliant student Brown Deer High had ever matriculated, within her first few days on campus she had made the jarring observation that she trailed behind her peers from better school districts. Her sharp intellect, quick wit, and competitive streak soon helped her to gain an equal footing, and once securely there, she was eager to cast off her reputation as a grind interested in nothing more than top grades. When her friends teased her about being an uptight, square, small-town girl, she became less particular about attending classes and completing assignments on time. Everyone said that a person’s education took place outside of the classroom as well as in it, and it was difficult to care about, say, Elizabeth Barrett Browning when kids her age were dying in an illegal war on the other side of the planet. Classes became a drag; visits home to Brown Deer, unbearable. Her parents looked at her with increasing helplessness as if she had become a stranger. Gwen didn’t think she had changed so much; she had merely stopped pretending to be what other people wanted her to be.
At the end of her sophomore year, Gwen decided to leave school and find herself. She had been stuck in a square little town for too long, chafing against her parents’ and neighbors’ expectations. She had no idea who Gwen Sullivan was or what she was meant to do with her life. College would always be there, if and when she decided to return. She only had a brief moment in the sun to be young, to love freely, to live as she pleased, and to discover who she really was.
She set out with two friends, hitchhiking across the country, crashing wherever they were offered a bed, sampling whatever was passed to her, watching the days slowly unfold as if through a rosy, warm haze. She parted with her friends in Denver and hooked up with another group headed out to California; she left them in Los Angeles and made her way north alone, hitchhiking up the coast. A casual invitation led to a lengthy stay in a commune in Berkeley, where she cooked for a changeable group of twelve perpetual students in exchange for a fold-out sofa and access to their collective library, shelved on wooden planks stacked on milk crates in a converted detached garage. She wandered the campus, joining in antiwar protests and occasionally sitting in on lectures. Knowledge was meant to be free, and her attendance wasn’t preventing a tuition-paying student from occupying an otherwise empty chair. On one such day, she met Dennis, yelling epithets as he burned an effigy of the president outside of Sproul Hall. Her mother would have said Gwen was instantly smitten—that is, if her mother would not have fainted dead away at the sight of the longhaired, strung out, unwashed, pale young man with his arms around her daughter. Gwen was certain she had discovered her soul mate.
After their barefoot wedding ceremony on the beach—it was too cold to go barefoot in February, but Dennis insisted they have unencumbered contact with the earth—they traveled the country with two other couples in a van plastered with peace signs and antiwar slogans. They bartered for gas money and worked occasional odd jobs for food. They went where they chose, with nothing to hold them down, nothing to bear them up but each other.
The carefree times ended when Gwen realized she was pregnant.
She considered, for about half a minute, ending the pregnancy, but even if she could have found a safe way to do it, she couldn’t make herself think of the baby as anything less than a human being. How could she denounce sending American boys to die in Vietnam and yet condone killing her own child? She was careless, but she was no hypocrite. Her long-dormant pragmatism forcibly reasserted itself. Suddenly it mattered where their next meal would come from, where they would live, what kind of mother she would be. When she gave up pot—which she had only pretended to enjoy since it gave her migraines—Dennis’s drug use, once a minor irritant, began to worry her. When she tried to persuade him to quit, he told her she was jealous, uptight, and square—that same old label he knew she hated. “Relax, baby,” he said, blowing smoke in her face. Then he bent over to speak to her abdomen, still as flat as the day she had left Brown Deer. “That goes for you, too, baby.”
Watching him, his head thrown back in a fit of helpless giggling, Gwen felt nothing for him but shame and disgust. How could she have ever thought she loved him? How could she bring a child into the world and expect him to help her raise it? Dennis could barely remember to look after himself. Where would they get diapers and toys and clothes? She couldn’t raise a child in the backseat of a van, with a constantly shifting cast of characters filling the front seats.
The next time they stopped for gas, Gwen left her wedding ring on the dashboard, stuffed her few possessions into her backpack, announced that she had to take a leak, and left without saying good-bye. She walked along the highway in the opposite direction the van was traveling, hoping to get a good head start before Dennis and the others realized she wasn’t coming back. She considering returning to the commune in Berkeley, where the kind, gentle residents might welcome her, newborn infant and all. But after an hour of trudging along on the shoulder of the road, the only driver who pulled over was heading east. After a moment’s hesitation, she accepted the ride.
A week later, she walked the last mile into Brown Deer, filthy, hungry, and fervently hoping that no one would recognize her. A boy with baseball cards in the spokes of his bicycle wheels stopped on the sidewalk and stared as she climbed the stairs to her parents’ front door and rang the bell. She gave him a pointed look over her shoulder until he sped off, but her stomach gave a sudden lurch at the sound of the door opening, and she spun back around.
Her mother stood with her hand on the doorknob, staring at her. “Hi, Mom,” Gwen said, shifting her backpack and attempting a grin.
Her mother promptly burst into tears.
Immediately Gwen let her backpack fall to the ground and reached forward to comfort her, but her mother had stepped away from the door to hurry into the other room. “Harry, Harry,” Gwen heard her mother cry, “she’s home!”
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Gwen swallowed hard and entered the house as her mother disappeared into the kitchen. She caught a glimpse of herself in the three gilt-framed mirrors hanging above the sofa and saw that long wisps of auburn hair had come free from her braid and that her face was sunburned and streaked with dirt. Through it all shone that unmistakable knocked-up girl’s glow. She wished she had thought to stop at a gas station and clean herself up first. She shouldn’t have feared being recognized.
Her mother reappeared, knotting her hands in the white apron she wore over her flowered dress. Behind her trailed Gwen’s father, his dark hair neatly parted on the side and slicked down, his eyes brimming with tears behind his black-framed glasses. “Gwen,” he said, his voice shaking. “Where have you been? We were so worried.”
Shame flooded her. She had never thought of them back home wondering about her, worrying, contemplating all the dangers a young woman might face in the world beyond Brown Deer. “California, mostly,” she said, trying to remember the last time she had called or written. She let her backpack slide to the floor and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch better. It’s hard on the road. You know.” Although of course, they had no idea.
“Never mind that now.” Her mother came forward to embrace her, and her father reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “You’re home now. Welcome home.”
Gwen clung to her, filled with sudden anguish and relief.
While her mother fixed her something to eat, Gwen showered and slipped into some of her old clothes, which hung loosely upon her now, even around her middle. She studied herself in her vanity mirror, pressing her palm against her abdomen, while reflected behind her, her twin bed lay draped with the candy-colored Jewel Box quilt her mother had made. It was a little girl’s room, preserved as a shrine as if her parents still mourned a daughter they had lost in childhood. Perhaps they did.
Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt Page 13
